"I mean, on one hand you have no business viewing porn on company time..."
Actually, I disgree with this somewhat. Shocking, I realize, but follow me here.
The company expends a certain amount of resources by having me here. Salary, benefits, cost to light my cube, cost to provide a certain amount of bandwidth, etc. If the amount of work I do doesn't exceed that cost by whatever arbitrary (but consistent) amount the company wants, then I should be fired. So if I am a particularly productive employee, it shouldn't matter if I spend 45 minutes in the morning viewing porn or taking drugs. I'm still a net benefit to the company.
You might argue that I'm not "giving it my all". Well, no. But it's not the company's place to compare what I am doing to what I could be doing. It's the company's place to compare what I am doing to what they are giving me.
Of course, this is somewhat tangential to the actual case of censorship. --
While I applaud Peacefire's (and Slashdot's) efforts to defeat censorware on a practical front, I'd like to (again) point out:
1) Even if the software could implement one person's definition of "obscene" 100% accurately, it couldn't do so for more than one person simultaneously.
2) Even if we all agreed that something was obscene, keeping someone (who is old enough) from looking at it is STILL WRONG.
We don't want to move the censorware battle to a place where they keep getting more accurate and we keep pointing out the remaining flaws. We want to start discussing where it is appropriate to target censorware, if anywhere. For instance, I am totally against any kind of filtering in a library or on all ISPs (that is, I don't mind of ChristSoft wants to implement a filter for their members, but I don't want ALL ISPs to start doing it).
Just imagine 5 years from now. FamilyClick is 100% accurate in filtering out those items they think are obscene. They come to Slashdot and say "happy now?" We say, "well, it's accurate---but we don't like it." Too late. --
No, the author is NOT justified in putting ANY specific programming information in. If the company asks me "can you implement a linked list in Java in 10 lines or less", then that's not a place I want to work.
The place I want to work (in fact, the place I AM working) is where they know you are a good problem-solver and that you can pick up any tools you need. Specifics like linked-lists tell nothing about the quality of the employee.
And this isn't just me talking as an employee. I hired a guy once who had a civil engineering degree. He didn't know things like linked lists, depth-first vs breadth first, turing machines, yada yada yada. And his programming wasn't even all that top-notch (good, but not what I'd call outstanding). But could that boy solve a problem and FAST. Give him a task, however complex, and you'd know it was SOLVED--ASAP. --
I have no issues with Mr Plant--I don't know him at all. Nor do I know anything about Time City.
However, I do know that doctors don't operate on their friends (or family of friends) or families (or friends of family). Same goes for journalism. From the facts presented by "Jay" and you, it seems as though you've interviewed a friend of a friend for your article. That's a no-no, regardless of newsworthiness. Why not just have roblimo or someone interview the friend? --
Create your own email client. Have it auto-BCC all email to snooping@fbi.gov. Market it at DEFCON, TerrorCON, UnaCON and all the other bad guy conventions.
The set of people who are dumb enough to run this client has a great deal of overlap with the set of people who aren't smart enough to use encryption or off-shore ISPs. PLUS, it's cheaper to make (and may have income from selling it) AND has no pesky legal problems (RealMedia does it, why not the FBI?). --
"...99% of all major companies USE Microsoft products."
True.
"They use then because we are safe in the knowledge that they have been strenuosly tested for deployment in large scale organisations."
Unproven. Without asking each company why they MS products, you have no way of knowing why they do so. For instance the only reason my company uses MS is because so many companies use MS. We have to be able to read Word files. Etc.
"I for one, would not even consider using Linux at work..."
Can't argue with that. However, I can add an additional opinion: I not only consider running Linux, I DO run Linux (at home and at work). Furthermore, now that I've spent 9 months running Linux at work, I refuse to go back to Windows. There is a possibility that I will be asked to go to Windows development full-time at my current job. If that happens, I will quit. Not because I love Linux, but because I hate Windows.
And don't think this is some irrational "I refuse to bow to The Man" thing. When I use Windows, I feel cramped and uncomfortable:
--No virtual screens? But alt-tab-tab-tab-tab takes a lot longer than ctrl-arrow
--No grep/diff/awk/sed/find? (yes, I know you can get these elsewhere--but why not just use Unix?)
--No real shell-scripting? How am I supposed to automate my nightly builds?
--A lot of rebooting?
--DLL Hell?
--ETC!
You can argue all you like, but the fact remains that people are MOVING to Linux. What people use NOW makes no difference--what people SWITCH TO is what's key. --
The "Model Server" (may not be the real name). This was back around '93 or '94. There was a webserver in France (IIRC) that served up a page with a picture of an attractive woman (I can't recall now how [or if] they were dressed). When you hit reload (NOT refresh) you got a different woman. Seeing the old globe-with-papers-in-front-and-a-wavy-line-behind icon of Mosaic brought it all back to me.
I also remember when I used to browse ALL of Yahoo seeing if there was "anything new on the Internet". Those were the days... --
This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from fulfilling your request. The most likely cause is a misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in the server's error log.
"...request for details on how Carnivore works...have not yet been acted upon."
Calvin: *scribbling furiously* Well, uh, Miss Wormwood, see, the food goes in this end with all the teeth and then goes into this part (psst, Susie, what's the scientific name for "guts"?) the, uh, intensifications right. --
I remember writing a program (on a TRS-80!) that simulated those order-taking consoles at McDonald's. LAME!
Some suggestions:
1) Lego Mindstorms. Get enough of them so your can put 3-5 kids on each and have them compete (cross the room, soccer, whatever). 2) Games games games. Find out what this year's class' favorite game is. Write a (simplified) emulated version of it. 3) Simulation. Have an ongoing "physics simulator" (or something similar) project. The first year the students can do some design and basic coding. The next year they can do more advanced coding. Etc. 4) Simple AI. Do some theorem-proving AIs or ElizaBots or something.
Really, thinking up ideas for a CompSci class is as close as your nearest tech mag. --
getty - sets terminal mode, speed, and line discipline --
I'm surprised no one's mentioned
on
Plex86 Runs DOS
·
· Score: 3
Bochs. Kevin Lawton is the creator and maintainer of bochs, which, like Plex86 and VMWare is an Intel emulator. It also runs on Linux, Windows and I think Mac. Best of all, it was recently GPL'd (or LGPL'd maybe). That's why Kevin is working on Plex86 now. He's kind of merging the two projects together.
I've tried bochs and it's neat--but very very slow. I'm running Win95 in the emulator on my PII 350 (with 128MB) and it is so slow as to be totally unusable. It's also got some issues with devices (like it doesn't support network and the mouse is really flakey). --
It's not quite the same as a TV. A regular TV needs to have a lot of depth for the electrons to have time to deflect by the time they hit the phosphor. And before you quickly respond with "it's like a flat-screen" remember that LCD flatscreens are hard to see from an angle whereas the wooden mirror is easy to see from an angle.
I like the idea of the nano-screen although I'm not sure "whatever scale you wanted" is necessarily true. The signal still has to get to all the pixels relatively simultaneously. Think of the cool applications though: TV paint. Slap some TV paint on a wall and you can watch MacGyver re-runs in any room (or on your shirt). --
The standard "tiny white text on a black background" keeps me from reading the site. Last time I mentioned this people came up with some good ideas on why it was so hard to read. The two basic ideas were:
1) Serif vs Sans Serif fonts 2) Monitor size/type
Well, both of these are (surprise!) graphical issues. So why can't someone who attended SIGGRAPH understand that concept and write a review that is going to be visible to everyone. --
A big burly guy with a horned helmet is on the prow of a boat at it lands on the Redmond campus. He turns and shouts to his men "Charge!" They proceed to rape and pillage.
Voiceover: "In 2000 AD, Ericsson the Red(hat) sacked the degenerate empire's capital..." --
The only sense in which Java is "standard" is the same sense that Word is "standard". Either the word applies to both or it applies to neither. I personally think that "common" or "widespread" (or "riddling the populace like a cancer") would be a better term. "Standard" implies there is a publicly available and malleable written specification. --
There's got to be more to this story. Else why reassure us that Ransom Love will "remain CEO"? I mean, duh, he is buying (part of) another company--why WOULDN'T he remain CEO? --
I setup a hotmail account long ago just to get my/. login. I've never posted that address anywhere else, and I rarely even check the mail there. But I generally have 20-30 spams in 6 months. How can that be? Either/. is leaking addresses or spammers are trying names at random.
Anyway, back ontopic: I just went and tried to get in. It took SEVERAL seconds to load each page. That's slower than I've ever seen it. And don't tell me it's the Slashdot Effect--something the size of hotmail should handle that. --
Slashdot Mirror
Haiku are not hard
Pen flowing easily
a mountain stream
Not just syllables
Haiku reference nature
Lightning strikes Tower.
--
"I mean, on one hand you have no business viewing porn on company time..."
Actually, I disgree with this somewhat. Shocking, I realize, but follow me here.
The company expends a certain amount of resources by having me here. Salary, benefits, cost to light my cube, cost to provide a certain amount of bandwidth, etc. If the amount of work I do doesn't exceed that cost by whatever arbitrary (but consistent) amount the company wants, then I should be fired. So if I am a particularly productive employee, it shouldn't matter if I spend 45 minutes in the morning viewing porn or taking drugs. I'm still a net benefit to the company.
You might argue that I'm not "giving it my all". Well, no. But it's not the company's place to compare what I am doing to what I could be doing. It's the company's place to compare what I am doing to what they are giving me.
Of course, this is somewhat tangential to the actual case of censorship.
--
While I applaud Peacefire's (and Slashdot's) efforts to defeat censorware on a practical front, I'd like to (again) point out:
1) Even if the software could implement one person's definition of "obscene" 100% accurately, it couldn't do so for more than one person simultaneously.
2) Even if we all agreed that something was obscene, keeping someone (who is old enough) from looking at it is STILL WRONG.
We don't want to move the censorware battle to a place where they keep getting more accurate and we keep pointing out the remaining flaws. We want to start discussing where it is appropriate to target censorware, if anywhere. For instance, I am totally against any kind of filtering in a library or on all ISPs (that is, I don't mind of ChristSoft wants to implement a filter for their members, but I don't want ALL ISPs to start doing it).
Just imagine 5 years from now. FamilyClick is 100% accurate in filtering out those items they think are obscene. They come to Slashdot and say "happy now?" We say, "well, it's accurate---but we don't like it." Too late.
--
No, the author is NOT justified in putting ANY specific programming information in. If the company asks me "can you implement a linked list in Java in 10 lines or less", then that's not a place I want to work.
The place I want to work (in fact, the place I AM working) is where they know you are a good problem-solver and that you can pick up any tools you need. Specifics like linked-lists tell nothing about the quality of the employee.
And this isn't just me talking as an employee. I hired a guy once who had a civil engineering degree. He didn't know things like linked lists, depth-first vs breadth first, turing machines, yada yada yada. And his programming wasn't even all that top-notch (good, but not what I'd call outstanding). But could that boy solve a problem and FAST. Give him a task, however complex, and you'd know it was SOLVED--ASAP.
--
http://world.std.com/~joeshmoe/sj/spj.ethics
In particular, check out 4b and 4c. "Potential conflicts" would presumably include "he's my friend's friend so I don't want to make him look back".
I just noticed the "joeshmoe" in that URL, but I don't feel like looking for a more reputable-seeming link.
--
I have no issues with Mr Plant--I don't know him at all. Nor do I know anything about Time City.
However, I do know that doctors don't operate on their friends (or family of friends) or families (or friends of family). Same goes for journalism. From the facts presented by "Jay" and you, it seems as though you've interviewed a friend of a friend for your article. That's a no-no, regardless of newsworthiness. Why not just have roblimo or someone interview the friend?
--
Do they look anything like this:
/ comments.
pl,");m ments.pl,
");
now = new Date();
tail = now.getTime();
document.write("<IMG SRC='http://images2.slashdot.org/Slashdot/pc.gif?
document.write(tail);
document.write("' WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>");
document.write("<IMG SRC='http://images.slashdot.org/pagecount.gif?/co
document.write(tail);
document.write("' WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>
");
--
Create your own email client. Have it auto-BCC all email to snooping@fbi.gov. Market it at DEFCON, TerrorCON, UnaCON and all the other bad guy conventions.
The set of people who are dumb enough to run this client has a great deal of overlap with the set of people who aren't smart enough to use encryption or off-shore ISPs. PLUS, it's cheaper to make (and may have income from selling it) AND has no pesky legal problems (RealMedia does it, why not the FBI?).
--
I just remembered: They had nude AND non-nude. You could choose a "prude" option (or something like that) if you didn't want to see nude chicks.
I also remember that I learned how to use uuencode and uudecode for the...er...binary newsgroups.
--
"...99% of all major companies USE Microsoft products."
True.
"They use then because we are safe in the knowledge that they have been strenuosly tested for deployment in large scale organisations."
Unproven. Without asking each company why they MS products, you have no way of knowing why they do so. For instance the only reason my company uses MS is because so many companies use MS. We have to be able to read Word files. Etc.
"I for one, would not even consider using Linux at work..."
Can't argue with that. However, I can add an additional opinion: I not only consider running Linux, I DO run Linux (at home and at work). Furthermore, now that I've spent 9 months running Linux at work, I refuse to go back to Windows. There is a possibility that I will be asked to go to Windows development full-time at my current job. If that happens, I will quit. Not because I love Linux, but because I hate Windows.
And don't think this is some irrational "I refuse to bow to The Man" thing. When I use Windows, I feel cramped and uncomfortable:
--No virtual screens? But alt-tab-tab-tab-tab takes a lot longer than ctrl-arrow
--No grep/diff/awk/sed/find? (yes, I know you can get these elsewhere--but why not just use Unix?)
--No real shell-scripting? How am I supposed to automate my nightly builds?
--A lot of rebooting?
--DLL Hell?
--ETC!
You can argue all you like, but the fact remains that people are MOVING to Linux. What people use NOW makes no difference--what people SWITCH TO is what's key.
--
The "Model Server" (may not be the real name). This was back around '93 or '94. There was a webserver in France (IIRC) that served up a page with a picture of an attractive woman (I can't recall now how [or if] they were dressed). When you hit reload (NOT refresh) you got a different woman. Seeing the old globe-with-papers-in-front-and-a-wavy-line-behind icon of Mosaic brought it all back to me.
I also remember when I used to browse ALL of Yahoo seeing if there was "anything new on the Internet". Those were the days...
--
Server Error
This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from fulfilling your request. The most likely cause is a misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in the server's error log.
This is a lot like Slashdot looks NOW.
--
"No class (to my knowledge) has actually completed the project, but it's the process that's important."
Now that's a telling comment...
--
"...request for details on how Carnivore works...have not yet been acted upon."
Calvin: *scribbling furiously* Well, uh, Miss Wormwood, see, the food goes in this end with all the teeth and then goes into this part (psst, Susie, what's the scientific name for "guts"?) the, uh, intensifications right.
--
I remember writing a program (on a TRS-80!) that simulated those order-taking consoles at McDonald's. LAME!
Some suggestions:
1) Lego Mindstorms. Get enough of them so your can put 3-5 kids on each and have them compete (cross the room, soccer, whatever).
2) Games games games. Find out what this year's class' favorite game is. Write a (simplified) emulated version of it.
3) Simulation. Have an ongoing "physics simulator" (or something similar) project. The first year the students can do some design and basic coding. The next year they can do more advanced coding. Etc.
4) Simple AI. Do some theorem-proving AIs or ElizaBots or something.
Really, thinking up ideas for a CompSci class is as close as your nearest tech mag.
--
man getty
getty - sets terminal mode, speed, and line discipline
--
Bochs. Kevin Lawton is the creator and maintainer of bochs, which, like Plex86 and VMWare is an Intel emulator. It also runs on Linux, Windows and I think Mac. Best of all, it was recently GPL'd (or LGPL'd maybe). That's why Kevin is working on Plex86 now. He's kind of merging the two projects together.
I've tried bochs and it's neat--but very very slow. I'm running Win95 in the emulator on my PII 350 (with 128MB) and it is so slow as to be totally unusable. It's also got some issues with devices (like it doesn't support network and the mouse is really flakey).
--
It's not quite the same as a TV. A regular TV needs to have a lot of depth for the electrons to have time to deflect by the time they hit the phosphor. And before you quickly respond with "it's like a flat-screen" remember that LCD flatscreens are hard to see from an angle whereas the wooden mirror is easy to see from an angle.
I like the idea of the nano-screen although I'm not sure "whatever scale you wanted" is necessarily true. The signal still has to get to all the pixels relatively simultaneously. Think of the cool applications though: TV paint. Slap some TV paint on a wall and you can watch MacGyver re-runs in any room (or on your shirt).
--
The standard "tiny white text on a black background" keeps me from reading the site. Last time I mentioned this people came up with some good ideas on why it was so hard to read. The two basic ideas were:
1) Serif vs Sans Serif fonts
2) Monitor size/type
Well, both of these are (surprise!) graphical issues. So why can't someone who attended SIGGRAPH understand that concept and write a review that is going to be visible to everyone.
--
By malleable, I mean something under public control. If SMTP needs a change, anyone can submit an RFC. If Java needs a change, you have to ask Sun.
--
A big burly guy with a horned helmet is on the prow of a boat at it lands on the Redmond campus. He turns and shouts to his men "Charge!" They proceed to rape and pillage.
Voiceover: "In 2000 AD, Ericsson the Red(hat) sacked the degenerate empire's capital..."
--
"...existing industry standards, such as Java..."
The only sense in which Java is "standard" is the same sense that Word is "standard". Either the word applies to both or it applies to neither. I personally think that "common" or "widespread" (or "riddling the populace like a cancer") would be a better term. "Standard" implies there is a publicly available and malleable written specification.
--
There's got to be more to this story. Else why reassure us that Ransom Love will "remain CEO"? I mean, duh, he is buying (part of) another company--why WOULDN'T he remain CEO?
--
I'm famous!
--
I setup a hotmail account long ago just to get my /. login. I've never posted that address anywhere else, and I rarely even check the mail there. But I generally have 20-30 spams in 6 months. How can that be? Either /. is leaking addresses or spammers are trying names at random.
Anyway, back ontopic: I just went and tried to get in. It took SEVERAL seconds to load each page. That's slower than I've ever seen it. And don't tell me it's the Slashdot Effect--something the size of hotmail should handle that.
--