All this new storage space will doubtless be quite useful, but I wonder if we're about to get to the point where the network becomes the primary limiting factor in the usefuless of a computer (for most users), rather than the size of the hard drive? Just as memory is now usually the bottleneck, rather than the CPU, I can see that very soon the extra space will exceed that which can be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time (say, a year) - especially in sprawling, predominantly rural countries like the US.
I've played around with the notion of there being "content neutral" downloading services, where people bring in their external hard drives, plug in, and download at very high speeds for a premium, returning in an hour or so (akin to having film developed). This may actually make sense at some point, provided the legal hurdles can be jumped.
I'd like to think that more women will become involved with FOSS, although I'm not sure how exactly that will happen. There is still a huge gap in the numbers of men and women in CS programs, and there are other cultural factors, especially in the teenage years, that pressure females to not engage in "nerdy" activities like programming (which is seen to be asocial, even though FOSS development is quite social).
On a more contraversial note, it seems to me that a lot of FOSS is driven by a very... male... obsessiveness. It is the experience of myself and my collegues that female programmers tend not to be "computer geeks," in the sense that when 5:00 rolls around, they are done programming for the day - no hobby coding, no/.ing, nothing. That does not mean it's true of all females, but even if a majority of female programmers are like this (which it seems to be), that's a huge chunk out of an already tiny share. Combine this with the fact that working women are still (somehow) expected by their husbands to do more of the housework and childcare... yeah I'm not so optimistic.
Of course I, for one, would welcome our new female FOSS overlords, but I think that's probably a long way off.
Secret questions are only as secure as the secret itself - if you just gave that answer off to some web site, what's to stop you from giving it to another? Imagine this - you have an account of someone you want to break into, and you know their email address. You send them an email (tailored to not be like spam at all) inviting them to some special promotion on a site you set up, complete with login and the same security question. Anyone who answers this, poof, they have given you access to whatever account it is that you seek.
I have thoroughly enjoyed the aptly titled Computer Stupidities. To be fair, may people really have no reason to know better, but there's a few entries in there that show that all too many people are willing to throw logic out the window, or are gullible beyond belief.
Secret questions are only as secure as the secret itself - if you just gave that answer off to some web site, what's to stop you from giving it to another? Imagine this - you have an account of someone you want to break into, and you know their email address. You send them an email (tailored to not be like spam at all) inviting them to some special promotion on a site you set up, complete with login and the same security question. Anyone who answers this, poof, they have given you access to whatever account it is that you seek.
Head on is so great, that they have taken it upon themselves to not only educate the masses about their product (Apply directly to the forehead!), but also discouraging couch potatoes by the incessent repeating of their usage instructions. That's like two services in one!
There's something about Slashdot that encourages these terrible analogies.
This is called "People who don't know what they are talking about trying to explain things to people who understand even less." It's a blind leading the blind situation. Too bad so many good comments get hidden in that garbage.
This shouldn't be surprising - computers have almost become as commoditized as cell phones, which are often given out for free by phone companies. I don't know if Microsoft is the best one to pull this off (I'd put my money on someone like Dell which has the infrastructure and logistics in place), but it's going to happen sooner or later.
Slashdot is not about stories, Digg and other linkfarms are about stories. Slashdot is about comments, Slashdot is about community. Considering the sorry state of the moderation system, it's hard to read many of the good comments without also coming upon highly-rated but rather banal comments (including a few I have authored). People who are too busy to browse through hundreds of comments will enjoy the backslash approach, and I, for one, think it can help extend debate on issues that are important (at least for nerds).
To use the yard analogy that seems to be popular for these threads, lets supposed your neighbor's massively retarded child asks your massively retarded child for permission for his Daddy to use your yard, and your child agrees. Neighbor then comes over and stages a cookout on your lawn, or for that matter just walks across it.
This is a very interesting anology, as computer systems are very "dumb," but unlike developmentally challenged individuals, computers are also very easy to control (i.e. they do precisely what you tell them to and nothing else, if you count the code as instructions). It is a simple matter to encrypt a wifi point (and a well reccomended practice), whereas a retarded child is probably difficult to train to restrict lawn access, and that is not generally a well-reccomended practice.
To be honest, I don't think any analogy quite sums up the situation. If you're on someone's wifi, and you're not causing harm, and they left it open, what is the problem?
I personally abhor the notion of Trusted Computing on my personal computer, but if you're using a computer provided to you by the government or a corporation for the express purpose of working, it's their right to control what goes on on that computer. It's possible that this will help to stem the tide of malware (at least in corporate environments) by rejecting execution privledges, and allow IT staff to better enforce policies about what can and cannot be run on their computer. It would also help stop things like the Free USB Key Attack (formerly discussed on slashdot).
Of course, this could also make users feel like they are not trusted, and could even lead to overconfidence in the security of the system. Still I see it as a major plus, at least unless I get saddled with it at home.
I do not recognize ownership of source code of any binary you have been given as some kind of fundamental right, but RMS does. It's rather difficult to argue about what should be a fundamental right - hundreds of years ago, many rights we now consider fundamental would be the subject of much laughter or scorn.
Look at the websites of government grant agencies such as NASA and NSF. See what non-university institutions are receving money from them. They might be of interest to you.
You might also want to look at institutions receiving money from DARPA, as defense often provides other very interesting (and also sometimes surprisingly pure/abstract) problems to be solved. Plenty of $$$ for that to be had in the US, as long as you sleep OK at night.
What is wrong with a guy doing a little research before implementing an assigned task?
Agreed - slashdot may not be a good (or sane) place for legal advice, but if there's FOSS out there to do a task, someone on/. knows about it (or wrote it).
The problem with the concept of complexity based on program length, is that program length is highly dependent on the system of encoding used to represent the program. Short programs in functional languages can be quite long in imperative languages, and lamdba calculus functions for even simple things are sometimes so long as to be impossible to represent in a published paper.
I've yet to see any "cannnonical" representation that can be used for this purpose. "Kolmogorov complexity" is not useful for these things for that reason. A more interesting metric, often used in software engineering, is cyclomatic complexity.
To be honest, if you want to do "useless"/interesting research, your best bet may be a government lab. There's plenty of pie-in-the-sky research at places like JPL. I met a ton of interesting people there, and a lot of the challenges of exploring other planets actually bring about some rather abstract problems to be solved.
I wonder - if Microsoft was not such a big player, but rather there were several somewhat smaller players, like Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, would there be any large companies that invest in open source as IBM does now? I mean, it seems like one of the big reasons that IBM and Google invest in FOSS is because it is a good way to strike indirectly - and often directly - at Microsoft. If there was no "king of the hill," would we still see this level of investment?
To be honest, asking your boss for a day or two to just sit down with some good books and tutorials, and work with new technologies firsthand... that's what works best for me, at least. A lot less expensive than travelling around the country, and you might just get better results.
Also check to see if there are any consultants in your area (like me, well probably not in your area) who offer training services custom-tailored to what you need.
Slashdot Mirror
All this new storage space will doubtless be quite useful, but I wonder if we're about to get to the point where the network becomes the primary limiting factor in the usefuless of a computer (for most users), rather than the size of the hard drive? Just as memory is now usually the bottleneck, rather than the CPU, I can see that very soon the extra space will exceed that which can be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time (say, a year) - especially in sprawling, predominantly rural countries like the US.
I've played around with the notion of there being "content neutral" downloading services, where people bring in their external hard drives, plug in, and download at very high speeds for a premium, returning in an hour or so (akin to having film developed). This may actually make sense at some point, provided the legal hurdles can be jumped.
Digg had an article recently about how to perform a windows re-install without loss of information. This may be of use to you.
Someone didn't have their coffee yet today, did they?
I'd like to think that more women will become involved with FOSS, although I'm not sure how exactly that will happen. There is still a huge gap in the numbers of men and women in CS programs, and there are other cultural factors, especially in the teenage years, that pressure females to not engage in "nerdy" activities like programming (which is seen to be asocial, even though FOSS development is quite social).
/.ing, nothing. That does not mean it's true of all females, but even if a majority of female programmers are like this (which it seems to be), that's a huge chunk out of an already tiny share. Combine this with the fact that working women are still (somehow) expected by their husbands to do more of the housework and childcare... yeah I'm not so optimistic.
On a more contraversial note, it seems to me that a lot of FOSS is driven by a very... male... obsessiveness. It is the experience of myself and my collegues that female programmers tend not to be "computer geeks," in the sense that when 5:00 rolls around, they are done programming for the day - no hobby coding, no
Of course I, for one, would welcome our new female FOSS overlords, but I think that's probably a long way off.
Secret questions are only as secure as the secret itself - if you just gave that answer off to some web site, what's to stop you from giving it to another? Imagine this - you have an account of someone you want to break into, and you know their email address. You send them an email (tailored to not be like spam at all) inviting them to some special promotion on a site you set up, complete with login and the same security question. Anyone who answers this, poof, they have given you access to whatever account it is that you seek.
I have thoroughly enjoyed the aptly titled Computer Stupidities. To be fair, may people really have no reason to know better, but there's a few entries in there that show that all too many people are willing to throw logic out the window, or are gullible beyond belief.
I often wish that there was a "-1, Stupid" moderation, but this is the first time I wish it would be applied to one of my comments.
Secret questions are only as secure as the secret itself - if you just gave that answer off to some web site, what's to stop you from giving it to another? Imagine this - you have an account of someone you want to break into, and you know their email address. You send them an email (tailored to not be like spam at all) inviting them to some special promotion on a site you set up, complete with login and the same security question. Anyone who answers this, poof, they have given you access to whatever account it is that you seek.
Head on is so great, that they have taken it upon themselves to not only educate the masses about their product (Apply directly to the forehead!), but also discouraging couch potatoes by the incessent repeating of their usage instructions. That's like two services in one!
Just a thought: Microsoft isn't paying for the electric bills, might they not want to sell/donate extra CPU cycles to get extra revenue/reputation?
There's something about Slashdot that encourages these terrible analogies.
This is called "People who don't know what they are talking about trying to explain things to people who understand even less." It's a blind leading the blind situation. Too bad so many good comments get hidden in that garbage.
This shouldn't be surprising - computers have almost become as commoditized as cell phones, which are often given out for free by phone companies. I don't know if Microsoft is the best one to pull this off (I'd put my money on someone like Dell which has the infrastructure and logistics in place), but it's going to happen sooner or later.
Slashdot is not about stories, Digg and other linkfarms are about stories. Slashdot is about comments, Slashdot is about community. Considering the sorry state of the moderation system, it's hard to read many of the good comments without also coming upon highly-rated but rather banal comments (including a few I have authored). People who are too busy to browse through hundreds of comments will enjoy the backslash approach, and I, for one, think it can help extend debate on issues that are important (at least for nerds).
Only on slashdot could a post suggesting the use of groin thrusting combined with donkey sounds be moderated "+4, Interesting."
To use the yard analogy that seems to be popular for these threads, lets supposed your neighbor's massively retarded child asks your massively retarded child for permission for his Daddy to use your yard, and your child agrees. Neighbor then comes over and stages a cookout on your lawn, or for that matter just walks across it.
This is a very interesting anology, as computer systems are very "dumb," but unlike developmentally challenged individuals, computers are also very easy to control (i.e. they do precisely what you tell them to and nothing else, if you count the code as instructions). It is a simple matter to encrypt a wifi point (and a well reccomended practice), whereas a retarded child is probably difficult to train to restrict lawn access, and that is not generally a well-reccomended practice.
To be honest, I don't think any analogy quite sums up the situation. If you're on someone's wifi, and you're not causing harm, and they left it open, what is the problem?
I personally abhor the notion of Trusted Computing on my personal computer, but if you're using a computer provided to you by the government or a corporation for the express purpose of working, it's their right to control what goes on on that computer. It's possible that this will help to stem the tide of malware (at least in corporate environments) by rejecting execution privledges, and allow IT staff to better enforce policies about what can and cannot be run on their computer. It would also help stop things like the Free USB Key Attack (formerly discussed on slashdot).
Of course, this could also make users feel like they are not trusted, and could even lead to overconfidence in the security of the system. Still I see it as a major plus, at least unless I get saddled with it at home.
I do not recognize ownership of source code of any binary you have been given as some kind of fundamental right, but RMS does. It's rather difficult to argue about what should be a fundamental right - hundreds of years ago, many rights we now consider fundamental would be the subject of much laughter or scorn.
Thanks I had a bit of trouble with the coral cache.
Look at the websites of government grant agencies such as NASA and NSF. See what non-university institutions are receving money from them. They might be of interest to you.
You might also want to look at institutions receiving money from DARPA, as defense often provides other very interesting (and also sometimes surprisingly pure/abstract) problems to be solved. Plenty of $$$ for that to be had in the US, as long as you sleep OK at night.
What is wrong with a guy doing a little research before implementing an assigned task?
/. knows about it (or wrote it).
Agreed - slashdot may not be a good (or sane) place for legal advice, but if there's FOSS out there to do a task, someone on
The problem with the concept of complexity based on program length, is that program length is highly dependent on the system of encoding used to represent the program. Short programs in functional languages can be quite long in imperative languages, and lamdba calculus functions for even simple things are sometimes so long as to be impossible to represent in a published paper.
I've yet to see any "cannnonical" representation that can be used for this purpose. "Kolmogorov complexity" is not useful for these things for that reason. A more interesting metric, often used in software engineering, is cyclomatic complexity.
To be honest, if you want to do "useless"/interesting research, your best bet may be a government lab. There's plenty of pie-in-the-sky research at places like JPL. I met a ton of interesting people there, and a lot of the challenges of exploring other planets actually bring about some rather abstract problems to be solved.
Digg mirror of the story can be found here
:) </shameless plug>
<shameless plug> If you need an Asterisk VPS, (or any other kind) check out lylix.net - guarantee we never need mirrored
I wonder - if Microsoft was not such a big player, but rather there were several somewhat smaller players, like Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, would there be any large companies that invest in open source as IBM does now? I mean, it seems like one of the big reasons that IBM and Google invest in FOSS is because it is a good way to strike indirectly - and often directly - at Microsoft. If there was no "king of the hill," would we still see this level of investment?
To be honest, asking your boss for a day or two to just sit down with some good books and tutorials, and work with new technologies firsthand... that's what works best for me, at least. A lot less expensive than travelling around the country, and you might just get better results.
Also check to see if there are any consultants in your area (like me, well probably not in your area) who offer training services custom-tailored to what you need.