So because you have "several commercial packages" installed, that means everything is okay?
Sorry chap, but i said "platform." And the scope of the Linux platform has increased beyond a kernel and basic set of file i/o services to include a series of advanced tools for serving files, web pages, a number of very nice compilers and GUIs and IDEs and mp3 players and version control services and word processing packages and graphics manipulation tools and web browsers and DVD software and hacking tools. All free. If you have a commercial package installed, you're probably using one that doubles some other functionality for which you didn't have to pay. And this is my point: Linux is about making as much free and part of the OS as possible. This is not an environment in which you make a mint preserving your "Freedom and security software"...it's an environment in which you can't possibly make money. It's like trying to sell Ferraris at a flea market.
Ha. This is my favorite phrase coming from most Linux users, because it is so typical of the predominate attitude in the community. Linux users never pay for anything -- they complain when a company goes pay-for-play with support, they complain about difficult to find cvs systems or when a download is too big (but available on CD for $30), they complain if an O'reilly book doesn't have a web parellel. And yet, whenever one of these "mostly for free" service goes under, somebody pulls out that line..."I would have paid."
Then goddamn it, why didn't you? Because the software was beta? Because it required a little hacking? This never would have stopped you if it was GNU licensed software with a Makefile or an rpm and available on every street corner distro ftp.
I'm an OS-X user, and I have to fight for nearly every piece of software I use -- fight x86 only binaries, Linux makefiles that are unfriendly to BSD at times and unfriendly to the G4 at others, and I have to fight against companies who think that, since Classic will run their software with 75% functionality and very slowly, they don't need to devote time to a rebuild. And though I complain, I never really let it bother me -- in the Mac world, I'm still in a very elite minority. I don't scream that I would pay for a version of AppleWorks, or a good build of instant messenger. I'm used to Apple getting the shaft from every company out there whose decision makers don't realise that though the market share is small, Apple users buy software like nobody's business. That's right, buy -- not compile or extend or pay for service. And yet, we get shafted by everybody...IBM (and they make our bloody processor, man), Corel, Microsoft, and even Adobe sometimes. It's a way of life for the mac user...you feel everything about your platform is superior, and yet nobody in the computer world will share your joy.
I guess what I'm saying is, if your platform prides itself on the freedom (as in beer) and hackability of most of its applications, you can't complain when a company decides that maybe this platform isn't the right space for them to devote their limited resources on a product which should be unhackable by design. It's more work with very low return, and ain't a CFO alive who will fight for that philosophy -- even if it does mean a free (as in love) society.
Re:Curiosity killed the cat
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 2
Babies consume objects smaller than they are because there exist objects smaller than they are. Ain't much smaller than subatomic. And if you're a small black hole feeding on subatomic particles (just the ones with mass, mind you, and they have to get so close to you it's almost arbitrary), you're not going to grow very fast. Fact is, black holes and their event horizons are sized according to the mass going into their creation, and the only ones we've made so far have been due to the collision of subatomic particles -- meaning they're considerably smaller than even subatomic particles, and have a subatomically size E.H. A black hole this small couldn't even suck up one lousy atom -- it's be thousands of times larger than the E.H!
We're not talking about the "baby black holes" created when a medium sized star, such as our sun, collapses -- baby holes that may have E.H's the size of earth or smaller. We're talking abount something nearly infinitly smaller.
Re:Real risks with this expirement
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 3
You don't like dark matter because you are trying to keep the black man down.
Re:Curiosity killed the cat
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 3
Um, yeah, lots of people thought of the consequences -- or else they wouldn't be doing it. This isn't the wonderful hodge podge corporate america pseudo science we're all used to, putting mascara on a cat's ass to see if it causes polyps. These are the world's greatest thinkers testing hypothesises. Are you suggesting they didn't consider the ramifications of their actions? Don't be naive.
Creating a black hole the size of an atom has little to no effect on the planet because its mass is meager compared to everything else around it -- meaning practically no gravitational forces. Find a way to contain it and its subatomic event horizon and you've got the coolest vacation home for your sea monkeys ever. Remember: gravity doesn't change just because you're a singularity; a kilogram with no volume is still a kilogram, still a negligible factor in the universe, and if you dropped it it wouldn't have much affect on the earth or the people around it.
As for creating micro supernovas...they're super small, dude, and only as powerful as the lasers involved. You'll see more possibility for an environmental disaster in your average Hollywood movie than in this experiment. I know, I know...your high school science teacher said that supernovas are bad. But this is a really freaking small one, controlled by people who know what they're doing and in an expensive experiment that had to be reviewed and rereviewed a dozen times over before it could be approved for the extensive grants and equipment could be divvied up. If a slashdotter can point out flaws that these eggheads can't find, well then I just lost my faith in the scientific method.
Please, please PLEASE interview the guy from timecube.com next! He's terribly interesting, but won't answer my email any more (i'm doing a graduate rhetoric project on the internet as an advancement tool for fringe philosophies...time cube was, at one time, my golden example)). Sure, there's none of the political or scientific importance of Alexchiu, but it's still great stuff.
Good points, all, and dually noted. Your perspective is totally valid.
However, I would like to throw a few monkey wrenches into your theory. First: if the work has been tooled and retooled and gone into proproduction multiple times, then it is not exactly a hidden work. This is an obvious difference between the case at hand and other works released posthumously: the work wasn't buried under mountains of correspondence in somebody's attic, or in the possession of a trust friend, or in some other way existant only in analog in a precarious location. It exists on the disk drive of a personal computer, which he used to write all of his works, and his publisher knew about it (in computational terms, a handle existed to the file and it was still in memory). So, as soon as some reporter says to the publisher "will we ever see a lost work of our D.D., D.O.A. D.N.A.?", he is able to respond "well, yeah, I guess." The work is at hand: it needs no restoration. Furthurmore, the editors who were helping D.A. with the work are alive and kicking, and able to supply their interpretation of his vision as explained to them during the editorial process to its finalization.
I'm not saying finances weren't a factor -- certainly, collectors who couldn't care less about D.A. are going to want copies for their Dead Author's shelves. But finances were not the only factor, or needen't be -- this certainly won't be the case with future "memorial editions" of the H2G2 and Dirk. And I argue, also, that D.A. never put in that much money -- I bought my copy of the penultimate H2G2 at an overstock sale for $3 -- it's roughly 800 pages long in hardcover.
Privacy is something to be reserved for his relationship with his friends and family, with his style of living, or for his medical records...it's not something to worry about with works that were destined for the public view, anyway. I know if I were to die tomorrow, my code wouldn't be locked away in my coffin -- it would be exploited by the other programs, fixed, tweaked, replaced and otherwise trampled. A work like this -- which has apparently been close to release on several occasions -- is a rather different matter than truly personal documents.
So you're saying that the era spoils all valid reasons for publishing the final work of a truly intestesting writer? I think that's a very shallow reading of the situation. "Tackiness" is such a terribly subjective thing, and has deep tendrils in the destruction of quality. Consider: Harry Potter sequels, unauthorized Priness Di biorgaphies and "Survivor" guest appearances are invented first for their marketability, and then adapted for content. In other words, any value that exists for the reader stems from an afterthought, not from the theme of the content. The essential difference between this sort of disjointed construction and releasing an essentially unfinished work is that the content is driving the concept, and not vica versa. Cosnider it thus: The Onion's editors write a headline before they right the page content, and therefore the page content is often far inferior to the hook. In the rest of the newspaper industry, the inverse is true...which is how a wholly intelligible and interesting article can have a title like "Man Dies in Truck Accident." Douglas' work, even if released for financial reasons, will indeed have positive literary value because it is not generated in response to this financial drive.
As for dignity, we must choose are battles. When all the pundits come out of the woodwork to prove Adams was gay/a nazi/a communist/a Tory/Ethel Merman, then we'll fight for his dignity. But to say that taking his notes and bringing them into the eye of his fans is robbing him of his dignity is anticipating that he was hiding them delibrately. If he was, trust me, we never would have found them -- Adams was an ace with a computer and would have locked them down like a new bicycle.
I wish all you "let the man be" people would take a hint from classical literature.
Writers are their own worst critics...good writers esepcially. And great writers, of whom I think Mr. Adams squeaks into the fray quite nicely, are often so critical of their own work they don't recognize the genious in it. Alan Ginsberg sat on Kaddish for something close to a year before releasing it, and when he did he only made minor revisions. And Emily Dickinson didn't release anything during her life -- books of her work were only compiled after her death when her loved ones and associated exchanged poems she had written for them. Surely, E.D. would have complained about the publishing of her most personal thoughts, her rawest fantesies, into the general public. But she can't. That's one of the appeals of posthumous publishing, you can remove the complaints of the party post likely to be embarassed by their own genius. And I, for one, applaud the effort. The dead have no claim to our world, because they are totally uneffected by it. If some of us would like a chance to see Adams' final works published -- and I do, if even as a tribute to the editrial process Adams undertook -- then by all means we should be allowed to.
Unfinished does not mean "crappy," just as finishing a book does not imply it was done with any quality. Mostly Harmless was a mistaken book to most who read it, far too cynical and abrupt. An unrushed, paced novel with no thoughts of marketability or story length would be a gem from the often disjointed Adams -- it could be as brilliant as some of the unfinished symphonies. And those who would place blame on the future publishers, answer me this: won't you buy it if it is published? Won't you read it and complain when it lacks the genius of Dirk Gently? I know I will...money making or not, this is not "2pac'
s poetry book"...this is Douglas Adams.
At the end of the day, you're tired from space walking everywhere with the kids, the long ride in the station wagon shuttle on the way to Grandma's house on the moon, all you really want is some rest, clean atmosphere and a vaccuum you can pee into. Here at Space Station Six, we beleive in amenities like artifical gravity, free space suits for the kids and a complementary freeze dried continental breakfast.
So come on down to Space Station 6 next time you're trekking across the cosmos. We'll leave the landing light on for you.
OK, something new can be used to identify your usage patterns. Big freakin' deal. Every time a poster mentions a cool idea like this, some sort of neat ID method which doesn't require cards or passwords, somebody mentions how "scary" it is. Why? Your skin, fingerprints, vocal patterns, mannerisms, the way you move and talk all identify who you are. The way you post on slashdot identifies who you are -- in fact, a cool but probably impossible feature to slashcode would be a symantic login system, which guesses your ID based on your input speed, cadence, number of spelling mistakes and which words you don't correct properly, your vocabulary and your tendancy to resort to FP. My point is, that identification in and of itself means nothing -- unless the system knows something about you besides that. It's once a system like this is combined with some insidious hack (notice I didn't mention "advertising" -- personalized advertising is a much more preferrable to today's "you have one message waiting but your connection isn't optimized so shock the damn monkey" ads) to track web viewership that the concept leaves simple coolness factors and enters into a whole realm of dangerous big brothering. Of course, technically you could acheive the same thing with a massive log linkage system...
And of course, your ultimate reparation to this paranoia? Switch to a Dvorak keyboard and Trackpad when you want to be sneaky...you usage patterns will instantly change with an unfamiliar key setup and shortened track field. Hell, it wouldn't take much to defeat this system entirely...a randomized keyboard -- where keys change to different positions across the pad and are identified with slick LEDs on the keys themselves -- would change your usage patterns per session.
Actually, that was inherent in the metaphor. Consider: my first trip into the 'dacks, I picked a flower for a girl I liked, who didn't like me and was a consumate woodsman. "You shouldn't pick the flowers," she said, "because there aren't many wild flowers left. If you pick them, they won't grow back, and then there won't be anything left for the next group."
Wise young girl, with the exception of her taste in guys...her current boyfriend is a dipshit.
You know, I've always thought something like this had to exist at Microsoft.
You see, I've seen a lot of smart, talented young coders and scientists get recruited by Microsoft. Half of them go in for the huge stock options, their name on a blue MS shirt, and, of course, the booth babes. The other half are misfits and nutjobs who really want to change the world. In fact, that's the reason why I'm not anti-MS...I've known too many good men entering the behemoth to think that it's all fluff and marketeering.
We all like to think of Windows as an underpowered, oversimplified mush...but Microsoft, despite its market crap (XP,.Net, ASP), has been doing a lot of great shit. Fast XML parsers. Semi stable windowing OSs. A decent scripting language (or, rather, engine...i write my WSH stuff in Perl or JavaScript). All of these things well documented in MSDN with text files that were obviously not hit with the same marketeering technical writers who tried to sell us on Windows Media 8, the death of the paper clip or the "excitement" of.Net: The Network is the Comput-oh wait, that's not.Net!
This "Fnord" box is apparently the house of some of these innovators at Micrsoft. The ones taking the ideas that UN*X users come up with and adapting them for the mass market. These are the guys that are going to eventually build the Ipv6 core that us Windows users will have underneath it all in four or five years -- before marketting makes them paint it yellow and cover it with MSIPv6 logos.
Don't hate MS for looking at GPL code...that's what GPL code is for. Hate the marketeers who cover this free code with bumper stickers and sell it back to us at a premium. We're all in a field of flowers, but Microsoft is picking them and selling them to folks who are too lazy to come to the countryside.
Ha! My dad works for Time Warner cable in a VP position, and his corporate e-mail system until just last november was an embarrassing IBM system that worked over telnet. I mean, this system was only a little beneath the level of telnetting into the smtp server and writing your messages with an echo. They upgraded to a very very basic pop system but since the turnover rate of management is pretty low, few of them have taken to the advanced features. My dad was heard to remark on several occasions how "stupid" outlook was and how he used to be able to read him mail so much quicker in "the black window."
I might add that he's worked there close to forty years (since way before it was called "Time Warner", is an engineering genius and a great boss (so I've heard) and he is NOT afraid of technology. There are people at TW who are dicks and technophobes. For all of these people, AOL mail is more than sufficient. They don't need secure mail and bccs and flagging and receipts because they wouldn't even use them.
What is it with CEOs that they must all be rhetorical drones?
"As a well funded company, we are looking to leverage our cash position to explore potential strategic partners. "
Yeah? Is that right? A company with money is trying to use it to get more money? Shit dog, I never would have expected it. Seriously, what is the point of making this statement? Is it not OBVIOUS that a company looking for money is interested in using that money to grow a company? You see, this is the kind of dumbass shit that makes the absurd dollar amounts of most CEOs something sickly laughable -- they use the same methodology as everybody else, and when they fail using that methodology it's the market's fault and when they succeed it's because that CEO is somehow better than other CEOs using the same bullshit methodology and rhetoric. Shit, at least athletes thank Jesus for their fluke victories.
"An ideal partner would enhance our market position and leverage the Company's core assets," said Joe Robinson, Chairman and Founder, UGO Networks.
Is that right? Well, captain dotcom, my ideal partner is a leggy blond with a sweet honeypot and tits til tuesday, but I don't feel the need to usher a press release -- because anybody could guess it. Why not spend less time looking for this magic rich bitch of a dotcom partner and spend a little time finding a successful business model? UGO is in charge of the futures of some of my favorite sites and net personalities (Kyle from HardOCP, who is my hero, Seanbaby and of course lovabel Miguel from fatchicksinpartyhats). And rather than try and innovate their way into profitability, they're praying to the partner fairy and relying on a dead advertiser's market. Why not do something useful instead of treading water with these damn bloodthirsty VCs?
Sure, it seems intuitive. Programmers spending their time programming instead of thinking up neat ideas. And, for business, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea. But then I look around at our organization. Specs handed to us from project managers are hideous -- they don't take into account what the technology (a damn web browser) can do with regards to input and output and aren't willing to spill over into new technologies. Customers aren't sure of what they want...they ask for a new feature and expect it generated without us bothering them again, and they want to be able to use it without training. And the only people holding this organization together is the programmers. Our programmers are with some exceptions, excellent at revising specs to be what looks good and is fnctional. We bring an air of experience and a feel for conformity to the world of interface design. And we're constantly implementing new features that customers love and that they never would have gotten if management had their druthers. Customers (who, by the way, are IT folks at other companies, not people who actually use the software. These people, often peons or temps, are never asked what would make their job easier) want features but they don't know what they need until they get it (who though they needed the internet or cell phones in 1994). Managers don't know what's out there or what can be done. The only people who really know what a technology can do easily are those with their fingers in its heart -- the programmers, and to a lesser extent the IT folks and the peon "users." As such, the best specs and features in the world will still have problems: they will not be sync'd with what the technology could do.
"So?" you may say, "isn't it a coder's job to fix these things?" Yes it is. But we fix problems with specs by letting the application take its own flow. Even in a modular, rational-esque approach to software, each module must still grow naturally through a series of trials and attempts before it can reach true usefulness and speed. Hence the numerous driver fixes that you see for complex hardware like video cards. After a week, you may have a working driver, but it won't reach its speed or stability peak for another year. And if things are as fast as they can get, you need a manager who will beleive in you...not a supscriber to XP who thinks that by specing the driver faster the hardware will follow.
XP, feh...much of it IS marketting bullshit, and it's designed to take power away from the people who have always made the revolution in computing -- the programmers. Of course, I'm all for the peer review and modularity stuff, but in the end it isn't programmer-manager-customer...the programmer has a hand at every level.
Union workers are fat, annoying, elitist jerks who make too much money for what little work they do. Any time you contact one, he is as likely to ignore you as to actually help you out, and when he does help you there's a good chance he'll act put out.
This surly, onoxious attitude makes them meld perfectly with IT folks, with the small exception that I've yet to see a mob run IT department.
If there's one thing I've learned about ISPs, it's that the best way to get a lot of high tech users on your line is to make it free. People who don't pay for things always know what they're doing and never complain about your service. Honest.
Whilst driving in my car, I had the following thought: Napster users get files from file sharing, not from other sources. And thus, they all have the same digital copy of the same song. You can see this effect any time you do a napster search for something common; say, bob dylan. Notice that 80% of the files will have the same bitrate, file size and title, and another 10% will be interrupted downloads of the above. Now, since all mp3 encoders are different and have a different approach to compression, even compressing the same track at the same rate on different encoders will produce different effects. This means that all those users had the same source, a sort of digital music analogy of mitochondrial Eve. If that first file is cooked or truncated or a special version, all users will hve those cooks or truncations.
So what does this mean? Well, if digital protection stops 95% of users from copying an mp3, it won't matter a pair od fetid dingo's kidneys to the music theft scene. One lucky champ will manage to get a decent sounding version somehow, and then everybody will trade that. In this scenario, copy prot only serves to slow down the trade of cds among friends, which most of the industry agrees should be encouraged (or at least not discouraged).
To Recap: Napster users aren't particularly picky and all tend to grab the first example of a track they find. Digital protection will serve only to alienate the end user, making him or her more reliant on Napster and less able to deal with his or her own music. Result: more Napster usage, further development of the music release scene and less money for the music industry (namely, the money spent on the copy protection infrastructure).
The only solution is freedom...I'm whistling "unforgiven" right now...
I somehow have difficulty feeling sorry for an employee who felt that role playing games and synergy were more important than delivering a product. I've seen dozens of entepeneurs with great ideas and actual results who couldn't get the time of day from capitalists, while these guys come up with a colour and took a lot of time to do nothing. Honestly, the world doesn't need synergy...it doesn't need a group of youngsters who feel good about charging blindly into a business world using pitchforks to unload bowling balls. What the American business landscape needs is nice products -- fine china so we don't buy from Mikasa, a quality automobile so we don't buy from BMW, a quality TV so we don't by from SONY, and decent clothing so we don't buy from Indonesia. We need blue collar work to reduce crime and better pay for salesman, so they don't need to force crap and extended warranties down our throats to live. But this is what we get...funding for dumb ideas (or, in this case, no ideas...just elves and trolls in yellow caps dreaming hazily) while great ones sit on the sidelines because they don't offer to change the world.
As a post graduate rhetorician betrothed to a post graduate anthropologistm i am quite well qualified to say that you are ignorant of the studies involved with each of these fields. Not that I blame you -- to those who don't really look into them, they do seem a little stupid, associating scant evidence with lofty theories. And, in truth there is great contention in both fields any time somebody inroduces a new theory -- unlike mathematics there is no concrete proof to indicate genious or malarky. But there is still reason for the generation of these theories you should realise.
First, realise that the best artists, authors and musicians have no idea what they're doing...they are generally good readers who, at some point, decided to put words together in a way they found pleasant. Which, of course, means that any deep meaning or allegory you uncover is quite possibly something they didn't intend; Hemminway went to his death claiming it was "just a fish." But this isn't the point. The crucifix is just a log, and the Grateful Dead were just potheads, but you can't make these claims around the devoted -- they see great meaning in the relative works. And the field of dissertation known as deconstructionism says "hey, if you think it has meaning, and can prove it with a little basic association and logic, then it has meaning, and nuts to what the author had in mind." First year English majors, encountering some of the whacko theories regarding modern literature, are quick to say that this is a bunch of bullshit. But us old hat parties in the field of discourse are forced to wonder if there isn't more to it. Consider this: all literature exists in print, using words. But words are defined only in context of other words or concepts, and these concepts are interpretted differently by each viewer (read into Saussure for more on this great philosophy called "Syntamatics"). As such, any work only has meaning once it's been read, and that meaning is rather personal. Therefore, all these whacko theories are entirely valid -- but that doesn't mean you have to believe them.
And as for the anthropologists...only the charlatans you see on the Discovery channel, moving bodies about and uncovering tombs would be so quick to judge. Real anthroplogy is boring, scientific shit...it involves such activities as slowly documenting, drawing, photographing and examining using non destructive means every small, insignificant artifact at a dig. My girlfriend is excited if she found a doll's head tossed into a latrine a hundred years ago. It is this huge research entity (propelled by the fact that many states have regulations forbidding you to dig in certain areas without paying for an anthropological assessment first) that allow researchers of truly interesting finds to make assumptions. They're based on statistical analysis and comparison to what we know today...for example, a woman's hips grind into each other at a much higher rate when she is pregnant, and the grinding marks are different from those of a woman who carries a lot of weight or is just fat. Teeth are worn in different patterns depending on diets. Still, there is ocasional contention on the anthropological community about whether these assumptions are right, and many times these reassessments have brought about change. There are, for example, three major theories of the life of early man have been proposed, and there is evidence for each. One says that man got most of his food from hunting, and that women held an inferior role. Another holds that gathering was far more important and supplied the majority of sustenance, and that women supervised this activity (while men slumped about looking for stuff to kill). A third holds that both men and women were involved and that the activity was far less planned -- that humans were scavengers waiting for sick animals, stashes of really sweet berries and nuts, and waited for leftovers after another animal made a kill.
But though there is contention in these fields, they are not by any means worthy of the type of contempt you have for them...these are some of the greatest thinkers in the world, and they've made a lot of important advances in the attempt to make fields that were previously guesswork become much more concrete and ordered. They're trying to make legitimate fields into legitimate realms, so that naysayers won't consider them laughable for jumping over unnecesary logical steps. They've moved beyond P -> Q and Q -> R to P -> R...in much the same way that physicists no longer debate the validity of theories based on quantum mechanics solely on their statistical approach.
Well, because most of [pick your favorite open source piece of shit] was designed piecemeal, with no real goal in mind. Developers with no deadlines or specs wrote things as they came, and the fact is that it is much easier and quicker to ignore things like data integrity, pluggability or thread safety. C++ is a much more elegant weapon, and you'll find that a vast majority of corporate software is written in C++. It's just easier when you're dealing with a massive project to design things OO (and no, i'm not a disciple of Rational), and from a maintnenace standpoint much easier to build enhancements or scrap old parts. You want to use a new graphics driver with different variable types (maybe going from ints to doubles)? Well, you don't have to worry about checking all your plugin code to be sure you're not removing a variable that's read by some piece of hacked code in C written by an amateur who thought he was speeding things up in his app. Because for all of the nobility of Open Source, it's much more difficult to check the source code of a dozen components using your FILESIZE variable to be sure that they're synchronized than it is to just utilize a synchronized getFilesize() method.
And of course, in the modern world of multiple servers and multiple tiers of service, OODMSs make a lot of sense. Rather than having to worry about locks and commits and dirty reads, you just offer all callers synchronized setXxX() methods and asynchronous getYyY() functions. Rather than have to worry about the schema when upgrading a product (and no, you don't always have to have a spec when you do this...i haven't seen a spec in months other than a few lines in an email) and worry about messing up older areas of an application which might use your fields differently, you can just alter the internal workings of the storage and leave the methods with the same output as before. To be honest, we do this kind of work in RDBMS systems already -- we use triggers to perform integrity checks and update related tables, indexes to speed up queries, stored procedures to perform reads and writes as if the db was an object, and most telling of all we use Views to hide the true nature of a DB.
Finally, OO is no more closed or proprietary than C code...in fact, it's much better. I can find out the source and methods of any java class in our company in seconds, and get detailed information on how they run thx. to javadoc. I don't need to hutn for annotated source code or wait on a post to alt.software.shitty.opensource.operatingsystems. Sure, they can be black boxes, but they should be...you don't want to fuck up the variables hidden in those boxes and you don't want to rely on them because they are inefficient.
I try not to work at all. But I type a lot, and bring up important concepts gleamed from the pages of Internet Publishing World and VB Developers Journal.
Slashdot Mirror
So because you have "several commercial packages" installed, that means everything is okay?
Sorry chap, but i said "platform." And the scope of the Linux platform has increased beyond a kernel and basic set of file i/o services to include a series of advanced tools for serving files, web pages, a number of very nice compilers and GUIs and IDEs and mp3 players and version control services and word processing packages and graphics manipulation tools and web browsers and DVD software and hacking tools. All free. If you have a commercial package installed, you're probably using one that doubles some other functionality for which you didn't have to pay. And this is my point: Linux is about making as much free and part of the OS as possible. This is not an environment in which you make a mint preserving your "Freedom and security software"...it's an environment in which you can't possibly make money. It's like trying to sell Ferraris at a flea market.
Ha. This is my favorite phrase coming from most Linux users, because it is so typical of the predominate attitude in the community. Linux users never pay for anything -- they complain when a company goes pay-for-play with support, they complain about difficult to find cvs systems or when a download is too big (but available on CD for $30), they complain if an O'reilly book doesn't have a web parellel. And yet, whenever one of these "mostly for free" service goes under, somebody pulls out that line..."I would have paid."
Then goddamn it, why didn't you? Because the software was beta? Because it required a little hacking? This never would have stopped you if it was GNU licensed software with a Makefile or an rpm and available on every street corner distro ftp.
I'm an OS-X user, and I have to fight for nearly every piece of software I use -- fight x86 only binaries, Linux makefiles that are unfriendly to BSD at times and unfriendly to the G4 at others, and I have to fight against companies who think that, since Classic will run their software with 75% functionality and very slowly, they don't need to devote time to a rebuild. And though I complain, I never really let it bother me -- in the Mac world, I'm still in a very elite minority. I don't scream that I would pay for a version of AppleWorks, or a good build of instant messenger. I'm used to Apple getting the shaft from every company out there whose decision makers don't realise that though the market share is small, Apple users buy software like nobody's business. That's right, buy -- not compile or extend or pay for service. And yet, we get shafted by everybody...IBM (and they make our bloody processor, man), Corel, Microsoft, and even Adobe sometimes. It's a way of life for the mac user...you feel everything about your platform is superior, and yet nobody in the computer world will share your joy.
I guess what I'm saying is, if your platform prides itself on the freedom (as in beer) and hackability of most of its applications, you can't complain when a company decides that maybe this platform isn't the right space for them to devote their limited resources on a product which should be unhackable by design. It's more work with very low return, and ain't a CFO alive who will fight for that philosophy -- even if it does mean a free (as in love) society.
Babies consume objects smaller than they are because there exist objects smaller than they are. Ain't much smaller than subatomic. And if you're a small black hole feeding on subatomic particles (just the ones with mass, mind you, and they have to get so close to you it's almost arbitrary), you're not going to grow very fast. Fact is, black holes and their event horizons are sized according to the mass going into their creation, and the only ones we've made so far have been due to the collision of subatomic particles -- meaning they're considerably smaller than even subatomic particles, and have a subatomically size E.H. A black hole this small couldn't even suck up one lousy atom -- it's be thousands of times larger than the E.H!
We're not talking about the "baby black holes" created when a medium sized star, such as our sun, collapses -- baby holes that may have E.H's the size of earth or smaller. We're talking abount something nearly infinitly smaller.
You don't like dark matter because you are trying to keep the black man down.
Um, yeah, lots of people thought of the consequences -- or else they wouldn't be doing it. This isn't the wonderful hodge podge corporate america pseudo science we're all used to, putting mascara on a cat's ass to see if it causes polyps. These are the world's greatest thinkers testing hypothesises. Are you suggesting they didn't consider the ramifications of their actions? Don't be naive.
Creating a black hole the size of an atom has little to no effect on the planet because its mass is meager compared to everything else around it -- meaning practically no gravitational forces. Find a way to contain it and its subatomic event horizon and you've got the coolest vacation home for your sea monkeys ever. Remember: gravity doesn't change just because you're a singularity; a kilogram with no volume is still a kilogram, still a negligible factor in the universe, and if you dropped it it wouldn't have much affect on the earth or the people around it.
As for creating micro supernovas...they're super small, dude, and only as powerful as the lasers involved. You'll see more possibility for an environmental disaster in your average Hollywood movie than in this experiment. I know, I know...your high school science teacher said that supernovas are bad. But this is a really freaking small one, controlled by people who know what they're doing and in an expensive experiment that had to be reviewed and rereviewed a dozen times over before it could be approved for the extensive grants and equipment could be divvied up. If a slashdotter can point out flaws that these eggheads can't find, well then I just lost my faith in the scientific method.
I work for a COllege station. We make nothing.
Hey Thompson, see if you can get your superior wavelet mathematicians and marketting statisticians to tell you what 2% of ZERO is!
dM
Please, please PLEASE interview the guy from timecube.com next! He's terribly interesting, but won't answer my email any more (i'm doing a graduate rhetoric project on the internet as an advancement tool for fringe philosophies...time cube was, at one time, my golden example)). Sure, there's none of the political or scientific importance of Alexchiu, but it's still great stuff.
Good points, all, and dually noted. Your perspective is totally valid.
However, I would like to throw a few monkey wrenches into your theory. First: if the work has been tooled and retooled and gone into proproduction multiple times, then it is not exactly a hidden work. This is an obvious difference between the case at hand and other works released posthumously: the work wasn't buried under mountains of correspondence in somebody's attic, or in the possession of a trust friend, or in some other way existant only in analog in a precarious location. It exists on the disk drive of a personal computer, which he used to write all of his works, and his publisher knew about it (in computational terms, a handle existed to the file and it was still in memory). So, as soon as some reporter says to the publisher "will we ever see a lost work of our D.D., D.O.A. D.N.A.?", he is able to respond "well, yeah, I guess." The work is at hand: it needs no restoration. Furthurmore, the editors who were helping D.A. with the work are alive and kicking, and able to supply their interpretation of his vision as explained to them during the editorial process to its finalization.
I'm not saying finances weren't a factor -- certainly, collectors who couldn't care less about D.A. are going to want copies for their Dead Author's shelves. But finances were not the only factor, or needen't be -- this certainly won't be the case with future "memorial editions" of the H2G2 and Dirk. And I argue, also, that D.A. never put in that much money -- I bought my copy of the penultimate H2G2 at an overstock sale for $3 -- it's roughly 800 pages long in hardcover.
Privacy is something to be reserved for his relationship with his friends and family, with his style of living, or for his medical records...it's not something to worry about with works that were destined for the public view, anyway. I know if I were to die tomorrow, my code wouldn't be locked away in my coffin -- it would be exploited by the other programs, fixed, tweaked, replaced and otherwise trampled. A work like this -- which has apparently been close to release on several occasions -- is a rather different matter than truly personal documents.
So you're saying that the era spoils all valid reasons for publishing the final work of a truly intestesting writer? I think that's a very shallow reading of the situation. "Tackiness" is such a terribly subjective thing, and has deep tendrils in the destruction of quality. Consider: Harry Potter sequels, unauthorized Priness Di biorgaphies and "Survivor" guest appearances are invented first for their marketability, and then adapted for content. In other words, any value that exists for the reader stems from an afterthought, not from the theme of the content. The essential difference between this sort of disjointed construction and releasing an essentially unfinished work is that the content is driving the concept, and not vica versa. Cosnider it thus: The Onion's editors write a headline before they right the page content, and therefore the page content is often far inferior to the hook. In the rest of the newspaper industry, the inverse is true...which is how a wholly intelligible and interesting article can have a title like "Man Dies in Truck Accident." Douglas' work, even if released for financial reasons, will indeed have positive literary value because it is not generated in response to this financial drive.
As for dignity, we must choose are battles. When all the pundits come out of the woodwork to prove Adams was gay/a nazi/a communist/a Tory/Ethel Merman, then we'll fight for his dignity. But to say that taking his notes and bringing them into the eye of his fans is robbing him of his dignity is anticipating that he was hiding them delibrately. If he was, trust me, we never would have found them -- Adams was an ace with a computer and would have locked them down like a new bicycle.
I wish all you "let the man be" people would take a hint from classical literature.
Writers are their own worst critics...good writers esepcially. And great writers, of whom I think Mr. Adams squeaks into the fray quite nicely, are often so critical of their own work they don't recognize the genious in it. Alan Ginsberg sat on Kaddish for something close to a year before releasing it, and when he did he only made minor revisions. And Emily Dickinson didn't release anything during her life -- books of her work were only compiled after her death when her loved ones and associated exchanged poems she had written for them. Surely, E.D. would have complained about the publishing of her most personal thoughts, her rawest fantesies, into the general public. But she can't. That's one of the appeals of posthumous publishing, you can remove the complaints of the party post likely to be embarassed by their own genius. And I, for one, applaud the effort. The dead have no claim to our world, because they are totally uneffected by it. If some of us would like a chance to see Adams' final works published -- and I do, if even as a tribute to the editrial process Adams undertook -- then by all means we should be allowed to.
Unfinished does not mean "crappy," just as finishing a book does not imply it was done with any quality. Mostly Harmless was a mistaken book to most who read it, far too cynical and abrupt. An unrushed, paced novel with no thoughts of marketability or story length would be a gem from the often disjointed Adams -- it could be as brilliant as some of the unfinished symphonies. And those who would place blame on the future publishers, answer me this: won't you buy it if it is published? Won't you read it and complain when it lacks the genius of Dirk Gently? I know I will...money making or not, this is not "2pac' s poetry book"...this is Douglas Adams.
At the end of the day, you're tired from space walking everywhere with the kids, the long ride in the station wagon shuttle on the way to Grandma's house on the moon, all you really want is some rest, clean atmosphere and a vaccuum you can pee into. Here at Space Station Six, we beleive in amenities like artifical gravity, free space suits for the kids and a complementary freeze dried continental breakfast.
So come on down to Space Station 6 next time you're trekking across the cosmos. We'll leave the landing light on for you.
Nelson Mandella says Apartheid is bad.
Dr. Ruth thinks sex is good.
And Larry Ellison thinks that having a shitload of money just might not be that bad.
OK, something new can be used to identify your usage patterns. Big freakin' deal. Every time a poster mentions a cool idea like this, some sort of neat ID method which doesn't require cards or passwords, somebody mentions how "scary" it is. Why? Your skin, fingerprints, vocal patterns, mannerisms, the way you move and talk all identify who you are. The way you post on slashdot identifies who you are -- in fact, a cool but probably impossible feature to slashcode would be a symantic login system, which guesses your ID based on your input speed, cadence, number of spelling mistakes and which words you don't correct properly, your vocabulary and your tendancy to resort to FP. My point is, that identification in and of itself means nothing -- unless the system knows something about you besides that. It's once a system like this is combined with some insidious hack (notice I didn't mention "advertising" -- personalized advertising is a much more preferrable to today's "you have one message waiting but your connection isn't optimized so shock the damn monkey" ads) to track web viewership that the concept leaves simple coolness factors and enters into a whole realm of dangerous big brothering. Of course, technically you could acheive the same thing with a massive log linkage system...
And of course, your ultimate reparation to this paranoia? Switch to a Dvorak keyboard and Trackpad when you want to be sneaky...you usage patterns will instantly change with an unfamiliar key setup and shortened track field. Hell, it wouldn't take much to defeat this system entirely...a randomized keyboard -- where keys change to different positions across the pad and are identified with slick LEDs on the keys themselves -- would change your usage patterns per session.
Actually, that was inherent in the metaphor. Consider: my first trip into the 'dacks, I picked a flower for a girl I liked, who didn't like me and was a consumate woodsman. "You shouldn't pick the flowers," she said, "because there aren't many wild flowers left. If you pick them, they won't grow back, and then there won't be anything left for the next group."
Wise young girl, with the exception of her taste in guys...her current boyfriend is a dipshit.
You know, I've always thought something like this had to exist at Microsoft.
.Net, ASP), has been doing a lot of great shit. Fast XML parsers. Semi stable windowing OSs. A decent scripting language (or, rather, engine...i write my WSH stuff in Perl or JavaScript). All of these things well documented in MSDN with text files that were obviously not hit with the same marketeering technical writers who tried to sell us on Windows Media 8, the death of the paper clip or the "excitement" of .Net: The Network is the Comput-oh wait, that's not .Net!
You see, I've seen a lot of smart, talented young coders and scientists get recruited by Microsoft. Half of them go in for the huge stock options, their name on a blue MS shirt, and, of course, the booth babes. The other half are misfits and nutjobs who really want to change the world. In fact, that's the reason why I'm not anti-MS...I've known too many good men entering the behemoth to think that it's all fluff and marketeering.
We all like to think of Windows as an underpowered, oversimplified mush...but Microsoft, despite its market crap (XP,
This "Fnord" box is apparently the house of some of these innovators at Micrsoft. The ones taking the ideas that UN*X users come up with and adapting them for the mass market. These are the guys that are going to eventually build the Ipv6 core that us Windows users will have underneath it all in four or five years -- before marketting makes them paint it yellow and cover it with MSIPv6 logos.
Don't hate MS for looking at GPL code...that's what GPL code is for. Hate the marketeers who cover this free code with bumper stickers and sell it back to us at a premium. We're all in a field of flowers, but Microsoft is picking them and selling them to folks who are too lazy to come to the countryside.
Ha! My dad works for Time Warner cable in a VP position, and his corporate e-mail system until just last november was an embarrassing IBM system that worked over telnet. I mean, this system was only a little beneath the level of telnetting into the smtp server and writing your messages with an echo. They upgraded to a very very basic pop system but since the turnover rate of management is pretty low, few of them have taken to the advanced features. My dad was heard to remark on several occasions how "stupid" outlook was and how he used to be able to read him mail so much quicker in "the black window."
I might add that he's worked there close to forty years (since way before it was called "Time Warner", is an engineering genius and a great boss (so I've heard) and he is NOT afraid of technology. There are people at TW who are dicks and technophobes. For all of these people, AOL mail is more than sufficient. They don't need secure mail and bccs and flagging and receipts because they wouldn't even use them.
Yeah? Is that right? A company with money is trying to use it to get more money? Shit dog, I never would have expected it. Seriously, what is the point of making this statement? Is it not OBVIOUS that a company looking for money is interested in using that money to grow a company? You see, this is the kind of dumbass shit that makes the absurd dollar amounts of most CEOs something sickly laughable -- they use the same methodology as everybody else, and when they fail using that methodology it's the market's fault and when they succeed it's because that CEO is somehow better than other CEOs using the same bullshit methodology and rhetoric. Shit, at least athletes thank Jesus for their fluke victories.
Is that right? Well, captain dotcom, my ideal partner is a leggy blond with a sweet honeypot and tits til tuesday, but I don't feel the need to usher a press release -- because anybody could guess it. Why not spend less time looking for this magic rich bitch of a dotcom partner and spend a little time finding a successful business model? UGO is in charge of the futures of some of my favorite sites and net personalities (Kyle from HardOCP, who is my hero, Seanbaby and of course lovabel Miguel from fatchicksinpartyhats). And rather than try and innovate their way into profitability, they're praying to the partner fairy and relying on a dead advertiser's market. Why not do something useful instead of treading water with these damn bloodthirsty VCs?
Sure, it seems intuitive. Programmers spending their time programming instead of thinking up neat ideas. And, for business, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea. But then I look around at our organization. Specs handed to us from project managers are hideous -- they don't take into account what the technology (a damn web browser) can do with regards to input and output and aren't willing to spill over into new technologies. Customers aren't sure of what they want...they ask for a new feature and expect it generated without us bothering them again, and they want to be able to use it without training. And the only people holding this organization together is the programmers. Our programmers are with some exceptions, excellent at revising specs to be what looks good and is fnctional. We bring an air of experience and a feel for conformity to the world of interface design. And we're constantly implementing new features that customers love and that they never would have gotten if management had their druthers. Customers (who, by the way, are IT folks at other companies, not people who actually use the software. These people, often peons or temps, are never asked what would make their job easier) want features but they don't know what they need until they get it (who though they needed the internet or cell phones in 1994). Managers don't know what's out there or what can be done. The only people who really know what a technology can do easily are those with their fingers in its heart -- the programmers, and to a lesser extent the IT folks and the peon "users." As such, the best specs and features in the world will still have problems: they will not be sync'd with what the technology could do.
"So?" you may say, "isn't it a coder's job to fix these things?" Yes it is. But we fix problems with specs by letting the application take its own flow. Even in a modular, rational-esque approach to software, each module must still grow naturally through a series of trials and attempts before it can reach true usefulness and speed. Hence the numerous driver fixes that you see for complex hardware like video cards. After a week, you may have a working driver, but it won't reach its speed or stability peak for another year. And if things are as fast as they can get, you need a manager who will beleive in you...not a supscriber to XP who thinks that by specing the driver faster the hardware will follow.
XP, feh...much of it IS marketting bullshit, and it's designed to take power away from the people who have always made the revolution in computing -- the programmers. Of course, I'm all for the peer review and modularity stuff, but in the end it isn't programmer-manager-customer...the programmer has a hand at every level.
Union workers are fat, annoying, elitist jerks who make too much money for what little work they do. Any time you contact one, he is as likely to ignore you as to actually help you out, and when he does help you there's a good chance he'll act put out.
This surly, onoxious attitude makes them meld perfectly with IT folks, with the small exception that I've yet to see a mob run IT department.
If there's one thing I've learned about ISPs, it's that the best way to get a lot of high tech users on your line is to make it free. People who don't pay for things always know what they're doing and never complain about your service. Honest.
Whilst driving in my car, I had the following thought: Napster users get files from file sharing, not from other sources. And thus, they all have the same digital copy of the same song. You can see this effect any time you do a napster search for something common; say, bob dylan. Notice that 80% of the files will have the same bitrate, file size and title, and another 10% will be interrupted downloads of the above. Now, since all mp3 encoders are different and have a different approach to compression, even compressing the same track at the same rate on different encoders will produce different effects. This means that all those users had the same source, a sort of digital music analogy of mitochondrial Eve. If that first file is cooked or truncated or a special version, all users will hve those cooks or truncations.
So what does this mean? Well, if digital protection stops 95% of users from copying an mp3, it won't matter a pair od fetid dingo's kidneys to the music theft scene. One lucky champ will manage to get a decent sounding version somehow, and then everybody will trade that. In this scenario, copy prot only serves to slow down the trade of cds among friends, which most of the industry agrees should be encouraged (or at least not discouraged).
To Recap: Napster users aren't particularly picky and all tend to grab the first example of a track they find. Digital protection will serve only to alienate the end user, making him or her more reliant on Napster and less able to deal with his or her own music. Result: more Napster usage, further development of the music release scene and less money for the music industry (namely, the money spent on the copy protection infrastructure).
The only solution is freedom...I'm whistling "unforgiven" right now...
I somehow have difficulty feeling sorry for an employee who felt that role playing games and synergy were more important than delivering a product. I've seen dozens of entepeneurs with great ideas and actual results who couldn't get the time of day from capitalists, while these guys come up with a colour and took a lot of time to do nothing. Honestly, the world doesn't need synergy...it doesn't need a group of youngsters who feel good about charging blindly into a business world using pitchforks to unload bowling balls. What the American business landscape needs is nice products -- fine china so we don't buy from Mikasa, a quality automobile so we don't buy from BMW, a quality TV so we don't by from SONY, and decent clothing so we don't buy from Indonesia. We need blue collar work to reduce crime and better pay for salesman, so they don't need to force crap and extended warranties down our throats to live. But this is what we get...funding for dumb ideas (or, in this case, no ideas...just elves and trolls in yellow caps dreaming hazily) while great ones sit on the sidelines because they don't offer to change the world.
As a post graduate rhetorician betrothed to a post graduate anthropologistm i am quite well qualified to say that you are ignorant of the studies involved with each of these fields. Not that I blame you -- to those who don't really look into them, they do seem a little stupid, associating scant evidence with lofty theories. And, in truth there is great contention in both fields any time somebody inroduces a new theory -- unlike mathematics there is no concrete proof to indicate genious or malarky. But there is still reason for the generation of these theories you should realise.
First, realise that the best artists, authors and musicians have no idea what they're doing...they are generally good readers who, at some point, decided to put words together in a way they found pleasant. Which, of course, means that any deep meaning or allegory you uncover is quite possibly something they didn't intend; Hemminway went to his death claiming it was "just a fish." But this isn't the point. The crucifix is just a log, and the Grateful Dead were just potheads, but you can't make these claims around the devoted -- they see great meaning in the relative works. And the field of dissertation known as deconstructionism says "hey, if you think it has meaning, and can prove it with a little basic association and logic, then it has meaning, and nuts to what the author had in mind." First year English majors, encountering some of the whacko theories regarding modern literature, are quick to say that this is a bunch of bullshit. But us old hat parties in the field of discourse are forced to wonder if there isn't more to it. Consider this: all literature exists in print, using words. But words are defined only in context of other words or concepts, and these concepts are interpretted differently by each viewer (read into Saussure for more on this great philosophy called "Syntamatics"). As such, any work only has meaning once it's been read, and that meaning is rather personal. Therefore, all these whacko theories are entirely valid -- but that doesn't mean you have to believe them.
And as for the anthropologists...only the charlatans you see on the Discovery channel, moving bodies about and uncovering tombs would be so quick to judge. Real anthroplogy is boring, scientific shit...it involves such activities as slowly documenting, drawing, photographing and examining using non destructive means every small, insignificant artifact at a dig. My girlfriend is excited if she found a doll's head tossed into a latrine a hundred years ago. It is this huge research entity (propelled by the fact that many states have regulations forbidding you to dig in certain areas without paying for an anthropological assessment first) that allow researchers of truly interesting finds to make assumptions. They're based on statistical analysis and comparison to what we know today...for example, a woman's hips grind into each other at a much higher rate when she is pregnant, and the grinding marks are different from those of a woman who carries a lot of weight or is just fat. Teeth are worn in different patterns depending on diets. Still, there is ocasional contention on the anthropological community about whether these assumptions are right, and many times these reassessments have brought about change. There are, for example, three major theories of the life of early man have been proposed, and there is evidence for each. One says that man got most of his food from hunting, and that women held an inferior role. Another holds that gathering was far more important and supplied the majority of sustenance, and that women supervised this activity (while men slumped about looking for stuff to kill). A third holds that both men and women were involved and that the activity was far less planned -- that humans were scavengers waiting for sick animals, stashes of really sweet berries and nuts, and waited for leftovers after another animal made a kill.
But though there is contention in these fields, they are not by any means worthy of the type of contempt you have for them...these are some of the greatest thinkers in the world, and they've made a lot of important advances in the attempt to make fields that were previously guesswork become much more concrete and ordered. They're trying to make legitimate fields into legitimate realms, so that naysayers won't consider them laughable for jumping over unnecesary logical steps. They've moved beyond P -> Q and Q -> R to P -> R...in much the same way that physicists no longer debate the validity of theories based on quantum mechanics solely on their statistical approach.
Well, because most of [pick your favorite open source piece of shit] was designed piecemeal, with no real goal in mind. Developers with no deadlines or specs wrote things as they came, and the fact is that it is much easier and quicker to ignore things like data integrity, pluggability or thread safety. C++ is a much more elegant weapon, and you'll find that a vast majority of corporate software is written in C++. It's just easier when you're dealing with a massive project to design things OO (and no, i'm not a disciple of Rational), and from a maintnenace standpoint much easier to build enhancements or scrap old parts. You want to use a new graphics driver with different variable types (maybe going from ints to doubles)? Well, you don't have to worry about checking all your plugin code to be sure you're not removing a variable that's read by some piece of hacked code in C written by an amateur who thought he was speeding things up in his app. Because for all of the nobility of Open Source, it's much more difficult to check the source code of a dozen components using your FILESIZE variable to be sure that they're synchronized than it is to just utilize a synchronized getFilesize() method.
And of course, in the modern world of multiple servers and multiple tiers of service, OODMSs make a lot of sense. Rather than having to worry about locks and commits and dirty reads, you just offer all callers synchronized setXxX() methods and asynchronous getYyY() functions. Rather than have to worry about the schema when upgrading a product (and no, you don't always have to have a spec when you do this...i haven't seen a spec in months other than a few lines in an email) and worry about messing up older areas of an application which might use your fields differently, you can just alter the internal workings of the storage and leave the methods with the same output as before. To be honest, we do this kind of work in RDBMS systems already -- we use triggers to perform integrity checks and update related tables, indexes to speed up queries, stored procedures to perform reads and writes as if the db was an object, and most telling of all we use Views to hide the true nature of a DB.
Finally, OO is no more closed or proprietary than C code...in fact, it's much better. I can find out the source and methods of any java class in our company in seconds, and get detailed information on how they run thx. to javadoc. I don't need to hutn for annotated source code or wait on a post to alt.software.shitty.opensource.operatingsystems. Sure, they can be black boxes, but they should be...you don't want to fuck up the variables hidden in those boxes and you don't want to rely on them because they are inefficient.
I try not to work at all. But I type a lot, and bring up important concepts gleamed from the pages of Internet Publishing World and VB Developers Journal.