I've come to regard The New Scientist as the Weekly World News of scientific publications. I don't know how many times they've gone and overthrown some foundational tenet of science on the word of some crackpot, or turned some minor study that basically confirms some already-known fact into a budding scientific revolution.
If their next issue claimed that water was wet, I'd be skeptical. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if they've grossly exaggerated this study's importance, certainty, or novelty (my guess: all three).
You just don't get it. See, laws like the DMCA are designed to protect the rulers (politicians, law enforcement, big business) from the ruled. If a law makes things inconvenient for the rulers, they simply don't follow it. That explains everything from why Congress doesn't have to follow OSHA regs to our newfound ability to hold people indefinitely without trial.
"The machine did not register my vote" sounds about as convincing as "my dog ate my homework". It sounds as though they wanted to vote yes, but couldn't face the political fallout back home.
Where in the story did it say these websites were being used to collect money? I think that if they had a PayPal link up, British Intelligence wouldn't be knocking the website down. Rather, they'd be quietly using the money transfers to gather intel on supporters and recipients alike.
Let me get this straight. Christians are told over and over to repress their sexual thoughts and behaviors, that it is shameful, sinful, and satanic to entertain these wicked desires. Then along come some pictures of gleeful naked people. The Christian finds something pleasant and enjoyable about viewing these pictures and thinking about sex. This pleasure becomes something sinister and shameful that they have to hide from their wives, their family, their friends.
Again, just so we're absolutely clear... it's the porn that's screwing these people up?
Back when I was a Christian (okay, technically Mormon, so you'll probably say it doesn't count), I thought I was "addicted" to porn. But when I finally realized that Big Daddy wasn't looking over my shoulder, ready to smite me, when I realized that there was nothing particularly shameful about enjoying porn, and that it was just a timesink that needed to be limited so I could do more productive things, my addiction ended.
You Christians have such problems with porn because you have to struggle alone with these deep-seated repressions. Get over them, come to terms with the idea that you're meant to enjoy these lascivious thoughts, and stop spoiling things for the rest of us.
Geez Louize! What did the Romans ever do to earn the right to name all nine friggin' planets? Nothing! Okay, there were the aqueducts. But aside from that, the roads, public sanitation, law and order, bathhouses, and the like... nothing!
My proposal: Why not sell the naming rights to whatever megacorp wants to finance a chunk of a manned Mars expidition? Planet Pepsi Xtreme! The choice of the space generation! Okay, that's lame, but it's the sort of lame that will get us to Mars.
Somehow, I just knew that all I had to do was click on this story, type "Ctrl-F rup", and find someone had saved me the trouble of telling the joke.
You know, they really should call the bloody thing Rupert. The whole Roman god kick always struck me as too pretentious-nineteenth-century-Victorian for my tastes.
You shouldn't be calling it "memory mismanagement". You should be calling it a leak.
A leak happens when an application requests memory from the operating system (using new), then throws away its knowledge of it (discarding or changing the pointer) without telling the OS that it's done with it (using delete). While the program is running, the OS cannot allocate the memory elsewhere because it doesn't know that the application is done with it.
When you restart, the application closes, and the OS knows that it doesn't need that memory anymore. Restarting an app should take care of any memory leaked by the app.
Now, if the OS has a memory leak, then you have problems.
Okay, so if I'm surfing along in IE, and open up a PDF, suddenly Acrobat Reader launches inside my web browser, and the File menu now refers to that? For example, if I click on Help, it takes me to the Acrobat help system?
First, how do you know it works this way? Have you tried the beta? Heard it from a friend? Read it on Slashdot? Got it straight from IE's lead developer? For all I know, you're entirely correct. But you don't know what you know until you know how you know what you know, you know?
Given that it works as you claim (that is, it works as I interpret your claim), what happens if I was looking for IE's help menu instead of Acrobat's? If the Help button now refers to the embedded app, how do I get to the Help button for the embedding app?
You compare the situation to Apple's "one menu that always refers to the focused app" system. But it's more the situation you'd get if they allowed apps to be embedded within apps, and the menu always referred to the innermost app.
This strikes me as just of many examples in IE's new interface where the developers thought, "Why should we have two buttons when one will do?" They've combined the forward and back histories into one (though not in such a way that the "you are here" page is intuitive). They've combined the reload and stop buttons into one (another decision I dislike). Screen space is precious, but they've gone too far.
In conclusion, there are two things the menu could refer to, it will take users a good while to figure out when it refers to what, and I don't see how to pull this off without sometimes losing access to the menu for the containing app.
I'm not sure, but I think you're misunderstanding the nature of the project. The project isn't intended to give Firefox the ability to run ActiveX controls (ick). The goal is to turn Firefox itself into an embeddable ActiveX control that people can use to build other software.
Say you wanted to build a web browser like the "Crazy Browser" mentioned in the review. You could use the Mozilla ActiveX doohickey, much the way that browser uses the guts of IE, and build your own user interface on top of it. Since the project goal is to provide the same interface as the IE ActiveX control, it probably wouldn't be hard to switch back and forth between the two.
If you understood all this already, I do apologize, but I'm confused about what you're trying to say in your post.
Re:FreeBSD is free'er, MacOS X better for users
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 1
The BSD license is good for the little guy? How so? Conforming to the GPL isn't hard, and legal action only seems to happen in extreme cases. So it's hard to believe that legal liabilities are the most pressing concern for small-time developers.
If I were a "little guy" who wanted to create and market his own version of a BSD program, I would be more worried about MegaSuperCorpX seeing the niftiness of my version, grabbing the source of the original, making their own, incompatible version, and using their vast marketplace leverage to turn my version into roadkill.
Now, if I'm deriving my application from a GPL'ed source, they can make their own version, but they can't lock their code away from me.
Yes, BSD provides more freedom, but that statement only applies to the initial recipient of the code. No guarantees of freedom exist for anyone else.
Not a bad point, though that's not the way the etymology of "novel" actually developed. The word "novel" was coined in the 16th century because the stories contained therein were considered, well, novel. In addition, the term was often used to refer to a single story in a bound collection. Magazine serials didn't really come about until the 19th century, as a way to fill pulp magazines.
But the strict factuality of the comparison isn't important. In retrospect, it does make sense to make a distinction between the forms. I think my initial reaction was that the inventors of the term "graphic novel" were being pretentious, trying to elevate their work to an art form by equating their works with an already credible genre. But upon further consideration (and some berating by a real life friend who occasionally monitors my Slashdotting misadventures), the whole thing is starting to make more sense.
The term "graphic novel" was popularized by Will Eisner after it appeared on the cover of the trade paperback edition of A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Baronet Books, published October 1978)
I guess you're working under the standard assumption that Mr. Anonymous Coward, Esq., is about twelve years old, then?
Frankly, nothing in the Wikipedia entry dissuades me from the idea that "Graphic Novel" means either, "okay, yeah, it's a comic book, but it's a good comic book," or, "Okay, yeah, it's a comic book, but we feel rather pretentious today." The only non-subjective distinction I could glean from the article is that graphic novels are usually longer than a standard comic book. But given that some standard comic books have plot arcs spanning dozens of episodes, that distinction strikes me as an unimportant one.
Yes, "comic book" carries a lot of negative connotations. It implies that on some level the work in question is fluff, not suitable for anyone over the age of fifteen. So did the term "video game" twenty years ago. Since then, the genre has expanded and a lot of games of unquestionable artistry got released. Now it's possible to talk about games having powerful stories, compelling characters, and artistic merit without so much as a raised eyebrow from most people.
If the fans of those first few experiments in artful gaming had rebranded the works "raster novels" or some other equally silly term, I don't think that evolution of the original term would ever have happened. Me, my reaction to this story was, "Hmm, so it's based on a comic book? Wait, there are good comic books out there? Where do I find these dealies?"
Stop being so insistent on terminology. You're nearly as bad as the person you're responding to. If these "graphic novelists" are doing what they claim they are doing, they don't need the crutch of a separate designation; the term "comic book" will expand to fit their works.
Just my view, as a total graphicomic novelbook n00b. Take it for what little it's worth.
People were saying the same thing about Firefly, based solely on the trailer. On both, I prefer to adopt a "wait-and-see" approach, because the movie might be solid, but the trailer dumbed down in order to convince people that it has mass market appeal.
When it comes out, grab a copy off bittorrent, and decide if it's worth the eight bucks. The purpose of the trailer is to convince the broadest possible spectrum of people that the movie is worth their time, and that means lots of skin, explosions, and flashing from image to image like an ADHD eight-year-old wired to his eyeballs on expresso.
Summary: In general, it is possible that a movie created to appeal to you might have a trailer created to appeal to Joe Wal-Mart.
The rhs item ("a good movie") is of type Movie, while the lhs item ("Any movie where the bad guy has no depth") is of type list. Use of this comparator should cause a compile time error. On the other hand, you might have overloaded it, which is a case of very bad design. Overloaded operators should do what they imply they do.
Allow me to suggest alternative code:
bool Movie::isBadMovie() {
if( badguy.depth == 0 )
return true;
else if( 1 )// todo: get other signs of suckitude from Ebert
return false; }
// todo: Stop posting pseudocode to/. // It never survives the code review.
Complete accountability is wonderful in theory, but problematic in practice. First, even theoretically, it can only work if everyone is held accountable. If you're accountable to the police, but the police are not accountable to the people they serve, then anonymity might be required in order to report corruption and whatnot.
Now let's move on to practice. Say you want to do something pretty much harmless, but frowned upon by society at large, like lighting up a joint, having sex with your girlfriend, or killing a hobo with a ball-peen hammer. If society bans certain acts arbitrarily and irrationally, then you shouldn't have to be "accountable" to that sort of insanity.
Violate my copyright???? You *will* be hearing from my lawyers.:)
Oh, all right. Ahem, "I do hereby release my earlier post under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license." Actually, I really don't care about attribution, but they took away that variation because it wasn't very popular.
Wonderful idea. His email seems to be john@dvorak.org. I'm sending him the following:
Mr. Dvorak,
I just read your article, "Creative Commons Humbug", and would like to reprint it on my blog as a tutorial on how to wax indignant about a subject without performing even the most basic research about it beforehand.
Bill Gates realizes that he made a bunch of hugely arrogant mistakes that sabotaged his efforts with the content providers, but has humbled himself, turned over a new leaf, and is now ready to make a bunch of hugely arrogant mistakes that will sabotage his efforts with the content buyers.
What's the old saying? Something about it being impossible for a Microsoft product to not suck before version 3.0? It sounds like Gates has a whole new series of lessons to learn before Microsoft gets this right.
Yawn. It's not slander. It's not even directed against HBR. Its saying that the PHBs who read it often do stupid things afterwards. People read stuff like this, and somehow manage to find justification in them for doing whatever it was they intended to do in the first place.
Consider this: Kids her age in neighboring Afghanistan are disarming landmines by that age.
Getting certifications, disarming unexploded ordinance... what's wrong with American kids? I can't recall meeting a ten year old with any practical skills whatsoever.
She's from Pakistan, not India. As near as I can tell, Pakistan is very nearly an Islamic theocracy. India may have some problems, but being from Pakistan makes the story far more impressive.
I don't think your accusations are fair. It sounded to me like her parents were simply giving her further opportunities to explore a field that she discovered on her own and pursued on her own.
Me, I don't have memories of this idyllic childhood you describe. What I remember was being bored bored bored so bloody bored. I lived in a rural town, and didn't have many friends. So my summers were spent watching television. We didn't even have cable. I don't think FOX was even a network at that point. Meanwhile, this girl is pursuing an education in a highly technical field, earning some measure of fame, traveling abroad to meet one of the most powerful and influential men in the world, and chewing him out for not hiring enough women.
Maybe I'm living vicariously through this kid. Maybe her parents are also. But my first impression is that she's having one rockin' childhood, and I'm pleasantly jealous.
The article says she earned a "Microsoft Certified Application Developer" certification, and that she programmed a calculator in C#.
I don't know C#.
This isn't your average nine year old.
Or maybe she is, and we just don't give nine year olds enough credit.
In any case, she did something very cool, and we shouldn't be trying to tear down a little girl to make ourselves feel a bit less like the discontented band of underachievers that we really are. Instead, we should be congratulating her, and encouraging her to get some Linux certifications under her belt.
Slashdot Mirror
I've come to regard The New Scientist as the Weekly World News of scientific publications. I don't know how many times they've gone and overthrown some foundational tenet of science on the word of some crackpot, or turned some minor study that basically confirms some already-known fact into a budding scientific revolution.
If their next issue claimed that water was wet, I'd be skeptical. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if they've grossly exaggerated this study's importance, certainty, or novelty (my guess: all three).
You just don't get it. See, laws like the DMCA are designed to protect the rulers (politicians, law enforcement, big business) from the ruled. If a law makes things inconvenient for the rulers, they simply don't follow it. That explains everything from why Congress doesn't have to follow OSHA regs to our newfound ability to hold people indefinitely without trial.
"The machine did not register my vote" sounds about as convincing as "my dog ate my homework". It sounds as though they wanted to vote yes, but couldn't face the political fallout back home.
Where in the story did it say these websites were being used to collect money? I think that if they had a PayPal link up, British Intelligence wouldn't be knocking the website down. Rather, they'd be quietly using the money transfers to gather intel on supporters and recipients alike.
Let me get this straight. Christians are told over and over to repress their sexual thoughts and behaviors, that it is shameful, sinful, and satanic to entertain these wicked desires. Then along come some pictures of gleeful naked people. The Christian finds something pleasant and enjoyable about viewing these pictures and thinking about sex. This pleasure becomes something sinister and shameful that they have to hide from their wives, their family, their friends.
Again, just so we're absolutely clear... it's the porn that's screwing these people up?
Back when I was a Christian (okay, technically Mormon, so you'll probably say it doesn't count), I thought I was "addicted" to porn. But when I finally realized that Big Daddy wasn't looking over my shoulder, ready to smite me, when I realized that there was nothing particularly shameful about enjoying porn, and that it was just a timesink that needed to be limited so I could do more productive things, my addiction ended.
You Christians have such problems with porn because you have to struggle alone with these deep-seated repressions. Get over them, come to terms with the idea that you're meant to enjoy these lascivious thoughts, and stop spoiling things for the rest of us.
It's heated by the excitement generated by the Internet! The blogosphere is abuzz, I tell you! Positively abuzz!
Geez Louize! What did the Romans ever do to earn the right to name all nine friggin' planets? Nothing! Okay, there were the aqueducts. But aside from that, the roads, public sanitation, law and order, bathhouses, and the like... nothing!
My proposal: Why not sell the naming rights to whatever megacorp wants to finance a chunk of a manned Mars expidition? Planet Pepsi Xtreme! The choice of the space generation! Okay, that's lame, but it's the sort of lame that will get us to Mars.
Thank you.
Somehow, I just knew that all I had to do was click on this story, type "Ctrl-F rup", and find someone had saved me the trouble of telling the joke.
You know, they really should call the bloody thing Rupert. The whole Roman god kick always struck me as too pretentious-nineteenth-century-Victorian for my tastes.
You shouldn't be calling it "memory mismanagement". You should be calling it a leak.
A leak happens when an application requests memory from the operating system (using new), then throws away its knowledge of it (discarding or changing the pointer) without telling the OS that it's done with it (using delete). While the program is running, the OS cannot allocate the memory elsewhere because it doesn't know that the application is done with it.
When you restart, the application closes, and the OS knows that it doesn't need that memory anymore. Restarting an app should take care of any memory leaked by the app.
Now, if the OS has a memory leak, then you have problems.
Okay, so if I'm surfing along in IE, and open up a PDF, suddenly Acrobat Reader launches inside my web browser, and the File menu now refers to that? For example, if I click on Help, it takes me to the Acrobat help system?
First, how do you know it works this way? Have you tried the beta? Heard it from a friend? Read it on Slashdot? Got it straight from IE's lead developer? For all I know, you're entirely correct. But you don't know what you know until you know how you know what you know, you know?
Given that it works as you claim (that is, it works as I interpret your claim), what happens if I was looking for IE's help menu instead of Acrobat's? If the Help button now refers to the embedded app, how do I get to the Help button for the embedding app?
You compare the situation to Apple's "one menu that always refers to the focused app" system. But it's more the situation you'd get if they allowed apps to be embedded within apps, and the menu always referred to the innermost app.
This strikes me as just of many examples in IE's new interface where the developers thought, "Why should we have two buttons when one will do?" They've combined the forward and back histories into one (though not in such a way that the "you are here" page is intuitive). They've combined the reload and stop buttons into one (another decision I dislike). Screen space is precious, but they've gone too far.
In conclusion, there are two things the menu could refer to, it will take users a good while to figure out when it refers to what, and I don't see how to pull this off without sometimes losing access to the menu for the containing app.
I'm not sure, but I think you're misunderstanding the nature of the project. The project isn't intended to give Firefox the ability to run ActiveX controls (ick). The goal is to turn Firefox itself into an embeddable ActiveX control that people can use to build other software.
Say you wanted to build a web browser like the "Crazy Browser" mentioned in the review. You could use the Mozilla ActiveX doohickey, much the way that browser uses the guts of IE, and build your own user interface on top of it. Since the project goal is to provide the same interface as the IE ActiveX control, it probably wouldn't be hard to switch back and forth between the two.
If you understood all this already, I do apologize, but I'm confused about what you're trying to say in your post.
The BSD license is good for the little guy? How so? Conforming to the GPL isn't hard, and legal action only seems to happen in extreme cases. So it's hard to believe that legal liabilities are the most pressing concern for small-time developers.
If I were a "little guy" who wanted to create and market his own version of a BSD program, I would be more worried about MegaSuperCorpX seeing the niftiness of my version, grabbing the source of the original, making their own, incompatible version, and using their vast marketplace leverage to turn my version into roadkill.
Now, if I'm deriving my application from a GPL'ed source, they can make their own version, but they can't lock their code away from me.
Yes, BSD provides more freedom, but that statement only applies to the initial recipient of the code. No guarantees of freedom exist for anyone else.
I would continue, but I believe IHBT.
What's the matter, coward? Afraid to use your real name? Huh? HUH???
Not a bad point, though that's not the way the etymology of "novel" actually developed. The word "novel" was coined in the 16th century because the stories contained therein were considered, well, novel. In addition, the term was often used to refer to a single story in a bound collection. Magazine serials didn't really come about until the 19th century, as a way to fill pulp magazines.
But the strict factuality of the comparison isn't important. In retrospect, it does make sense to make a distinction between the forms. I think my initial reaction was that the inventors of the term "graphic novel" were being pretentious, trying to elevate their work to an art form by equating their works with an already credible genre. But upon further consideration (and some berating by a real life friend who occasionally monitors my Slashdotting misadventures), the whole thing is starting to make more sense.
Frankly, nothing in the Wikipedia entry dissuades me from the idea that "Graphic Novel" means either, "okay, yeah, it's a comic book, but it's a good comic book," or, "Okay, yeah, it's a comic book, but we feel rather pretentious today." The only non-subjective distinction I could glean from the article is that graphic novels are usually longer than a standard comic book. But given that some standard comic books have plot arcs spanning dozens of episodes, that distinction strikes me as an unimportant one.
Yes, "comic book" carries a lot of negative connotations. It implies that on some level the work in question is fluff, not suitable for anyone over the age of fifteen. So did the term "video game" twenty years ago. Since then, the genre has expanded and a lot of games of unquestionable artistry got released. Now it's possible to talk about games having powerful stories, compelling characters, and artistic merit without so much as a raised eyebrow from most people.
If the fans of those first few experiments in artful gaming had rebranded the works "raster novels" or some other equally silly term, I don't think that evolution of the original term would ever have happened. Me, my reaction to this story was, "Hmm, so it's based on a comic book? Wait, there are good comic books out there? Where do I find these dealies?"
Stop being so insistent on terminology. You're nearly as bad as the person you're responding to. If these "graphic novelists" are doing what they claim they are doing, they don't need the crutch of a separate designation; the term "comic book" will expand to fit their works.
Just my view, as a total graphicomic novelbook n00b. Take it for what little it's worth.
People were saying the same thing about Firefly, based solely on the trailer. On both, I prefer to adopt a "wait-and-see" approach, because the movie might be solid, but the trailer dumbed down in order to convince people that it has mass market appeal.
When it comes out, grab a copy off bittorrent, and decide if it's worth the eight bucks. The purpose of the trailer is to convince the broadest possible spectrum of people that the movie is worth their time, and that means lots of skin, explosions, and flashing from image to image like an ADHD eight-year-old wired to his eyeballs on expresso.
Summary: In general, it is possible that a movie created to appeal to you might have a trailer created to appeal to Joe Wal-Mart.
Allow me to suggest alternative code:
Complete accountability is wonderful in theory, but problematic in practice. First, even theoretically, it can only work if everyone is held accountable. If you're accountable to the police, but the police are not accountable to the people they serve, then anonymity might be required in order to report corruption and whatnot.
Now let's move on to practice. Say you want to do something pretty much harmless, but frowned upon by society at large, like lighting up a joint, having sex with your girlfriend, or killing a hobo with a ball-peen hammer. If society bans certain acts arbitrarily and irrationally, then you shouldn't have to be "accountable" to that sort of insanity.
Violate my copyright???? You *will* be hearing from my lawyers. :)
Oh, all right. Ahem, "I do hereby release my earlier post under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license." Actually, I really don't care about attribution, but they took away that variation because it wasn't very popular.
Dvorak hasn't responded to mine. Pity.
Wonderful idea. His email seems to be john@dvorak.org. I'm sending him the following:
Mr. Dvorak,
I just read your article, "Creative Commons Humbug", and would like to reprint it on my blog as a tutorial on how to wax indignant about a subject without performing even the most basic research about it beforehand.
May I?
Bill Gates realizes that he made a bunch of hugely arrogant mistakes that sabotaged his efforts with the content providers, but has humbled himself, turned over a new leaf, and is now ready to make a bunch of hugely arrogant mistakes that will sabotage his efforts with the content buyers.
What's the old saying? Something about it being impossible for a Microsoft product to not suck before version 3.0? It sounds like Gates has a whole new series of lessons to learn before Microsoft gets this right.
Yawn. It's not slander. It's not even directed against HBR. Its saying that the PHBs who read it often do stupid things afterwards. People read stuff like this, and somehow manage to find justification in them for doing whatever it was they intended to do in the first place.
Consider this: Kids her age in neighboring Afghanistan are disarming landmines by that age.
Getting certifications, disarming unexploded ordinance... what's wrong with American kids? I can't recall meeting a ten year old with any practical skills whatsoever.
That's it, I'm adopting an Afghani kid.
She's from Pakistan, not India. As near as I can tell, Pakistan is very nearly an Islamic theocracy. India may have some problems, but being from Pakistan makes the story far more impressive.
I don't think your accusations are fair. It sounded to me like her parents were simply giving her further opportunities to explore a field that she discovered on her own and pursued on her own.
Me, I don't have memories of this idyllic childhood you describe. What I remember was being bored bored bored so bloody bored. I lived in a rural town, and didn't have many friends. So my summers were spent watching television. We didn't even have cable. I don't think FOX was even a network at that point. Meanwhile, this girl is pursuing an education in a highly technical field, earning some measure of fame, traveling abroad to meet one of the most powerful and influential men in the world, and chewing him out for not hiring enough women.
Maybe I'm living vicariously through this kid. Maybe her parents are also. But my first impression is that she's having one rockin' childhood, and I'm pleasantly jealous.
The article says she earned a "Microsoft Certified Application Developer" certification, and that she programmed a calculator in C#.
I don't know C#.
This isn't your average nine year old.
Or maybe she is, and we just don't give nine year olds enough credit.
In any case, she did something very cool, and we shouldn't be trying to tear down a little girl to make ourselves feel a bit less like the discontented band of underachievers that we really are. Instead, we should be congratulating her, and encouraging her to get some Linux certifications under her belt.