And the GNU GPL forbids the addition of extra restrictions.... Do you see the problem yet?
No, I don't. You could distribute the program strictly under the GPL, and not put in any such restriction. The fact that the EU passed laws making it illegal to modify the code to take out the currency blocker is not a restriction imposed by those distributing the code. I do not see how a GIMP developer, even in the EU, is in violation of the GPL by distributing a program that is further restricted by EU law.
Caveat: depending on how the EU law is written, such an EU GIMP developer may well be in violation of the EU law, e.g. if the law prohibits distributing enabling technology, the way the DMCA does in America for copy-prevention-breaking software. EUphies should check that before releasing GIMP or similar patches.
Caveat2: IANAL, nor am I EU, so do your own legal advising.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
No, that was OS/9, which was an alternate OS for the Radio Shack Color Computer II, a completely different product line than the TRS-80. The TRS-80 had:
full keyboard
came with a BW monitor
used a Z80 CPU
while the Color Computer II had:
chicklet keyboard
a modulator to interface to a color TV
used a 6809 CPU
To make it a really useful OS/9 machine, one would skip the color TV and the chicklet keyboard, and instead snarf an old serial terminal and plug it in the serial port in the back and log in.
The CoCo II was my (counts on fingers and toes) 4th computer. A shell prompt and multi-user OS in 64KB on an 8-bit CPU was damned impressive back in 1986.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
You clearly had no clue what I was talking about, and I even spelled it out for you: "conservative, in the small-c sense of danger-aversion." This has nothing to do with the left/right liberal/conservative meaning. RTFP.
Uh...right. I suppose that you would also contend that the reason the U.S. has better healthcare for a lower cost than anyone else in the world is...
You're high, right? It is well documented that the US pays more per capita for health care than anywhere else in the world, and for less coverage. Having actually lived under both systems for many years, the US system sucks ass. It is one of the singular ways in which I prefer Canada; in most other regards, I like it better here in the US.
That's a pretty hefty generalization...
No One You Know asked for a generalization about what its like in Canada. Of course the responses are generalizations, and of course generalizations have exceptions.
Me, for example: No one ever describes me as "polite", only rarely as "reasonable", and quite often as "excitable":)
moved to the US 10 years ago after finishing my PhD
worked in the US and Canada as a developer/intern, and in the US as a professor and executive
Bias: as a child, I was always an American-wanna-be
My opinion: Canada and the US are very similar: It is wisely said that Canadians are polite, unarmed Americans, with health care. However, there are interesting differences:
Canadians are more "conservative", in the small-c sense of danger-aversion. Canadians by and large will accept an average lower standard of living in exchange for a lower risk of catastrophe. This shows up in substantially lower wages for technical staff, but with a substantially higher standard of living for those supported by the social safety net.
There is much less entreprenure-ship in Canada. Go to Canada if you like large companies, because there are a lot fewer start-ups.
Republican bullshit not withstanding, the Canadian single-payer health care system works better than anything I have ever seen in the US.
Canadians are generally more reasonable and less excitable than Americans. Conversely, Canadians are a lot less exciting than Americans. A Canadian radio station once ran a contest to pick a saying analogous to "As American as apple pie." The winner was "As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances."
A lot of Canadians have a very poor opinion of the quality of life in the US. I submit that this is because a substantial plurality of Canadians actually live in Southern Ontario, between Buffalo and Detroit. If all you ever heard of the US was that North Tonowanda was burning again, what would you think?:)
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
The only way yoru going to take out a THEL with a reflective coating is if you had the mirror perfectly perpendicular to the bear.
No, that is just not true. There are at least two easy ways to construct mirrors that send light back from where it came, regardless of the angle of incidence. One is spheres with a refractive index of 2.0, and the other is right-angle mirrors. The former is used in bicycle reflective strips, and the latter was used on moon missions to deposit 2 foot devices on the moon that would conveniently bounce laser beams back to earth for handy measurements, without having to precisely aim a mirror at the earth. Absolutely no perpendicularity required.
Caveat: except for efficiency. These bounce-back mechanisms both involve reflecting the laser beam twice before returning it. That doubles the amount of energy the missle absorbs, but it is still absorbing a lot less than it is sending back to the cannon.
Hmmm. Ok, so high quality reflective material in the infrared range is hard. Sounds like a technology problem. It leads to an arms race:
On one hand, we have some guys trying to make durable, high-quality reflective material that can sustain high load in grubby battle conditions. The reflection does not have to be very precise, just "go somewhere else" will do.
On the other hand, we have some guys trying to make laser cannon. This involves near-perfect mirrors that have to survive battle conditions. The cannon has to handle power loads of 10X to 100X at least vs. the reflection guys. The cannon has to precisely target a distant, small, high-velocity projectile. The cannon also has to power through various weather conditions, clouds of smoke, etc.
Who's job is tougher?
I don't say the cannon cannot be built, or even that it won't work against missles that don't have a defense, but I do think the advantage is with the missle guys.
Are you claiming that it is somehow difficult to make material that is highly reflective in the infrared range?
I suggested bicycle strips because they have a fascinating property. They are made of zillions of little sphericle beads, with a refractive index of approximately 2.0. Such beads have the interesting property that light shining into them is reflected back directly at the source. For amusement, go get a laser pointer and point it at some bicycle strips, and you will notice that your hand holding the laser pointer is painted with laser light, regardless of the angle you hit the strip from.
So if I want to beat laser missle defenses, I go into the lab and make milspec beads with a refractive index of 2.0 in the right infrared range, and the lasers suddenly don't work so well.
Bonus: make the reflective layer 1 inch thick, and make it boil when heated, and you get ablative armor: it fogs the missle with a clound that blocks the laser. IIRC, idea due to Charles Sheffield (RIP).
He said that "The "average" student in an Indian english language high school is already the geek elite." I say that no they are not. They might be geek elite wanna-be, but they certainly do not all achieve it.
As an educator, I can assure you that there are both brilliant minds and slacker idiots among people of all races and places of origin."highschool and undergraduate in India" is no assurance of quality, any more than doing your education in California or Montana.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
You're half right. It is a programming language, but it is a domain-specific language (DSL). DSL's are not always Turing-equivalant (which is what it takes for a language to bootstrap itself). Configuration files are an example of a limited kind of non-Turing-complete DSL's. Also called "little languages" by Brian Kernighan.
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
The article makes a compelling case that the surface area of the sensor inside the camera is a sound metric of quality: the bigger the sensor surface area, the better sensitivity you get, and thus the better signal:noise ratio, especially in low-light or high-speed situations.
I would be very happy if camera vendors and review sites started prominently listing sensor surface area as prominent figure of merit.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
You would think that, after the second time this happened, it would occur to either UFL or the admin that if people hate the newsletter enough to spacop it, then just maybe it needs an "unsubscribe" mechanism. Clever CS majors that don't want it will have it forwarded to fuckoff@example.com, but the rest of campus is unlikely to think of that.
Academic CS has a major blind spot: they don't take system administration seriously. They typically think it is just that crufty, unimportant technology stuff that is of no intellectual interest. I found this out when I, as a junior professor, said that I thought system administration was ripe for major research investigation, and got responses that ranged from blank stares to giggles.
I think academic CS is majorly wrong in this regard. "System administration" is the residual work that is left over after you have abstracted all the easy stuff. Lather, rinse, repeat for 40 years, and system administration of very large & complex systems is highly distilled complexity and difficulty. Small wonder that senior system administrators are grand wizards of black magic within their field. I have published at LISA, twice. I get little credit for it, except among system administrators.
Another poster pointed out the irony in my devaluing degrees but valuing these certifications. All I can say is I can think of at least 5 honours degree holders that wouldnt have even come close to passing these certs without serious study.
This mostly tells me that you do not understand the value of a (good) degree. Degrees teach concepts (software engineering, concurrency, relational databases) while certificates teach particular technologies(Visual Studio, particular thread libraries, Oracle). I will take someone trained in the concepts over someone trained in the technologies any day.
Technologies come and go, and picking up a new one is just a matter of reading the manual. Concepts require hard-core education, and someone trained only in technologies often falls flat as soon as the technology falls out of vogue. Consider: how would you value someone with a resume that said they were familiar with Borland, DBase IV, and HTML?
Caveat: I am not saying that people who don't have degrees don't understand concepts. Rather, that the certificates focus on technology trivia, and thereofre you cannot tell whether the candidate knows the concepts or not.
YMMV, judging by your sig you are obviously an educated man but when I think about the truely outstanding technical people I have worked with during my relatively short career so far I find that that majority were those without the education.
I have met some astoundingly brilliant letterless people. I disagree that a majority of outstanding developers are degreeless, but they certainly are a big chunk.
I do however, take slight issue with your point about certificates. I have found some of these to be very worthwhile. I have certificates from Sun in their Java programmer, Java developer and Java web component developer qualifications and found them (particually the programmer) to be an excellent base-line skill test.
While have occasionally found people with certificates to be quite good (some of my best friends are CISSP's:-) I have never found any significant correlation from certificates to skills. If anything, there is an anti-correlation: those holding (more importantly, advertising) "certificates" have a slightly elevated probability of being useless posers who are good at test taking, and little else. I put the certificates at the bottom of the resume pile, and the actual/relevant skills at the top.
I have recommended to my current employer that all developers working on our software should either have the programmer certificate or be working towards it.
I find that highly disturbing, and would not tolerate such a policy. Why should someone who is highly competent, productive, and well-read in the subject be forced to be "working on" a certificate that does nothing but expensively validate skills you already know are present? I value real degrees because they tend to deliver education. I devalue "certificates", because they tend to be light on the education and heavy on the testing.
Must be great. However, here's the question. Do you have anyone working for you that doesn't have a degree or maybe has a degree in a non-technical field? Do you have anybody without a degree that's been shipping production software for 15 years or so?
My guess is no. If true, that would mean that you hire people based on credentials instead of performance. Make me glad that I don't work for you.
And what would be the basis for this bogus guess of yours? My point in placing the disclaimer was precisely that we hire on performance instead of credentials. More particularly, a real degree from a serious school is an achievement, just as substantive work experience is an achievement, and I don't distinguish.
"Certificates", on the other hand, are largely crap that serve only to identify people who do broad/shallow test-taking well and can afford to pay the fees. "Certified" people may or may not also be competent, but the certificate tells me little about their skills.
You mean that a cheesy diploma from a paper-mill that reads the O'Reilly manuals to you for a semester or two and charges you tens of thousands of dollars is no substitute for a real degree or real experience? I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you!!
Well, no, I'm not really shocked:)
Disclaimer: several bachelor's and master's degrees work for me, as well as several no-degree people with strong skills, but as far as I know, no "certificates", which is the way I like it.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
I like it that Tivo can track my viewing habits. That way, when I don't watch yet another trite and lame episode of "Friends" and instead choose to watch something interesting, perhaps the morons in network programming will get a fucking clue.
Crispin, always wanted to be in the Neilson ratings
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Think very seriously about why anyone would want to contribute at your site rather than somewhere else. I'm not a kernel coder of any sort...
Sardonix is not about the kernel per se. It is mostly about auditing applications, which is where most of the security vulnerabilities are.
Now lets look at those points. What gives them any value?
Their intended value was a objective assessment of the person's ability to audit code. They are not "awarded" by an organization, they are objectively computed by performance: how may packages or lines of code did you audit? How many bugs were subsequently found in code you audited? These metrics give people a real assessment of how good you are at auditing code.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
The project is not dead. You can still go there and submit an audit. We have no intention of turning it off, and if people want to contribute, we welcome that.
All the conspiracy theory noise on this topic is just a load of crap. DARPA didn't cut us off for any spooky reason, the contract just ended on schedule. I did my best to market the project to suitable audiences, but it never caught on. I'm still all for making it work, but I no longer have Federal money to pay for it, so its now all-volunteer.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Slashdot Mirror
Caveat: depending on how the EU law is written, such an EU GIMP developer may well be in violation of the EU law, e.g. if the law prohibits distributing enabling technology, the way the DMCA does in America for copy-prevention-breaking software. EUphies should check that before releasing GIMP or similar patches.
Caveat2: IANAL, nor am I EU, so do your own legal advising.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
- full keyboard
- came with a BW monitor
- used a Z80 CPU
while the Color Computer II had:- chicklet keyboard
- a modulator to interface to a color TV
- used a 6809 CPU
To make it a really useful OS/9 machine, one would skip the color TV and the chicklet keyboard, and instead snarf an old serial terminal and plug it in the serial port in the back and log in.The CoCo II was my (counts on fingers and toes) 4th computer. A shell prompt and multi-user OS in 64KB on an 8-bit CPU was damned impressive back in 1986.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Crispin
Me, for example: No one ever describes me as "polite", only rarely as "reasonable", and quite often as "excitable" :)
Crispin
Crispin
Canadian born and educated
moved to the US 10 years ago after finishing my PhD
worked in the US and Canada as a developer/intern, and in the US as a professor and executive
Bias: as a child, I was always an American-wanna-be My opinion: Canada and the US are very similar: It is wisely said that Canadians are polite, unarmed Americans, with health care. However, there are interesting differences:
- Canadians are more "conservative", in the small-c sense of danger-aversion. Canadians by and large will accept an average lower standard of living in exchange for a lower risk of catastrophe. This shows up in substantially lower wages for technical staff, but with a substantially higher standard of living for those supported by the social safety net.
- There is much less entreprenure-ship in Canada. Go to Canada if you like large companies, because there are a lot fewer start-ups.
- Republican bullshit not withstanding, the Canadian single-payer health care system works better than anything I have ever seen in the US.
- Canadians are generally more reasonable and less excitable than Americans. Conversely, Canadians are a lot less exciting than Americans. A Canadian radio station once ran a contest to pick a saying analogous to "As American as apple pie." The winner was "As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances."
A lot of Canadians have a very poor opinion of the quality of life in the US. I submit that this is because a substantial plurality of Canadians actually live in Southern Ontario, between Buffalo and Detroit. If all you ever heard of the US was that North Tonowanda was burning again, what would you think?Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Caveat: except for efficiency. These bounce-back mechanisms both involve reflecting the laser beam twice before returning it. That doubles the amount of energy the missle absorbs, but it is still absorbing a lot less than it is sending back to the cannon.
Crispin
- On one hand, we have some guys trying to make durable, high-quality reflective material that can sustain high load in grubby battle conditions. The reflection does not have to be very precise, just "go somewhere else" will do.
- On the other hand, we have some guys trying to make laser cannon. This involves near-perfect mirrors that have to survive battle conditions. The cannon has to handle power loads of 10X to 100X at least vs. the reflection guys. The cannon has to precisely target a distant, small, high-velocity projectile. The cannon also has to power through various weather conditions, clouds of smoke, etc.
Who's job is tougher?I don't say the cannon cannot be built, or even that it won't work against missles that don't have a defense, but I do think the advantage is with the missle guys.
Crispin
I suggested bicycle strips because they have a fascinating property. They are made of zillions of little sphericle beads, with a refractive index of approximately 2.0. Such beads have the interesting property that light shining into them is reflected back directly at the source. For amusement, go get a laser pointer and point it at some bicycle strips, and you will notice that your hand holding the laser pointer is painted with laser light, regardless of the angle you hit the strip from.
So if I want to beat laser missle defenses, I go into the lab and make milspec beads with a refractive index of 2.0 in the right infrared range, and the lasers suddenly don't work so well.
Bonus: make the reflective layer 1 inch thick, and make it boil when heated, and you get ablative armor: it fogs the missle with a clound that blocks the laser. IIRC, idea due to Charles Sheffield (RIP).
Crispin
Crispin
Crispin
Crispin
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
I would be very happy if camera vendors and review sites started prominently listing sensor surface area as prominent figure of merit.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Crispin
I think academic CS is majorly wrong in this regard. "System administration" is the residual work that is left over after you have abstracted all the easy stuff. Lather, rinse, repeat for 40 years, and system administration of very large & complex systems is highly distilled complexity and difficulty. Small wonder that senior system administrators are grand wizards of black magic within their field. I have published at LISA, twice. I get little credit for it, except among system administrators.
Crispin
Technologies come and go, and picking up a new one is just a matter of reading the manual. Concepts require hard-core education, and someone trained only in technologies often falls flat as soon as the technology falls out of vogue. Consider: how would you value someone with a resume that said they were familiar with Borland, DBase IV, and HTML?
Caveat: I am not saying that people who don't have degrees don't understand concepts. Rather, that the certificates focus on technology trivia, and thereofre you cannot tell whether the candidate knows the concepts or not.
Crispin
You can send me a resume if you want, but we are not hiring for the forseable future. Crispin
Crispin
"Certificates", on the other hand, are largely crap that serve only to identify people who do broad/shallow test-taking well and can afford to pay the fees. "Certified" people may or may not also be competent, but the certificate tells me little about their skills.
Crispin
Well, no, I'm not really shocked :)
Disclaimer: several bachelor's and master's degrees work for me, as well as several no-degree people with strong skills, but as far as I know, no "certificates", which is the way I like it.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Crispin, always wanted to be in the Neilson ratings
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
All the conspiracy theory noise on this topic is just a load of crap. DARPA didn't cut us off for any spooky reason, the contract just ended on schedule. I did my best to market the project to suitable audiences, but it never caught on. I'm still all for making it work, but I no longer have Federal money to pay for it, so its now all-volunteer.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.