Cogsci is a mix of philosophy, computer science, linguistics and psychology. Weigh the disiplines according to your interests, but a good cogsci program will have elements of each. Your goal: understand, in a meaningful way, things that are described by words such as intelligence, consciousness, emotion, awareness. Some like to call it "AI". There are amazing and interesting challenges in this field.
With regard to the plans for new media and networking features in GNOME, I hope that the GNOME team leverages efforts from the x.org project to work towards a common implementation of those features. In particular, I think that the Media Application Server looks very promising. Since future versions of GNOME will likely be running on x.org anyways, the wheel should not be re-invented with respect to advanced media features.
This is great news. Hopefully it will scare more companies into compliance. I'm sure that there are a lot of companies using code from open source projects in their products, and I bet that there are more than a few in violation of the GPL.
What makes you think he won't make the world a better place as a plumber? He may very well become the best damned plumber in England!
Perhaps now he'll have more free time, and raise a family that he otherwise wouldn't have -- or now that he has more income, perhaps he can better pay for his children's needs, or donate to his favorite charity, or drink more of his favorite beer.
There is obviously a demand for open source business software, and in time, it will be available, and of comparable quality to whatever is available commercially. The whole open source movement is still relatively young. There are a lot of big, powerful companies investing heavily in open source software now, though (IBM, HP, Apple, Sun, to name a few). So the catch-up time will be shorter than the time its taken to come this far.
When people like yourself lock your businesses into a proprietary environment, it will be all that much more expensive and painful to change things when your competitors start to kick your ass because they're not burdened by the ever increasing costs, and decreasing code quality, of proprietary software.
If you, and I'm guessing that you're from the USA, published a security exploit before notifying the vendor, would it follow that your motive must have been America's intention to harm the vendor? Of course it wouldn't. Your logic is fallacious.
On another note, although China, like many countries is embracing open source software, it doesn't mean that they are anti-Microsoft. Adopting open source software is a reasonable thing to do, independent of other considerations.
The part about this story that gets to me is that the researcher didn't alert Microsoft before posting to a public mailing list. Sure, a lot of people don't like Microsoft, but that's no reason to make it worse for the millions of people who are forced to use Microsoft products, especially for security holes which have yet to be exploited.
While I agree that all vendors, even Evil(tm) ones, should be notified and given adequate time to fix a bug before exploit code is published, I disagree that there is no reason to "make it worse for the millions of people who are forced to use Microsoft products". There are plenty of reasons.
Making things worse for MS users will lead to more people objecting to being "forced" into using MS products (the word "forced" is used loosely, as in your post). The more people that object to the monopoly, the less likihood that the monopoly will continue to thrive. Whether you admit it or not, the proliferation of MS security exploits in the form of viruses, worms and any other means, is a big part of the recent success of the adoption of open source software around the world. People are getting fed up with viruses and security problems on their PCs, and looking to alternatives. Just by looking at alternatives, the world is coming to realize that there are better ways to get software than paying a vendor for a licence to use binaries, under restrictions.
Another reason is that Microsoft itself is getting fed up with the problem, and so maybe some day they'll change their ways and maybe get a part of a clue about security. This ties in with the first reason I cited, in so far as their present solution to their security problems will only make people dislike them more than they already do. MS constantly blames the users for problems in MS software, so their solution is to remove control from the users and put it in the hands of... whomever. This is more good news for MS alternatives.
There are a multitude of reasons that stem directly from the first reason that I mentioned. Lots of good things will happen if the monopoly crumbles. After only a few crumbs have come off the edges, there are already benefits. For example, poor countries are now much more able to build up their infrastructure, thanks to the existence and advocacy of alternatives to the monopoly. The monopoly itself is bad for security: some of the world's leading computer security experts have argued that the lack of platform diversity is itself a security threat. There are many economic arguments about why monopolies are bad.
So MS users may have some pain coming their way, but in the end the result will be beneficial for society.
Re:Farscape not so great
on
Farscape is Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Au contraire -- that Farscape's plotlines were intelligent enough that they couldn't be captured in the standard "1 hour minus advertising" TV slot. That was part of what made the show a step above the rest. The plot was in fact very consistent, if you view it as a whole. More like a movie, spread out over episodes. If you miss several episodes, then yeah, I can see how one might not understand some elements.
Quibble: the introduction of Americanism following 9/11 was an unfortunate downturn in the series, possibly motivated by the absurdly Americanized competing series, SG1. SG1 is so "go USA" I can't even watch it. Patriotism and sci-fi are just a terrible mix.
What if biometric authentication were used instead? Thumbprints, retina scans and the like will probably eventually replace the pile of plastic cards that we're all forced to carry around. The practical problem with the Vancouver nightclubs' plan will be getting customers to go through with the photo ID card process. There will always be bars that choose not to be Orwellian, and there are other things to do in Vancouver besides clubbing. If biometrics is ubiquitous, though, schemes like this might become the norm, like in the movie Minority Report.
This thread is actually from yesterday, and my highly unmodded comments about it still apply;). Basically that Sun's execs may be clueless, however they are contributing to FOSS despite their perhaps dubious intentions, and in the end, their contributions are making the world a better place for FOSS.
They're just like most giant companies - they see only economics. What Sun's execs are missing is the whole open source culture, which is really what is relevant to most of the/. crowd. This culture is nothing like the "Enterprise" environment in which execs like Schwartz live. So they don't get it. So what? What have they done that sucks?
They've released significant amounts of code into the open source arena, and their new desktop efforts will just mean that there will be more linux boxen in the world. This is a Good Thing. It doesn't matter if the business droids at the top of the corporate ladder don't understand anything besides 'our price vs their price' and marketshare, etc.. More people will be working in an open source environment, which will ultimately improve the technology for everyone, and further erode the Microsoft monopoly. Its all good.
In the part of the country where I live meth labs are a major problem in many counties. Prosecutors using these new procedures are seeing their arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rates increase.
That all sounds pretty wonderful to me. If you're making meth, you're dealing in death and ruined lives.
If you think the laws banning the manufacture of certain drugs are inadequate, then ammend them. Make them more serious than murder and rape... oh wait, they already are... The drug dealers and manufacturers are supplying an existing demand in a blackmarket that was created and is maintained by your government's disfunctional prohibition laws. If you are going to mandate what people can and cannot put into their own bodies, what they can and cannot buy and sell, then you are going to have a blackmarket for those things.
This has absolutely nothing at all to do with "terrorism" or "chemical weapons". Permitting the abuse of these laws is the first step down a steep and dangerous slippery slope of corruption and oppression. Wake up, you fools!
One example in the article is the guy running a meth lab who's now up for a life sentence for 'manufacturing chemical weapons'
DMCA, Patriot Act, War on Drugs, Total Information Awareness, Preemptive Strikes... and the sanctioned abuse of bad laws. The USA is really becoming a disgusting offense to justice.
How many inner city students will be able to afford Windows XP -- now more expensive than entire computer systems? The same goes for MS Office. Poor kids can probably get now-obsolete-by-market-standards hardware for free. For example, I know of one university with a few hundred P200's sitting in storage. No one wants them, and its expensive to recycle them.
Linux user group(s) in Philadelphia should think about finding old, donated equipment, and offer it along with group Linux lessons and installfests to students of "MS High". Contact the student council. MS isn't running the school, they're only providing the technology & support. The exposure to technology that these kids will get at school may spark their interest, but they could have no money for the expensive proprietary software, and we know what happens when MS software is pirated. With some help, they could learn that great software isn't necessarily expensive.
I once worked for a comany that was in the midst of a lawsuit. It was company policy that emails were not archived. It made presenting information for discovery so much easier.
I guess that depends on how Evil(tm) your company plans on being. I guess the company you worked for had aspirations to be as Evil(tm) as Microsoft, and by the sounds of it, is well on the way.
Evil(tm) is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.
Keep documentation on everything you do -- you want a detailed to-do list, and a log of what you've done already. When asked to do something new, send them the to-do list, and have them decide on the priority of this new item. Then it will be obvious what will get put on hold while doing this new task. Basically, just remove yourself from the prioritization decisions and let management manage your time. Then there will be no surprises when some things don't get done, and everything is documented, to cover your ass.
It will let your boss/client guage how busy you are, and after some time, get a feel for how long things take. Plus it makes them feel special - management likes to manage. They like to delegate responsibilities, and if you don't keep them informed of the delegations they've made already, and their consequences, they won't have to accept the management responsibilities that go along with delegation of tasks.
When I took this approach, management decided that nobody was allowed to make IT requests without clearing it with them first. They were quivering with power:P. And I suddenly had a lot of time to work on important things.
You don't throw out a product with 80% of the market just because you can't get your minority system to work correctly with it.
What is essential to realize with this evaluation is the reason the minority systems don't work correctly with it. It is not a shortcoming of the minorities, but the result of deliberate effort of the monopolist. One can only do so much when relying on reverse-engineered proprietary protocols that change at the whim of the monopolist.
Now the question should be, do you want 80% of your IT environment to depend on a product from a company that behaves this way?
Slashdot Mirror
http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/
Cogsci is a mix of philosophy, computer science, linguistics and psychology. Weigh the disiplines according to your interests, but a good cogsci program will have elements of each. Your goal: understand, in a meaningful way, things that are described by words such as intelligence, consciousness, emotion, awareness. Some like to call it "AI". There are amazing and interesting challenges in this field.
With regard to the plans for new media and networking features in GNOME, I hope that the GNOME team leverages efforts from the x.org project to work towards a common implementation of those features. In particular, I think that the Media Application Server looks very promising. Since future versions of GNOME will likely be running on x.org anyways, the wheel should not be re-invented with respect to advanced media features.
This is great news. Hopefully it will scare more companies into compliance. I'm sure that there are a lot of companies using code from open source projects in their products, and I bet that there are more than a few in violation of the GPL.
What makes you think he won't make the world a better place as a plumber? He may very well become the best damned plumber in England!
Perhaps now he'll have more free time, and raise a family that he otherwise wouldn't have -- or now that he has more income, perhaps he can better pay for his children's needs, or donate to his favorite charity, or drink more of his favorite beer.
If she needs anything more done than plugging in cables, she will call you, her dear nephiew/niece, to come "fix her printer" for her.
Hell, we'd never be so lucky that Aunt Tillie would actually try plugging in cables!
The last thing the open source community needs is for Microsoft to have an excuse to claim that some of THEIR code has shown up in the Linux kernel.
Oh come on... give the kernel maintainers some credit! As if they'd let such poor quality code in!
There is obviously a demand for open source business software, and in time, it will be available, and of comparable quality to whatever is available commercially. The whole open source movement is still relatively young. There are a lot of big, powerful companies investing heavily in open source software now, though (IBM, HP, Apple, Sun, to name a few). So the catch-up time will be shorter than the time its taken to come this far.
When people like yourself lock your businesses into a proprietary environment, it will be all that much more expensive and painful to change things when your competitors start to kick your ass because they're not burdened by the ever increasing costs, and decreasing code quality, of proprietary software.
If you, and I'm guessing that you're from the USA, published a security exploit before notifying the vendor, would it follow that your motive must have been America's intention to harm the vendor? Of course it wouldn't. Your logic is fallacious.
On another note, although China, like many countries is embracing open source software, it doesn't mean that they are anti-Microsoft. Adopting open source software is a reasonable thing to do, independent of other considerations.
The part about this story that gets to me is that the researcher didn't alert Microsoft before posting to a public mailing list. Sure, a lot of people don't like Microsoft, but that's no reason to make it worse for the millions of people who are forced to use Microsoft products, especially for security holes which have yet to be exploited.
While I agree that all vendors, even Evil(tm) ones, should be notified and given adequate time to fix a bug before exploit code is published, I disagree that there is no reason to "make it worse for the millions of people who are forced to use Microsoft products". There are plenty of reasons.
Making things worse for MS users will lead to more people objecting to being "forced" into using MS products (the word "forced" is used loosely, as in your post). The more people that object to the monopoly, the less likihood that the monopoly will continue to thrive. Whether you admit it or not, the proliferation of MS security exploits in the form of viruses, worms and any other means, is a big part of the recent success of the adoption of open source software around the world. People are getting fed up with viruses and security problems on their PCs, and looking to alternatives. Just by looking at alternatives, the world is coming to realize that there are better ways to get software than paying a vendor for a licence to use binaries, under restrictions.
Another reason is that Microsoft itself is getting fed up with the problem, and so maybe some day they'll change their ways and maybe get a part of a clue about security. This ties in with the first reason I cited, in so far as their present solution to their security problems will only make people dislike them more than they already do. MS constantly blames the users for problems in MS software, so their solution is to remove control from the users and put it in the hands of... whomever. This is more good news for MS alternatives.
There are a multitude of reasons that stem directly from the first reason that I mentioned. Lots of good things will happen if the monopoly crumbles. After only a few crumbs have come off the edges, there are already benefits. For example, poor countries are now much more able to build up their infrastructure, thanks to the existence and advocacy of alternatives to the monopoly. The monopoly itself is bad for security: some of the world's leading computer security experts have argued that the lack of platform diversity is itself a security threat. There are many economic arguments about why monopolies are bad.
So MS users may have some pain coming their way, but in the end the result will be beneficial for society.
Au contraire -- that Farscape's plotlines were intelligent enough that they couldn't be captured in the standard "1 hour minus advertising" TV slot. That was part of what made the show a step above the rest. The plot was in fact very consistent, if you view it as a whole. More like a movie, spread out over episodes. If you miss several episodes, then yeah, I can see how one might not understand some elements.
Quibble: the introduction of Americanism following 9/11 was an unfortunate downturn in the series, possibly motivated by the absurdly Americanized competing series, SG1. SG1 is so "go USA" I can't even watch it. Patriotism and sci-fi are just a terrible mix.
.
GAIM 0.70 works fine...
What if biometric authentication were used instead? Thumbprints, retina scans and the like
will probably eventually replace the pile of plastic cards that we're all forced to carry around. The practical problem with the Vancouver nightclubs' plan will be getting customers to go through with the photo ID card process. There will always be bars that choose not to be Orwellian, and there are other things to do in Vancouver besides clubbing. If biometrics is ubiquitous, though, schemes like this might become the norm, like in the movie Minority Report.
.
I guess the US alcohol culture is different to that in Britain...
No doubt that it is, but the topic at hand involves Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
This thread is actually from yesterday, and my ;). Basically that Sun's execs may be clueless, however they are contributing to FOSS despite their perhaps dubious intentions, and in the end, their contributions are making the world a better place for FOSS.
highly unmodded comments about it still apply
And what will happen when XIMIAN/NOVEL change there Evolution Licence ?
Evolution is licensed under the GPL v2. So unless Novell wanted to start over with a fresh codebase, they can't change it's license.
Fuck Sun.
/. crowd. This culture is nothing like the "Enterprise" environment in which execs like Schwartz live. So they don't get it. So what? What have they done that sucks?
They suck.
They're just like most giant companies - they see only economics. What Sun's execs are missing is the whole open source culture, which is really what is relevant to most of the
They've released significant amounts of code into the open source arena, and their new desktop efforts will just mean that there will be more linux boxen in the world. This is a Good Thing. It doesn't matter if the business droids at the top of the corporate ladder don't understand anything besides 'our price vs their price' and marketshare, etc.. More people will be working in an open source environment, which will ultimately improve the technology for everyone, and further erode the Microsoft monopoly. Its all good.
In the part of the country where I live meth labs are a major problem in many counties. Prosecutors using these new procedures are seeing their arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rates increase.
That all sounds pretty wonderful to me. If you're making meth, you're dealing in death and ruined lives.
If you think the laws banning the manufacture of certain drugs are inadequate, then ammend them. Make them more serious than murder and rape... oh wait, they already are... The drug dealers and manufacturers are supplying an existing demand in a blackmarket that was created and is maintained by your government's disfunctional prohibition laws. If you are going to mandate what people can and cannot put into their own bodies, what they can and cannot buy and sell, then you are going to have a blackmarket for those things.
This has absolutely nothing at all to do with "terrorism" or "chemical weapons". Permitting the abuse of these laws is the first step down a steep and dangerous slippery slope of corruption and oppression. Wake up, you fools!
One example in the article is the guy running a meth lab who's now up for a life sentence for 'manufacturing chemical weapons'
DMCA, Patriot Act, War on Drugs, Total Information Awareness, Preemptive Strikes... and the sanctioned abuse of bad laws. The USA is really becoming a disgusting offense to justice.
How many inner city students will be able to afford Windows XP -- now more expensive than entire computer systems? The same goes for MS Office. Poor kids can probably get now-obsolete-by-market-standards hardware for free. For example, I know of one university with a few hundred P200's sitting in storage. No one wants them, and its expensive to recycle them.
Linux user group(s) in Philadelphia should think about finding old, donated equipment, and offer it along with group Linux lessons and installfests to students of "MS High". Contact the student council. MS isn't running the school, they're only providing the technology & support. The exposure to technology that these kids will get at school may spark their interest, but they could have no money for the expensive proprietary software, and we know what happens when MS software is pirated. With some help, they could learn that great software isn't necessarily expensive.
to not have a backup of emails.
I once worked for a comany that was in the midst of a lawsuit. It was company policy that emails were not archived. It made presenting information for discovery so much easier.
I guess that depends on how Evil(tm) your company plans on being. I guess the company you worked for had aspirations to be as Evil(tm) as Microsoft, and by the sounds of it, is well on the way.
Evil(tm) is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.
Keep documentation on everything you do -- you want a detailed to-do list, and a log of what you've done already. When asked to do something new, send them the to-do list, and have them decide on the priority of this new item. Then it will be obvious what will get put on hold while doing this new task. Basically, just remove yourself from the prioritization decisions and let management manage your time. Then there will be no surprises when some things don't get done, and everything is documented, to cover your ass.
:P. And I suddenly had a lot of time to work on important things.
It will let your boss/client guage how busy you are, and after some time, get a feel for how long things take. Plus it makes them feel special - management likes to manage. They like to delegate responsibilities, and if you don't keep them informed of the delegations they've made already, and their consequences, they won't have to accept the management responsibilities that go along with delegation of tasks.
When I took this approach, management decided that nobody was allowed to make IT requests without clearing it with them first. They were quivering with power
Good luck!
Gates can't even coerce his movie mogul partners (even with his power to give the crap away for free) to use Windows on their desktops.
They are probably moving off of SGI workstations (commercial UNIX), not Windows.
Hah.. no, so I can roll back to previous versions (oh, maybe that paragraph I deleted three hours ago would be usefull here after all).
You don't throw out a product with 80% of the market just because you can't get your minority system to work correctly with it.
What is essential to realize with this evaluation is the reason the minority systems don't work correctly with it. It is not a shortcoming of the minorities, but the result of deliberate effort of the monopolist. One can only do so much when relying on reverse-engineered proprietary protocols that change at the whim of the monopolist.
Now the question should be, do you want 80% of your IT environment to depend on a product from a company that behaves this way?