Knowing the right combination is always easy in hindsight. Once found, we can always awe at any solution's simplicity and elegance. But to find it is like trying to guess a PIN number. The possibilities are always exponential with every new variable. So that is why we need super computers. To say trial and error is a viable approach is highly underestimating the scale of the problem. Trial and error is for production, not discovery.
The author adds a note at the end directly contradicting the title of his own article. It must be hard being a "journalist" these days...
NOTE:... This does not mean Flash is directly supported on your device, just that the media server will be able to export Flash assets as an HTML5-supporting format, for example, so you should eventually be able to access such content, but only as publishers deploy the new Adobe software.
I find the wording puzzling, since everything we download is, well, copyrighted. So the "illegal downloading of" is dependent on there being "illegal distribution" of copyrighted material by a non-copyright-holder, in which case, shouldn't the distributors be punished *first*?
And what about all the free legal distribution of copyrighted content by copyright holders, which in turn can easily be saved as mp3s? It is saying if someone downloads something via P2P they are criminal, but if they save a youtube stream to a file, they are model citizens.
Love this. The "giving of instructions to the kids to execute" by another poster is also lovely, but this would be what I'd do if I'd preferred the kids to remain seated!
A programmer can only make the computer do what the computer can already do. But then, how do you make it do something it has never done before, but just for you?
Maybe start with a premise that you wash dishes. But provide commands that would let them piece together a program that would "scrub" jelly onto a "plate" of bread... Then at the end, don't forget to show them the instructions they compiled, and present that as a function they can execute again. And make a student do it.
I am no psychologist or biologist, but if viewed in terms of information theory and abstraction layers, the language layer is higher than the thought layer. Thought may be closer to the hardware (figuratively - literally I have no idea), but language provides a simpler, easier way to organize and express those thoughts. Without language, there would be less order, and the patterns we remember would be far more complex. For example, it is very difficult to communicate thoughts without language. Language is what provides that higher level of abstraction that simplifies expression.
But there is more to it than simplification, since language itself can then become a though, act to shape thoughts, and intentionally or unintentionally alter interpretations. Furthermore, when full languages are acquired, they come with a lot of cultural and epistemological firmware so to speak. Language is used intentionally to enforce certain ways of thinking, and it will also unintentionally shape how certain observations are interpreted when expression is automatic or forced.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that much of our intelligence would not be possible without language. Yes, biologically, we should be just as capable, but as far as our articulation and spread of knowledge is concerned, it would be impossible to be where we are without language. Take mathematical formulas. We would not be able to express them or understand them without being able to communicate in mathematical terms first.
Who in their right mind would think it okay to publish a password and publish the correct one? They could have published the same book with a fake password all the same, yet obviously it was the password.
As for it being temporary, it wasn't an access password, but a decryption password. And in the eyes of the law, why would what Wikileaks said even matter if non-disclosure was part of their arrangement?
This is a great point. Innovation is great, but at some point one has to wonder, is it really about innovation anymore? It's similar to starvation. It isn't that we don't have food. The problem can be political/socioeconomical.
We need to figure out how to get existing innovation to where it is needed. We already have plenty of technical answers. But maybe the real questions that need answered right now are not technical.
If not caring, not understanding, and not knowing were all the same, you'd be right. As it stands, facebook continues to monetize the mistakes and misunderstanding of the masses, mostly caused from how facebook works... Like a mousetrap really. Pure genius.
This is spot on. A lot of people don't know or care how bad the storm was elsewhere, and they won't evacuate next time. For all practical purposes, if the next storm does require evacuation, they are going to have to scream louder to get the same reaction. They might even need a better word than "hurricane".
It is only natural that with open source bugs gather less volunteer enthusiasm. Ask any programmer and I doubt they enjoy squashing bugs over implementing new features. Debugging is the grunge work, or rather, the toilet cleaning of coding, yet it can also be the hardest part, requiring your very best resources.
With that said, IE sucks the worse. Just imagine how many bugs IE would have if they had the same bug reporting system? "Our software has bugs, we don't care, and we are sitting on billions of dollars."
For mozilla to lag on fixes is forgivable, and their openness is truly commendable. And for someone to be able to come out and speak up like this is a testament to why the model is so much better than closed source.
But honestly, you'd think Microsoft would do a better job. It's as if they intentionally want every web developer to hate IE. That is a lot of people that hate you, and for a fairly good reason. And with browsers being the #1 application everyone uses, you'd think someone high in the ranks would think of making it a priority.
Either that, or this proves you cannot just throw money at code.
... there is human error there will be weakness. Before innovation, there is caution and upkeep. Careless server admins just leave their gates open, a la Sony. A simple misconfiguration and the East goes dark, a la Amazon.
But like all things founded on good democratic freedoms, we are free to be idiots. And unless we add socialized security, the internet will always be full of gaping weaknesses. And all of us, including those that serve responsibly, will suffer their consequences. A la the United States of America.
Not that either is good or bad, but just sayin' this is the world we surf in.
You're still pitting iOS against Android, when iOS is exclusive to Apple. You can't compare the OS market for phones, because it isn't an OS market.
The hardware may abstract the OS, but "the phone" abstracts everything. That is why we don't call an iPhone an iOS.
Fanboy perspectives aside, Google already tried to build their own phone and failed miserably. Sure, they'll be back, but to say Android = Google = Apple is Losing is completely skewed. Apple is winning winning winning. It's all about stock prices.
Putting all Android devices in the same column opposite the iPhone is the same fanboy thinking (to borrow your fine words) of the opposition. Or is that what you meant? I am not an Apple fanboy, but I'm just against fanboy statistics, which is what I replied to.
How many Android phone were sold to people who wanted an iPhone but couldn't get one? How many Android phones are sold by wireless companies that want to sell iPhones but can't? How many Android phones are built by manufacturers that want to build an Apple product but can't?
It is Apple versus the world. Android is their weapon of choice. But nothing is beating the iPhone. It just so happens that every competitor has the same OS. To say that that OS is made by Google so Google is beating Apple is like coloring an apple orange and pretending to compare oranges.
If you are in the industry and still think you can compete with Apple, you will end up like HP.
The lesson here is not about solid engineering, eye-catching design, or pricing. It is about how to avoid contesting something that is in a league of its own, in the zone, and has become a force of nature. They're at Exxon levels. And to do that as a tech company that actually makes something is insane.
Apple right now is Mike Tyson in his heyday. Many Tyson fans didn't follow boxing. They followed Mike. It's the same with Apple. Most people who bought an iPad don't even know the specs. The iPad commercial probably isn't what got them to buy it either. They simply don't care.
HP spent a ton of money getting celebrities to do fancy commercials, and the design and specs of their Tablet isn't bad either. But it's too bad, because no one cares.
Apple has gotten to the point where people just buy their products because everybody chants how great they are. If you dare step in the ring with them, they'll knock you the &%$# out and take everything you put into the fight.
I am not an Apple fan, but it doesn't take one to see what is going on. If you understood the phenomenon that is Apple right now, you'd think twice before picking a fight.
Gotta love it. So Marc is complaining on the Wall Street Journal that "too much of the debate is still around financial valuation".
Why, Marc, to them it is always about financial valuation!!!
The importance of software in the economy has not been underestimated. I'd go as far as to say, it has been kept a secret. Our whole financial system runs on software. The stock market is driven by system trades. Our economy is pretty much online and runs on software.
If you can't see it, it's because it's everywhere.
Honestly, to the financial markets, philosophy, ethics, morals, insight, what have you, are all just distractions. Valuation is all that matters, and it has nothing to do with the topic of software.
What's worse is that the encryption part is free, and verification easily could be free too.
The whole industry is built on the false notion that notaries provide encryption, when all they do is make browsers stop complaining. If browsers didn't complain about certificates or show fancy colored address bars, this industry would not exist.
What's even worse is there are enough people that don't even check URLs in the first place, making verification a non-issue!!!!!
The way in which the author is comparing now with history gives history a huge advantage. The chances of today being as good as your best day is small, because the past contains more days. So on any day I could write a "today is dead" article as long as today isn't my best day ever, and I could do that for any day in the past.
There is an elegant way around this skewing of perspective: Make the comparisons proportional. If we compare today with a day before, and then look ahead to a day after, today is rarely dead. It is usually much like yesterday, and most days are the same. No drama, no article.
Now expand "day" to "50 years" for the purpose of this article. Comparing the big ideas between 1910 and 1960 with those between 1961 and 2010, and then looking ahead to the next 50 years, I find it is extremely difficult to be pessimistic. Rather, one could easily argue they are getting bigger. And that would be an article more worthy of a read.
Right. But what I am trying to get at is that with the number of people who work IT on Wall Street, they must be enforcing non-disclosure and no distribution clauses for no code to ever come out of it. Either that or everyone there believes in "not giving back" without exception.
In my ideal open source world, when innovation happens, it should be open, not a trade secret. I thought the GPL encouranged that, until now.
Spot on. Kinda like the "web is dead" headline, it's overly provocative to generate reaction. But we knew that since it's a NY Times piece.
FYI The article starts with a criticism of The Atlantic trumpets the “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” which is a pathetic list and nothing to base any science on. Then the author drags on to criticize everything he doesn't like or understand about modern pop culture in comparison with historic intellects. It turns out most of his complaints are about modern media and the influences it has that are unintellectual... In that context, one could say this is a fairly accurate article written by someone with a front row seat. But it still doesn't change how ridiculous his premise is and how fast he digresses into what he really wants to talk about.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Sony has good lawyers. If only their server admins were as competent....
Knowing the right combination is always easy in hindsight. Once found, we can always awe at any solution's simplicity and elegance. But to find it is like trying to guess a PIN number. The possibilities are always exponential with every new variable. So that is why we need super computers. To say trial and error is a viable approach is highly underestimating the scale of the problem. Trial and error is for production, not discovery.
The author adds a note at the end directly contradicting the title of his own article. It must be hard being a "journalist" these days...
NOTE: ... This does not mean Flash is directly supported on your device, just that the media server will be able to export Flash assets as an HTML5-supporting format, for example, so you should eventually be able to access such content, but only as publishers deploy the new Adobe software.
I find the wording puzzling, since everything we download is, well, copyrighted. So the "illegal downloading of" is dependent on there being "illegal distribution" of copyrighted material by a non-copyright-holder, in which case, shouldn't the distributors be punished *first*?
And what about all the free legal distribution of copyrighted content by copyright holders, which in turn can easily be saved as mp3s? It is saying if someone downloads something via P2P they are criminal, but if they save a youtube stream to a file, they are model citizens.
Love this. The "giving of instructions to the kids to execute" by another poster is also lovely, but this would be what I'd do if I'd preferred the kids to remain seated!
A programmer can only make the computer do what the computer can already do. But then, how do you make it do something it has never done before, but just for you?
Maybe start with a premise that you wash dishes. But provide commands that would let them piece together a program that would "scrub" jelly onto a "plate" of bread... Then at the end, don't forget to show them the instructions they compiled, and present that as a function they can execute again. And make a student do it.
That is programming.
I am no psychologist or biologist, but if viewed in terms of information theory and abstraction layers, the language layer is higher than the thought layer. Thought may be closer to the hardware (figuratively - literally I have no idea), but language provides a simpler, easier way to organize and express those thoughts. Without language, there would be less order, and the patterns we remember would be far more complex. For example, it is very difficult to communicate thoughts without language. Language is what provides that higher level of abstraction that simplifies expression.
But there is more to it than simplification, since language itself can then become a though, act to shape thoughts, and intentionally or unintentionally alter interpretations. Furthermore, when full languages are acquired, they come with a lot of cultural and epistemological firmware so to speak. Language is used intentionally to enforce certain ways of thinking, and it will also unintentionally shape how certain observations are interpreted when expression is automatic or forced.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that much of our intelligence would not be possible without language. Yes, biologically, we should be just as capable, but as far as our articulation and spread of knowledge is concerned, it would be impossible to be where we are without language. Take mathematical formulas. We would not be able to express them or understand them without being able to communicate in mathematical terms first.
File sharing? Most of us don't even go there anymore. Everything can be taken straight off youtube in broad daylight:
http://en.crav-ing.com/
Another awkward moment for justice, for being able to do the same thing but legally... and for it being powered by google.
Who in their right mind would think it okay to publish a password and publish the correct one? They could have published the same book with a fake password all the same, yet obviously it was the password.
As for it being temporary, it wasn't an access password, but a decryption password. And in the eyes of the law, why would what Wikileaks said even matter if non-disclosure was part of their arrangement?
This is a great point. Innovation is great, but at some point one has to wonder, is it really about innovation anymore? It's similar to starvation. It isn't that we don't have food. The problem can be political/socioeconomical.
We need to figure out how to get existing innovation to where it is needed. We already have plenty of technical answers. But maybe the real questions that need answered right now are not technical.
If not caring, not understanding, and not knowing were all the same, you'd be right. As it stands, facebook continues to monetize the mistakes and misunderstanding of the masses, mostly caused from how facebook works... Like a mousetrap really. Pure genius.
This is spot on. A lot of people don't know or care how bad the storm was elsewhere, and they won't evacuate next time. For all practical purposes, if the next storm does require evacuation, they are going to have to scream louder to get the same reaction. They might even need a better word than "hurricane".
It is only natural that with open source bugs gather less volunteer enthusiasm. Ask any programmer and I doubt they enjoy squashing bugs over implementing new features. Debugging is the grunge work, or rather, the toilet cleaning of coding, yet it can also be the hardest part, requiring your very best resources.
With that said, IE sucks the worse. Just imagine how many bugs IE would have if they had the same bug reporting system? "Our software has bugs, we don't care, and we are sitting on billions of dollars."
For mozilla to lag on fixes is forgivable, and their openness is truly commendable. And for someone to be able to come out and speak up like this is a testament to why the model is so much better than closed source.
But honestly, you'd think Microsoft would do a better job. It's as if they intentionally want every web developer to hate IE. That is a lot of people that hate you, and for a fairly good reason. And with browsers being the #1 application everyone uses, you'd think someone high in the ranks would think of making it a priority.
Either that, or this proves you cannot just throw money at code.
The UK government were friends with their citizens and followed them on twitter, they'd have a clue what all the commotion was about...
... there is human error there will be weakness. Before innovation, there is caution and upkeep. Careless server admins just leave their gates open, a la Sony. A simple misconfiguration and the East goes dark, a la Amazon.
But like all things founded on good democratic freedoms, we are free to be idiots. And unless we add socialized security, the internet will always be full of gaping weaknesses. And all of us, including those that serve responsibly, will suffer their consequences. A la the United States of America.
Not that either is good or bad, but just sayin' this is the world we surf in.
So, does everyone get a badge? They claim they have a real name policy, yet only those with real real names get badges.
You're still pitting iOS against Android, when iOS is exclusive to Apple. You can't compare the OS market for phones, because it isn't an OS market.
The hardware may abstract the OS, but "the phone" abstracts everything. That is why we don't call an iPhone an iOS.
Fanboy perspectives aside, Google already tried to build their own phone and failed miserably. Sure, they'll be back, but to say Android = Google = Apple is Losing is completely skewed. Apple is winning winning winning. It's all about stock prices.
Putting all Android devices in the same column opposite the iPhone is the same fanboy thinking (to borrow your fine words) of the opposition. Or is that what you meant? I am not an Apple fanboy, but I'm just against fanboy statistics, which is what I replied to.
How many Android phone were sold to people who wanted an iPhone but couldn't get one?
How many Android phones are sold by wireless companies that want to sell iPhones but can't?
How many Android phones are built by manufacturers that want to build an Apple product but can't?
It is Apple versus the world. Android is their weapon of choice. But nothing is beating the iPhone. It just so happens that every competitor has the same OS. To say that that OS is made by Google so Google is beating Apple is like coloring an apple orange and pretending to compare oranges.
If you are in the industry and still think you can compete with Apple, you will end up like HP.
The lesson here is not about solid engineering, eye-catching design, or pricing. It is about how to avoid contesting something that is in a league of its own, in the zone, and has become a force of nature. They're at Exxon levels. And to do that as a tech company that actually makes something is insane.
Apple right now is Mike Tyson in his heyday. Many Tyson fans didn't follow boxing. They followed Mike. It's the same with Apple. Most people who bought an iPad don't even know the specs. The iPad commercial probably isn't what got them to buy it either. They simply don't care.
HP spent a ton of money getting celebrities to do fancy commercials, and the design and specs of their Tablet isn't bad either. But it's too bad, because no one cares.
Apple has gotten to the point where people just buy their products because everybody chants how great they are. If you dare step in the ring with them, they'll knock you the &%$# out and take everything you put into the fight.
I am not an Apple fan, but it doesn't take one to see what is going on. If you understood the phenomenon that is Apple right now, you'd think twice before picking a fight.
Gotta love it. So Marc is complaining on the Wall Street Journal that "too much of the debate is still around financial valuation".
Why, Marc, to them it is always about financial valuation!!!
The importance of software in the economy has not been underestimated. I'd go as far as to say, it has been kept a secret. Our whole financial system runs on software. The stock market is driven by system trades. Our economy is pretty much online and runs on software.
If you can't see it, it's because it's everywhere.
Honestly, to the financial markets, philosophy, ethics, morals, insight, what have you, are all just distractions. Valuation is all that matters, and it has nothing to do with the topic of software.
What's worse is that the encryption part is free, and verification easily could be free too.
The whole industry is built on the false notion that notaries provide encryption, when all they do is make browsers stop complaining. If browsers didn't complain about certificates or show fancy colored address bars, this industry would not exist.
What's even worse is there are enough people that don't even check URLs in the first place, making verification a non-issue!!!!!
The way in which the author is comparing now with history gives history a huge advantage. The chances of today being as good as your best day is small, because the past contains more days. So on any day I could write a "today is dead" article as long as today isn't my best day ever, and I could do that for any day in the past.
There is an elegant way around this skewing of perspective: Make the comparisons proportional. If we compare today with a day before, and then look ahead to a day after, today is rarely dead. It is usually much like yesterday, and most days are the same. No drama, no article.
Now expand "day" to "50 years" for the purpose of this article. Comparing the big ideas between 1910 and 1960 with those between 1961 and 2010, and then looking ahead to the next 50 years, I find it is extremely difficult to be pessimistic. Rather, one could easily argue they are getting bigger. And that would be an article more worthy of a read.
Right. But what I am trying to get at is that with the number of people who work IT on Wall Street, they must be enforcing non-disclosure and no distribution clauses for no code to ever come out of it. Either that or everyone there believes in "not giving back" without exception.
In my ideal open source world, when innovation happens, it should be open, not a trade secret. I thought the GPL encouranged that, until now.
Spot on. Kinda like the "web is dead" headline, it's overly provocative to generate reaction. But we knew that since it's a NY Times piece.
FYI The article starts with a criticism of The Atlantic trumpets the “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” which is a pathetic list and nothing to base any science on. Then the author drags on to criticize everything he doesn't like or understand about modern pop culture in comparison with historic intellects. It turns out most of his complaints are about modern media and the influences it has that are unintellectual... In that context, one could say this is a fairly accurate article written by someone with a front row seat. But it still doesn't change how ridiculous his premise is and how fast he digresses into what he really wants to talk about.
Right. But anyone who received it can publish it, yet no one has published it? They cannot enforce internal/personal use if I am not mistaken...
Just sad to think they won't even give us the code when they're not even in the business of selling software!!