If you're doing a device driver or something that interacts with conditions within the machine without a lot of user interaction then a text editor may be all you need because there's an implicit degree of organization within that environment.
It seems to me that where the GUI can come in handy is in dealing with the human interface. This becomes truer and truer as the interaction becomes more and more meta --that is, as you have to account for more potential courses of action based on user input. If you don't have a development GUI here to help you hold all your conceptual place holders, you're fighting against yourself and will probably become frustrated with your work or develop your own GUI to save your project. Gee, maybe that's where these IDEs come from.
So, the question is weak as usual, hardly more than flame bait. Meaningless debates about which is BETTER just get the kids all excited and start a few pissin contests at best. After all, most GUI dev tools have command line interfaces built in, so the distinction only appears clear to those who don't know any better.
I wanted to use Bryce because the USGS had a plug-in for their satellite maps that only works with Bryce, but I got so fed up with the interface I decided to wait till they get around to putting them into.dxf like they should have from the beginning so I can use whatever 3D environment I prefer.
Just goes to show you, you can't please all the people. Same goes for Poser. The presmise is cool, but the interface just seems to make work and get in the way. I'll take power users.
Treating Slashdot as though it was a Linux version of ZDNet misses the whole point as far as I'm concerned as a rhetorician.
Slashdot is a FORUM. Ranting about all the MS loving talking heads like Dvorak or the Salon whores is perfectly justified though petty and borish. But when you extend the definition of journalism to include a forum like Slashdot that is closer to a newsgroup than an on-line magazine you've passed into incoherent rambling and I am forced to virtually bitch slap you back into reality.
Calling telecommuting extreme because it's far away doesn't make much sense. After all, when we add the "tele" prefix we're supposed to assume it's distant. I have to agree with an earlier poster who raised this question.
But whatever, I'll still take the bait. I'm an American living in Taiwan and I work for a company in France. (not Dassault, I swear)
Ta Da! Did I win?
In fact, I did. It's rad. It's not the kind of situation you find in the local paper help wanted section, but if things work out that way, so be it.
Gratified to have shared my exotic little post card better-than-that-russia-stuff image, I return to the fact that this was a ridiculous premise. Anybody anywhere on the face of the earth with a working phone may as well be anywhere else where there's another working phone and that's hardly a news story.
Hang the DJ!
I say this article sucked.
Clueless hype is all that's out there these hot summer days. It's ridiculous. They did concede that IPv6 is inevitable, but they sure spent some time wringing hands over totally irrelevant crap at the same time. I saw that link on CNN earlier in the evening and didn't read it because I knew it would suck and only went back and read it only because I saw the link here on/. and knew I could vent.
For those of us old enough to go ahead and got busy organizing networks here and there back when ICANN was getting started and you could just ask for net numbers --as I and many others did-- the problem is all too clear. The beauracratic, financial and legal powers that became involved over the years totally twisted the original premise. If you want a frickin' number you get one. If you want a thousand, you get a thousand. They're just numbers. Deal with it.
But that's not what it turned into at all. Vast portions of those billions of IPv4 numbers don't go anywhere because network routing is a financial issue closely intertwined with a technical issue that few people outside of open source are familiar with.
It's irrelevant though because IPv6 is inevitable and this has already been covered in so many other ways.
And, to top it off, dynamic domain names makes it all meta anyway. Yeah, I'm not crying about the way things are by any means but more numbers is such a rational idea. And why stop at IPv6, next step is get rid of this restricive domain naming stuff. They've already started using Chinese characters at some domain registrars. So let's just name domains like long file names so we can use popular phrases! Shit, you don't think there will be a gold rush on that shit? There's a limited set of English phrases. You take that from an English major.
There's room for lots of approaches, I'm sure.
I felt the author was a bit disingenuous with this quote:
"A little submarine that was to be a hunter-killer for cancer cells would have to carry on board a little diagnostic laboratory, and because that laboratory would require sampling devices and reagents and reaction chambers and analytical devices, it would cease to be little."
This is clearly a mix of humor and a rhetorical stab at the nanotech research community. That's fine for a popular magazine like SciAm, but it's not a serious analytical point. We'd be kidding ourselves to pretend that the only possible techniques for identifying cancer cells when parked before them on the nanoscale would require lab reagents and little miniature lab assistants in white coats drawn by Gary Larson.
Of course SciAm has always been a popular publication masquerading as a scholarly journal and evocative claims have long been the stock in trade.
Good one, I guess.
It's nice to be able to see more than just the most recent four posts, but being able to page through ALL of them would be conveneient at some point. I know, you can just do a search for your user ID, but that's not exactly the same thing.
Also, how about getting rid of the text on the top of the "Your Info" page that questions why people should be interested in themselves. I've taken offence at that from the fist time I saw it. If you don't take interest in yourself, why should anybody else give a flying fuck? Assuming that people who are concerned with themselves and the responses to their own posts are somehow irregular seems bizarre and highly illogical.
If the goal of Slashdot is, in fact, an insightful discussion, we probably want people participating who are very conscious of and proud of their self image rather than the sad masses begging for attention because they feel so worthless and pathetic that they need to seek out attention by the lowest common denominator --acting like annoying children smearing shit on the walls and calling other people names etc.
How about this for the new text on the Your Info page:
This is your user info page. There are thousands more, but this one is yours. Here we have archived your eloquent contributions to our profound forum. This is your private sanctuary in which the text of your thoughts have been immortalized and conveniently organized by the caring Slashdot staff. We encourage you to re-read your own work and contemplate the greatness that is you. If you're looking to change your password or click pretty widgets to kill time, try clicking Preferences.
So MS makes a new catch phrase and everybody is supposed to shit their pants?
The web,/. aside, is a frickin' lame excuse for one big corporate ad at best. Sometimes ads are cool. I spend hours a day reading ads for stuff I'm interested in like all the other surfers out there, but a browser is not an OS and it never will be.
If there's enough bandwidth to make web services workable then specific apps will be developed to implement them, but they won't be built around freakin' web browsers.
Notice that the posters clutching their guts over this silliness are mostly in financial services. Yeah, that's where all the real open source heart is at.
I used to have great respect for people who could speak multiple languages --I'm off topic here talking about language in general rather than programming in specific. I've got a little anecdote though and I'd like to share it.
I moved to Asia from California in my early twenties looking for fame and fotrune and sleazy discos. In the latter, I met all these cute asian babes who could speak three or four languages on average. As an American I was so impressed by this. I assumed these lurid disco dollies were really on the ball. Over time, I realized how far from the mark I was and how totally disconnected language skills and intelligence were.
I knew girls who were raped and beaten repeatedly and I made the mistake of trying to step in and act all righteous like an American boy thinks he oughtta, but boy did I find out the hard way that my assistance was not welcomed and even led to hostility from the victims themselves even when they had come to me crying and asking for help.
Fair enough, I learned a bit about the real world and how to detatch myself from other people's affairs --even the cute ones asking for help. I also learned that the ability to memorize languages is not an indicator of intelligence as I understand the term.
Having said this, I'm very proud of my own Chinese and English literary skills and I consider myself a sophisticated programmer although I wouldn't know C code from a chemistry formula.
It goes back to the phrase "to be well read." You know the deal, you can read three books and be well read; wheras you can read variations on the same trash all your life and never make the grade.
If you read all the threads, you'd see where I show where the author --you?-- lifted the whole master slave SM reference from Nietzche. What the hell is this deconstructionist stuff you're talking about? I'm talking rhetoric and you're talkin' trash.
If you were in the front row in one of my classes, I'd spit all over you.
If that articles was any indication of Ars, then I'm not too impressed.
Mr. Hanibal tries to step outside of the rhetoric of the Intellectual Property debate, but that's where the real action is. I would allow that, but for the fact that he wants to use structure as a metaphor and that makes me associate him with his illustrious predecessors. Among these predecessors is Nietzche who famously wrote aphorisms.
This piece is hardly aphoristic.
But wait, let me explain what that means and my original point will be clearer.
Nietzche was a huge inspiration on many thinkers who believed that answers to compex questions could be found by speaking in terms of structures.
But what was it about Nietzche's writing? Perhaps it's a mere side note that I'm overemphasizing, but one very noticeable thing about Nietzche's writing style was his use of aphorisms. For the kids in the crowd --and I'm being pedantic, so if you're not a kid you can fuck off-- Nietzche makes for an odd read because it's got all these slogans stuck in there.
You know what they're like . . . that's right, sig files.
Well this Ars article totally ducks the slogan side of things and then owes all this stuff to the masters and doesn't mention it.
Don't buy it, well check this out.
Here's an aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil --even the titles are cool!, that Ars article had a weak title. Anyways, here it is--
"There are master morality and slave morality."(F.N.)
See, this exact concept that was brought up on page three of the article is covered heavily by Nietzche, ie, who should owe whom respect and when and how in a master/slave situation. So, the debt is there whether it's intended or not.
Given the presence of this backgroud that the writer intentionally conjures you'd hope there would be some debate worthy one liners or at least some obscenity or profane reference, but that just didn't happen. Sorry, Ars, don't call us, we'll call you.
I recommend our budding structuralist read Jakobson's essay on Baudelaiure's Le Chats. You'll find it in any university library. Perhaps you even recall, that Levi Strauss got very fascinated with this notion of "discovering" the underlying structures of language and even thought that it extended the bounds of language to include non-verbal, non-textual elements as well -- led to semiotics as you will recall from last week's lecture.
Eh hem, but that's only for history buffs who want extra credit. As to the topic at hand, the author flys in the face of all the poststructuralist theorists, particularly Derrida, with his insistence that there is some deeper meaning to be found in the IP debate by mudding the waters in a frezy of defining the long efaced metaphor of structure.
There's nothing there. You may as well be staring at the sun, son. The fact is, the debate must take place in rhetoric. If you find rhetoric uncomfortable, then don't write articles about the IP debate. Easy.
Seriously reading through a Grolliers CD encyclopedia a few years ago, in the cover-to-cover sense, I came across a little error that I pointed out to with a letter to the editor. I know we're talking Brittanica here, but Grolliers is another example of a competing for-profit encyclopedia so this may be of interest.
They had an article about the use of corn in ancient Greek religious ceremonies. That struck me as strange as I recalled that I had read that corn came from the New World. There had to be something wrong. Either corn was european, or the Greeks didn't use corn in their worship.
The encyclopedia staff and I found out that the word "corn" as it had been used in the article on the greeks originated with sources written hundreds of years ago when the maize plant was still relatively new to europeans who used the term "corn" similarly to what we now call "grain", ie, a broader category of crunchy bit than that plant now known as corn.
At least that was their bullshit coverup.
So, this obvious factual inaccuracy for any reader assuming the article was written in modern English had been in Grolliers for however many decades since the inception of the project now and finally got updated for free from yours truly the nerd himself. But to tell you the truth, I'm not even sure that they will bother making any changes or that any one in a position to do so will ever bother.
That's a real experience from someone who loves encyclopedias enough to actually read them. I think an open encyclopedia promises accountability that private concerns can't handle because they can't lose face. Being hoity toity stick in the ass about star contributors is stupid. I have to assume Buckminster Fuller and Einstein would fully appreciate having their Britannica pieces redistributed freely.
The same thing goes for academic testing. Why do we use ETS' bastard tests? How about open source standardized testing? I've caught ETS making factual errors too. What do you expect, grad students do all the damn work for them if you judge by the quality of their "research." Used Grolliers no doubt. Next time, hire a real editor.
Yeah, that's the catch, isn't it. I can't reant all day, but I expect top get paid for catching other people's errors somewhere down the line, don't I?
Oh well, screw it, I'll keep on editing encyclopedias and standardized tests for free if I can have all the media I can collect and fat pipes to get it with. Sounds like a social contract to me.
Whoa! Nice work. The salts. Man, you schooled 'em with that one. That's straight off a scantron test.
That sure do make too helluva much sense that you'd encounter brines on the surface of a planet, don't it? I mean what with our own beloved oceans all full of magnesium and sodium and whatnot. And Mars supposedly having dried up oceans. That sounds like a damn salty situation to me.
And the cruel thing is that those bitter tears of the earlier poster when he realizes what a fool he was and cries himself to sleep will remind him in their saltiness of his own failure to observe the obvious.
Only someone with money to burn would spend hundreds of millions of dollars coming up with a better, cheaper and stronger way to build a house given that such research was carried out extensively throughout the 30s 40s and 50s and resulted in little more than the clarification of the fact that people insist on living in square wooden boxes.
Felix Candela, the famous Mexican ferrocement shell designer, produced buildings so cheaply that he refused to disclose his materials costs because of the damage it would have done to the traditional construction industry if others realized what he was getting away with.
Felix's "trick" was to build walls of only one and a half inches thick with dense woven meshes of relatively thin guage reinforcing steel. This was a very scientific approach to the application of ferrocement in that it emphasized the accurate placement of the steel --which photos depict as very similar to highly intricate interwoven 3D wireframes-- rather than reliance upon the notorious instability of concrete.
The practice was considered such a threat to the construction industry --aws well as being linked to communism-- that the US set a standard of a minimum of three inches thick for all ferrocement shell stuructures. These heavier, thicker walls require much more cement and steel and are therefore much heavier hence requiring larger foundations and limiting design considerations.
So, the innocent notion of the helpful patent system saving us from our own devices mentioned by the above post is poorly served by the analogy to the housing industry. If anything, the history of housing ominously illustrates the reality of government legislation to protect vested interet against innovation.
That's true with samples for loops, too isn't it? You don't want people knowing the mic is on if you're trying to get amateurs to make some noise, or even better you want people who can act right.
But most folks can't act for shit. So, you can't get anything worth having if you say the mic's on. Stagefright is real. I just did a class of 85 mouths this evening so it's fresh in my head.
Put that in the reality of an officer's position and you can't really say the mic is on without coming across as though you're doing an interview or something.
So, what's the topic? I mean it doesn't work that way. It's not like you're gonna click on your mic and turn to the officer and start asking him the questions --are you?
If so, then why did you pull him over would be a great starter, and indeed that's the first question that we expect in this interview process. But the catch is obviously that you didn't pull over the cop, the cop pulled you over.
Hmm. I think Boston is lame anyways. I was just there a few months ago. It's cold. Why do people live there? Harvard blows. They wouldn't even let me piss on campus. They call that a school? For the first twenty years or so they used to only go to school there if there was free beer. That's true. Look it up. I'm not surprised. Its sucks. I don't understand why it's still so thriving. I'd rather live in New Mexico and I'm not planning on movin' to New Mexico.
If somebody has what it takes to go off on a project without waiting for management to tell them how to wipe their ass then all power to those who would take the power.
I strongly believe any one who can, should force a project out of managements hands and take the upper hand by doing so. If you do so, you're a real prima donna and that's always a good thing if it is indeed real and not just a fantasy. It's like basketball. If you've got what it takes, go take the ball. If you're just in it for the team spirit then kudos to you, but don't get jealous about the guy who goes and takes the ball.
Especially when talking about extremely complex projects you need accountability. If an individual really has what it takes to account for a project by themselves, the management will find no choice but to let them shoulder the liability. That is unless the ranking individuals want to go ego trippin' out which is probably as common as not. That's part of the gamble of doing busines though.
Another dumbass who didn't read my post.
Look, I despise the Mac business model more than you do. I have never owned a single piece of Mac hardware.
But, for THE tools for making computer based tests, the winner was decided long ago. It's called Macromedia Authorware.
I'm saying that until Authorware can run on K, then MS owns technology in education in conjunction with Macromedia and Lotus/IBM and ETS the inventors of the scantron. You know what a scantron is?
No, I don't think. this is melodramatic at all. Perhaps the word motherfucker makes you nervous, but it expresses my sentiments presisely. And, the piece was about MS in schools which is all about controlling the GUI in education which is what I'd hope the discussion would be about as well. Instead of this . . . when I was a boy, I had to get up three hours before I went to bed, have a bowl of cold gravel before my father stabbed us all to death! You try to tell this to kids these days and they just don't believe you.
You're off topic.
Uhm, well let's look a little closer at this.
First, I totally agree that Mac much more so than Windows was the software company that courted education.
But it wasn't just about the GUI. It was also the development tools. Macromedia is THE producer of Authorware which is THE tool for creating "media rich on-line learning interactions." But even closer to the bone, Authorware is the package used by ETS --the real education monopoly-- to make their multimedia tests.
Testing is what Authorware is all about. Sure, there are other icon.flow control packages that are fine for kiosks or whatever, but Authorware is the testers choice. The concept being that teachers all over the nation and globe were going to create their own unique tests by the gazillions full of bitchin multimedia and the future would be brighter by the minute as this vast array of awesome intellectual property reinvented the learning experience.
Well, we're still in the midst of things I suppose. But one of the problems is precisely that MS got involved. But it's not just MS. IBM bought out the backend of Authorware --the database that you want for administering a whole campus of test takers. It's called Pathware and its now owned by Lotus and you can have a copy for a mere $200K. You get the picture? These money grubbing motherfuckers are ransoming our future in very obvious and specific ways.
If you want to see a revolution in Linux adption in education then let's see a Linux run-time for Authrware. I'll be glad to lend a hand if there are people out there who want to get something started. I don't know jack about C, but I've used Authorware daily for about five years now. There's already a Mac and a Windows runtime, so what's to stop a K runtime?
This idea is particularly interesting in that Authorware charges the users for the use of the run-time rather than the authoring environment. There's no need to re-create the latter since it is readily available. Could Macromedia legally prevent people from Authoring and distributing an open source K run time?
I tell you what. I'll put my money where my mouth is. I have some commercial products written in Authorware and distributed with the Windows run time. If someone can come up with a K run-time, I'll re-package me media and distribute it for free as in beer.
The smog exemption used to be set at 1965, but it was bumped up to a rolling thirty year "cooling off" period. After thirty years, you can do as you please.
I'm saving my '79 Celica till 009 and then I'm gonna bend the header pipes with just a torch and some sand and toss on a junkyard fuel injection off a newer model and possibly mix and match heads and blocks just for fun. I'll probably want to put in a roll-cage too. It's the exoskeleton answer to the air bag.
As far as the topic is concerned, I'm in the middle of it. I developed (note, past tense) a set of free on-line windows based multimedia study guides right there in the 1998-1999 time period. I was trying to angle this into a credit card payment system based on limited uses with a net authentication system that I had soooo smoothly worked out with custom encryption and a totally unique server authentication system. We were going for the gold.
Or so I thought. 2000 came and we released our new ultra advanced system. Downloads were in the thousands quickly. The demand was out there, but what about payment?
Well, there were some payments at six bucks for ten uses which compared very favorably with buying a book which was supposedly obsolete at this point anyway.
But these payments were few and far between. We decided to drop to three bucks and make it twenty uses for three bucks. Our sales doubled! Hah, get it? We were treading water and the water was thin.
Well, we've seen a steady increase, but now that it's just three bucks, we need huge sales increases, and there's no way it's going to happen. Essentially, my bullet proof plan had a leak that had nothing to do with the security of the app itself.
But put away those hankys. We're okay. The ironic thing is that we have turned around and put out a book and CD with a twenty dollar cover and it's selling like hotcakes. It's bizarre. What the consumer doesn't want to download for three bucks with a 20 use limit, they'll pay twenty bucks for and probably only use once or twice. Reality is stranger than fiction once again.
It's not quite as strange as I make in this little vignette though. We already had big book sales for years and years before they ever made PCs. In fact, my office is quite literally a book shop. So, if the e-commerce deal had worked it would have been more shocking than the way it actually did turn out. I am sorely disappointed though. The consumer could win from this as I've seen from the other side, but certainly a payment system is one of the problems.
Another huge problem is security for a global payment system. As an custom encryption routine scriptin' fool, I know there's wayz folks think it can be done. But . . .
For example, why not just like phone cards? What about money laundering or other illicity financial transactions? That's a big issue when you talk about global commerce. If you make every convenience store on every block of every street all over the world into a bank your potential for abuse is quite high. I think herein lies one of the major obstacles that won't go away till the UN conquers DC and that may be awhile.
I hesitate to make this comment on Slashdot, but since this crayon character brought it up. . .
Pascal predates C by decades and its maturity is obvious to anyone who uses in for any length of time. As we all know, the orignal Mac up to System7 was done in Apple's ObjectPascal and there are still various development tools that rely on Pascal based scripting including Borland and several other Windows based development environments.
I'm not saying Pascal is better than C all around, but when it comes to scripting a user interface that simply calls upon functions written in a lower level language, I can't see the point of using anything else other than simple ignorance of the alternatives.
In educational multimedia, Pascal is king. This is an ugly market to a lot of slashdotters as it is a market where a lot of content experts rather than nerd-core geek "programmers" publish software with emphasis on ease of use. But if Linux is to really take market share from MS in the education market, there will have to be better Pascal-based development tools for making quick and easy user interfaces.
So, yeah, this idea sounds like a misguided student project which further underscores my point about getting better multimedia scripting environments for Linux into education.
I was telling my loved ones in the Peuget Sound area to get the fuck out before the implosion hit when I saw the Mandrake install. Mandrake is a particularly good example for Mr. Katz to contemplate because it's coming from another continent and another country. MS has amazing global penetration when you compare them to something like autos, but software is not car sales. I've seen plenty of Linux action outside the States and major resentment against MS among other US companies. There's already been distros from Taiwan and you know there's going to be more as we --I just got my marriage visa, so I'm an offical part of this lovely island now too I suppose-- enter mainland China with the goods that companys like AMD and Intel don't even want to get their hands dirty with because they're too low-end.
Well, in case you can't see the light here I'll spell it out. The Taiwan computing industry has publicly stated over and over in the media that their intention is to drop the bottom out of the traditional PC market in order to force mainland penetration.
Rather sexual metaphor eh? Well, like I said, I'm in love with the place. But personal life aside, you get the picture. This mainland China/India strategy is no secret. Stories about Via's plans to go low have been on slashdot repeatedly. And then there was that Anandtech.net piece on nVidia's new ultra all-in-one Xbox knock-off chipsets. Sure, those aren't going to be cheap per unit right off the bat, but they're clearly meant for volume production in a commodified market as the boards simply don't need cards.
So with all these clues that globally PCs are going for cost controls at all costs, how can anyone be so confident that MS is going to be the dominant player in software? I mean even if MS bundled Office and the OS for two hundred --I think OfficeXP is almost five hundred all by itself-- it's not making much sense as PCs enter the sub-three hundred dollar zone.
I thought the opposite of Katz. I must confess, I had no idea MS stock was up so high. I thought things were falling apart. Oh well, it's just a matter of time. Maybe it's a long time, but I seriously think the glory days done gone by for this ol' dog.
The author of the thesis sounds concerned that companies and individuals creating their own distribution and IP protection systems over the net will trample fair use provisions. I think he's skipping ahead to the second frog --hegemonic control of valuable data-- without leaping the first one --cash money that demonstrates the value of the data.
Net security has been there from day one. You can protect your IP all day long if you know your users will have network access.
Getting all paranoid about the long term effects of this is simply dismissing missing the point that people have to be willing to fork over cold hard cash on-line. Otherwise, there's no profit from protecting IP.
I was hoping to be one of these ominous IP protecting dictatorial types, but I found that the actually making the on-line-sales part really gets in the way of plans for selling a product where and how and when you like with your snazzy high security control system.
The volume of info available on the net continues to expand enormously despite the fact that there are few IP protections and minimal profits. When XP doesn't float, then we'll see a good example of why this thesis is sorta shooting too high. The architecture is already fine for those who like lots of data freely and readily available such as myself. And for those would-be neo-architects, such as myself again, who actually try employing some security measures to protect their IP . . . well, good luck. Remember, there's still a big print market. I don't think we need to be afraid of these folks yet. XP will be the windsock telling us how these things will blow.
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If you're doing a device driver or something that interacts with conditions within the machine without a lot of user interaction then a text editor may be all you need because there's an implicit degree of organization within that environment.
It seems to me that where the GUI can come in handy is in dealing with the human interface. This becomes truer and truer as the interaction becomes more and more meta --that is, as you have to account for more potential courses of action based on user input. If you don't have a development GUI here to help you hold all your conceptual place holders, you're fighting against yourself and will probably become frustrated with your work or develop your own GUI to save your project. Gee, maybe that's where these IDEs come from.
So, the question is weak as usual, hardly more than flame bait. Meaningless debates about which is BETTER just get the kids all excited and start a few pissin contests at best. After all, most GUI dev tools have command line interfaces built in, so the distinction only appears clear to those who don't know any better.
I wanted to use Bryce because the USGS had a plug-in for their satellite maps that only works with Bryce, but I got so fed up with the interface I decided to wait till they get around to putting them into .dxf like they should have from the beginning so I can use whatever 3D environment I prefer.
Just goes to show you, you can't please all the people. Same goes for Poser. The presmise is cool, but the interface just seems to make work and get in the way. I'll take power users.
And of course they didn't show up, it's HTML. What was I thinking. Bitch slap for me too.
Treating Slashdot as though it was a Linux version of ZDNet misses the whole point as far as I'm concerned as a rhetorician.
Slashdot is a FORUM. Ranting about all the MS loving talking heads like Dvorak or the Salon whores is perfectly justified though petty and borish. But when you extend the definition of journalism to include a forum like Slashdot that is closer to a newsgroup than an on-line magazine you've passed into incoherent rambling and I am forced to virtually bitch slap you back into reality.
Calling telecommuting extreme because it's far away doesn't make much sense. After all, when we add the "tele" prefix we're supposed to assume it's distant. I have to agree with an earlier poster who raised this question.
But whatever, I'll still take the bait. I'm an American living in Taiwan and I work for a company in France. (not Dassault, I swear)
Ta Da! Did I win?
In fact, I did. It's rad. It's not the kind of situation you find in the local paper help wanted section, but if things work out that way, so be it.
Gratified to have shared my exotic little post card better-than-that-russia-stuff image, I return to the fact that this was a ridiculous premise. Anybody anywhere on the face of the earth with a working phone may as well be anywhere else where there's another working phone and that's hardly a news story.
Hang the DJ!
I say this article sucked. /. and knew I could vent.
Clueless hype is all that's out there these hot summer days. It's ridiculous. They did concede that IPv6 is inevitable, but they sure spent some time wringing hands over totally irrelevant crap at the same time. I saw that link on CNN earlier in the evening and didn't read it because I knew it would suck and only went back and read it only because I saw the link here on
For those of us old enough to go ahead and got busy organizing networks here and there back when ICANN was getting started and you could just ask for net numbers --as I and many others did-- the problem is all too clear. The beauracratic, financial and legal powers that became involved over the years totally twisted the original premise. If you want a frickin' number you get one. If you want a thousand, you get a thousand. They're just numbers. Deal with it.
But that's not what it turned into at all. Vast portions of those billions of IPv4 numbers don't go anywhere because network routing is a financial issue closely intertwined with a technical issue that few people outside of open source are familiar with.
It's irrelevant though because IPv6 is inevitable and this has already been covered in so many other ways.
And, to top it off, dynamic domain names makes it all meta anyway. Yeah, I'm not crying about the way things are by any means but more numbers is such a rational idea. And why stop at IPv6, next step is get rid of this restricive domain naming stuff. They've already started using Chinese characters at some domain registrars. So let's just name domains like long file names so we can use popular phrases! Shit, you don't think there will be a gold rush on that shit? There's a limited set of English phrases. You take that from an English major.
There's room for lots of approaches, I'm sure.
I felt the author was a bit disingenuous with this quote:
"A little submarine that was to be a hunter-killer for cancer cells would have to carry on board a little diagnostic laboratory, and because that laboratory would require sampling devices and reagents and reaction chambers and analytical devices, it would cease to be little."
This is clearly a mix of humor and a rhetorical stab at the nanotech research community. That's fine for a popular magazine like SciAm, but it's not a serious analytical point. We'd be kidding ourselves to pretend that the only possible techniques for identifying cancer cells when parked before them on the nanoscale would require lab reagents and little miniature lab assistants in white coats drawn by Gary Larson.
Of course SciAm has always been a popular publication masquerading as a scholarly journal and evocative claims have long been the stock in trade.
Good one, I guess.
It's nice to be able to see more than just the most recent four posts, but being able to page through ALL of them would be conveneient at some point. I know, you can just do a search for your user ID, but that's not exactly the same thing.
Also, how about getting rid of the text on the top of the "Your Info" page that questions why people should be interested in themselves. I've taken offence at that from the fist time I saw it. If you don't take interest in yourself, why should anybody else give a flying fuck? Assuming that people who are concerned with themselves and the responses to their own posts are somehow irregular seems bizarre and highly illogical.
If the goal of Slashdot is, in fact, an insightful discussion, we probably want people participating who are very conscious of and proud of their self image rather than the sad masses begging for attention because they feel so worthless and pathetic that they need to seek out attention by the lowest common denominator --acting like annoying children smearing shit on the walls and calling other people names etc.
How about this for the new text on the Your Info page:
This is your user info page. There are thousands more, but this one is yours. Here we have archived your eloquent contributions to our profound forum. This is your private sanctuary in which the text of your thoughts have been immortalized and conveniently organized by the caring Slashdot staff. We encourage you to re-read your own work and contemplate the greatness that is you. If you're looking to change your password or click pretty widgets to kill time, try clicking Preferences.
So MS makes a new catch phrase and everybody is supposed to shit their pants? /. aside, is a frickin' lame excuse for one big corporate ad at best. Sometimes ads are cool. I spend hours a day reading ads for stuff I'm interested in like all the other surfers out there, but a browser is not an OS and it never will be.
The web,
If there's enough bandwidth to make web services workable then specific apps will be developed to implement them, but they won't be built around freakin' web browsers.
Notice that the posters clutching their guts over this silliness are mostly in financial services. Yeah, that's where all the real open source heart is at.
I used to have great respect for people who could speak multiple languages --I'm off topic here talking about language in general rather than programming in specific. I've got a little anecdote though and I'd like to share it.
I moved to Asia from California in my early twenties looking for fame and fotrune and sleazy discos. In the latter, I met all these cute asian babes who could speak three or four languages on average. As an American I was so impressed by this. I assumed these lurid disco dollies were really on the ball. Over time, I realized how far from the mark I was and how totally disconnected language skills and intelligence were.
I knew girls who were raped and beaten repeatedly and I made the mistake of trying to step in and act all righteous like an American boy thinks he oughtta, but boy did I find out the hard way that my assistance was not welcomed and even led to hostility from the victims themselves even when they had come to me crying and asking for help.
Fair enough, I learned a bit about the real world and how to detatch myself from other people's affairs --even the cute ones asking for help. I also learned that the ability to memorize languages is not an indicator of intelligence as I understand the term.
Having said this, I'm very proud of my own Chinese and English literary skills and I consider myself a sophisticated programmer although I wouldn't know C code from a chemistry formula.
It goes back to the phrase "to be well read." You know the deal, you can read three books and be well read; wheras you can read variations on the same trash all your life and never make the grade.
If you read all the threads, you'd see where I show where the author --you?-- lifted the whole master slave SM reference from Nietzche. What the hell is this deconstructionist stuff you're talking about? I'm talking rhetoric and you're talkin' trash.
If you were in the front row in one of my classes, I'd spit all over you.
If that articles was any indication of Ars, then I'm not too impressed.
Mr. Hanibal tries to step outside of the rhetoric of the Intellectual Property debate, but that's where the real action is. I would allow that, but for the fact that he wants to use structure as a metaphor and that makes me associate him with his illustrious predecessors. Among these predecessors is Nietzche who famously wrote aphorisms.
This piece is hardly aphoristic.
But wait, let me explain what that means and my original point will be clearer.
Nietzche was a huge inspiration on many thinkers who believed that answers to compex questions could be found by speaking in terms of structures.
But what was it about Nietzche's writing? Perhaps it's a mere side note that I'm overemphasizing, but one very noticeable thing about Nietzche's writing style was his use of aphorisms. For the kids in the crowd --and I'm being pedantic, so if you're not a kid you can fuck off-- Nietzche makes for an odd read because it's got all these slogans stuck in there.
You know what they're like . . . that's right, sig files.
Well this Ars article totally ducks the slogan side of things and then owes all this stuff to the masters and doesn't mention it.
Don't buy it, well check this out.
Here's an aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil --even the titles are cool!, that Ars article had a weak title. Anyways, here it is--
"There are master morality and slave morality."(F.N.)
See, this exact concept that was brought up on page three of the article is covered heavily by Nietzche, ie, who should owe whom respect and when and how in a master/slave situation. So, the debt is there whether it's intended or not.
Given the presence of this backgroud that the writer intentionally conjures you'd hope there would be some debate worthy one liners or at least some obscenity or profane reference, but that just didn't happen. Sorry, Ars, don't call us, we'll call you.
I recommend our budding structuralist read Jakobson's essay on Baudelaiure's Le Chats. You'll find it in any university library. Perhaps you even recall, that Levi Strauss got very fascinated with this notion of "discovering" the underlying structures of language and even thought that it extended the bounds of language to include non-verbal, non-textual elements as well -- led to semiotics as you will recall from last week's lecture.
Eh hem, but that's only for history buffs who want extra credit. As to the topic at hand, the author flys in the face of all the poststructuralist theorists, particularly Derrida, with his insistence that there is some deeper meaning to be found in the IP debate by mudding the waters in a frezy of defining the long efaced metaphor of structure.
There's nothing there. You may as well be staring at the sun, son. The fact is, the debate must take place in rhetoric. If you find rhetoric uncomfortable, then don't write articles about the IP debate. Easy.
Seriously reading through a Grolliers CD encyclopedia a few years ago, in the cover-to-cover sense, I came across a little error that I pointed out to with a letter to the editor. I know we're talking Brittanica here, but Grolliers is another example of a competing for-profit encyclopedia so this may be of interest.
They had an article about the use of corn in ancient Greek religious ceremonies. That struck me as strange as I recalled that I had read that corn came from the New World. There had to be something wrong. Either corn was european, or the Greeks didn't use corn in their worship.
The encyclopedia staff and I found out that the word "corn" as it had been used in the article on the greeks originated with sources written hundreds of years ago when the maize plant was still relatively new to europeans who used the term "corn" similarly to what we now call "grain", ie, a broader category of crunchy bit than that plant now known as corn.
At least that was their bullshit coverup.
So, this obvious factual inaccuracy for any reader assuming the article was written in modern English had been in Grolliers for however many decades since the inception of the project now and finally got updated for free from yours truly the nerd himself. But to tell you the truth, I'm not even sure that they will bother making any changes or that any one in a position to do so will ever bother.
That's a real experience from someone who loves encyclopedias enough to actually read them. I think an open encyclopedia promises accountability that private concerns can't handle because they can't lose face. Being hoity toity stick in the ass about star contributors is stupid. I have to assume Buckminster Fuller and Einstein would fully appreciate having their Britannica pieces redistributed freely.
The same thing goes for academic testing. Why do we use ETS' bastard tests? How about open source standardized testing? I've caught ETS making factual errors too. What do you expect, grad students do all the damn work for them if you judge by the quality of their "research." Used Grolliers no doubt. Next time, hire a real editor.
Yeah, that's the catch, isn't it. I can't reant all day, but I expect top get paid for catching other people's errors somewhere down the line, don't I?
Oh well, screw it, I'll keep on editing encyclopedias and standardized tests for free if I can have all the media I can collect and fat pipes to get it with. Sounds like a social contract to me.
Whoa! Nice work. The salts. Man, you schooled 'em with that one. That's straight off a scantron test.
That sure do make too helluva much sense that you'd encounter brines on the surface of a planet, don't it? I mean what with our own beloved oceans all full of magnesium and sodium and whatnot. And Mars supposedly having dried up oceans. That sounds like a damn salty situation to me.
And the cruel thing is that those bitter tears of the earlier poster when he realizes what a fool he was and cries himself to sleep will remind him in their saltiness of his own failure to observe the obvious.
Only someone with money to burn would spend hundreds of millions of dollars coming up with a better, cheaper and stronger way to build a house given that such research was carried out extensively throughout the 30s 40s and 50s and resulted in little more than the clarification of the fact that people insist on living in square wooden boxes.
Felix Candela, the famous Mexican ferrocement shell designer, produced buildings so cheaply that he refused to disclose his materials costs because of the damage it would have done to the traditional construction industry if others realized what he was getting away with.
Felix's "trick" was to build walls of only one and a half inches thick with dense woven meshes of relatively thin guage reinforcing steel. This was a very scientific approach to the application of ferrocement in that it emphasized the accurate placement of the steel --which photos depict as very similar to highly intricate interwoven 3D wireframes-- rather than reliance upon the notorious instability of concrete.
The practice was considered such a threat to the construction industry --aws well as being linked to communism-- that the US set a standard of a minimum of three inches thick for all ferrocement shell stuructures. These heavier, thicker walls require much more cement and steel and are therefore much heavier hence requiring larger foundations and limiting design considerations.
So, the innocent notion of the helpful patent system saving us from our own devices mentioned by the above post is poorly served by the analogy to the housing industry. If anything, the history of housing ominously illustrates the reality of government legislation to protect vested interet against innovation.
That's true with samples for loops, too isn't it? You don't want people knowing the mic is on if you're trying to get amateurs to make some noise, or even better you want people who can act right.
But most folks can't act for shit. So, you can't get anything worth having if you say the mic's on. Stagefright is real. I just did a class of 85 mouths this evening so it's fresh in my head.
Put that in the reality of an officer's position and you can't really say the mic is on without coming across as though you're doing an interview or something.
So, what's the topic? I mean it doesn't work that way. It's not like you're gonna click on your mic and turn to the officer and start asking him the questions --are you?
If so, then why did you pull him over would be a great starter, and indeed that's the first question that we expect in this interview process. But the catch is obviously that you didn't pull over the cop, the cop pulled you over.
Hmm. I think Boston is lame anyways. I was just there a few months ago. It's cold. Why do people live there? Harvard blows. They wouldn't even let me piss on campus. They call that a school? For the first twenty years or so they used to only go to school there if there was free beer. That's true. Look it up. I'm not surprised. Its sucks. I don't understand why it's still so thriving. I'd rather live in New Mexico and I'm not planning on movin' to New Mexico.
If somebody has what it takes to go off on a project without waiting for management to tell them how to wipe their ass then all power to those who would take the power.
I strongly believe any one who can, should force a project out of managements hands and take the upper hand by doing so. If you do so, you're a real prima donna and that's always a good thing if it is indeed real and not just a fantasy. It's like basketball. If you've got what it takes, go take the ball. If you're just in it for the team spirit then kudos to you, but don't get jealous about the guy who goes and takes the ball.
Especially when talking about extremely complex projects you need accountability. If an individual really has what it takes to account for a project by themselves, the management will find no choice but to let them shoulder the liability. That is unless the ranking individuals want to go ego trippin' out which is probably as common as not. That's part of the gamble of doing busines though.
Another dumbass who didn't read my post.
Look, I despise the Mac business model more than you do. I have never owned a single piece of Mac hardware.
But, for THE tools for making computer based tests, the winner was decided long ago. It's called Macromedia Authorware.
I'm saying that until Authorware can run on K, then MS owns technology in education in conjunction with Macromedia and Lotus/IBM and ETS the inventors of the scantron. You know what a scantron is?
No, I don't think. this is melodramatic at all. Perhaps the word motherfucker makes you nervous, but it expresses my sentiments presisely. And, the piece was about MS in schools which is all about controlling the GUI in education which is what I'd hope the discussion would be about as well. Instead of this . . . when I was a boy, I had to get up three hours before I went to bed, have a bowl of cold gravel before my father stabbed us all to death! You try to tell this to kids these days and they just don't believe you.
You're off topic.
Uhm, well let's look a little closer at this.
First, I totally agree that Mac much more so than Windows was the software company that courted education.
But it wasn't just about the GUI. It was also the development tools. Macromedia is THE producer of Authorware which is THE tool for creating "media rich on-line learning interactions." But even closer to the bone, Authorware is the package used by ETS --the real education monopoly-- to make their multimedia tests.
Testing is what Authorware is all about. Sure, there are other icon.flow control packages that are fine for kiosks or whatever, but Authorware is the testers choice. The concept being that teachers all over the nation and globe were going to create their own unique tests by the gazillions full of bitchin multimedia and the future would be brighter by the minute as this vast array of awesome intellectual property reinvented the learning experience.
Well, we're still in the midst of things I suppose. But one of the problems is precisely that MS got involved. But it's not just MS. IBM bought out the backend of Authorware --the database that you want for administering a whole campus of test takers. It's called Pathware and its now owned by Lotus and you can have a copy for a mere $200K. You get the picture? These money grubbing motherfuckers are ransoming our future in very obvious and specific ways.
If you want to see a revolution in Linux adption in education then let's see a Linux run-time for Authrware. I'll be glad to lend a hand if there are people out there who want to get something started. I don't know jack about C, but I've used Authorware daily for about five years now. There's already a Mac and a Windows runtime, so what's to stop a K runtime?
This idea is particularly interesting in that Authorware charges the users for the use of the run-time rather than the authoring environment. There's no need to re-create the latter since it is readily available. Could Macromedia legally prevent people from Authoring and distributing an open source K run time?
I tell you what. I'll put my money where my mouth is. I have some commercial products written in Authorware and distributed with the Windows run time. If someone can come up with a K run-time, I'll re-package me media and distribute it for free as in beer.
The smog exemption used to be set at 1965, but it was bumped up to a rolling thirty year "cooling off" period. After thirty years, you can do as you please.
I'm saving my '79 Celica till 009 and then I'm gonna bend the header pipes with just a torch and some sand and toss on a junkyard fuel injection off a newer model and possibly mix and match heads and blocks just for fun. I'll probably want to put in a roll-cage too. It's the exoskeleton answer to the air bag.
As far as the topic is concerned, I'm in the middle of it. I developed (note, past tense) a set of free on-line windows based multimedia study guides right there in the 1998-1999 time period. I was trying to angle this into a credit card payment system based on limited uses with a net authentication system that I had soooo smoothly worked out with custom encryption and a totally unique server authentication system. We were going for the gold.
Or so I thought. 2000 came and we released our new ultra advanced system. Downloads were in the thousands quickly. The demand was out there, but what about payment?
Well, there were some payments at six bucks for ten uses which compared very favorably with buying a book which was supposedly obsolete at this point anyway.
But these payments were few and far between. We decided to drop to three bucks and make it twenty uses for three bucks. Our sales doubled! Hah, get it? We were treading water and the water was thin.
Well, we've seen a steady increase, but now that it's just three bucks, we need huge sales increases, and there's no way it's going to happen. Essentially, my bullet proof plan had a leak that had nothing to do with the security of the app itself.
But put away those hankys. We're okay. The ironic thing is that we have turned around and put out a book and CD with a twenty dollar cover and it's selling like hotcakes. It's bizarre. What the consumer doesn't want to download for three bucks with a 20 use limit, they'll pay twenty bucks for and probably only use once or twice. Reality is stranger than fiction once again.
It's not quite as strange as I make in this little vignette though. We already had big book sales for years and years before they ever made PCs. In fact, my office is quite literally a book shop. So, if the e-commerce deal had worked it would have been more shocking than the way it actually did turn out. I am sorely disappointed though. The consumer could win from this as I've seen from the other side, but certainly a payment system is one of the problems.
Another huge problem is security for a global payment system. As an custom encryption routine scriptin' fool, I know there's wayz folks think it can be done. But . . .
For example, why not just like phone cards? What about money laundering or other illicity financial transactions? That's a big issue when you talk about global commerce. If you make every convenience store on every block of every street all over the world into a bank your potential for abuse is quite high. I think herein lies one of the major obstacles that won't go away till the UN conquers DC and that may be awhile.
I hesitate to make this comment on Slashdot, but since this crayon character brought it up. . .
Pascal predates C by decades and its maturity is obvious to anyone who uses in for any length of time. As we all know, the orignal Mac up to System7 was done in Apple's ObjectPascal and there are still various development tools that rely on Pascal based scripting including Borland and several other Windows based development environments.
I'm not saying Pascal is better than C all around, but when it comes to scripting a user interface that simply calls upon functions written in a lower level language, I can't see the point of using anything else other than simple ignorance of the alternatives.
In educational multimedia, Pascal is king. This is an ugly market to a lot of slashdotters as it is a market where a lot of content experts rather than nerd-core geek "programmers" publish software with emphasis on ease of use. But if Linux is to really take market share from MS in the education market, there will have to be better Pascal-based development tools for making quick and easy user interfaces.
So, yeah, this idea sounds like a misguided student project which further underscores my point about getting better multimedia scripting environments for Linux into education.
I was telling my loved ones in the Peuget Sound area to get the fuck out before the implosion hit when I saw the Mandrake install. Mandrake is a particularly good example for Mr. Katz to contemplate because it's coming from another continent and another country. MS has amazing global penetration when you compare them to something like autos, but software is not car sales. I've seen plenty of Linux action outside the States and major resentment against MS among other US companies. There's already been distros from Taiwan and you know there's going to be more as we --I just got my marriage visa, so I'm an offical part of this lovely island now too I suppose-- enter mainland China with the goods that companys like AMD and Intel don't even want to get their hands dirty with because they're too low-end.
Well, in case you can't see the light here I'll spell it out. The Taiwan computing industry has publicly stated over and over in the media that their intention is to drop the bottom out of the traditional PC market in order to force mainland penetration.
Rather sexual metaphor eh? Well, like I said, I'm in love with the place. But personal life aside, you get the picture. This mainland China/India strategy is no secret. Stories about Via's plans to go low have been on slashdot repeatedly. And then there was that Anandtech.net piece on nVidia's new ultra all-in-one Xbox knock-off chipsets. Sure, those aren't going to be cheap per unit right off the bat, but they're clearly meant for volume production in a commodified market as the boards simply don't need cards.
So with all these clues that globally PCs are going for cost controls at all costs, how can anyone be so confident that MS is going to be the dominant player in software? I mean even if MS bundled Office and the OS for two hundred --I think OfficeXP is almost five hundred all by itself-- it's not making much sense as PCs enter the sub-three hundred dollar zone.
I thought the opposite of Katz. I must confess, I had no idea MS stock was up so high. I thought things were falling apart. Oh well, it's just a matter of time. Maybe it's a long time, but I seriously think the glory days done gone by for this ol' dog.
The author of the thesis sounds concerned that companies and individuals creating their own distribution and IP protection systems over the net will trample fair use provisions. I think he's skipping ahead to the second frog --hegemonic control of valuable data-- without leaping the first one --cash money that demonstrates the value of the data.
Net security has been there from day one. You can protect your IP all day long if you know your users will have network access.
Getting all paranoid about the long term effects of this is simply dismissing missing the point that people have to be willing to fork over cold hard cash on-line. Otherwise, there's no profit from protecting IP.
I was hoping to be one of these ominous IP protecting dictatorial types, but I found that the actually making the on-line-sales part really gets in the way of plans for selling a product where and how and when you like with your snazzy high security control system.
The volume of info available on the net continues to expand enormously despite the fact that there are few IP protections and minimal profits. When XP doesn't float, then we'll see a good example of why this thesis is sorta shooting too high. The architecture is already fine for those who like lots of data freely and readily available such as myself. And for those would-be neo-architects, such as myself again, who actually try employing some security measures to protect their IP . . . well, good luck. Remember, there's still a big print market. I don't think we need to be afraid of these folks yet. XP will be the windsock telling us how these things will blow.