For the time invested, reading is a very poor way of getting information, especially with regards to fiction. Yes, there are advantages (ability to use imagination, etc.) but really, reading at 50 pages an hour I might spend 10 hours reading a new Tom Clancy book.
At the end, the total amount of recall I have of specific aspects of the book will be about equivalent to the recall I'd have after seeing a movie, only the movie gives me the information passively and in a fifth the time. Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?
Also, (and I think this is hugely important) reading has very limited memetic aspects. When I've read a new book, the first thing I want to do is discuss it with other people. However, since relatively few people have read the same book. The meme hasn't propagated. I can explain the experience of reading the book to others, but most of the time they really don't care because I'm unable to convey enough to start discussion. With a movie that millions have seen, or a webpage with a quick read that I could blog about or send the link around in email, the memetic aspects are much greater.
I don't get any of the viruses thanks to SpamAssassin and whatever else our fine Admins have put on the mailserver, but what I do end up getting is about 200 autoreplies from dumb MTAs who believe I have sent them a virus when in fact it's the virus/worm/whatever spoofing itself off as me.
Despite the fact that I didn't actually send a virus-infected email from mta3.someserver.pl to a nonexistent address, I still get the helpful autoreply that tells me that the user at that nonexistent address does indeed not exist.
The debate here is whether the NYTimes is reporting the statistics right. We all know that the Windows Error Reporting service generally jumps up at us whenever we have an application crash, which is the fault of the application. Having not seen a real, bona-fide BSOD on my own Windows machines in years (literally), I don't know whether the crash reporting service reports them to MS or not.
Whether the NYTimes reporter can tell the difference between an application crash and an OS crash is up for debate (I'd say there are 50/50 odds either way).
That number is also a huge aggregate of apples and oranges. It doesn't make a distinction between 9X kernels and NT kernels, which I would bet have wildly different numbers of OS crashes (just about anything can blow up a 9X kernel, NT kernel BSODs are generally caused by faulty device drivers, hardware faults, and OS bugs).
The real problem WRT crashing on NT kernel machines is the device drivers running in kernel space. This means that a non-OS part of the system can zap the OS part of the system. Thus, even if you do convert everybody to an NT kernel-based OS, you're probably going to continue to have trouble with people that run terribly bad hardware with equally terrible device drivers. Unfortunately, most people don't understand that buying that white box ethernet card from Fry's or that roundy-looking-box-with-crappy-monitor consumer PC from Best Buy really *can* hurt you in the morning.
When and if MS rearchitects the Windows kernel so device drivers run in user space, or some protected space, I think that the so-called reliability gap between UNIX/UNIX workalikes and Windows will be very, very small indeed.
"I am David Turner! My Pagerank is SO MUCH BIGGER than your Pagerank! My organization is the number one Google hit for ONE LETTER of the alphabet! Ph33r m3!"
What a smarmy comment that serves no purpose and is absolutely irrelevant. Quite like the content of FSF licenses actually.
--- My software doesn't have a philosophy. It just works.
Hilary: Hey, Jack, did you get that email from the Kazaa guys?
Jack: Yeah, what about it?
Hilary: Is that something we should consider doing?
Jack: Did I miss Hell freezing over or something?
Hilary: No, no, I'm just fucking with you:)
Jack: Phew, I thought you were serious there for a minute. Don't do that!
gandhicon -eric -raymond -esr -"welcome to gandhicon 4": 15 hits
The original source (a blog entry by Doc Searls) involves a conversation between the author and Raymond. So, it looks like there are only two people actively using the term: Doc Searls and ESR.
CYA goes both ways. If you recommend a course of action different than the one they're suggesting, and it fails, you will likely be held responsible. So the question is:
Are you getting paid to stop the company from making bad decisions?
If not, keep yer yap shut. If you will NOT be held liable for not stopping the company from doing something stupid, then there is no incentive to do so, and it may get you in trouble if you turn out to be wrong in the end.
Look, everybody knows there will be several different releases of the special edition. You've got 1st mix through 7th mix, followed by The Matrix Disney Daze, then Matrix 7th Mix MAX and MAX2, followed, of course, by The Matrix 7th Mix MAX300A.
The later versions will change uot the simple DVD scene selection menu for a pentagon system where you can select versions of the movie with varying amounts of action, intrigue, sex, technology, and agents. Also, if you hit certain combos or finish the movie in a certain amount of time, you unlock secret versions.
The DOT has already approved Methanol in small quantities for uses such as powering fuel-cell powered laptops, see here.
You "recharge" by popping in a new cartridge of methanol, which should be cheap ($3-5 initial starting price, probably down to $0.30 eventually. You don't actually have to plug the laptop in for a few hours to recharge it either, so on that long airline flight you can run the laptop indefinitely with enough little cartridges. I saw a pic of a prototype cartridge once somewhere, it looked about the size of a AA battery.
I was once given some code by a guy who had been writing code since far before my own birth and was learning Java. In there, I found a table:
public static final int X_00 = 0; public static final int X_01 = 1; ... public static final int X_FF = 255;
I asked him what was up with that. His reply? "Java doesn't have hex support built in." My reply: "Uhm, yeah it does. Always did, in fact." His reply: "Oh, well, I never found it."
Knowledge of the language and its libraries are extremely important.
True story: I was thinking of asking this one girl out. Honor student, totally anal, the whole works. So I googled her, as any good hacker would. What came up?
The local police blotter!
Thank you, Google! I still know where my wallet is because of you!
Why has the Windows Source Code, arguably the most valuable piece of source code in history, never been leaked? Certainly, as others have said, people have it. Or parts of it. The distribution methods are out there (Gnutella, Freenet, Overseas servers). Once this genie gets out of the bottle, it couldn't ever be stoppered back in. So why has there been ten or fifteen years of Windows with no source leaks?
I mean, if the atom bomb got out, which has only a fraction of the destructive power of Windows (just kidding), then why not Windows?
Has it been:
- People are too scared of Microsoft to do it, even with anonymizing technology?
- Microsoft's security is just that good?
- ???
I'm sorry, but with the obscurity of these items, it's turned a scavenger hunt from a fun afternoon activity with some purpose into a monumental waste of time, energy, and resources.
I'm impressed with how far open source has come. From the days when you could spend a week trying to figure out what your monitor's horizontal refresh rate was just to get X running under Slackware, to the wizard-style installs of RedHat, the installation process (as mentioned in the article) has come a long way.
I just recently came back to try to set up a dedicated Linux server on an old PC. I was going to put some custom servlets on there, so I wanted Apache and Tomcat installed.
Apache came with the RedHat installation I did, but not Tomcat. No problem. I download an RPM of Tomcat and install it fairly easily (although I have to RTFM to figure out how to install the RPM).
After that, it took me three days to get Apache to talk to Tomcat. After installing, uninstalling, and finally compiling an entirely new build of Apache, I got the webapp connector to work, only to find it was broken. Some more futzing around and trying to read the broken-English documentation of the mod_jk2 connector and I finally got it working. I'm a developer with fifteen years' experience, I'm not a newbie here. I can fly circles around all but the most experienced vi user, but this was a baffling array of too many choices, not enough guidance, and no friendly setup.
Other usability problems I encountered included:
1. The graphical tool for configuring Apache provided by RedHat doesn't like you touching the config file with any other editor, but it doesn't provide all the functionality either. So, the minute you have to touch the config file with an editor, your user-friendly tool breaks.
2. I had three choices for everything. Did I want to use Tomcat as my main server? Integrate with Apache? What directories did I want to integrate? Which of three different connectors that do exactly the same thing did I want to use? (Hint: whichever one that just works). As a first-time user, I didn't want a choice, I wanted a decision.
In contrast, the first time I ever set up a servlet engine on a Windows NT box (and this was in the bad-old-days) the procedure was:
Double click installer, click next about five times, select "IIS" and hit "Finish." Took me less than an hour--the first time. Sure, it probably wasn't tuned to perfection, but it worked.
With the success of the Linux installers being so easy, it appears that usability is making inroads...but it's not there yet.
Okay, so assuming this extorti...I mean apparently-legal action goes through, who gets the money? Is this anti-piracy group going to go out and distribute the monies to the appropriate copyright holders? Who decided what price to set for the various downloaded artifacts? Certainly there's a significant markup here.
Assuming a CD has, on average, 15 songs, and you can get a CD for $12 at Best Buy, $2.67--that's a 250% markup on each song.
And, who is going to ensure that paying these folks will prevent future prosecution by the copyright holders? Do I get to keep the songs and movies that I downloaded if I pay up?
Out for a walk late last week in Southern California with some friends, a big blue streak shot across the sky...FAST, before disappearing just two seconds later. This one seemed very low and VERY bright; I'd guess maybe 10x brighter than a star. I don't go watching meteor showers or anything, so I don't have anything to gauge it against, but I have seen the Space Shuttle/ISS with the naked eye. This definitely looked much brighter, lower, and faster.
Don't we need a translator that goes the other way? As far as I know, Geeks are smart people, and take a more common-sense approach to the world than the law does.
What we really need is a tutorial on GeekSpeak for lawyers. That would teach them things like:
Why the legal system is not prepared to sue thousands of people for minor cases of copyright infringement.
No, you can't turn off Gnutella.
No, you can't turn off the Internet just because Gnutella is on there.
The record industry does not deserve phat l3wt5 simply because it has strongarmed us into giving it to them them in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
For the time invested, reading is a very poor way of getting information, especially with regards to fiction. Yes, there are advantages (ability to use imagination, etc.) but really, reading at 50 pages an hour I might spend 10 hours reading a new Tom Clancy book.
At the end, the total amount of recall I have of specific aspects of the book will be about equivalent to the recall I'd have after seeing a movie, only the movie gives me the information passively and in a fifth the time. Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?
Also, (and I think this is hugely important) reading has very limited memetic aspects. When I've read a new book, the first thing I want to do is discuss it with other people. However, since relatively few people have read the same book. The meme hasn't propagated. I can explain the experience of reading the book to others, but most of the time they really don't care because I'm unable to convey enough to start discussion. With a movie that millions have seen, or a webpage with a quick read that I could blog about or send the link around in email, the memetic aspects are much greater.
And you all said I was a fool! :)
Hell yeah, and when I started out, the only way to transfer a file to a floppy disk was with a paperclip and a magnet!
...another device predicted by The Simpsons...
I don't get any of the viruses thanks to SpamAssassin and whatever else our fine Admins have put on the mailserver, but what I do end up getting is about 200 autoreplies from dumb MTAs who believe I have sent them a virus when in fact it's the virus/worm/whatever spoofing itself off as me.
Despite the fact that I didn't actually send a virus-infected email from mta3.someserver.pl to a nonexistent address, I still get the helpful autoreply that tells me that the user at that nonexistent address does indeed not exist.
The debate here is whether the NYTimes is reporting the statistics right. We all know that the Windows Error Reporting service generally jumps up at us whenever we have an application crash, which is the fault of the application. Having not seen a real, bona-fide BSOD on my own Windows machines in years (literally), I don't know whether the crash reporting service reports them to MS or not.
Whether the NYTimes reporter can tell the difference between an application crash and an OS crash is up for debate (I'd say there are 50/50 odds either way).
That number is also a huge aggregate of apples and oranges. It doesn't make a distinction between 9X kernels and NT kernels, which I would bet have wildly different numbers of OS crashes (just about anything can blow up a 9X kernel, NT kernel BSODs are generally caused by faulty device drivers, hardware faults, and OS bugs).
The real problem WRT crashing on NT kernel machines is the device drivers running in kernel space. This means that a non-OS part of the system can zap the OS part of the system. Thus, even if you do convert everybody to an NT kernel-based OS, you're probably going to continue to have trouble with people that run terribly bad hardware with equally terrible device drivers. Unfortunately, most people don't understand that buying that white box ethernet card from Fry's or that roundy-looking-box-with-crappy-monitor consumer PC from Best Buy really *can* hurt you in the morning.
When and if MS rearchitects the Windows kernel so device drivers run in user space, or some protected space, I think that the so-called reliability gap between UNIX/UNIX workalikes and Windows will be very, very small indeed.
"I am David Turner! My Pagerank is SO MUCH BIGGER than your Pagerank! My organization is the number one Google hit for ONE LETTER of the alphabet! Ph33r m3!"
What a smarmy comment that serves no purpose and is absolutely irrelevant. Quite like the content of FSF licenses actually.
---
My software doesn't have a philosophy. It just works.
Hilary: Hey, Jack, did you get that email from the Kazaa guys? :)
Jack: Yeah, what about it?
Hilary: Is that something we should consider doing?
Jack: Did I miss Hell freezing over or something?
Hilary: No, no, I'm just fucking with you
Jack: Phew, I thought you were serious there for a minute. Don't do that!
Nope, it's actually blog pollution:
gandhicon -eric -raymond -esr -"welcome to gandhicon 4": 15 hits
The original source (a blog entry by Doc Searls) involves a conversation between the author and Raymond. So, it looks like there are only two people actively using the term: Doc Searls and ESR.
CYA goes both ways. If you recommend a course of action different than the one they're suggesting, and it fails, you will likely be held responsible. So the question is:
Are you getting paid to stop the company from making bad decisions?
If not, keep yer yap shut. If you will NOT be held liable for not stopping the company from doing something stupid, then there is no incentive to do so, and it may get you in trouble if you turn out to be wrong in the end.
Look, everybody knows there will be several different releases of the special edition. You've got 1st mix through 7th mix, followed by The Matrix Disney Daze, then Matrix 7th Mix MAX and MAX2, followed, of course, by The Matrix 7th Mix MAX300A.
The later versions will change uot the simple DVD scene selection menu for a pentagon system where you can select versions of the movie with varying amounts of action, intrigue, sex, technology, and agents. Also, if you hit certain combos or finish the movie in a certain amount of time, you unlock secret versions.
I think we should call the first 747 with a mounted laser off the line "TROGDOR THE BURNINATOR!"
You "recharge" by popping in a new cartridge of methanol, which should be cheap ($3-5 initial starting price, probably down to $0.30 eventually. You don't actually have to plug the laptop in for a few hours to recharge it either, so on that long airline flight you can run the laptop indefinitely with enough little cartridges. I saw a pic of a prototype cartridge once somewhere, it looked about the size of a AA battery.
Well, now we have the speed of light AND the speed of gravity! If we can find out the Speed of Darkness, we'll be all set!
public static final int X_00 = 0;
public static final int X_01 = 1;
...
public static final int X_FF = 255;
I asked him what was up with that. His reply? "Java doesn't have hex support built in." My reply: "Uhm, yeah it does. Always did, in fact." His reply: "Oh, well, I never found it."
Knowledge of the language and its libraries are extremely important.
True story: I was thinking of asking this one girl out. Honor student, totally anal, the whole works. So I googled her, as any good hacker would. What came up?
The local police blotter!
Thank you, Google! I still know where my wallet is because of you!
Why has the Windows Source Code, arguably the most valuable piece of source code in history, never been leaked? Certainly, as others have said, people have it. Or parts of it. The distribution methods are out there (Gnutella, Freenet, Overseas servers). Once this genie gets out of the bottle, it couldn't ever be stoppered back in. So why has there been ten or fifteen years of Windows with no source leaks?
I mean, if the atom bomb got out, which has only a fraction of the destructive power of Windows (just kidding), then why not Windows?
Has it been:
- People are too scared of Microsoft to do it, even with anonymizing technology?
- Microsoft's security is just that good?
- ???
I'm sorry, but with the obscurity of these items, it's turned a scavenger hunt from a fun afternoon activity with some purpose into a monumental waste of time, energy, and resources.
I'm impressed with how far open source has come. From the days when you could spend a week trying to figure out what your monitor's horizontal refresh rate was just to get X running under Slackware, to the wizard-style installs of RedHat, the installation process (as mentioned in the article) has come a long way.
I just recently came back to try to set up a dedicated Linux server on an old PC. I was going to put some custom servlets on there, so I wanted Apache and Tomcat installed.
Apache came with the RedHat installation I did, but not Tomcat. No problem. I download an RPM of Tomcat and install it fairly easily (although I have to RTFM to figure out how to install the RPM).
After that, it took me three days to get Apache to talk to Tomcat. After installing, uninstalling, and finally compiling an entirely new build of Apache, I got the webapp connector to work, only to find it was broken. Some more futzing around and trying to read the broken-English documentation of the mod_jk2 connector and I finally got it working. I'm a developer with fifteen years' experience, I'm not a newbie here. I can fly circles around all but the most experienced vi user, but this was a baffling array of too many choices, not enough guidance, and no friendly setup.
Other usability problems I encountered included:
1. The graphical tool for configuring Apache provided by RedHat doesn't like you touching the config file with any other editor, but it doesn't provide all the functionality either. So, the minute you have to touch the config file with an editor, your user-friendly tool breaks.
2. I had three choices for everything. Did I want to use Tomcat as my main server? Integrate with Apache? What directories did I want to integrate? Which of three different connectors that do exactly the same thing did I want to use? (Hint: whichever one that just works). As a first-time user, I didn't want a choice, I wanted a decision.
In contrast, the first time I ever set up a servlet engine on a Windows NT box (and this was in the bad-old-days) the procedure was:
Double click installer, click next about five times, select "IIS" and hit "Finish." Took me less than an hour--the first time. Sure, it probably wasn't tuned to perfection, but it worked.
With the success of the Linux installers being so easy, it appears that usability is making inroads...but it's not there yet.
Hey, remember SaveKaryn? Well, I guess it's time for the /. crowd to set up:
http://www.saveapoordanishpir8.org/
My Money: $320
Your Money: $524.53
Ebay Sales of Breakfast Pastries: $2.25
Remaining total: $12,348.23
Okay, so assuming this extorti...I mean apparently-legal action goes through, who gets the money? Is this anti-piracy group going to go out and distribute the monies to the appropriate copyright holders? Who decided what price to set for the various downloaded artifacts? Certainly there's a significant markup here.
Assuming a CD has, on average, 15 songs, and you can get a CD for $12 at Best Buy, $2.67--that's a 250% markup on each song.
And, who is going to ensure that paying these folks will prevent future prosecution by the copyright holders? Do I get to keep the songs and movies that I downloaded if I pay up?
Out for a walk late last week in Southern California with some friends, a big blue streak shot across the sky...FAST, before disappearing just two seconds later. This one seemed very low and VERY bright; I'd guess maybe 10x brighter than a star. I don't go watching meteor showers or anything, so I don't have anything to gauge it against, but I have seen the Space Shuttle/ISS with the naked eye. This definitely looked much brighter, lower, and faster.
What we really need is a tutorial on GeekSpeak for lawyers. That would teach them things like:
Superparamagnetism...expialidocious!