This shit is not about who is the ``freeest'' motherfucker. This shit is about not allowing corps to strangle the competition by using source code as a kind of bank vault for arbitrary implementation detail (ie. "trade secrets").
Now if you look closely, you'll see that Franklin qualifies his statement by using the words "temporary", and the slippery "essential".
Franklin does not help us when we can give up "non-essential liberties" (whatever those may be) to gain "permanent safety" (as far as that is possible).
I don't think he's really giving Short 8 moves. He's getting his pawns out of the way and throwing Short off balance. Given that most chess games will have two or three pawn moves in the first 8 moves, and given the obvious strategical import of moving all 8 (since he did win after all), you could say he didn't "give" Short any moves at all. Of course, I'm not a chess expert.
Bah, that is not a mature approach. The mature approach is to release a 1.0
that works, a 2.0 that's useful, a 3.0 that's good, and a 4.0 that
eliminates the competition.
Lofty "it's finished when it's finished" rhetoric just does not work for
projects on the scale of Moz.
Suppose that the renderer is finished but that mailnews is still a mess. The
release is delayed. The mailnews team makes a supreme effort and manages to
deliver only by their clever and novel uses for the renderer. Six months
later there's a much improved mailnews. There are also lots of new issues
with the renderer. Release is delayed again. And so on. And so on..
99.44% "You are the product of a mutational union of ~640Mbytes of genetic information."
The world. You are forgetting the world. That genetic information is meaningless if it's not in the world. I think you should account for all the information in the world that makes these pathetic 640 megs of genetic information mean something.
Which should go a long way to show you that "standards-based" means nothing.
As for the W3C, you would have to be a fool not to know by now that they are a vacillatory council of bureaucrats, whose main expertise is in the regulation of technology to the point where an actual implementation becomes unfeasible.
Q: What are "stable, feature-complete, office suite, full-featured"?
A: Pompous marketing-speaks designed to soothe self-important losers who couldn't come up with a single original thought if they had their whole life to do it.
I've been using the QuietPC stuff for about a year now (CPU cooler, 300W power supply, and SilentDrive enclosures) in a dual PIII Linux system, and I've got to say that it works miracles.
What's especially great about this stuff is not just how it reduces the loudness, but how it also changes the kind of noise that your machine makes into a much smoother and rounder sound. It's a bit as if you're listening through a low-pass filter.
Some of this nice "dampening" disappears as the hardware ages though.
Yes, well, I've been hearing this stuff for ages, about how programmers should "be more efficient", but meanwhile, all those wonderful word processors written in assembler (Tempus Word) seem to have perished.
Besides, some people think that so-called "cruft" (clip-art, templates,...) is added value. Should people design their own fonts, too?
In any case, there was a time when 3000 bytes could hold an interpreter. You need 3000 bytes just to write a character to a file. Go figure.
The heart of the matter is that applications grow larger as they incorporate more elements from the day to day world (page sizes, fonts, languages, sound, advertisements...). Writing tight code does nothing to avoid that.
The parent is right. I'm seeing a number of replies to the effect of "no you're wrong, threads are good!", but most of these seem to be missing the point. Read what the parent writes:
"The first rule of multithreaded programming is the same as the first rule of optimization: Don't do it."
Now think about that. Does that really suggest "don't use threads!"? Or "don't optimize your programs!"? I don't think so.
A more reasonable interpretation is that "whenever you feel the urge -- as opposed to a reasoning that can be supported by facts -- to [optimize your program|employ threads]: don't do it.".
What's particularly lucid about this comment is the way it likens (premature) optimization to the (over) use of threads, in recognition of the fact that both practices start out showing great promise, then bog down owing to inexplicable roadblocks, only to finally end up as liabilities.
Then again, that is perhaps the story of all software development..
Re:The nature of laws, and what this implies...
on
Harm From The Hague
·
· Score: 1
Ultimately, what is a law? It's a restriction on freedom.
Some laws restrict some persons freedom at some particular time, but you have to consider that if that persons freedom were not restricted at that particular point in time, you might be dead.
That said, I don't see how someone reading the article could come to the conclusion that portscanning is categorically deemed illegal.
In fact a considerable part of the article is dedicated to an investigation of various definitions of what constitutes unauthorized "access", and the author takes some pains to point out that these may or may not include some form of port scanning as part of the consideration of whether tresspass has occurred. But nowhere does the article say, "nmap is illegal".
Yeah, Minsky does have a propensity to come across like a highly educated fool. But perhaps he's just being provocative to spur the debate. IOW, a troll.
Slashdot Mirror
No, coz there isn't any. Privacy is not anonymity.
And if it's anonymity you want, get off the Internet. Hide in a crowd, instead. You won't have any privacy tho'.
Hey loudmouth.
This shit is not about who is the ``freeest'' motherfucker. This shit is about not allowing corps to strangle the competition by using source code as a kind of bank vault for arbitrary implementation detail (ie. "trade secrets").
Thanks for digging up the original quote.
Now if you look closely, you'll see that Franklin qualifies his statement by using the words "temporary", and the slippery "essential".
Franklin does not help us when we can give up "non-essential liberties" (whatever those may be) to gain "permanent safety" (as far as that is possible).
I don't think he's really giving Short 8 moves. He's getting his pawns out of the way and throwing Short off balance. Given that most chess games will have two or three pawn moves in the first 8 moves, and given the obvious strategical import of moving all 8 (since he did win after all), you could say he didn't "give" Short any moves at all. Of course, I'm not a chess expert.
Yeah, I think the original poster knew that. So why is this funny?
Lofty "it's finished when it's finished" rhetoric just does not work for projects on the scale of Moz.
Suppose that the renderer is finished but that mailnews is still a mess. The release is delayed. The mailnews team makes a supreme effort and manages to deliver only by their clever and novel uses for the renderer. Six months later there's a much improved mailnews. There are also lots of new issues with the renderer. Release is delayed again. And so on. And so on..
How can the parent be overrated?? It wasn't even moderated!
As for the W3C, you would have to be a fool not to know by now that they are a vacillatory council of bureaucrats, whose main expertise is in the regulation of technology to the point where an actual implementation becomes unfeasible.
A: Pompous marketing-speaks designed to soothe self-important losers who couldn't come up with a single original thought if they had their whole life to do it.
The one time somebody writes an fierce and distinguished comment on /. he is told to "calm down"?! A brave new world, indeed!
So, security is a pipe-dream. Thanks for clearing that up.
It strikes me as patently stupid, more like.
What's especially great about this stuff is not just how it reduces the loudness, but how it also changes the kind of noise that your machine makes into a much smoother and rounder sound. It's a bit as if you're listening through a low-pass filter.
Some of this nice "dampening" disappears as the hardware ages though.
Because the noise shouldn't be there in the first place ... duh.
I often choose a password based on how easy it is to type. Then I make sure that I type it a lot for a few days. After that, it's all muscle memory.
Besides, some people think that so-called "cruft" (clip-art, templates, ...) is added value. Should people design their own fonts, too?
In any case, there was a time when 3000 bytes could hold an interpreter. You need 3000 bytes just to write a character to a file. Go figure.
The heart of the matter is that applications grow larger as they incorporate more elements from the day to day world (page sizes, fonts, languages, sound, advertisements ...). Writing tight code does nothing to avoid that.
So you saved ~350K on a ~354K file. But that doesn't mean that you'll also save ~350M on a ~354M application distribution.
No sir! It's gamers, demanding you publish your biometric signature on a .NET powered authentication server!
A more reasonable interpretation is that "whenever you feel the urge -- as opposed to a reasoning that can be supported by facts -- to [optimize your program|employ threads]: don't do it.".
What's particularly lucid about this comment is the way it likens (premature) optimization to the (over) use of threads, in recognition of the fact that both practices start out showing great promise, then bog down owing to inexplicable roadblocks, only to finally end up as liabilities.
Then again, that is perhaps the story of all software development ..
IIRC the system would perform a nightly optimization pass on translated x86 binaries.
Perhaps if you're worried about portscanning, you shouldn't connect your computer to the Internet.
That said, I don't see how someone reading the article could come to the conclusion that portscanning is categorically deemed illegal.
In fact a considerable part of the article is dedicated to an investigation of various definitions of what constitutes unauthorized "access", and the author takes some pains to point out that these may or may not include some form of port scanning as part of the consideration of whether tresspass has occurred. But nowhere does the article say, "nmap is illegal".
Yeah, Minsky does have a propensity to come across like a highly educated fool. But perhaps he's just being provocative to spur the debate. IOW, a troll.