OK, so "taking it out" on the low guys isn't the best solution. Maybe telling them about anal sex or verbally abusing them isn't the answer.
One Mormon guy I know starts telling telemarketers about his religious beliefs -- annoying, yes, but at worst he's annoying, and at best he can hope he's changing someone's life. So why not try evangelizing YOUR favorite cause, religion, book, band, or whatever you think might make the world a better place!
TELEMARKETER: I'm calling to inform you about HomeSelect, a brand new program from MegaCard...
YOU: That's great! You know, I have something I'm really excited about too -- have you ever used the open source text editor vim? I've been using things like BBEdit and CodeWrite for a while, but vim is amazing.
(And now the question is, who will flame me first? People who don't like Mormonism? People who don't like vim? BBEdit Bigots? CodeWrite haters? I love slashdot! )
Well for starters you lose all those lovely ease of use features once you start using X instead of aqua. So there goes that.
The ease of use is *not* totally lost once you start using X. In fact, for many people, I suspect the ease of use associated with the Mac OS isn't really just the cues/navigation abilities in the Finder and widget set -- though those are nice.
No, the real niceness is in the system administration/configuration/installation courtesies. It generally just seems to take less time to learn how to do these, so you get your system out of the way faster to do whatever else it is you wanted to.
OS X follows in this tradition. I installed it, and it worked. Inside 30 minutes. OK, with all the dev tools it inside 45. And oh yes, it's full of all the commandline goodness I've come to expect and love from Linux.
Secondly, you can't run full OS X on x86 platforms - just darwin. So you get an expensive and slow computer from apple that has a candy coated shell. Am I the only one that doesn't see a point?
Apple *will* somehow have to address the price performance issue if they want to gouge market share out of others. But they can keep their core advantages (enumerated above) and keep their core customre base, maybe even grow a little.
BTW, on what do you base your assumption that current apple hardware is "second rate" other than processor speed?
The deal is that since apple customers are cultist followers,
Blah, blah. "I don't understand apple custumors so they must not be rational." Great logic. I expect you to admit also think people like Minkowski and Feynman were loons (pardon my assumption that you don't understand all the theories they published).
But at least they don't have a cpu fan - that's worth an extra $600, right?
Not, as it turns out, in the mass market. But I love laptops for this reason. I hate the noise.
And, as it turns out, one of my hobbies is audio/video production -- a big market for apple. Having a quiet computer really is an asset. But you probably didn't think about that.
If OS-X does anything, it'll simply be to raise the bar for KDE and GNOME - a challenge they will be able to meet.
KDE and GNOME, great as they are, don't get anywhere at solving the underlying system administration problem. Eazel might.
Sorry, but apple has gone the way of the Amiga - thousands of deluded followers and zero relevance.
If by deluded you means that there's not hope of world domination, then your comment has truth. But if you mean that Apple's offerings don't have things worth examining -- even buying -- then you're off your rocker. The Cocoa (formerly Yellowbox/Openstep) development framework by itself is a find. The other benefits I've touted in this post are real and will appeal to people -- even some Linux users.
Mass abandonment of Linux for OS X? Hardly probable. Even if OS X was completely superior and ran on Intel hardware, the ideology of Open Source and sheer stubborn religiousness withing the
*LINUX* community would keep users -- just like the "deluded apple followers" you mention.
But don't think that means that OS X isn't something to be reckoned with -- and learned from.
The only thing between me and never going back to Linux right now is the fact that under linux, I can do the./configure-make-make-test-make-install thing and get my software.
Though some packages are on the road (Apache compiled quite nicely, even though 1.3.12 had no idea what the platform was.), I don't think most are. MySQL and Lynx, for example. Sigh.
But contrast the ease of system administration and installation, and it's no contest. Mac OS X PB is sheer joy.
We thought we understood the mass ranges of planets of other stars. We thought we understood
the full diversity of planets.
What's frightening to me is if they really thought they understood these things.
We've been able to find planets outside our solar system for what, a few years now? And we expect to have "a thorough comprehension of their diversity?" We're still finding stuff on our own planet that blows our minds.
The universe is going to hold some serious surprises for a Real Long Time to come. Please check your arrogance at the door. Especially with things we have mostly theories about and very little data.
puh-LEASE yourself, Mr. Devil's advocate. Having a different opinion from the majority of slashdot folks doesn't make you erudite.
If you have to ask why people are afraid of Microsoft, you simply haven't been paying attention. MS would attract about the same level of animosity as Apple, except for one thing: when Microsoft sets its sights on a market, there's a strong chance that they'll try to destroy everything else in it. Consumer choice goes down. Choice about what we get to use to do our jobs disappears. This isn't alarmism -- this was the world that I worked in for a couple of years.
I'm really happy to say that Microsoft products and technology hardly matter at all to me right now. I work with technologies of MY choice right now, and the people I work for actually listen to me instead of MS marketeering. This is largely because I work in the Web App development world and I choose employers who don't list Visual Basic as a required skill.
But I have no illusions about Microsoft being in their death throes -- the amount of market power they have is incredible, and the amount of money they can just throw at things is equally incredible, and they've demonstrated they're not shy about using it to stomp out alternatives. So when I see them trying to "embrace and extend" the internet, I'm a little afraid, yes. And you think we're overreacting?
Cut the crap, already. You know that both yourselves and the majority of your readers are scrappy Linux-hacker wannabes. Why not post stories about things they can have intellgent discussions? Here are a few suggesstions:
* "Ask Slashdot: What is the l337est GNOME skin?"
* "Interview: A Non-virgin"
* "The coolest TI-83 games to play during English class"
* "Science: Stealth masturbation"
* "BSD: Not as l337 as LUN1X!!"
* "Book review: O'Reilly's Acne Prevention in a Nutshell"
Oh, boy, NOW you've really raised the level of dialogue on slashdot. Good work.:|
I remember having a conversation in 1994 about the future of windows. I remember two code names -- Cairo and Chicago. I think one of them was Win95 and the other was what became NT 5.0 The projected release for NT 5.0 was late 1995 early 1996.
While many people view the presence of different OS's as a fight to the death with only one winner (and while this often happens), it's obvious that they sometimes influence one anothers design. In the open source world, I sometimes expect this to happen to a greater extent, since the ideas and code are shared freely. I'm curious to know if you've played tried Darwin and NetBSD, and what you think about them. Anything cool about them LinuxPPC doesn't have? Any directions they're taking you think will influence LinuxPPC? And you could answer the same questions for the other PPC Linux distros....
An AC in the other Y2K thread said he felt sorry for Pete, and wanted to send him a thank you note.
My initial reaction was "+1, gracious", but then I realized I'm not a moderator, and that rating doesn't exist, and also, the AC didn't include Peter's email address.
So: pdejager@year2000.com
And, as I said when I posted it in that thread, I realize it's a little sappy and superfluous, but why not counteract a little gratuitous hate mail? Especially 'round the holiday season ("You see, Peter, you really DID have a wonderful life").
The idea behind this technology is at least 15 years old; The first time I ever heard about this technology was from that phenomenon of americanized anime: Robotech! Somewhere in the "second generation," the clever/nerdy character (Louie, I think his name was) invented goggles that tracked pupil movement, which could in turn automatically target weapons systems to whatever the wearer was looking at. The result? Our heroes were able to avoid getting their clocks completely cleaned by the Robotech Masters and their armies of new-and-improved Bioroids (see if you ever get THAT level of inventiveness out of Pokemon or DragonBallz).
The apps I thought of following watching that were similar to some mentioned here, including hands-free computing (I had never used a mouse, though, so I was thinking of a CLI based on a gaze selected alphabet. Arg.:). But I wonder if we're going to start seeing Pupil Pistols, and looks really will be able to kill.
I spoke with my employer about this a while back. He wanted to develop and market the technology to do the very
thing described in this article. I told him it'd never fly, people would hate it, and I'd feel questionable about
developing it. He said "It'll HAVE TO fly. Otherwise the Internet will collapse. There's not enough revenue in the current ad scheme.
Possibly true. But the Internet grew up just fine w/o much commercial support. There are sites out there that exist w/o it, and would continue to exist w/o any prospect of commercial support.
Despite the success it has brought and can bring many businesses, money is not the only motivation for putting stuff on the web.
The point is lost on some people, but maybe that's OK. It seems likely that the non-commercial portion of the web will remain that way no matter what the current ad-fad is.
Then the ad monstrosities can be avoided and people can start looking at real information and Twinkie experiments -- what the web is REALLY about!
If you take the premise that good open source software starts with scratching an itch, then the first thing you have to do is figure out where you're itching.
So:
1) sit down, make a list of your itches
2) find out if there's any open source projects out there that fit (freshmeat, sourceforge).
3) pick one. Start _using_ it. Chances are you'll find an issue that you'll want to do something about, eventually. Chances are that before you're even done INSTALLING it, you'll find something you think could be done better. If nothing else, you can document it. With some research and some help, you may even be able come up with a fix yourself.
I'll give you an example. LinuxPPC. I've installed it on some older model macintoshes, but I've had an iBook for 6 weeks and haven't got it to run on the iBook yet. This despite the documentation out there and the patient help of several people from comp.os.linux.ppc. It will take patience, but I'm going to get this, and by the time I'm done with this, I expect that I'll be able to write a half-decent HowTo that will be a contribution to the community. I'll also have some familiarity with kernel issues and open firmware and other stuff that may help me if I ever get an itch to contribute code.
And if there is no project for your itch, well, then you get to strike out on your own.:) Good luck.
Contact the US Copyright Office with your cogent, well thought out protest and discussion of alternatives:
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/about.html#contact
They don't have an email address listed, but they do have fax/snailmail.
I think the important thing is that the RIAA be only allowed to collect for music that their members hold copyright to -- and that they be required to demonstrate you're playing such music before they can take any action to collect.
If I recall correctly, OpenDoc wasn't necessarily
tied to a specific language or platform. It was a description of how to write container apps and objects. A spec, which Apple produced an implementation of. I think a company called Digital Harbor actually produced the theoretical word processor.
I've heard you can do most of the things that OpenDoc did with Java, and perhaps other languages. True?
So when I was a kid, somewhere I heard the idea -- maybe from my mother -- that you could tell whether or not someone could was lying by looking at their face coloring. A flush of a "yellowish" color was said to enter the forehead of a liar.
Hmmm.
I'd always thought it was a psychological ploy: if someone claimed they could tell when you were lying, then you may as well give up and tell the truth.
But if there are tetrachromats, or even other kinds of better vision, maybe they CAN see things like this....
Insightful? Interesting? Blacchhhh.
Somebody with some mod points take this guy down
to at least a 4. Insightful is right out. Interesting has a case -- since a bunch of people followed up to this post.
In fact, the person I felt the most for/with in the online chapters was Peter; if he becomes the main character in this book, perhaps we can recapture the same energies as the original Ender's Game.
Well, the title is Shadow of the Hegemon, so one assumes we'll get at least as much Hegemon (Peter) as we saw of Ender in Ender's Shadow. Likely more, as we already had Ender's Game to give us info about Ender, but we don't have much on Peter, really.
I heartily agree with you, though -- Peter is the high point of the first five chapters so far.
Card explained why he started writing the sequels in the intro to Ender's Shadow. He was going to start farming out the Ender "universe" to other authors, and let them write from the point of views of other characters from the story. He'd even got someone who was interested in doing this. But, then, the more he thought about it, the more jealous he was of the guy who was going to get to do this. Eventually, he decided to swipe the project back.
Now, of course, you could say that's all a smoke screen. But it sounds to me like he did it for one reason: fun.
This is just like the time a co-worker asked me to determine what the set of all points equidistant from a point and a line in 3 space is. Hours of work were lost (because you can't stop with a point and a line, no, you've got to do point-plane, line-plane, and then think about 4 space). All.... CPU Cycles... being... consumed... Must... resist... attractive... problem...
Plus, now Slashdot is simply going to lose everybody who makes quality posts. They'll be too busy writing their own java apps for "programmer's mineswepper" (no I'm not going to give you the URL). Slashdot will become a banal wasteland of first posts, trolls, and karma whores....
I've always thought that one of the problems with math -- as taught at the secondary level -- was that you didn't actually learn any abstract math skills (well, you might, but you're not taught them). Just more algebraic manipulation, or, if you're luck, the foundations of calc.
I think games and optimization problems, though, could provide a fertile and interesting framework for teaching real mathematical thinking. Minesweeper. Knight's Tours. John Conway's games. Nim. Dominoes. Any small, discrete system with definable rules can get you thinking mathematically, though most people probably just play with heuristics....
Just a second... maybe that's the point! Any encryption can be broken with sufficient random clicking.:-)
Well, yes. This is called brute force. Of course most of the time it's easy to think of brute force being a sequential trial of everything in the keyspace, but it doesn't have to be (although that guarantees you try every key only once).
I don't understand why this isn't a free speech issue. If this was a government entity, not only would WE be all over them, but three or four watchdog groups and probably a fair portion of the population.
This isn't the only place this is happening. I'm hearing about legal cases where people aren't allowed to say anything to others about their own case. I don't know about you, but this is FAR more worrisome to me than web censorship on public machines. Somehow, contract and other branches of the law are overriding people's right to free speech.
I'm not sure where to draw the line. There's times when voluntarily agreeing not to speeak up about something is probably good. NDAs, for example. But perhaps the time is coming when we're going to need something besides the first ammendment to protect free speech. Congress might not be able to make any law prohibiting free speech, but corporations can sure draw up contracts and suits that are doing the job.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm. That's a thought. Identification w/o information. Doesn't help the tracking problem, though.
--
OK, so "taking it out" on the low guys isn't the best solution. Maybe telling them about anal sex or verbally abusing them isn't the answer.
One Mormon guy I know starts telling telemarketers about his religious beliefs -- annoying, yes, but at worst he's annoying, and at best he can hope he's changing someone's life. So why not try evangelizing YOUR favorite cause, religion, book, band, or whatever you think might make the world a better place!
TELEMARKETER: I'm calling to inform you about HomeSelect, a brand new program from MegaCard...
YOU: That's great! You know, I have something I'm really excited about too -- have you ever used the open source text editor vim? I've been using things like BBEdit and CodeWrite for a while, but vim is amazing.
(And now the question is, who will flame me first? People who don't like Mormonism? People who don't like vim? BBEdit Bigots? CodeWrite haters? I love slashdot! )
--
You haven't used OS X, have you? Let's talk.
Well for starters you lose all those lovely ease of use features once you start using X instead of aqua. So there goes that.
The ease of use is *not* totally lost once you start using X. In fact, for many people, I suspect the ease of use associated with the Mac OS isn't really just the cues/navigation abilities in the Finder and widget set -- though those are nice.
No, the real niceness is in the system administration/configuration/installation courtesies. It generally just seems to take less time to learn how to do these, so you get your system out of the way faster to do whatever else it is you wanted to.
OS X follows in this tradition. I installed it, and it worked. Inside 30 minutes. OK, with all the dev tools it inside 45. And oh yes, it's full of all the commandline goodness I've come to expect and love from Linux.
Secondly, you can't run full OS X on x86 platforms - just darwin. So you get an expensive and slow computer from apple that has a candy coated shell. Am I the only one that doesn't see a point?
Apple *will* somehow have to address the price performance issue if they want to gouge market share out of others. But they can keep their core advantages (enumerated above) and keep their core customre base, maybe even grow a little.
BTW, on what do you base your assumption that current apple hardware is "second rate" other than processor speed?
The deal is that since apple customers are cultist followers,
Blah, blah. "I don't understand apple custumors so they must not be rational." Great logic. I expect you to admit also think people like Minkowski and Feynman were loons (pardon my assumption that you don't understand all the theories they published).
But at least they don't have a cpu fan - that's worth an extra $600, right?
Not, as it turns out, in the mass market. But I love laptops for this reason. I hate the noise.
And, as it turns out, one of my hobbies is audio/video production -- a big market for apple. Having a quiet computer really is an asset. But you probably didn't think about that.
If OS-X does anything, it'll simply be to raise the bar for KDE and GNOME - a challenge they will be able to meet.
KDE and GNOME, great as they are, don't get anywhere at solving the underlying system administration problem. Eazel might.
Sorry, but apple has gone the way of the Amiga - thousands of deluded followers and zero relevance.
If by deluded you means that there's not hope of world domination, then your comment has truth. But if you mean that Apple's offerings don't have things worth examining -- even buying -- then you're off your rocker. The Cocoa (formerly Yellowbox/Openstep) development framework by itself is a find. The other benefits I've touted in this post are real and will appeal to people -- even some Linux users.
Mass abandonment of Linux for OS X? Hardly probable. Even if OS X was completely superior and ran on Intel hardware, the ideology of Open Source and sheer stubborn religiousness withing the
*LINUX* community would keep users -- just like the "deluded apple followers" you mention.
But don't think that means that OS X isn't something to be reckoned with -- and learned from.
--
The only thing between me and never going back to Linux right now is the fact that under linux, I can do the ./configure-make-make-test-make-install thing and get my software.
Though some packages are on the road (Apache compiled quite nicely, even though 1.3.12 had no idea what the platform was.), I don't think most are. MySQL and Lynx, for example. Sigh.
But contrast the ease of system administration and installation, and it's no contest. Mac OS X PB is sheer joy.
(wasn't this discussed earlier last week?)
--
We thought we understood the mass ranges of planets of other stars. We thought we understood
the full diversity of planets.
What's frightening to me is if they really thought they understood these things.
We've been able to find planets outside our solar system for what, a few years now? And we expect to have "a thorough comprehension of their diversity?" We're still finding stuff on our own planet that blows our minds.
The universe is going to hold some serious surprises for a Real Long Time to come. Please check your arrogance at the door. Especially with things we have mostly theories about and very little data.
--
puh-LEASE yourself, Mr. Devil's advocate. Having a different opinion from the majority of slashdot folks doesn't make you erudite.
:|
If you have to ask why people are afraid of Microsoft, you simply haven't been paying attention. MS would attract about the same level of animosity as Apple, except for one thing: when Microsoft sets its sights on a market, there's a strong chance that they'll try to destroy everything else in it. Consumer choice goes down. Choice about what we get to use to do our jobs disappears. This isn't alarmism -- this was the world that I worked in for a couple of years.
I'm really happy to say that Microsoft products and technology hardly matter at all to me right now. I work with technologies of MY choice right now, and the people I work for actually listen to me instead of MS marketeering. This is largely because I work in the Web App development world and I choose employers who don't list Visual Basic as a required skill.
But I have no illusions about Microsoft being in their death throes -- the amount of market power they have is incredible, and the amount of money they can just throw at things is equally incredible, and they've demonstrated they're not shy about using it to stomp out alternatives. So when I see them trying to "embrace and extend" the internet, I'm a little afraid, yes. And you think we're overreacting?
Cut the crap, already. You know that both yourselves and the majority of your readers are scrappy Linux-hacker wannabes. Why not post stories about things they can have intellgent discussions? Here are a few suggesstions:
* "Ask Slashdot: What is the l337est GNOME skin?"
* "Interview: A Non-virgin"
* "The coolest TI-83 games to play during English class"
* "Science: Stealth masturbation"
* "BSD: Not as l337 as LUN1X!!"
* "Book review: O'Reilly's Acne Prevention in a Nutshell"
Oh, boy, NOW you've really raised the level of dialogue on slashdot. Good work.
--
I remember having a conversation in 1994 about the future of windows. I remember two code names -- Cairo and Chicago. I think one of them was Win95 and the other was what became NT 5.0 The projected release for NT 5.0 was late 1995 early 1996.
All hearsay, of course.
--
While many people view the presence of different OS's as a fight to the death with only one winner (and while this often happens), it's obvious that they sometimes influence one anothers design. In the open source world, I sometimes expect this to happen to a greater extent, since the ideas and code are shared freely. I'm curious to know if you've played tried Darwin and NetBSD, and what you think about them. Anything cool about them LinuxPPC doesn't have? Any directions they're taking you think will influence LinuxPPC? And you could answer the same questions for the other PPC Linux distros....
--
An AC in the other Y2K thread said he felt sorry for Pete, and wanted to send him a thank you note.
My initial reaction was "+1, gracious", but then I realized I'm not a moderator, and that rating doesn't exist, and also, the AC didn't include Peter's email address.
So: pdejager@year2000.com
And, as I said when I posted it in that thread, I realize it's a little sappy and superfluous, but why not counteract a little gratuitous hate mail? Especially 'round the holiday season ("You see, Peter, you really DID have a wonderful life").
(promise, I'm not drunk, really, I'm a Mormon).
--
I feel like sending him a thank-you note.
+1, gracious. Not a bad idea at all.
His email appears to be: pdejager@year2000.com
Yeah, it seems a little superfluous and sappy,
but it sort of balances out the uncalled for
hate mail and death threats. Sheesh.
--
The idea behind this technology is at least 15 years old; The first time I ever heard about this technology was from that phenomenon of americanized anime: Robotech! Somewhere in the "second generation," the clever/nerdy character (Louie, I think his name was) invented goggles that tracked pupil movement, which could in turn automatically target weapons systems to whatever the wearer was looking at. The result? Our heroes were able to avoid getting their clocks completely cleaned by the Robotech Masters and their armies of new-and-improved Bioroids (see if you ever get THAT level of inventiveness out of Pokemon or DragonBallz).
:). But I wonder if we're going to start seeing Pupil Pistols, and looks really will be able to kill.
The apps I thought of following watching that were similar to some mentioned here, including hands-free computing (I had never used a mouse, though, so I was thinking of a CLI based on a gaze selected alphabet. Arg.
Ah, speculation...
--
Possibly true. But the Internet grew up just fine w/o much commercial support. There are sites out there that exist w/o it, and would continue to exist w/o any prospect of commercial support. Despite the success it has brought and can bring many businesses, money is not the only motivation for putting stuff on the web.
The point is lost on some people, but maybe that's OK. It seems likely that the non-commercial portion of the web will remain that way no matter what the current ad-fad is. Then the ad monstrosities can be avoided and people can start looking at real information and Twinkie experiments -- what the web is REALLY about!
--
If you take the premise that good open source software starts with scratching an itch, then the first thing you have to do is figure out where you're itching.
:) Good luck.
So:
1) sit down, make a list of your itches
2) find out if there's any open source projects out there that fit (freshmeat, sourceforge).
3) pick one. Start _using_ it. Chances are you'll find an issue that you'll want to do something about, eventually. Chances are that before you're even done INSTALLING it, you'll find something you think could be done better. If nothing else, you can document it. With some research and some help, you may even be able come up with a fix yourself.
I'll give you an example. LinuxPPC. I've installed it on some older model macintoshes, but I've had an iBook for 6 weeks and haven't got it to run on the iBook yet. This despite the documentation out there and the patient help of several people from comp.os.linux.ppc. It will take patience, but I'm going to get this, and by the time I'm done with this, I expect that I'll be able to write a half-decent HowTo that will be a contribution to the community. I'll also have some familiarity with kernel issues and open firmware and other stuff that may help me if I ever get an itch to contribute code.
And if there is no project for your itch, well, then you get to strike out on your own.
--
Contact the US Copyright Office with your cogent, well thought out protest and discussion of alternatives:
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/about.html#contact
They don't have an email address listed, but they do have fax/snailmail.
I think the important thing is that the RIAA be only allowed to collect for music that their members hold copyright to -- and that they be required to demonstrate you're playing such music before they can take any action to collect.
Mac user writing commands on a shell or editing a /etc file by hand. I just can't. Is there anybody out there?
:)
Hmmmm.
root@cs:/etc# vi conf.modules
<me fixes pesky i/o port setting problem>
I'm a Mac user since 1989, and Unix user since 1988.
root@cs:/etc# find / -name "tired_macuser_stereotype" -exec rm {} \;
Of course, now folks will be getting on me because I still use vi/vim.
If I recall correctly, OpenDoc wasn't necessarily
tied to a specific language or platform. It was a description of how to write container apps and objects. A spec, which Apple produced an implementation of. I think a company called Digital Harbor actually produced the theoretical word processor.
I've heard you can do most of the things that OpenDoc did with Java, and perhaps other languages. True?
And if so, why not try and create such a thing?
So when I was a kid, somewhere I heard the idea -- maybe from my mother -- that you could tell whether or not someone could was lying by looking at their face coloring. A flush of a "yellowish" color was said to enter the forehead of a liar.
Hmmm.
I'd always thought it was a psychological ploy: if someone claimed they could tell when you were lying, then you may as well give up and tell the truth.
But if there are tetrachromats, or even other kinds of better vision, maybe they CAN see things like this....
Insightful? Interesting? Blacchhhh. Somebody with some mod points take this guy down to at least a 4. Insightful is right out. Interesting has a case -- since a bunch of people followed up to this post.
That since they walked off with your boxen,
that the last thing you probably want is having
your security system running off of said boxen.
OK, true, the cops may have been called by the time they get in to retrieve your stuff... but still, don't make your security system a target.
In fact, the person I felt the most for/with in the online chapters was Peter; if he becomes the main character in this book, perhaps we can recapture the same energies as the original Ender's Game.
Well, the title is Shadow of the Hegemon, so one assumes we'll get at least as much Hegemon (Peter) as we saw of Ender in Ender's Shadow. Likely more, as we already had Ender's Game to give us info about Ender, but we don't have much on Peter, really.
I heartily agree with you, though -- Peter is the high point of the first five chapters so far.
Card explained why he started writing the sequels in the intro to Ender's Shadow. He was going to start farming out the Ender "universe" to other authors, and let them write from the point of views of other characters from the story. He'd even got someone who was interested in doing this. But, then, the more he thought about it, the more jealous he was of the guy who was going to get to do this. Eventually, he decided to swipe the project back.
Now, of course, you could say that's all a smoke screen. But it sounds to me like he did it for one reason: fun.
Arg! Do you realize what you've just done?
... Must... resist... attractive... problem...
This is just like the time a co-worker asked me to determine what the set of all points equidistant from a point and a line in 3 space is. Hours of work were lost (because you can't stop with a point and a line, no, you've got to do point-plane, line-plane, and then think about 4 space). All.... CPU Cycles... being... consumed
Plus, now Slashdot is simply going to lose everybody who makes quality posts. They'll be too busy writing their own java apps for "programmer's mineswepper" (no I'm not going to give you the URL). Slashdot will become a banal wasteland of first posts, trolls, and karma whores....
(oh, wait...)
I've always thought that one of the problems with math -- as taught at the secondary level -- was that you didn't actually learn any abstract math skills (well, you might, but you're not taught them). Just more algebraic manipulation, or, if you're luck, the foundations of calc.
I think games and optimization problems, though, could provide a fertile and interesting framework for teaching real mathematical thinking. Minesweeper. Knight's Tours. John Conway's games. Nim. Dominoes. Any small, discrete system with definable rules can get you thinking mathematically, though most people probably just play with heuristics....
Just a second... maybe that's the point! Any encryption can be broken with sufficient random clicking. :-)
:)
Well, yes. This is called brute force. Of course most of the time it's easy to think of brute force being a sequential trial of everything in the keyspace, but it doesn't have to be (although that guarantees you try every key only once).
Suffecient would be the trick.
I don't understand why this isn't a free speech issue. If this was a government entity, not only would WE be all over them, but three or four watchdog groups and probably a fair portion of the population.
This isn't the only place this is happening. I'm hearing about legal cases where people aren't allowed to say anything to others about their own case. I don't know about you, but this is FAR more worrisome to me than web censorship on public machines. Somehow, contract and other branches of the law are overriding people's right to free speech.
I'm not sure where to draw the line. There's times when voluntarily agreeing not to speeak up about something is probably good. NDAs, for example. But perhaps the time is coming when we're going to need something besides the first ammendment to protect free speech. Congress might not be able to make any law prohibiting free speech, but corporations can sure draw up contracts and suits that are doing the job.