It's amusing that you by implication use one award-winning science fiction author (Orson Scott Card) to deprecate another (Neal Stephenson). Also ironic that you complain about people frothing at the mouth about linux in a posting at/.:)
The use of the word geek to describe people who are passionate about programming comes from more than ten years ago: we called ourselves geeks, in a sort of ironic sense. It was something which bonded us together: a rallying cry of technology-oriented people to describe what united us.
The stereotypical geek is, yes, what you describe. But not all, or even most, of them.
One of the things that's happened in literary circles in the last several decades is that the concept of objectivity has fallen into disrepute. Not, beware, because it's intrinsically bad, but because it's intrinsically unachievable: you can't help but report the world as it looks from your vantage point, and no matter how hard you struggle to invent a mythological static reference, it won't work.
So Jon is writing truth: truth as it applies to him, to the world he knows and the life he lives. Some of that will resonate with others; some won't... YMMV.
However, this "tax" you speak of, unlike actual taxes, costs you nothing.
Not so. If I, as a corporation, pay someone for six months to come up with a solution to a particular problem, and my competitor then takes the same solution my employee has developed and uses it, he gets it for free --- which means, if we're both applying the idea to the production of something, that he can sell that something for less than I can. So... I do the work, he gets the business.
That isn't a cost to me? That isn't a cost to _everyone_ once I go out of business?
It's fine if an inventor chooses to make his ideas public. But I wouldn't like a regime in which an inventor couldn't NOT make his ideas public.
As an xhausmate would say, kinda sorta not really.
The problem is that _everything_ used to be in the center of the universe --- that's, by definition, what it means for the universe to be expanding. So, from the point of view of all points in the universe, it looks like the rest of the universe is accelerating away... IOW, the distance between points of interest is getting greater.
So everyone thinks they used to be the center of the universe, and they're right.
The argument in favor of our patent system, as I understand it, is that a system which ensures that people are financially rewarded for their expertise/inventiveness/innovations/whatever will encourage them to make use of same.
Under that theory, then the proper response when you find that your solution to a problem domain has already been patented is to be innovative and inventive and find another solution...
except. except that some modern day software patents are a little... broad. a patent on dynamic load balancing is like a patent on building fences --- unlike, say, a patent on dynamic load balancing using steps or procedures XXX and YYY.
also: except that in many cases you are investigating a particular problem domain, and find a solution, and that solution overlaps with a solution someone found to a completely different problem domain, and patented, and you don't even know about it until you get a call from a lawyer.
on the other side, though... and this is a hard thing to argue here, in the midst of the open-source community, but still: if I spend six months researching some problem and put together a solution that nobody else has put together, and someone wants to use that solution that i spent time and energy and resources to develop, shouldn't i be able to charge them for it, if i so desire? if not, then you are asking me to subsidize everyone else who wants to use the solution... in essence, you are placing a tax on my inventiveness.
in particular, and i've _seen_ this happen, shouldn't i have a recourse if i solve a problem and then someone else uses that solution and markets it and makes $xxx million off of it while I get nothing?
Like most political-social problems, I don't know what the solution is. Patents as currently applied in the software industry often are absurd, and overly broad --- but no patents at all would hardly be a better solution.
In essence, right now, content providers DO pay networks to connect them to ISPs.
Consider the case of someone with a 56K link, and a site paid for by advertising, that suddenly generates high demand: their server is clogged, nobody can get to their web site, their customers complain, and they go out and get a nice DSL line.
They're paying for bandwidth just as much as the "consumers" are.
In other words: when it comes to bandwidth, content providers are just as much bandwidth consumers as content consumers are.
If (a) I had moderator access and (b) I wasn't already posting in this thread, I would have moderated it down.
I don't know if I agree with the war. But messages that post "stop the war" don't add anything, and look like a troll --- they aren't arguments as to WHY we should stop the war, they aren't discussions, they're merely slogans shouted into the wind.
Modern americans have not had a war on our soil, I suspect was the point. Our ancestors have... but unlike almost all Europeans, none of us have memories of our homes being threatened by advancing armies, of foreign troops in our cities telling us what to do. We don't have the memories of bombs dropping in the middle of the night, of our industry and transit structures being destroyed, of mass graves to bury those who died fighting or just died for being in the wrong place.
War, to most Americans who haven't been in the military, is an abstraction. It isn't real to us in the way it is to someone living in countries that have fought wars on their soil in recent memory.
Except for Pearl Harbor, the last war fought on American soil ended in 1865.
OK, that's fair; it's not necessarily true that only thoroughly tested applications get applied to my system. In fact, since I have test our software's compatability with things like IE5, I often have to install things I think might be questionable simply to see if we can coexist with them.
Easternmost it may be, by some definition... but the international date line keeps all of Alaska on this side, so it ends up being the westernmost (for time purposes).
I'm in the professional windows development world ---that is, I write, and test, software which runs under windows. I find that NT4 crashes on me about once a week, win98 about once every two days. [But then, i'm not exactly doing user-level stuff, either.]
Example: there's a camera off of a hotel looking over the beach in santa cruz. Check it out: is the weather good for going to the beach?
Similarly, there's a camera which points at HWY17 -- a two-lane each-direction highway over a windy mountain pass connecting scruz and silicon valley. "How is the traffic going to be for the commute home?"
I've been to places that have essentially similar concepts --- they are godsends when you are travelling in unfamiliar places.
Just think, you are a thousand miles from home, and you can pay $10 and get dinner and internet access.
Of course, it all depends on what they mean by "internet". I'll bet $10 that they don't allow telnet, ftp, or anything other than web access.
Re:Lucas Should Be Worrying About Other Issues.
on
More Star Wars Hype
·
· Score: 1
Go to the netherlands. Or Poland: in both places they"ll show it subtitled instead of dubbed.
Re:The solution in Minneapolis/Saint Paul..
on
IP Address Shortage
·
· Score: 1
I'd quibble with the assertion that the geographical split is better --- or, at the very least, claim it depends on where you live.
The 408 area code --- covering san jose and monterey --- was split last year. The demand for numbers is growing so fast that it would be split again next year, with resultant area codes smaller than the city limits of San Jose; one more split --- not hard to imagine in the forseeable future --- and you'd be down to approximately a 10 mile square area per area code.
Unfortunately, few people actually have a clear enough geographical picture to be able to tell, at that resolution, what belongs in which area code. Hell, it's hard enough now with the existing 6 area codes in the san francisco bay area to tell which neighborhoods belong in which area code.
Overlyaing alleviates this somewhat by establishing geographical boundaries which are at least somewhat amenable to memorization.:)
This isn't particularly scary --- it is, after all, a war --- but it's stupid. It's stupid because one of the things Milosevic is best at is playing the propoganda game, twisting the news to meet the interpretation of the facts he wants.
In the eyes of the average Serbian, the genocide in Bosnia and Croatia was directed exclusively at them; the bombing of Dubrovnik, and the ethnic cleansing of moslems and Croats, was, they have been taught to believe, a retaliation --- if they even know about it. Similarly, the refugees are fleeing our bombing, not the genocide that everyone in the west believes is happening....
The internet is one of the few sources of information, aside from television and radio in neighboring countries and CNN rebroadcasts out of Podgorice (Montenegro) which can combat the propoganda spewed by Milosevic's regime.
Yet, if this story is true, the west is cutting off the internet --- undermining its own attempts to win the hearts and souls of the serbian people.
Either this means: (a) that the leadership of NATO is a bunch of clueless morons (an idea which certainly can't be completely discounted given the way they've run this war so far) or (b) NATO believes that the yugoslav government has been using the internet as a source of _information_ which has hindered the war effort.
Let's see if we can turn this into a political flame war, shall we? *grin*
The US can't be a terrorist nation. That isn't to say it can't do evil things --- it unquestionably has, and does. But since the US is, in the current era, the dominant member of the international oligarchy --- the guarantor, if you will, of THE SYSTEM --- and since terrorism is more or less defined as the use of violent and somewhat random means to overthrow the system... well, trying to define the US as terrorist is oxymoronic with those definitions, isn't it?:)
Putting aside pedantry for a moment... there are a lot of things the US has done that I dislike. This has been true in modern times irrespective of which president or which political party is in power. But I've spent 3-4% of my life overseas, and that's an amount that's increasing in recent years rather than decreasing... and I can't say as I like the actions of any other countries any better.
That said, Iran is somewhat more... unpleasant.. than most. I'm a modern westerner, so the notion of a religious theocracy grates against my nerves pretty strongly. On the other hand, Iran is undeniably nowhere near as obnoxious as Afghanistan... and the age-old diplomatic question remains, the same question that plagues relations with China: will we do more to make Iran a better place by engaging and trading with them, or by punishing them (like Cuba?)
I'm interested every time I see an article claiming that restlessness is particular to the tech industry; it implies that there are people out there who aren't restless... an idea which to me is incomprehensible.
Restlessness is simply a fact of life. I'm relatively lucky; I have a strong emotional commitment to the product I work on, and I check in while on vacation not because I'm required to, but because I _care_... but there is still always a restlessness in the background, a thought that there must be more to life than this. I quit my job and travelled for six months, and that luzlled the restlessness into a sort of quiescence, but it's still there, lingering, building pressure, waiting to come out and reassert itself in the future.
Is this because I'm a tech industry worker? Am I a tech industry worker because of this restlessness? Or is there something about life in our culture, the modern consumer culture, which encourages restlessness and angst?
What is important in life? What truly leads to happiness? My parents didn't know; I've never learned it in school and my friends and colleagues don't know... and i live in a fast-paced world where the entire universe can literally change overnight, where I feel like I am always responding to events not driving them, even when I'm making the decisions. When do I have time to sit back and learn the things i've never learned?
I love my job. I love my friends. I live in a city that seems like paradise whenever I describe it while I'm travelling. I'm more or less content. But I'm not happy, and the worst of it is, I don't know why.
The spam ruling --- or not ruling, perhaps, as it's unclear from the article and wasn't too much more clear in der Welt am Sonntag this morning --- is a secondary issue.
The real issue is the lead in the article: the EU has set rules for where businesses should be regulated. This is _considerably_ more important than it appears at first glance to an American.
Consider the fact that it is illegal in Germany to possess nazi paraphernalia, and it's certainly illegal to _sell_ it. So what happens if someone in the Netherlands, where as far as I can tell it's more or less legal to do anything, puts up a website selling Nazi flags? Can he be prosecuted under German law?
Until yesterday the answer was YES. Now the answer is no... he can only be prosecuted if he violates Dutch law.
This problem has echoes in the US in cases where proprietors of pornographic web sites in California have been prosecuted for violating the community standards of southern states.
It's been a good week for sanity on the part of government: US encryption restrictions were tossed, and the EU put forward an unusually intelligent ruling that says that on-line companies exist in the place out of which they are operating and are not subject to the laws of the country in which the client of the company lives.
[Intelligent readers will note that this means that rogue companies can operate out of somewhere like, say, Aruba. That is true... but that is better than the chaos which would ensue if everyone were subejct to the laws of every country, and the only way to prevent it depends on a worldwide regulation of the net that I think few of us would welcome...]
"San Francisco" is San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin counties. "San Jose" is Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. "Oakland" is Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth noting that the memory leaks/segmentation fault stuff might easily be a problem on activision's side, not lokisoft's ...
It's amusing that you by implication use one award-winning science fiction author (Orson Scott Card) to deprecate another (Neal Stephenson). Also ironic that you complain about people frothing at the mouth about linux in a posting at /. :)
The use of the word geek to describe people who are passionate about programming comes from more than ten years ago: we called ourselves geeks, in a sort of ironic sense. It was something which bonded us together: a rallying cry of technology-oriented people to describe what united us.
The stereotypical geek is, yes, what you describe. But not all, or even most, of them.
You've got a good reason why ... but TPM, no.
Star Wars will be remembered in
popular culture for longer than
the Matrix, yes
TPM seemed to undermine the force
by turning it from eastern mysticism
to western rationality.
One of the things that's happened in literary circles in the last several decades is that the concept of objectivity has fallen into disrepute. Not, beware, because it's intrinsically bad, but because it's intrinsically unachievable: you can't help but report the world as it looks from your vantage point, and no matter how hard you struggle to invent a mythological static reference, it won't work.
... YMMV.
So Jon is writing truth: truth as it applies to him, to the world he knows and the life he lives. Some of that will resonate with others; some won't
However, this "tax" you speak of, unlike actual taxes, costs you nothing.
Not so. If I, as a corporation, pay someone for six months to come up with a solution to a particular problem, and my competitor then takes the same solution my employee has developed and uses it, he gets it for free --- which means, if we're both applying the idea to the production of something, that he can sell that something for less than I can. So
That isn't a cost to me? That isn't a cost to _everyone_ once I go out of business?
It's fine if an inventor chooses to make his ideas public. But I wouldn't like a regime in which an inventor couldn't NOT make his ideas public.
As an xhausmate would say, kinda sorta not really.
... IOW, the distance between points of interest is getting greater.
The problem is that _everything_ used to be in the center of the universe --- that's, by definition, what it means for the universe to be expanding. So, from the point of view of all points in the universe, it looks like the rest of the universe is accelerating away
So everyone thinks they used to be the center of the universe, and they're right.
The argument in favor of our patent system, as I understand it, is that a system which ensures that people are financially rewarded for their expertise/inventiveness/innovations/whatever will encourage them to make use of same.
...
... broad. a patent on dynamic load balancing is like a patent on building fences --- unlike, say, a patent on dynamic load balancing using steps or procedures XXX and YYY.
... and this is a hard thing to argue here, in the midst of the open-source community, but still: if I spend six months researching some problem and put together a solution that nobody else has put together, and someone wants to use that solution that i spent time and energy and resources to develop, shouldn't i be able to charge them for it, if i so desire? if not, then you are asking me to subsidize everyone else who wants to use the solution ... in essence, you are placing a tax on my inventiveness.
Under that theory, then the proper response when you find that your solution to a problem domain has already been patented is to be innovative and inventive and find another solution
except. except that some modern day software patents are a little
also: except that in many cases you are investigating a particular problem domain, and find a solution, and that solution overlaps with a solution someone found to a completely different problem domain, and patented, and you don't even know about it until you get a call from a lawyer.
on the other side, though
in particular, and i've _seen_ this happen, shouldn't i have a recourse if i solve a problem and then someone else uses that solution and markets it and makes $xxx million off of it while I get nothing?
Like most political-social problems, I don't know what the solution is. Patents as currently applied in the software industry often are absurd, and overly broad --- but no patents at all would hardly be a better solution.
In essence, right now, content providers DO pay networks to connect them to ISPs.
Consider the case of someone with a 56K link, and a site paid for by advertising, that suddenly generates high demand: their server is clogged, nobody can get to their web site, their customers complain, and they go out and get a nice DSL line.
They're paying for bandwidth just as much as the "consumers" are.
In other words: when it comes to bandwidth, content providers are just as much bandwidth consumers as content consumers are.
If (a) I had moderator access and (b) I wasn't already posting in this thread, I would have moderated it down.
I don't know if I agree with the war. But messages that post "stop the war" don't add anything, and look like a troll --- they aren't arguments as to WHY we should stop the war, they aren't discussions, they're merely slogans shouted into the wind.
Modern americans have not had a war on our soil, I suspect was the point. Our ancestors have ... but unlike almost all Europeans, none of us have memories of our homes being threatened by advancing armies, of foreign troops in our cities telling us what to do. We don't have the memories of bombs dropping in the middle of the night, of our industry and transit structures being destroyed, of mass graves to bury those who died fighting or just died for being in the wrong place.
War, to most Americans who haven't been in the military, is an abstraction. It isn't real to us in the way it is to someone living in countries that have fought wars on their soil in recent memory.
Except for Pearl Harbor, the last war fought on American soil ended in 1865.
OK, that's fair; it's not necessarily true that
...
only thoroughly tested applications get applied
to my system. In fact, since I have test our
software's compatability with things like IE5,
I often have to install things I think might be
questionable simply to see if we can coexist
with them.
I'm impressed at the uptime you report, tho
Easternmost it may be, by some definition ... but the international date line keeps all of Alaska on this side, so it ends up being the westernmost (for time purposes).
What type of stuff do you do on your workstation?
I'm in the professional windows development
world ---that is, I write, and test, software
which runs under windows. I find that NT4 crashes on me about once a week, win98 about once every two days. [But then, i'm not exactly doing user-level stuff, either.]
There are some useful web cams.
Example: there's a camera off of a hotel
looking over the beach in santa cruz. Check
it out: is the weather good for going to the beach?
Similarly, there's a camera which points at
HWY17 -- a two-lane each-direction highway over
a windy mountain pass connecting scruz and silicon valley. "How is the traffic going to be for the commute home?"
I've been to places that have essentially similar concepts --- they are godsends when you are travelling in unfamiliar places.
Just think, you are a thousand miles from home, and you can pay $10 and get dinner and internet access.
Of course, it all depends on what they mean by "internet". I'll bet $10 that they don't allow telnet, ftp, or anything other than web access.
Go to the netherlands. Or Poland: in both places they"ll show it subtitled instead of dubbed.
I'd quibble with the assertion that the geographical split is better --- or, at the very least, claim it depends on where you live.
:)
The 408 area code --- covering san jose and monterey --- was split last year. The demand for numbers is growing so fast that it would be split again next year, with resultant area codes smaller than the city limits of San Jose; one more split --- not hard to imagine in the forseeable future --- and you'd be down to approximately a 10 mile square area per area code.
Unfortunately, few people actually have a clear enough geographical picture to be able to tell, at that resolution, what belongs in which area code. Hell, it's hard enough now with the existing 6 area codes in the san francisco bay area to tell which neighborhoods belong in which area code.
Overlyaing alleviates this somewhat by establishing geographical boundaries which are at least somewhat amenable to memorization.
This isn't particularly scary --- it is, after all, a war --- but it's stupid. It's stupid because one of the things Milosevic is best at is playing the propoganda game, twisting the news to meet the interpretation of the facts he wants.
....
In the eyes of the average Serbian, the genocide in Bosnia and Croatia was directed exclusively at them; the bombing of Dubrovnik, and the ethnic cleansing of moslems and Croats, was, they have been taught to believe, a retaliation --- if they even know about it. Similarly, the refugees are fleeing our bombing, not the genocide that everyone in the west believes is happening
The internet is one of the few sources of information, aside from television and radio in neighboring countries and CNN rebroadcasts out of Podgorice (Montenegro) which can combat the propoganda spewed by Milosevic's regime.
Yet, if this story is true, the west is cutting off the internet --- undermining its own attempts to win the hearts and souls of the serbian people.
Either this means: (a) that the leadership of NATO is a bunch of clueless morons (an idea which certainly can't be completely discounted given the way they've run this war so far) or (b) NATO believes that the yugoslav government has been using the internet as a source of _information_ which has hindered the war effort.
IOW, maybe we're afraid of yugoslav hackers?
Let's see if we can turn this into a political flame war, shall we? *grin*
... well, trying to define the US as terrorist is oxymoronic with those definitions, isn't it? :)
... there are a lot of things the US has done that I dislike. This has been true in modern times irrespective of which president or which political party is in power. But I've spent 3-4% of my life overseas, and that's an amount that's increasing in recent years rather than decreasing ... and I can't say as I like the actions of any other countries any better.
... unpleasant .. than most. I'm a modern westerner, so the notion of a religious theocracy grates against my nerves pretty strongly. On the other hand, Iran is undeniably nowhere near as obnoxious as Afghanistan ... and the age-old diplomatic question remains, the same question that plagues relations with China: will we do more to make Iran a better place by engaging and trading with them, or by punishing them (like Cuba?)
The US can't be a terrorist nation. That isn't to say it can't do evil things --- it unquestionably has, and does. But since the US is, in the current era, the dominant member of the international oligarchy --- the guarantor, if you will, of THE SYSTEM --- and since terrorism is more or less defined as the use of violent and somewhat random means to overthrow the system
Putting aside pedantry for a moment
That said, Iran is somewhat more
I don't think anyone really knows the answer.
It's true that American!=english speaking,
but the former British world uses a system like this:
10E6=million
10E9=thousand million
10E12=billion
etc. which is quite different from the US system (but in line with the system used in continental europe.)
I'm interested every time I see an article claiming that restlessness is particular to the tech industry; it implies that there are people out there who aren't restless ... an idea which to me is incomprehensible.
... but there is still always a restlessness in the background, a thought that there must be more to life than this. I quit my job and travelled for six months, and that luzlled the restlessness into a sort of quiescence, but it's still there, lingering, building pressure, waiting to come out and reassert itself in the future.
... and i live in a fast-paced world where the entire universe can literally change overnight, where I feel like I am always responding to events not driving them, even when I'm making the decisions. When do I have time to sit back and learn the things i've never learned?
Restlessness is simply a fact of life. I'm relatively lucky; I have a strong emotional commitment to the product I work on, and I check in while on vacation not because I'm required to, but because I _care_
Is this because I'm a tech industry worker? Am I a tech industry worker because of this restlessness? Or is there something about life in our culture, the modern consumer culture, which encourages restlessness and angst?
What is important in life? What truly leads to happiness? My parents didn't know; I've never learned it in school and my friends and colleagues don't know
I love my job. I love my friends. I live in a city that seems like paradise whenever I describe it while I'm travelling. I'm more or less content. But I'm not happy, and the worst of it is, I don't know why.
i loved that poem when i was a child.
*sigh*
somehow, and i'm not sure why, this is sadder
than dr. suess dying.
I think you just needed to wait a while until :)
the right people had read the posts and changed their scores.
The spam ruling --- or not ruling, perhaps, as it's unclear from the article and wasn't too much more clear in der Welt am Sonntag this morning --- is a secondary issue.
... he can only be prosecuted if he violates Dutch law.
... but that is better than the chaos which would ensue if everyone were subejct to the laws of every country, and the only way to prevent it depends on a worldwide regulation of the net that I think few of us would welcome ...]
The real issue is the lead in the article: the EU has set rules for where businesses should be regulated. This is _considerably_ more important than it appears at first glance to an American.
Consider the fact that it is illegal in Germany to possess nazi paraphernalia, and it's certainly illegal to _sell_ it. So what happens if someone in the Netherlands, where as far as I can tell it's more or less legal to do anything, puts up a website selling Nazi flags? Can he be prosecuted under German law?
Until yesterday the answer was YES. Now the answer is no
This problem has echoes in the US in cases where proprietors of pornographic web sites in California have been prosecuted for violating the community standards of southern states.
It's been a good week for sanity on the part of government: US encryption restrictions were tossed, and the EU put forward an unusually intelligent ruling that says that on-line companies exist in the place out of which they are operating and are not subject to the laws of the country in which the client of the company lives.
[Intelligent readers will note that this means that rogue companies can operate out of somewhere like, say, Aruba. That is true
"San Francisco" is
San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin counties.
"San Jose" is
Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties.
"Oakland" is
Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
[This has irritated me for years.]