This horse has already been beat, but it does hurt the company you work for which is paying for the machines that's running the clients for you. It hurts them just as much as if you'd been renting out your hotel's vacant rooms for charity, while stocking and cleaning them up yourself afterwards. You're lucky you didn't get fired.
Some perspective is in order. While I don't think the article mentioned whose solution Gateway was using, most grid computing platforms running on untrusted machines are going to use encryption, most machines aren't going to look at enough of a job to be useful even if the encryption was broken, and each individual job is going to be run on multiple machines to ensure one machine doesn't (intentionally or not) return faulty data.
What data would people pay to have crunched in public ? Well, I can tell you that animation houses, financial shops and biotechnology companies are all crunching their data "in public".
i am convinced that my new iBook 800 with combo drive is the best Mac i've ever owned.
Isn't this almost true by construction ? I mean, can one imagine buying a computer - *any* computer - that *wasn't* much better than their previous, older one ? I mean really, man, you're comparing you're new computer against, among other things, an ancient Powerbook !
And when you went to college you *did* have the opportunity to get that PB 100... the only difference is that in this example, the purchase price is hidden in the tuition cost.
it is now impossible to either fax or email an invoice...since it appears to use their own mail server.
Couldn't you just do something like print the invoices to a PDF then email that through the mailer of your choice ? Sure beats having to move your operation and data to a new system, and with the convenient plus that if you want, as some do, you can always have a copy of the invoice exactly as it was printed.
Is the key and operative term used in the article. It makes perfect sense for these companies to want to have some control over what will get said by THEIR employees and hence as THEIR _Official_ representatives. There are lots of techs out there who are quick to say/write/post things that are offensive/incorrect - policy guidelines notwithstanding, and there's no good way for these companies to retract/correct them. How many times have _you_ dealt with a surly/incompetent/incoherent tech that reflects very poorly on their company ? Could you imagine the company having a policy that, say, only fluent English speakers are allowed to post, without that company being open to lawsuits ?
I don't blame these companies a bit for wanting to be able to control what their company says and how their company is portrayed. The article says nothing about the companies prohibiting the techs from posting in an unofficial capacity.
I find Stallman instead to be one of the most persistently, relentlessly reasonable people whose thoughts I've ever encountered. Stallman may be a dogmatist,
Almost by definition, a dogmatist can't be reasonable, since dogma itself, as a tenet, is not subject to reason.
Software isn't as much like poetry as he suggests
on
The Poetry Of Programming
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sure, there's a creative aspect. But there's a creative aspect to the bridge-building example he describes. And while maybe on any given program you're working on only the 7th or 8th generation at most, almost any programming task that people deal with has been worked umpteen times - maybe not by them, but by someone. Let's face it, most programming is mundane, whether you work for Bank of America or Playboy, and involves working mostly the same old strategies and structures for slightly different ends. How creative can you get with bubble-sort or linked-lists, or which you've probably used tons of times before ?
The designers of the program - i.e., usually the project managers (*ducks*) or system architects do most of the creative work of conceptualizings how things will work and how they will meet the constraints of the particular problem. The programmers, most of the time, are brick-layers, carpenters and plumbers. Not that there is anything less noble about this latter work, but it's hard to call it creative.
Most of the creativity in software comes from newly emerging fields like, say, robotics, AI, or computational biology, but usually this creativity comes from the algorithms which get hashed out and proven by theoreticians, not rank-and-file programmers.
The closest thing to a proof that programming is mostly not art, that I can come up with, is this: bad programming is mostly identifiable by almost every programmer. But there is nothing close to a consensus as to what defines bad art, or bad poetry, or bad architecture. The latter judgements are far more subjective.
their big old file server had 5 hard drives in it, but was only using 1 in windows! Being the smart boy that he is, he dutifully shuts down the machine, removes one of the drives, puts it on the broken machine, formats and loads windows on it.
So how did he decide which of the 5 drives he was going to pull ?
I was going to clean up my apartement, but instead I wrote a piece for Greplaw
If I was this guy, I would be the most prolific contributor to Greplaw. Legal scholars would be citing my works as I am always looking for ways to put off cleaning my apartment.
Thank heavens for slovenliness, or we would have one fewer article to throw on the copyright flame-heap here.
I was absolutely Taken by it. (cymbal crash) Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Little known about Einstein ??
on
Einstein Unveiled
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
On the other hand there's little knowledge of who Einstein really was and the human being behind the genius.
Please. As far as scientists go, there are none whose personality has been more revealed and documented than Einstein - except now, maybe John Nash. Lots of lay people know at least something about Einstein's personality; he's probably the only scientist ever who has been adopted by the media. By contrast, see if the lay people around you know anything about the personalities/loves/quirks of Darwin, Newton, Bohr or Freud.
There is a world out there that's hardly connected (some call it Africa) that has some influence on our world's economy but is left out completely.
Let's be serious. You could over or underestimate Africa's economic figures by probably an order of magnitude or more and still not create half as much noise in your predictions as being off by a quarter of a point in your interest rate forecasts. Yes, Africa has some influence on the world economy. But it doesn't have much.
If Sun does make most of their money from their really nice hardware, how are they possibly going to benefit from opening the source ? By having everyone run Solaris on commodity x86 boxes ?
(drumroll please) 5. computers will be much faster than they are today 4. computers will be much less expensive than they are now 3. programs will take much more space than they do now 2. hard drive capacities will be much larger than they are now and finally... (drumroll please) 1. there will be even more duped articles on Slashdot
In other news.... - Wired released their holiday gift guide. - ThinkGeek releases their holiday gift guide - Tom's Hardware releases their holiday gift guide - Scientific American releases their holiday gift guide - Popular Mechanics releases their holiday gift guide - Business 2.0 releases their holiday gift guide - Anime Weekly releases their holiday gift guide - Hello Kitty World magazine releases their holiday gift guide and finally.... - Slashdot releases their holiday gift guide
But does anyone doubt that the software in question is playing off the Microsoft Windows brand and mark ? I'd understand the argument if the software described did things totally unrelated to MS Windows, but I bet (without actually looking up these products) from the sounds of their names that their functionalities are intimately related to MS Windows.
As for whether or not Windows is a registered trademark in Russia or not, I have to say I'd be very, very surprised if it is not. And if it isn't , then someone in Russia ought to go and register that trademark NOW. In fact, it makes me wonder why the Russian programmer in question wouldn't register the trademark if only to protect HIS mark.
Why would you be so sure ? AFAIK, there are no large movements under foot in corporations to move from Windows to OS X. And OS X suffers from many of the same undesirable qualities as Windows: for instance, it's not (completely) open and it requires hefty licensing fees. Moreover, the huge variety of apps availble under Windows are mostly NOT avaible under OS X. So why would MS deem OS X to be a threat ?
Slashdot Mirror
It hurts NOTHING, but could do a lot of good.
This horse has already been beat, but it does hurt the company you work for which is paying for the machines that's running the clients for you. It hurts them just as much as if you'd been renting out your hotel's vacant rooms for charity, while stocking and cleaning them up yourself afterwards. You're lucky you didn't get fired.
Some perspective is in order. While I don't think the article mentioned whose solution Gateway was using, most grid computing platforms running on untrusted machines are going to use encryption, most machines aren't going to look at enough of a job to be useful even if the encryption was broken, and each individual job is going to be run on multiple machines to ensure one machine doesn't (intentionally or not) return faulty data.
What data would people pay to have crunched in public ? Well, I can tell you that animation houses, financial shops and biotechnology companies are all crunching their data "in public".
i am convinced that my new iBook 800 with combo drive is the best Mac i've ever owned.
... the only difference is that in this example, the purchase price is hidden in the tuition cost.
Isn't this almost true by construction ? I mean, can one imagine buying a computer - *any* computer - that *wasn't* much better than their previous, older one ? I mean really, man, you're comparing you're new computer against, among other things, an ancient Powerbook !
And when you went to college you *did* have the opportunity to get that PB 100
it is now impossible to either fax or email an invoice ...since it appears to use their own mail server.
Couldn't you just do something like print the invoices to a PDF then email that through the mailer of your choice ? Sure beats having to move your operation and data to a new system, and with the convenient plus that if you want, as some do, you can always have a copy of the invoice exactly as it was printed.
she has gone from being a somewhat normal person, to being one of the higher level characters in Anarchy Online...sounds like a happy ending to me
no, sounds like she really didget addicted. Can you say "rationalization"?
Is the key and operative term used in the article. It makes perfect sense for these companies to want to have some control over what will get said by THEIR employees and hence as THEIR _Official_ representatives. There are lots of techs out there who are quick to say/write/post things that are offensive/incorrect - policy guidelines notwithstanding, and there's no good way for these companies to retract/correct them. How many times have _you_ dealt with a surly/incompetent/incoherent tech that reflects very poorly on their company ? Could you imagine the company having a policy that, say, only fluent English speakers are allowed to post, without that company being open to lawsuits ?
I don't blame these companies a bit for wanting to be able to control what their company says and how their company is portrayed. The article says nothing about the companies prohibiting the techs from posting in an unofficial capacity.
I find Stallman instead to be one of the most persistently, relentlessly reasonable people whose thoughts I've ever encountered. Stallman may be a dogmatist,
Almost by definition, a dogmatist can't be reasonable, since dogma itself, as a tenet, is not subject to reason.
"Linux a charity case"
Sure, there's a creative aspect. But there's a creative aspect to the bridge-building example he describes. And while maybe on any given program you're working on only the 7th or 8th generation at most, almost any programming task that people deal with has been worked umpteen times - maybe not by them, but by someone. Let's face it, most programming is mundane, whether you work for Bank of America or Playboy, and involves working mostly the same old strategies and structures for slightly different ends. How creative can you get with bubble-sort or linked-lists, or which you've probably used tons of times before ?
The designers of the program - i.e., usually the project managers (*ducks*) or system architects do most of the creative work of conceptualizings how things will work and how they will meet the constraints of the particular problem. The programmers, most of the time, are brick-layers, carpenters and plumbers. Not that there is anything less noble about this latter work, but it's hard to call it creative.
Most of the creativity in software comes from newly emerging fields like, say, robotics, AI, or computational biology, but usually this creativity comes from the algorithms which get hashed out and proven by theoreticians, not rank-and-file programmers.
The closest thing to a proof that programming is mostly not art, that I can come up with, is this: bad programming is mostly identifiable by almost every programmer. But there is nothing close to a consensus as to what defines bad art, or bad poetry, or bad architecture. The latter judgements are far more subjective.
their big old file server had 5 hard drives in it, but was only using 1 in windows! Being the smart boy that he is, he dutifully shuts down the machine, removes one of the drives, puts it on the broken machine, formats and loads windows on it.
So how did he decide which of the 5 drives he was going to pull ?
I personally would love to hear any ide-raid stories that slashdotters might have.
Once upon a time, in an array far, far away, there lived a young princess who was worried about the integrity of her data...
I was going to clean up my apartement, but instead I wrote a piece for Greplaw
If I was this guy, I would be the most prolific contributor to Greplaw. Legal scholars would be citing my works as I am always looking for ways to put off cleaning my apartment.
Thank heavens for slovenliness, or we would have one fewer article to throw on the copyright flame-heap here.
I was absolutely Taken by it.
(cymbal crash)
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
On the other hand there's little knowledge of who Einstein really was and the human being behind the genius.
Please. As far as scientists go, there are none whose personality has been more revealed and documented than Einstein - except now, maybe John Nash. Lots of lay people know at least something about Einstein's personality; he's probably the only scientist ever who has been adopted by the media. By contrast, see if the lay people around you know anything about the personalities/loves/quirks of Darwin, Newton, Bohr or Freud.
Why should it be illegal if the users have agreed to a valid disclaimer ?
There is a world out there that's hardly connected (some call it Africa) that has some influence on our world's economy but is left out completely.
Let's be serious. You could over or underestimate Africa's economic figures by probably an order of magnitude or more and still not create half as much noise in your predictions as being off by a quarter of a point in your interest rate forecasts. Yes, Africa has some influence on the world economy. But it doesn't have much.
If Sun does make most of their money from their really nice hardware, how are they possibly going to benefit from opening the source ? By having everyone run Solaris on commodity x86 boxes ?
Actually, the article specifically indicates that fruiterers are excepted from the scope of Apple's trademarks.
But what about a company called "Apple Clothing" ? Or "Apple Tampons" ? Should these too be subject to litigation by Apple Computer at their whim ?
(drumroll please)
5. computers will be much faster than they are today
4. computers will be much less expensive than they are now
3. programs will take much more space than they do now
2. hard drive capacities will be much larger than they are now
and finally... (drumroll please)
1. there will be even more duped articles on Slashdot
Here's the sum-total of a complete Macintosh game-buyers guide:
1) Diablo II
2) Lemonade
In other news....
- Wired released their holiday gift guide.
- ThinkGeek releases their holiday gift guide
- Tom's Hardware releases their holiday gift guide
- Scientific American releases their holiday gift guide
- Popular Mechanics releases their holiday gift guide
- Business 2.0 releases their holiday gift guide
- Anime Weekly releases their holiday gift guide
- Hello Kitty World magazine releases their holiday gift guide
and finally....
- Slashdot releases their holiday gift guide
But does anyone doubt that the software in question is playing off the Microsoft Windows brand and mark ? I'd understand the argument if the software described did things totally unrelated to MS Windows, but I bet (without actually looking up these products) from the sounds of their names that their functionalities are intimately related to MS Windows.
As for whether or not Windows is a registered trademark in Russia or not, I have to say I'd be very, very surprised if it is not. And if it isn't , then someone in Russia ought to go and register that trademark NOW. In fact, it makes me wonder why the Russian programmer in question wouldn't register the trademark if only to protect HIS mark.
Ever wonder what "Ode to Joy" would sound like if stretched to 24 hours?
Uhh, no ?
I'm sure OS X is on MS's mind as well.
Why would you be so sure ? AFAIK, there are no large movements under foot in corporations to move from Windows to OS X. And OS X suffers from many of the same undesirable qualities as Windows: for instance, it's not (completely) open and it requires hefty licensing fees. Moreover, the huge variety of apps availble under Windows are mostly NOT avaible under OS X. So why would MS deem OS X to be a threat ?
If NASA is serious then some of us are going to get very tired hearing about how the Russians are sending every boy band member into space.