Much as I hate to give MS any ground on security, it does seem their lag time between vulnerabilities and patches is getting shorter recently. Amazing what some fear of competition will do:-)
Younger minds are better
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 0, Interesting
There is no disputing the fact that maths is a young man's game (although that age appears to be rising, as recent discussions have revealed), and programming is just easy math. In addition, younger people are cheaper to hire -- bonus! Younger people are also stronger for physical work, fitter for athletics, and the same goes in many many professions. This is not a new problem. When you get older, you have to start doing things that your experience allow you to do better than those younger than you -- like management, consultancy, and project management (as opposed to the administrative kind).
Programmers are just pissed off by this because programming is a fairly new profession -- until recently, there haven't been very large numbers of older programmers around. In short: deal with it, people.
Spreading FUD about Linux is one thing -- you have a real chance of scaring away some potential Linux users that way. But AIX? It's old-school, like prehistoric. It's firmly entrenched into the legacy systems of some of the biggest corporations in the world, and they not only don't want to get rid of it, they are in fact be completely unable to do so without hugely expensive redevelopment and massive disruption. It is far cheaper for the AIX users of the world to pour money into the defence of UNIX than attempt to abandon the platform. SCO is just waving a red flag in front of one hell of a bull, and they are going to get seriously trampled.
How do free e-mail services work when mail costs money? A large group of the poorest users would decide to stick with the cheap, zero-cost mail, even if that meant they received lots of spam.
How do you manage the transition? Do people who have penny post refuse e-mail from people who don't? That would put a huge barrier up against upgrading: "hey, buy our e-mail product and you won't be able to receive e-mails from anybody but other people who've bought our product!"
How do you manage authenticity? Spammers are not the most scrupulous people; they already show no qualms about breaking the laws that exists against spam. Why would they pay attention to this one? Spammers would simply find some technological loophole or a security flaw and exploit it to send mass cheap e-mail anyway.
Spam is a natural result of an unregulated network. The reason the Internet is so interesting and creative is because it's unregulated. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Sure, get angry at the spammers, prosecute them even. But don't think about restricting freedoms just because it's convenient to do so: that's what DMCA is about, and the Patriot act, and all the dozens of other stupid "anti-terrorist" laws that countries around the world are implementing right now.
Give me freedom, or give me death. I'll take the spam.
What the hell happened? Did someone declare a second space race and I missed the memo? The X-prize has been around a while, but in the last few weeks I've read of four separate previously-secret ventures to get people into space cheaply. So soon after Columbia, and in the middle of an economic downturn doesn't sound like the greatest time to announce high-risk, expensive projects like these. What gives? Even if the others are just copycats, what pushed the first guy to publish?
The mule was however a "freak", something that would happen only once in hundreds of years. However, unexpected new inventions happens all the time: consider how many there have been in the last two centuries, and how much they've transformed society beyond expectation in that time. It's not really a rare occurrence, as Asimov attempts to make it out to be.
Yes, I was aware when writing that I should have been clearer about what I meant by a 50% probability... but then, it's Slashdot, so I also knew some math geek would pop out of the woodwork to add an informative comment about how statistics works to my own, so I needn't bother. Isn't/. wonderful?:-)
And even Asimov admitted it. The theory was as follows: although individuals and small groups of people are impossible to predict, large groups of people will, statistically, behave in a predictable way to the given conditions. Thus, by modelling the influences on large groups of people, you can predict their reactions, and thus predict the future course of social history.
This has a lot of intuitive weight. A few weirdos may do unusual things, but the society does seem fairly predictable. However, there's loads of things it doesn't take into account.
Most important is statistical probability. Even if you base all your decisions on 95% probability results, the probability of you being right every time gets lower as you go along. In fact, after just 14 decisions like that, the probability is less than 50%. In the Foundation saga, Hari Seldon (a favourite of mine, obviously) uses psychohistory to predict events hundreds of years into the future -- which couldn't happen, even with only 1 decision to predict per year. In the books, Asimov resolves this using the Second Foundation, who (secretly) guide the progress of society to make sure everything goes to plan.
The second is, simply, new ideas. You can base a model of future history on populations and variables if they are known; but with the future there are too many unknowns. What if someone invents a new weapon? Or faster ships, meaning planets get colonised faster than you expected? Or new medicines come out, increasing life expectancies enormously? Or conversely, what if we lose some of the technologies we have now? The kind of prediction in psychohistory only works in a stagnant model.
Again, you can fix this using the Second Foundation bodge, so the books are believable. But the science itself is just not rational.
This is exactly the same syndrome that used to make people wary of e-commmerce back in the 90s: "it's in computers! I don't understand computers! Anything could happen!" And just like it's easier for the shop clerk to steal your credit card number when he's ringing up your purchase, it's actually a lot easier to rig elections when they're done manually than when they're done electronically (as Jeb Bush will happily inform you) because you can declare big chunks of those paper ballots "unreadable" and exclude them from manual counting, which is what happened in Florida in 2000 in a number of democrat areas.
Electronic voting is instant, traceable, and most importantly interactive: how much would all those idiots who accidentally voted for Buchanan in 2000 have appreciated a dialog box popping up saying "You are about to vote for X"?
It started off just being a simple language for describing academic documents. Now you can plug so much junk into HTML that you can create whole applications. HTML is bursting at the seams because of all these hacks and extra languages tacked on to the end, but it still works. I think that's amazing.
What do you expect him to do? He can no longer write stories about "Apple makes a comeback" or "Apple's amazing new success", because everyone and their dog has done that already and people know about it; nobody would read articles like that. The way to grab people's attention is to write an article the predicts something unexpected or surprising, or takes a controversial point of view: and saying Apple will die, when it appears to be at the height of its power, is a good way to do that, as evidenced by the fact that it's been posted to the front page of Slashdot!
Now, maybe this guy's an idiot. I don't know. But whether intentionally or not, he's being the best kind of journalist: the one whose articles people actually read.
MS will appeal. Every SQL developer and his dog will appeal. Just like every other ruling that negatively affects huge numbers of developers......oh wait, you mean the DMCA is still being upheld? Well fuck you then, Microsoft. I hope Adobe uses SQL server:-)
In the wake of the telecoms bust a whole bunch of comms companies went under: that's what's supposed to happen. The market was oversupplied, so the weaker companies died. It's competition, and it's good. Changing the rules like this is nothing more than protectionism for these companies, which is almost never a good idea (occasionally it can be justified if the company is being regulated to provide service to unprofitable areas that would suffer from the removal of the service, like train companies serving outlying districts). But were these phone companies really in enough financial trouble to justify this rule-change? The FCC isn't the greatest institution in the world, but they're not sub-moronic; does anybody know what their motivation was for doing this?
Coincidentally, about 3 days ago I installed Connectix's Virtual PC product. It appears to be very Windows-oriented; Connectix sells licensed "system images" with various flavours of Windows pre-installed. For the purposes of a uni project I tried to install Mandrake 7.2 on my virtual PC, giving it a healthy 64MB of RAM and a 10 gig HDD. The install did pretty well until the X configuration part, when it asked for my video card -- it totally gagged; I mean, what graphics card was I supposed to choose on this virtual machine? Nothing I tried worked, and the install eventually fell over. Apparently VMWare supplies its own drivers for X; I don't know whether connectix does as I ceased experimenting at that point. Anybody else been more successful?
On the other hand, the text-mode stuff worked fine...
The UK is a bit ahead of the US in broadcasting HDTV -- we have several digital-only channels -- but as reported in this BBC article takeup of HDTV (more generally known as just "digital TV" in the UK) has been slowed by the collapse of the first big digital TV company, ITV Digital. The collapse was more due to poor management than any real flaw in HDTV, but as another article states, the deadline (in the UK) of 2010 for the full switch to digital is probably unrealistic, given how long it took to switch the nation to colour television (didn't happen in any major way until 1969!).
Every media player in existence (RealOne, Windows Media, QuickTime, even Winamp3) attempt to register themselves as the default player of every type of media they support on installation. I have all four installed, with no major conflicts -- it's really not hard to pick "advanced installation" when you install it and change the settings for file types. Even the fairly devious installation routine for RealONE lets you do that.
Don't rag on Quicktime just because you're too lazy to read the screens during the installation. Quicktime is a great player.
I think that's part of the reason it's done as anime, rather than live-action: to distinguish between the two points of view. The manga on the Matrix website is done from two points of view: that of the robots, before the war, and that of people still inside the Matrix who become aware in some way that the world may not be "real". Perhaps later episodes will take the human, trapped-in-the-matrix perspective.
It's great! The visuals are spectacular. If you've read the manga on the Matrix site before you will recognize both the style and some of the characters. I really admire the producers of the Matrix for not just turning it into a movie franchise, but into a fully-fledged universe, like Star Wars did. I'm looking forward to the rest...
Slashdot Mirror
Much as I hate to give MS any ground on security, it does seem their lag time between vulnerabilities and patches is getting shorter recently. Amazing what some fear of competition will do :-)
Programmers are just pissed off by this because programming is a fairly new profession -- until recently, there haven't been very large numbers of older programmers around. In short: deal with it, people.
Spreading FUD about Linux is one thing -- you have a real chance of scaring away some potential Linux users that way. But AIX? It's old-school, like prehistoric. It's firmly entrenched into the legacy systems of some of the biggest corporations in the world, and they not only don't want to get rid of it, they are in fact be completely unable to do so without hugely expensive redevelopment and massive disruption. It is far cheaper for the AIX users of the world to pour money into the defence of UNIX than attempt to abandon the platform. SCO is just waving a red flag in front of one hell of a bull, and they are going to get seriously trampled.
Spam is a natural result of an unregulated network. The reason the Internet is so interesting and creative is because it's unregulated. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Sure, get angry at the spammers, prosecute them even. But don't think about restricting freedoms just because it's convenient to do so: that's what DMCA is about, and the Patriot act, and all the dozens of other stupid "anti-terrorist" laws that countries around the world are implementing right now.
Give me freedom, or give me death. I'll take the spam.
What the hell happened? Did someone declare a second space race and I missed the memo? The X-prize has been around a while, but in the last few weeks I've read of four separate previously-secret ventures to get people into space cheaply. So soon after Columbia, and in the middle of an economic downturn doesn't sound like the greatest time to announce high-risk, expensive projects like these. What gives? Even if the others are just copycats, what pushed the first guy to publish?
Waiting to be enlightened here....
The mule was however a "freak", something that would happen only once in hundreds of years. However, unexpected new inventions happens all the time: consider how many there have been in the last two centuries, and how much they've transformed society beyond expectation in that time. It's not really a rare occurrence, as Asimov attempts to make it out to be.
Yes, I was aware when writing that I should have been clearer about what I meant by a 50% probability... but then, it's Slashdot, so I also knew some math geek would pop out of the woodwork to add an informative comment about how statistics works to my own, so I needn't bother. Isn't /. wonderful? :-)
The books are more than 30 years old! If you haven't managed to read them by now, you can't blaim me for discussing spoilers...
And even Asimov admitted it. The theory was as follows: although individuals and small groups of people are impossible to predict, large groups of people will, statistically, behave in a predictable way to the given conditions. Thus, by modelling the influences on large groups of people, you can predict their reactions, and thus predict the future course of social history.
This has a lot of intuitive weight. A few weirdos may do unusual things, but the society does seem fairly predictable. However, there's loads of things it doesn't take into account.
Most important is statistical probability. Even if you base all your decisions on 95% probability results, the probability of you being right every time gets lower as you go along. In fact, after just 14 decisions like that, the probability is less than 50%. In the Foundation saga, Hari Seldon (a favourite of mine, obviously) uses psychohistory to predict events hundreds of years into the future -- which couldn't happen, even with only 1 decision to predict per year. In the books, Asimov resolves this using the Second Foundation, who (secretly) guide the progress of society to make sure everything goes to plan.
The second is, simply, new ideas. You can base a model of future history on populations and variables if they are known; but with the future there are too many unknowns. What if someone invents a new weapon? Or faster ships, meaning planets get colonised faster than you expected? Or new medicines come out, increasing life expectancies enormously? Or conversely, what if we lose some of the technologies we have now? The kind of prediction in psychohistory only works in a stagnant model.
Again, you can fix this using the Second Foundation bodge, so the books are believable. But the science itself is just not rational.
This is exactly the same syndrome that used to make people wary of e-commmerce back in the 90s: "it's in computers! I don't understand computers! Anything could happen!" And just like it's easier for the shop clerk to steal your credit card number when he's ringing up your purchase, it's actually a lot easier to rig elections when they're done manually than when they're done electronically (as Jeb Bush will happily inform you) because you can declare big chunks of those paper ballots "unreadable" and exclude them from manual counting, which is what happened in Florida in 2000 in a number of democrat areas.
Electronic voting is instant, traceable, and most importantly interactive: how much would all those idiots who accidentally voted for Buchanan in 2000 have appreciated a dialog box popping up saying "You are about to vote for X"?
It started off just being a simple language for describing academic documents. Now you can plug so much junk into HTML that you can create whole applications. HTML is bursting at the seams because of all these hacks and extra languages tacked on to the end, but it still works. I think that's amazing.
What do you expect him to do? He can no longer write stories about "Apple makes a comeback" or "Apple's amazing new success", because everyone and their dog has done that already and people know about it; nobody would read articles like that. The way to grab people's attention is to write an article the predicts something unexpected or surprising, or takes a controversial point of view: and saying Apple will die, when it appears to be at the height of its power, is a good way to do that, as evidenced by the fact that it's been posted to the front page of Slashdot!
Now, maybe this guy's an idiot. I don't know. But whether intentionally or not, he's being the best kind of journalist: the one whose articles people actually read.
MS will appeal. Every SQL developer and his dog will appeal. Just like every other ruling that negatively affects huge numbers of developers... ...oh wait, you mean the DMCA is still being upheld? Well fuck you then, Microsoft. I hope Adobe uses SQL server :-)
In the wake of the telecoms bust a whole bunch of comms companies went under: that's what's supposed to happen. The market was oversupplied, so the weaker companies died. It's competition, and it's good. Changing the rules like this is nothing more than protectionism for these companies, which is almost never a good idea (occasionally it can be justified if the company is being regulated to provide service to unprofitable areas that would suffer from the removal of the service, like train companies serving outlying districts). But were these phone companies really in enough financial trouble to justify this rule-change? The FCC isn't the greatest institution in the world, but they're not sub-moronic; does anybody know what their motivation was for doing this?
Thanks!
:-) The truly 1337 make asses of themselves in public forums to find the answers they need! :-)
Manuals are clearly for weenies
Coincidentally, about 3 days ago I installed Connectix's Virtual PC product. It appears to be very Windows-oriented; Connectix sells licensed "system images" with various flavours of Windows pre-installed. For the purposes of a uni project I tried to install Mandrake 7.2 on my virtual PC, giving it a healthy 64MB of RAM and a 10 gig HDD. The install did pretty well until the X configuration part, when it asked for my video card -- it totally gagged; I mean, what graphics card was I supposed to choose on this virtual machine? Nothing I tried worked, and the install eventually fell over. Apparently VMWare supplies its own drivers for X; I don't know whether connectix does as I ceased experimenting at that point. Anybody else been more successful?
On the other hand, the text-mode stuff worked fine...
AltaVista is clearly a dying brand as far as web-search goes; is overture just buying it for the traffic?
The UK is a bit ahead of the US in broadcasting HDTV -- we have several digital-only channels -- but as reported in this BBC article takeup of HDTV (more generally known as just "digital TV" in the UK) has been slowed by the collapse of the first big digital TV company, ITV Digital. The collapse was more due to poor management than any real flaw in HDTV, but as another article states, the deadline (in the UK) of 2010 for the full switch to digital is probably unrealistic, given how long it took to switch the nation to colour television (didn't happen in any major way until 1969!).
If you use a pirated copy of tax submission software, can you still declare it as an expense?
That sounds like its target audience to me. X-men, Spiderman and the Matrix seemed to do quite well, with pretty much the same demographic...
Every media player in existence (RealOne, Windows Media, QuickTime, even Winamp3) attempt to register themselves as the default player of every type of media they support on installation. I have all four installed, with no major conflicts -- it's really not hard to pick "advanced installation" when you install it and change the settings for file types. Even the fairly devious installation routine for RealONE lets you do that.
Don't rag on Quicktime just because you're too lazy to read the screens during the installation. Quicktime is a great player.
This was posted nearly a month ago...
I think that's part of the reason it's done as anime, rather than live-action: to distinguish between the two points of view. The manga on the Matrix website is done from two points of view: that of the robots, before the war, and that of people still inside the Matrix who become aware in some way that the world may not be "real". Perhaps later episodes will take the human, trapped-in-the-matrix perspective.
It's great! The visuals are spectacular. If you've read the manga on the Matrix site before you will recognize both the style and some of the characters. I really admire the producers of the Matrix for not just turning it into a movie franchise, but into a fully-fledged universe, like Star Wars did. I'm looking forward to the rest...
But using both Mozilla and MSIE, their website keeps reverting to the front page, in dutch. Not very useful...