i say the same about nike. who cares if small asian children work 16 hours a day for almost nothing-they sure make good shoes. really though it's called having principles. if you think a company is bad, for whatever reason, you shouldnt do business with that company-not just the part of the company you disagree with.
WHOA! How about a little perspective, huh? Is Microsoft doing anything on the level of exploiting third-world children? Sure, they've been convicted of operating an illegal monopoly, but the only folks that got hurt were those trying to sell software of their own. Is this the principle you are trying to follow - fair competition in a regulated market? Does that mean your principles lead you to buy third-party software? Or is your principle that software should be free, and thus you don't care about those other businesses that were shut out? I must admit, I'm not sure what you are talking about, and I can't wrap my brain around any principle that lumps Microsoft's "business practices and operating systems" with Nike's treatment of third-world workers. Or, are you commenting that Nike's new initiatives to help third-world workers are comparable to Microsoft's new initiatives to fix security problems?
Personally, I'm quite happy about Microsoft's business practices - they resulted in cheap PCs (every PC didn't have to meet IBM's specs, just Microsoft's) and angry programmers, which directly resulted in the Linux operating system. Linux may be putting a free operating system in every computer, but Microsoft put those computers on people's desks - they are like the ugly booster rockets that put the shuttle in orbit.
BTW, horrible link to NIKEWORKERS.ORG. Like your comments, it assumes everything (that you agree that Nike exploits third-world workers) and explains nothing (no examples of Nike's exploitation). In fact, the only stories in the ABOUT section were old articles about paid endorsers that didn't know about the problems, and the only links in the NEWS section were about Reebok! This would have been a better link.
Here's the output of the Perl program I used to solve it:
0 = ((-((((-(9-9))/9)/9)/9)-9)/9)*9+9
1 = (-(-((9)*9)-9-9)-9+9-9)/9-9
2 = ((-((((((-(9+9))/9)/9)/9)*9)*9))/9)*9 ... snip snip ...
39 = (-((-(9+9)-9-9)*9-9-9-9))/9
40 = -((-(9+9)-9-9)/9-9)+9+9+9
41 not found in the set.
I'd post the Perl program, but Slashdot doesn't like code for some reason. It basically used a huge hash, using the result as a key and the formula that generated that result as the value, selectively overwriting existing key/value pairs.
I imagine the Lisp solution is more elegant, but I haven't got around to learning Lisp.
The research in this article (one extreme case among millions leading to warnings) is astounding. Then again, they do have "WARNING: HOT" on coffee nowadays. Have to protect the public from themselves:-/
McDonald's probably has the best litigation strategy of any company I've ever seen. Even though McDonald's was clearly wrong in the coffee cases in the early 90's, and had to settle out of court for a undisclosed sum, they successfully spun that the litigants were idiots that need "WARNING: HOT" labelled on the side of their cups, destracting everyone from the facts of the case.
(BTW -- I yanked the VCR out of the mix 2 weeks later and moved it to another TV. Between the TiVo and my DVD player, the VCR was pointless)
I wish. Everyone at my wife's office comes up to her and says "I missed <show x> - I know you recorded it with TiVo - can you make a tape for me?". However, the playback to VCR is pretty cool - shows a nice white on black summary screen, I can kick it off just before I go to bed.
Am I one of the few people here that took Bill Gates' message at face value? That they have decided to make a top-down corporate commitment to security, probably due to external and internal pressures?
Bad security practices can be expensive - I know I've lost a few hours of work due to not having an up-to-date-and-scanning virus program. This has to have a definate impact on MS's operational budget, trying to figure out how to spin the latest virus while testing solutions against the entire MS suite. On top of that, there has to be some managers and employees that still believe the old lines, that customers pay for new features, not bug fixes, that interoperability and ease of use sell, not security.
Microsoft knows that it has won the Desktop OS wars, that it's closest competators are Apple's OSX (only runs on expensive hardware, so it will have a minimal impact on business sales) and Linux (still playing catch-up with MS). Now it needs to figure out how to sell upgrade units to existing customers, and has to think about the eventual multi-computer households with home servers, where it is currently losing to Linux. Most reviewers that tried XP loved it's stability, and I've even been tempted to upgrade my 98 desktop (which runs fine once you get all the programs working together).
Extra bells and whistles aren't doing it anymore - customers are tired of gaining ease of use at the cost of patches and bugs. Customers want an invisible operating system, which makes easy things easy, and they almost don't care about making hard things possible. This will require MS to transition from a company focused on beating competators by innovation (by whatever means) to beating competators by having a better product (more stable, less supprises, better cooked).
To make a change in basic philosophy requires a redirection of management. The Gates memo is the first step, and I think we can take it at face value. Sure, it's a strategy to further MS's competative edge, but I really don't think that there's anything underhanded going on here. I think Bill is giving the lowest guy on the totem pole a weapon to tell his boss - Here, I want to work this bug out before we release it; if you have a problem, take it up with Bill. That a Good Thing, and I'm planning to be suprised by what the folks at MS can do when they have the will to make a secure product.
Katz say the book claims that the declining job security has lowered the motivation for the working and middle to participate in the political process. This makes sense to me - politics usually starts locally. If you don't think you will hold on to your job for long, why fight for the union? If you think you might have to move to find work, why get involved in the neighborhood association? If you have moved to find work, and you may have to move again, why get interested in local politics?
Then Katz says the author claims that this mobile, insecure worker will become politically aware at a world level, and we'll have a whole new class of involved citizens.
I don't see how you get there from here. Where's step B?
It seems that workers may become more familiar with the global sources of their labor problems, but without the avenue of local solutions, then I don't see these people becoming political agents. More likely, they will complain about global and national problems, but be unable to think of a way to solve those problems.
In other words, a bunch of complainers, rather than folks who take action. Remind you of any online communities you know?
Half of the people say "Add lines in sources.list for Woody.
Half say "Replace stable with woody".
I did the first, and now I have a screwed-up system, and will probably have to re-install, since I'm having a hard time finding out how to fix a %#$^ed-up system.
Re: the kernel
I need the 2.4 kernel. If I have to learn syntax for a firewall, I'd rather learn ipfilter and get portmapping for free.
That shouldn't happen. I love Debian so much that when I hear of someone with a problem like this, I somehow feel personally responsible.
I'd offer you help, but if you don't have time to help yourself, you probably don't have time to get help from someone else (as that might take longer). I'm so sorry you're having problems with what I believe is the best Linux distro out there.
I agree - it makes me a bit of a whiner to complain but not be able to do anything about it.
Let me just ask a general question then - what's the best way to install a fresh Woody system? My current system is a bastardized Potato with some ugly Sid stuff thrown in to make it complicated. I want a Woody system, upgraded to a 2.4 kernel with ipfilter, and I'm willing to start from scratch.
Do I remove all non-Woody sources from the apt-get sources file? Do I manually remove all potato and unstable packages? Or is it best to format and start over?
Do these questions make it obvious that there is some newbie book or documentation that I should be reading?
The biggest problem I have is that this is a P1-100 box, which takes about 3 hours to re-compile the kernel, AND it's my firewall/router, so I lose much of my ability to read net sources when it's down. The current bastardized system is ugly and doesn't do everything I want, but at least it works.
Anyone have trouble with the current Woody boot disks? I tried installing that (wanted reiserfs support) on a Compaq DL360 yesterday too. It froze during boot and just put lines on the screen. I tried disabling frame buffer at the boot prompt...but that didn't help.
Yeah, I tried to upgrade a potato box to woody (wanted ipfilter for firewall AND portmapping), and I've never gotten it to boot. It prints a whole bunch of dots, then reboots. I'm currently booting potato off a floppy, and have no idea how to procede, and no time to mess with it...
Basically, Hutu civilian and army extremists began a campaign of genocide against the Tutsis. They set up roadblocks and went from house to house raping and killing enemies. The most common weapon was a simple machette. In 100 days, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were murdered. A huge refugee crisis is created, and the entire region is destabilized.
The worst part is, there were armed U.N. troops on the ground the whole time. They weren't allowed to intervene. They were there because the Rwandan President was about to sign a peace accord creating a coalition government and allowing refugees to return home. The extremists shot down his plane, and the slaughter began that night.
These were often unorganized civilians, armed with machetees, few with firearms. All that would have been required is for the world leaders to call it genocide (it was), and put a larger police force on the ground, and set up a basic rule of law (a simple curfew, and one law - "Don't murder"). Instead, they discussed and debated behind closed doors, and avoided bringing the issue in front of the U.N.. There is a great deal of evidence that the world community knew that a slaughter like this was emminent, and decided not to get their hands dirty.
That is evil. The extremists who did this were evil, and their leaders mostly follow your pattern of "fighting for some kind of gain". The world leaders who ignored the signs beforehand and tried to ignore it while it happened allowed this evil to occur. They should have intervened - if they were looking for some gain, the only gain availible is "to prevent genocide, and to stop a huge crisis that will haunt this country for 100 years". We were WRONG not to do anything. I hope the world leaders that did nothing are haunted by the events of those 100 days on their deathbeds.
That's what I think is right and what's wrong. That's what I think is good and evil. I'm willing to fight for these things, and to pay whatever taxes it takes to stop these sorts of things. My only worry is that the moral fiber of this country will be so weakened by comfort, that when the next Rwanda, the next Bosnia comes along, we'll have to have the whole "what is truth" discussion while people are raped and murdered and kicked out of their homes.
Sure, there's no absolute black and there's no absolute white. But there are shades of grey that are damned near close to black, and others damned near close to white. We as a people need to have a good idea in our mind how white is white enough and how black is black enough, so that we don't have to argue about shades when the time comes to do something about it.
I said:
We should have acted in Afghanistan after......the first World Trade Center bombing.
You said:
ObL wasn't in Afghanistan in 1993. the Taliban weren't runing the show there until 1996, which is when he was invited in to the party.
Thanks - I goofed. But he was in Afghanistan in 1998, after the embassy bombings.
We should have done more after the embassy bombings then fire a few cruise missles based on intellegence info. It seems that every time one of these al-Qaida missions goes off without the organization getting caught or sufficently punished, then the ranks increase. There are still those that think God is on the side of Bin Laden, and that He will protect him from getting caught; if he escapes, then he may have even more recruits for the next mission.
An interesting observation, but I think that it is possible that the reason that this works in Civ or MOO (though I have played neither) is that, in that defined system, maximizing research delivers maximimum game-end benefit. I don't think the same is necessarily true in meatspace (ie diminishing returns from long term investment as we reach limits of what is possible). Also, there is no game end the real world.
That may be true, but I'll consider the game won when I'm in the first 10K to be put into cyro-statis for the first flight to Alpha Centari.
Screw the diplomatic victory.
Re:You Believe This??
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The bottom line is that the United States military is, man for man, the most powerful fighting force in the world, and occasionally, even the worst naysayer has to give them credit for doing things correctly.
Don't mean to take one statement out of context, but I have to wholeheartedly agree with you on this point.
On 9/11, we had quite a few folks saying "Let's make a glass parking lot out of Afghanistan!" I felt I was a lone voice saying "Wait, there's only a small part of Afghanistan that supports these terrorist acts, the Taliban is mostly foriegn supported and supplied, the Afghani people are as much victims of the Taliban as we now are...". It seems the administration and the military knew these things as well. Yes, our contribution was mostly bombing the hell out of Al Quaida, but that's because people high up knew that the domestic resistance would and should take care of the ground work.
Our government has learned a hell of a lot in the last 50-75 years. World War II showed us the benefit of a standing military (stops guys like Hitler from forming grand world domination plans), as well as helped up learn that there are wars worth fighting for. We took this lesson to extremes when fighting Communism, fighting proxy wars when we didn't have the support of the folks we were fighting for. Vietnam was a horrible mistake, and much of the post Vietnam period has been years of navel-gazing about the actual role of the military and when to intervene.
I believe that we were on the right side of intervention in Iraq, in Bosnia, and in Afghanistan. The only time we've been wrong is when we didn't go far enough - we didn't get Sadaam, and we dropped the ball when the popular revolt against him started. We did nothing in Rowanda. We waited too long in Bosnia. We should have acted in Afghanistan after the embassy bombings, or after the Cole, or after the first World Trade Center bombing. But we've just about reached the point where the military knows how to fight these new wars (with air superiority, free-world support, and a clear mandate from the local population) and the administration is willing to do it. This second part is harder - both Clinton and the later Bush avoided the Vietnam War themselves, and have to fight their own demons to fight these new wars.
In short, excellent post. I'm still not 100% happy with everything the administration is doing, but I think our ability to fight 21st-century wars is better than ever. I may even fly a flag one of these days...
1) Open Source software development is by definition a producer/consumer system. The point is that freeloading is allowed - in fact, necessary! What would be the point in a load of hackers writing the Linux kernel if loads of people didn't download it? End users don't have to contribute back to the pool; that's why they are so called.
Like another poster, I almost agree with you. Yes, freeloaders are allowed under Open Source, but open source isn't much more successful than closed source if there is no feedback from users.
There are four possibilities:
(Win)(Win) - A feedback loop is created between code creators and code users (or code co-creators), which results in a better application for all.
(Lose)(Win) - The code creator releases code, and the user uses the code to create a better, closed source competing product.
(Lose)(Lose) - The code creator releases code, losing competitive advantage, and the user uses the code with out feedback, and the product never improves.
(Win)(Lose) - I can't think of a way for the user to lose under open source, while the code-creator wins.
In any case, open source is only a (Win)(Win) when the feedback loop is created, and the users help make the next iteration better. (Lose)(Win) is possible under a BSD-type license, or when the company loses the right to sell the product under the GPL (think Netscape, perhaps). (Lose)(Lose) happens all the times, under any open-source license.
So, in 2 out of 3 cases, the guy loses who releases open source rather than sell it as a product. Why release code under open source? Well, hopefully, the gains made under a (Win)(Win) are greater than the losses under the other situations. This seems to be the case with some larger products - Linus has made huge wins with Linux, and it seems everyone has won with Apache and Perl. I'm sure you can name others.
Now the question is, is Mozilla a (Win)(Win), and, if it's not, will it ever be?
Not an original, but mutated a bit over the years. Here's a proto-version (text-only or in context), from the google archives (uk.singles, April 1996). The interesting thing is that he apologizes "to those who already have this archived" - I wonder where?. The poster goes by the name Nick Sellors, nicks@wipak.demon.co.uk.
Gotta love those Google archives. Here's the main part, if the google link is too slow...
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. What is that tripe you call your opinions? What is that scrofulous little tumor you call a brain? Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth, you wad of pus. You're a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a goat then be seen with you.
You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention, you smell?
You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You're grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. I have excreted better things than you. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you.
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. I would rather bathe with Hitler than speak to you. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease.
On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends to character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
You are a fiend and a coward and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.
I was reading over the page (Shifman is a Moron Spammer), and got to the point where other folks were getting the email, and emailing back the link, saying "I found this link, sorry, I'd never hire a spammer." So, I tried to do a google search for "Bernard Shifman".
If I received the spam, and were just the right level of cluelessness (clueless enough to consider hiring a spammer, clueful enough to do a web search on his name), then I may not find a web page claiming him as a spammer. Either Google has removed some content, or it was never indexed. There's no//petemoss.com/robot.txt, so I have to assume the former.
This may mean the folks that sent him back the link heard about it through the anti-spam newsgroups, or some other channel. That's a little different than doing a web search. I can imagine HR folks doing a web search, but maybe not a usenet search. Of course, if you do do the google usenet search, you find a number of links.
While I'm being fair, I did do a few ARIN whois searches. For those out of the know (I was one of them this time last year), the whois database gives information about the entity that registered a particular domain.
Searching for petemoss.com (Neil Schwartzman's prefered domain and the host of the website) gave nothing. I then pinged petemoss.com, got an IP address (206.117.161.122). The query returns the netblock's identity, as well as an administrator name, email, and (important to Shifman) phone and fax.
It seems a little more damning that Mr. Shifman doesn't know about these tools of the trade for tracking down people on the net. Of course, since I'm being fair, it wasn't until I started setting up my own home network and had to decipher firewall logs that I learned about whois...
I had to scan all the way down to a 1 comment to find out what LDAP was. I'm a code monkey by trade, but I was on the student paper, and the amateur journalist in me cringes when an acronym is used 9 times in a row without being defined once...
Wow, I wonder how many Slashdot readers are too young to know about that movie [movieprop.com].
I guess I'm one of them. I know the Morlocks and the Eloi from Jules Verne's book (The Time Machine). I'm not sure if the original had the "tech creators vs. tech user's" bias, but it seems many found that interpretation later. Neal Stephenson was one of them - I discovered his interpretation in the excellent essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line". The essay is primarily about operating systems, and can be found online on his Cryptonomicon site.
Not so, I have seen completely secure military installations.
I don't care what you see on TV, Nobody without authorization can get in.
and no, you can get authorization without an extensive check that includes checking figureprints and a face to face with the security officer, and a photo taken AT that time to use as reference each time you want authorization.
Also theres the fact that if you don't ID yourself befor entering no man zone(a long white hallway)they'll shoot you. but that last part,might be difficult to do with a non-military control center.
Just out of curiosity, what security checks do the janitors go through? Repair personnel? What if there is a fire? Are there security-cleared firemen?
I haven't even seen a clear, understandable business study explaining why it's better and cheaper to run Microsoft software (although I have seen lots of faulty studies).
The Microsoft V.P. was saying that this study would be customer-ready. Perhaps marketing types have different reading skills than the rest of us?
I think your analysis may be a little simplistic. Half-Life originally started out as a Quake total conversion project. The designers began to get the sense that the end product wasn't going to be all that good.
< Interesting stuff removed >
The point I'm trying to make is that the team recognized that the direction in which they were headed wasn't leading anywhere. So they took stock of what they had, kept the best pieces, threw out the rest, and started over. Not an easy thing for anyone to do.
Thanks for that insight - again, we could learn a lot if a good journalist asked the folks on successful projects what went right, what went worng, and what lessons were learned.
I also wonder how many times Daikatana "started over" - wasn't it originally on the Quake engine, then they decided to start over on the Quake II engine? That would have been an excellent moment to do what the Half-Life team did...
Whoa - it seems a little unfair to have John Carmack reply. Still, I'd love to see Romero's response, if he feels up to it.
I have to admit, lack of top-down leadership seems plausible. How else can you explain Half-Life being so good, and Daikatana being so bad? Same basic engine, but one lacked the ability to pull off the added extras.
Still, there's a great book to be written on game design theory, from concept to box. I'd love to see some insight into id, which seems to have done well from shareware like Commander Keen all the way into the present, vs. the other teams that didn't quite make it. I'd love to hear what happened at Origin after Ultima 7. Anyone else have favorite untold game design stories?
In my line of work, the boss has a saying - There's a time to shoot the engineer and ship the thing. Maybe in game design, there's a time to shoot the designers and let the programmers get it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is a grand total of 421,422 FPS!!!!
My only question... When can I buy one?
If Moore's law holds up, in 25-30 years, for about $1000.
Of course, in 30 years, it will only get 30 fps in Quake XII.
WHOA! How about a little perspective, huh? Is Microsoft doing anything on the level of exploiting third-world children? Sure, they've been convicted of operating an illegal monopoly, but the only folks that got hurt were those trying to sell software of their own. Is this the principle you are trying to follow - fair competition in a regulated market? Does that mean your principles lead you to buy third-party software? Or is your principle that software should be free, and thus you don't care about those other businesses that were shut out? I must admit, I'm not sure what you are talking about, and I can't wrap my brain around any principle that lumps Microsoft's "business practices and operating systems" with Nike's treatment of third-world workers. Or, are you commenting that Nike's new initiatives to help third-world workers are comparable to Microsoft's new initiatives to fix security problems?
Personally, I'm quite happy about Microsoft's business practices - they resulted in cheap PCs (every PC didn't have to meet IBM's specs, just Microsoft's) and angry programmers, which directly resulted in the Linux operating system. Linux may be putting a free operating system in every computer, but Microsoft put those computers on people's desks - they are like the ugly booster rockets that put the shuttle in orbit.
BTW, horrible link to NIKEWORKERS.ORG. Like your comments, it assumes everything (that you agree that Nike exploits third-world workers) and explains nothing (no examples of Nike's exploitation). In fact, the only stories in the ABOUT section were old articles about paid endorsers that didn't know about the problems, and the only links in the NEWS section were about Reebok! This would have been a better link.
Do you really disagree with that?
Wow - if I did that all the time, I may not be happily married now...
0 = ((-((((-(9-9))/9)/9)/9)-9)/9)*9+9
...
...
1 = (-(-((9)*9)-9-9)-9+9-9)/9-9
2 = ((-((((((-(9+9))/9)/9)/9)*9)*9))/9)*9
snip snip
39 = (-((-(9+9)-9-9)*9-9-9-9))/9
40 = -((-(9+9)-9-9)/9-9)+9+9+9
41 not found in the set.
I'd post the Perl program, but Slashdot doesn't like code for some reason. It basically used a huge hash, using the result as a key and the formula that generated that result as the value, selectively overwriting existing key/value pairs.
I imagine the Lisp solution is more elegant, but I haven't got around to learning Lisp.
McDonald's probably has the best litigation strategy of any company I've ever seen. Even though McDonald's was clearly wrong in the coffee cases in the early 90's, and had to settle out of court for a undisclosed sum, they successfully spun that the litigants were idiots that need "WARNING: HOT" labelled on the side of their cups, destracting everyone from the facts of the case.
If you want to know the real story of the McDonald's coffee case, here's a web site that has the details . I have to admit, it changed my mind about the case.
I wish. Everyone at my wife's office comes up to her and says "I missed <show x> - I know you recorded it with TiVo - can you make a tape for me?". However, the playback to VCR is pretty cool - shows a nice white on black summary screen, I can kick it off just before I go to bed.
Bad security practices can be expensive - I know I've lost a few hours of work due to not having an up-to-date-and-scanning virus program. This has to have a definate impact on MS's operational budget, trying to figure out how to spin the latest virus while testing solutions against the entire MS suite. On top of that, there has to be some managers and employees that still believe the old lines, that customers pay for new features, not bug fixes, that interoperability and ease of use sell, not security.
Microsoft knows that it has won the Desktop OS wars, that it's closest competators are Apple's OSX (only runs on expensive hardware, so it will have a minimal impact on business sales) and Linux (still playing catch-up with MS). Now it needs to figure out how to sell upgrade units to existing customers, and has to think about the eventual multi-computer households with home servers, where it is currently losing to Linux. Most reviewers that tried XP loved it's stability, and I've even been tempted to upgrade my 98 desktop (which runs fine once you get all the programs working together).
Extra bells and whistles aren't doing it anymore - customers are tired of gaining ease of use at the cost of patches and bugs. Customers want an invisible operating system, which makes easy things easy, and they almost don't care about making hard things possible. This will require MS to transition from a company focused on beating competators by innovation (by whatever means) to beating competators by having a better product (more stable, less supprises, better cooked).
To make a change in basic philosophy requires a redirection of management. The Gates memo is the first step, and I think we can take it at face value. Sure, it's a strategy to further MS's competative edge, but I really don't think that there's anything underhanded going on here. I think Bill is giving the lowest guy on the totem pole a weapon to tell his boss - Here, I want to work this bug out before we release it; if you have a problem, take it up with Bill. That a Good Thing, and I'm planning to be suprised by what the folks at MS can do when they have the will to make a secure product.
Then Katz says the author claims that this mobile, insecure worker will become politically aware at a world level, and we'll have a whole new class of involved citizens.
I don't see how you get there from here. Where's step B?
It seems that workers may become more familiar with the global sources of their labor problems, but without the avenue of local solutions, then I don't see these people becoming political agents. More likely, they will complain about global and national problems, but be unable to think of a way to solve those problems.
In other words, a bunch of complainers, rather than folks who take action. Remind you of any online communities you know?
Half of the people say "Add lines in sources.list for Woody.
Half say "Replace stable with woody".
I did the first, and now I have a screwed-up system, and will probably have to re-install, since I'm having a hard time finding out how to fix a %#$^ed-up system.
Re: the kernel
I need the 2.4 kernel. If I have to learn syntax for a firewall, I'd rather learn ipfilter and get portmapping for free.
I'd offer you help, but if you don't have time to help yourself, you probably don't have time to get help from someone else (as that might take longer). I'm so sorry you're having problems with what I believe is the best Linux distro out there.
I agree - it makes me a bit of a whiner to complain but not be able to do anything about it.
Let me just ask a general question then - what's the best way to install a fresh Woody system? My current system is a bastardized Potato with some ugly Sid stuff thrown in to make it complicated. I want a Woody system, upgraded to a 2.4 kernel with ipfilter, and I'm willing to start from scratch.
Do I remove all non-Woody sources from the apt-get sources file? Do I manually remove all potato and unstable packages? Or is it best to format and start over?
Do these questions make it obvious that there is some newbie book or documentation that I should be reading?
The biggest problem I have is that this is a P1-100 box, which takes about 3 hours to re-compile the kernel, AND it's my firewall/router, so I lose much of my ability to read net sources when it's down. The current bastardized system is ugly and doesn't do everything I want, but at least it works.
Yeah, I tried to upgrade a potato box to woody (wanted ipfilter for firewall AND portmapping), and I've never gotten it to boot. It prints a whole bunch of dots, then reboots. I'm currently booting potato off a floppy, and have no idea how to procede, and no time to mess with it...
I've already given a good impression of what I think is right and wrong. Let me continue - what happened in Rwanda was wrong and evil.
I didn't know all the details: here are a few.
Basically, Hutu civilian and army extremists began a campaign of genocide against the Tutsis. They set up roadblocks and went from house to house raping and killing enemies. The most common weapon was a simple machette. In 100 days, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were murdered. A huge refugee crisis is created, and the entire region is destabilized.
The worst part is, there were armed U.N. troops on the ground the whole time. They weren't allowed to intervene. They were there because the Rwandan President was about to sign a peace accord creating a coalition government and allowing refugees to return home. The extremists shot down his plane, and the slaughter began that night.
These were often unorganized civilians, armed with machetees, few with firearms. All that would have been required is for the world leaders to call it genocide (it was), and put a larger police force on the ground, and set up a basic rule of law (a simple curfew, and one law - "Don't murder"). Instead, they discussed and debated behind closed doors, and avoided bringing the issue in front of the U.N.. There is a great deal of evidence that the world community knew that a slaughter like this was emminent, and decided not to get their hands dirty.
That is evil. The extremists who did this were evil, and their leaders mostly follow your pattern of "fighting for some kind of gain". The world leaders who ignored the signs beforehand and tried to ignore it while it happened allowed this evil to occur. They should have intervened - if they were looking for some gain, the only gain availible is "to prevent genocide, and to stop a huge crisis that will haunt this country for 100 years". We were WRONG not to do anything. I hope the world leaders that did nothing are haunted by the events of those 100 days on their deathbeds.
That's what I think is right and what's wrong. That's what I think is good and evil. I'm willing to fight for these things, and to pay whatever taxes it takes to stop these sorts of things. My only worry is that the moral fiber of this country will be so weakened by comfort, that when the next Rwanda, the next Bosnia comes along, we'll have to have the whole "what is truth" discussion while people are raped and murdered and kicked out of their homes.
Sure, there's no absolute black and there's no absolute white. But there are shades of grey that are damned near close to black, and others damned near close to white. We as a people need to have a good idea in our mind how white is white enough and how black is black enough, so that we don't have to argue about shades when the time comes to do something about it.
You said: ObL wasn't in Afghanistan in 1993. the Taliban weren't runing the show there until 1996, which is when he was invited in to the party.
Thanks - I goofed. But he was in Afghanistan in 1998, after the embassy bombings.
We should have done more after the embassy bombings then fire a few cruise missles based on intellegence info. It seems that every time one of these al-Qaida missions goes off without the organization getting caught or sufficently punished, then the ranks increase. There are still those that think God is on the side of Bin Laden, and that He will protect him from getting caught; if he escapes, then he may have even more recruits for the next mission.
That may be true, but I'll consider the game won when I'm in the first 10K to be put into cyro-statis for the first flight to Alpha Centari.
Screw the diplomatic victory.
Don't mean to take one statement out of context, but I have to wholeheartedly agree with you on this point.
On 9/11, we had quite a few folks saying "Let's make a glass parking lot out of Afghanistan!" I felt I was a lone voice saying "Wait, there's only a small part of Afghanistan that supports these terrorist acts, the Taliban is mostly foriegn supported and supplied, the Afghani people are as much victims of the Taliban as we now are...". It seems the administration and the military knew these things as well. Yes, our contribution was mostly bombing the hell out of Al Quaida, but that's because people high up knew that the domestic resistance would and should take care of the ground work.
Our government has learned a hell of a lot in the last 50-75 years. World War II showed us the benefit of a standing military (stops guys like Hitler from forming grand world domination plans), as well as helped up learn that there are wars worth fighting for. We took this lesson to extremes when fighting Communism, fighting proxy wars when we didn't have the support of the folks we were fighting for. Vietnam was a horrible mistake, and much of the post Vietnam period has been years of navel-gazing about the actual role of the military and when to intervene.
I believe that we were on the right side of intervention in Iraq, in Bosnia, and in Afghanistan. The only time we've been wrong is when we didn't go far enough - we didn't get Sadaam, and we dropped the ball when the popular revolt against him started. We did nothing in Rowanda. We waited too long in Bosnia. We should have acted in Afghanistan after the embassy bombings, or after the Cole, or after the first World Trade Center bombing. But we've just about reached the point where the military knows how to fight these new wars (with air superiority, free-world support, and a clear mandate from the local population) and the administration is willing to do it. This second part is harder - both Clinton and the later Bush avoided the Vietnam War themselves, and have to fight their own demons to fight these new wars.
In short, excellent post. I'm still not 100% happy with everything the administration is doing, but I think our ability to fight 21st-century wars is better than ever. I may even fly a flag one of these days...
Like another poster, I almost agree with you. Yes, freeloaders are allowed under Open Source, but open source isn't much more successful than closed source if there is no feedback from users.
There are four possibilities:
(Win)(Win) - A feedback loop is created between code creators and code users (or code co-creators), which results in a better application for all.
(Lose)(Win) - The code creator releases code, and the user uses the code to create a better, closed source competing product.
(Lose)(Lose) - The code creator releases code, losing competitive advantage, and the user uses the code with out feedback, and the product never improves.
(Win)(Lose) - I can't think of a way for the user to lose under open source, while the code-creator wins.
In any case, open source is only a (Win)(Win) when the feedback loop is created, and the users help make the next iteration better. (Lose)(Win) is possible under a BSD-type license, or when the company loses the right to sell the product under the GPL (think Netscape, perhaps). (Lose)(Lose) happens all the times, under any open-source license.
So, in 2 out of 3 cases, the guy loses who releases open source rather than sell it as a product. Why release code under open source? Well, hopefully, the gains made under a (Win)(Win) are greater than the losses under the other situations. This seems to be the case with some larger products - Linus has made huge wins with Linux, and it seems everyone has won with Apache and Perl. I'm sure you can name others.
Now the question is, is Mozilla a (Win)(Win), and, if it's not, will it ever be?
Gotta love those Google archives. Here's the main part, if the google link is too slow...
I found the inevitable geneology links, a link to his actual web page (check the phone number), and an old link to a web page that has since removed the email.
If I received the spam, and were just the right level of cluelessness (clueless enough to consider hiring a spammer, clueful enough to do a web search on his name), then I may not find a web page claiming him as a spammer. Either Google has removed some content, or it was never indexed. There's no //petemoss.com/robot.txt, so I have to assume the former.
This may mean the folks that sent him back the link heard about it through the anti-spam newsgroups, or some other channel. That's a little different than doing a web search. I can imagine HR folks doing a web search, but maybe not a usenet search. Of course, if you do do the google usenet search, you find a number of links.
While I'm being fair, I did do a few ARIN whois searches. For those out of the know (I was one of them this time last year), the whois database gives information about the entity that registered a particular domain.
Searching for petemoss.com (Neil Schwartzman's prefered domain and the host of the website) gave nothing. I then pinged petemoss.com, got an IP address (206.117.161.122). The query returns the netblock's identity, as well as an administrator name, email, and (important to Shifman) phone and fax.
It seems a little more damning that Mr. Shifman doesn't know about these tools of the trade for tracking down people on the net. Of course, since I'm being fair, it wasn't until I started setting up my own home network and had to decipher firewall logs that I learned about whois...
Mod the parent up!
I had to scan all the way down to a 1 comment to find out what LDAP was. I'm a code monkey by trade, but I was on the student paper, and the amateur journalist in me cringes when an acronym is used 9 times in a row without being defined once...
OK - always double-check the facts. It's H.G. Wells, not Jules Verne.
I guess I'm one of them. I know the Morlocks and the Eloi from Jules Verne's book (The Time Machine). I'm not sure if the original had the "tech creators vs. tech user's" bias, but it seems many found that interpretation later. Neal Stephenson was one of them - I discovered his interpretation in the excellent essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line". The essay is primarily about operating systems, and can be found online on his Cryptonomicon site.
Just out of curiosity, what security checks do the janitors go through? Repair personnel? What if there is a fire? Are there security-cleared firemen?
The Microsoft V.P. was saying that this study would be customer-ready. Perhaps marketing types have different reading skills than the rest of us?
< Interesting stuff removed >
The point I'm trying to make is that the team recognized that the direction in which they were headed wasn't leading anywhere. So they took stock of what they had, kept the best pieces, threw out the rest, and started over. Not an easy thing for anyone to do.
Thanks for that insight - again, we could learn a lot if a good journalist asked the folks on successful projects what went right, what went worng, and what lessons were learned.
I also wonder how many times Daikatana "started over" - wasn't it originally on the Quake engine, then they decided to start over on the Quake II engine? That would have been an excellent moment to do what the Half-Life team did...
I have to admit, lack of top-down leadership seems plausible. How else can you explain Half-Life being so good, and Daikatana being so bad? Same basic engine, but one lacked the ability to pull off the added extras.
Still, there's a great book to be written on game design theory, from concept to box. I'd love to see some insight into id, which seems to have done well from shareware like Commander Keen all the way into the present, vs. the other teams that didn't quite make it. I'd love to hear what happened at Origin after Ultima 7. Anyone else have favorite untold game design stories?
In my line of work, the boss has a saying - There's a time to shoot the engineer and ship the thing. Maybe in game design, there's a time to shoot the designers and let the programmers get it right.