I wrote 'journaled filing system' but I really meant something else. However, I don't think NTFS is a journaled filing system. You may verify this for yourself by reading this site if you like.
I had my comment completely wrong, though. I was actually thinking of a volume manager around a file system. The volume manager works in tandem with a journaled filing system to record changes made to a file to a kind of database. This would allow someone to 'roll back' the file to a prior version.
I don't know if there's an open source version of this sort of thing available, but Veritas provides this. I've never used this product myself, though.. I don't even know if it works for Windows.
I have four years of liberal-arts college behind me, an emphasis on music composition. I've had to study a lot of stuff related to the 'arts' (poetry, music, paintings, sculpture, etc). While I wouldn't go so far as to claim that I know all one might know about it, I'm probably further along than the average person.
The term 'art' seems to always mean different things to different people. As far as the dictionary is concerned, it may be taken to mean 'a sytem of rules serving to facilitate the performance of certain actions; a system of principles and rules for attaining a desired end; method of doing well some special work'. Yet at the university (UNCA, for the curious), it seemed that art meant 'creative self-expression' or the like.
If taken to mean 'creative self-expression', the computer will have a difficult time; how may a computer express itself creatively when it doesn't even know it exists?
Otherwise, by the dictionary definition, one might argue that every computer program of repute performs art specific to its function. To do so, however, exposes a weakness in the dictionary definition; I doubt anyone would think of a computer program's system of rules as conforming to a proper definition of art, although the making of these rules for the computer would be. Or, put another way, the computer program itself may represent the results of a work of art, but its output, unguided (by human intervention), might not be.
Although even this isn't exactly convincing; I view screensavers as excellent examples of computer-generated art.
I suspect the key to answering this comes from Genung: "Science is systematized knowledge... Art is knowledge made efficient by skill." That is, perhaps, programs that perform well (regardless of its respective 'discipline') generate works of art themselves only when those works are skillful in some fashion.
But then, who could be viewed as the author of the work? The programmer or the program?
Surely by now there must be a Microsoft-compatible implementation of a journalled filing system available. One that has a relatively friendly user interface.
With that, it doesn't matter what format the file might be in, you have a sense of 'version' in that the latest file within the system would become the file of interest. If you should discover that the file needs to be 'rolled back' you simply acquire one from an earlier time-stamp. Something like that should be fairly intuitive to work with, I should think.
We have several licensing schemes available for the Open Source enthusiast, all dependant upon one's definition of 'Open Source'. Would you care to comment on each of these licenses, and their various pro's and con's?
Off the top of my head: GPL, QT Open Source, Public Domain, BSD.. most likely others.
It might be interesting if folks started building Open Hardware (much like the Open Software movement). With Open Hardware, the specifications are open (as are the standards), but customers would still need to pay for manufacturing.
I wish we'd start doing something like this... we could then build Linux on top of it, and know that the drivers will work well. Not to mention the benefits of open peer review against the hardware specs.
Aside from the SciFi sound of all this, I can't help but feel how weird such a story seems.
You'd have to race your nuclear toys up to an unsuspecting asteroid, somehow land your payload at just the right places with very little gravity to help, then detonate everything at just the right time.
I don't see this becoming the latest terrorist threat anytime soon.
There's been much integration between our technology and alien technology?
If so, I hope I don't have any close encounters.
[Fleeb] Hey! What do you mean, plucking me out of my sleep like that? And what's with the big eyes?
[Alien] Oh, we're just going to do the usual... probing around for flora and fauna... oh, and they're easier to see you with.
[A sinister-looking device enters the room. One of its protruberances enters where one dares not say.]
[Fleeb, screaming] You bastards! The thing is drilling a hole through my lower intestines! It's killing me!
[Alien to other alien] What do you mean 'I loaded that WinCE OS thing into it'? You fool! You know how it damn near threw us into the star when we installed it to the navigation system!
For some reason, this reminds me of a university professor who found it faster to store all his projects on tape and drive across state to the other university for unpacking into the 'remote' computer than trying to use FTP.
Or maybe I'm not quite understanding this business model.
I'm a little surprised the article suggests dashed hopes for "LinuxLinux" (perhaps a la Little Caesar's PizzaPizza commercials).
Frankly, I'd love to see a company for Linux distros called 'TurboCare'. I would expect it to be Japanese owned, though, to match the various other 'Turbo-' names I saw in that country (e.g. 'TurboHeadphones'... that was a favorite).
Ah well... at least they didn't go with Pocari Sweat.
Re:Just a matter of time before real printed circu
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 2
Did everyone forget about the paper computer article that appeared on Slashdot some time ago?
I do not work in the banking industry myself.. I do work as a software developer for a large corporation.
I think taking an extremely cautious approach towards any banking system warrants merit. No bank wants to risk exposing themselves to massive lawsuits over inadequate security over a person's account. I feel certain banks do not enjoy risk beyond working the stock market.
However, bankers do occasionally embrace new technologies. Witness the ATM machines, which didn't exist as readily today as twenty years ago. Also witness the growing trend in online-banking. As a new technology, open source development holds promise, but hasn't matured yet. But this doesn't rule it out as a viable technology.
Consequently, I think it's too early to say that the banking industry will never embrace open source. I suspect they simply need to wait for it to prove itself further before they may enjoy its benefits.
I will gently side-step the DMCA issue to point out that many banks provide their own developers towards projects in-house. Consequently, I doubt the DMCA issue needs to be drawn in here; banks would simply have their developers close whatever security issue arose. And, if the banks' developers worked with open source development, they would probably find themselves controlling much of the software... to include project management (possibly).
Open source offers a greater chance towards better security than the rather scary practices they currently hold. I've recently read about the transaction protocols used by the banking industry; if they truly use a 56-bit key to encrypt a password without using public-key encryption, in a relatively short period of time, cracking such transactions should become trivial. This is not the sort of freedom open source developers want to see in their information, and neither should bankers. I do not happen to have the URL for this information readily in hand, or I would merrily direct you to it.
While I'm sure some open source project management might be poorly executed, it doesn't mean all projects are poorly managed. I would point towards the linux kernel itself as a relatively good example of project management in the open source model.
If there truly is 'no confidence communicated that any application developed in the open source model would not be secure...' this would indicate a failing of open source evangelism, and not of the technology. I would challenge 348 to provide credible evidence of a well-known, popularly used open source project relying upon security that proved to be less secure than its close-source counterpart.. and further, upon doing so, I would challenge 348 to note how long it would take for the project to repair said security issues.
As for open source zealotry, screams of 'information wants to be free' and whatnot, I suspect these statements show a lack of understanding of open source values, and a misunderstanding of our culture. I would refer you to esr's Homesteading The Noosphere (sic?) for a better understanding of this culture. Of course, as with any group of people, you have your bad elements... but these do not necessarily represent the collective view. It would be like suggesting that all Americans were money-grubbing opportunists.
Would they be in violation of the Nethack license (specifically, "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license, but changing it is not allowed.", which is the first sentence of their license)? What then?
Frankly, it could only improve Quake 3... I much prefer hjkl to moving my mouse around, and I'd be particularly amused to see a nice happy 3-d 'h' symbol attempt to attack me with its razor frizbee.
Supposedly, one may learn the Chinese system of writing (kanji, a non-phonetic writing system) well enough to read a newspaper within a month. You just need a decent book on the topic.
Try James W. Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" volumes 1 and 2, ISBN 0-87040-739-2 and ISBN (JAPAN) 4-88996-002-3. You might be able to get it at Amazon if you don't mind them. They supposedly approach learning the system similiarly to the way a native learns, by using a set of stories to help you remember the kanji. I'm pretty certain, though, that the stories used are different from the ones taught to a native, due to cultural differences.
I originally started programming in BASIC many years ago (possibly when I was 13, too). Today, I work with C++ at a large corporation, and as best as I can determine, I'm considered rather competent.
Admittedly, BASIC sucks, but it provides an okay start. Ultimately, what's really important isn't necessarily the language as much as the drive and desire to learn the fundamentals of programming.
For me, I found it fun to delve into some of the deeper, darker aspects of the system; I used to use the poke/peek statements to bit-twiddle, and I even took the time to learn a little Z-80 assembly so I could do scary neat tricks (this is in my mid-teens, mind you). By sheer experimentation, I eventually developed better techniques that were portable to other languages.
I could just as easily have started with PASCAL, batch files, LISP, ALGOL, PL1, Smalltalk or (god forbid) Perl. It doesn't matter... my own interest in programming drew me to learn whatever languages I wanted to learn.
If I had to do everything all over again, though, I would wish that I had Smalltalk available to me as a kid. Smalltalk is a relatively easy language to learn (in my humble opinion). It also (more importantly) provides a strong object-oriented environment that helps get you thinking about how objects work together. Too often, someone starts out with C or BASIC or some other procedural language, and then finds they have to go through some kind of 'paradigm shift' to adjust to a radically different way of programming with objects.
This 'shift' provided the greatest challange to me as a programmer. I had to learn how to get away from looking at things in terms of process, to see things in terms of interrelationships. Smalltalk makes this relatively easy to see because it's already a fairly robust system of objects communicating with each other.
And.. lucky you.. Smalltalk is freely available these days. You might try GNU Smalltalk..
Ultimately, though, if you simply listen to your child, and see if there's any interest in programming at all, the tike will take to it without much prompting.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you imagine the practical jokes the NASA folks could pull on these guys?
Heh... wouldn't it be funny if I figured out who hacked my Diablo II account and raped my Necromancer... and it turned out to be my boss.
Oh yeah... I'll have that code ready for you...
And they said the design wouldn't scale.
I wrote 'journaled filing system' but I really meant something else. However, I don't think NTFS is a journaled filing system. You may verify this for yourself by reading this site if you like.
I had my comment completely wrong, though. I was actually thinking of a volume manager around a file system. The volume manager works in tandem with a journaled filing system to record changes made to a file to a kind of database. This would allow someone to 'roll back' the file to a prior version.
I don't know if there's an open source version of this sort of thing available, but Veritas provides this. I've never used this product myself, though.. I don't even know if it works for Windows.
A quick run-down on my background:
I have four years of liberal-arts college behind me, an emphasis on music composition. I've had to study a lot of stuff related to the 'arts' (poetry, music, paintings, sculpture, etc). While I wouldn't go so far as to claim that I know all one might know about it, I'm probably further along than the average person.
The term 'art' seems to always mean different things to different people. As far as the dictionary is concerned, it may be taken to mean 'a sytem of rules serving to facilitate the performance of certain actions; a system of principles and rules for attaining a desired end; method of doing well some special work'. Yet at the university (UNCA, for the curious), it seemed that art meant 'creative self-expression' or the like.
If taken to mean 'creative self-expression', the computer will have a difficult time; how may a computer express itself creatively when it doesn't even know it exists?
Otherwise, by the dictionary definition, one might argue that every computer program of repute performs art specific to its function. To do so, however, exposes a weakness in the dictionary definition; I doubt anyone would think of a computer program's system of rules as conforming to a proper definition of art, although the making of these rules for the computer would be. Or, put another way, the computer program itself may represent the results of a work of art, but its output, unguided (by human intervention), might not be.
Although even this isn't exactly convincing; I view screensavers as excellent examples of computer-generated art.
I suspect the key to answering this comes from Genung: "Science is systematized knowledge... Art is knowledge made efficient by skill." That is, perhaps, programs that perform well (regardless of its respective 'discipline') generate works of art themselves only when those works are skillful in some fashion.
But then, who could be viewed as the author of the work? The programmer or the program?
What about using a journaled filing system?
Surely by now there must be a Microsoft-compatible implementation of a journalled filing system available. One that has a relatively friendly user interface.
With that, it doesn't matter what format the file might be in, you have a sense of 'version' in that the latest file within the system would become the file of interest. If you should discover that the file needs to be 'rolled back' you simply acquire one from an earlier time-stamp. Something like that should be fairly intuitive to work with, I should think.
We have several licensing schemes available for the Open Source enthusiast, all dependant upon one's definition of 'Open Source'. Would you care to comment on each of these licenses, and their various pro's and con's?
Off the top of my head: GPL, QT Open Source, Public Domain, BSD.. most likely others.
It might be interesting if folks started building Open Hardware (much like the Open Software movement). With Open Hardware, the specifications are open (as are the standards), but customers would still need to pay for manufacturing.
I wish we'd start doing something like this... we could then build Linux on top of it, and know that the drivers will work well. Not to mention the benefits of open peer review against the hardware specs.
Actually, I strongly suspect this could have a serious impact on the British game Mornington Crescent.
All puns intended, of course.
Aside from the SciFi sound of all this, I can't help but feel how weird such a story seems.
You'd have to race your nuclear toys up to an unsuspecting asteroid, somehow land your payload at just the right places with very little gravity to help, then detonate everything at just the right time.
I don't see this becoming the latest terrorist threat anytime soon.
There's been much integration between our technology and alien technology?
If so, I hope I don't have any close encounters.
[Fleeb] Hey! What do you mean, plucking me out of my sleep like that? And what's with the big eyes?
[Alien] Oh, we're just going to do the usual... probing around for flora and fauna... oh, and they're easier to see you with.
[A sinister-looking device enters the room. One of its protruberances enters where one dares not say.]
[Fleeb, screaming] You bastards! The thing is drilling a hole through my lower intestines! It's killing me!
[Alien to other alien] What do you mean 'I loaded that WinCE OS thing into it'? You fool! You know how it damn near threw us into the star when we installed it to the navigation system!
I'm having this uncomfortable feeling of Microsoft getting involved in some way.
"Abort, Retry, Fail..."
Gives 'Blue Screen Of Death' quite a different perspective, eh?
For some reason, this reminds me of a university professor who found it faster to store all his projects on tape and drive across state to the other university for unpacking into the 'remote' computer than trying to use FTP.
Or maybe I'm not quite understanding this business model.
Gives new meaning to the phrase 'packet collision'. Sorta the Addams Family approach to network management.
Hey, how come the Internet Advertising Bureau itself doesn't have any banner ads on their web site?
I'm a little surprised the article suggests dashed hopes for "LinuxLinux" (perhaps a la Little Caesar's PizzaPizza commercials).
Frankly, I'd love to see a company for Linux distros called 'TurboCare'. I would expect it to be Japanese owned, though, to match the various other 'Turbo-' names I saw in that country (e.g. 'TurboHeadphones'... that was a favorite).
Ah well... at least they didn't go with Pocari Sweat.
Did everyone forget about the paper computer article that appeared on Slashdot some time ago?
I do not work in the banking industry myself.. I do work as a software developer for a large corporation.
I think taking an extremely cautious approach towards any banking system warrants merit. No bank wants to risk exposing themselves to massive lawsuits over inadequate security over a person's account. I feel certain banks do not enjoy risk beyond working the stock market.
However, bankers do occasionally embrace new technologies. Witness the ATM machines, which didn't exist as readily today as twenty years ago. Also witness the growing trend in online-banking. As a new technology, open source development holds promise, but hasn't matured yet. But this doesn't rule it out as a viable technology.
Consequently, I think it's too early to say that the banking industry will never embrace open source. I suspect they simply need to wait for it to prove itself further before they may enjoy its benefits.
I will gently side-step the DMCA issue to point out that many banks provide their own developers towards projects in-house. Consequently, I doubt the DMCA issue needs to be drawn in here; banks would simply have their developers close whatever security issue arose. And, if the banks' developers worked with open source development, they would probably find themselves controlling much of the software... to include project management (possibly).
Open source offers a greater chance towards better security than the rather scary practices they currently hold. I've recently read about the transaction protocols used by the banking industry; if they truly use a 56-bit key to encrypt a password without using public-key encryption, in a relatively short period of time, cracking such transactions should become trivial. This is not the sort of freedom open source developers want to see in their information, and neither should bankers. I do not happen to have the URL for this information readily in hand, or I would merrily direct you to it.
While I'm sure some open source project management might be poorly executed, it doesn't mean all projects are poorly managed. I would point towards the linux kernel itself as a relatively good example of project management in the open source model.
If there truly is 'no confidence communicated that any application developed in the open source model would not be secure...' this would indicate a failing of open source evangelism, and not of the technology. I would challenge 348 to provide credible evidence of a well-known, popularly used open source project relying upon security that proved to be less secure than its close-source counterpart.. and further, upon doing so, I would challenge 348 to note how long it would take for the project to repair said security issues.
As for open source zealotry, screams of 'information wants to be free' and whatnot, I suspect these statements show a lack of understanding of open source values, and a misunderstanding of our culture. I would refer you to esr's Homesteading The Noosphere (sic?) for a better understanding of this culture. Of course, as with any group of people, you have your bad elements... but these do not necessarily represent the collective view. It would be like suggesting that all Americans were money-grubbing opportunists.
If this article hadn't been written, I might have mistook Christmas day's eclipse for a failure to pay the electrical bill. Thanks, Slashdot!
- TreyWhat if someone made a Nethack Mod to Quake 3?
Would they be in violation of the Nethack license (specifically, "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license, but changing it is not allowed.", which is the first sentence of their license)? What then?
Frankly, it could only improve Quake 3... I much prefer hjkl to moving my mouse around, and I'd be particularly amused to see a nice happy 3-d 'h' symbol attempt to attack me with its razor frizbee.
- TreySupposedly, one may learn the Chinese system of writing (kanji, a non-phonetic writing system) well enough to read a newspaper within a month. You just need a decent book on the topic.
Try James W. Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" volumes 1 and 2, ISBN 0-87040-739-2 and ISBN (JAPAN) 4-88996-002-3. You might be able to get it at Amazon if you don't mind them. They supposedly approach learning the system similiarly to the way a native learns, by using a set of stories to help you remember the kanji. I'm pretty certain, though, that the stories used are different from the ones taught to a native, due to cultural differences.
I originally started programming in BASIC many years ago (possibly when I was 13, too). Today, I work with C++ at a large corporation, and as best as I can determine, I'm considered rather competent.
Admittedly, BASIC sucks, but it provides an okay start. Ultimately, what's really important isn't necessarily the language as much as the drive and desire to learn the fundamentals of programming.
For me, I found it fun to delve into some of the deeper, darker aspects of the system; I used to use the poke/peek statements to bit-twiddle, and I even took the time to learn a little Z-80 assembly so I could do scary neat tricks (this is in my mid-teens, mind you). By sheer experimentation, I eventually developed better techniques that were portable to other languages.
I could just as easily have started with PASCAL, batch files, LISP, ALGOL, PL1, Smalltalk or (god forbid) Perl. It doesn't matter... my own interest in programming drew me to learn whatever languages I wanted to learn.
If I had to do everything all over again, though, I would wish that I had Smalltalk available to me as a kid. Smalltalk is a relatively easy language to learn (in my humble opinion). It also (more importantly) provides a strong object-oriented environment that helps get you thinking about how objects work together. Too often, someone starts out with C or BASIC or some other procedural language, and then finds they have to go through some kind of 'paradigm shift' to adjust to a radically different way of programming with objects.
This 'shift' provided the greatest challange to me as a programmer. I had to learn how to get away from looking at things in terms of process, to see things in terms of interrelationships. Smalltalk makes this relatively easy to see because it's already a fairly robust system of objects communicating with each other.
And.. lucky you.. Smalltalk is freely available these days. You might try GNU Smalltalk..
Ultimately, though, if you simply listen to your child, and see if there's any interest in programming at all, the tike will take to it without much prompting.