The solution is not just to send everyone on to PhD programs, either: IMO we need to go through our educational pipeline from kindergarten to '16th grade' and examine what's being taught in terms of relevance; we're burning a lot of years of people's lives with information they never use, and over time that's going to make us less competitive as a nation.
I am very skeptical about the educational value of US Phd programs. I think that the quality of the qualification is not comensurate with the effort required of the student. In Europe a PhD means the the holder has demonstrated that they are capable of developing, executing and documenting a research program. The US programs take twice as long to achieve this result. The bulk of the time seems to be spent as cheap labor for the university.
I think that the Clinton administration was encouraging a better approach when they began the push to support lifelong learning as the goal. The role of Universities should be to produce graduates who are educated, that is they share a basic corpus of knowledge considered central to their field and they are capable of learning additional information as needed.
There is a thing called protocol. Diplomatic protocol has many functions, one of them is to serve as a spam filter.
It sounds as if what they did was to send the letter to the French PM's office directly where it would be mixed in with all the letters from the other hundred thousand or so cranks writing to him. The chance that the letter would even be read by a minor functionary in that time is small. The chance of a prompt reply smaller.
Correct protocol in the case of RMS would have been to send the letter to the French Embassy in the US and request a meeting with the minister in charge of technology. Demanding a meeting with the PM is pretty presumptuous for a private individual who is not even a citizen of the country concerned.
I was really hoping that this was going to be a case where I could say that I had zero sympathy for either party. However it appears that only RMS was acting in a meglamonaical fashion in this particular case.
If you filter out the remedial courses that US Uni's offer to get US students up to speed, they are better than most foreign Uni's. In Japan, College is the time to party, while in the US, High School is the time to party.
It all depends where you measure. Paul Graham appears to be basing his experience on MIT. Unfortunately the US only has one MIT and only five or so universities in the same class for technology.
The US Ivy League is unfortunately not world class in technology. The same is true of Oxford, the humanities are supreme, there is some world class science and math. Engineering is not an institutional priority. Yale and Harvard still have admissions policies that discriminate in favour of the children of alumni and against the most qualified applicants. You can't take second rate students and be first rate.
In the past this peversely helped the US system. MIT might well have remained a respected but unexciting trade school if Havard had decided to take engineering seriously. If Harvard and MIT had merged as was proposed before WWI then MIT would never have been the powerhouse it was after WWII. Harvard's anti-semitic hiring policies would have excluded most of the stars of the current CSAIL faculty.
Its not just the Rivests and Minskys that you loose with anti-semitic hiring, its all the non-jews who do not want to work in that type of environment. i think that this is probably one of the bigger effects on German academia, the NAZIs did not just exclude the jews, they excluded everyone who questioned their ideology. Once an institution has excluded the type of people who ask questions it can take centuries to recover. The Catholic church has not yet recovered from the counter-reformation, it probably never will.
There is no ideal higher education strategy. The US has historically had a much higher percentage of the population go through tertiary education. That is on balance probably a better strategy for this century than the UK where in the past only 10% went to university and there was a very deliberate divide between the ordinary and the elite schools.
On balance I don't think it is MITs and Stanfords that give the US the edge. You can always hire in elite engineers. And the people who succeed at places like MIT are people who would probably succeed almost anywhere. I think it is the large span of middle ranking institutions.
The point is that you need relatively few engineers compared to the number of salespeople, marketers, finance, administrators etc. And while engineers do not typically value the inputs of non engineers much these have a massive effect on the performance of a business, if only because smart people find it pretty difficult to work with people whose intellectual development stopped at 18. university is not a perfect cure for this but it can help.
I have never been to myspace, I would never use a Murdoch controlled site.
So what if someone went off and created a profile for me? Posted the untrue story about me calling into a conference call while in a hot tub (I was sitting next to it and the clean cycle went off). I'll admit I did call in from a bar on a beach in Jamaca while on a cruise and yes I did call in from the delivery room after our first child was born but the kid was asleep and the mother said she didn't mind.
You could really do a number on someone and they likely would never find out why. Particularly effective if you knew the other people applying, say you met them in the waiting room before the interview and remembered their names.
Post an essay from a jihadi site praising Bin Laden. Post some of the nuttier rantings of Ward Churchill and Ann Coulter on the 9/11 victims.
Heh, an aunt of mine knows coulter well, and assures me she doesn't believe most of what she says. In her own words, she has no qualms about telling the book buying public what they hope to hear from her, both liberals, conservatives and anyone else. It's just good business.
I have no doubt that she is merely doing what Colbert does, only staying in character more and taking the winguts for a very profitable ride.
She gets $30,000 per speaking engagement and the wingnut 'think' tanks buy tens of thousands of copies of her books. Or did before she went off message with her last rant.
The issue is NOT "theft" or not. It's economics. In economics, things have value because they are scarse. Bits are not scarse. So the RIAA puts special limitations to make it scarse.
Actually it is the government that does this, not the RIAA. Copyright and patents are enumerated in the US constitution as responsibilities of the Federal government.
The WTO treaty requires signatories to respect transnational IPR claims as a condition of membership. The US pushed for these requirements so its not too suprising it is enforcing them.
It was not always this way back in Victorian times US publishers ripped of UK authors such as Gilbert and Sullivan and Dickens by relying on similarly corrupt copyright laws as the one the Russian site is relying on. Under the then US copyright law the first publisher of a book in the US gained the copyright regardless of whether they actually wrote the book, they could even sue the real author for publishing their own work.
I would have a bit more respect for supporters of these sites if they actually admitted that what they like about them is getting stuff for free or for next to nothing.
I can't speak from experience for emacs, but I know vi has the ability to do syntax highlighting
Vi and emacs are to an IDE what a Ford model T is to a 2006 Lexus.
No matter how much lipstick you put on the pig it is still a pig underneath. The real value of an IDE has nothing to do with the syntax highlighting or other eye candy. The value of an IDE is in the effortless integration of the components.
In visual studio the debugger, compiler and editor are absolutely and totally integrated without any rough edges. Emacs gives me sharp edges everywhere and a file to round them off after I discover them the hard way.
Do not teach the students with vi or emacs, you will teach them to build code that looks like vi and emacs - shiny tools for geeks that are utterly incomprehensible to people who don't know the handshake.
Lots of people like being in the freemasons. Most of us can get by without dressing up in leather aprons, rolling up a trouser leg and being buggered by a goat. When I learned to write I did not begin by learning how to make ink and cut a quil pen.
The people who think emacs and csh should be absolute prerequisites to 'real computing' are no different to the people who used to think that FORTAN, COBOL and MVS were absolute requirements before anything of any importance could be done on a computer. Most of the old timers who thought that way are currently unemployed writing whining letters to the papers about how terrible it is that the government is allowing new H1B hires of programers while they can't find a job. The fact that this is entirely due to the fact they refuse to learn to use the in demand tools completely escapes them.
This is a technology business. If you are not prepared to learn the most cutting edge technology of the day you probably won't have a technical job in ten years time and you certainly should not be teaching others.
It is interesting to note that the first priority for the British authorities was to rid themselves of the puritans. Getting rid of thieves was a much lower priority.
All countries develop ridiculous foundation myths. The story of the giants Gog and Maggog is not taught in modern British schools but it certainly was popular in druid times.
The Australians overstate the role of the convicts because it plays well, just as Americans vastly overstate the role of taxation in the revolutionary war. The Whigs understood that taxation was inevitable, the real complaint was the lack of representation.
Still interesting choice of news priorities for slashdot: Google hires intern. What next? Microsoft hires canteen staff, Linus has breakfast.
I think the chance that this is a distraction is much greater than any other motive suggested.
It is very unlikely that someone whose moral compass is so broken that they spend their time writing viruses is that upset about other law breakers. I suspect that the author has huge amounts of stolen software and music.
More likely this is just a nasty, vicious little perp who is thinking of a way to do something nasty and vicious. Maybe they think that this type of attack is less likely to be taken seriously by the authorities (wrong) or less likely to lead to criminal complaints (right, but there will be enough complaints).
Another strong possibility is that the criminals calculate that creating security paranoia is useful for their business and this is a way to increase concern. They will probably follow up with a marketting campaign selling hijacked copies of anti-virus software.
Regardless of what immediate damage is caused every trojan has to be treated as if it was intended to be used for phishing.
Given the new trends on virtualization, OS's running within OS's, virtual servers, mainframe partitions, single processor concurrent contexts, multiple processors single contexts. etc. etc. etc. Does it really matter the inner architecture of the operating system?
Yes because all current mainstream O/S have a big security hole, the security scheme has in effect two levels when dealing with a malicious attack: user and root.
Windows has lots of fine grain privilleges and those are really good for stopping programs accidentaly doing something they should not or allowing a buffer over run exploit to do something drastic. Buth they do nothing at all to stop a bad device driver clobbering the whole system.
Thats essentially what a rootkit is - a malicious device driver. Windows has a bunch of controls to try to limit the problem. The user is now asked before an attempt to install an unsigned driver. But the old saying is still true - once ring 0 always ring 0.
Linux has exactly the same problem. Once you get to root it is game over, there is no way to recover the system.
With a microkernel it is quite practical to design the system in such a way that the portion ot he operating system that is vulnerable to a rootkit attack is considerably reduced. Instead of every driver being a vulnerability this is limited to the microkernel itself.
I think that Tanenbaum is right on the technical argument. Where he was probably wrong is that it was probably not practical to build a microkernel based O/S in 1993 when the original argument took place.
In the meantime signed drivers is a pretty good alternative. Just make sure that the root of trust can be set by the owner of the machine.
Another thing I would like to see is much more use of generic drivers. My windows box has something like 1000 different printer drivers. In reality of course there are only 20 or so basic variations and many of those are close. Why not have a generic printer description format in XML that the computer can pull off the printer as needed? This could be extensible to allow support for proprietary formats. Most printers would only need to note that a standard page description format is supported and codes to state the number of paper trays, paper sizes &ct.
There are some cases where code is going to be essential. A display adapter is almost certainly going to need some code support. But most devices do not need to define executable content.
This declarative approach has other advatages. The O/S has more information on the printer available and can do more customization and localization as a result.
Have you tried using Opera Mini? I've been using it on my Treo 600, and have been quite happy with it
Thats not really the point, if the phone is meant to compete with the Windows phone it should come with a top grade browser. Otherwise we get into the type of comparisons that says that a dodge neon is as good as a ferrari because it can go faster than a Ferrari if you weld a jet engine on the back.
I should not need to buy a new browser for a $600 phone that may only last a year or so.
The biggest strike against the Treo is that it is way too bulky, about twice as thick as the Razr. It is the first converged PDA/Phone/Pager to be worth having but it is clearly a transitional device. The RAZR has almost the same functionality but is half the thickness.
Minor bluetooth upgrades, more ram, EVDO(which has excessive charges upwards toward 60 per month), and a better screen than the 700w are about all that is worth listing. I'm keeping my 650. --
Is it any smaller or any more reliable?
I don't care which O/S they use, just that the thing works. The 650 is much better than my iPaq phone which was abysmal reliability wise and much too big and the TMobile GPRS was worse.
But the 650 still has major problems. The browser sucks really badly. It has no cache, not even for the last page visited. And if you use the phone or it goesw to standby all info in the beowser is lost completely.
It worst habbit is turning off the phone for no apparent reason.
DisplayPort is, as I understand, a direct competitor to HDMI.
Not quite, its more of a sidegrade. DisplayPort is a direct competitor to UDI which is an Intel scheme to do the same thing.
Both have 'content protection'. I don't know why folk get so up tight about it. There is no way it can possibly work. Copy protection is break once run anywhere. The copyright pirates are going to quickly take apart a display and extract the keys, once they do thay they can do anything they like.
What I am more anoyed about is that this standard does not solve my real problem, cable clutter (extended rant on blog).
The DisplayPort people have half a clue, they have included an audio channel so I don't have to run two sets of cables between my computer and my monitor. But where is the USB? they keyboard/mouse connector? Power to drive an attached laptop?.
There is a pretty small chance that I will be buying a screen so large that DVI is inadequate in the next year or two. I now have cable clutter in three different rooms. Cable clutter is pretty much a universal pain point for every computer user. And don't get me started on those shitty brick adaptors that they now use instead of building power supplies into printers, monitors or the like. At the back of my desk I have a ten way power strip and six adapter bricks. There is another ten way power strip under the printer table.
I currently have two laptops by the same manufacturer that both require a different docking station. Its completely unnecessary, there should have been a standard ten years ago, but that would end the racket of selling $350 docking stations and $100 travel adaptors.
The other way this is a huge lose is that it is still electrical. I have a $90 DVI cable. My son's complete PC cost less than $500. If they made the move to an optical interconnect one cable would meet every need - today or in the future. There would be no problem running cables 100ft or longer. Fibre is now standard for audio interconnect, why not use it for video???
The problem is that the driving force behind the initiative is the percieved need to support bigger displays rather looking at what the majority of customers actually want.
Uh, the Pepper has been available since last year. I've even seen a couple out in the wild.
OK, I still don't see a reason to say Microsoft is 'pimping' Origami. Its unprofessional to talk that way and it just irritates people who are not hardcore Microsoft haters.
Out of interest, can you provide some examples? I see the article does in fact have a "Criticism" section, which is fairly high up, not to mention a dedicated article for Criticism of Wal-Mart.
Maybe this week, but that is only because the blatant manipulation from WalMart has been noticed and there are plenty of editors willing to stand guard over the article.
The criticism article was originally created by the WalMart faction as a way to clean all negative comment from the main article. They then re-ordered the criticism article so that people would have to read through ten screenfulls of moonbat articles on what WalMart might do in the future before seeing anything on union busting, employment of illegal aliens or any of the other unfair labour practices Walmart is actually accused of.
The WalMart article and the Cindy Sheehan article both get plenty of attention and so attempts to skew them pretty much fail. The exception to the rule being the Katherine Harris article where there are Democrats desperately editing out the negative info because they want Nelson to face Harris in November rather than a more electable replacement, meanwhile there are Republicans doing the opposite because they fear the negative impace Harris will have on the other state races. Expect this to reverse after May 14th.
First off, 20 GB? C'mon guys. You need to get that up to 60-80GB to be really useful. 100+ GB is a bit of a pipedream at the moment, but you should be shooting for that later on.
As I said earlier, the original premise here was that these devices would be cheap. Of course the main determinant of cheap is volume so you don't get cheap by stripping out features.
I think that is is possible to have either a small disk or no DVD support, both is a disaster. What I would want to do with the device is to fill it up with films ripped from the home media vault before going on a trip. I don't want to have to take DVDs on the road with me.
20Gb is tight for a PC these days. It is pretty easy to eat up 5Gb with the O/S and basic applications (Firefox, Google Earth, Office, &ct). I have 6Gb of ripped CDs. that leaves less than 10Gb for video, thats only 2 DVDs.
I agree that no USB2.0 or Firewire really cripples the device as a mobile media vault. I can't download my video camera in the field.
This looks to me to be something that a manufacturer botched together as quickly as they could for the sole purpose of announcing the device before the big manufacturers put their Origami devices on sale. The size of the device makes it clear that it has a laptop motherboard inside. So the only development specific to this model is the case.
Incidentally, I am a little suspicious of just how available the device is. The few sites that have the device all show the same drawing, I could find only two actual photographs and its not possible to see whether the display is real or simulated in either. The Internet Tablet 770 Nokia was selling at the IETF is certainly genuine, smaller, neater and more capable.
I was going to say "it has a touch screen and a stylus and that should be adequate for 'a note or two' blah, blah, blah" but apparently this device does not support handwriting recognition.
Probably because the article is pretty much Linux boosterism. They start with the untrue claim that this has beaten the windows devices to market. Some Windows devices have already shipped.
I get a bit tired of apple/linux advocacy of the 'lets ignore every defect of our system' variety. Its like watching the idiot talking heads on the Sunday chat shows. Today the left will be trying to explain why driving on prescription drugs is no big deal whil the right try to claim that the resignation of the CIA Director had nothing to do with the gay hookers being ferried to the Watergate building to spice up the poker parties attended by GOP congressmen and the guy he appointed number 3 in the agency.
If only the partisans on either side would just once admit 'hey one of our guys screwed up'.
I blogged on Pepper earlier. I won't go into the full details but I think that the PC makers have so far botched the midi format. The original premise was that the format would be cheap, so the makers don't want to make the devices too good in case they poach customers from the existing laptop market. So they make sure that a couple of features they identify as essential for 'power users' are stripped out.
The feature that has been stripped out of all the devices to date is video out. The Pepper device has composite out for a TV but you can't hook it up to a projector to do PowerPoint (or open office equivalent). Without that capability the device is no use to me personally and I suspect no use to most of the intended early adopters. Adapters, add on cards don't cut it, the capability has to be native to the machine.
The main early adopters of a device like this are likely to be salesmen. They have the budget to buy toys, they do a lot of travel. Without the ability to present its useless.
The other killer app I suspect would be photographers who want a super-duper media vault. But anyone doing that is almost certain to want to have photoshop on the device as well and the ability to hook up to a full size display when available.
The thumb board is a welcome development, although it is forced on this device due to lack of good open source handwriting recognition (too many patents for that to be viable) I think it will quickly appear on the windows ones as well.
This type of activity just doesn't make business sense. The overhead would be enormous, and the payback would be undefined. That's not to say someone isn't doing it...I just don't think it's Wal-Mart Store, Inc.
It would not be the first time that that Walmart spent a pile of cash on a pointless operation. They spend a fortune trying to avoid paying their staff a living wage or give them real health benefits.
Exxon spent tens of millions last year on phony think tanks dedicated to peddling the myth that there is scientific doubt over global warming.
Walmart is penny wise pound foolish. Their financial results over the past five years are far from impressive. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Costco has a much better, much more sustainable model. Pay an honest wage, control costs by selling in bulk.
While I don't work directly for W*M, I do work with their IT dept very closely. One thing I've learned is they are very serious about ROI's (return on investment). I find it very hard to believe anyone (Public Relations or IT) would be able to convince management that fighting over a Wiki entry had a solid ROI.
Try editing the Walmart article on Wikipedia and you will soon learn that you are wrong. They always have someone on the Wikipedia article. Every piece of criticism is pushed as far down the article as possible and then deleted. They have something like ten different editors. If you look at their histories they don't edit many other articles.
This is a big problem across Wikipedia in general, it is pretty easy for a politician or a company to erase negative information.
If you look at the Fox News article you will find that pretty much all mention of its role as a conservative propaganda organization is eliminated. The only mention of the fact that many people consider Fox has a hard right tilt comes right at the end. Thats just the folk comming in from the wingnut-sphere. I really doubt Fox cares about being considered conservative, its just an act they put on because they know it gets up the nose of liberals (but not as much as Colbert got up their nose this week).
If you read the Katherine Harris article you will find that there are people who don't think the fact that she had a meal costing $2,800 with a defense contractor who just pled guilty to corruption and bribery notable at all, nor the fact that she tried to send a $10 million federal contract his way through an earmark the next day and subsequently lied about doing so repeatedly. That fight is particularly amusing because the people most desperate to get Harris off the November ballot are her own party. Jeb Bush, Karl Rove and Ed Rollins are all on the record briefing against Harris.
You can even find bogus info in the history articles and the articles on religion. There is a group that is very eager to tell us that nothing really bad happened during the Spanish Inquisition.
Crank contributions come in from both the left and the right. Its quite interesting to see an MIT full professor being told he does not understand the technology he pioneered.
I think that these problems are fixable but it needs a change of priority that Jimbo does not seem willing to make at this point. The priority is to have the widest range of participation with the lowest barriers. That may not be the best way to create articles on controversial subjects.
I think that there needs to be a bit more process and a mechanism to track editor reputation, similar to the slashdot scheme but with something added to cope with the partisanship factor. Slashdot forays into politics are none to successful unless it is on a topic like CALEA where there is a guaranteed 500 posts, all with the same opinion.
The Web site has a second hand account of a somewhat bizare interpretation of the treaty. The treaty does not extinguish fair use rights, does not bar the Daily Show from using clips of Fox News, does not provide the degree of control described.
What the treaty does appear to be trying to do is to extend geographic rights limitations currently enforced through the limitations of broadcast media (TV signals only go so far) to the Internet.
An international treaty has no effect unless the member states agree to ratify it. The UN is certainly not working outside its scope by proposing the treaty, the entire reason for WIPO and the UN to exist is to draft treaties.
What is a concern is the use of international treaty making to perform an end run around the legislative system. Its a way of avoiding accountability. In the UK a frequent bleat from governments of both colours is that they are forced to do something because of the EU. What they fail to mention is that they were the primary movers in getting the directive they are now complaining about passed.
There is no value in a public key scheme here. If either the key or the car is compromised the other is. The protocol only ever involves the same two parties, the car and the key.
There seems to be some confusion as to what is going on here. The attackers are not trying every code in turn, they are doing cryptanalysis of the weak crypto scheme used in the keys which is 40 bits or so.
It is insecure and it isn't....Security through obscurity if you want to put it like that does do one thing: it buys time for them to create a fix. If they came out right away and told people about the holes then they would be in an even more intense race against attackers.
The point is that relying on security through obscurity alone is a bad strategy. The ideal is to be able to publish the entire architecture and the system would still be safe. No system in existence meets the ideal.
Full disclosure is bunk, there are large numbers of evil hackers on BUGTRAQ. Exploit code is often published there for the sole purpose of covering the tracks of an attacker.
Slashdot Mirror
And before that the LISP machine.
I think he had a good point in those days. It was a bit off the way the taxpayer paid for the research and somehow the code ended up private property.
I know RMS, I have talked to him, he is not of this world.
I am very skeptical about the educational value of US Phd programs. I think that the quality of the qualification is not comensurate with the effort required of the student. In Europe a PhD means the the holder has demonstrated that they are capable of developing, executing and documenting a research program. The US programs take twice as long to achieve this result. The bulk of the time seems to be spent as cheap labor for the university.
I think that the Clinton administration was encouraging a better approach when they began the push to support lifelong learning as the goal. The role of Universities should be to produce graduates who are educated, that is they share a basic corpus of knowledge considered central to their field and they are capable of learning additional information as needed.
There is a thing called protocol. Diplomatic protocol has many functions, one of them is to serve as a spam filter.
It sounds as if what they did was to send the letter to the French PM's office directly where it would be mixed in with all the letters from the other hundred thousand or so cranks writing to him. The chance that the letter would even be read by a minor functionary in that time is small. The chance of a prompt reply smaller.
Correct protocol in the case of RMS would have been to send the letter to the French Embassy in the US and request a meeting with the minister in charge of technology. Demanding a meeting with the PM is pretty presumptuous for a private individual who is not even a citizen of the country concerned.
I was really hoping that this was going to be a case where I could say that I had zero sympathy for either party. However it appears that only RMS was acting in a meglamonaical fashion in this particular case.
It all depends where you measure. Paul Graham appears to be basing his experience on MIT. Unfortunately the US only has one MIT and only five or so universities in the same class for technology.
The US Ivy League is unfortunately not world class in technology. The same is true of Oxford, the humanities are supreme, there is some world class science and math. Engineering is not an institutional priority. Yale and Harvard still have admissions policies that discriminate in favour of the children of alumni and against the most qualified applicants. You can't take second rate students and be first rate.
In the past this peversely helped the US system. MIT might well have remained a respected but unexciting trade school if Havard had decided to take engineering seriously. If Harvard and MIT had merged as was proposed before WWI then MIT would never have been the powerhouse it was after WWII. Harvard's anti-semitic hiring policies would have excluded most of the stars of the current CSAIL faculty.
Its not just the Rivests and Minskys that you loose with anti-semitic hiring, its all the non-jews who do not want to work in that type of environment. i think that this is probably one of the bigger effects on German academia, the NAZIs did not just exclude the jews, they excluded everyone who questioned their ideology. Once an institution has excluded the type of people who ask questions it can take centuries to recover. The Catholic church has not yet recovered from the counter-reformation, it probably never will.
There is no ideal higher education strategy. The US has historically had a much higher percentage of the population go through tertiary education. That is on balance probably a better strategy for this century than the UK where in the past only 10% went to university and there was a very deliberate divide between the ordinary and the elite schools.
On balance I don't think it is MITs and Stanfords that give the US the edge. You can always hire in elite engineers. And the people who succeed at places like MIT are people who would probably succeed almost anywhere. I think it is the large span of middle ranking institutions.
The point is that you need relatively few engineers compared to the number of salespeople, marketers, finance, administrators etc. And while engineers do not typically value the inputs of non engineers much these have a massive effect on the performance of a business, if only because smart people find it pretty difficult to work with people whose intellectual development stopped at 18. university is not a perfect cure for this but it can help.
Mechanical? Why mechanical? I thought we had left the Babbage era approach behind when they invented the transistor.
Whats wrong with electricity?
So what if someone went off and created a profile for me? Posted the untrue story about me calling into a conference call while in a hot tub (I was sitting next to it and the clean cycle went off). I'll admit I did call in from a bar on a beach in Jamaca while on a cruise and yes I did call in from the delivery room after our first child was born but the kid was asleep and the mother said she didn't mind.
You could really do a number on someone and they likely would never find out why. Particularly effective if you knew the other people applying, say you met them in the waiting room before the interview and remembered their names.
Post an essay from a jihadi site praising Bin Laden. Post some of the nuttier rantings of Ward Churchill and Ann Coulter on the 9/11 victims.
I have no doubt that she is merely doing what Colbert does, only staying in character more and taking the winguts for a very profitable ride.
She gets $30,000 per speaking engagement and the wingnut 'think' tanks buy tens of thousands of copies of her books. Or did before she went off message with her last rant.
Next you will be telling me that Ann Coulter only accuses the 9/11 widows of enjoying the death of their spouses to get attention.
Actually it is the government that does this, not the RIAA. Copyright and patents are enumerated in the US constitution as responsibilities of the Federal government.
The WTO treaty requires signatories to respect transnational IPR claims as a condition of membership. The US pushed for these requirements so its not too suprising it is enforcing them.
It was not always this way back in Victorian times US publishers ripped of UK authors such as Gilbert and Sullivan and Dickens by relying on similarly corrupt copyright laws as the one the Russian site is relying on. Under the then US copyright law the first publisher of a book in the US gained the copyright regardless of whether they actually wrote the book, they could even sue the real author for publishing their own work.
I would have a bit more respect for supporters of these sites if they actually admitted that what they like about them is getting stuff for free or for next to nothing.
Vi and emacs are to an IDE what a Ford model T is to a 2006 Lexus.
No matter how much lipstick you put on the pig it is still a pig underneath. The real value of an IDE has nothing to do with the syntax highlighting or other eye candy. The value of an IDE is in the effortless integration of the components.
In visual studio the debugger, compiler and editor are absolutely and totally integrated without any rough edges. Emacs gives me sharp edges everywhere and a file to round them off after I discover them the hard way.
Do not teach the students with vi or emacs, you will teach them to build code that looks like vi and emacs - shiny tools for geeks that are utterly incomprehensible to people who don't know the handshake.
Lots of people like being in the freemasons. Most of us can get by without dressing up in leather aprons, rolling up a trouser leg and being buggered by a goat. When I learned to write I did not begin by learning how to make ink and cut a quil pen.
The people who think emacs and csh should be absolute prerequisites to 'real computing' are no different to the people who used to think that FORTAN, COBOL and MVS were absolute requirements before anything of any importance could be done on a computer. Most of the old timers who thought that way are currently unemployed writing whining letters to the papers about how terrible it is that the government is allowing new H1B hires of programers while they can't find a job. The fact that this is entirely due to the fact they refuse to learn to use the in demand tools completely escapes them.
This is a technology business. If you are not prepared to learn the most cutting edge technology of the day you probably won't have a technical job in ten years time and you certainly should not be teaching others.
It is interesting to note that the first priority for the British authorities was to rid themselves of the puritans. Getting rid of thieves was a much lower priority. All countries develop ridiculous foundation myths. The story of the giants Gog and Maggog is not taught in modern British schools but it certainly was popular in druid times. The Australians overstate the role of the convicts because it plays well, just as Americans vastly overstate the role of taxation in the revolutionary war. The Whigs understood that taxation was inevitable, the real complaint was the lack of representation. Still interesting choice of news priorities for slashdot: Google hires intern. What next? Microsoft hires canteen staff, Linus has breakfast.
I think the chance that this is a distraction is much greater than any other motive suggested. It is very unlikely that someone whose moral compass is so broken that they spend their time writing viruses is that upset about other law breakers. I suspect that the author has huge amounts of stolen software and music. More likely this is just a nasty, vicious little perp who is thinking of a way to do something nasty and vicious. Maybe they think that this type of attack is less likely to be taken seriously by the authorities (wrong) or less likely to lead to criminal complaints (right, but there will be enough complaints). Another strong possibility is that the criminals calculate that creating security paranoia is useful for their business and this is a way to increase concern. They will probably follow up with a marketting campaign selling hijacked copies of anti-virus software. Regardless of what immediate damage is caused every trojan has to be treated as if it was intended to be used for phishing.
Yes because all current mainstream O/S have a big security hole, the security scheme has in effect two levels when dealing with a malicious attack: user and root.
Windows has lots of fine grain privilleges and those are really good for stopping programs accidentaly doing something they should not or allowing a buffer over run exploit to do something drastic. Buth they do nothing at all to stop a bad device driver clobbering the whole system.
Thats essentially what a rootkit is - a malicious device driver. Windows has a bunch of controls to try to limit the problem. The user is now asked before an attempt to install an unsigned driver. But the old saying is still true - once ring 0 always ring 0.
Linux has exactly the same problem. Once you get to root it is game over, there is no way to recover the system.
With a microkernel it is quite practical to design the system in such a way that the portion ot he operating system that is vulnerable to a rootkit attack is considerably reduced. Instead of every driver being a vulnerability this is limited to the microkernel itself.
I think that Tanenbaum is right on the technical argument. Where he was probably wrong is that it was probably not practical to build a microkernel based O/S in 1993 when the original argument took place.
In the meantime signed drivers is a pretty good alternative. Just make sure that the root of trust can be set by the owner of the machine.
Another thing I would like to see is much more use of generic drivers. My windows box has something like 1000 different printer drivers. In reality of course there are only 20 or so basic variations and many of those are close. Why not have a generic printer description format in XML that the computer can pull off the printer as needed? This could be extensible to allow support for proprietary formats. Most printers would only need to note that a standard page description format is supported and codes to state the number of paper trays, paper sizes &ct.
There are some cases where code is going to be essential. A display adapter is almost certainly going to need some code support. But most devices do not need to define executable content.
This declarative approach has other advatages. The O/S has more information on the printer available and can do more customization and localization as a result.
Thats not really the point, if the phone is meant to compete with the Windows phone it should come with a top grade browser. Otherwise we get into the type of comparisons that says that a dodge neon is as good as a ferrari because it can go faster than a Ferrari if you weld a jet engine on the back.
I should not need to buy a new browser for a $600 phone that may only last a year or so.
The biggest strike against the Treo is that it is way too bulky, about twice as thick as the Razr. It is the first converged PDA/Phone/Pager to be worth having but it is clearly a transitional device. The RAZR has almost the same functionality but is half the thickness.
Is it any smaller or any more reliable?
I don't care which O/S they use, just that the thing works. The 650 is much better than my iPaq phone which was abysmal reliability wise and much too big and the TMobile GPRS was worse.
But the 650 still has major problems. The browser sucks really badly. It has no cache, not even for the last page visited. And if you use the phone or it goesw to standby all info in the beowser is lost completely.
It worst habbit is turning off the phone for no apparent reason.
Not quite, its more of a sidegrade. DisplayPort is a direct competitor to UDI which is an Intel scheme to do the same thing.
Both have 'content protection'. I don't know why folk get so up tight about it. There is no way it can possibly work. Copy protection is break once run anywhere. The copyright pirates are going to quickly take apart a display and extract the keys, once they do thay they can do anything they like.
What I am more anoyed about is that this standard does not solve my real problem, cable clutter (extended rant on blog).
The DisplayPort people have half a clue, they have included an audio channel so I don't have to run two sets of cables between my computer and my monitor. But where is the USB? they keyboard/mouse connector? Power to drive an attached laptop?.
There is a pretty small chance that I will be buying a screen so large that DVI is inadequate in the next year or two. I now have cable clutter in three different rooms. Cable clutter is pretty much a universal pain point for every computer user. And don't get me started on those shitty brick adaptors that they now use instead of building power supplies into printers, monitors or the like. At the back of my desk I have a ten way power strip and six adapter bricks. There is another ten way power strip under the printer table.
I currently have two laptops by the same manufacturer that both require a different docking station. Its completely unnecessary, there should have been a standard ten years ago, but that would end the racket of selling $350 docking stations and $100 travel adaptors.
The other way this is a huge lose is that it is still electrical. I have a $90 DVI cable. My son's complete PC cost less than $500. If they made the move to an optical interconnect one cable would meet every need - today or in the future. There would be no problem running cables 100ft or longer. Fibre is now standard for audio interconnect, why not use it for video???
The problem is that the driving force behind the initiative is the percieved need to support bigger displays rather looking at what the majority of customers actually want.
OK, I still don't see a reason to say Microsoft is 'pimping' Origami. Its unprofessional to talk that way and it just irritates people who are not hardcore Microsoft haters.
Maybe this week, but that is only because the blatant manipulation from WalMart has been noticed and there are plenty of editors willing to stand guard over the article.
The criticism article was originally created by the WalMart faction as a way to clean all negative comment from the main article. They then re-ordered the criticism article so that people would have to read through ten screenfulls of moonbat articles on what WalMart might do in the future before seeing anything on union busting, employment of illegal aliens or any of the other unfair labour practices Walmart is actually accused of.
The WalMart article and the Cindy Sheehan article both get plenty of attention and so attempts to skew them pretty much fail. The exception to the rule being the Katherine Harris article where there are Democrats desperately editing out the negative info because they want Nelson to face Harris in November rather than a more electable replacement, meanwhile there are Republicans doing the opposite because they fear the negative impace Harris will have on the other state races. Expect this to reverse after May 14th.
As I said earlier, the original premise here was that these devices would be cheap. Of course the main determinant of cheap is volume so you don't get cheap by stripping out features.
I think that is is possible to have either a small disk or no DVD support, both is a disaster. What I would want to do with the device is to fill it up with films ripped from the home media vault before going on a trip. I don't want to have to take DVDs on the road with me.
20Gb is tight for a PC these days. It is pretty easy to eat up 5Gb with the O/S and basic applications (Firefox, Google Earth, Office, &ct). I have 6Gb of ripped CDs. that leaves less than 10Gb for video, thats only 2 DVDs.
I agree that no USB2.0 or Firewire really cripples the device as a mobile media vault. I can't download my video camera in the field.
This looks to me to be something that a manufacturer botched together as quickly as they could for the sole purpose of announcing the device before the big manufacturers put their Origami devices on sale. The size of the device makes it clear that it has a laptop motherboard inside. So the only development specific to this model is the case.
Incidentally, I am a little suspicious of just how available the device is. The few sites that have the device all show the same drawing, I could find only two actual photographs and its not possible to see whether the display is real or simulated in either. The Internet Tablet 770 Nokia was selling at the IETF is certainly genuine, smaller, neater and more capable.
Probably because the article is pretty much Linux boosterism. They start with the untrue claim that this has beaten the windows devices to market. Some Windows devices have already shipped.
I get a bit tired of apple/linux advocacy of the 'lets ignore every defect of our system' variety. Its like watching the idiot talking heads on the Sunday chat shows. Today the left will be trying to explain why driving on prescription drugs is no big deal whil the right try to claim that the resignation of the CIA Director had nothing to do with the gay hookers being ferried to the Watergate building to spice up the poker parties attended by GOP congressmen and the guy he appointed number 3 in the agency.
If only the partisans on either side would just once admit 'hey one of our guys screwed up'.
I blogged on Pepper earlier. I won't go into the full details but I think that the PC makers have so far botched the midi format. The original premise was that the format would be cheap, so the makers don't want to make the devices too good in case they poach customers from the existing laptop market. So they make sure that a couple of features they identify as essential for 'power users' are stripped out.
The feature that has been stripped out of all the devices to date is video out. The Pepper device has composite out for a TV but you can't hook it up to a projector to do PowerPoint (or open office equivalent). Without that capability the device is no use to me personally and I suspect no use to most of the intended early adopters. Adapters, add on cards don't cut it, the capability has to be native to the machine.
The main early adopters of a device like this are likely to be salesmen. They have the budget to buy toys, they do a lot of travel. Without the ability to present its useless.
The other killer app I suspect would be photographers who want a super-duper media vault. But anyone doing that is almost certain to want to have photoshop on the device as well and the ability to hook up to a full size display when available.
The thumb board is a welcome development, although it is forced on this device due to lack of good open source handwriting recognition (too many patents for that to be viable) I think it will quickly appear on the windows ones as well.
It would not be the first time that that Walmart spent a pile of cash on a pointless operation. They spend a fortune trying to avoid paying their staff a living wage or give them real health benefits.
Exxon spent tens of millions last year on phony think tanks dedicated to peddling the myth that there is scientific doubt over global warming.
Walmart is penny wise pound foolish. Their financial results over the past five years are far from impressive. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Costco has a much better, much more sustainable model. Pay an honest wage, control costs by selling in bulk.
Try editing the Walmart article on Wikipedia and you will soon learn that you are wrong. They always have someone on the Wikipedia article. Every piece of criticism is pushed as far down the article as possible and then deleted. They have something like ten different editors. If you look at their histories they don't edit many other articles.
This is a big problem across Wikipedia in general, it is pretty easy for a politician or a company to erase negative information.
If you look at the Fox News article you will find that pretty much all mention of its role as a conservative propaganda organization is eliminated. The only mention of the fact that many people consider Fox has a hard right tilt comes right at the end. Thats just the folk comming in from the wingnut-sphere. I really doubt Fox cares about being considered conservative, its just an act they put on because they know it gets up the nose of liberals (but not as much as Colbert got up their nose this week).
If you read the Katherine Harris article you will find that there are people who don't think the fact that she had a meal costing $2,800 with a defense contractor who just pled guilty to corruption and bribery notable at all, nor the fact that she tried to send a $10 million federal contract his way through an earmark the next day and subsequently lied about doing so repeatedly. That fight is particularly amusing because the people most desperate to get Harris off the November ballot are her own party. Jeb Bush, Karl Rove and Ed Rollins are all on the record briefing against Harris.
You can even find bogus info in the history articles and the articles on religion. There is a group that is very eager to tell us that nothing really bad happened during the Spanish Inquisition.
Crank contributions come in from both the left and the right. Its quite interesting to see an MIT full professor being told he does not understand the technology he pioneered.
I think that these problems are fixable but it needs a change of priority that Jimbo does not seem willing to make at this point. The priority is to have the widest range of participation with the lowest barriers. That may not be the best way to create articles on controversial subjects.
I think that there needs to be a bit more process and a mechanism to track editor reputation, similar to the slashdot scheme but with something added to cope with the partisanship factor. Slashdot forays into politics are none to successful unless it is on a topic like CALEA where there is a guaranteed 500 posts, all with the same opinion.
What the treaty does appear to be trying to do is to extend geographic rights limitations currently enforced through the limitations of broadcast media (TV signals only go so far) to the Internet.
An international treaty has no effect unless the member states agree to ratify it. The UN is certainly not working outside its scope by proposing the treaty, the entire reason for WIPO and the UN to exist is to draft treaties.
What is a concern is the use of international treaty making to perform an end run around the legislative system. Its a way of avoiding accountability. In the UK a frequent bleat from governments of both colours is that they are forced to do something because of the EU. What they fail to mention is that they were the primary movers in getting the directive they are now complaining about passed.
There seems to be some confusion as to what is going on here. The attackers are not trying every code in turn, they are doing cryptanalysis of the weak crypto scheme used in the keys which is 40 bits or so.
The point is that relying on security through obscurity alone is a bad strategy. The ideal is to be able to publish the entire architecture and the system would still be safe. No system in existence meets the ideal.
Full disclosure is bunk, there are large numbers of evil hackers on BUGTRAQ. Exploit code is often published there for the sole purpose of covering the tracks of an attacker.