Sending loud angry rebuttles to articles like this just dignifies them. Crap like this is not worthy of a response, and ought to be ignored. Just my $0.02
Here's an interview with Dr. Tatiana herself, available online in real and ogg courtesy of the Canadian Brodcasting Corp.: http://www.radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/ar chives/0 2-03/jan18.html
Ford: They make a big thing of the ships cybernetics: "A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers with the new GPP feature." Arthur: GPP feature? What's that? Ford: It says, "Genuine People Personalities". Arthur: Sounds ghastly. Marvin: It is. Arthur: What? Marvin: Ghastly. It all is, absolutely ghastly, just don't even talk about it. Look at this door. All the doors in this ship have a sunny and cheerful disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done. Door (closing): Mmmmmmmmm.... yum! Marvin: Hateful, isn't it. Come on, I've been ordered to take you up to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cause I don't. Ford: Excuse me, which government owns this ship? Marvin: You watch this door, it's about to open again. I can tell by the air of intollerable smugness it suddenly generates. Come on. Door (opening): Glad to be of service. Marvin: Thank you, the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Door (closing): You're welcome. Mmmmmm... Marvin: "Let's build robots with genuine people personalities", they said. So they tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype, you can tell, can't you? Ford: Umm.... Marvin: I hate that door. I'm not getting you down am I? Ford: Which government owns this ship? Marvin: No government owns it, it's been stolen. Ford & Arthur: Stolen?!? Marvin: Stolen?!? Ford: Who by? Marvin: Zaaphod Beeblebrox. Ford: Zaaphod Beeblebrox?!? Marvin: Sorry, did I say something wrong? Pardon me for breathing which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it. Oh God, I'm so depressed. Here's another of those self-satisfied doors. Life. Don't talk to me about life! Arthur: No one even mentioned it.
Stirring deep within a memetic soup of half-conceived notions and half-understood terminology, the latest buzzword chimera of the brave new computing future is born. Is this creature the essence of our collective future? Maybe it is, but most definitely its a clever trick to sell magazines.
As a student of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, articles like this quite frankly give me a queasy feeling at the pit of my stomach. Someone has taken the material that I ( and many others ) sweat over and bust our balls to work through, boiled off all the real substance, thoroughly smothered it with a cacophony of Dilbertesque managerial buzzwords, and served it up as though it were a full course meal.
Whenever I first discuss these topics with people who've not read much of the literature, there is a distinction I always draw them to. This is, IMHO, a key thing to remember in any discussions about AI. The terms "strong" and "weak" AI, refer respectively to the ultimate goal of the scientific project to create artificial minds, and the reality of the limited systems we have today. Ultimately we want to understand the operations of the mind in as much detail and with as much scientific rigour as we understand physics, or chemistry; that is the goal of cognitive science.
There is a long tradition in western philosophy which claims that the mind is nothing more than highly sophisticated information processing, which may or may not be true. If ( and only if ) this is true then it should be possible to make a machine which processes information in the same way as a human mind. The ultimate goal, then, behind AI is to produce a machine which does not just imitate what real minds can do, but IS a mind in every real sense. This would be "strong" AI, machines which are, in every sense, fully sentient ( self-aware ) cognitive ( thinking ) agents ( well, you can't really call them people can you? ). The reason for wanting to do this is not for Frankensteinian reasons, nor to create a Big-Brother state or something like the Matrix, but just because if we could create a machine which thinks, then we would have a very good reason to believe that we understood what a mind is.
"Weak" AI, on the other hand, is what we actually have today. These are imitators of intelligence. They can mimick certain specific behaviours which humans have, but they have no claim to be truly thinking. There are machines which can play chess better than any human being, which can diagnose thousands of illnesses from a list of symptoms, which can identify spoken words from recorded sounds, or printed words from an image. However, there is nowhere a system ( other than us ) which can do all of these, and thousands more. Moreover, each of these individual systems could not even be taught to do something else ( I mean taught in the sense that we are taught, not by being programmed ), because they have no frame of reference for it. You could not engage in a conversation with a speech recognition program, nor "teach" it the precepts behind flower arranging or how to change a flat tire, no matter how hard you try - it has no "idea" about what you're saying, it just dutifully listens and transcribes.
There is of course, a lot of debate about how intelligent these "weakly intelligent" machines truly are. Some researchers ( who I suspect probably spend far to much time with their computers ), even go so far as to claim that they've already invented artificial minds, and that you can't turn them off, otherwise it would be murder ( ok, that's an extreme example ). I tend to lean towards the side which believes that all we've done is come up with clever ways of imitating various faculties of human behaviour, but have not tapped into the core of why we can do what we do. A human being ( and even some primates ), has an amazing ability to learn new things, to both identify new problems as they occur and then come up with strategies for solving them. Not even the most sophisticated computer system can do this. All "cogn
if its not a significant risk, then why did I get nearly debilitating pain in my wrists when I coded all day long with a standard keyboard, but it went away as soon as I switched to an M$ natural keyboard? I'd never had such pain before, and since I've switched, I haven't had it return. I'd say that this pain was "caused" by the use of a lousy keyboard for long periods - but maybe I'm deluding myself.
Since most people these days save nothing and live paycheck to paycheck, self-respect comes in a distant second behind money.
You can go an flip burgers, but that won't pay your $1,200 mortgage payment.
Sure, but its still a choice that you make. Don't pretend that you have to put up with crap - you just have to take into account what's at stake - maybe your mortgage is at stake. How much is that worth to you? I'm not saying you have to just say "F-off you bastards, I'm quitting". I'm just saying that you're going to make a dollars-and-cents appraisal of what your self-respect is worth in any case, either consciously or not, and its probably better if you do it consciously than let your unconscious fears drive you to doing something that you might regret later. There's always a choice, some are worth making and others not. That's all.
So far in the other posts I've read, it seems that a lot of people are concerned about unemployment. They say that you better have a new job lined up before jumping ship on your current one, because you'll have a tough time getting new work in the current economy. I'd like to interject a different opinion here for a moment.
Personally I've spent a lot of my career free-lancing, so maybe I've gotten used to the intermittent nature of this line of work, but honestly I don't think being out of work is really so bad. Also, I haven't found that there has been a great drop in available employment, but that may just be my anecdotal experience. However, all that being said, the issue really comes down to how much do you value your self-respect.
Ultimately you have to make a decision, and draw a personal line somewhere which represents how much do you value your self-respect. It may sound facile to try to put a dollars-and-cents pricetag on this, but really that's what you're doing anyway, so you might as well think about it that way. Ask yourself a few questions: 1) how much is my self respect worth? 2) how much of my self respect involves doing a particular job?
Once you've thought these through, you'll be in a better position to figure out whether you want to quit or not. How much crap can you suck up before whatever money you're making isn't worth it anymore? Personally, I've had to quit quite lucrative jobs because the kind of crap that was flying around simply wasn't worth it. I'd rather be broke for whatever time it takes than make good money and be miserable about it.
Also think about how much you feel like you need to be doing a particular job to be happy with yourself. Again, I'd rather take a joe-job flipping burgers or telemarketing ( *gasp* - yes even that ) than put up with the crap some companies impose. You've got to decide which is more important to your sense of self, being a professional "..." ( programmer, sysadmin, whatever... ) or being treated with respect. At least in a burger flipping situation you won't be nearly so intimidated to tell your boss to F-off when he's an @$$, because after all, who the hell is he anyway?
This brings me to my third point. Have you tried discussing the problems with your boss? I'm always amazed by how many people would rather take drastic actions than spend a few minutes discussing the issue with those involved. It can be emotionally heated, and intimidating, but sometimes that's the point, you want that emotion to be there - because then maybe the boss will understand how much this stuff actually affects you. You'd really be amazed how sometimes an honest, rational 5 minute chat can transform a relationship, work-related or otherwise. Maybe you should go to your boss ( either individually or as a group ) and say "look, I have a problem with X, Y, and Z, and its something we need to deal with... lets talk". A little tip - you get better results by trying to engage them in solving the problem than by being confrontational and aggressive. Your self-respect isn't something that they get the right to walk all over just because they're your boss, sometimes they need to be reminded of that fact in a friendly no-BS way. The worst that can happen is you find out that they really are the jerks you feared they were, and so you can still quit.
Don't forget that even in a market where the supply of labour is high relative to the demand, they still need you around. You provide essential services to the company, and even if they can replace you, what will it do to them trying to fill in the gap until they've found someone else. How much downtime and lost productivity will they suffer until you've been replaced? It's a major pain for them to spend that time finding someone, training them ( or at least getting them up to speed on how things work ), etc. It will cost them something to replace you, so you've still got some bargaining muscle.
So in the end it's your decision, you've got to figure out how bad
As a guess, perhaps the dragonfly is able to accomplish this by using the same visual cues it evokes in its prey - if the dragonfly moves in the right way, then its prey will appear to be a stationary object (from the dragonfly's perspective) as well.
This wouldn't work - in the Discovery article, they said that this study was conducted with pairs of male dragonflies jousting for territory. Obviously then this technique works on the dragonflies own visual system as well as that of insects it might prey upon. If the stalker maintained the stalkee in a constant position, then the stalkee would become invisible to the stalker and probably ruin his ability to stalk up on him properly.
Re:How they manage it still has them puzzled...
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Camouflage in Motion
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The insect visual system is much too primitive to take such variables into account. This is evolutionary economics - because they have such small simple nervous systems that they can't afford to devote too many neurons to any one task. The whole trick is accomplished by visual neurons simply not reacting ( not firing ) to any stimulus that is not changing. So a change in the retinal image will trigger some reaction on the part of the neurons, and bring the attention of the insect to it, but no change will trigger no reaction. If the dragonfly maintains the same orientation to its prey, then it will maintain the same pattern on the retina of its prey, and not excite any response from those neurons. Even if the dragonfly becomes orientated so that it is seen upon a different background - it is the change in the background which will excite attention by the prey, not the dragonfly itself. So if anything, the changing background would attract more attention than the dragonfly, and actually help keep the prey distracted.
The article suggests that armies could learn something useful about camouflage from dragonflies. What are they suggesting, that soldiers flit about the battlefield to keep in the same position in the enemies' retinas all the time - how would they manage this? Jet packs? Pogosticks? Even a helicopter which has maneuverability analogous to a dragonfly could never do this. The scale for humans is just all wrong - a dragonfly only has to dart short distances, because the relative scale is quite small, but a human can quite quickly track his/her visual field across many miles of sky / terrain simply by a turn of the head. Are they suggesting that helicopters or soldiers would instantaneously flit miles through space to come to a complete stop at exactly the right position at exactly the right moment with exactly the right orientation to maintain the same retinal pattern? Somehow this strikes me as unlikely. Furthermore, this trick of "becoming invisible" does not apply to the mammalian optic system - its fine for insects & reptiles because their optical systems rely on picking up changes in the visual field so still objects become in effect invisible. Evolutionarily this makes sense, because it allows them to maintain relatively useful vision without devoting a lot of sophisticated neurons which they simply can't afford - its like a cheap hack, but it works. Mammals have much more developped brains, and much more developped visual systems, and can afford the luxury of actually seeing things that don't move. What's more, is that this is fine in a hunter-prey scenario where there is only one individual you need to hide from. You could never accomplish this trick when you need to hide from several different observers. Another example of inane scientific journalism.
Re:Totally Non-Ximian-Specific red herring
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Ximian's Back
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I understand your pain. I too wish there was a non-distro specific way to resolve package dependencies and automatically sort through the multi-lib version scenario. Unfortunately there is no such thing at the moment. However, this problem is not specific to Ximian, it is common across all distros - however, adding Ximian on top of a given distro does tend to exascerbate the problem, adding extra layers of (in)compatibility.
Re:Totally Non-Ximian-Specific red herring
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Ximian's Back
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Quite possibly he is talking about this - if so, I stand corrected. However, the added maturity of these tools, nice though it is, is not what I'd consider a major advantage of XD2 over RH. Maybe a minor plus.
Re:Why the emphasis on a polished desktop?
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Ximian's Back
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Linuxconfig used to be good for setting up most components of a system, but it was only good for Redhat, who dumped it around 7.0, and not replaced.
You obviously haven't looked at RH 8 or 9. Redhat has replaced all the functions of linuxconf with a set of their own configuration tools. Personally I find that they all work much better than linuxconf ever did.
Totally Non-Ximian-Specific red herring
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Ximian's Back
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This report is a bit bogus, as he totally fails to point out any of the advantages of Ximian over the standard RH 8 / 9 desktop. Both use Gnome 2.x, and many of the features of Gnome 2.x are common to both. In the article he lists numerous "advantages" or features which he liked, but all of them are either standard to all Gnome 2.x desktops and are available with the RH bluecurve desktop or they are specific to applications like FileRoller, Galeon or Evolution which are independent of the desktop and also available under RH.
All the system-config utilities he mentions are available in redhat packages ( in fact I wonder if this author isn't just confused as to what parts of his desktop came from whom ). The only real advantage he's mentioned is the ability to use a GUI to customize the programs menus - which is one major flaw in RH 8. Other than that, there's nothing in this article to persuade me that Ximian is superior to bluecurve. Not saying that I won't give it a try myself, but this article is a bit of a red herring.
What do you think? Is it true philanthropy or just another tactic to assimilate everyone into the MS collective?
Yeah, 'cause philanthropy always helps the bottom line - sure, right. Economics 101 my friend - corporations are profit maximizers, and if that means taking some strategic losses to increase market share, then that's what they'll do. Nothing to do with goodwill towards man or that crap.
make life easier, not harder
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Making Change
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I think that the premise of this analysis is off. Instead of trying to find an optimal arrangement for change where the minimum is 1 cent, simply eliminate 1 cent coins and make the minimum transaction denomination either 2-cents or 5-cents - that way you have a more limited and more convenient number of possible coin combinations.
I remember that this is how it is done in Switzerland; they have no 1-cent coin - the smallest is a 5-cent coin. This way all transactions are rounded to the nearest 5-cents and it makes the use of change much more easy. The number of combinations of change is much constrained, and its very easy to come up with change quickly and easily. Even a move to a minimum 2-cent coin would improve the situation a lot. Certainly this would be a lot simpler to live with than the ridiculous notion of coins of odd denominations like 83 cents or 1.33 cents.
Mind you, being an amazingly affluent nation of bankers, they have other peculiarities with money also - you could pay for a loaf of bread with a 500 chf note ( bread might cost about 1-3 chf ) and the cashier wouldn't even bat an eye. If you tried to use a 1000chf note they might take a moment to see if its genuine, but they'd still happily make you change for it.
How 'bout this - build in a system whereby users who have downloaded a file can mod its quality up or down. Then while searching the network, you also get MD5s for the files, and the associate rating is accumulated from others who you search. This way crappy files float to the bottom.
Well this does sound typical of a media arts project, ie: just do a bunch of stuff without any understanding of the underlying premises.
What did they expect really? I mean, that old saying was meant as a thought experiment to demonstrate a principle of probabilities. Namely that even highly unlikely eventualities will occur given enough repetitions. With an infinite number of monkeys & computers, you should expect to see the complete works of William Shakespeare appear infinitely fast. In fact, you could even remove the monkeys all together and get the same result, because at least one computer in an infinite number would undergo enough of the exactly correct quantum fluctuations to have the works of W.S. appear instantly. In fact you would have an infinite number of such computers, following a statistical distribution for the probability of this happening.
The idea that you would see anything even remotelly resembling this in such a small sample is absurd. It represents what Statistician's refer to as the fallacious "law of small numbers". The law of large numbers is that with enough repetitions, the trend in random events will tend towards the probabilistic norms of the underlying events. That is, if you flip a coin enough, than the number of heads will become roughly 50%. It is a fallacy, however, to assume that any subsample of these tosses will also tend towards that same deviation.
There are lots of monkeys and apes who have been trained to type and use computers - but to just introduce one to untrained monkeys and expect anything other than destruction is absurd. So all I can think is either these media arts students really have nothing better to do, or they are just really ignorant; most likely both.
Well the nice thing about a database is that it doesn't matter how its implemented. You can create some general querying API that is used by all installer scripts & apps, and the database can internally be organized however you like.
As for human mistakes, naturally some would be fixeable in an automatic way, because certain missing or inconsistent information can be safely inferred from other existing information. In the cases of serious breaches, then it is the responsibility of the packager to fix said information.
As for maliciousness, this is no different than any other code security issue that exists today. If you download untrusted binaries and run them with root privileges, then you open yourself to all sorts of unhappiness. Same goes for running untrusted scripts. But the community has already dealt with these issues - what exists currently is not perfect, but a reasonable compromise that is mostly safe and secure. This installer isn't meant to solve the problems of human error or human interference, but rather to solve the problem of distributing apps and libraries so that they are still able to work without being tied to any particular distribution's ( or individual's ) file structure conventions.
Slashdot Mirror
Sending loud angry rebuttles to articles like this just dignifies them. Crap like this is not worthy of a response, and ought to be ignored. Just my $0.02
sorry, try that link here:0 2-03/jan18.html
http://www.radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/archives/
PS - also available in mp3
Here's an interview with Dr. Tatiana herself, available online in real and ogg courtesy of the Canadian Brodcasting Corp.:r chives/0 2-03/jan18.html
http://www.radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/a
Uh oh, he's posting to /.
NetNanny must be on the blink again.
"The researchers showed that they can drive Rabi oscillations
Sounds like a bad joke:
How do you drive a Rabbi into excited oscillations?
Oh, wait... that's 'Rabi' not 'Rabbi'.
Ford: They make a big thing of the ships cybernetics: "A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers with the new GPP feature."
Arthur: GPP feature? What's that?
Ford: It says, "Genuine People Personalities".
Arthur: Sounds ghastly.
Marvin: It is.
Arthur: What?
Marvin: Ghastly. It all is, absolutely ghastly, just don't even talk about it. Look at this door. All the doors in this ship have a sunny and cheerful disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.
Door (closing): Mmmmmmmmm.... yum!
Marvin: Hateful, isn't it. Come on, I've been ordered to take you up to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cause I don't.
Ford: Excuse me, which government owns this ship?
Marvin: You watch this door, it's about to open again. I can tell by the air of intollerable smugness it suddenly generates. Come on.
Door (opening): Glad to be of service.
Marvin: Thank you, the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Door (closing): You're welcome. Mmmmmm...
Marvin: "Let's build robots with genuine people personalities", they said. So they tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype, you can tell, can't you?
Ford: Umm....
Marvin: I hate that door. I'm not getting you down am I?
Ford: Which government owns this ship?
Marvin: No government owns it, it's been stolen.
Ford & Arthur: Stolen?!?
Marvin: Stolen?!?
Ford: Who by?
Marvin: Zaaphod Beeblebrox.
Ford: Zaaphod Beeblebrox?!?
Marvin: Sorry, did I say something wrong? Pardon me for breathing which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it. Oh God, I'm so depressed. Here's another of those self-satisfied doors. Life. Don't talk to me about life!
Arthur: No one even mentioned it.
As a student of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, articles like this quite frankly give me a queasy feeling at the pit of my stomach. Someone has taken the material that I ( and many others ) sweat over and bust our balls to work through, boiled off all the real substance, thoroughly smothered it with a cacophony of Dilbertesque managerial buzzwords, and served it up as though it were a full course meal.
Whenever I first discuss these topics with people who've not read much of the literature, there is a distinction I always draw them to. This is, IMHO, a key thing to remember in any discussions about AI. The terms "strong" and "weak" AI, refer respectively to the ultimate goal of the scientific project to create artificial minds, and the reality of the limited systems we have today. Ultimately we want to understand the operations of the mind in as much detail and with as much scientific rigour as we understand physics, or chemistry; that is the goal of cognitive science.
There is a long tradition in western philosophy which claims that the mind is nothing more than highly sophisticated information processing, which may or may not be true. If ( and only if ) this is true then it should be possible to make a machine which processes information in the same way as a human mind. The ultimate goal, then, behind AI is to produce a machine which does not just imitate what real minds can do, but IS a mind in every real sense. This would be "strong" AI, machines which are, in every sense, fully sentient ( self-aware ) cognitive ( thinking ) agents ( well, you can't really call them people can you? ). The reason for wanting to do this is not for Frankensteinian reasons, nor to create a Big-Brother state or something like the Matrix, but just because if we could create a machine which thinks, then we would have a very good reason to believe that we understood what a mind is.
"Weak" AI, on the other hand, is what we actually have today. These are imitators of intelligence. They can mimick certain specific behaviours which humans have, but they have no claim to be truly thinking. There are machines which can play chess better than any human being, which can diagnose thousands of illnesses from a list of symptoms, which can identify spoken words from recorded sounds, or printed words from an image. However, there is nowhere a system ( other than us ) which can do all of these, and thousands more. Moreover, each of these individual systems could not even be taught to do something else ( I mean taught in the sense that we are taught, not by being programmed ), because they have no frame of reference for it. You could not engage in a conversation with a speech recognition program, nor "teach" it the precepts behind flower arranging or how to change a flat tire, no matter how hard you try - it has no "idea" about what you're saying, it just dutifully listens and transcribes.
There is of course, a lot of debate about how intelligent these "weakly intelligent" machines truly are. Some researchers ( who I suspect probably spend far to much time with their computers ), even go so far as to claim that they've already invented artificial minds, and that you can't turn them off, otherwise it would be murder ( ok, that's an extreme example ). I tend to lean towards the side which believes that all we've done is come up with clever ways of imitating various faculties of human behaviour, but have not tapped into the core of why we can do what we do. A human being ( and even some primates ), has an amazing ability to learn new things, to both identify new problems as they occur and then come up with strategies for solving them. Not even the most sophisticated computer system can do this. All "cogn
For those who care, there is also a comparison of AMD 3200+ to P4 3.2 GHz at tomshardware: here
if its not a significant risk, then why did I get nearly debilitating pain in my wrists when I coded all day long with a standard keyboard, but it went away as soon as I switched to an M$ natural keyboard? I'd never had such pain before, and since I've switched, I haven't had it return. I'd say that this pain was "caused" by the use of a lousy keyboard for long periods - but maybe I'm deluding myself.
You can go an flip burgers, but that won't pay your $1,200 mortgage payment.
Sure, but its still a choice that you make. Don't pretend that you have to put up with crap - you just have to take into account what's at stake - maybe your mortgage is at stake. How much is that worth to you? I'm not saying you have to just say "F-off you bastards, I'm quitting". I'm just saying that you're going to make a dollars-and-cents appraisal of what your self-respect is worth in any case, either consciously or not, and its probably better if you do it consciously than let your unconscious fears drive you to doing something that you might regret later. There's always a choice, some are worth making and others not. That's all.
So the next generation of programmers will have their start writing virii!
So far in the other posts I've read, it seems that a lot of people are concerned about unemployment. They say that you better have a new job lined up before jumping ship on your current one, because you'll have a tough time getting new work in the current economy. I'd like to interject a different opinion here for a moment.
Personally I've spent a lot of my career free-lancing, so maybe I've gotten used to the intermittent nature of this line of work, but honestly I don't think being out of work is really so bad. Also, I haven't found that there has been a great drop in available employment, but that may just be my anecdotal experience. However, all that being said, the issue really comes down to how much do you value your self-respect.
Ultimately you have to make a decision, and draw a personal line somewhere which represents how much do you value your self-respect. It may sound facile to try to put a dollars-and-cents pricetag on this, but really that's what you're doing anyway, so you might as well think about it that way. Ask yourself a few questions:
1) how much is my self respect worth?
2) how much of my self respect involves doing a particular job?
Once you've thought these through, you'll be in a better position to figure out whether you want to quit or not. How much crap can you suck up before whatever money you're making isn't worth it anymore? Personally, I've had to quit quite lucrative jobs because the kind of crap that was flying around simply wasn't worth it. I'd rather be broke for whatever time it takes than make good money and be miserable about it.
Also think about how much you feel like you need to be doing a particular job to be happy with yourself. Again, I'd rather take a joe-job flipping burgers or telemarketing ( *gasp* - yes even that ) than put up with the crap some companies impose. You've got to decide which is more important to your sense of self, being a professional "..." ( programmer, sysadmin, whatever... ) or being treated with respect. At least in a burger flipping situation you won't be nearly so intimidated to tell your boss to F-off when he's an @$$, because after all, who the hell is he anyway?
This brings me to my third point. Have you tried discussing the problems with your boss? I'm always amazed by how many people would rather take drastic actions than spend a few minutes discussing the issue with those involved. It can be emotionally heated, and intimidating, but sometimes that's the point, you want that emotion to be there - because then maybe the boss will understand how much this stuff actually affects you. You'd really be amazed how sometimes an honest, rational 5 minute chat can transform a relationship, work-related or otherwise. Maybe you should go to your boss ( either individually or as a group ) and say "look, I have a problem with X, Y, and Z, and its something we need to deal with... lets talk". A little tip - you get better results by trying to engage them in solving the problem than by being confrontational and aggressive. Your self-respect isn't something that they get the right to walk all over just because they're your boss, sometimes they need to be reminded of that fact in a friendly no-BS way. The worst that can happen is you find out that they really are the jerks you feared they were, and so you can still quit.
Don't forget that even in a market where the supply of labour is high relative to the demand, they still need you around. You provide essential services to the company, and even if they can replace you, what will it do to them trying to fill in the gap until they've found someone else. How much downtime and lost productivity will they suffer until you've been replaced? It's a major pain for them to spend that time finding someone, training them ( or at least getting them up to speed on how things work ), etc. It will cost them something to replace you, so you've still got some bargaining muscle.
So in the end it's your decision, you've got to figure out how bad
This wouldn't work - in the Discovery article, they said that this study was conducted with pairs of male dragonflies jousting for territory. Obviously then this technique works on the dragonflies own visual system as well as that of insects it might prey upon. If the stalker maintained the stalkee in a constant position, then the stalkee would become invisible to the stalker and probably ruin his ability to stalk up on him properly.
The insect visual system is much too primitive to take such variables into account. This is evolutionary economics - because they have such small simple nervous systems that they can't afford to devote too many neurons to any one task. The whole trick is accomplished by visual neurons simply not reacting ( not firing ) to any stimulus that is not changing. So a change in the retinal image will trigger some reaction on the part of the neurons, and bring the attention of the insect to it, but no change will trigger no reaction. If the dragonfly maintains the same orientation to its prey, then it will maintain the same pattern on the retina of its prey, and not excite any response from those neurons. Even if the dragonfly becomes orientated so that it is seen upon a different background - it is the change in the background which will excite attention by the prey, not the dragonfly itself. So if anything, the changing background would attract more attention than the dragonfly, and actually help keep the prey distracted.
The article suggests that armies could learn something useful about camouflage from dragonflies. What are they suggesting, that soldiers flit about the battlefield to keep in the same position in the enemies' retinas all the time - how would they manage this? Jet packs? Pogosticks? Even a helicopter which has maneuverability analogous to a dragonfly could never do this. The scale for humans is just all wrong - a dragonfly only has to dart short distances, because the relative scale is quite small, but a human can quite quickly track his/her visual field across many miles of sky / terrain simply by a turn of the head. Are they suggesting that helicopters or soldiers would instantaneously flit miles through space to come to a complete stop at exactly the right position at exactly the right moment with exactly the right orientation to maintain the same retinal pattern? Somehow this strikes me as unlikely. Furthermore, this trick of "becoming invisible" does not apply to the mammalian optic system - its fine for insects & reptiles because their optical systems rely on picking up changes in the visual field so still objects become in effect invisible. Evolutionarily this makes sense, because it allows them to maintain relatively useful vision without devoting a lot of sophisticated neurons which they simply can't afford - its like a cheap hack, but it works. Mammals have much more developped brains, and much more developped visual systems, and can afford the luxury of actually seeing things that don't move. What's more, is that this is fine in a hunter-prey scenario where there is only one individual you need to hide from. You could never accomplish this trick when you need to hide from several different observers. Another example of inane scientific journalism.
I understand your pain. I too wish there was a non-distro specific way to resolve package dependencies and automatically sort through the multi-lib version scenario. Unfortunately there is no such thing at the moment. However, this problem is not specific to Ximian, it is common across all distros - however, adding Ximian on top of a given distro does tend to exascerbate the problem, adding extra layers of (in)compatibility.
Quite possibly he is talking about this - if so, I stand corrected. However, the added maturity of these tools, nice though it is, is not what I'd consider a major advantage of XD2 over RH. Maybe a minor plus.
You obviously haven't looked at RH 8 or 9. Redhat has replaced all the functions of linuxconf with a set of their own configuration tools. Personally I find that they all work much better than linuxconf ever did.
This report is a bit bogus, as he totally fails to point out any of the advantages of Ximian over the standard RH 8 / 9 desktop. Both use Gnome 2.x, and many of the features of Gnome 2.x are common to both. In the article he lists numerous "advantages" or features which he liked, but all of them are either standard to all Gnome 2.x desktops and are available with the RH bluecurve desktop or they are specific to applications like FileRoller, Galeon or Evolution which are independent of the desktop and also available under RH.
All the system-config utilities he mentions are available in redhat packages ( in fact I wonder if this author isn't just confused as to what parts of his desktop came from whom ). The only real advantage he's mentioned is the ability to use a GUI to customize the programs menus - which is one major flaw in RH 8. Other than that, there's nothing in this article to persuade me that Ximian is superior to bluecurve. Not saying that I won't give it a try myself, but this article is a bit of a red herring.
Yeah, 'cause philanthropy always helps the bottom line - sure, right. Economics 101 my friend - corporations are profit maximizers, and if that means taking some strategic losses to increase market share, then that's what they'll do. Nothing to do with goodwill towards man or that crap.
I think that the premise of this analysis is off. Instead of trying to find an optimal arrangement for change where the minimum is 1 cent, simply eliminate 1 cent coins and make the minimum transaction denomination either 2-cents or 5-cents - that way you have a more limited and more convenient number of possible coin combinations.
I remember that this is how it is done in Switzerland; they have no 1-cent coin - the smallest is a 5-cent coin. This way all transactions are rounded to the nearest 5-cents and it makes the use of change much more easy. The number of combinations of change is much constrained, and its very easy to come up with change quickly and easily. Even a move to a minimum 2-cent coin would improve the situation a lot. Certainly this would be a lot simpler to live with than the ridiculous notion of coins of odd denominations like 83 cents or 1.33 cents.
Mind you, being an amazingly affluent nation of bankers, they have other peculiarities with money also - you could pay for a loaf of bread with a 500 chf note ( bread might cost about 1-3 chf ) and the cashier wouldn't even bat an eye. If you tried to use a 1000chf note they might take a moment to see if its genuine, but they'd still happily make you change for it.
How 'bout this - build in a system whereby users who have downloaded a file can mod its quality up or down. Then while searching the network, you also get MD5s for the files, and the associate rating is accumulated from others who you search. This way crappy files float to the bottom.
Well this does sound typical of a media arts project, ie: just do a bunch of stuff without any understanding of the underlying premises.
What did they expect really? I mean, that old saying was meant as a thought experiment to demonstrate a principle of probabilities. Namely that even highly unlikely eventualities will occur given enough repetitions. With an infinite number of monkeys & computers, you should expect to see the complete works of William Shakespeare appear infinitely fast. In fact, you could even remove the monkeys all together and get the same result, because at least one computer in an infinite number would undergo enough of the exactly correct quantum fluctuations to have the works of W.S. appear instantly. In fact you would have an infinite number of such computers, following a statistical distribution for the probability of this happening.
The idea that you would see anything even remotelly resembling this in such a small sample is absurd. It represents what Statistician's refer to as the fallacious "law of small numbers". The law of large numbers is that with enough repetitions, the trend in random events will tend towards the probabilistic norms of the underlying events. That is, if you flip a coin enough, than the number of heads will become roughly 50%. It is a fallacy, however, to assume that any subsample of these tosses will also tend towards that same deviation.
There are lots of monkeys and apes who have been trained to type and use computers - but to just introduce one to untrained monkeys and expect anything other than destruction is absurd. So all I can think is either these media arts students really have nothing better to do, or they are just really ignorant; most likely both.
Well the nice thing about a database is that it doesn't matter how its implemented. You can create some general querying API that is used by all installer scripts & apps, and the database can internally be organized however you like.
As for human mistakes, naturally some would be fixeable in an automatic way, because certain missing or inconsistent information can be safely inferred from other existing information. In the cases of serious breaches, then it is the responsibility of the packager to fix said information.
As for maliciousness, this is no different than any other code security issue that exists today. If you download untrusted binaries and run them with root privileges, then you open yourself to all sorts of unhappiness. Same goes for running untrusted scripts. But the community has already dealt with these issues - what exists currently is not perfect, but a reasonable compromise that is mostly safe and secure. This installer isn't meant to solve the problems of human error or human interference, but rather to solve the problem of distributing apps and libraries so that they are still able to work without being tied to any particular distribution's ( or individual's ) file structure conventions.
... and pulls crumpets out of his @$$