Re:Not quite as good as 9.x yet
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A lot of things still don't work as well as 9.x yet. For example, a USB laser printer I got for my G4 Cube. It takes longer for it to print under OS X than in 9.2. Then there are programs I used everyday, MUSIC programs, like Finale and Digital Performer, that don't work (Performer) in OS X or are buggy (Finale).
Well the biggest incentive for a developer to port their software to Mac OS X is that Mac OS 9 isn't going to be developed in the future. So their revnue streams dry up if they don't make the leap to the new OS. I'm sure this move is primarily aimed at getting more third party software to X, so it should address your concern.
I mean, it's great that they want to move to OS X. It's a great OS. I love running it. I just can't get all the things I need to work on it yet. And, if memory serves me, didn't Apple support System 7.X for a long time after System 8 came out? And when they switched to Power PC Chips from Motorola 680XX chips. We had FAT (68K/PPC) programs for like years.
Apple haven't announced they will stop supporting 9. I would guess (no inside info) that they'll support it for years to come. They've just announced they won't be developing it any further. That means no more releases of 9.x except for bug fixes. This is exactly what happened with the shift from 7.x to 8.x: they continued to support 7.x but didn't release any version after 7.6 (if that's the right number).
What is the big rush Steve?
Don't forget this was announced at the developer's conference. The venue is significant. It's Apple's way of telling its third party developers that it is time to port your software to Mac OS X.
I support a large number of Mac people, and they just aren't moving to OS X.
The question is: why aren't they moving? The answers I've most often heard are:
1) Not enough applications on X yet. 2) Not enough hardware drivers on X yet. 3) Don't like the UI
Killing development of 9 is the best way Apple can incent third party software developers to address issues 1 and 2, which is exactly why this is a good move, IMHO. There's not much they can do about 3, but most Mac users I know who have tried both actually find Mac OS X works fine for them. YMMV.
This makes huge sense for Apple: their future is Mac OS X and the company has been saying this for some time. I'm glad they are making the cut now, still relatively early in the new OS's life cycle. This will help push developers onto the new platform; in turn this is good for end users because the applications they need to run are more likely to appear on Mac OS X.
And again it shows that Apple are able to make gutsey decisions and lead the market rather than follow it. Whatever you think of the relative merits of X vs. 9, this is the kind of bleeding-edge decision making that Apple needs if it is to differentiate itself from the Windows platform.
Well given that this man is supposed to be an "expert witness" *some* knowledge of major competing OSes might be expected.
Agreed, this is an embarassing blunder by Microsoft.
What bothers me about Microsoft is their monolithic view of their role in computing. The honestly believe that without them, no innovation would have occured between 1985 and now, and so we should just let them walk over consumers and competitors out of gratefulness.
I don't think this is what Microsoft believes at all. I think they are the first to acknowledge they have "borrowed" (to be overly tactful) a great deal of technology from other places. One of Microsoft's great strengths is that they don't suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome that has stiffled some other companies. Take this quote from an article by Amy Wohl at the time when Microsoft was trying to buy Intuit:
"Give Bill Gates and Microsoft credit. They did what few high tech companies can do, put their NIH (Not Invented Here) banner in the closet, found a home (at Novell, see article following) for their own Money product, and bought what they thought was the winning strategy. Gates doesn't hesitate to reinvent Microsoft's game plan -- or Microsoft itself -- if he thinks that's what it takes. What he cares about is winning. " here
Gates and Microsoft will acquire, develop or copy whatever they need to make their platform ubiquitous. They are the first company to recognize innovation elsewhere.
In at attempt to make the text of the interview (which is just a transcript of a spoken exchange, after all) comply with Sun's trademark guidelines, they ended up with sentences like this:
That would make [the] Java [programming language] much more flexible.
Actually I didn't read this as marketing speak at all. I thought they were making real technical distinctions. As Gosling pointed out in the interview, there are important technical differences between Java the language and Java the set of frameworks.
In the quote above, for example, the speaker was talking about only the language, not the frameworks. The added words disambiguated the question so that its technical meaning was clear for those who don't yet understand the different things that the term "Java" alone can mean.
Which is an argument for the possibility of 'supernatural' (ie. unexplained) phenomena.
Sorry but supernatural does not equal unexplained. A supernatural phenomena is one that requires explainations other than purely natural ones. This means that the phenomena must be partly non-physical or spiritual (like "angels" or "ghosts"). Unexplained just means we don't know how it works yet. Of course some unexplained phenomena might be supernatural, but given that every phenomena of the past that someone has claimed to be supernatural and that has been explained has turned out to be "only" physical rather gives me hope that the world is a physical not a spiritual place.
Also, please recognize that you make a statement of faith when you assume that the belief that your philosophical basis for dealing with the world around you will be able to account for all possible things.
But I didn't make that statement. Your argument was that because science (or any other philosophy) is currently incomplete it must necessarily always be incomplete. I just pointed out that your argument was flawed. I didn't claim that science could be complete.
It's a cop-out. I could just say, 'Well, god will provide an answer when I need to know' and it would be just as rational. (God has provided "answers" in the past, ala Bible. Science has provided "answers" in the past, ala empiricism.)
You are arguing against something I didn't say. Please re-read my post.
By the way, waiting for God to answer you, would not be as rational. Science does not provide answers. Science provides a method by which we can discover (and verify) answers for ourselves. God just gives us rules many of which have already turned out to be wrong (or are you a creationist?)
Science, logic, empiricism, and the like are very good at explaining stuff. In fact, you can explain a whole lot of things with these. But you cannot explain everything with them; there are holes. And there are holes in every school of thought out there; the universe is just plain not simple enough to allow for a single set of principles to explain all things. So to fill in those gaps, something else is needed. And whatever this "something else" is, it has its own holes, ones filled in by science. They complement each other, rather than conflict.
I'm sorry but that argument doesn't stand up to a moment's examination. First just because our current set of scientific theories don't explain everything says nothing about science's ability to explain everything, which seems to be your argument. Just because I don't know something today doesn't mean I can't learn something new tomorrow. Second, I don't see and you give no evidence at all to back up, the claim that the current holes in scientific theory are complemented by any alternative "theory" (presumably some form of religion). There are plenty of phenomena that are explained by neither science nor any alternative theory. Believing in lots of contradictory systems does not get you any closer to a "complete" understanding of the universe than believing in any one of them.
In the end, though, it all goes back to Goedel's theorem that no system of methematics can be both consistent and complete at the same time. It's true for schools of thought as well; if you want to be truly consistent in your beliefs, then it is impossible to stick with only one.
I'm sorry but you are just plain wrong about this. Godel's theorem is about mathematics and mathematics alone. It cannot be applied to other fields of knowledge such as general philosophy. If your argument is based on the belief that Godel's theorem is applicable outside mathematics then you need to go back and try to understand Godel's theorem again. For example, Boyer states that: "Gödel showed that within a rigidly logical system such as Russell and Whitehead had developed for arithmetic, propositions can be formulated that are undecidable or undemonstrable within the axioms of the system." Clearly many philosophies are not "rigidly logical systems..." and so Godel's theorem does not apply to them.
if you want to be truly consistent in your beliefs, then it is impossible to stick with only one.
This is so preposterously not what Godel's theorem states that I am beginning to suspect you are a troll. Please go back to a good account of Godel's work and take another run at it.
Science is also an appeal to authority. You haven't actually recreated and personally verified every scientific experiment ever performed, have you? Or do you believe certain science because you read it in a book?
No, science is not an appeal to authority because anyone can verify or falsify any experiment (cf for example, cold fusion). An appeal to authority says: "believe X because I say so"; science says: "here is the evidence I have collected to support X, and here is the method you can follow to get the same evidence". Totally different.
Just because I don't repeat every experiment, doesn't mean I can't. With religion I have no mechanism to verify any claim because it is only an appeal to authority.
None of those things can be disproven by science anyway... Belief and science are not completely contrary to each other.
Of course because nothing can be disproven by science. Science is a method by which you gather evidence to support or challenge a theory. The process of science never results in absolute proof, it "only" continually improves the state of our knowledge about the world.
Religion, on the other hand, demands absolute faith in unsubstantiated phenomena. It requires you to believe in something despite all evidence to the contrary. It asks you to take someone else's word over the evidence of your own eyes. Just because that someone's name is "god" doesn't make it any less stupid to believe them just because they say so. What a way to live your life.
Religion is one big appeal to authority. By definition.
Science does not pretend to know the absolute truth, but it does tend to gather overwhelming evidence to support the theories it puts forward.
I know which system I would prefer to place my belief in.
While Napster may allow (we could even say encourage) piracy, the designers of Napster did not "breathe life" into Napster, giving it the ability to act of it's own accord. Someone has to tell napster to perform an errant action. This is not true of OutLook.
Outlook was designed to allow a remote user to cause your computer to take action on it's own.
IANAL, but that's not my understanding of how intent would legally be assigned here. Microsoft's intent was to allow certain specific functions - I suspect mainly related to the calendar feature of Outlook. I very much doubt that Microsoft's intent was to allow viruses and worms. The mechanism they chose to implement these features was too generic and allowed viruses in, but that was not the intention.
There might be a case for arguing that Microsoft was negligent in the choosing the mechanism they did, but I doubt you could make a case based on intent stick.
As I said in my original post, Microsoft should take some responsibility for not writing better software. But the person responsible for the Klez virus is ultimately the idiot who wrote it.
I'm wondering if the space.com photo of "the mice" galaxies is the right picture.
Looks a lot like a cut from a film I watched in health class in the 6th grade.
Funny, yes, but this comment also points out an interesting truth about the physical world. There are many structures out there that are remarkably similar to structures on vastly different scales. Galaxies can look a lot like bacterial infections. The fractal nature of the universe is a fascinating subject. A good overview can be found in this report on a talk by Dr. Richard Voss.
Thanks a lot to Microsoft for being responsible of the most annoying viruses so far.
Isn't that a bit like holding Napster responsible for all theft of music that happens on its systems, or the manufacturers of CD-RW drives for all software piracy done on their machines? That's the argument used by the supporters of DCMA and other nasty bills that outlaw fair use.
The scum-wad(s) who wrote the virus are responsible for its actions. Microsoft should do a better job of writing secure software, but the primary responsibility lies with the virus writer. Any responsibility born by Microsoft is equalled by the responsibility born by those users who don't apply security updates and don't run up-to-date firewall and virus checking software.
Here is the spiritual predecessor of the Segway, the Sinclair C5. First sold in January 1985 this one-person electric vehicle cost less than $500 and was still an absolute commercial disaster.
Although superficially very different, the C5 and the Segway try to solve similar problems of personal mobility without being a car or motorbike. The Segway is undoubtably more advanced (and several times the price) but like the C5 is: small (one person, no luggage), exposed, slow and makes you look like a dork.
I'm not sure I see why the Segway won't go the same way as the C5. I certainly wouldn't buy any stock in Segway.
How is this Insightful?! If people don't know not to run untrusted binaries from untrusted sources, we need a serious wake-up call!
Come on people! This should be as obvious as...
Well just because its obvious to you does not mean its obvious to everyone. There are lots of people who are just learning to use P2P networks and sites like Slashdot. How are they supposed to learn the "obvious" things if we're not allowed to tell them?
Kazaa et al. are new services themselves. They've only been around for a couple of years, and they've been in the "mainstream" for considerably less time than that. Plenty of people don't work on Internet time, they don't rush out and adopt every new technology within a few days of its launch. And yes, a lot of these people (I'd guess) read Slashdot. Don't forget that the vast majority of Slashdot readers don't post; therefore posters like you and me are highly unrepresentative of readers.
I don't think we're anywhere near the point, even in the Geek community, where we can stop giving out these warnings because they are "obvious". So yes, I think this was an insightful post.
In my experience it's the programmers who think about what's good for the company, IT managers generally think about what will make them look good.
Isn't it odd? Programmers believe only they think about what's good for the company and that managers are idiots. Managers think only they care about what's good for the company and that programmers are bozos who only play Quake and goof off working on their open source project on the company's dime.
Well guess what? Neither view is right. You aren't good because you're a programmer, or bad because you're a manager. You are good or not, as a person. You are a manger or a programmer (or whatever). These are orthogonal attributes.
You sound like you've had some lousy managers. I'm sorry that there are people in the world who can't see beyond their narrow self-interest and who don't know their limitations. But if you believe programmers can't be like that too then I suggest you might be suffering from the kind of short-sightedness you so loathe in others.
The fact that a phrase like "the dark side" is used, however tongue in cheek, indicates just how little some geeks get it.
In the commercial world, software isn't developed in a vacuum. In order to build a successful business you need to understand: who are your customers? what problems do they have? what software should you build to solve those problems?
People pay money for your software because it has value for them: it solves their problems. If enough people pay you enough money you will build a business.
Management and marketing aren't impediments to the "good guys" doing their jobs. They are essential parts of the overall job of building a successful business. The world doesn't owe you a living, no matter how skilled you are. It pays you for doing something that is valuable.
If your company is well run and you disagree with your management its because you aren't seeing the bigger picture. It may be cool to build technology X, but if no-one wants that and everyone wants technology Y, then you are wasting your time and skills working on X.
Of course there are bad companies with bozo managers. But that is a function of particular people, not of the role of the manager or leader.
HCI suffers in real-world situations because tomes like Carroll's collection are of interest to academics, but are often hard to apply to day-to-day problem solving that most development teams need. Here's a list of books I'd recommend before buying HCI for the New Millenium
This is to some extent fair, but academic researchers are usually well aware of this issue. Their work is (usually) not intended to be applicable to today's day-to-day problems. It either provides the theory you transform into day-to-day practice or it is work that will solve problems that will occur ten years from now.
Most importantly if you understand the scientific underpinnings of the field you will get a lot more from the "practitioners" books you mention (which are all good recommendations).
I spent 7 years as an academic HCI/AI researcher. I have spent the last 10 years as a commercial software developer. Having an academic understanding of the theory of HCI makes me a profoundly better user interaction designer in the "real world".
Neither 1st or 2nd generation Tivo hardware include an ethernet port, yet the 3.0 update includes ethernet support...
This is mainly, I suspect, to support the USB port built into the Series 2 TiVo boxes. TiVo have been semi-officially talking about a USB Ethernet adaptor for some time now on the TiVo boards.
What we need to do is pass a law that permits only one law to be introduced per bill. What the heck does an adults-only domain have to do with videotaping others without their consent? (Besides the obvious, of course.) Might as well add on a tax increase while we're at it.
A nice idea but how do you define "one law" well enough to police this? It could be argued (not by me, but someone could) that the.prn TLD and the camera bits of this bill are one law because they both address a single concern: limiting voyeuritics porn.
Law cannot be 'up for interpretation'. This is why the drinking age is 21, why the pr0n age is 18. Once you make things open for interpretation, cops are suddenly 'biased' and governments are suddenly tyrannical.
First this is not a "modern" problem. The debate about absolute laws versus interpretation has been around for at least a thousand years.
Law has to be open to a certain amount of interpretation. This is a fundamental principle of government and one of the reasons the American constitution is framed to separate the judicial and legislative branches. The framers recognized that there has to be interpretation in the system and put an explicit procedure in place to allow the judicial branch to interpret the laws written by the legislative branch.
If you didn't allow interpretation lawmakers would have to anticipate every possibility both present and future. This is at best an absurdly optimistic requirement. In the real world it is impossible to write a law that will never require interpretation. The system needs to be able to adapt to changes in society. Look how much the interpretation of the first amendment has changed since the second world war.
The system must retain some flexibility or it will become obsolete, inappropriate and eventually so out of touch it will be overthrown. The only questions are how much interpretation should be allowed and where and who should be responsible for interpreting. These are good and important questions and are widely debated in the legal profession and elsewhere.
When things are clear cut there is no argument. You either broke the law or you didn't. There will always be the few extrordinary circumstances (is abortion murder or self mutilation? one is illegal, one is not.) which is why the judicial system exists. Not to interpret.
This is clearly not true - go back to the constitution and the founding of the American judicial system. Take a look at the roles of the courts of appeal, especially the Supreme Court. The judicial system exists both to interpret and to rule based on law.
Public opinion doesn't stop autocrats from making repugnant decisions (look at Nixon-Reagan's drug policies for historical perspective).
Care to offer any evidence that at the time the majority of the American public found these policies "repugnant"? You may find them repugnant, I find them repugnant, but they may actually reflect the views of most people. This would in fact be democracy in action (to some extent). There are examples of both good and bad policies enacted against the will of the people, but I don't think that this is one of them.
These politicians have already been paid by their investors (RIAA, etc...) to manufacture their product (:%s/SSSCA/nom de jour/), so this bill will become law soon and a majority of Americans--the majority whose opinions match the opinions of their favorite television news personality--will come to believe it is a Good Thing®.
Personally I don't think Holllings' monstrosity will pass. Let's come back to this in a few years and see if your cynicism is well founded or not.
For all the huffing and puffing I hear about Special Interest Groups, money changing hands, corruption, and the like, occasionally something Really Important comes up that renews my faith in our Government of Checks and Balances.
What exactly do you think a Special Interest Group is? Its a group of people who see an issue that they consider Really Important and come together to lobby hard about it. What exactly do you think the geek community (for want of a better term) has done over the Hollings Bill? Mass lobbying is a well used and effective form of Special Interest Group organization.
Special Interest Groups are an inevitable and proper part of any democratic system. The systems without Special Interest Groups are those where most people have no say over how they are governed.
"They seem satisfied to try to attack it in the press rather than trying to make it work," said Sen. Hollings spokesman Andy Davis.
I'd be satisfied too, so far it looks to have been a pretty effective strategy. Let's hope it is successful enough to get this malignant bill killed at the earliest possible opportunity.
QuickTime is a set of APIs that support certain types of codecs (Sorenson, being one). To play media that supports QuickTime's API's, you have an *application* called, "QuickTime Player". One can remove QuickTime Player, and the Mac OS will run fine. QuickTime (as a set of APIs and collection of codecs) is very different from Microsoft shoving Internet Explorer application into Windows and intertwining it as much as possible.
Well no, which is Microsoft's point. They claim that IE is also a set of APIs and a wrapper application. You can relatively easily remove the wrapper app but the underlying functionality is still embedded in Windows and used by other applications. So IE is a lot like QuickTime, at least in the way it is deployed within the OS.
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A lot of things still don't work as well as 9.x yet. For example, a USB laser printer I got for my G4 Cube. It takes longer for it to print under OS X than in 9.2.
Then there are programs I used everyday, MUSIC programs, like Finale and Digital Performer, that don't work (Performer) in OS X or are buggy (Finale).
Well the biggest incentive for a developer to port their software to Mac OS X is that Mac OS 9 isn't going to be developed in the future. So their revnue streams dry up if they don't make the leap to the new OS. I'm sure this move is primarily aimed at getting more third party software to X, so it should address your concern.
I mean, it's great that they want to move to OS X. It's a great OS. I love running it. I just can't get all the things I need to work on it yet. And, if memory serves me, didn't Apple support System 7.X for a long time after System 8 came out? And when they switched to Power PC Chips from Motorola 680XX chips. We had FAT (68K/PPC) programs for like years.
Apple haven't announced they will stop supporting 9. I would guess (no inside info) that they'll support it for years to come. They've just announced they won't be developing it any further. That means no more releases of 9.x except for bug fixes. This is exactly what happened with the shift from 7.x to 8.x: they continued to support 7.x but didn't release any version after 7.6 (if that's the right number).
What is the big rush Steve?
Don't forget this was announced at the developer's conference. The venue is significant. It's Apple's way of telling its third party developers that it is time to port your software to Mac OS X.
I support a large number of Mac people, and they just aren't moving to OS X.
The question is: why aren't they moving? The answers I've most often heard are:
1) Not enough applications on X yet.
2) Not enough hardware drivers on X yet.
3) Don't like the UI
Killing development of 9 is the best way Apple can incent third party software developers to address issues 1 and 2, which is exactly why this is a good move, IMHO. There's not much they can do about 3, but most Mac users I know who have tried both actually find Mac OS X works fine for them. YMMV.
This makes huge sense for Apple: their future is Mac OS X and the company has been saying this for some time. I'm glad they are making the cut now, still relatively early in the new OS's life cycle. This will help push developers onto the new platform; in turn this is good for end users because the applications they need to run are more likely to appear on Mac OS X.
And again it shows that Apple are able to make gutsey decisions and lead the market rather than follow it. Whatever you think of the relative merits of X vs. 9, this is the kind of bleeding-edge decision making that Apple needs if it is to differentiate itself from the Windows platform.
Come on, this was only posted on Saturday. Doesn't anyone read Slashdot anymore?
Well given that this man is supposed to be an "expert witness" *some* knowledge of major competing OSes might be expected.
Agreed, this is an embarassing blunder by Microsoft.
What bothers me about Microsoft is their monolithic view of their role in computing. The honestly believe that without them, no innovation would have occured between 1985 and now, and so we should just let them walk over consumers and competitors out of gratefulness.
I don't think this is what Microsoft believes at all. I think they are the first to acknowledge they have "borrowed" (to be overly tactful) a great deal of technology from other places. One of Microsoft's great strengths is that they don't suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome that has stiffled some other companies. Take this quote from an article by Amy Wohl at the time when Microsoft was trying to buy Intuit:
"Give Bill Gates and Microsoft credit. They did what few high tech companies can do, put their NIH (Not Invented Here) banner in the closet, found a home (at Novell, see article following) for their own Money product, and bought what they thought was the winning strategy. Gates doesn't hesitate to reinvent Microsoft's game plan -- or Microsoft itself -- if he thinks that's what it takes. What he cares about is winning. " here
Gates and Microsoft will acquire, develop or copy whatever they need to make their platform ubiquitous. They are the first company to recognize innovation elsewhere.
In at attempt to make the text of the interview (which is just a transcript of a spoken exchange, after all) comply with Sun's trademark guidelines, they ended up with sentences like this:
That would make [the] Java [programming language] much more flexible.
Actually I didn't read this as marketing speak at all. I thought they were making real technical distinctions. As Gosling pointed out in the interview, there are important technical differences between Java the language and Java the set of frameworks.
In the quote above, for example, the speaker was talking about only the language, not the frameworks. The added words disambiguated the question so that its technical meaning was clear for those who don't yet understand the different things that the term "Java" alone can mean.
Which is an argument for the possibility of 'supernatural' (ie. unexplained) phenomena.
Sorry but supernatural does not equal unexplained. A supernatural phenomena is one that requires explainations other than purely natural ones. This means that the phenomena must be partly non-physical or spiritual (like "angels" or "ghosts"). Unexplained just means we don't know how it works yet. Of course some unexplained phenomena might be supernatural, but given that every phenomena of the past that someone has claimed to be supernatural and that has been explained has turned out to be "only" physical rather gives me hope that the world is a physical not a spiritual place.
Also, please recognize that you make a statement of faith when you assume that the belief that your philosophical basis for dealing with the world around you will be able to account for all possible things.
But I didn't make that statement. Your argument was that because science (or any other philosophy) is currently incomplete it must necessarily always be incomplete. I just pointed out that your argument was flawed. I didn't claim that science could be complete.
It's a cop-out. I could just say, 'Well, god will provide an answer when I need to know' and it would be just as rational. (God has provided "answers" in the past, ala Bible. Science has provided "answers" in the past, ala empiricism.)
You are arguing against something I didn't say. Please re-read my post.
By the way, waiting for God to answer you, would not be as rational. Science does not provide answers. Science provides a method by which we can discover (and verify) answers for ourselves. God just gives us rules many of which have already turned out to be wrong (or are you a creationist?)
Science, logic, empiricism, and the like are very good at explaining stuff. In fact, you can explain a whole lot of things with these. But you cannot explain everything with them; there are holes. And there are holes in every school of thought out there; the universe is just plain not simple enough to allow for a single set of principles to explain all things. So to fill in those gaps, something else is needed. And whatever this "something else" is, it has its own holes, ones filled in by science. They complement each other, rather than conflict.
I'm sorry but that argument doesn't stand up to a moment's examination. First just because our current set of scientific theories don't explain everything says nothing about science's ability to explain everything, which seems to be your argument. Just because I don't know something today doesn't mean I can't learn something new tomorrow. Second, I don't see and you give no evidence at all to back up, the claim that the current holes in scientific theory are complemented by any alternative "theory" (presumably some form of religion). There are plenty of phenomena that are explained by neither science nor any alternative theory. Believing in lots of contradictory systems does not get you any closer to a "complete" understanding of the universe than believing in any one of them.
In the end, though, it all goes back to Goedel's theorem that no system of methematics can be both consistent and complete at the same time. It's true for schools of thought as well; if you want to be truly consistent in your beliefs, then it is impossible to stick with only one.
I'm sorry but you are just plain wrong about this. Godel's theorem is about mathematics and mathematics alone. It cannot be applied to other fields of knowledge such as general philosophy. If your argument is based on the belief that Godel's theorem is applicable outside mathematics then you need to go back and try to understand Godel's theorem again. For example, Boyer states that: "Gödel showed that within a rigidly logical system such as Russell and Whitehead had developed for arithmetic, propositions can be formulated that are undecidable or undemonstrable within the axioms of the system." Clearly many philosophies are not "rigidly logical systems..." and so Godel's theorem does not apply to them.
if you want to be truly consistent in your beliefs, then it is impossible to stick with only one.
This is so preposterously not what Godel's theorem states that I am beginning to suspect you are a troll. Please go back to a good account of Godel's work and take another run at it.
Science is also an appeal to authority. You haven't actually recreated and personally verified every scientific experiment ever performed, have you? Or do you believe certain science because you read it in a book?
No, science is not an appeal to authority because anyone can verify or falsify any experiment (cf for example, cold fusion). An appeal to authority says: "believe X because I say so"; science says: "here is the evidence I have collected to support X, and here is the method you can follow to get the same evidence". Totally different.
Just because I don't repeat every experiment, doesn't mean I can't. With religion I have no mechanism to verify any claim because it is only an appeal to authority.
None of those things can be disproven by science anyway... Belief and science are not completely contrary to each other.
Of course because nothing can be disproven by science. Science is a method by which you gather evidence to support or challenge a theory. The process of science never results in absolute proof, it "only" continually improves the state of our knowledge about the world.
Religion, on the other hand, demands absolute faith in unsubstantiated phenomena. It requires you to believe in something despite all evidence to the contrary. It asks you to take someone else's word over the evidence of your own eyes. Just because that someone's name is "god" doesn't make it any less stupid to believe them just because they say so. What a way to live your life.
Religion is one big appeal to authority. By definition.
Science does not pretend to know the absolute truth, but it does tend to gather overwhelming evidence to support the theories it puts forward.
I know which system I would prefer to place my belief in.
The difference is intent.
While Napster may allow (we could even say encourage) piracy, the designers of Napster did not "breathe life" into Napster, giving it the ability to act of it's own accord. Someone has to tell napster to perform an errant action. This is not true of OutLook.
Outlook was designed to allow a remote user to cause your computer to take action on it's own.
IANAL, but that's not my understanding of how intent would legally be assigned here. Microsoft's intent was to allow certain specific functions - I suspect mainly related to the calendar feature of Outlook. I very much doubt that Microsoft's intent was to allow viruses and worms. The mechanism they chose to implement these features was too generic and allowed viruses in, but that was not the intention.
There might be a case for arguing that Microsoft was negligent in the choosing the mechanism they did, but I doubt you could make a case based on intent stick.
As I said in my original post, Microsoft should take some responsibility for not writing better software. But the person responsible for the Klez virus is ultimately the idiot who wrote it.
I'm wondering if the space.com photo of "the mice" galaxies is the right picture.
Looks a lot like a cut from a film I watched in health class in the 6th grade.
Funny, yes, but this comment also points out an interesting truth about the physical world. There are many structures out there that are remarkably similar to structures on vastly different scales. Galaxies can look a lot like bacterial infections. The fractal nature of the universe is a fascinating subject. A good overview can be found in this report on a talk by Dr. Richard Voss.
Thanks a lot to Microsoft for being responsible of the most annoying viruses so far.
Isn't that a bit like holding Napster responsible for all theft of music that happens on its systems, or the manufacturers of CD-RW drives for all software piracy done on their machines? That's the argument used by the supporters of DCMA and other nasty bills that outlaw fair use.
The scum-wad(s) who wrote the virus are responsible for its actions. Microsoft should do a better job of writing secure software, but the primary responsibility lies with the virus writer. Any responsibility born by Microsoft is equalled by the responsibility born by those users who don't apply security updates and don't run up-to-date firewall and virus checking software.
Here is the spiritual predecessor of the Segway, the Sinclair C5. First sold in January 1985 this one-person electric vehicle cost less than $500 and was still an absolute commercial disaster.
Although superficially very different, the C5 and the Segway try to solve similar problems of personal mobility without being a car or motorbike. The Segway is undoubtably more advanced (and several times the price) but like the C5 is: small (one person, no luggage), exposed, slow and makes you look like a dork.
I'm not sure I see why the Segway won't go the same way as the C5. I certainly wouldn't buy any stock in Segway.
How is this Insightful?! If people don't know not to run untrusted binaries from untrusted sources, we need a serious wake-up call!
Come on people! This should be as obvious as...
Well just because its obvious to you does not mean its obvious to everyone. There are lots of people who are just learning to use P2P networks and sites like Slashdot. How are they supposed to learn the "obvious" things if we're not allowed to tell them?
Kazaa et al. are new services themselves. They've only been around for a couple of years, and they've been in the "mainstream" for considerably less time than that. Plenty of people don't work on Internet time, they don't rush out and adopt every new technology within a few days of its launch. And yes, a lot of these people (I'd guess) read Slashdot. Don't forget that the vast majority of Slashdot readers don't post; therefore posters like you and me are highly unrepresentative of readers.
I don't think we're anywhere near the point, even in the Geek community, where we can stop giving out these warnings because they are "obvious". So yes, I think this was an insightful post.
In my experience it's the programmers who think about what's good for the company, IT managers generally think about what will make them look good.
Isn't it odd? Programmers believe only they think about what's good for the company and that managers are idiots. Managers think only they care about what's good for the company and that programmers are bozos who only play Quake and goof off working on their open source project on the company's dime.
Well guess what? Neither view is right. You aren't good because you're a programmer, or bad because you're a manager. You are good or not, as a person. You are a manger or a programmer (or whatever). These are orthogonal attributes.
You sound like you've had some lousy managers. I'm sorry that there are people in the world who can't see beyond their narrow self-interest and who don't know their limitations. But if you believe programmers can't be like that too then I suggest you might be suffering from the kind of short-sightedness you so loathe in others.
The fact that a phrase like "the dark side" is used, however tongue in cheek, indicates just how little some geeks get it.
In the commercial world, software isn't developed in a vacuum. In order to build a successful business you need to understand: who are your customers? what problems do they have? what software should you build to solve those problems?
People pay money for your software because it has value for them: it solves their problems. If enough people pay you enough money you will build a business.
Management and marketing aren't impediments to the "good guys" doing their jobs. They are essential parts of the overall job of building a successful business. The world doesn't owe you a living, no matter how skilled you are. It pays you for doing something that is valuable.
If your company is well run and you disagree with your management its because you aren't seeing the bigger picture. It may be cool to build technology X, but if no-one wants that and everyone wants technology Y, then you are wasting your time and skills working on X.
Of course there are bad companies with bozo managers. But that is a function of particular people, not of the role of the manager or leader.
HCI suffers in real-world situations because tomes like Carroll's collection are of interest to academics, but are often hard to apply to day-to-day problem solving that most development teams need. Here's a list of books I'd recommend before buying HCI for the New Millenium
This is to some extent fair, but academic researchers are usually well aware of this issue. Their work is (usually) not intended to be applicable to today's day-to-day problems. It either provides the theory you transform into day-to-day practice or it is work that will solve problems that will occur ten years from now.
Most importantly if you understand the scientific underpinnings of the field you will get a lot more from the "practitioners" books you mention (which are all good recommendations).
I spent 7 years as an academic HCI/AI researcher. I have spent the last 10 years as a commercial software developer. Having an academic understanding of the theory of HCI makes me a profoundly better user interaction designer in the "real world".
Neither 1st or 2nd generation Tivo hardware include an ethernet port, yet the 3.0 update includes ethernet support...
This is mainly, I suspect, to support the USB port built into the Series 2 TiVo boxes. TiVo have been semi-officially talking about a USB Ethernet adaptor for some time now on the TiVo boards.
What we need to do is pass a law that permits only one law to be introduced per bill. What the heck does an adults-only domain have to do with videotaping others without their consent? (Besides the obvious, of course.) Might as well add on a tax increase while we're at it.
.prn TLD and the camera bits of this bill are one law because they both address a single concern: limiting voyeuritics porn.
A nice idea but how do you define "one law" well enough to police this? It could be argued (not by me, but someone could) that the
This is the problem with modern law:
Law cannot be 'up for interpretation'. This is why the drinking age is 21, why the pr0n age is 18. Once you make things open for interpretation, cops are suddenly 'biased' and governments are suddenly tyrannical.
First this is not a "modern" problem. The debate about absolute laws versus interpretation has been around for at least a thousand years.
Law has to be open to a certain amount of interpretation. This is a fundamental principle of government and one of the reasons the American constitution is framed to separate the judicial and legislative branches. The framers recognized that there has to be interpretation in the system and put an explicit procedure in place to allow the judicial branch to interpret the laws written by the legislative branch.
If you didn't allow interpretation lawmakers would have to anticipate every possibility both present and future. This is at best an absurdly optimistic requirement. In the real world it is impossible to write a law that will never require interpretation. The system needs to be able to adapt to changes in society. Look how much the interpretation of the first amendment has changed since the second world war.
The system must retain some flexibility or it will become obsolete, inappropriate and eventually so out of touch it will be overthrown. The only questions are how much interpretation should be allowed and where and who should be responsible for interpreting. These are good and important questions and are widely debated in the legal profession and elsewhere.
When things are clear cut there is no argument. You either broke the law or you didn't. There will always be the few extrordinary circumstances (is abortion murder or self mutilation? one is illegal, one is not.) which is why the judicial system exists. Not to interpret.
This is clearly not true - go back to the constitution and the founding of the American judicial system. Take a look at the roles of the courts of appeal, especially the Supreme Court. The judicial system exists both to interpret and to rule based on law.
Public opinion doesn't stop autocrats from making repugnant decisions (look at Nixon-Reagan's drug policies for historical perspective).
Care to offer any evidence that at the time the majority of the American public found these policies "repugnant"? You may find them repugnant, I find them repugnant, but they may actually reflect the views of most people. This would in fact be democracy in action (to some extent). There are examples of both good and bad policies enacted against the will of the people, but I don't think that this is one of them.
These politicians have already been paid by their investors (RIAA, etc...) to manufacture their product (:%s/SSSCA/nom de jour/), so this bill will become law soon and a majority of Americans--the majority whose opinions match the opinions of their favorite television news personality--will come to believe it is a Good Thing®.
Personally I don't think Holllings' monstrosity will pass. Let's come back to this in a few years and see if your cynicism is well founded or not.
For all the huffing and puffing I hear about Special Interest Groups, money changing hands, corruption, and the like, occasionally something Really Important comes up that renews my faith in our Government of Checks and Balances.
What exactly do you think a Special Interest Group is? Its a group of people who see an issue that they consider Really Important and come together to lobby hard about it. What exactly do you think the geek community (for want of a better term) has done over the Hollings Bill? Mass lobbying is a well used and effective form of Special Interest Group organization.
Special Interest Groups are an inevitable and proper part of any democratic system. The systems without Special Interest Groups are those where most people have no say over how they are governed.
"They seem satisfied to try to attack it in the press rather than trying to make it work," said Sen. Hollings spokesman Andy Davis.
I'd be satisfied too, so far it looks to have been a pretty effective strategy. Let's hope it is successful enough to get this malignant bill killed at the earliest possible opportunity.
QuickTime is a set of APIs that support certain types of codecs (Sorenson, being one). To play media that supports QuickTime's API's, you have an *application* called, "QuickTime Player". One can remove QuickTime Player, and the Mac OS will run fine. QuickTime (as a set of APIs and collection of codecs) is very different from Microsoft shoving Internet Explorer application into Windows and intertwining it as much as possible.
Well no, which is Microsoft's point. They claim that IE is also a set of APIs and a wrapper application. You can relatively easily remove the wrapper app but the underlying functionality is still embedded in Windows and used by other applications. So IE is a lot like QuickTime, at least in the way it is deployed within the OS.