The modern Olympic games are just a friggin' waste of TV time
I know - and TV time is just soooo valuable these days. I would hate to have Springer canceled just to watch a guy that has trained his entire life win a gold medal which just happens to be the higest honor his sport can bestow.
Living in Salt Lake City, I have been a large critic of the Organizing Committee. I agree with everything they say about the Mormon Olympics, and the bribery scandal, and the liquor laws, and the transportation snafus, and any other politcal goat fuck that has popped up over the last 6 years.
But also, as my brother was a competitive ski racer (and my mother was a hell of a ice skater in her day), I have a real appreaciation for the hard work and pain that many of these atheletes endure for their entire lives just to get one shot at olympic glory. Thats a huge commitment, and it is important for the games to be televised , and to give these guys the 7 and 1/2 minutes of fame that they deserve. When the games actually start, all the politics and evilness will subside and we may be able to share a little bit of triumph with our athletes.
If you don't want to watch, thats fine - the games will be televised with or without you, but you shouldn't attack the meaning that these 2 weeks have in the lives of the athletes. No matter how commercial or screwed up they are, these are still the friggin Olympic games.
Contratulations! As the 50,000th maker of a polgamy joke, you are entitled to a free glass of root beer at any Brigham's Pancake House in the Salt Lake area. (one per customer, while supplies last, no gentiles please).
Not exactly right. You do need experience in being convinced that the code you write is superior to all others, despite any indications to the contrary.
There are lots of things to remember before you rail against the machine about open standards. Remember, that TCP/IP fills its nitche, but it doesn't adapt fully to everything, especially the types of connections we are discussing here. Who needs to route around trouble when you are transmitting directly to a device?
It is unrealistic to think that the major players in a multi-million dollar communciations industry are going to all want to use an open standard that they have no control over. First, they want the most efficent scheme for *their* platform, and second they want to fight it out in the market place, and see who can gain the upper hand. This isn't anything new - of course, the same thing has been happening for generation of electronic gizmos.
We are fortunate that these kind of standards are being opened up at all, so at least we have a fighting chance of getting a reasonable standard that everybody can decide on. Unfortunately, instead of a fight on a whiteboard, the winner of these standards battles will be decided in the market place.
Actually, its the other way around. People who truely use their handhelds want the Palm OS. The people who are going to *buy* the handheld wants Palm OS. Thats because, in the long run, people in the know want a reliable, supported, and stupidly easy OS. And most importantly, they want an operating system designed for a handheld.
A handheld is *NOT* a cute little version of the desktop. Period. You don't use the same applications, and its not designed to use the same applications. And this is why non PocketPC operating systems outpace Microsoft 2 to 1. And by 2005, Microsoft is expected to be 4th in the embedded space behind Palm, Linux and VxWorks.
On PalmOS, you have to familiarize yourself with the device.
Wow, and thats all of what, 10 minutes?
Never underestimate the value of shiny things.
The value of shiny things depreciates much faster then the value of things that atually work.
Plagiarism is illegal? Uhh... its not. Its unethical, sneaky, and it might get you fired (or killed, depending on who you copy from), but the odds of prosecution is unlikely.
Though an employer *might* be able to get somebody on a copyright violation. But we know how well that works...
I see the problem as defining what "effort" really means. Why are we paying these researchers, exactly?
Are they getting a grant to produce widget X, or are they getting a grant to increase our public knowlege about developing things *like* widget X?
In other words, is the actual product / code / geome map / beer can pyramid the goal of the project, or is it just a lucky result of the funded research?
I think that in the minds of the researchers, the actual (and patentable) project is the goal. But to those releasing the funds (especially public ones), I think that they want to milk the benefit of the development process. I just can't imagine a goverment agency would be sitting around trying to figure out which patent will generate the most money (though I imagine private funders would).
And I also think that the net gains reached by the research far outweighs the relatively low profits that public funds generate. I don't have any hard data on this, but thinking back along some of the more publicized successes of my alma mater (University of Utah), I can't see one instance where the money generated by a patent has outweighed the value of the research generated while developing the patent.
I write white papers, I do presentations, I balance my checkbook, and I read hundreds of e-mails from around the world daily. Apparently thats not work?
If you don't want a alternative, thats your business. I am not one to tell you what operating system to use, because frankly, I don't care. But if you really serious about looking for a alternative, you would have already noticed that completely acceptable alternatives already exist.
We all use X11 because its there. It has always been there. When Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden, I'm pretty sure that he took a few X11 floppies with him. Much in the Microsoft tradition, its the most used because its the only one there.
That doesn't mean though, that it is the end all be all for windowing systems. It is at its very best in a distributed environment with many different types of machines. It is at its very worst when it is on an embedded system.
Its all a matter of having the right tool for the job.
Uhhh.... in case you didn't notice, IE and MS Office are Microsoft products too. So its a win-win for ol' billy boy - You pay several thousand dollars for his software, and he doesn't have to support them because you're using an unapproved operating system.
And then when Lindows pisses you off to much, he'll just hand you a copy of XP (oh, and that'll be 200 dollars please).
Geez, thats really sticking it to the man.
Wanna break the monopoly? Support and buy alternate software products, not just operating systems.
I can't stress enough how much the core CS classes have helped me. I have a much better understanding of data structures, algorithms, software engineering, etc. than I would have if I'd taught myself those subjects reading books. You may be a different type of learner - I'm just going from personal experience, but I wouldn't skip too much of the core CS. Intro to programming courses don't matter, but don't cheat yourself out of a solid CS theory foundation.
I agree - Programming is no different than learning a new language. You go about it two ways:
You can move to the country in question, learn by ear, and though you will get a great vocabulary and a feel for the language, you will have absolutely no grasp of the mechanics of the language which will damage your ability to adapt to future changes in the language or the culture. Or you could go to school and learn the language from the ground up. Then, you can head on over to the country with a solid basis in hand. Imagine how much farther you would go and how much more you would be able to do.
Either way, however I can't stress the importance of actually getting out and experiencing the culture (ie, get a job).
Every major ship of a radically new technology in the United States arsenal is named Enterprise. for example, the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier was called Enterprise.
The tradition started with a super fast wooden schooner (of what type I am unsure) which was never duplicated because somebody lost the plans (doh!).
I believe that there have been eight crafts of various types named Enterprise, but I am unsure. I read this a long time ago in Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, so I am a bit hazy on the details. Can anyone confirm?
He obviously has a problem with corporation or person who is willing to market themselves to make a little money. Yeah, Dilbert is a little overmarketed, but somebody is still buying all the crap, right? Yeah, the internet is dominated by a few corporations, but everyone is still going to their websites, right?
This guy doesn't care that the internet is becoming more of a corporate entity. He doesn't care that the commonly held view of the net as the last bastion of truly democratic mass communication is, in fact, a myth. He's just pissed that people aren't buying books or going to his website, so he decided to fire off a few well carefully worded editorials, and try to extend his 15 minutes of fame.
And the really sad thing is this: He got his 15 minutes from/. -- a website owned by a publicly traded corporation --
Even in renewal, it gets screwed by being placed in a timeslot where it has no chance, opposite Friends and Survivor.
Yeah, like Fox cares about that....
Anyway, thats a dead timeslot. At least they are trying to put something worth watching on, unlike the other networks when they are up against an unbeatable program.
Ever seen any of the crap that CBS and NBC try to put up against Monday Night Football? At least they could *try* to grab some of the non football crowd.
This is not a push to develop a new security model, rather than a push to develop a way for security models to be integrated with Linux. The problem that exists is that everyone wants to roll their own in security... In Linus's own words:
Everybody has their _own_ particular flavour that they want to push, and don't realize that I cannot accept that as a maintainer.
This security module is an effort to make it so that Linux can have an easy way to implement security without actually having to choose a particular security implementation to stick in the kernel. As has been the rule in Linux, this is not an operating system that tries to be all things to all people, rather it tries to give people the ability to choose everything they need and nothing that they don't.
The thing I like most about this, is that it gives America some perspective on where they stand in relation to the rest of the world.
We all know, due to the birth rate, that at any given second, lots of people around the world are having sex. Even in the United States where pornography is looked down upon, folks are getting it on. Even here in Utah, where sex is *almost* as bad as taking a drink, babies are popping up everywhere. So its obvious, there is a whole lot of lovin' going on.
However, in many countries, this sexual activity is in the open: it is discussed, and it is celebrated. These people recognize that we are one of only two species on Earth that have sex for enjoyment, and they aim to get the most out of sex, as long as the innocent are not getting damaged by it.
But of course, here in the good 'ol US of A, we revert to our puritan values, and look down on anyone that openly exposes sexuality. The whole attitude of the United States can be summed up in the words of Helen Lovejoy dicussing the statue of David (from the Simpsons for the uninformed):
"It depicts body parts that, pratical as they are, are evil".
In other words, we know that sex is required for the survival of the species, but it shouldn't be enjoyed.
So we come to the Internet, which brings the whole world out in the open, and, hey, lookie there -- there is a whole lotta sex out there. To the rest of the world, this is normal and expected, but to Americans this is an "explosion of evil". Sorry, Mrs. Lovejoy - there is no sudden infusion of pornography in the world, it has always existed, and it always will.... you have just had your eyes closed for the last 200 years.
With the passing of each day, it becomes more and more obvious that the strengths of Linux are best shown in the embedded space. Tux might be having trouble getting into the desktop market, but he has no trouble running your coffee machine...:)
Some experts think that we are quickly moving toward the day when the desktop computer will be history. I know very successful people who don't use a desktop computer, but couldn't live without a PDA.
What do you think about the future of the desktop vs the handheld in general, and how does Linux fit into that?
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The modern Olympic games are just a friggin' waste of TV time
I know - and TV time is just soooo valuable these days. I would hate to have Springer canceled just to watch a guy that has trained his entire life win a gold medal which just happens to be the higest honor his sport can bestow.
Living in Salt Lake City, I have been a large critic of the Organizing Committee. I agree with everything they say about the Mormon Olympics, and the bribery scandal, and the liquor laws, and the transportation snafus, and any other politcal goat fuck that has popped up over the last 6 years.
But also, as my brother was a competitive ski racer (and my mother was a hell of a ice skater in her day), I have a real appreaciation for the hard work and pain that many of these atheletes endure for their entire lives just to get one shot at olympic glory. Thats a huge commitment, and it is important for the games to be televised , and to give these guys the 7 and 1/2 minutes of fame that they deserve. When the games actually start, all the politics and evilness will subside and we may be able to share a little bit of triumph with our athletes.
If you don't want to watch, thats fine - the games will be televised with or without you, but you shouldn't attack the meaning that these 2 weeks have in the lives of the athletes. No matter how commercial or screwed up they are, these are still the friggin Olympic games.
Contratulations! As the 50,000th maker of a polgamy joke, you are entitled to a free glass of root beer at any Brigham's Pancake House in the Salt Lake area. (one per customer, while supplies last, no gentiles please).
i bet that guy can hack a kernel but can't figure out how to change his oil or replace an alternator or something like that
That is true, but in the spirit of open source, we just borrow somebody else's car.
Not exactly right. You do need experience in being convinced that the code you write is superior to all others, despite any indications to the contrary.
proprietary "open" standards never win
I dunno.... PDF and PalmOS seem to do ok.
There are lots of things to remember before you rail against the machine about open standards. Remember, that TCP/IP fills its nitche, but it doesn't adapt fully to everything, especially the types of connections we are discussing here. Who needs to route around trouble when you are transmitting directly to a device?
It is unrealistic to think that the major players in a multi-million dollar communciations industry are going to all want to use an open standard that they have no control over. First, they want the most efficent scheme for *their* platform, and second they want to fight it out in the market place, and see who can gain the upper hand. This isn't anything new - of course, the same thing has been happening for generation of electronic gizmos.
We are fortunate that these kind of standards are being opened up at all, so at least we have a fighting chance of getting a reasonable standard that everybody can decide on. Unfortunately, instead of a fight on a whiteboard, the winner of these standards battles will be decided in the market place.
position that paid less than $90K
Right..... don't forget though, that raiding your Dad's trust fund isn't technially salary.
Actually, its the other way around. People who truely use their handhelds want the Palm OS. The people who are going to *buy* the handheld wants Palm OS. Thats because, in the long run, people in the know want a reliable, supported, and stupidly easy OS. And most importantly, they want an operating system designed for a handheld.
A handheld is *NOT* a cute little version of the desktop. Period. You don't use the same applications, and its not designed to use the same applications. And this is why non PocketPC operating systems outpace Microsoft 2 to 1. And by 2005, Microsoft is expected to be 4th in the embedded space behind Palm, Linux and VxWorks.
On PalmOS, you have to familiarize yourself with the device.
Wow, and thats all of what, 10 minutes?
Never underestimate the value of shiny things.
The value of shiny things depreciates much faster then the value of things that atually work.
Plagiarism is illegal? Uhh... its not. Its unethical, sneaky, and it might get you fired (or killed, depending on who you copy from), but the odds of prosecution is unlikely.
Though an employer *might* be able to get somebody on a copyright violation. But we know how well that works...
who graduated anyway because he cut-and-pasted the work of his (harder-working) classmates
Thats ok, he'll trade in his diploma for $60K a year and cut and paste the work of his (harder-working) co-workers.
I see the problem as defining what "effort" really means. Why are we paying these researchers, exactly?
Are they getting a grant to produce widget X, or are they getting a grant to increase our public knowlege about developing things *like* widget X?
In other words, is the actual product / code / geome map / beer can pyramid the goal of the project, or is it just a lucky result of the funded research?
I think that in the minds of the researchers, the actual (and patentable) project is the goal. But to those releasing the funds (especially public ones), I think that they want to milk the benefit of the development process. I just can't imagine a goverment agency would be sitting around trying to figure out which patent will generate the most money (though I imagine private funders would).
And I also think that the net gains reached by the research far outweighs the relatively low profits that public funds generate. I don't have any hard data on this, but thinking back along some of the more publicized successes of my alma mater (University of Utah), I can't see one instance where the money generated by a patent has outweighed the value of the research generated while developing the patent.
Windows 2000, MS Office, and Eudora
Sawfish, StarOffice, and kMail.
I write white papers, I do presentations, I balance my checkbook, and I read hundreds of e-mails from around the world daily. Apparently thats not work?
If you don't want a alternative, thats your business. I am not one to tell you what operating system to use, because frankly, I don't care. But if you really serious about looking for a alternative, you would have already noticed that completely acceptable alternatives already exist.
We all use X11 because its there. It has always been there. When Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden, I'm pretty sure that he took a few X11 floppies with him. Much in the Microsoft tradition, its the most used because its the only one there.
That doesn't mean though, that it is the end all be all for windowing systems. It is at its very best in a distributed environment with many different types of machines. It is at its very worst when it is on an embedded system.
Its all a matter of having the right tool for the job.
Uhhh.... in case you didn't notice, IE and MS Office are Microsoft products too. So its a win-win for ol' billy boy - You pay several thousand dollars for his software, and he doesn't have to support them because you're using an unapproved operating system.
And then when Lindows pisses you off to much, he'll just hand you a copy of XP (oh, and that'll be 200 dollars please).
Geez, thats really sticking it to the man.
Wanna break the monopoly? Support and buy alternate software products, not just operating systems.
M$ has been very good at being backwards compatible as in "Run old code on new OS" not "run new code on old OS".
I know this irevelent, but I couldn't let this slip by....
THATS THE DEFINITION OF BACKWARD COMPATIBLE!!!!!
Geez...
Or the GOP
Another point. This industry also moves faster than any academic course can keep up with.
Last time I looked, we're still using 0s and 1s.
I can't stress enough how much the core CS classes have helped me. I have a much better understanding of data structures, algorithms, software engineering, etc. than I would have if I'd taught myself those subjects reading books. You may be a different type of learner - I'm just going from personal experience, but I wouldn't skip too much of the core CS. Intro to programming courses don't matter, but don't cheat yourself out of a solid CS theory foundation.
I agree - Programming is no different than learning a new language. You go about it two ways:
You can move to the country in question, learn by ear, and though you will get a great vocabulary and a feel for the language, you will have absolutely no grasp of the mechanics of the language which will damage your ability to adapt to future changes in the language or the culture. Or you could go to school and learn the language from the ground up. Then, you can head on over to the country with a solid basis in hand. Imagine how much farther you would go and how much more you would be able to do.
Either way, however I can't stress the importance of actually getting out and experiencing the culture (ie, get a job).
Every major ship of a radically new technology in the United States arsenal is named Enterprise. for example, the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier was called Enterprise.
The tradition started with a super fast wooden schooner (of what type I am unsure) which was never duplicated because somebody lost the plans (doh!).
I believe that there have been eight crafts of various types named Enterprise, but I am unsure. I read this a long time ago in Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, so I am a bit hazy on the details. Can anyone confirm?
Is this Norman Solomon the same idiot who published the The Trouble With Dilbert??
/. -- a website owned by a publicly traded corporation --
He obviously has a problem with corporation or person who is willing to market themselves to make a little money. Yeah, Dilbert is a little overmarketed, but somebody is still buying all the crap, right? Yeah, the internet is dominated by a few corporations, but everyone is still going to their websites, right?
This guy doesn't care that the internet is becoming more of a corporate entity. He doesn't care that the commonly held view of the net as the last bastion of truly democratic mass communication is, in fact, a myth. He's just pissed that people aren't buying books or going to his website, so he decided to fire off a few well carefully worded editorials, and try to extend his 15 minutes of fame.
And the really sad thing is this: He got his 15 minutes from
The shame! The horror!
if i had a nickel for every bug in windows 95...
Gates already does....
where we bitch and moan all day about every fucking thing MS says instead of getting our shit together to really be able to compete.
Maybe instead of ACing instead you should show us what you're doing to help the cause.
Microwindows, QT Eand XFree86 do have their shit together and w're kicking CEs ass all over the embedded space.
Where are YOU programming today?
Even in renewal, it gets screwed by being placed in a timeslot where it has no chance, opposite Friends and Survivor.
Yeah, like Fox cares about that....
Anyway, thats a dead timeslot. At least they are trying to put something worth watching on, unlike the other networks when they are up against an unbeatable program.
Ever seen any of the crap that CBS and NBC try to put up against Monday Night Football? At least they could *try* to grab some of the non football crowd.
Now, thats just FUD....
This is not a push to develop a new security model, rather than a push to develop a way for security models to be integrated with Linux. The problem that exists is that everyone wants to roll their own in security... In Linus's own words:
Everybody has their _own_ particular flavour that they want to push, and don't realize that I cannot accept that as a maintainer.
This security module is an effort to make it so that Linux can have an easy way to implement security without actually having to choose a particular security implementation to stick in the kernel. As has been the rule in Linux, this is not an operating system that tries to be all things to all people, rather it tries to give people the ability to choose everything they need and nothing that they don't.
The thing I like most about this, is that it gives America some perspective on where they stand in relation to the rest of the world.
We all know, due to the birth rate, that at any given second, lots of people around the world are having sex. Even in the United States where pornography is looked down upon, folks are getting it on. Even here in Utah, where sex is *almost* as bad as taking a drink, babies are popping up everywhere. So its obvious, there is a whole lot of lovin' going on.
However, in many countries, this sexual activity is in the open: it is discussed, and it is celebrated. These people recognize that we are one of only two species on Earth that have sex for enjoyment, and they aim to get the most out of sex, as long as the innocent are not getting damaged by it.
But of course, here in the good 'ol US of A, we revert to our puritan values, and look down on anyone that openly exposes sexuality. The whole attitude of the United States can be summed up in the words of Helen Lovejoy dicussing the statue of David (from the Simpsons for the uninformed):
"It depicts body parts that, pratical as they are, are evil".
In other words, we know that sex is required for the survival of the species, but it shouldn't be enjoyed.
So we come to the Internet, which brings the whole world out in the open, and, hey, lookie there -- there is a whole lotta sex out there. To the rest of the world, this is normal and expected, but to Americans this is an "explosion of evil". Sorry, Mrs. Lovejoy - there is no sudden infusion of pornography in the world, it has always existed, and it always will.... you have just had your eyes closed for the last 200 years.
With the passing of each day, it becomes more and more obvious that the strengths of Linux are best shown in the embedded space. Tux might be having trouble getting into the desktop market, but he has no trouble running your coffee machine... :)
Some experts think that we are quickly moving toward the day when the desktop computer will be history. I know very successful people who don't use a desktop computer, but couldn't live without a PDA.
What do you think about the future of the desktop vs the handheld in general, and how does Linux fit into that?