Rubbish. Of course tools are evil. Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, etc. must be receiving tons of hate mail castigating them for creating technology that terrorists could use to demolish occupied buildings, no? And what about those engineers and architects who design buildings that terrorists can knock down with airplanes?
(Note to the sarcasm-impaired: I agree with the Subject:)
B'nai B'rith wants laws to make it more difficult for terrorist organizations to reveal themselves, finger potential new members, and perhaps spill important information about upcoming events? Did I read that right?
That's by James Hogan, and I too thought of it immediately. He discusses positive things about artificial black holes in the Giants books (_The Gentle Giants of Ganymede_, etc., but the series begins in _Inherit the Stars_.)
For a long answer (but a good read) see James Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_. Chironian civilization and software geeks have a lot in common: they tend to value respect and achievement above material stuff, and they exist in an environment where the economic rules are somewhat different from what humanity always had to live with before. The culture clash that drives the story may also provide some insight into the clash between traditional industry and free/open software. (I hope we won't have to fry any corporations off the map with exaWatt antiproton beams, though.)
The too-short answer: because it's fun to do the Right Thing without having to worry about fiddly financial and organizational stuff that doesn't interest us and, thanks to the characteristics of our medium, doesn't have to be important.
Indeed, being rebuffed for saying, in effect, "I want to help you sell more units and make more money, FOR FREE", is a bit thick.
It usually comes down to fears of reverse-engineering by competitors. Has anybody ever added up what it would cost to hire engineers to reverse-engineer a knock-off from specifications, vs. doing it from sample hardware, vs. just designing one's own product from scratch? Is it *really* that attractive? Remember, you've got to forward-engineer your product in any case, as well as designing the manufacturing process etc. Basically you save the cost of writing drivers by having your customers use someone else's. How much does that really save, compared to the cost of the reverse-engineering?
1. Uploaded a key.
2. Realized they don't personally know anyone else who uses crypto email and haven't heard of any keysigning parties anywhere nearby.
3. Are waiting for inspiration to strike.
Well, yeah. I want control. Control over who gets information, and what information. Control over whether or not my phone alerts me to the presence of nearby businesses that want my money.
I'd love to be able to file prescriptions with a central database, then walk into *any* handy pharmacy, insert my smartcard, and have my prescription filled (after the usual checks, and debiting the amount prescribed). No more of this "transfer" stuff. (You can imagine how much my neighborhood pharmacist likes that idea.) But I want it under my control. Most of the ideas I hear about are controlled by someone else, who just assumes that everybody wants to be known intimately everywhere and drenched in non-stop advertising.
As I began reading, I was reminded of three things:
uucp
BITNET
A story about interplanetary communication by Isaac Asimov, I think it is titled "My Son, the Physicist".
(Come to think of it, there's a lot of good SF inspired by communication. Clarke's "Meeting with Medusa", Smith's Venus Equilateral stories, Stasheff's _Escape Velocity_ (more social / political than technical).)
I was reminded of that scene in _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ in which Zaphod is trying (with limited success) to control some gesture-sensitive machine.
You send an HP printer ASCII text, you get output. You send it PostScript, you get output. You send it PCL, you get output. I don't see the problem.
*Management* is another matter. But you can talk Telnet or HTTP to recent JetDirect firmware loads and the JD neither knows nor cares what OS the traffic comes from. And I'm slowly tinkering up a gadget to do much of what JetAdmin does, but (a) more portably, and (b) without hanging on a useless splash screen for 69 minutes while it fiddles around doing God knows what.
It took a while to find, but there's a CDROM full of PCL and PJL info that cost less than $10.00 with shipping. Go forth and write good stuff.
Nonsense. You press a key on you keyboard and logic levels are interpreted by the serial port. The bios then send this data to the OS. The OS can not bypass the BIOS.
"Look haaaarder." -- Rafiki
The serial port jams bits into a register and pulls the interrupt line. The CPU notices the interrupt and jumps to wherever the vector for that interrupt points. If it points into BIOS, BIOS handles it; if the OS has rewritten the vector to point to itself, the OS handles the interrupt and BIOS never knows it happened. Go read the CPU databook and see.
IIRC Robin Hood was about Saxons getting a bit of their own back from the Normans who had taken over the place, after the Saxons had taken it over from the Celts. Does that clarify the situation, or just make Robin Hood a less effective metaphor?
A hacker most certainly does not break into computer systems. Hackers are too busy doing useful things. A person who breaks into computer systems is a burglar.
Many years ago I used VMS DCL to write what would now be called a bytecode compiler for a menusystem description language. Getting DCL to output arbitrary binary was, ah, an interesting experience.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only weirdo out there. Be creative! Think about what your tools *do*, not just how everybody else uses them. Has anybody else tried doing DHTML in m4?
Slashdot Mirror
Rubbish. Of course tools are evil. Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, etc. must be receiving tons of hate mail castigating them for creating technology that terrorists could use to demolish occupied buildings, no? And what about those engineers and architects who design buildings that terrorists can knock down with airplanes?
(Note to the sarcasm-impaired: I agree with the Subject:)
B'nai B'rith wants laws to make it more difficult for terrorist organizations to reveal themselves, finger potential new members, and perhaps spill important information about upcoming events? Did I read that right?
That's by James Hogan, and I too thought of it immediately. He discusses positive things about artificial black holes in the Giants books (_The Gentle Giants of Ganymede_, etc., but the series begins in _Inherit the Stars_.)
For a long answer (but a good read) see James Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_. Chironian civilization and software geeks have a lot in common: they tend to value respect and achievement above material stuff, and they exist in an environment where the economic rules are somewhat different from what humanity always had to live with before. The culture clash that drives the story may also provide some insight into the clash between traditional industry and free/open software. (I hope we won't have to fry any corporations off the map with exaWatt antiproton beams, though.)
The too-short answer: because it's fun to do the Right Thing without having to worry about fiddly financial and organizational stuff that doesn't interest us and, thanks to the characteristics of our medium, doesn't have to be important.
Indeed, being rebuffed for saying, in effect, "I want to help you sell more units and make more money, FOR FREE", is a bit thick.
It usually comes down to fears of reverse-engineering by competitors. Has anybody ever added up what it would cost to hire engineers to reverse-engineer a knock-off from specifications, vs. doing it from sample hardware, vs. just designing one's own product from scratch? Is it *really* that attractive? Remember, you've got to forward-engineer your product in any case, as well as designing the manufacturing process etc. Basically you save the cost of writing drivers by having your customers use someone else's. How much does that really save, compared to the cost of the reverse-engineering?
Yeah, my first thought was, "all you really need to make one of these is a Brambleweeny sub-meson brain and a really hot cup of tea."
Not to mention those who:
1. Uploaded a key.
2. Realized they don't personally know anyone else who uses crypto email and haven't heard of any keysigning parties anywhere nearby.
3. Are waiting for inspiration to strike.
:-(
See Clarke's little story, "A Meeting with Medusa", for thoughts on loop delays in controlling seriously remote vehicles, as well as a very good read.
Indeed, my first thought on reading the article was, "well, I think it should look like a power plant."
Well, yeah. I want control. Control over who gets information, and what information. Control over whether or not my phone alerts me to the presence of nearby businesses that want my money.
I'd love to be able to file prescriptions with a central database, then walk into *any* handy pharmacy, insert my smartcard, and have my prescription filled (after the usual checks, and debiting the amount prescribed). No more of this "transfer" stuff. (You can imagine how much my neighborhood pharmacist likes that idea.) But I want it under my control. Most of the ideas I hear about are controlled by someone else, who just assumes that everybody wants to be known intimately everywhere and drenched in non-stop advertising.
- uucp
- BITNET
- A story about interplanetary communication by Isaac Asimov, I think it is titled "My Son, the Physicist".
(Come to think of it, there's a lot of good SF inspired by communication. Clarke's "Meeting with Medusa", Smith's Venus Equilateral stories, Stasheff's _Escape Velocity_ (more social / political than technical).)If I can't watch what I want, when I want, then I just won't watch. Programming's more fun anyway.
I was reminded of that scene in _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ in which Zaphod is trying (with limited success) to control some gesture-sensitive machine.
Huh? My only printer is a DeskJet 682C. It works just fine with Linux. What's the problem?
You send an HP printer ASCII text, you get output. You send it PostScript, you get output. You send it PCL, you get output. I don't see the problem.
*Management* is another matter. But you can talk Telnet or HTTP to recent JetDirect firmware loads and the JD neither knows nor cares what OS the traffic comes from. And I'm slowly tinkering up a gadget to do much of what JetAdmin does, but (a) more portably, and (b) without hanging on a useless splash screen for 69 minutes while it fiddles around doing God knows what.
It took a while to find, but there's a CDROM full of PCL and PJL info that cost less than $10.00 with shipping. Go forth and write good stuff.
Dear Microsoft:
Please stop trying to personalize everything. I'm buying computer parts, or books, or what-have-you, not "experiences". I make my own experiences.
You mean, like the PDP6? :-)
"Look haaaarder." -- Rafiki
The serial port jams bits into a register and pulls the interrupt line. The CPU notices the interrupt and jumps to wherever the vector for that interrupt points. If it points into BIOS, BIOS handles it; if the OS has rewritten the vector to point to itself, the OS handles the interrupt and BIOS never knows it happened. Go read the CPU databook and see.
IIRC Robin Hood was about Saxons getting a bit of their own back from the Normans who had taken over the place, after the Saxons had taken it over from the Celts. Does that clarify the situation, or just make Robin Hood a less effective metaphor?
See also Digital's (now Compaq's) AUTOPATCH and SOUP/SOUPR. Quite old.
Not to mention diff and patch.
Many years ago I used VMS DCL to write what would now be called a bytecode compiler for a menusystem description language. Getting DCL to output arbitrary binary was, ah, an interesting experience.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only weirdo out there. Be creative! Think about what your tools *do*, not just how everybody else uses them. Has anybody else tried doing DHTML in m4?
Who really wants to buy groceries online?
er, I would.
I dunno, every time I think about having groceries delivered, I remember _Death Wish_.