Each of the possible 1 048 576 solutions were then represented by much longer strands of specially encoded DNA, which Adleman's team added to the first cell.
Granted I'm not a bio-engineer, but it's very difficult for me to believe that DNA will ever solve a problem faster then the computer can.
For this problem, millions of DNA strands were generated. I guarentee you the researchers didn't do it by hand. In the time the computer was instructing the hardware on how to make any given solution, it could have checked a thousand solutions. And the speed is accelerating.
Maybe, just maybe, if the strands could be generated automatically by a gene-gen'ed life form, except for the query strand, this could keep up with conventional silicon. But that's a tough nut itself.
I'm more intrigued by the QM computers... and I don't really believe in them, either.
(Biological computing may someday take off. But I don't think it's going to involve DNA. DNA is not meant for computing in the sense most of us find interesting. The gymnastics necessary to answer this simple question demonstrates that, and unlike conventional computers, where there has always been a clear path of progress, exactly what part of this computation is going to be streamlined? Millions upon millions of unique strands must be generated; what's the equivalent of shrinking the transistor by a factor of 2? I'm not holding my breath.)
In this case, is letting another company offer ISP services over your cable lines analogous to letting another company offer TV channels over your cable lines, or is it analogous to letting another long distance carrier complete calls to your phone customers.
Errr, you are aware both of these things happen? Cable companies are obligated to provide local channels on their cable service, and whenever you call someone on the other side of the country, a different long distance service completes the call. By your own argument, then, this ruling makes no sense.
You started off well, by ranting about the evils of analogies, but fell into the the trap yourself when you tried to draw some of your own.
Let's stay out of analogies. This ruling hands all the power to the local monopoly. This never works out well, and I don't see why this will work out well this time, either. (This isn't an analogy, this is an observed historical pattern.) Higher prices and lower service, here we come!
Nitpick further: Reliable for what definition of "reliable"? When Program A crashes through no fault of its own, but that Program B scrambled the process information in the kernel, in a strict sense, that renders Program A unreliable: You can't know it won't crash.
The fundamental problem with software is that like other mathematical entities, it only potentially takes one hole (and subsequent exploitation, accidental or otherwise) to bring the whole structure crashing down, from app to OS. (Or further; I've had Windows 3.1 programs that "reliably" (*grin*) managed to scramble the CMOS on their way down.) No physical structure and no physical metaphor (and by extension no thought processes that operate primarily by metaphor to the physical world) can fully capture this aspect of software.
Reliable, in the strict sense, means %100. My system has only rebooted spontaneously twice in the last month, but that's not %100.
The short version: The DMCA makes provisions for certain caches used in the transmission of information, such as your ISP may use. There are certain defined procedures that the ISP must implement to allow people to get their content out of that cache.
Google implements those procedures, and claims protection under the DMCA for their cache. (Note the hoops you must jump through to get them to remove stuff are the legally mandated hoops under the DMCA; they are not trying to be nasty.) Now, a careful reading of the DMCA will show that Google probably doesn't meet the qualifications of this cache exception; but nobody has cared enough to fight it yet. The few who care just jump through the hoops and forget about it.
The long version is: Read the DMCA and compare against Google's DMCA page and decide for yourself.
No. You confound the time it came out with the message of the book.
As I read it, which by the way you can too (so don't just take my word for it), the major point of the book is that the net is allowed all of us to communicate (again), so companies had better stop treating us like isolated, incommunicado sheep, lest we literally laugh them out of business. (Or just badmouth them, give bad reviews, tell the truth about the service records, etc. "Laughing" is just an evocative examples.)
Not only does it not really have anything to do with the DotCom bust, it rather clearly warned people not to do what the DotComs did... and indeed, what Slashdot seems well on its way to doing. The biggst DotCom failure was to aggregate eyeballs, and never even think for a moment about relating to people.
The DotCom bust proves the book out, it does not invalidate it.
Now, I've politely corrected you up to this point, so as to inform the other readers, but for pete's sake, check your facts before posting such antynomous information! You couldn't hardly be more wrong if you tried!
It DOES mean you need to give up the unrealistic goal of catching %100 of the cheaters. And furthermore, it implies that you need to do a cost/benefit analysis about whether it's worth spending $x and y trust-units to catch the next cheater, or stop now and decide you've got the best bang for the buck.
I'm beginning to think we should require a cross-disciplinary cost-benefits analysis class in high school. Of course, who'd write the course?
With sufficent bandwidth, why should anyone _ever_ pay for cycles that they do not use.
That's an argument for power (as in electricity) conservation, not cycle conservation. Use still tends to grow to match resources. Block off resource growth, on the excuse that it's unused, and you'll block off use growth, a.k.a. "innovation".
Normally one would want to consider the environmental side of increasing resources, but happily (and this is the great miracle of computers), there are no particular downsides (within reason) to increasing cycles. I still don't see the economic value in bastardizing our modern supercomputers, to save quite literally a couple of bucks, when the work could be done at home.
The edges still have vastly more power then the center, and that won't change. Ever. Virtually by definition.
I submit that only a naive analysis of the cost/benefits tradeoff can conclude that it's worth giving people "thin clients", and nothing else. If nothing else, do YOU want to be beholden to the Central Authority for what you can and can't do? Forget the moral issues, even. What if they don't install Quake VI when you want to use it? What if you want to install a software package that the Authority hasn't installed, for whatever reason? How shortsighted to give up the power to do these things, which even "mundanes" do all the time, just to save $15 on the client! (Throw in the personal freedom issues, and it's a *really* dumb idea.)
People still need their own processing centers inside their own homes. (They may chose to connect to that with OTHER thin clients, but there's still that central server, which is what Microsoft,.NET, and the "thin client" crowd keep trying to do away with. For their benefit, not yours.)
The era of the super-fastest home PC might be over.
Agreed! I've got an 800MHz machine, now over a factor of two behind state-of-the-art, rapidly coming up on three, and I have no desire to upgrade. (Wierd feeling, that.) I also use a Pentium 233 and even a 133 laptop, day to day, and the 133 only sometimes bothers me.
The time of super fast home-PCs is likely to not last very long. The incoming.NET and dotGNU waves are likely to make thin clients much more realistic.
Can you back this up with any real facts? Today, for $500, you can own a bare-bones Athlon system, which 20 years ago was a supercomputer, minus a bit of memory.
Even after we hit the Fundamental Barrier, whenever that is, computers will continue to improve for a while due to architecture improvements and innovative designs (like 3-D chips, currently totally unnecessary but providing one road for expansion in the future).
It gets to the point where on the consumer level, in a very short period of time (specifically, *before*.NET takes off), it costs very, very little to put in an Athlon, versus a Pentium 100, and that cost is swamped by the display cost. You still need memory on the client side for buffering. You still want a hard drive on the client side for other buffering (like video; a one minute buffer fills RAM pretty fast, but on any conceivable real-wrld future network, we'll need those buffers).
Maybe YOU call a 4GHz Athlon II w/ 512MB of RAM and a 100GB hard drive a thin client, useless to Mary. I call it a dream come true. You have to postulate a Major Breakthrough within the next two-to-three years in display technology for the cost of the display not to swamp the cost of at least (more realistically) a GHz machine with 128 MB of (fast) memory. We'd probably know about it already. So, do you buy the $200 "thin client" that can't do anything on its own, or the $235 "I'd kill for this machine in 1985" that runs fifty times faster, and feels ten times more responsive?
(I made a couple of assumptions in this post. But one way or another, Mary needs a super computer in her home. Either for use that looks like modern use, or to serve as the central server for the house. I, and many others, even amoung the computer non-savvy, will NOT farm my data out to a foriegn entity!.NET does not eliminate the need for fast computers, it just moves it. And the need for more power will be with us for a while yet. We're in a computation bubble here, but voice technology, video streaming, REAL teleconferencing, better video games, and a lot of truly desirable things are still waiting for us over the computation power horizen. And that's just the applications we KNOW about...)
You construct several examples, but miss my point, which is that the coverage of your examples is vanishingly less then.001% of things commited to storage. My credit data won't matter. My webserver logs won't matter. Terabytes of astronomical data won't matter.
For that vanishing percentage that matters, write it down. (It largely already is.) But to rant about the evils of modern storage (which is the thrust of this Slashdot discussion, not necessarily your message), based on a vanishingly small sample of data, is rather disingenous.
The second sentance of my post, which you left off, was the more importent one; the first sentance just set it up.
(I should learn to resist the tempation to be Zen on Slashdot.)
Oh, then maybe it was Diane who did the Vulcan stuff. I don't know, too many similar names for me to keep track.:-)
At any rate, I suspect that the Enterprise people are in no danger of seeing the light and inviting either of these two to help them with the Vulcans on Enterprise.:-(
You know, I have zero problem with saying people should be responsible for software they write, at least in the abstract. The idea that they should not is kind of silly, if you think about it honestly.
But at this point in time, it would be disasterous to start allowing liability. Why? Because liability is determined by the court system, and with no offense intended, the court system is incompetent at this time to make those sort of decisions.
I have no faith in the ability of the court system to distinguish between an obscure flaw that allows a man-in-the-middle attack on a so-called "secure" connection, and a glaringly obvious security problem like "By default, everyone in the world has full access to your desktop." (reference: Symantec's PCAnywhere for a *very* long time.) In fact, I don't trust me to make those decisions.
At this point in time, and at our current technology level, as we've all heard and said many times, one wrong character in the wrong location, out of billions, can cause a difficult-to-detect error that, when exploited, can give an attacker root access. It's difficult to come up with any sort of definition of proportional responsibility.
If a bridge collapses because all of the tons upon tons of concrete used was an inferior grade, that's one thing. But if the bridge collapses because one screw was made of aluminum instead of steel, is that worth suing over? My real point can be seen in how this metaphor is not applicable; A bridge would never collapse over something so trivial unless it had other fundamental problems! Software is fundamentally more fragile. (So far, all attempts to negate this have essentially failed, and I'm not willing to count on some miraculuous development in the future. Though I suppose if such a thing occurred, and it was legally mandated to use formal methods, that would make people like me who could understand them suddenly no longer competing with hacks who think they're leet 'cause they can sorta use Perl... >:-) )
Even a professional like me might be hard pressed, after the fact, to determine which sort of problem is before the court, to determine liability. Do you want to leave it in the hands of lawyers?
No, what Shatner writes is not Canon. The only Canon is the shows and the movies, and not even all of the shows; the animated series is basically ignored.
(Computer graphics will have come of age when a Horta crewmember is shown in a Star Trek series as a normal, every-episode crew member.)
What I find sad is that the authors have no understanding of Vulcans, which are (or perhaps "were") as finely developed as the Klingons were in TNG. As I understand it, the Vulcans are basically the brain child of D.C. Fontana (I think the first name is Dorothy), who created wonderful back history for the species. For instance, one part that came out in the original series: Why are Vulcans so logical? Because they are extremely emotional, and tend to kill each other in their 'natural' state.
Perhaps at least that tidbit came out on tonight's episode; I couldn't bring myself to watch it. Apparently, neither could my TiVo; it recorded a re-run of Junkyard Wars, which was probably better anyhow.
If you ever see the book "Spock's World", by Fontana, pick it up. You'll be impressed by the true story of Vulcan. You'll wish you saw more of them. My greatest hope for Enterprise is that they'll eventually get around to exploring Vulcan, in a way that the original series could oly dream of... but what are the odds? The most nuanced charecterization I've seen of the Vulcan's so far on Enterprise is that they're jackasses.
Woo, there's some deep charecterization!
I'm losing interest fast; such damned shallow writing when there is such potential being *handed* to the writers on a silver platter is painful to watch.
Just searching for 'OpenBSD Bug' on Google Groups retrieves over 20,500 queries.
Searching for "Brian bug" on Google shows 441,000 hits. Clearly you're 20 times buggier then OpenBSD, so I wouldn't be slinging implied accusations around.
I was disappointed to see Will Wright (SimCity, Sims, etc.) say the following:
Maxis Software's Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims, was also asked his opinion on the matter.
"This is a rather complicated issue, but let's say I create a game about [a fictitious character named] 'Zars from Mars,'" begins Wright. "Now even though the game may be off the market, by allowing everyone to freely download or even sell collections of old games, I might lose whatever copyright claims I have on the original character. So if many years later I want to start a comic book about Zars, I might have a hard time legally protecting the intellectual property."
That is incorrect. Copyright never expires due to lack of enforcement, and this argument is complete bullcrap... though to be fair, I bet Will Wright doesn't know that.
It would be interesting to know if he came up with this misunderstanding on his own, or if somebody fed him this line.
Now, he may be legitimately concerned about the trademark, which does need to be defended, but as long as nobody is doing anything with the charecters other then downloading the game they came from, I can't imagine that trademark infringements are taking place. That would happen if you started printing posters of the char, or putting it in your own movies, or other similarly infringing activities, none of which have anything to do with downloading a game.
Downloading games does not strip publishers of any rights. In fact, if massive downloads of a game did strip publishers of the copyright, then this would be a null issue, as abandonware would be perfectly legal! Once the copyright is stripped, we could all download these things with impunity. (Extensive warezing could become legal, too, by the same argument.) Lawyers aren't stupid, so they didn't leave this gaping loophole open.
It's difficult to move debate on these issues forward when there's so much ignorance of the issues. (How many of you noticed this before I pointed it out? And IANAL, either.)
One scary moment that everybody should experience before they consider themselves an adult is the final realization that everybody is just winging it. People like Bill Gates or Thomas Jefferson or [insert your hero here] are simply better then winging it then others.
It's scary. Your government is winging it. Your doctor is winging it. The CIA, FBI, FDA, FCC, the Supreme Court, the Russian Government, Al-Qaeda, they're all winging it. Some a little less then others, but don't kid yourself; how often does the Supreme Court decide based largely on logic, versus based largely on their gut feelings (a.k.a. "political philosophy")?
Your managers, being human, are winging it. They have no more bandwidth then you in life. You can barely keep up with your projects and the industry. They have their own problems, and they aren't keeping up with your projects or the state of your industry.
Everybody's winging that. Carry that around with you. I wish everybody realized that; the world would be somewhat safer if everybody acted with this knowlege.
(Boy, it's scary. Really scary. But there's no compelling evidence to the contrary, only isolated counter examples.)
This does not mean that you should have zero confidence, but I would say low levels of confidence are in order. (Boy, I hope my future employer(s) don't see this, or if they do, I hope they understand what I'm saying here.)
You can't fight this, so don't. Roll with it. Don't commit your soul to your job. You must cultivate the ability to detach from your job, so if one VP's decision wipes out your last six years of coding, try not to be too upset.
Like all good advice about managing one's inner self, this is impossible to apply fully, and I'll be the last to claim I have. But like all good advice, at least trying helps more then not trying at all.
This is one of the many reasons I hobby program. Nobody can do that to me, except myself.
Re:Sigh, Diana could never figure it out...
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Robot Mine Smasher
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· Score: 2
You can't even hold your own argument together. Cluster bombs are irrelevent to (and I quote you) "the US Armed Forces places its mines humanely".
And it would be incumbent upon you to explain why (accidentally) unexploded ordinance is (morally) identical to (deliberately placed and subsequently removed) mines. It's not trivially obvious, there's a big intent difference there.
You can prove anything by dragging in emotion-laden tangential issues.
(Note I haven't said whether I agree or disagree with you, so comments attacking my unstated and unknown-by-you personal beliefs will be met with extreme derision.)
Re:I honestly can't figure out
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What is .NET?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
For what its worth, Javascript has been effectively standardized for, oh, I'd say the last five years, even before the ECMA standard. (Note the word 'effectively', it's a critical one to my point.)
What you're complaining about (justifiably) is the DOM, or Document Object Model. The DOM was standardized much more recently, and unfortunately contains a few holes large enough to drive a truck through, necessitating the need for non-standard extensions in practice. (One of the most-commonly-used of these is the "innerHTML" attributes, which is *not defined* in the standard, despite the fact that it is wonderfully useful. Mozilla actually explicitly added it many milestones ago because people were screaming for it. The 'standardized' way of doing that was upwards of 10-20 lines of rather difficult-to-read code, involving walking the tree and regenerating the HTML, then nearly-manually parsing the given HTML back into a tree, then swapping the newly-parsed Node tree into the document! Is anyone surprised nobody, even those who understood it, wanted to do that?)
The DOMs are inconsistent, partially because they're hard to get write. But Javascript itself is nearly unchanged since Netscape 3.0. That's not a typo. Yes, a few nice things have been added (for instance, I think an exception mechanism has been added since then), but effectively all of the language anyone uses on a web page script was there in Netscape 3.0. (How many people here have created their own objects in Javascript, or fiddled with the prototypes? IIRC, this feature was in 3.0, and it's still too-advanced to be necessary in most web scripts. Short scripts don't need a lot.)
This works out on topic nicely... because you're very likely looking at the future of Mono. "What use is Mono when the same code doesn't *quite* run on.NET?" What use, indeed? The greatest challenge facing those who would implement the CLR is not in writing the class libraries, it's matching them bug-for-bug. (One of the reasons Mozilla and IE still don't work identically is that Mozilla was forced to abandon its plans for bug-for-bug compatibility with IE, due to the feature's excessively high "pie in the sky" factor.)
Musicians always spread that FUD about how all great scientists are musically inclined.
I've heard "many", not "all". Big difference in the point. Critical, in fact.
If musicians are so smart, how come they aren't all scientists?
Contains the amazingly arrogant implicit assumption that only scientists are smart! Good grief! Who the hell modded you up as "insightful"? I'd call the designation antynomous!
Just because Einstein dabbled in music, all of a sudden his abilities outside of music apply to all those who are musically inclined?
Straw man. Nobody claims anything on evidence that limited. To the contrary, it's well backed up by fairly solid psychological studies, which I leave as an exercise for the careful reader to locate.
I'd say the correlation is well established. (Might want to look up the word "correlation" before replying. Evidence suggest you'll react as if I said something to the effect of "A person is smart if and only if they are musical", which is not what was said.)
I'd recommend a little brushing up on logic yourself. You've got a wicked case of unexamined-axiomitis.
Here's a thought; this sort of thing could replace current eye exam methodologies, or at least supplement them.
Rather then asking a series of binary questions, "Is this... or this... better?", give the examinee some control over the process and do things like "Twist this knob until the line is in focus."
Where this could become really useful is in the more exotically deformed eyes... 'normal' near-/far-sightedness is identified plenty well by current methodologies, but imagine someone with spherical distortion being able to fiddle with the knobs until they see things correctly, and letting the computer figure out what the settings are. Or perhaps "Make this line so it doesn't curve."
One could theorectically do some of this with just a screen, but this technology might allow better control over precise focus and other similar precise controls that might make this significantly better then current practice.
I'm not an optamologist, just a nerd rambling, so perhaps this is already being looked into.
Two major reasons: The object requirements, and the implicit assumption that relatively large systems are going to be built with this tool.
Python's objects are more refined and mature then Perl's. Perl is working on correcting this, but it's in the future, not now. This is not really a topic for debate, BTW, it's basically established fact, unless you personally have extremely kooky definitions of OO. It does not sound like the specifier has kooky definitions.
Python also works better with large systems, because There's More Then One Way To Do It is bad when multiple programmers are working together. Each programmer's dialect may or may not be even comprehensible to another. Mind you, this is actually a strength for Perl, it just happens to make it somewhat less suitable for certain tasks.
In the Python vs. Perl flamewar, my call on the issue is "the right tool for the right job". This one's pretty clearly in Python's camp.
Slashdot Mirror
Each of the possible 1 048 576 solutions were then represented by much longer strands of specially encoded DNA, which Adleman's team added to the first cell.
Granted I'm not a bio-engineer, but it's very difficult for me to believe that DNA will ever solve a problem faster then the computer can.
For this problem, millions of DNA strands were generated. I guarentee you the researchers didn't do it by hand. In the time the computer was instructing the hardware on how to make any given solution, it could have checked a thousand solutions. And the speed is accelerating.
Maybe, just maybe, if the strands could be generated automatically by a gene-gen'ed life form, except for the query strand, this could keep up with conventional silicon. But that's a tough nut itself.
I'm more intrigued by the QM computers... and I don't really believe in them, either.
(Biological computing may someday take off. But I don't think it's going to involve DNA. DNA is not meant for computing in the sense most of us find interesting. The gymnastics necessary to answer this simple question demonstrates that, and unlike conventional computers, where there has always been a clear path of progress, exactly what part of this computation is going to be streamlined? Millions upon millions of unique strands must be generated; what's the equivalent of shrinking the transistor by a factor of 2? I'm not holding my breath.)
In this case, is letting another company offer ISP services over your cable lines analogous to letting another company offer TV channels over your cable lines, or is it analogous to letting another long distance carrier complete calls to your phone customers.
Errr, you are aware both of these things happen? Cable companies are obligated to provide local channels on their cable service, and whenever you call someone on the other side of the country, a different long distance service completes the call. By your own argument, then, this ruling makes no sense.
You started off well, by ranting about the evils of analogies, but fell into the the trap yourself when you tried to draw some of your own.
Let's stay out of analogies. This ruling hands all the power to the local monopoly. This never works out well, and I don't see why this will work out well this time, either. (This isn't an analogy, this is an observed historical pattern.) Higher prices and lower service, here we come!
Nitpick further: Reliable for what definition of "reliable"? When Program A crashes through no fault of its own, but that Program B scrambled the process information in the kernel, in a strict sense, that renders Program A unreliable: You can't know it won't crash.
It's not widgets that are the problem, it's everything. For all you know, your console library will crash the system on some input. Follow the link, that's not idle speculation.
The fundamental problem with software is that like other mathematical entities, it only potentially takes one hole (and subsequent exploitation, accidental or otherwise) to bring the whole structure crashing down, from app to OS. (Or further; I've had Windows 3.1 programs that "reliably" (*grin*) managed to scramble the CMOS on their way down.) No physical structure and no physical metaphor (and by extension no thought processes that operate primarily by metaphor to the physical world) can fully capture this aspect of software.
Reliable, in the strict sense, means %100. My system has only rebooted spontaneously twice in the last month, but that's not %100.
The short version: The DMCA makes provisions for certain caches used in the transmission of information, such as your ISP may use. There are certain defined procedures that the ISP must implement to allow people to get their content out of that cache.
Google implements those procedures, and claims protection under the DMCA for their cache. (Note the hoops you must jump through to get them to remove stuff are the legally mandated hoops under the DMCA; they are not trying to be nasty.) Now, a careful reading of the DMCA will show that Google probably doesn't meet the qualifications of this cache exception; but nobody has cared enough to fight it yet. The few who care just jump through the hoops and forget about it.
The long version is: Read the DMCA and compare against Google's DMCA page and decide for yourself.
No. You confound the time it came out with the message of the book.
As I read it, which by the way you can too (so don't just take my word for it), the major point of the book is that the net is allowed all of us to communicate (again), so companies had better stop treating us like isolated, incommunicado sheep, lest we literally laugh them out of business. (Or just badmouth them, give bad reviews, tell the truth about the service records, etc. "Laughing" is just an evocative examples.)
Not only does it not really have anything to do with the DotCom bust, it rather clearly warned people not to do what the DotComs did... and indeed, what Slashdot seems well on its way to doing. The biggst DotCom failure was to aggregate eyeballs, and never even think for a moment about relating to people.
The DotCom bust proves the book out, it does not invalidate it.
Now, I've politely corrected you up to this point, so as to inform the other readers, but for pete's sake, check your facts before posting such antynomous information! You couldn't hardly be more wrong if you tried!
It means that you've got far too much time on your hands.
That accusation says more about the accuser then the accused.
It DOES mean you need to give up the unrealistic goal of catching %100 of the cheaters. And furthermore, it implies that you need to do a cost/benefit analysis about whether it's worth spending $x and y trust-units to catch the next cheater, or stop now and decide you've got the best bang for the buck.
I'm beginning to think we should require a cross-disciplinary cost-benefits analysis class in high school. Of course, who'd write the course?
With sufficent bandwidth, why should anyone _ever_ pay for cycles that they do not use.
.NET, and the "thin client" crowd keep trying to do away with. For their benefit, not yours.)
That's an argument for power (as in electricity) conservation, not cycle conservation. Use still tends to grow to match resources. Block off resource growth, on the excuse that it's unused, and you'll block off use growth, a.k.a. "innovation".
Normally one would want to consider the environmental side of increasing resources, but happily (and this is the great miracle of computers), there are no particular downsides (within reason) to increasing cycles. I still don't see the economic value in bastardizing our modern supercomputers, to save quite literally a couple of bucks, when the work could be done at home.
The edges still have vastly more power then the center, and that won't change. Ever. Virtually by definition.
I submit that only a naive analysis of the cost/benefits tradeoff can conclude that it's worth giving people "thin clients", and nothing else. If nothing else, do YOU want to be beholden to the Central Authority for what you can and can't do? Forget the moral issues, even. What if they don't install Quake VI when you want to use it? What if you want to install a software package that the Authority hasn't installed, for whatever reason? How shortsighted to give up the power to do these things, which even "mundanes" do all the time, just to save $15 on the client! (Throw in the personal freedom issues, and it's a *really* dumb idea.)
People still need their own processing centers inside their own homes. (They may chose to connect to that with OTHER thin clients, but there's still that central server, which is what Microsoft,
The era of the super-fastest home PC might be over.
;-)
Agreed! I've got an 800MHz machine, now over a factor of two behind state-of-the-art, rapidly coming up on three, and I have no desire to upgrade. (Wierd feeling, that.) I also use a Pentium 233 and even a 133 laptop, day to day, and the 133 only sometimes bothers me.
But I'm not giving up the 800MHz...
Perhaps by looking through our credit histories, with their new math and understanding, they could avoid some peril that was a root cause of the fall.
:-)
*chuckle* I like that. Sounds like an interesting premise for a short sci-fi story.
The time of super fast home-PCs is likely to not last very long. The incoming .NET and dotGNU waves are likely to make thin clients much more realistic.
.NET takes off), it costs very, very little to put in an Athlon, versus a Pentium 100, and that cost is swamped by the display cost. You still need memory on the client side for buffering. You still want a hard drive on the client side for other buffering (like video; a one minute buffer fills RAM pretty fast, but on any conceivable real-wrld future network, we'll need those buffers).
.NET does not eliminate the need for fast computers, it just moves it. And the need for more power will be with us for a while yet. We're in a computation bubble here, but voice technology, video streaming, REAL teleconferencing, better video games, and a lot of truly desirable things are still waiting for us over the computation power horizen. And that's just the applications we KNOW about...)
Can you back this up with any real facts? Today, for $500, you can own a bare-bones Athlon system, which 20 years ago was a supercomputer, minus a bit of memory.
Even after we hit the Fundamental Barrier, whenever that is, computers will continue to improve for a while due to architecture improvements and innovative designs (like 3-D chips, currently totally unnecessary but providing one road for expansion in the future).
It gets to the point where on the consumer level, in a very short period of time (specifically, *before*
Maybe YOU call a 4GHz Athlon II w/ 512MB of RAM and a 100GB hard drive a thin client, useless to Mary. I call it a dream come true. You have to postulate a Major Breakthrough within the next two-to-three years in display technology for the cost of the display not to swamp the cost of at least (more realistically) a GHz machine with 128 MB of (fast) memory. We'd probably know about it already. So, do you buy the $200 "thin client" that can't do anything on its own, or the $235 "I'd kill for this machine in 1985" that runs fifty times faster, and feels ten times more responsive?
(I made a couple of assumptions in this post. But one way or another, Mary needs a super computer in her home. Either for use that looks like modern use, or to serve as the central server for the house. I, and many others, even amoung the computer non-savvy, will NOT farm my data out to a foriegn entity!
You construct several examples, but miss my point, which is that the coverage of your examples is vanishingly less then .001% of things commited to storage. My credit data won't matter. My webserver logs won't matter. Terabytes of astronomical data won't matter.
For that vanishing percentage that matters, write it down. (It largely already is.) But to rant about the evils of modern storage (which is the thrust of this Slashdot discussion, not necessarily your message), based on a vanishingly small sample of data, is rather disingenous.
The second sentance of my post, which you left off, was the more importent one; the first sentance just set it up.
(I should learn to resist the tempation to be Zen on Slashdot.)
If society collapses, will you give a damn about your data, while you're subsistence farming?
If so, perhaps you should commit it to paper after all.
Oh, then maybe it was Diane who did the Vulcan stuff. I don't know, too many similar names for me to keep track. :-)
:-(
At any rate, I suspect that the Enterprise people are in no danger of seeing the light and inviting either of these two to help them with the Vulcans on Enterprise.
You know, I have zero problem with saying people should be responsible for software they write, at least in the abstract. The idea that they should not is kind of silly, if you think about it honestly.
But at this point in time, it would be disasterous to start allowing liability. Why? Because liability is determined by the court system, and with no offense intended, the court system is incompetent at this time to make those sort of decisions.
I have no faith in the ability of the court system to distinguish between an obscure flaw that allows a man-in-the-middle attack on a so-called "secure" connection, and a glaringly obvious security problem like "By default, everyone in the world has full access to your desktop." (reference: Symantec's PCAnywhere for a *very* long time.) In fact, I don't trust me to make those decisions.
At this point in time, and at our current technology level, as we've all heard and said many times, one wrong character in the wrong location, out of billions, can cause a difficult-to-detect error that, when exploited, can give an attacker root access. It's difficult to come up with any sort of definition of proportional responsibility.
If a bridge collapses because all of the tons upon tons of concrete used was an inferior grade, that's one thing. But if the bridge collapses because one screw was made of aluminum instead of steel, is that worth suing over? My real point can be seen in how this metaphor is not applicable; A bridge would never collapse over something so trivial unless it had other fundamental problems! Software is fundamentally more fragile. (So far, all attempts to negate this have essentially failed, and I'm not willing to count on some miraculuous development in the future. Though I suppose if such a thing occurred, and it was legally mandated to use formal methods, that would make people like me who could understand them suddenly no longer competing with hacks who think they're leet 'cause they can sorta use Perl... >:-) )
Even a professional like me might be hard pressed, after the fact, to determine which sort of problem is before the court, to determine liability. Do you want to leave it in the hands of lawyers?
No, what Shatner writes is not Canon. The only Canon is the shows and the movies, and not even all of the shows; the animated series is basically ignored.
(Computer graphics will have come of age when a Horta crewmember is shown in a Star Trek series as a normal, every-episode crew member.)
What I find sad is that the authors have no understanding of Vulcans, which are (or perhaps "were") as finely developed as the Klingons were in TNG. As I understand it, the Vulcans are basically the brain child of D.C. Fontana (I think the first name is Dorothy), who created wonderful back history for the species. For instance, one part that came out in the original series: Why are Vulcans so logical? Because they are extremely emotional, and tend to kill each other in their 'natural' state.
Perhaps at least that tidbit came out on tonight's episode; I couldn't bring myself to watch it. Apparently, neither could my TiVo; it recorded a re-run of Junkyard Wars, which was probably better anyhow.
If you ever see the book "Spock's World", by Fontana, pick it up. You'll be impressed by the true story of Vulcan. You'll wish you saw more of them. My greatest hope for Enterprise is that they'll eventually get around to exploring Vulcan, in a way that the original series could oly dream of... but what are the odds? The most nuanced charecterization I've seen of the Vulcan's so far on Enterprise is that they're jackasses.
Woo, there's some deep charecterization!
I'm losing interest fast; such damned shallow writing when there is such potential being *handed* to the writers on a silver platter is painful to watch.
Just searching for 'OpenBSD Bug' on Google Groups retrieves over 20,500 queries.
Searching for "Brian bug" on Google shows 441,000 hits. Clearly you're 20 times buggier then OpenBSD, so I wouldn't be slinging implied accusations around.
That is incorrect. Copyright never expires due to lack of enforcement, and this argument is complete bullcrap... though to be fair, I bet Will Wright doesn't know that.
It would be interesting to know if he came up with this misunderstanding on his own, or if somebody fed him this line.
Now, he may be legitimately concerned about the trademark, which does need to be defended, but as long as nobody is doing anything with the charecters other then downloading the game they came from, I can't imagine that trademark infringements are taking place. That would happen if you started printing posters of the char, or putting it in your own movies, or other similarly infringing activities, none of which have anything to do with downloading a game.
Downloading games does not strip publishers of any rights. In fact, if massive downloads of a game did strip publishers of the copyright, then this would be a null issue, as abandonware would be perfectly legal! Once the copyright is stripped, we could all download these things with impunity. (Extensive warezing could become legal, too, by the same argument.) Lawyers aren't stupid, so they didn't leave this gaping loophole open.
It's difficult to move debate on these issues forward when there's so much ignorance of the issues. (How many of you noticed this before I pointed it out? And IANAL, either.)
One scary moment that everybody should experience before they consider themselves an adult is the final realization that everybody is just winging it. People like Bill Gates or Thomas Jefferson or [insert your hero here] are simply better then winging it then others.
It's scary. Your government is winging it. Your doctor is winging it. The CIA, FBI, FDA, FCC, the Supreme Court, the Russian Government, Al-Qaeda, they're all winging it. Some a little less then others, but don't kid yourself; how often does the Supreme Court decide based largely on logic, versus based largely on their gut feelings (a.k.a. "political philosophy")?
Your managers, being human, are winging it. They have no more bandwidth then you in life. You can barely keep up with your projects and the industry. They have their own problems, and they aren't keeping up with your projects or the state of your industry.
Everybody's winging that. Carry that around with you. I wish everybody realized that; the world would be somewhat safer if everybody acted with this knowlege.
(Boy, it's scary. Really scary. But there's no compelling evidence to the contrary, only isolated counter examples.)
This does not mean that you should have zero confidence, but I would say low levels of confidence are in order. (Boy, I hope my future employer(s) don't see this, or if they do, I hope they understand what I'm saying here.)
You can't fight this, so don't. Roll with it. Don't commit your soul to your job. You must cultivate the ability to detach from your job, so if one VP's decision wipes out your last six years of coding, try not to be too upset.
Like all good advice about managing one's inner self, this is impossible to apply fully, and I'll be the last to claim I have. But like all good advice, at least trying helps more then not trying at all.
This is one of the many reasons I hobby program. Nobody can do that to me, except myself.
You can't even hold your own argument together. Cluster bombs are irrelevent to (and I quote you) "the US Armed Forces places its mines humanely".
And it would be incumbent upon you to explain why (accidentally) unexploded ordinance is (morally) identical to (deliberately placed and subsequently removed) mines. It's not trivially obvious, there's a big intent difference there.
You can prove anything by dragging in emotion-laden tangential issues.
(Note I haven't said whether I agree or disagree with you, so comments attacking my unstated and unknown-by-you personal beliefs will be met with extreme derision.)
For what its worth, Javascript has been effectively standardized for, oh, I'd say the last five years, even before the ECMA standard. (Note the word 'effectively', it's a critical one to my point.)
.NET?" What use, indeed? The greatest challenge facing those who would implement the CLR is not in writing the class libraries, it's matching them bug-for-bug. (One of the reasons Mozilla and IE still don't work identically is that Mozilla was forced to abandon its plans for bug-for-bug compatibility with IE, due to the feature's excessively high "pie in the sky" factor.)
What you're complaining about (justifiably) is the DOM, or Document Object Model. The DOM was standardized much more recently, and unfortunately contains a few holes large enough to drive a truck through, necessitating the need for non-standard extensions in practice. (One of the most-commonly-used of these is the "innerHTML" attributes, which is *not defined* in the standard, despite the fact that it is wonderfully useful. Mozilla actually explicitly added it many milestones ago because people were screaming for it. The 'standardized' way of doing that was upwards of 10-20 lines of rather difficult-to-read code, involving walking the tree and regenerating the HTML, then nearly-manually parsing the given HTML back into a tree, then swapping the newly-parsed Node tree into the document! Is anyone surprised nobody, even those who understood it, wanted to do that?)
The DOMs are inconsistent, partially because they're hard to get write. But Javascript itself is nearly unchanged since Netscape 3.0. That's not a typo. Yes, a few nice things have been added (for instance, I think an exception mechanism has been added since then), but effectively all of the language anyone uses on a web page script was there in Netscape 3.0. (How many people here have created their own objects in Javascript, or fiddled with the prototypes? IIRC, this feature was in 3.0, and it's still too-advanced to be necessary in most web scripts. Short scripts don't need a lot.)
This works out on topic nicely... because you're very likely looking at the future of Mono. "What use is Mono when the same code doesn't *quite* run on
Musicians always spread that FUD about how all great scientists are musically inclined.
I've heard "many", not "all". Big difference in the point. Critical, in fact.
If musicians are so smart, how come they aren't all scientists?
Contains the amazingly arrogant implicit assumption that only scientists are smart! Good grief! Who the hell modded you up as "insightful"? I'd call the designation antynomous!
Just because Einstein dabbled in music, all of a sudden his abilities outside of music apply to all those who are musically inclined?
Straw man. Nobody claims anything on evidence that limited. To the contrary, it's well backed up by fairly solid psychological studies, which I leave as an exercise for the careful reader to locate.
I'd say the correlation is well established. (Might want to look up the word "correlation" before replying. Evidence suggest you'll react as if I said something to the effect of "A person is smart if and only if they are musical", which is not what was said.)
I'd recommend a little brushing up on logic yourself. You've got a wicked case of unexamined-axiomitis.
Here's a thought; this sort of thing could replace current eye exam methodologies, or at least supplement them.
Rather then asking a series of binary questions, "Is this... or this... better?", give the examinee some control over the process and do things like "Twist this knob until the line is in focus."
Where this could become really useful is in the more exotically deformed eyes... 'normal' near-/far-sightedness is identified plenty well by current methodologies, but imagine someone with spherical distortion being able to fiddle with the knobs until they see things correctly, and letting the computer figure out what the settings are. Or perhaps "Make this line so it doesn't curve."
One could theorectically do some of this with just a screen, but this technology might allow better control over precise focus and other similar precise controls that might make this significantly better then current practice.
I'm not an optamologist, just a nerd rambling, so perhaps this is already being looked into.
As if it'$ hard to get BE$T FILE OF THE YEAR accolade$. Hell, thanks to Sony, we now know the accolader need not even exist!
So why not use Perl?
Two major reasons: The object requirements, and the implicit assumption that relatively large systems are going to be built with this tool.
Python's objects are more refined and mature then Perl's. Perl is working on correcting this, but it's in the future, not now. This is not really a topic for debate, BTW, it's basically established fact, unless you personally have extremely kooky definitions of OO. It does not sound like the specifier has kooky definitions.
Python also works better with large systems, because There's More Then One Way To Do It is bad when multiple programmers are working together. Each programmer's dialect may or may not be even comprehensible to another. Mind you, this is actually a strength for Perl, it just happens to make it somewhat less suitable for certain tasks.
In the Python vs. Perl flamewar, my call on the issue is "the right tool for the right job". This one's pretty clearly in Python's camp.