I think that most would agree that that statement's disingenuous.
GPL was one way for it to happen. There were a myriad of other ways it could have happened, as well. Just because one path was followed doesn't make it inherently better than the paths not taken.
Besides, I didn't say that the GPL and code under the GPL has not done good things, did I? GPL has provided me certain choices which I would not otherwise have. It could have happened under any of a multitude of licenses, though. We'll just never fully know how, since the GPL was there and did fill the need of a plethora of coders.
Freedom to succeed also means freedom to fail.
Too much of government in this age is set up to protect people from themselves.
I won't go spouting off libertarian mantra at this point...
The GPL sets up rules from which it's impossible to escape. It does so in the name of freedom, to keep code from falling into the paws of capitalists. This restraint is in the name of freedom. How can a restraint be in the name of freedom? By enabling a bigger freedom. How, though, does the GPL make anything more free than public domain? Than BSD? It doesn't make the software free. It makes the coder happier, I guess.
Perhaps some day, people will understand that the GPL does not make code free. Freedom is not something which can be forced, for if it is forced, it is not freedom.
I recently met a girl who's so amazingly well rounded I'm in awe. She talks about philosophy, history, math, music, and pretty much everything else with an understanding of how it all fits together. She's got knowledge and passion... and spending time with her gives me that rare feeling of humility.
If he resists non-technical things, introduce him to DaVinci.
As another poster has mentioned, intelligence is about making connections between and among things. Help him have an amazing variety of connected and disparate things with which to develop those connections.
Wouldn't it be more useful to pursue optical storage mechanisms than magnetic? Isn't information density going to be best served by three-dimensional storage?
I've interviewed a number of people in the past year or so. I've had quite a few things which come to mind...
There was a guy who had worked at a company which did mail and something else in India... I asked him what port SMTP was... he didn't know. He had Oracle on his resume... so I tried to get him to give some details... it took 20 minutes to get him to admit that they had DBAs who did the actual work *and* made sure the processes were running, and all he did was make sure that an app which used the Oracle stayed running.
I interviewed a guy who worked exclusively on DNS for three months and he didn't know what port it used... and stared at me blankly when I asked.
I interviewed another guy who called himself a UNIX sysadmin and was going for a Senior Systems Engineer position, but he didn't know what to do if the root password was lost/forgotten on a Solaris box.
WHAT!?!
Insist upon an honest self-evaluation, and be ready to call them on the honesty...
--
Find the obvious, but that which people don't worry about when they play with something at home. Any schmo can run NT/2K at home and set up a PDC, printer and file shares, etc.
You don't need someone who has done everything... you're unlikely to find one of those without paying boatloads... you want someone who has done enough to be comfortable and know the basics without thinking, and can figure it out with anything else.
--
When I was being interviewed for my first computer-related position, as a Cluster Consultant (TM) for the labs at Carnegie Mellon, when they asked how I'd handle a question on XYZ (which I'd never touched), I answered that I'd grab the manual and walk back to the user's station with them and work through it with them.
When I later got to the point where I was able to read the post-interview discussions on the ACS bulletin board, I found out how much they'd thought that it meant that the first thing I said was that I'd grab the manual.
Nobody should be expected to be infallible or omniscient. After a certain amount of knowledge, it's the approach which counts.
-Nev
Re:OK -- So when's /. going to HTTPS ???
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 1
Actually, most of the load happens at the time of setup of the session key. There are plenty of encryption coprocessors which aid in offloading this from the server's cpu... nCipher, Intel, etc. make products to do this.
When I leave the house in the morning, I've got my analog watch on my wrist (a nice Movado... stylin'), a Palm Vx, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, a SecurID card, a Panasonic Minidisc player, keys, money, wallet, etc., in my pockets, and a Motorola Timeport hanging on my hip.
This is far too much crap.
Unless the PalmOS 4 is going to fix that... I see no biggie.
Minidisc - because MP3 players and their media tend to be too small and expensive.
SecurID - so I can get into work e-mail from wherever I may be, including at work but at a computer not on the IT net.
Palm - notes/phone#'s/and most importantly, games for when I'm sitting at the train station waiting for whatever train may or may not come.
Phone - nobody's ever at their desk, including me.
So... where does that leave us? How about someone makes a nice, neat phone which does the phone and palm functions, and maybe has a clik! drive for MP3s? RSA does something where they can use the SIM card in the phone along with some software to provide the unique secure code generation, and bam, I can actually fit my cigarettes in my pocket again?
Is there anything actually stopping someone from redirecting requests to the registration/ad servers elsewhere (i.e. localhost proxy or alternate server ala Napigator)?
Hell, with a free ISP which shows banner ads, adware in Opera, and banners on web pages, you might as well just get a full-screen ad display which runs 24/7.
Fairness is "universal service". Telcos charge extra to everyone to subsidize an essential service to the few way the hell out in the mountains, or the woods, or the desert.
VoIP doesn't itself threaten that at all. Poor people can still have their telephones. "Snail phones"?:)
The problem arises when you need to have an expensive PC to do VoIP. If regular telephones went away today, poor people would be shafted. The fact is, though, that we're a long way away from anything close to that. Most of the IP telephony happening now hops out to the PSTN *somewhere* along the line.
What may change this is "net pipe wall socket" where you plug right into a TCP/IP network, and your phone has an embedded chip to do VoIP itself.
Then again, by the time that happens, poor people will be able to purchase/lease/borrow them from, at a minimum, the net pipe provider.
Well, with laws in France dictating that it's illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, and plenty of coders doing 70 hours a week, I think that somehow, karmically, all the vacation accumulates in France.
Well, I think it's worse that in the office I'm moving out of, I lost the wireless connection any time the elevator went by.
Yeah, bad planning for placement of the base station, but I'm betting that they put the telco closet by the elevators for easy access to wiring all the floors together.
For example, if you like WWF wrestling, you get to hang out with a theatre full of other WWF fans.
Rather than sounding like a bonus for the attendees, it sounds like the only good that could come out of it is getting all the WWF fans into a room and locking the doors.
Having worked for Qwest in their web hosting environment in two of their data centres, I've seen these things up close.
1) Decide on pure colo vs. managed colo. Some companies will manage your boxes for you if you buy the hardware from them and pay their monthly management fees.
a) You get backup included, and someone's always watching out for your box... getting paged at 3am because some log filled up your drive -- then having to get up, connect in, and fix it -- is a downer.
b) You don't have root. If you are using non-supported apps, this is often unacceptable.
2) Get someone who does hosting to assist with your design. Don't hesitate to pay a few grand up front.
a) Many hosting companies have experience with load balancing, HA, and network security. Your techies may be great with development, databases, optimization, and the like, but most larger hosting companies deal with financial institutions on a regular basis. They fully understand high availability in every sense.
b) It's wonderful that you've got a great site. Have you even considered an SSL accelerator, for example? An nCipher nFast, for example, can dramatically increase the number of SSL connections your server can make per second, and dramatically lower CPU overhead. Hosting companies know about things like this, which your techies may not. They also know, for example, that the reason that it appears that the iowait on the box with a SCSI-connected nFast is high is simply because the device keeps open a channel to report back errors from the device to the driver, and is not actually seriously affecting your box like it may seem. This kind of troubleshooting panic can be avoided by discussing your plans with someone who "does hosting".
When you look at the expense of hiring 24x7 staff to look after your boxes, it's often worth the cost of paying for a managed service.
If records are being kept with regard to overall usage, then there should not be a problem. Ascertaining profiles of overall usage is something which should be done to determine proper resource allocation.
I think it's similar to some ISPs' policy of not carrying alt.binaries.* on their news servers. If students are killing the lines downloading MP3s, and others are not able to use thomas.loc.gov or the like, then fine. It's not the collection or analysis of data which is a problem, it's how it's acted upon.
Why the hard-on for this ethereal vaporware which we call "quantum computing"? Is there even enough of a model available to implement "quantum computing" in any sort of traditional way, or is this entirely a religious belief?
"back in the day" it wouldn't have been a problem even if the users did only use their search engine. It seemed as though every site had a Links section linking to entirely unrelated sites that the html monkey found interesting...
Now, most web sites try to hold on for dear life. Links captured in frames... duplicating external content on their own site...
Slashdot Mirror
That's not freedom, that's openness.
Exactafuckinmundo.
I got too caught up in my replies to realize the simple way of saying what Arandir just did. Someone mod the parent to this up.
-Nev
I think that most would agree that that statement's disingenuous.
GPL was one way for it to happen. There were a myriad of other ways it could have happened, as well. Just because one path was followed doesn't make it inherently better than the paths not taken.
Besides, I didn't say that the GPL and code under the GPL has not done good things, did I? GPL has provided me certain choices which I would not otherwise have. It could have happened under any of a multitude of licenses, though. We'll just never fully know how, since the GPL was there and did fill the need of a plethora of coders.
-Nev
Thomas Jefferson's another good one, but mentioning him tends to begin arguments about slavery, dead white men in power, etc.
-Nev
Freedom to succeed also means freedom to fail.
Too much of government in this age is set up to protect people from themselves.
I won't go spouting off libertarian mantra at this point...
The GPL sets up rules from which it's impossible to escape. It does so in the name of freedom, to keep code from falling into the paws of capitalists. This restraint is in the name of freedom. How can a restraint be in the name of freedom? By enabling a bigger freedom. How, though, does the GPL make anything more free than public domain? Than BSD? It doesn't make the software free. It makes the coder happier, I guess.
-Nev
Perhaps some day, people will understand that the GPL does not make code free. Freedom is not something which can be forced, for if it is forced, it is not freedom.
-Nev
This person's got it right.
I recently met a girl who's so amazingly well rounded I'm in awe. She talks about philosophy, history, math, music, and pretty much everything else with an understanding of how it all fits together. She's got knowledge and passion... and spending time with her gives me that rare feeling of humility.
If he resists non-technical things, introduce him to DaVinci.
As another poster has mentioned, intelligence is about making connections between and among things. Help him have an amazing variety of connected and disparate things with which to develop those connections.
-Nev
Wouldn't it be more useful to pursue optical storage mechanisms than magnetic? Isn't information density going to be best served by three-dimensional storage?
Ah, but with the ability to make red, green, blue, yellow, and white LEDs, couldn't the combined light produced be tuned to emulate natural light?
-Nev
I've interviewed a number of people in the past year or so. I've had quite a few things which come to mind...
There was a guy who had worked at a company which did mail and something else in India... I asked him what port SMTP was... he didn't know. He had Oracle on his resume... so I tried to get him to give some details... it took 20 minutes to get him to admit that they had DBAs who did the actual work *and* made sure the processes were running, and all he did was make sure that an app which used the Oracle stayed running.
I interviewed a guy who worked exclusively on DNS for three months and he didn't know what port it used... and stared at me blankly when I asked.
I interviewed another guy who called himself a UNIX sysadmin and was going for a Senior Systems Engineer position, but he didn't know what to do if the root password was lost/forgotten on a Solaris box.
WHAT!?!
Insist upon an honest self-evaluation, and be ready to call them on the honesty...
--
Find the obvious, but that which people don't worry about when they play with something at home. Any schmo can run NT/2K at home and set up a PDC, printer and file shares, etc.
You don't need someone who has done everything... you're unlikely to find one of those without paying boatloads... you want someone who has done enough to be comfortable and know the basics without thinking, and can figure it out with anything else.
--
When I was being interviewed for my first computer-related position, as a Cluster Consultant (TM) for the labs at Carnegie Mellon, when they asked how I'd handle a question on XYZ (which I'd never touched), I answered that I'd grab the manual and walk back to the user's station with them and work through it with them.
When I later got to the point where I was able to read the post-interview discussions on the ACS bulletin board, I found out how much they'd thought that it meant that the first thing I said was that I'd grab the manual.
Nobody should be expected to be infallible or omniscient. After a certain amount of knowledge, it's the approach which counts.
-Nev
Actually, most of the load happens at the time of setup of the session key. There are plenty of encryption coprocessors which aid in offloading this from the server's cpu... nCipher, Intel, etc. make products to do this.
It's feasible, just more expensive.
-Nev
When I leave the house in the morning, I've got my analog watch on my wrist (a nice Movado... stylin'), a Palm Vx, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, a SecurID card, a Panasonic Minidisc player, keys, money, wallet, etc., in my pockets, and a Motorola Timeport hanging on my hip.
This is far too much crap.
Unless the PalmOS 4 is going to fix that... I see no biggie.
Minidisc - because MP3 players and their media tend to be too small and expensive.
SecurID - so I can get into work e-mail from wherever I may be, including at work but at a computer not on the IT net.
Palm - notes/phone#'s/and most importantly, games for when I'm sitting at the train station waiting for whatever train may or may not come.
Phone - nobody's ever at their desk, including me.
So... where does that leave us? How about someone makes a nice, neat phone which does the phone and palm functions, and maybe has a clik! drive for MP3s? RSA does something where they can use the SIM card in the phone along with some software to provide the unique secure code generation, and bam, I can actually fit my cigarettes in my pocket again?
-Nev
In French, "dur" means hard.
Is Duron supposed to give someone a hardon? It's not workin' for me.
-Nev
It all goes back about a million years.
Urg the caveman stepped on one of these fish, got pissed off, and said, "blow me". The rest is history.
Is there anything actually stopping someone from redirecting requests to the registration/ad servers elsewhere (i.e. localhost proxy or alternate server ala Napigator)?
Hell, with a free ISP which shows banner ads, adware in Opera, and banners on web pages, you might as well just get a full-screen ad display which runs 24/7.
-Nev
Fairness is "universal service". Telcos charge extra to everyone to subsidize an essential service to the few way the hell out in the mountains, or the woods, or the desert.
:)
VoIP doesn't itself threaten that at all. Poor people can still have their telephones. "Snail phones"?
The problem arises when you need to have an expensive PC to do VoIP. If regular telephones went away today, poor people would be shafted. The fact is, though, that we're a long way away from anything close to that. Most of the IP telephony happening now hops out to the PSTN *somewhere* along the line.
What may change this is "net pipe wall socket" where you plug right into a TCP/IP network, and your phone has an embedded chip to do VoIP itself.
Then again, by the time that happens, poor people will be able to purchase/lease/borrow them from, at a minimum, the net pipe provider.
-Nev
Anyone know how much a StorageTek Powderhorn silo runs?
Since going straight to tape would be impraticable, it'd likely require at least one EMC Symmetrix as well... the costs are obviously understated.
-Nev
Well, with laws in France dictating that it's illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, and plenty of coders doing 70 hours a week, I think that somehow, karmically, all the vacation accumulates in France.
-Nev
Well, I think it's worse that in the office I'm moving out of, I lost the wireless connection any time the elevator went by.
Yeah, bad planning for placement of the base station, but I'm betting that they put the telco closet by the elevators for easy access to wiring all the floors together.
-Nev
For example, if you like WWF wrestling, you get to hang out with a theatre full of other WWF fans.
Rather than sounding like a bonus for the attendees, it sounds like the only good that could come out of it is getting all the WWF fans into a room and locking the doors.
-Nev
*cough*
.ch is Switzerland...
.cn is PROC,
Anyway...
I just find it interesting that the PROC is trying to *preserve* intellectual property.
:)
-Nev
Having worked for Qwest in their web hosting environment in two of their data centres, I've seen these things up close.
1) Decide on pure colo vs. managed colo. Some companies will manage your boxes for you if you buy the hardware from them and pay their monthly management fees.
a) You get backup included, and someone's always watching out for your box... getting paged at 3am because some log filled up your drive -- then having to get up, connect in, and fix it -- is a downer.
b) You don't have root. If you are using non-supported apps, this is often unacceptable.
2) Get someone who does hosting to assist with your design. Don't hesitate to pay a few grand up front.
a) Many hosting companies have experience with load balancing, HA, and network security. Your techies may be great with development, databases, optimization, and the like, but most larger hosting companies deal with financial institutions on a regular basis. They fully understand high availability in every sense.
b) It's wonderful that you've got a great site. Have you even considered an SSL accelerator, for example? An nCipher nFast, for example, can dramatically increase the number of SSL connections your server can make per second, and dramatically lower CPU overhead. Hosting companies know about things like this, which your techies may not. They also know, for example, that the reason that it appears that the iowait on the box with a SCSI-connected nFast is high is simply because the device keeps open a channel to report back errors from the device to the driver, and is not actually seriously affecting your box like it may seem. This kind of troubleshooting panic can be avoided by discussing your plans with someone who "does hosting".
When you look at the expense of hiring 24x7 staff to look after your boxes, it's often worth the cost of paying for a managed service.
-Nev
If records are being kept with regard to overall usage, then there should not be a problem. Ascertaining profiles of overall usage is something which should be done to determine proper resource allocation.
I think it's similar to some ISPs' policy of not carrying alt.binaries.* on their news servers. If students are killing the lines downloading MP3s, and others are not able to use thomas.loc.gov or the like, then fine. It's not the collection or analysis of data which is a problem, it's how it's acted upon.
-Nev
Why the hard-on for this ethereal vaporware which we call "quantum computing"? Is there even enough of a model available to implement "quantum computing" in any sort of traditional way, or is this entirely a religious belief?
-Nev
Force feedback *chair* for Quake?
What version is this for, Wheelchair Quake?
Quake Sydney Paralympics 2000?
-Nev
"back in the day" it wouldn't have been a problem even if the users did only use their search engine. It seemed as though every site had a Links section linking to entirely unrelated sites that the html monkey found interesting...
Now, most web sites try to hold on for dear life. Links captured in frames... duplicating external content on their own site...
I guess people would call it evolution.
I think it's sad.
-Nev