As for staying out, I think I agree with Kaa above where he suggests (though not directly) that there are times when one cannot turn a blind eye to the horrors perpetrated outside of North America. In accordance with the most basic and universal human morality, something must be done. This is the principle behind Peacekeeping efforts - you may not agree with the implementation, but I sure as hell hope you agree with the design.
I think you missed my point. I agreed (in the end) with the implementation. Clinton was right in his assessment that we could limit our involvement in Kosovo and still achieve his stated goals.
I disagreed with the design.
The United States should not be expected to act as Europe's police force every time they start killing each other. It is hard to morally justify sending some agnostic 18-year-old American kid to die just because Eastern Orthodox followers in the ass-end of Europe can't get along with their Muslim neighbors.
If resolving a situation is vital to our freedom and security at home, that is one thing, but as soon as you start fighting wars for global human rights, then how can you not get equally involved in Congo/Zaire, Korea, Cuba, China, and every piss-pot country where some nutcase is destroying people's lives?
I feel even more strongly that frickin' Canadians have no business telling us what wars we should get involved in. Send your bilingual peace-keeping force into harm's way if you like, but we will decide for ourselves what wars we will fight, thank you.
1) If we had this kind of technology on D-Day in 1944, many Americans would be spending Memorial Day visiting grandpas instead of gravesites.
2) The same people who are now wringing their hands over Bush's failure to wipe out the Iraqi government would have screamed bloody murder if the war went on for one more day than it had to. Removing a dictator means occupying a country until a new government can be established. Does anybody really think we were prepared to do that in '91? The Gulf War was not about human rights. It was about restoring the balance of power in the Middle East.
3) We live in a democracy, and Clinton never really had popular support for an extended war in Kosovo. While some leaders (FDR, Reagan, etc.) might have used the media to persuade the nation of the importance of the cause, Clinton (for better or worse) is not that kind of President. Personally, I think Clinton took the right approach when he limited our involvement, although at the time I thought that we should have stayed out entirely (and still do, somewhat).
You don't want to shell shock these kids out of programming altogether by throwing into gcc, perl, or even the antiquated Borland Turbo C++ IDE.
Sorry, but I still disagree. Any kid that goes out of their way to express a desire in programming probably wants to get their fingernails dirty with the real thing. Mastering CLI concepts will make it much easier for them to understand what is really happening when they work with a GUI-based object language.
To tell a new hacker to start out with VB would be like telling a young gear-head that his first hot-rod should be a Honda Civic. Sometimes you can get away with that, but I say you give that kid a rusted-out junk-yard Ford Mustang to restore, and harness that youthful enthusiasm to its full potential.
I would say that the real irony is that you were modded up to (Score:4, Insightful), when your post contained absolutely no insight whatsoever. I'm sure all the/. trolls & karma whores are in awe of your technique.:)
Watch any half-hour of the Dilbert TV show, and you will never accuse a cartoonist of selling out again. What began its life as the funniest strip in the paper ended up as the worst show on television.
Between that and the weird psuedo-science chapter at the end of "The Dilbert Future", it looks like Scott Adams has spent whatever geek cred he ever had.
I can completely negate Watterson's point in two words:
Charles Schultz
"Selling out" was practically invented by the Peanuts franchise (Snoppy's image is on everything; a buddy of mine has a great "Joe Hacker" T-shirt, for example) but you will never find a strip with more heart.
That said, Calvin & Hobbes was a great strip for the run that it had. I kind of wish BW would take another stab at it someday.
Visual Basic is sort of like a Fisher Price "My First Programming Language"
Which makes it great for very young children or MCSE's.;)
This guy said his kids really want to be programmers. If that is true, they are probably math geeks that can take on raw code without the pretty pictures and not get scared. I was their age when I was hacking on Commodores and Apple II's, and I loved it. Starting out with near-WYSIWYG object programming might actually take some of the fun out of it.
I totally agree. 10 or 11 is the perfect age for a motivated young geek to get started.
This is not just a hunch, I have a degree in education, and know from studying childhood development models that the pre-teen and the "terrible twos" are the two periods of life when the human brain is growing the fastest... and they were too busy learning to talk to write code when they were toddlers.:) You do not want to waste these years.
Give them the most powerful tools they can handle. Kids at this age don't just love the feeling of power, they crave it. They have no control over their voices, bodies, emotions, or sex drive... that's why kids often go for weird or elaborate haircuts at that age (one of the few things they can control is their hair). Put one of these kids in front of a flexible CLI and let them hack away at it! One of the best things my parents ever did for me was buy my my first computer (a Vic20) and insist that I figure it all out for myself. With all the web information out there these days, your kid might even know more than you in a couple years.:)
Their actual DSL division seems to have a clue, but they work as part of a company that does not know how to install cable properly. For the last year and a half, my phone line has been lying across my back yard & my neighbor's yard... I have to snake it through the trees every time I mow my lawn.
I have a problem with either their phone service or their billing department about once every 2 months.
Now my plan is to drop them entirely: I will get the 2-way cable-modem service from Roadrunner, and use my PCS phone for voice. Land lines are nice, but it is just not worth putting up with those idiots.
The quality of mp3's is a great deal better than tape.
A good dub tape sounds much, much better than an mp3 rip. Anyone who has listened to both on a quality hi-fi system and thinks otherwise has ears of tin.
Of course, being a drummer in a heavy metal band for your entire adult life could make parsing out sound fidelity pretty tricky. When Lars says that mp3's are a perfect copy of the masters, I'm sure he is taking somebody's word for it; no doubt everything he hears is blended with a steady "eeee..."
I would have used more "e"s to make my point, but the dang lameness filler kicked in.:(
That's one of the most interesting observations I have heard so far. If eBay were smart, they would go out of their way to encourage Buyer's Edge to crawl their site. After all, if somebody sees an eBay item via BE, they still gotta go to eBay to buy it, and they might not have seen it otherwise.
This is like a photo-negative of all those companies trying to buy fake pattern matches on search engines like Lycos a couple years ago.
How would ebay feel if all it's thousands of users turned their own robots loose on the the servers?
That's an adroit question. Too bad you are not on the board at eBay.
If you call used car dealers to get price comparissons on the '98 Crown Victoria, you are costing the "spied on" store money through the waste of sales-staff time... but car dealers do this to each other all the time. They don't sue each other over it.
E-Bay is perfectly within their right to deny someone access to their computers just as a retail store has the right to throw out spies when caught (which they also do).
If eBay had made a technology change that "broke" the crawler, that would be like throwing a spy out... what they did was criminalize the behavior in the courts, which is a Bad Thing, if you ask me.
Okay. Some marketing team for a tennis ball company was trying to come up with a means of making their tennis balls more distinct from the competition. Every tennis ball that meets the specs for tournament play is pretty much the same, so if you are trying to sell a "brand-name" ball at a higher price, you gotta do something to make it stand out. Using a different color is no good, because people expect tennis balls to be a certain color. If it is not day-glow green (or, in a few cases, yellow or orange), it won't be used.
Therefore, they decided, "why don't we make our tennis balls smell different than all the other ones? The smell of fresh-cut grass will remind people of the Wimbeton tournament, let's go with that. Oh, and we better get a trademark for tennis balls that smell like fresh grass clippings, or the market will be flooded with cheapie knock-offs."
That's all there is to the story... no need to get your undies in a bunch over smells being "patented". It ain't happening. The editors at/. should be a little embarrassed that they ran this.
Good luck running Navigator or Gimp in an X environment on an old 386 though.
People can, and do, run Photoshop and web browsers on old '030 and '020 Macs.
Like I was saying, the differences from 7.5.3 up to 9.0 ammount to mostly incremental upgrades. Specifically, a slightly spiffier-looking desktop, PowerPC-specific code, and support for new hardware like USB.
I can tell that YANALE (You are not a lawyer either).
Odds are, the computer you are using right now contains hardware that was reverse-engineered... and there's not a thing that IBM can do about it, because Compaq (and later other companies) did it legally.
You are correct. The reason for my confusion was that my old Duo 230 was stolen last year, and replaced with a 280 from a pawn shop. I have 8.1 running on the 280, but still think of it as an 030 machine (it is actually an LC040). My mistake.
Still, 7.5.3 does almost everything 8.1 does, and on older hardware it often does it better, so I think my point is still valid.
Although it is not dead-on-topic, I hope your comment gets modded way up, becuase you hit the nail right on the head.
Apple is not trying to say "think differently"... Just like when people say "think big", they don't mean "think bigly".
Also, being flexible with grammar takes a page right out of the infamous Jargon File of hacker vernacular, which proclaims "all nouns can be verbed".:)
A split infinitive is like ending a sentence with a preposition -- it's not something most people notice.
Bingo! And what is the prime directive of all marketing campaigns? To get noticed!
I would say that it was a brilliant move. They are sort-of saying, some people are so pedantic that they nit-pick about the grammer used in advertisements, but we are not like those poor souls... we think different.
(This reminds me of a pretty funny rumor: Steve Jobs is notorious for parking his Mercades pretty much wherever the hell he wants on the Apple campus, usually taking up at least two spaces. As the story goes, some brave employee snuck up and put a sticker on his back bumper that said "Park Different".)
Speaking as one libertarian to another, your argument has a few gaps.
The authors of viruses can be prosecuted because that code may present a real danger.
Writing a virus, or even publishing one, is not and should not be illegal. In fact, such restrictions would interfere with the creation of anti-virus software. What is outlawed is the act of unleashing a destructive self-replicating program out into the world... for that matter, even putting destructive software one single, stand-alone box that does not belong to you is a crime, because you are damaging somebody's property.
Just as the courts have decided to impose limits on verbal expression... they will place restrictions on the distribution of code.
One concept that could perhaps be re-examined here is the nature of software: is code invented (like a coffee maker) or authored (like a novel)? One is protected by patents, the other by copyright.
Programs are mathematical constructs. They are important for their functions, not their forms. "Good design" is only valued because it improves the functionality (runs faster, debugs with less trouble, etc.)
In this sense, software is more like an invention to be pantented than a document to be copyrighted. If you invent a formula that tastes just like coke, or write a program that decodes DVD's, and do so using honest reverse-engineering methods, then you should be free and clear to do what you like.
IANAL, but it seems to me that this might turn into a case that brings up a lot of questions that the courts need to ask.
Is it such a radical idea to think that kids who can easily get music for free aren't buying less CDs?
Kids are not know for their money-managements skills.
A simple word problem: Breanna has a $30 allowance for the month. Sally has a $30 allowance for the month. Each of them buy 2 Brittany Spears albums at the mall, but Sally also uses Napster to download albums from Ricky Martin, N'Sync, and Brandy (none of which she likes enough to buy, but she thinks it is fun to have a lot of music to choose from). The next month, they both blow their allowance on CD's at the mall again (Christina Aguilera and Jewel), and Sally downloads a few more albums that she sort-of likes. How much money has the record company lost because of Sally's piracy?
"The Internet and its distinctive architecture have created a freer culture than we have ever had before"
It seems to me that it would be much more accurate to say:
A freer culture than we ever had before has created the Internet and its distinctive architecture.
When the Internet was still the exclusive playground of universities and government, the "culture" you are talking about was dialing in to stand-alone private BBS systems.
If the Internet ever becomes less usefull to hackers and geeks, we will simply go elsewhere (along the lines of the "Walled City" in William Gibson's "Idoru"). Have no fear: If "the spine" was taken down tomorrow, and replaced with Al Gore's pirate-free, carefully monitored, kid-friendly, politically correct "information super highway" we would have our own replacement up and running within the year, paid for with our "day jobs" supporting the corporate net.
What it comes down to is that the Internet needs geeks to function, not the other way around.
Re:I disagree with his anti-corporate stance
on
At The Crossroads
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· Score: 1
If only all the other trolls on/. were capable of your subtlety. You had me going right up until "...which have increased synergy across the web"
I especially liked the part when you called the old-school gurus of the Internet "Luddites", without even a hint of irony. That's not just trolling; it's poetry.
I actually enjoyed reading your post even more than the article.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you missed my point. I agreed (in the end) with the implementation. Clinton was right in his assessment that we could limit our involvement in Kosovo and still achieve his stated goals.
I disagreed with the design.
The United States should not be expected to act as Europe's police force every time they start killing each other. It is hard to morally justify sending some agnostic 18-year-old American kid to die just because Eastern Orthodox followers in the ass-end of Europe can't get along with their Muslim neighbors.
If resolving a situation is vital to our freedom and security at home, that is one thing, but as soon as you start fighting wars for global human rights, then how can you not get equally involved in Congo/Zaire, Korea, Cuba, China, and every piss-pot country where some nutcase is destroying people's lives?
I feel even more strongly that frickin' Canadians have no business telling us what wars we should get involved in. Send your bilingual peace-keeping force into harm's way if you like, but we will decide for ourselves what wars we will fight, thank you.
2) The same people who are now wringing their hands over Bush's failure to wipe out the Iraqi government would have screamed bloody murder if the war went on for one more day than it had to. Removing a dictator means occupying a country until a new government can be established. Does anybody really think we were prepared to do that in '91? The Gulf War was not about human rights. It was about restoring the balance of power in the Middle East.
3) We live in a democracy, and Clinton never really had popular support for an extended war in Kosovo. While some leaders (FDR, Reagan, etc.) might have used the media to persuade the nation of the importance of the cause, Clinton (for better or worse) is not that kind of President. Personally, I think Clinton took the right approach when he limited our involvement, although at the time I thought that we should have stayed out entirely (and still do, somewhat).
Sorry, but I still disagree. Any kid that goes out of their way to express a desire in programming probably wants to get their fingernails dirty with the real thing. Mastering CLI concepts will make it much easier for them to understand what is really happening when they work with a GUI-based object language.
To tell a new hacker to start out with VB would be like telling a young gear-head that his first hot-rod should be a Honda Civic. Sometimes you can get away with that, but I say you give that kid a rusted-out junk-yard Ford Mustang to restore, and harness that youthful enthusiasm to its full potential.
I would say that the real irony is that you were modded up to (Score:4, Insightful), when your post contained absolutely no insight whatsoever. I'm sure all the /. trolls & karma whores are in awe of your technique. :)
Between that and the weird psuedo-science chapter at the end of "The Dilbert Future", it looks like Scott Adams has spent whatever geek cred he ever had.
Charles Schultz
"Selling out" was practically invented by the Peanuts franchise (Snoppy's image is on everything; a buddy of mine has a great "Joe Hacker" T-shirt, for example) but you will never find a strip with more heart.
That said, Calvin & Hobbes was a great strip for the run that it had. I kind of wish BW would take another stab at it someday.
Which makes it great for very young children or MCSE's. ;)
This guy said his kids really want to be programmers. If that is true, they are probably math geeks that can take on raw code without the pretty pictures and not get scared. I was their age when I was hacking on Commodores and Apple II's, and I loved it. Starting out with near-WYSIWYG object programming might actually take some of the fun out of it.
This is not just a hunch, I have a degree in education, and know from studying childhood development models that the pre-teen and the "terrible twos" are the two periods of life when the human brain is growing the fastest... and they were too busy learning to talk to write code when they were toddlers. :) You do not want to waste these years.
Give them the most powerful tools they can handle. Kids at this age don't just love the feeling of power, they crave it. They have no control over their voices, bodies, emotions, or sex drive... that's why kids often go for weird or elaborate haircuts at that age (one of the few things they can control is their hair). Put one of these kids in front of a flexible CLI and let them hack away at it! One of the best things my parents ever did for me was buy my my first computer (a Vic20) and insist that I figure it all out for myself. With all the web information out there these days, your kid might even know more than you in a couple years. :)
Oh yea, and if your house could travel through time, that would be cool too.
Their actual DSL division seems to have a clue, but they work as part of a company that does not know how to install cable properly. For the last year and a half, my phone line has been lying across my back yard & my neighbor's yard... I have to snake it through the trees every time I mow my lawn.
I have a problem with either their phone service or their billing department about once every 2 months.
Now my plan is to drop them entirely: I will get the 2-way cable-modem service from Roadrunner, and use my PCS phone for voice. Land lines are nice, but it is just not worth putting up with those idiots.
Yes.
A good dub tape sounds much, much better than an mp3 rip. Anyone who has listened to both on a quality hi-fi system and thinks otherwise has ears of tin.
Of course, being a drummer in a heavy metal band for your entire adult life could make parsing out sound fidelity pretty tricky. When Lars says that mp3's are a perfect copy of the masters, I'm sure he is taking somebody's word for it; no doubt everything he hears is blended with a steady "eeee..."
I would have used more "e"s to make my point, but the dang lameness filler kicked in. :(
This is like a photo-negative of all those companies trying to buy fake pattern matches on search engines like Lycos a couple years ago.
How would ebay feel if all it's thousands of users turned their own robots loose on the the servers?
That's an adroit question. Too bad you are not on the board at eBay.
E-Bay is perfectly within their right to deny someone access to their computers just as a retail store has the right to throw out spies when caught (which they also do).
If eBay had made a technology change that "broke" the crawler, that would be like throwing a spy out... what they did was criminalize the behavior in the courts, which is a Bad Thing, if you ask me.
Therefore, they decided, "why don't we make our tennis balls smell different than all the other ones? The smell of fresh-cut grass will remind people of the Wimbeton tournament, let's go with that. Oh, and we better get a trademark for tennis balls that smell like fresh grass clippings, or the market will be flooded with cheapie knock-offs."
That's all there is to the story... no need to get your undies in a bunch over smells being "patented". It ain't happening. The editors at /. should be a little embarrassed that they ran this.
People can, and do, run Photoshop and web browsers on old '030 and '020 Macs.
Like I was saying, the differences from 7.5.3 up to 9.0 ammount to mostly incremental upgrades. Specifically, a slightly spiffier-looking desktop, PowerPC-specific code, and support for new hardware like USB.
Odds are, the computer you are using right now contains hardware that was reverse-engineered... and there's not a thing that IBM can do about it, because Compaq (and later other companies) did it legally.
Still, 7.5.3 does almost everything 8.1 does, and on older hardware it often does it better, so I think my point is still valid.
Although it is not dead-on-topic, I hope your comment gets modded way up, becuase you hit the nail right on the head.
Apple is not trying to say "think differently"... Just like when people say "think big", they don't mean "think bigly".
Also, being flexible with grammar takes a page right out of the infamous Jargon File of hacker vernacular, which proclaims "all nouns can be verbed". :)
g/grammer/s//grammar/g
Bingo! And what is the prime directive of all marketing campaigns? To get noticed!
I would say that it was a brilliant move. They are sort-of saying, some people are so pedantic that they nit-pick about the grammer used in advertisements, but we are not like those poor souls... we think different.
(This reminds me of a pretty funny rumor: Steve Jobs is notorious for parking his Mercades pretty much wherever the hell he wants on the Apple campus, usually taking up at least two spaces. As the story goes, some brave employee snuck up and put a sticker on his back bumper that said "Park Different".)
The authors of viruses can be prosecuted because that code may present a real danger.
Writing a virus, or even publishing one, is not and should not be illegal. In fact, such restrictions would interfere with the creation of anti-virus software. What is outlawed is the act of unleashing a destructive self-replicating program out into the world... for that matter, even putting destructive software one single, stand-alone box that does not belong to you is a crime, because you are damaging somebody's property.
Just as the courts have decided to impose limits on verbal expression ... they will place restrictions on the distribution of code.
One concept that could perhaps be re-examined here is the nature of software: is code invented (like a coffee maker) or authored (like a novel)? One is protected by patents, the other by copyright.
Programs are mathematical constructs. They are important for their functions, not their forms. "Good design" is only valued because it improves the functionality (runs faster, debugs with less trouble, etc.)
In this sense, software is more like an invention to be pantented than a document to be copyrighted. If you invent a formula that tastes just like coke, or write a program that decodes DVD's, and do so using honest reverse-engineering methods, then you should be free and clear to do what you like.
IANAL, but it seems to me that this might turn into a case that brings up a lot of questions that the courts need to ask.
Kids are not know for their money-managements skills.
A simple word problem: Breanna has a $30 allowance for the month. Sally has a $30 allowance for the month. Each of them buy 2 Brittany Spears albums at the mall, but Sally also uses Napster to download albums from Ricky Martin, N'Sync, and Brandy (none of which she likes enough to buy, but she thinks it is fun to have a lot of music to choose from). The next month, they both blow their allowance on CD's at the mall again (Christina Aguilera and Jewel), and Sally downloads a few more albums that she sort-of likes. How much money has the record company lost because of Sally's piracy?
It seems to me that it would be much more accurate to say:
A freer culture than we ever had before has created the Internet and its distinctive architecture.
When the Internet was still the exclusive playground of universities and government, the "culture" you are talking about was dialing in to stand-alone private BBS systems.
If the Internet ever becomes less usefull to hackers and geeks, we will simply go elsewhere (along the lines of the "Walled City" in William Gibson's "Idoru"). Have no fear: If "the spine" was taken down tomorrow, and replaced with Al Gore's pirate-free, carefully monitored, kid-friendly, politically correct "information super highway" we would have our own replacement up and running within the year, paid for with our "day jobs" supporting the corporate net.
What it comes down to is that the Internet needs geeks to function, not the other way around.
I especially liked the part when you called the old-school gurus of the Internet "Luddites", without even a hint of irony. That's not just trolling; it's poetry.
I actually enjoyed reading your post even more than the article. :)