I couldn't agree more. It had several cool features. Bit testing instructions. Two complete sets of general purpose registers (EX and EXX instructions, remember?). More on-chip integration than most (the refresh register for dynamic memories). It had a vectored interrupt system. All of this and full instruction set compatibility with the much less capable 8080A (and its later incarnation, the 8085).
My Dad was an EE who worked for Control Data and I was a pimply-faced teenager who loved programming. We homebrewed an S-100 bus based Z80A computer between 1975 and 1978 (so it took us awhile!). I wrote the BIOS for our hardware for CP/M 1.2 (later 1.4 and 2.0 also) in Z80 assembler.
We also did a number of embedded projects with the chip. The z80 had features that were a dream for embedded programmers. In our case, we made a simulated event-driven machine by polling during a timer interrupt. We made use of the aforementioned dual register sets. Instead of the normal chaos of stack frame switching (and hoping you do it right) we just said the prime register set is for the interrupt service routine and the regular set is for the normal operation. On entry to the ISR, just do an EXX and on exit do another one. No disruption of the "application" whatsoever, plus interrupt latency is unbeliveably small (no external bus cycles at ALL!)
I did and do love this chip. I know it can't really cut it as a general purpose computer CPU anymore, but some of those apps that were built on and ran on this hardware (WordStar, etc.) did quite a bit. They're not that much weaker than Word and they would run in less than 64k on machines clocked at from 2 to 6 MHz. How well would Word do?
It is great to see this processor still alive and kicking.
It is patently false that there was no opposition to going to the moon. There was considerable opposition from every end of the political spectrum. Kennedy himself found the idea causing him such political trouble that he even publicly offered to cooperate with the Soviets on the project (with, more than likely, the quiet hope that they could be blamed if the effort failed). While it is virtually impossible to find anyone today who was opposed, this is because the program became such a (short lived) popular success.
Now, I don't happen to think the fact that the world is not a utopian paradise is sufficient reason to scuttle the space program. Europe was no utopian paradise when the "voyages of exploration" began in the sixteenth century. Even so, I think we should be looking for ways to profit from manned space flight, otherwise we should leave space to the robots.
I've heard the argument about "machines can't think," and true as this is, you should take a look at what it costs to make a long space flight survivable for a human being. You can put a lot of brains in a robot for what that costs.
I laughed out loud at the scene at the beginning of the movie Apollo 13 when Lovell calls to his kids and they were all sitting on the stairs. I was a kid on the stairs those July nights in 1969, pretending I was down in my room, listening to everything as it happened on the TV. I will never forget it.
Apollo was lousy science (in space exploration terms, not in technological development terms), but it sure had me dreaming of the stars and dying to be a scientist/engineer.
I see the future of man in space in the very long term. It took almost 100 years for Europeans to follow the explorers into the "new world." The distances and difficulties and costs of this expansion are so much greater that I do no think 1000 years out of line for the length of time it will take to have interplanetary trade and civilization, but I think we should continue to try.
"A man's reach should always exceed his grasp." Help the poor, yes. But don't put everything on hold until poverty is gone. Society doesn't act. Individuals act. Select your priorties and put your effort in there. Give others the freedom to do the same. The world can and will become better if you do.
Do a little dance. Make a little love. Get down tonight!
The last two weeks of managment shuffles have looked like a soap opera. SGI to MS, Sun to AOL, AOL to, er, wherever... Is it possible that all of these executives changing positions all at once could put enough stress on the San Andreas to finally trigger "The Big One?" Maybe we should get a map out, find the headquarters of these companies, and calculate the torques?
Being briefly serious, does anyone think this might bode ill for Mozilla?
You are quite right, but are also reading far more into my post than I put there. As I said, for a two key system to make sense you need a secure way to switch the keys. Take a look at PGP's method for key revocation (note that it is recommended that a revocation message be generated WHEN THE KEY IS GENERATED). Now, the fact that apparently MS has no formal method for switching keys is why I described their implementation as "brain dead."
As for your first point, I agree. But if you had a secure way to switch between two keys, it would be a smart thing because you could keep signing things even in the event of a compromise and you would not have to get a new copy of the software with a new public key to everybody in order to do so. However, since MS's scheme trusts both keys, I agree with you that two copies of one key would be functionally equivalent.
I think what stinks is that MS is a closed source company. You can't know for certain what they are doing or why. You are only as secure as MS knows you. You, you have no idea. Yeah, I like that.
The secondary key makes a great deal of sense. It's the MS implementation that is brain dead. I can think of two reasons to switch to a backup key. Destruction of the primary (they shouldn't have multiple copies lying around, so posit an explosion/flood/whatever destorying the primary). The second reason would be known compromise of the first key (Ballmer accidentally copied it to his laptop, an MS employee responsible for the key was bribed, whatever).
The problem with the MS implementation is that EITHER key is trusted! There should be a mechanism to switch keys in a secure manner such that one key becomes untrusted. As it is now, if one key is compromised, it will still be trusted!
I guess I will just have to agree to disagree with you. The choice to make Star Wars a huge hit was not Alec Guiness' choice. My concept of individual liberty does not permit a mob to take over my life because I do something the mob worships. If the fans resent Alce for this, stop going to his movies.
I've read essays by many popular writers about the difficulty and stress in their lives caused by the incessant demands of the mob for "the next book." While I can see your argument, and agree that the love of the public for one's work is something for which one should be grateful, I think the artist owes something to the text -- to tell a story in a compelling, perhaps even an illuminating way, and that is the sole obligation. If there is no audience, the work was still honorable. If there is a mass audience, the work was still honorable. If the artist sets out with a duty to the mob instead of a duty to the text, well, whatever the work is, it is not art.
The labor of the artist is for the art, not for the audience. If the art is good, if it is human, if it is truthful and compelling, the audience will come. If it is not, there will be no audience.
Why should an actor, writer, or director be a slave to an audience?
By buying a ticket to Star Wars you do not buy firendship from Alec Guiness. Period.
I am infintely disturbed by the rage that is shown in some of these posts towards Alec Guiness because he told a kid who had "seen it [Star Wars] 100 times" to "never watch it again." He also claims that he throws his fan mail in the trash.
A number of people have posted claiming that Guiness "owes something" to the fans.
I hardly think so. The notion that an actor (or a writer or a director) is a puppet who must perform in his life as "the fans" expect is painfully barbarous. Are people seriously suggesting that, if a person is popular or successful, that he must, from then on, conform to the expectations of those who made him successful? That because something he did for money (and I can't imagine that Mr. Guiness made Star Wars for any other reason) was a huge success, he no longer owns his own life?
Forget the fashionable vampires. It is hardly a revelation that humans are obsessed with sex and death. Try "fans" if you want a howling, bloodsucking, all-consuming, shreiking, soulless hunger.
A person has a right to own his or her life for themselves and they owe exactly nothing to the fans.
I am infintely disturbed by the rage that is shown in some of these posts towards Alec Guiness because he told a kid who had "seen it [Star Wars] 100 times" to "never watch it again." He also claims that he throws his fan mail in the trash.
A number of people have posted claiming that Guiness "owes something" to the fans.
I hardly think so. The notion that an actor (or a writer or a director) is a puppet who must perform in his life as "the fans" expect is painfully barbarous. Are people seriously suggesting that, if a person is popular or successful, that he must, from then on, conform to the expectations of those who made him successful? That because something he did for money (and I can't imagine that Mr. Guiness made Star Wars for any other reason) was a huge success, he no longer owns his own life?
Forget the fashionable vampires. They are merely the product of the trendy sexual undead. Try "fans" if you want a howling, bloodsucking, all-consuming, shreiking, soulless hunger.
A person has a right to own his or her life for themselves and they owe exactly nothing to the fans.
W. Richard Stevens was that rarity in modern humanity: a gentleman and a scholar. I am deeply saddend to see the number of people posting hateful comments about this man because he didn't like perl and he didn't like linux. I can assure you that professor Stevens knew what he was talking about and had reasons for those statements. The fact that one might not agree with them is not a justification for assailing a man's character or intelligence.
In 1993 I was writing some networking applications software for RS-6000's at a large IT shop. I was, like almost everyone else in the industry, working from W. Richard Steven's excellent "Unix Network Programming." I was testing code examples from that book and found (to my mild concern) that Steven's code to run-time detect whether you were on a system V or a BSD style system (for signal handling) was returning true for both cases on the version of AIX I was on.
I was pretty sure that AIX wasn't so deviant that such standard stuff as is found in that book would not work, but I'm certainly not too proud to seek expert advice. I hopped on over to USENET (web? What web?) and posted a question basically asking if Stevens' code would work on AIX. Later that day I got an e-mail from Stevens himself with details on what works, what doesn't and why (almost all of it worked, BTW). In 1993 the 'net wasn't quite the sea of raging lunatics that it is today, but even then USENET was full of loudmouthed know-nothings. That Stevens would take the time to review newsgroups and help out an indivdual questioner says something about the man.
His contribution to the modern net is difficult to overstate. I would venture that almost every serious developer of Internet applications (esp. those who were here before the explosion of the WWW) learned his or her trade from Stevens (and Comer, and a handful of others). Whatever he thought of Linux and Perl, or about NAFTA or any other damned thing, he was a knowledgeable and generous man. Such a man is worth ten thousand foul-mouthed AC's. Shame on you.
Re:Umm, what other kind of microwave is there?
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I bet they aren't 100 Mw. I'm sure they're very hot, but 100,000,000 watts is a gawdawful lot of power. Even if they are 100Mw, the primary effect would be internal burns. I've (thank goodness) never been exposed to anything like that. I'm sure it hits like a physical blow, and the muscles would probably convulse in response to the sudden stimulus of, oh, most of the nerves in the body. If they moved quickly away or the radar was only on for a very short time, I'm sure there were few long term effects. I was trying to get at the inverse square law here. The power exposure decreases with the square of the distance, so if you get belted and run a few feet away, you won't get belted anymore.
The other folks here were also quite right in pointing out that a microwave oven is designed to be a high Q, and at a frequency that couples well with water molecules. Your body has host of different compounds, tissues, and organs, all with various whole body resonance lengths. Not all of the power from any source will directly interact with your body.
I was just trying to point out that the setup suggested here was probably around 10 watts, and almost certainly less than 200 watts; if the power is down around that level, then you would feel hardly any effects from the radiation even a foot away from the antenna. At a foot or more, you get far less radiation from that antenna than you get from the sun.
A few more numbers for you to use as a yarstick when someone hands you a metal rod and says "Here, hold this:"
Your typical microwave oven radiates between 500 and 1500 watts (in its cavity). As I said, the sun gives you about 1000 watts (that's whole spectrum -- I'm not really sure how much of it is in the 1.5+ Gig up to infrared range; all of which may fairly be called "microwave").
I've seen a guy burn his finger in a waveguide. He wasn't killed. He didn't grow two heads. The main effect of this stuff is heat (I suppose there could be some chance ionization effects, but not much).
Anyways, I certainly don't lay claim to more than a ham's knowledge of radio. Get an EE or a physicist to come in and give the actual lecture.
My main point is that it helps to throw some "sanity boundaries" up. If the exposure numbers are orders of magnitude lower than you get standing in sunlight, then this system will almost certainly not be dropping people, birds, and fuzzy little bunnies in their tracks.
Whenever someone starts talking about hazards, I try to take my limited knowledge and see if I can come within a factor of ten of the claimed danger. If something I know to be (almost) harmless (like standing in sunlight) is at least a factor of ten more dangerous than the worst possible case for the stated "danger," then I think one can safely conclude that the threat is overstated.
I don't think I'd recommend making a habit of standing a foot in front of, say, fighter plane threat radars, just the same. I promise you they can kill you, and while I don't know how long it would take, I'd like to experiment with non-human subjects to find out...;)
Parting thought: Think how much power the sun must be putting out given the inverse square law and that the energy at the Earth's surface is 1,000 watts per square meter at a distance of 93,000,000 miles!
Re:Umm, what other kind of microwave is there?
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You do mean 100mw, I hope. While some very ignorant people (and that isn't a crime, folks; people just need the facts -- that's what the 'net is about -- the only cure for ignorance is confession) are shouting here about the "dangers" of microwaves (as if they were magically different from sunlight), being within a few dozen feet of a transmitter outputting 100 Megawatts would, indeed, be very deadly. Mw would be Megawatts, mw would be milliwatts.
Folks, let's put this in a little perspective. You receive about 1000 watts per square meter of RF energy from sunlight. Standing in direct sunlight complaining about the RF energy from a microwave antenna on a rooftop is like calling your neighbor during a hurricane to complain that his cat is breathing on your tree! (I wish I could take credit for that comparison, but I read that in an article about low freq RF from power-lines).
The amount of energy you receive from a point source of microwave energy is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. I'd be very surprised if these systems are putting out more than 10 watts, and I assure you it would be illegal for them to put out more than 200 watts without special FCC dispensation. Let's be impossibly pessemistic. If, at one inch away from the antenna, you receive 100% of the radiated power, or 200 watts, then at 2 inchs you receive 1/4 of that, or 50 watts. At four inches you would receive 12.5 watts. At about a foot away we are getting into cat breath territory.
I have tried for over a year not to rant on/., but the discussion under this topic has finally sent me beyond the precipice. This is WAY OFF TOPIC (or is it?)
Rant 1: Re: People who complain about/. moderation. Moderation doesn't censor anything. Just set your threshold to -1 folks and you can read every post. Slashdot is a group and as the cliche goes the IQ of a group is equal to the loswest IQ in the group divided by the number of people in the group. Moderators are slashdot readers. Try to get over the pain of being moderated down and try making your point again, but this time use careful language that doesn't fall to personal abuse. You'd be surprised how suggesting someone has a Philistine attitude gets moderated up while calling someone a shithead gets moderated down. Just try to write like you would actually speak to someone in person and maybe you'll be happier with the moderating (but maybe not).
Rant 2: People who flame anything anti-Linux. I use Linux. I use Windows (although I do not want to). I use other Unices. I like Linux. I want Linux to win. I want people to like Linux just like I want people to like the TV shows I like and worship the God I worship. And that's what we need to beware of. I am often reminded of that scene from Life of Brian where the "Vow of Silence" man attacks Brian and the reaction of the crowd, esp. Cleese shouting, "Heretic! Unbeliever! Persecute! Kill!" For goodness sake, it's a computer program!
Rant 3: People who talk about Slashdot readers and posters as if they were all of like mind. There is astounding diversity of opinion on Slashdot. Read the thread a couple of days ago on the Kansas/Evolution thing. Now there happen to be certain overlapping domains (like Linux-love) in the nerd/geek community, but there is some part of each of us unique and outside all the overlaps. That's what brings me back again and again. I can get perpetual self-congratulation by watching any E! program.
Rant 4: People who think anything Microsoft does matters in the slightest. Linux is not and cannot be destroyed. It is not in even the slightest way threatened by anything Microsoft does. Linux businesses may be, but the network is here. The code is here. It cannot be taken away or destroyed. If every Linux business were forced to fold tomorrow the whole thing would just keep right on going. I do not care what Microsoft does.
Rant 5: People who just don't get it. It seems to be an American disease, but it is spreading everywhere. The only thing that matters is money. People talk about the quality of movies on the basis of how much was spent to make them, or how much they are making. An amazing number of people think I am "exploited" because I have given away code I have written. They do not understand that I wrote that code for my personal needs or pleasure. These same people think that I am not exploited when I code things I don't want to code for other people to make them richer forty hours a week, 52-weeks a year (that's ~87 days a year folks, for 45 years that's 3,900 days, or about 10 years 6 months of my life), for which I get paid just enough to keep me in debt for most of that time, after which I become a liability to the healthcare system until I die. Exploitation comes in many forms. Writing source code and giving it away is not one of those forms as far as I am concerned. (BTW, consider that between work, school, and sleep you use about 16 of every 24 hours of your life for 60 years not doing what you want. That's 40 years of your life spent not doing what you want. Let's assume you live to 75 years and that you sleep 8 hours a day for those years you are not working or going to school. That's another 5 years of sleep. So, out of 75 years of living, you get to do what you want to for yourself for 30 years out of 75. Now talk to me about exploitation.)
Rant 6: People who sneer at anything. Given the numbers above, why do so many of us feel that there is time to sneer at anything? Maybe we should try to form some genuine, sincere, honest, trusting, real relationships between actual caring living people in the time we have left?
Boy, I feel a lot better having gotten that off my chest.
from the base directory (wineYYYYMMDD) and see how many contributions Corel has made. They've made less than I personally hoped, but they've made quite a few. To be fair, I've poked in that code some, this is not a trivial project. In many ways it is much more complicated than the Linux kernel (I guess that shouldn't surprise any of us!). Corel's team may well be still finding their way around. They may also be concentrating on those things that affect their applications primarily.
They are there and they are doing things...
I doubt this news will do anything but improve Wine's situation. A guy who has done much of the lead work on Wine in his spare time will now be working on it full time and being paid to do so. I can't see how this can do anything but help.
Sorry if I'm getting hooked by a troll, but he has been one of the lead developers of Wine (an open-source project) for several years now (at least three). His open-source credentials are impeccable.
I cannot believe the level of callousness and disregard to posterity being displayed by the entire technology economy. Their "quick-fix" mentality is going to lead to complete disaster. Just for the sake of saving a few bytes, they are restricting computer systems to 4-digit years.
I might not be around for it, but I just wanted to be the first on record predicting chaos, doom, disaster, and the pillaging of the frozen-head museum where the heads of Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and John Koskinen will be pulled from their freezers and used for football games when the Year 10,000 rolls around and all the matter teleportation units shut down!
I shouted Katz' praises on his earlier posts about the media hysteria over "killer geeks." I still think society at large is paying far too little attention to youth, and that attention does not mean the application of mind control, but active and interested involvement in the lives of children.
That said, I think this is an overreaction to an unfortunate publication.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is just issuing recommendations to Pediatricians. This is not some sort of censorship. I don't think there's anything here over which to get one's knickers in a twist.
My problem with it is that the conclusion that TV be limited is not based on any research. It is little more than a "feeling." A feeling I happen to agree with. I think TV sucks out your brains and leaves you an addled idiot, addicted to constant but bland stimulation, easy laughs obtained without wit, and a constant desire to fill that vague human angst with an endless stream of brightly packaged products.
I think television is Soma.
Sometimes I think that Katz forgets that children are not little adults; that children do need the guidance of parents; that parents should be censors. My own parents never ever told me there was anything I couldn't read. That way I had no fear to walk into the home with any book I chose. When they saw me with something that troubled them, they would express their concerns and ask to talk to me after I read the book. We would discuss the book and what was in it. We would talk about violence, cruelty, tratment of women, minorities, what was good and what was bad. From this, I became very aware of my parent's morals, and I knew their reasons for them. This did not result in me being a little parrot of my parents, because I was also thinking for myself. I was deciding what out of these books and what they believed I would take into myself and make a part of my code for living.
TV was a slightly different story. We simply did not watch much of it until we were about 10 years old. Then we watched a lot (my dad was a classic TV junkie -- he'd watch anything). I found, however, that I had little time for most of the junk. Now, I'm not some ivory tower who eschews "The Simpsons" because I have to get back to my copy of "Le Rechereche du Temps Perdus." I am now a bit of a TV junkie myself, but I formed an aesthetic and moral sense early, and I decide what goes through the glass teat (nod to Harlan Ellison) into my brain.
So, the pedes wrote a good thing as bad science. I think that's a shame and they shouldn't have done it, but I think any parent who doesn't know what his or her child is watching is a lousy parent.
Godel did not prove anything of the sort. All facts of mathematics are just as true and just as valid as they were before Godel published his incompleteness theory. What Godel said was that not all true facts are provable.
Very well said. This is what I meant (that any symbolic system must contain unprovable assertions). My sloppy sentence was merely meant to call attention to this point. Thanks for stating it more precisely.
Wolfgang! Of course! (You know whay I didn't put his first name in? Because "Linus" as in "Linus Pauling" was the name my brain kept coming up with. I knew that wasn't right so I didn't want to embarass myself!;-)
I appreciate your compliment, but I must say that I disagree with you that people tend to believe what is true. My experience has been that people want to go on believing what they presently believe, no matter what that is. Furthermore, this is true of everybody: scientists, engineers, priests, parishoners, and the honey wagon driver. This means that whole human race has a blind spot for new ideas that fundmentally reposition world views. All belief systems resist new beliefs, including science. This is, I think, part of the human psychological makeup. We like constancy, even though life tells us again and again that the universe is inconstant.
I personally consider the scientific evidence for species differentiation by natural selection overwhelming. The lack of a complete theory of genetic drift tells us that we have much more to learn, but does not tell us that Wallace and Darwin's theory is fatally flawed. You must find evidence that contradicts the theory, not that shows it be incomplete. The theory explains all the presently known facts.
Now, I do think that it is a theory, a sound one, but a theory. I think the missing elements can be pointed out in science class, but I do not for a minute believe that there is any reason to remove teaching it as a requirement of the biology syllabus. It is one of the most important theories in modern biology and I think it is ridiculous to remove it to please a religious sensibility.
I think that creationism can be taught in public schools, but not as science. I think evolution can be taught in public schools, but not in math or gym.
As for your point about constructing scientific experiments to find what you expect to find, I would ask you to suggest to me what kind of experiemnt to run with absolutely no preconceptions about what will be found? It is impossible to look at the world without preconception. I think it is unreasonable to expect a telescope to give you useful data on the human genome. You must have some preconception. You must, however, try to keep yourself aware of how your observation affects the observed. As I said in my original post, science is really actually hard!
Oooh! Oooh! One more. Of course I knew full well that acceleration due to gravity falls off as you move the masses apart. I do know my Newton. Here what I was getting at is that if, suddenly one day the acceleration due to gravity at sea level were to change without a change in mass or a change in distance, we would have to re-evaluate what we have taken for centuries to be an immutable "Law of Nature." I was pointing out that scientific "facts" are always implicitly followed by "As Far As We Know (tm)."
I leapt in on an earlier response to try to clarify my original position, and I'd like to do so here as well. When I said we are no better off now than in the sixteenth and seventeenth century I was not referring to quality of life or material wealth. Clearly we are healthier, wealthier, better informed, more comfortable, and more powerful than in any previous epoch. No, what I was referring to specifically was the proportion of the population in possession of a deep understanding of and appreciation for the methods of science. Everybody thinks they know science because they learned about DNA and di-hybrid crosses, they tittrated (sp?) in chemistry, and they use nifty electronic gadgets all over the place. They confuse the knowledge or the technology with science. Science is the process, not the information. The process, not the technologies. My statement was meant to refer ONLY to the fact that percentage of people who know and fully appreciate the implications of scientific methods is not much higher today than in the years of science's infancy.
For the second point of clarification, note that I specifically said that science and religion cannot co-exist in the classroom or the laboratory. I kept it in that narrow domain because I'm specifically trying to argue that the kind of evidence posessed by those who have had religious experience is rarely (if ever) the kind of evidence that science is allowed by the rules that define what science is to use.
I am also trying to argue that a fundamentalist Christian is fully capable of performing perfectly good science, as long as he keeps his types of evidence properly compartmentalized.
Any epistemological system can become dogma, even science. Consider Wegener (sp?) and the reaction of geologists to his continental drift theory -- sometimes the entrenched science becomes dogma and requires overwhelming evidence to make the process work again. This is not because the scientific method is deficient, but rather because (as I am trying to point out) science is not the normal way people adopt "The Truth." Our world view is the union of our prejudices, even when those prejudices are rationally derived. No human being happily and easily surrenders a belief. I would imagine that practicing researchers must often struggle with this.
As the author of the original post on this thread, I just want to leap in with acouple of quick points. Materialism has a strict philosophical meaning, which I rather unfortunately implied I was using because I used the word in conjunction with other technical philosophical terms. I did not mean materialism in the technical sense. I meant it in the more common sense of "a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things" (quote from the Websters on-line dictionary.
As for the post I am directly responding to, just as I used "materialism" is a lax way, you have used "exist" in a lax way. That we can in no way empirically measure divine intervention; that we cannot detect or quantify "soul" or "conciousness" does mean that they necessarily do not exist, nor that they are either "natural" or "unnatural."
The thrust of my argument is that every intelligent person whom I know who has communicated to me a belief in God has no empirical evidence to offer and yet they possess certainty on the point. They know the belief is not scientific, but they believe anyway. They do not do this because they are mentally defective, but because they are willing to accept a type personally experienced evidence that is non-empirical. No scientist should ever be persuaded that such evidence is good science, but that does not make it unreal or untrue. (Note that it may be, I'm not saying one way or another, but science draws a very specific set of rules for what is within the domain of science and what is without it. Internal unmeasurable awareness of deity is definitely outside of science and yet not irreconcilable with it. The two can co-exist in separate philosophical domains.)
As usual, I swoop in and go waaaayyyy off topic (why stop now?). To me this little debacle (which is being blown out of all proportion because vague stories in the press are substantially inflating the scope and impact of this decision) illustrates a fact about life in the whole of these United States (and by no means just in Kansas).
That fact is that, despite widespread belief that we live in the "scientific age," we actually are little better off than we were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the formal techniques of modern science began to, if you will forgive the expression, evolve. Back then, a handful of very scholarly men began to apply the rigors of Aristotle's logic to direct observation of the physical world (with the first result being the complete desruction of Aristotle's own ideas about natural systems!). These handfuls of men began to develop rigorous methods for forming hypotheses, constructing experiments, carrying them out, collecting data, and analyzing results. They also made a clear distinction between hypothesis, theory, and fact. The only facts in science are logic and mathematics (and even these are only marginally facts as Godel proved centuries later) and that the data gathered in an experiment were the data gathered in the experiment. Take Galileo's little experiments rolling balls of differing weights down slopes of differing angles and measuring the time it takes the ball to go from one end of the slope to the other. He made literally thousands of observations and derived the first universal "law" in the history of science: All objects accelerate towards the earth at 32 feet per second per second. Even this, which gets labelled "Galileo's Law" is not a "fact." Tomorrow we might observe that things accelerate towards the earth at 29 feet per second per second (it would make a lot of us who are a bit tubby like me rather happy). That we know of no possible cause for such a thing and that we know it has never happened between Galileo's time and ours doesn't mean that it won't happen tomorrow. All scientific "facts" are provisional. Scientists must be prepared to re-examine and possibly refine or reject theories when new evidence is found contrary to theory.
Science is a form philosophy that is characterized by logic, experiment, observation, empiricism, skepticism, and materialism. Science and religion cannot co-exist in a classroom or a laboratory because religion (Judeo-Christian anyways, I'm certainly not an expert in world religions) has spiritualism in its philosophic base. Religion requires one to believe in non-empirical knowledge and science requires one to refuse any non-empirical evidence. Note that this does not mean that person cannot believe in both religion and science. If a religious person merely accepts that his knowledge of, say, Christ's death and Resurrection is non-empirical (but no less true) and therefore non-scientific and accepts that evolution by natual selection is empirical and therefore non-spiritual they can co-exist. This isn't mere semantic argybargy. I think that it is perfectly okay for a profoundly religious person to practice science through the very real fact (there's that word again!) that science inhernetly excludes from consideration an entire source of evidence, an entire way of experiencing the world called "Faith" or "spirit." That means, from this point of view that Science has a blind spot. A person can regard science as the more limited view and view it as a tool for getting behind the nature of life, while keeping their faith at the fore for exploring the meaning of life. If you ask any person of deep faith, I suspect you will find that they consider their non-measurable experience of faith to be more compelling and "real" (whatever that may mean) than any measurable empirical experience they have had. Who are you or I to say they are "wrong?"
Now, this is a problem for the handful of people today versed in the sciences. Most of us are very unscientific and know precious little about science. Even NPR's "Talk of the Nation Science Friday" program continually mistakes technology for science and they could not be more different.
The vast majority of people on the plane with you the next time you fly will have no idea whatsoever what makes the plane fly. Most people do not know how a battery works. Most do not know a proton from a neutron. More to the point, most do not know why science regards things as true. The evidence for evolution is every bit as strong as that for Galileo's Law, and yet many perfectly sensible people reject it utterly. That's because most of us (even scientists) are creatures of habit and predjudice. The reason we are not all scientists is that science is hard and demanding and completely foreign to the way humans make descisions about what is true and false. We use technology and we think "Boy, the wonders of science," but very few of us has even an inkling about the fact that electronics (a technology) required discovering quantum meachnics to come into being. Most people know who John F. Kennedy was, but very few know who Max Planck, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, and Pauli (forgot first name; see?) were.
We accept the products of science in the form of technology in much the same way we accept the eucharist, as a blessings from the priests of science, but with much less appreciation for the mystery. We do not live in a scientific age, but in an age of scientists. An age where the power of the knowledge discovered by science is valued by all, but the value of the knowledge itself and more importantly, how it was obtained is as mysterious as holy communion.
Seen in this light, very few of us should feel as free as we do to make fun of the "hicks" from Kansas. Believe me that average intelligence is Kansas is not significantly different from that in any other state in the union. Ignorance is bliss and America is a very happy country. All of it, not just Kansas.
While I agree with the conclusions, I'd just like to nitpick out a few historical facts.
1) Basic began life at Dartmouth. I don't know if a corporate contractor made it (is that who Computer Sciences is?). The BASIC interpreter is the only thing that (AFAIK) Gates ever actually wrote. Even then he knew the way to make money was to control the OS. He wanted BASIC to be *the* user interface to computers. He made arrangements with a number of hardware vendors to get MS-BASIC in the ROM on their machines. Captive consumers!
2) MS-DOS used to be known as 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. It was written by Tim Patterson to make it easy to port CP/M applications to the new 8086 processor. The 640k limit was imposed not by MS-DOS but by the IBM-PC architecture. The physical memory limit of the 8086 was 1MB. MS-DOS was available for other hardware (the Zenith Z-100 leaps to mind) where it could address more than 640k just fine. I'm not praising MS-DOS, jut trying to put the blame wth IBM where it really belongs...
3) Here I won't argue. I bought Windows 1.0 (how much will some of you pay me for a copy of the 1.0 manual? I've got it, you want it? I don't think I have the 5-1/4 floppies any more, but I might. I can look. I fired it up, played reversi a few times, erased it from my 10M hard drive and never ran it again). I will, however, point out that Digital Research was the arrogant corporate giant. They overcharged big time for CP/M-86 and they really did not keep up. No heirarchical file system (of course, neither did MS-DOS v1), no forward motion on the core system (but look at GEM later and at DR-DOS, once their lunch got eaten, they got innovative again). MS-DOS v1 reeked compared to CP/M, but MS-DOS v2 added some critical stuff and CP/M was too expensive and didn't move. I can't blame MS for CP/M's death. It killed itself. I *can* blame them for killing DR-DOS, however, with their bogus 95 "no more DOS" baloney. As for all the other products they've killed, each of those companies also rested on their laurels. Word 2 caught up with WP and Word 6 kicked its butt (and I *hate* Word!). MS actually made better (if fatter) apps. Borland? I don't know why people went to MS from Borland. As a guy who writes software for a living, I found the Borland stuff to be consistently far superior to the MS tools. I don't know why Borland lost. MS really started being abusive IMHO with DR-DOS and with Netscape. In both of these cases they used their OEM licensing agreements and thus their control of the distribution channels to crush the innovator.
So, while I dislike MS software, I don't think MS is wholly to blame for the demise of every defunct ISV, nor do I think that every sucky thing about PCs is due to them. IBM deserves a lot of blame for building and designing well below their capabilities.
One last thing. Would we have been stuck with the cruddy architectural heritage of the IBM PC design (which we still fight around to make good computers) if all software had been open source? Hell, no! We could have moved to new architectures with little effort if we had so desired. It is that "base of applications" sold binary by closed-source companies that have us locked on that set of legacy design crud. Those companies cannot cost-justify moving to a new platform ("why when there are gazillions of PCs?") but when you have the source, you can do it yourself. It is a chicken-and-egg thing. With the source, you just clone the d--ned chicken!
Get the music-only version. The "play" stinks. Also, the song "Flame" stinks, but it was meant to stink. It was meant to be an example of marketable pablum.
I don't think Pete has done anything lately to measure up to his first three major solo releases: "Empty Glass," "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes," and "White City." (he's got other stuff in there like his demo releases and such, but these are the three major ones).
I think "The Iron Man" was sort of a noble try. Anybody else heard "The Iron Man?" I'm interested in opinions. Especially if you are also familiar with the work of Ted Hughes. IMHO the album is good, but the rock-n-roll song just isn't the format for that material... I'd love to hear what others think...
I think "Psychoderelict" stands on the strength of a couple of songs. Please don't hate me for this, but no 16 year-old can fully appreciate "Fake It." I'm not aying you don't get it -- I'm sure you do. You just have to be pushing middle age and have migrating hair to feel it fully.
The music-only version of Psychoderelict stands up much better than the "play." "Let's Get Pretentious" is pretty amusing too... That doesn't mean any of it remotely approaches "Exquisitely Bored," "Slit Skirts," or "Somebody Saved Me" (which I have always believed to be the best of his numerous tributes to Keith Moon).
As a last defense, I'd rather hear Pete try and come up short than hear anything from, say, Elton John, who hasn't taken a musical chance since 1977 and has released just shy of 734 albums since then...
Pete released a new album a few years ago called "Psychoderelict" which seemed to me to be picking up on a few themes from Lifehouse. He also reworks some interesting (but dated) electronic riffs from a little known solo release called "Who Came First."
I have "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes" on CD already. They must have discontinued it... It is his single best work. From "The Sea Refuses no River" to "Slit Skirts" it is one of the most mature collections of rock lyrics ever. Pete is (IMHO) sometimes overrated as a guitar player, but he is even more underrated as a writer. The SOB can write!
One track off "Psychoderelict" that shows his greatest guitar skill is "Early Morning Dreams." He is perhaps the greatest rhythm guitarist in rock music. He does percussive strumms on this track that are only matched in my experience by Richard Thompson. (This track screams "Lifehouse." It even begins with a digitized voice [Pete's] singing the reassuring phrase "You are safe from harm on the Grid. You are safe from harm...")
He even deals well with the fact that he is a rock relic when rock worships youth. Think he can't write? Check out "Outlive the Dinosaur."
Pete Townshend consistently knocks me on my backside with his stuff. He gets at truth. Also, since he is aging just a bit ahead of me I keep on finding his lyrics growing older and more sophisticated just as I grow old enough to appreciate them. His work also provides a path back to reckless youth -- two songs off "Who's Next" are veritable teen anthems (again, IMHO): "Baba O'Reilly" (more familiar as "Teenage Wasteland" -- loved it when it showed up in the trailer for "A Bug's Life," funny without being mocking) and "We Don't Get Fooled Again" which may be the most insightful of the protest/authority defiance songs of the "end of the 60's" (the album dates to the eraly 70's, but it is pre-disco, pre-shag). I still find "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss" to be both shrill, youthful, and wise. Also simultaneously defiant and resigned. I can't think of too many from the 60's/70's generation who were both so passionate about changing the world and so aware that it is probably a lost cause. The song is positively Quixotic.
Well, I've eaten enough bandwidth with this "me too!," but I share the enthusiasm for a guy I've often felt was loved for the wrong reasons and ignored by those who should love him.
"After the fire/The fire still burns/The heart grows older/but never-ever learns/The memories smoulder/The soul always yearns/After the fire/The fire still burns"
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I couldn't agree more. It had several cool features. Bit testing instructions. Two complete sets of general purpose registers (EX and EXX instructions, remember?). More on-chip integration than most (the refresh register for dynamic memories). It had a vectored interrupt system. All of this and full instruction set compatibility with the much less capable 8080A (and its later incarnation, the 8085).
My Dad was an EE who worked for Control Data and I was a pimply-faced teenager who loved programming. We homebrewed an S-100 bus based Z80A computer between 1975 and 1978 (so it took us awhile!). I wrote the BIOS for our hardware for CP/M 1.2 (later 1.4 and 2.0 also) in Z80 assembler.
We also did a number of embedded projects with the chip. The z80 had features that were a dream for embedded programmers. In our case, we made a simulated event-driven machine by polling during a timer interrupt. We made use of the aforementioned dual register sets. Instead of the normal chaos of stack frame switching (and hoping you do it right) we just said the prime register set is for the interrupt service routine and the regular set is for the normal operation. On entry to the ISR, just do an EXX and on exit do another one. No disruption of the "application" whatsoever, plus interrupt latency is unbeliveably small (no external bus cycles at ALL!)
I did and do love this chip. I know it can't really cut it as a general purpose computer CPU anymore, but some of those apps that were built on and ran on this hardware (WordStar, etc.) did quite a bit. They're not that much weaker than Word and they would run in less than 64k on machines clocked at from 2 to 6 MHz. How well would Word do?
It is great to see this processor still alive and kicking.
It is patently false that there was no opposition to going to the moon. There was considerable opposition from every end of the political spectrum. Kennedy himself found the idea causing him such political trouble that he even publicly offered to cooperate with the Soviets on the project (with, more than likely, the quiet hope that they could be blamed if the effort failed). While it is virtually impossible to find anyone today who was opposed, this is because the program became such a (short lived) popular success.
Now, I don't happen to think the fact that the world is not a utopian paradise is sufficient reason to scuttle the space program. Europe was no utopian paradise when the "voyages of exploration" began in the sixteenth century. Even so, I think we should be looking for ways to profit from manned space flight, otherwise we should leave space to the robots.
I've heard the argument about "machines can't think," and true as this is, you should take a look at what it costs to make a long space flight survivable for a human being. You can put a lot of brains in a robot for what that costs.
I laughed out loud at the scene at the beginning of the movie Apollo 13 when Lovell calls to his kids and they were all sitting on the stairs. I was a kid on the stairs those July nights in 1969, pretending I was down in my room, listening to everything as it happened on the TV. I will never forget it.
Apollo was lousy science (in space exploration terms, not in technological development terms), but it sure had me dreaming of the stars and dying to be a scientist/engineer.
I see the future of man in space in the very long term. It took almost 100 years for Europeans to follow the explorers into the "new world." The distances and difficulties and costs of this expansion are so much greater that I do no think 1000 years out of line for the length of time it will take to have interplanetary trade and civilization, but I think we should continue to try.
"A man's reach should always exceed his grasp." Help the poor, yes. But don't put everything on hold until poverty is gone. Society doesn't act. Individuals act. Select your priorties and put your effort in there. Give others the freedom to do the same. The world can and will become better if you do.
Do a little dance. Make a little love. Get down tonight!
The last two weeks of managment shuffles have looked like a soap opera. SGI to MS, Sun to AOL, AOL to, er, wherever... Is it possible that all of these executives changing positions all at once could put enough stress on the San Andreas to finally trigger "The Big One?" Maybe we should get a map out, find the headquarters of these companies, and calculate the torques?
Being briefly serious, does anyone think this might bode ill for Mozilla?
You are quite right, but are also reading far more into my post than I put there. As I said, for a two key system to make sense you need a secure way to switch the keys. Take a look at PGP's method for key revocation (note that it is recommended that a revocation message be generated WHEN THE KEY IS GENERATED). Now, the fact that apparently MS has no formal method for switching keys is why I described their implementation as "brain dead."
As for your first point, I agree. But if you had a secure way to switch between two keys, it would be a smart thing because you could keep signing things even in the event of a compromise and you would not have to get a new copy of the software with a new public key to everybody in order to do so. However, since MS's scheme trusts both keys, I agree with you that two copies of one key would be functionally equivalent.
I think what stinks is that MS is a closed source company. You can't know for certain what they are doing or why. You are only as secure as MS knows you. You, you have no idea. Yeah, I like that.
The secondary key makes a great deal of sense. It's the MS implementation that is brain dead. I can think of two reasons to switch to a backup key. Destruction of the primary (they shouldn't have multiple copies lying around, so posit an explosion/flood/whatever destorying the primary). The second reason would be known compromise of the first key (Ballmer accidentally copied it to his laptop, an MS employee responsible for the key was bribed, whatever).
The problem with the MS implementation is that EITHER key is trusted! There should be a mechanism to switch keys in a secure manner such that one key becomes untrusted. As it is now, if one key is compromised, it will still be trusted!
I guess I will just have to agree to disagree with you. The choice to make Star Wars a huge hit was not Alec Guiness' choice. My concept of individual liberty does not permit a mob to take over my life because I do something the mob worships. If the fans resent Alce for this, stop going to his movies.
I've read essays by many popular writers about the difficulty and stress in their lives caused by the incessant demands of the mob for "the next book." While I can see your argument, and agree that the love of the public for one's work is something for which one should be grateful, I think the artist owes something to the text -- to tell a story in a compelling, perhaps even an illuminating way, and that is the sole obligation. If there is no audience, the work was still honorable. If there is a mass audience, the work was still honorable. If the artist sets out with a duty to the mob instead of a duty to the text, well, whatever the work is, it is not art.
The labor of the artist is for the art, not for the audience. If the art is good, if it is human, if it is truthful and compelling, the audience will come. If it is not, there will be no audience.
Why should an actor, writer, or director be a slave to an audience?
By buying a ticket to Star Wars you do not buy firendship from Alec Guiness. Period.
I am infintely disturbed by the rage that is shown in some of these posts towards Alec Guiness because he told a kid who had "seen it [Star Wars] 100 times" to "never watch it again." He also claims that he throws his fan mail in the trash.
A number of people have posted claiming that Guiness "owes something" to the fans.
I hardly think so. The notion that an actor (or a writer or a director) is a puppet who must perform in his life as "the fans" expect is painfully barbarous. Are people seriously suggesting that, if a person is popular or successful, that he must, from then on, conform to the expectations of those who made him successful? That because something he did for money (and I can't imagine that Mr. Guiness made Star Wars for any other reason) was a huge success, he no longer owns his own life?
Forget the fashionable vampires. It is hardly a revelation that humans are obsessed with sex and death. Try "fans" if you want a howling, bloodsucking, all-consuming, shreiking, soulless hunger.
A person has a right to own his or her life for themselves and they owe exactly nothing to the fans.
I am infintely disturbed by the rage that is shown in some of these posts towards Alec Guiness because he told a kid who had "seen it [Star Wars] 100 times" to "never watch it again." He also claims that he throws his fan mail in the trash.
A number of people have posted claiming that Guiness "owes something" to the fans.
I hardly think so. The notion that an actor (or a writer or a director) is a puppet who must perform in his life as "the fans" expect is painfully barbarous. Are people seriously suggesting that, if a person is popular or successful, that he must, from then on, conform to the expectations of those who made him successful? That because something he did for money (and I can't imagine that Mr. Guiness made Star Wars for any other reason) was a huge success, he no longer owns his own life?
Forget the fashionable vampires. They are merely the product of the trendy sexual undead. Try "fans" if you want a howling, bloodsucking, all-consuming, shreiking, soulless hunger.
A person has a right to own his or her life for themselves and they owe exactly nothing to the fans.
W. Richard Stevens was that rarity in modern humanity: a gentleman and a scholar. I am deeply saddend to see the number of people posting hateful comments about this man because he didn't like perl and he didn't like linux. I can assure you that professor Stevens knew what he was talking about and had reasons for those statements. The fact that one might not agree with them is not a justification for assailing a man's character or intelligence.
In 1993 I was writing some networking applications software for RS-6000's at a large IT shop. I was, like almost everyone else in the industry, working from W. Richard Steven's excellent "Unix Network Programming." I was testing code examples from that book and found (to my mild concern) that Steven's code to run-time detect whether you were on a system V or a BSD style system (for signal handling) was returning true for both cases on the version of AIX I was on.
I was pretty sure that AIX wasn't so deviant that such standard stuff as is found in that book would not work, but I'm certainly not too proud to seek expert advice. I hopped on over to USENET (web? What web?) and posted a question basically asking if Stevens' code would work on AIX. Later that day I got an e-mail from Stevens himself with details on what works, what doesn't and why (almost all of it worked, BTW). In 1993 the 'net wasn't quite the sea of raging lunatics that it is today, but even then USENET was full of loudmouthed know-nothings. That Stevens would take the time to review newsgroups and help out an indivdual questioner says something about the man.
His contribution to the modern net is difficult to overstate. I would venture that almost every serious developer of Internet applications (esp. those who were here before the explosion of the WWW) learned his or her trade from Stevens (and Comer, and a handful of others). Whatever he thought of Linux and Perl, or about NAFTA or any other damned thing, he was a knowledgeable and generous man. Such a man is worth ten thousand foul-mouthed AC's. Shame on you.
I bet they aren't 100 Mw. I'm sure they're very hot, but 100,000,000 watts is a gawdawful lot of power. Even if they are 100Mw, the primary effect would be internal burns. I've (thank goodness) never been exposed to anything like that. I'm sure it hits like a physical blow, and the muscles would probably convulse in response to the sudden stimulus of, oh, most of the nerves in the body. If they moved quickly away or the radar was only on for a very short time, I'm sure there were few long term effects. I was trying to get at the inverse square law here. The power exposure decreases with the square of the distance, so if you get belted and run a few feet away, you won't get belted anymore.
;)
The other folks here were also quite right in pointing out that a microwave oven is designed to be a high Q, and at a frequency that couples well with water molecules. Your body has host of different compounds, tissues, and organs, all with various whole body resonance lengths. Not all of the power from any source will directly interact with your body.
I was just trying to point out that the setup suggested here was probably around 10 watts, and almost certainly less than 200 watts; if the power is down around that level, then you would feel hardly any effects from the radiation even a foot away from the antenna. At a foot or more, you get far less radiation from that antenna than you get from the sun.
A few more numbers for you to use as a yarstick when someone hands you a metal rod and says "Here, hold this:"
Your typical microwave oven radiates between 500 and 1500 watts (in its cavity). As I said, the sun gives you about 1000 watts (that's whole spectrum -- I'm not really sure how much of it is in the 1.5+ Gig up to infrared range; all of which may fairly be called "microwave").
I've seen a guy burn his finger in a waveguide. He wasn't killed. He didn't grow two heads. The main effect of this stuff is heat (I suppose there could be some chance ionization effects, but not much).
Anyways, I certainly don't lay claim to more than a ham's knowledge of radio. Get an EE or a physicist to come in and give the actual lecture.
My main point is that it helps to throw some "sanity boundaries" up. If the exposure numbers are orders of magnitude lower than you get standing in sunlight, then this system will almost certainly not be dropping people, birds, and fuzzy little bunnies in their tracks.
Whenever someone starts talking about hazards, I try to take my limited knowledge and see if I can come within a factor of ten of the claimed danger. If something I know to be (almost) harmless (like standing in sunlight) is at least a factor of ten more dangerous than the worst possible case for the stated "danger," then I think one can safely conclude that the threat is overstated.
I don't think I'd recommend making a habit of standing a foot in front of, say, fighter plane threat radars, just the same. I promise you they can kill you, and while I don't know how long it would take, I'd like to experiment with non-human subjects to find out...
Parting thought: Think how much power the sun must be putting out given the inverse square law and that the energy at the Earth's surface is 1,000 watts per square meter at a distance of 93,000,000 miles!
You do mean 100mw, I hope. While some very ignorant people (and that isn't a crime, folks; people just need the facts -- that's what the 'net is about -- the only cure for ignorance is confession) are shouting here about the "dangers" of microwaves (as if they were magically different from sunlight), being within a few dozen feet of a transmitter outputting 100 Megawatts would, indeed, be very deadly. Mw would be Megawatts, mw would be milliwatts.
Folks, let's put this in a little perspective. You receive about 1000 watts per square meter of RF energy from sunlight. Standing in direct sunlight complaining about the RF energy from a microwave antenna on a rooftop is like calling your neighbor during a hurricane to complain that his cat is breathing on your tree! (I wish I could take credit for that comparison, but I read that in an article about low freq RF from power-lines).
The amount of energy you receive from a point source of microwave energy is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. I'd be very surprised if these systems are putting out more than 10 watts, and I assure you it would be illegal for them to put out more than 200 watts without special FCC dispensation. Let's be impossibly pessemistic. If, at one inch away from the antenna, you receive 100% of the radiated power, or 200 watts, then at 2 inchs you receive 1/4 of that, or 50 watts. At four inches you would receive 12.5 watts. At about a foot away we are getting into cat breath territory.
evilpenguin, aka, Michael Schwarz, aka N0ZES
I have tried for over a year not to rant on /., but the discussion under this topic has finally sent me beyond the precipice. This is WAY OFF TOPIC (or is it?)
/. moderation. Moderation doesn't censor anything. Just set your threshold to -1 folks and you can read every post. Slashdot is a group and as the cliche goes the IQ of a group is equal to the loswest IQ in the group divided by the number of people in the group. Moderators are slashdot readers. Try to get over the pain of being moderated down and try making your point again, but this time use careful language that doesn't fall to personal abuse. You'd be surprised how suggesting someone has a Philistine attitude gets moderated up while calling someone a shithead gets moderated down. Just try to write like you would actually speak to someone in person and maybe you'll be happier with the moderating (but maybe not).
Rant 1: Re: People who complain about
Rant 2: People who flame anything anti-Linux. I use Linux. I use Windows (although I do not want to). I use other Unices. I like Linux. I want Linux to win. I want people to like Linux just like I want people to like the TV shows I like and worship the God I worship. And that's what we need to beware of. I am often reminded of that scene from Life of Brian where the "Vow of Silence" man attacks Brian and the reaction of the crowd, esp. Cleese shouting, "Heretic! Unbeliever! Persecute! Kill!" For goodness sake, it's a computer program!
Rant 3: People who talk about Slashdot readers and posters as if they were all of like mind. There is astounding diversity of opinion on Slashdot. Read the thread a couple of days ago on the Kansas/Evolution thing. Now there happen to be certain overlapping domains (like Linux-love) in the nerd/geek community, but there is some part of each of us unique and outside all the overlaps. That's what brings me back again and again. I can get perpetual self-congratulation by watching any E! program.
Rant 4: People who think anything Microsoft does matters in the slightest. Linux is not and cannot be destroyed. It is not in even the slightest way threatened by anything Microsoft does. Linux businesses may be, but the network is here. The code is here. It cannot be taken away or destroyed. If every Linux business were forced to fold tomorrow the whole thing would just keep right on going. I do not care what Microsoft does.
Rant 5: People who just don't get it. It seems to be an American disease, but it is spreading everywhere. The only thing that matters is money. People talk about the quality of movies on the basis of how much was spent to make them, or how much they are making. An amazing number of people think I am "exploited" because I have given away code I have written. They do not understand that I wrote that code for my personal needs or pleasure. These same people think that I am not exploited when I code things I don't want to code for other people to make them richer forty hours a week, 52-weeks a year (that's ~87 days a year folks, for 45 years that's 3,900 days, or about 10 years 6 months of my life), for which I get paid just enough to keep me in debt for most of that time, after which I become a liability to the healthcare system until I die. Exploitation comes in many forms. Writing source code and giving it away is not one of those forms as far as I am concerned. (BTW, consider that between work, school, and sleep you use about 16 of every 24 hours of your life for 60 years not doing what you want. That's 40 years of your life spent not doing what you want. Let's assume you live to 75 years and that you sleep 8 hours a day for those years you are not working or going to school. That's another 5 years of sleep. So, out of 75 years of living, you get to do what you want to for yourself for 30 years out of 75. Now talk to me about exploitation.)
Rant 6: People who sneer at anything. Given the numbers above, why do so many of us feel that there is time to sneer at anything? Maybe we should try to form some genuine, sincere, honest, trusting, real relationships between actual caring living people in the time we have left?
Boy, I feel a lot better having gotten that off my chest.
Download the current copy of the wine source from http://metalab.unc.edu/pub /Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/, gunzip and untar it, and run:
grep corel ChangeLog
from the base directory (wineYYYYMMDD) and see how many contributions Corel has made. They've made less than I personally hoped, but they've made quite a few. To be fair, I've poked in that code some, this is not a trivial project. In many ways it is much more complicated than the Linux kernel (I guess that shouldn't surprise any of us!). Corel's team may well be still finding their way around. They may also be concentrating on those things that affect their applications primarily.
They are there and they are doing things...
I doubt this news will do anything but improve Wine's situation. A guy who has done much of the lead work on Wine in his spare time will now be working on it full time and being paid to do so. I can't see how this can do anything but help.
Sorry if I'm getting hooked by a troll, but he has been one of the lead developers of Wine (an open-source project) for several years now (at least three). His open-source credentials are impeccable.
I cannot believe the level of callousness and disregard to posterity being displayed by the entire technology economy. Their "quick-fix" mentality is going to lead to complete disaster. Just for the sake of saving a few bytes, they are restricting computer systems to 4-digit years.
I might not be around for it, but I just wanted to be the first on record predicting chaos, doom, disaster, and the pillaging of the frozen-head museum where the heads of Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and John Koskinen will be pulled from their freezers and used for football games when the Year 10,000 rolls around and all the matter teleportation units shut down!
I shouted Katz' praises on his earlier posts about the media hysteria over "killer geeks." I still think society at large is paying far too little attention to youth, and that attention does not mean the application of mind control, but active and interested involvement in the lives of children.
That said, I think this is an overreaction to an unfortunate publication.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is just issuing recommendations to Pediatricians. This is not some sort of censorship. I don't think there's anything here over which to get one's knickers in a twist.
My problem with it is that the conclusion that TV be limited is not based on any research. It is little more than a "feeling." A feeling I happen to agree with. I think TV sucks out your brains and leaves you an addled idiot, addicted to constant but bland stimulation, easy laughs obtained without wit, and a constant desire to fill that vague human angst with an endless stream of brightly packaged products.
I think television is Soma.
Sometimes I think that Katz forgets that children are not little adults; that children do need the guidance of parents; that parents should be censors. My own parents never ever told me there was anything I couldn't read. That way I had no fear to walk into the home with any book I chose. When they saw me with something that troubled them, they would express their concerns and ask to talk to me after I read the book. We would discuss the book and what was in it. We would talk about violence, cruelty, tratment of women, minorities, what was good and what was bad. From this, I became very aware of my parent's morals, and I knew their reasons for them. This did not result in me being a little parrot of my parents, because I was also thinking for myself. I was deciding what out of these books and what they believed I would take into myself and make a part of my code for living.
TV was a slightly different story. We simply did not watch much of it until we were about 10 years old. Then we watched a lot (my dad was a classic TV junkie -- he'd watch anything). I found, however, that I had little time for most of the junk. Now, I'm not some ivory tower who eschews "The Simpsons" because I have to get back to my copy of "Le Rechereche du Temps Perdus." I am now a bit of a TV junkie myself, but I formed an aesthetic and moral sense early, and I decide what goes through the glass teat (nod to Harlan Ellison) into my brain.
So, the pedes wrote a good thing as bad science. I think that's a shame and they shouldn't have done it, but I think any parent who doesn't know what his or her child is watching is a lousy parent.
Very well said. This is what I meant (that any symbolic system must contain unprovable assertions). My sloppy sentence was merely meant to call attention to this point. Thanks for stating it more precisely.
Wolfgang! Of course! (You know whay I didn't put his first name in? Because "Linus" as in "Linus Pauling" was the name my brain kept coming up with. I knew that wasn't right so I didn't want to embarass myself!
Thanks again for a good clarification.
I appreciate your compliment, but I must say that I disagree with you that people tend to believe what is true. My experience has been that people want to go on believing what they presently believe, no matter what that is. Furthermore, this is true of everybody: scientists, engineers, priests, parishoners, and the honey wagon driver. This means that whole human race has a blind spot for new ideas that fundmentally reposition world views. All belief systems resist new beliefs, including science. This is, I think, part of the human psychological makeup. We like constancy, even though life tells us again and again that the universe is inconstant.
I personally consider the scientific evidence for species differentiation by natural selection overwhelming. The lack of a complete theory of genetic drift tells us that we have much more to learn, but does not tell us that Wallace and Darwin's theory is fatally flawed. You must find evidence that contradicts the theory, not that shows it be incomplete. The theory explains all the presently known facts.
Now, I do think that it is a theory, a sound one, but a theory. I think the missing elements can be pointed out in science class, but I do not for a minute believe that there is any reason to remove teaching it as a requirement of the biology syllabus. It is one of the most important theories in modern biology and I think it is ridiculous to remove it to please a religious sensibility.
I think that creationism can be taught in public schools, but not as science. I think evolution can be taught in public schools, but not in math or gym.
As for your point about constructing scientific experiments to find what you expect to find, I would ask you to suggest to me what kind of experiemnt to run with absolutely no preconceptions about what will be found? It is impossible to look at the world without preconception. I think it is unreasonable to expect a telescope to give you useful data on the human genome. You must have some preconception. You must, however, try to keep yourself aware of how your observation affects the observed. As I said in my original post, science is really actually hard!
Oooh! Oooh! One more. Of course I knew full well that acceleration due to gravity falls off as you move the masses apart. I do know my Newton. Here what I was getting at is that if, suddenly one day the acceleration due to gravity at sea level were to change without a change in mass or a change in distance, we would have to re-evaluate what we have taken for centuries to be an immutable "Law of Nature." I was pointing out that scientific "facts" are always implicitly followed by "As Far As We Know (tm)."
I leapt in on an earlier response to try to clarify my original position, and I'd like to do so here as well. When I said we are no better off now than in the sixteenth and seventeenth century I was not referring to quality of life or material wealth. Clearly we are healthier, wealthier, better informed, more comfortable, and more powerful than in any previous epoch. No, what I was referring to specifically was the proportion of the population in possession of a deep understanding of and appreciation for the methods of science. Everybody thinks they know science because they learned about DNA and di-hybrid crosses, they tittrated (sp?) in chemistry, and they use nifty electronic gadgets all over the place. They confuse the knowledge or the technology with science. Science is the process, not the information. The process, not the technologies. My statement was meant to refer ONLY to the fact that percentage of people who know and fully appreciate the implications of scientific methods is not much higher today than in the years of science's infancy.
For the second point of clarification, note that I specifically said that science and religion cannot co-exist in the classroom or the laboratory. I kept it in that narrow domain because I'm specifically trying to argue that the kind of evidence posessed by those who have had religious experience is rarely (if ever) the kind of evidence that science is allowed by the rules that define what science is to use.
I am also trying to argue that a fundamentalist Christian is fully capable of performing perfectly good science, as long as he keeps his types of evidence properly compartmentalized.
Any epistemological system can become dogma, even science. Consider Wegener (sp?) and the reaction of geologists to his continental drift theory -- sometimes the entrenched science becomes dogma and requires overwhelming evidence to make the process work again. This is not because the scientific method is deficient, but rather because (as I am trying to point out) science is not the normal way people adopt "The Truth." Our world view is the union of our prejudices, even when those prejudices are rationally derived. No human being happily and easily surrenders a belief. I would imagine that practicing researchers must often struggle with this.
As the author of the original post on this thread, I just want to leap in with acouple of quick points. Materialism has a strict philosophical meaning, which I rather unfortunately implied I was using because I used the word in conjunction with other technical philosophical terms. I did not mean materialism in the technical sense. I meant it in the more common sense of "a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things" (quote from the Websters on-line dictionary.
As for the post I am directly responding to, just as I used "materialism" is a lax way, you have used "exist" in a lax way. That we can in no way empirically measure divine intervention; that we cannot detect or quantify "soul" or "conciousness" does mean that they necessarily do not exist, nor that they are either "natural" or "unnatural."
The thrust of my argument is that every intelligent person whom I know who has communicated to me a belief in God has no empirical evidence to offer and yet they possess certainty on the point. They know the belief is not scientific, but they believe anyway. They do not do this because they are mentally defective, but because they are willing to accept a type personally experienced evidence that is non-empirical. No scientist should ever be persuaded that such evidence is good science, but that does not make it unreal or untrue. (Note that it may be, I'm not saying one way or another, but science draws a very specific set of rules for what is within the domain of science and what is without it. Internal unmeasurable awareness of deity is definitely outside of science and yet not irreconcilable with it. The two can co-exist in separate philosophical domains.)
As usual, I swoop in and go waaaayyyy off topic (why stop now?). To me this little debacle (which is being blown out of all proportion because vague stories in the press are substantially inflating the scope and impact of this decision) illustrates a fact about life in the whole of these United States (and by no means just in Kansas).
That fact is that, despite widespread belief that we live in the "scientific age," we actually are little better off than we were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the formal techniques of modern science began to, if you will forgive the expression, evolve. Back then, a handful of very scholarly men began to apply the rigors of Aristotle's logic to direct observation of the physical world (with the first result being the complete desruction of Aristotle's own ideas about natural systems!). These handfuls of men began to develop rigorous methods for forming hypotheses, constructing experiments, carrying them out, collecting data, and analyzing results. They also made a clear distinction between hypothesis, theory, and fact. The only facts in science are logic and mathematics (and even these are only marginally facts as Godel proved centuries later) and that the data gathered in an experiment were the data gathered in the experiment. Take Galileo's little experiments rolling balls of differing weights down slopes of differing angles and measuring the time it takes the ball to go from one end of the slope to the other. He made literally thousands of observations and derived the first universal "law" in the history of science: All objects accelerate towards the earth at 32 feet per second per second. Even this, which gets labelled "Galileo's Law" is not a "fact." Tomorrow we might observe that things accelerate towards the earth at 29 feet per second per second (it would make a lot of us who are a bit tubby like me rather happy). That we know of no possible cause for such a thing and that we know it has never happened between Galileo's time and ours doesn't mean that it won't happen tomorrow. All scientific "facts" are provisional. Scientists must be prepared to re-examine and possibly refine or reject theories when new evidence is found contrary to theory.
Science is a form philosophy that is characterized by logic, experiment, observation, empiricism, skepticism, and materialism. Science and religion cannot co-exist in a classroom or a laboratory because religion (Judeo-Christian anyways, I'm certainly not an expert in world religions) has spiritualism in its philosophic base. Religion requires one to believe in non-empirical knowledge and science requires one to refuse any non-empirical evidence. Note that this does not mean that person cannot believe in both religion and science. If a religious person merely accepts that his knowledge of, say, Christ's death and Resurrection is non-empirical (but no less true) and therefore non-scientific and accepts that evolution by natual selection is empirical and therefore non-spiritual they can co-exist. This isn't mere semantic argybargy. I think that it is perfectly okay for a profoundly religious person to practice science through the very real fact (there's that word again!) that science inhernetly excludes from consideration an entire source of evidence, an entire way of experiencing the world called "Faith" or "spirit." That means, from this point of view that Science has a blind spot. A person can regard science as the more limited view and view it as a tool for getting behind the nature of life, while keeping their faith at the fore for exploring the meaning of life. If you ask any person of deep faith, I suspect you will find that they consider their non-measurable experience of faith to be more compelling and "real" (whatever that may mean) than any measurable empirical experience they have had. Who are you or I to say they are "wrong?"
Now, this is a problem for the handful of people today versed in the sciences. Most of us are very unscientific and know precious little about science. Even NPR's "Talk of the Nation Science Friday" program continually mistakes technology for science and they could not be more different.
The vast majority of people on the plane with you the next time you fly will have no idea whatsoever what makes the plane fly. Most people do not know how a battery works. Most do not know a proton from a neutron. More to the point, most do not know why science regards things as true. The evidence for evolution is every bit as strong as that for Galileo's Law, and yet many perfectly sensible people reject it utterly. That's because most of us (even scientists) are creatures of habit and predjudice. The reason we are not all scientists is that science is hard and demanding and completely foreign to the way humans make descisions about what is true and false. We use technology and we think "Boy, the wonders of science," but very few of us has even an inkling about the fact that electronics (a technology) required discovering quantum meachnics to come into being. Most people know who John F. Kennedy was, but very few know who Max Planck, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, and Pauli (forgot first name; see?) were.
We accept the products of science in the form of technology in much the same way we accept the eucharist, as a blessings from the priests of science, but with much less appreciation for the mystery. We do not live in a scientific age, but in an age of scientists. An age where the power of the knowledge discovered by science is valued by all, but the value of the knowledge itself and more importantly, how it was obtained is as mysterious as holy communion.
Seen in this light, very few of us should feel as free as we do to make fun of the "hicks" from Kansas. Believe me that average intelligence is Kansas is not significantly different from that in any other state in the union. Ignorance is bliss and America is a very happy country. All of it, not just Kansas.
A hick nerd from Minnesota...
While I agree with the conclusions, I'd just like to nitpick out a few historical facts.
1) Basic began life at Dartmouth. I don't know if a corporate contractor made it (is that who Computer Sciences is?). The BASIC interpreter is the only thing that (AFAIK) Gates ever actually wrote. Even then he knew the way to make money was to control the OS. He wanted BASIC to be *the* user interface to computers. He made arrangements with a number of hardware vendors to get MS-BASIC in the ROM on their machines. Captive consumers!
2) MS-DOS used to be known as 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. It was written by Tim Patterson to make it easy to port CP/M applications to the new 8086 processor. The 640k limit was imposed not by MS-DOS but by the IBM-PC architecture. The physical memory limit of the 8086 was 1MB. MS-DOS was available for other hardware (the Zenith Z-100 leaps to mind) where it could address more than 640k just fine. I'm not praising MS-DOS, jut trying to put the blame wth IBM where it really belongs...
3) Here I won't argue. I bought Windows 1.0 (how much will some of you pay me for a copy of the 1.0 manual? I've got it, you want it? I don't think I have the 5-1/4 floppies any more, but I might. I can look. I fired it up, played reversi a few times, erased it from my 10M hard drive and never ran it again). I will, however, point out that Digital Research was the arrogant corporate giant. They overcharged big time for CP/M-86 and they really did not keep up. No heirarchical file system (of course, neither did MS-DOS v1), no forward motion on the core system (but look at GEM later and at DR-DOS, once their lunch got eaten, they got innovative again). MS-DOS v1 reeked compared to CP/M, but MS-DOS v2 added some critical stuff and CP/M was too expensive and didn't move. I can't blame MS for CP/M's death. It killed itself. I *can* blame them for killing DR-DOS, however, with their bogus 95 "no more DOS" baloney. As for all the other products they've killed, each of those companies also rested on their laurels. Word 2 caught up with WP and Word 6 kicked its butt (and I *hate* Word!). MS actually made better (if fatter) apps. Borland? I don't know why people went to MS from Borland. As a guy who writes software for a living, I found the Borland stuff to be consistently far superior to the MS tools. I don't know why Borland lost. MS really started being abusive IMHO with DR-DOS and with Netscape. In both of these cases they used their OEM licensing agreements and thus their control of the distribution channels to crush the innovator.
So, while I dislike MS software, I don't think MS is wholly to blame for the demise of every defunct ISV, nor do I think that every sucky thing about PCs is due to them. IBM deserves a lot of blame for building and designing well below their capabilities.
One last thing. Would we have been stuck with the cruddy architectural heritage of the IBM PC design (which we still fight around to make good computers) if all software had been open source? Hell, no! We could have moved to new architectures with little effort if we had so desired. It is that "base of applications" sold binary by closed-source companies that have us locked on that set of legacy design crud. Those companies cannot cost-justify moving to a new platform ("why when there are gazillions of PCs?") but when you have the source, you can do it yourself. It is a chicken-and-egg thing. With the source, you just clone the d--ned chicken!
Ramble mode off...
Get the music-only version. The "play" stinks. Also, the song "Flame" stinks, but it was meant to stink. It was meant to be an example of marketable pablum.
I don't think Pete has done anything lately to measure up to his first three major solo releases: "Empty Glass," "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes," and "White City." (he's got other stuff in there like his demo releases and such, but these are the three major ones).
I think "The Iron Man" was sort of a noble try. Anybody else heard "The Iron Man?" I'm interested in opinions. Especially if you are also familiar with the work of Ted Hughes. IMHO the album is good, but the rock-n-roll song just isn't the format for that material... I'd love to hear what others think...
I think "Psychoderelict" stands on the strength of a couple of songs. Please don't hate me for this, but no 16 year-old can fully appreciate "Fake It." I'm not aying you don't get it -- I'm sure you do. You just have to be pushing middle age and have migrating hair to feel it fully.
The music-only version of Psychoderelict stands up much better than the "play." "Let's Get Pretentious" is pretty amusing too... That doesn't mean any of it remotely approaches "Exquisitely Bored," "Slit Skirts," or "Somebody Saved Me" (which I have always believed to be the best of his numerous tributes to Keith Moon).
As a last defense, I'd rather hear Pete try and come up short than hear anything from, say, Elton John, who hasn't taken a musical chance since 1977 and has released just shy of 734 albums since then...
Pete released a new album a few years ago called "Psychoderelict" which seemed to me to be picking up on a few themes from Lifehouse. He also reworks some interesting (but dated) electronic riffs from a little known solo release called "Who Came First."
I have "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes" on CD already. They must have discontinued it... It is his single best work. From "The Sea Refuses no River" to "Slit Skirts" it is one of the most mature collections of rock lyrics ever. Pete is (IMHO) sometimes overrated as a guitar player, but he is even more underrated as a writer. The SOB can write!
One track off "Psychoderelict" that shows his greatest guitar skill is "Early Morning Dreams." He is perhaps the greatest rhythm guitarist in rock music. He does percussive strumms on this track that are only matched in my experience by Richard Thompson. (This track screams "Lifehouse." It even begins with a digitized voice [Pete's] singing the reassuring phrase "You are safe from harm on the Grid. You are safe from harm...")
He even deals well with the fact that he is a rock relic when rock worships youth. Think he can't write? Check out "Outlive the Dinosaur."
Pete Townshend consistently knocks me on my backside with his stuff. He gets at truth. Also, since he is aging just a bit ahead of me I keep on finding his lyrics growing older and more sophisticated just as I grow old enough to appreciate them. His work also provides a path back to reckless youth -- two songs off "Who's Next" are veritable teen anthems (again, IMHO): "Baba O'Reilly" (more familiar as "Teenage Wasteland" -- loved it when it showed up in the trailer for "A Bug's Life," funny without being mocking) and "We Don't Get Fooled Again" which may be the most insightful of the protest/authority defiance songs of the "end of the 60's" (the album dates to the eraly 70's, but it is pre-disco, pre-shag). I still find "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss" to be both shrill, youthful, and wise. Also simultaneously defiant and resigned. I can't think of too many from the 60's/70's generation who were both so passionate about changing the world and so aware that it is probably a lost cause. The song is positively Quixotic.
Well, I've eaten enough bandwidth with this "me too!," but I share the enthusiasm for a guy I've often felt was loved for the wrong reasons and ignored by those who should love him.
"After the fire/The fire still burns/The heart grows older/but never-ever learns/The memories smoulder/The soul always yearns/After the fire/The fire still burns"
Yeah, for me too, Pete.