> You can use variations on that, such as having the winner only pay the next increment over the second highest bid instead of their actual amount, but the principle remains the same.
That's exactly what eBay does. You end the maximum you are willing to pay. You actually pay less than that - you pay only enough to be higher than the other bidder. In essence, eBay automatically bids for you, up the maximum bid you set.
There is no sniping, trying it doesn't work, if the bidders understand how eBay operates. Assuming all bidders understand how eBay works, everyone puts in their max price qnd the winner pays the minimum amount which wins. Sneaking it at the last second does you no good, because the other bidders already told eBay what their max is.
The thing is, some users do NOT understand how eBay works, or they haven't thought it through. They'll enter a bid lower than their max, planning to increase it later if needed. There's no need for that because eBay automatically bids for you, up to your maximum bid. People who failed to enter their actual maximum can get sniped.
Unfortunately, there is a second-order effect. Knowing that OTHER bidders may not behave rationally, it makes sense for you to try to snipe them. You couldn't snipe if everyone was being rational, but some people aren't, so that changes the rational strategy.
eBay's system is perfect theoretically - assuming rational bidders. Irrational bidders throw a monkey wrench into it.
Given irrational bidders exist, what eBay could do is say auctions end ten minutes after the last bid is received. The auction would continue for as long as the bidding continues to increase.
I have a bunch of tools here that I've used for one or two projects. They are ready to go if I need to them a third time. No point in paying 10 times as much when these Harbor Freight tools last ten times as long as I need them for.
The rotary hammer I bought cheap at Harbor Freight might well wear out after only drilling 600 holes in concrete. In four years, I've drilled six holes. So at this rate it should last me about four hundred years.
I wouldn't nornally buy a Harbor Freight ratchet because I plan to use the ratchet thousands of times. Same with my cordless drill. I use that all the time, so I bought one that will last through many uses.
Heck, even my air compressor (still running fine after six years) is from Harbor Freight. It turned out that I used my bench grinder more often than I expected, so after several years my $15 Harbor Freight bench grinder eventually wore out. Still, if I were to replace a $15 bench grinder every five years, that's a better value than replacing a $120 bench grinder every fifteen years.
Use the right tool for the job, and if you're only going to do the job once or twice (or ten times), a Harbor Freight tools might be the right tool.
> isn't terribly relevant to the point I'm making.
Your point seems to be that users do stuff things? That's true. And therefore we shouldn't tell them what's smart to do instead?
The fact is, if you install new hardware into your PCIe bus, you are implicitly trusting that hardware. Do you disagree? Or is your point that users attach crap to their bus? And therefore... what? Stop telling them that's risky?
A terminal is a really difficult interface for beginners, especially if you sit them down with no instruction. If the user has no clue, the interface better provide some clues. That's absolutely true.
For efficient use by people who do it every day, clicking through six levels of menus is a terrible interface. That's why efficient computer users regularly use even the worst of keyboard interfaces, like ctrl-v, (what does "v" have to do with "paste?") in preference to clicking, even though you've made keyboard use more difficult by designing the application strictly for the first-time user who needs to discover things for the first time. Watch someone clicking at on on-screen keyboard to enter their email address, then watch someone who can type do their email address from the keyboard. Without looking at the keyboard, they'll type it a thousand times faster than they can click it. Of course keyboard entry is only very good if you've used a keyboard before.
Discoverability is really important - once. If you design all of your applications, applications somebody has to use all day everyday, as if each use is their first use, you're doing it wrong. The requirements for use by someone who has done it before are totally different than what's needed if you measure only sitting someone down who has never seen the application before and tell them to figure it out, with no instruction.
Having said all of that, desktops and laptops are less than 5% of the computer market. Everytime you sit down and Google something, when you click at one computer, 30 other computers work to get you the results. For 30 out of 31 computers involved, what matters I that they work quickly and reliably - nobody is clicking at them.
> This doesn't work. You've created a distinction inside your head that no one else shares.
No one except people who have spent an hour or more learning about information security, any time within the last 35 years.
> Does everything have to be trusted? Is nothing trusted?
Excellent question! An important question. It's so important, it's one of the first things you learn if you study information security. What is trusted is called the Trusted Computing Base. It's defined quite thoroughly in the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC), popularly known as the Orange Book. This is a DoD standard first issued in 1983.
The TCB is composed of the things that must be trusted in order to build any sort of meaningful security - your CPU, your RAM, your bootloader, etc. User applications do not have to be trusted, they can be controlled by security systems.
The Trusted Computing Base is what *enforces* security policy, everything outside the TCB is subject to security policy. You can chmod a file or set a SELinux security context on a file, then you have to trust the kernel to enforce that chmod. Make sense?
Generally, the TCB is the hardware in your system and the basic software - the microcode, bios, bootloader, and at least parts of the kernel.
Note it's the trustED computing base, not trustWORTHY. After definitely what is trusted, what must be trusted, we then set out to certify them as trustworthy.
> Also, I'd like to ask if mice are secure devices. And keyboards. And monitors and speakers and headphones and USB fans and UPSes.
Mice and keyboards provide unfiltered input to the TCB (the bios, etc) and are trusted - so you need to make sure they are trustworthy. Speakers and headphones, plugged into an audio output port, are not.
> Nor do we train people to make any distinction between "secure" and "unsecure" ports. At most, we train people not to plug in unknown USB sticks
You haven't been to the trainings I give, nor watched them on YouTube.
> Do we put labels on unsecure ports to identify them? Do we put labels on secure ports? Condoms? Banana peels Anything?
As I said before, on most modern consumer-level computers, your port for untrusted connections is the RJ-45 port. The USB and lightning ports are for adding new hardware to the system. Hardware is trusted (so make sure it's trustworthy). Anything that is not part of your system, not trusted, should use the port designated for connecting to the world outside of your system. That's the network port.
That's certainly an option you have on desktops. You can avoid putting any high-performance ports external and install these things internally. On a laptop, not so much.
It does seem wise for an OS to not connect new peripherals while it's locked. I don't know offhand how each OS handles that.
Linux is used in far more roles professionally than Windows is, and is far, far more reliable. By orders of magnitude. Windows is designed for desktop use by people who need to see their options displayed in a graphical menu because otherwise they wouldn't know how to use their computer - they wouldn't know which command to type. It serves pretty well in that limited role.
> You're asking for a crash or some unexpected interaction if another piece of software expects a different version
True, if you OS programmers are utter morons and change the foo() function to return a completely different data type. The first month you start playing with programming, you might have a function getShape() which returns a shape object. A month later you might change it to return a coloredShape object, and break things. My four-year-old might do that. Professional programmers would ADD the new getColoredShape() function. Are you saying it's necessary because Microsoft's programmers are preschoolers?
That's true. These ports are like PCIe - you're adding new parts to your computer, plugging them into the motherboard. You probably shouldn't be trying to protect your computer from a malicious CPU, or RAM that I spying on you - these parts ARE your computer. So is your hard drive - whether you connect it via SATA, PCIe, Lightning, or mSATA. You aren't going to protect your computer against a malicious hard drive or graphics card, and the Lightning port is a port for hard drives and graphics.
If you want to connect to something while keeping it separate, having it not be part of your system, you can use the network port for that. That's the port for connecting to other things, untrusted things.
We COULD go back to the days of having separate, different types of ports for a keyboard, a printer, a display, etc. Then you'd know that what looks like a display can only act as a display, display, because it's connected to the VGA port, not the keyboard port.
Yes, "more security" would have slowed the data rate. Probably more noticeablw would have been that data transfers would use a LOT more CPU.
These ports are like PCIe - you're adding new parts to your computer, plugging them into the motherboard. You probably shouldn't be trying to protect your computer from a malicious CPU, or RAM that I spying on you - these parts ARE your computer. So is your hard drive - whether you connect it via SATA, PCIe, Lightning, or mSATA. You aren't going to protect your computer against a malicious hard drive or graphics card, and the Lightning port is a port for hard drives and graphics.
If you want to connect to something while keeping it separate, having it not be part of your system, you can use the network port for that. That's the port for connecting to other things, untrusted things.
We COULD go back to the days of having separate, different types of ports for a keyboard, a printer, a display, etc. Then you'd know that what looks like a display can only act as a display, display, because it's connected to the VGA port, not the keyboard port.
I chuckle a bit when people talk about letting the user choose what time to shutdown the entire machine for 30 minutes while Windows updates whatever - the color picker dialog and the wifi UI or whatever.
Twenty years ago, tou used to have to rebuild Linux if you updated the KERNEL. Only the kernel ever needed a reboot. Anything else, the update just saves the new version of the file to disk. If it's a running service you.want to update, restart that service. Updating the file sharing service means you restart file sharing, which takes three seconds. Why in the world do Microsoft programmers find it necessary to shut down the machine, and then extract the new version of the file? Do they really not know how to save a file on a system that is running?
Ten or fifteen years ago, Linux got live kernel updates. No need to reboot to activate the new kernel. Most people probably reboot into a new kernel out of habit and inertia, but that's the only time you'd reboot a Linux box related to an update. I had a machine up for eight years until I moved. It stayed updated.
Windows got multi-user security (DAC) 10-20 years after Unix and Linux. Windows got modern security, MAC (or at least a watered down simulation of it) about 10 years after Linux. Windows gets a lot of things 10-20 years after Linux does. Maybe it'll get the ability to update a file without shutting down the entire machine, in a few years.
Deflation is very much not a good thing. That's why central banks pretty much make sure it doesn't happen. The rare cases where deflation has occurred are generally associated with economic depressions.
There are several problems with deflation, involving different aspects, but here's one of the simpler problems, one that is easy to explain:
You go to work today and earn $100. Two weeks from now, when you get paid, it's only worth $90. You have to trim your spending by $10. EVERYONE ELSE had the same thing happen. Everybody's paycheck is worth less, so everybody has to cut their spending. Your boss tells you sales are down by 10% (of value), so he has to cut expenses. He cuts your hours by 10%. That cuts your next paycheck by 10% due to fewer hours, ans another 10% due to more deflation. You have to cut your spending by 20%. Everybody else is in the same situation - everybody's paycheck is worth 20% less. Everybody buys 20% less stuff, so your boss needs fewer workers ans cuts your hours by 20%. Around around it goes, everybody's hours getting cut, paychecks getting smaller and smaller.
That's way economists want to see a few percent inflation - to guard against the wreckage that comes when you slip into deflation.
That's funny. The endangered species list definitely does a good of making sure people are quiet about finding any on their property. Just discreetly get rid of them and make sure nobody ever finds out they were there.
So you're thinking still sell them to the highest bidder, the change would be you need a PhD to bid?
> it wouldn't be hard to find a mechanism for distribution.
Sure, you can distribute them by leaving them on the curb and someone will pick them up.
Distributing each one to the "most deserving" person, for somebody's opinion of most deserving, is a more interesting question. If one proposes to shut down the current distribution channels and replace it with one that is "better", I'd expect the person proposing that to state which "better" mechanism they want to switch to.
Based on the article, it sounds like they want the fossils to go "scientists and museums", or generally to whomever will.make best use of them. There is no mention of how they propose to decide who gets them, though. I'm a citizen scientist, do I get one?
Apparently in order to get them I do *not* need to contribute toward the costs involved in finding and preserving them. I would also NOT need to show that I have a compelling reason to have one by putting my money where my mouth is. So what's the proposal?
If you just point out the CompuServe post, you've shown the term was in use prior to the meeting. You win.
If instead you make bullshit statements like saying Bruce claims to have coined the term, anyone reading that will likely see that you are full of shit and stop reading before they even get to see the CompuServe link. You lose the argument because your evidence is never seen and you just look like an asshole.
> First you don't like what you think I said about Bruce,
That's right, I don't like lying - and it seriously distracts from any valid point you might have, mixed in with lies and half-truths.
The 1993 post not only uses "open source" as a stand-alone term, it's also capitalized, assuming the caps are there in the original rather than being adddd by you. Names get capitalized, so that look like "Open Source" is being used as the name of some particular thing. Not just happened to have both words (with separate meaning), but the capitalization suggested it's a combined noun phrase "open source".
Btw I was around back then too. I have no illusions that my memory of 20 years ago is more reliable than thr written record.
My post post might have been more clear if I had said "name" rather than "noun phrase".
"Source code" is the name of a specific thing.
There is a huge difference between spelling a url "h t t p colon slash slash..." versus using "colonslash.org" as the name of a particular thing.
Neither Peterson nor anyone else claims to have been first to the words "open" and "source". It is generally believed they *named* something "open source".
> agree with you that Perens didn't claim to have coined the term
That's great we agree on that point, thank you.
I may not have made myself clear regarding the Caldera headline. "Source code" has been a well-known term for many years, well before the period being discussed. It's a noun phrase with a specific meaning. That noun "source code" was and still is often described with many adjectives. You could could "messy code", "elegant source code", "corrupted source code", "open source code", "long source code".
Today we have another noun phrase "open source". Open source is a thing. Headlines say "open source more popular than ever".
The Caldera headline, while interesting, did not use rhe term "open source" as noun, a thing. It would have been far more interesting if the Caldera post said "Caldera is now open source". Instead, it used thr well-established noun phrase "source code", with historical usage indicating they used the adjective "open" to describe the "source code". Certainly an interesting link, but it would be far more interesting if the well-established term "source code" wasn't there, making "open source" the noun.
Note also that Christine Peterson has stated she brought the term "open source" to the meeting where they decided to switch to a new term, and doesn't remember hearing the name elsewhere, but it's possible. So it would be inappropriate to attack Ms. Peterson based on you thinking that she might be right when she says she could have heard it elsewhere.
I understand you remember certain things. I've also really enough of your posts to know you are pretty smart. Smart enough to know that at times we can be certain we remember something from 20 years ago - and we DO remember it, but it never happened. My mom gets very frustrated when that happens to her (often) and there is indisputable proof that her clear memory is in fact no re-membering (re-assembling) the event, but in fact assembling it.
So far I have seen your single citation of somebody saying "source code" was "open" - "open source code". If there were more than one such instance it would seem to be a term in use. Give only one, it seems most likely that by random chance someone used the adjective "open" to describe the noun "source code". Pick any two words and someone, somewhere, will have used them together by random chance - once or twice. I haven't seen any reference to a thing called "open source" until the famous meeting.
Unfortunately archive.org is throwing a 502 error right now, so I can see the video you linked. Is it someone describing source code as open? Or someone using "open source" as a noun?
You have, however, misrepresented the statement Bruce Perens made. This unfortunate fact turns your work from useful to bullshit. I'm not sure why you would put in all that time, then produce a lie. You could have lied without doing ANY research.
Bruce's statement is consistent with everyone else's. Bruce, ESR, Christine Peterson, et all discussed it and agreed upon that term. *Bruce then took the responsibility for drafting and maintaining a definition based upon the Debian document.* Perens never claimed to have originally coined the term, and your claim that he did is crap. Not only is it crap, but it's OBVIOUS bullshit, to anyone and everyone who has a basic grasp of the English language. What a waste of time and valuable research.
Your attempt to present it as of there is disagreement between the people involved in similarly bull. Neither Perens, nor ESR, not Stallman, nor any other person claims to have originated the term, only to have discussed ans agreed to it at the meeting with Christine Peterson, where she says she brought it up. Nobody disagrees with that. Trying to portray it as an argument between the people who were present is disingenuous.
You did find a single instance of someone talking about source code that is open; a subject line using the words "open" and "source code" together. That is interesting. It would be more interesting if it weren't buried in bullshit. It would have been more interesting if they said "open source software", but they didn't.
It would also be more interesting had they used the combined term "open source" as a noun. They used the noun phrase "source code" with the adjective "open", which may seem like a subtle difference. There is a world of difference between mentioning your tube and naming something You Tube, though.
You've misrepresented what Bruce said. He never claimed to have coined the term. He stated, correctly, that he took responsibility for putting together a definition document for the new term based on the Debian document. That is an undisputable fact. You've falsely misrepresented the different aspects of the story related by the people present as if they were fighting about it. That isn't the case. What a waste of your time and ours.
> Is the Unix philosophy really the best option for everything though?
Some people prefer the Unix philosophy, some people prefer the Windows philosophy. Today I'm not going to argue that either is wrong. There is an operating system for people who like the Windows way.
You crammed a lot of good ideas into a short post. I'm sending my team at work a link to your post.
You mentioned code can data. Linus Torvalds had this to say:
"I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful [â¦] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important."
"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
I'm inclined to agree. Once the data structure is right, the code oftem almost writes itself. It'll be easy to write and easy to read because it's obvious how one would handle data structured in that elegant way.
Writing the code necessary to transform the data from the input format into the right structure can be non-obvious, but it's normally worth it.
Zero Bugs & Program Faster is an interesting book. It's a collection of single-page ideas. It's the kind of thing to have on your desk (or in your bathroom) to read five minutes a day and let idea sink in.
Slashdot Mirror
> You can use variations on that, such as having the winner only pay the next increment over the second highest bid instead of their actual amount, but the principle remains the same.
That's exactly what eBay does. You end the maximum you are willing to pay. You actually pay less than that - you pay only enough to be higher than the other bidder. In essence, eBay automatically bids for you, up the maximum bid you set.
There is no sniping, trying it doesn't work, if the bidders understand how eBay operates. Assuming all bidders understand how eBay works, everyone puts in their max price qnd the winner pays the minimum amount which wins. Sneaking it at the last second does you no good, because the other bidders already told eBay what their max is.
The thing is, some users do NOT understand how eBay works, or they haven't thought it through. They'll enter a bid lower than their max, planning to increase it later if needed. There's no need for that because eBay automatically bids for you, up to your maximum bid. People who failed to enter their actual maximum can get sniped.
Unfortunately, there is a second-order effect. Knowing that OTHER bidders may not behave rationally, it makes sense for you to try to snipe them. You couldn't snipe if everyone was being rational, but some people aren't, so that changes the rational strategy.
eBay's system is perfect theoretically - assuming rational bidders. Irrational bidders throw a monkey wrench into it.
Given irrational bidders exist, what eBay could do is say auctions end ten minutes after the last bid is received. The auction would continue for as long as the bidding continues to increase.
I have a bunch of tools here that I've used for one or two projects. They are ready to go if I need to them a third time. No point in paying 10 times as much when these Harbor Freight tools last ten times as long as I need them for.
The rotary hammer I bought cheap at Harbor Freight might well wear out after only drilling 600 holes in concrete. In four years, I've drilled six holes. So at this rate it should last me about four hundred years.
I wouldn't nornally buy a Harbor Freight ratchet because I plan to use the ratchet thousands of times. Same with my cordless drill. I use that all the time, so I bought one that will last through many uses.
Heck, even my air compressor (still running fine after six years) is from Harbor Freight. It turned out that I used my bench grinder more often than I expected, so after several years my $15 Harbor Freight bench grinder eventually wore out. Still, if I were to replace a $15 bench grinder every five years, that's a better value than replacing a $120 bench grinder every fifteen years.
Use the right tool for the job, and if you're only going to do the job once or twice (or ten times), a Harbor Freight tools might be the right tool.
> OK, so how exactly do I plug a USB mass storage device into that port and get it working? Oh that's right, I can't.
https://www.wd.com/products/ne...
If your budget is under $50
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d...
> isn't terribly relevant to the point I'm making.
Your point seems to be that users do stuff things?
That's true. And therefore we shouldn't tell them what's smart to do instead?
The fact is, if you install new hardware into your PCIe bus, you are implicitly trusting that hardware. Do you disagree? Or is your point that users attach crap to their bus? And therefore ... what? Stop telling them that's risky?
A terminal is a really difficult interface for beginners, especially if you sit them down with no instruction. If the user has no clue, the interface better provide some clues. That's absolutely true.
For efficient use by people who do it every day, clicking through six levels of menus is a terrible interface. That's why efficient computer users regularly use even the worst of keyboard interfaces, like ctrl-v, (what does "v" have to do with "paste?") in preference to clicking, even though you've made keyboard use more difficult by designing the application strictly for the first-time user who needs to discover things for the first time. Watch someone clicking at on on-screen keyboard to enter their email address, then watch someone who can type do their email address from the keyboard. Without looking at the keyboard, they'll type it a thousand times faster than they can click it. Of course keyboard entry is only very good if you've used a keyboard before.
Discoverability is really important - once. If you design all of your applications, applications somebody has to use all day everyday, as if each use is their first use, you're doing it wrong. The requirements for use by someone who has done it before are totally different than what's needed if you measure only sitting someone down who has never seen the application before and tell them to figure it out, with no instruction.
Having said all of that, desktops and laptops are less than 5% of the computer market. Everytime you sit down and Google something, when you click at one computer, 30 other computers work to get you the results. For 30 out of 31 computers involved, what matters I that they work quickly and reliably - nobody is clicking at them.
> This doesn't work. You've created a distinction inside your head that no one else shares.
No one except people who have spent an hour or more learning about information security, any time within the last 35 years.
> Does everything have to be trusted? Is nothing trusted?
Excellent question! An important question. It's so important, it's one of the first things you learn if you study information security.
What is trusted is called the Trusted Computing Base.
It's defined quite thoroughly in the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC), popularly known as the Orange Book. This is a DoD standard first issued in 1983.
The TCB is composed of the things that must be trusted in order to build any sort of meaningful security - your CPU, your RAM, your bootloader, etc. User applications do not have to be trusted, they can be controlled by security systems.
The Trusted Computing Base is what *enforces* security policy, everything outside the TCB is subject to security policy. You can chmod a file or set a SELinux security context on a file, then you have to trust the kernel to enforce that chmod. Make sense?
Generally, the TCB is the hardware in your system and the basic software - the microcode, bios, bootloader, and at least parts of the kernel.
Note it's the trustED computing base, not trustWORTHY. After definitely what is trusted, what must be trusted, we then set out to certify them as trustworthy.
> Also, I'd like to ask if mice are secure devices. And keyboards. And monitors and speakers and headphones and USB fans and UPSes.
Mice and keyboards provide unfiltered input to the TCB (the bios, etc) and are trusted - so you need to make sure they are trustworthy. Speakers and headphones, plugged into an audio output port, are not.
> Nor do we train people to make any distinction between "secure" and "unsecure" ports. At most, we train people not to plug in unknown USB sticks
You haven't been to the trainings I give, nor watched them on YouTube.
> Do we put labels on unsecure ports to identify them? Do we put labels on secure ports? Condoms? Banana peels Anything?
As I said before, on most modern consumer-level computers, your port for untrusted connections is the RJ-45 port. The USB and lightning ports are for adding new hardware to the system. Hardware is trusted (so make sure it's trustworthy). Anything that is not part of your system, not trusted, should use the port designated for connecting to the world outside of your system. That's the network port.
That's certainly an option you have on desktops. You can avoid putting any high-performance ports external and install these things internally. On a laptop, not so much.
It does seem wise for an OS to not connect new peripherals while it's locked. I don't know offhand how each OS handles that.
Linux is used in far more roles professionally than Windows is, and is far, far more reliable. By orders of magnitude. Windows is designed for desktop use by people who need to see their options displayed in a graphical menu because otherwise they wouldn't know how to use their computer - they wouldn't know which command to type. It serves pretty well in that limited role.
> You're asking for a crash or some unexpected interaction if another piece of software expects a different version
True, if you OS programmers are utter morons and change the foo() function to return a completely different data type. The first month you start playing with programming, you might have a function getShape() which returns a shape object. A month later you might change it to return a coloredShape object, and break things. My four-year-old might do that. Professional programmers would ADD the new getColoredShape() function. Are you saying it's necessary because Microsoft's programmers are preschoolers?
That's true. These ports are like PCIe - you're adding new parts to your computer, plugging them into the motherboard. You probably shouldn't be trying to protect your computer from a malicious CPU, or RAM that I spying on you - these parts ARE your computer. So is your hard drive - whether you connect it via SATA, PCIe, Lightning, or mSATA. You aren't going to protect your computer against a malicious hard drive or graphics card, and the Lightning port is a port for hard drives and graphics.
If you want to connect to something while keeping it separate, having it not be part of your system, you can use the network port for that. That's the port for connecting to other things, untrusted things.
We COULD go back to the days of having separate, different types of ports for a keyboard, a printer, a display, etc. Then you'd know that what looks like a display can only act as a display, display, because it's connected to the VGA port, not the keyboard port.
Yes, "more security" would have slowed the data rate. Probably more noticeablw would have been that data transfers would use a LOT more CPU.
These ports are like PCIe - you're adding new parts to your computer, plugging them into the motherboard. You probably shouldn't be trying to protect your computer from a malicious CPU, or RAM that I spying on you - these parts ARE your computer. So is your hard drive - whether you connect it via SATA, PCIe, Lightning, or mSATA. You aren't going to protect your computer against a malicious hard drive or graphics card, and the Lightning port is a port for hard drives and graphics.
If you want to connect to something while keeping it separate, having it not be part of your system, you can use the network port for that. That's the port for connecting to other things, untrusted things.
We COULD go back to the days of having separate, different types of ports for a keyboard, a printer, a display, etc. Then you'd know that what looks like a display can only act as a display, display, because it's connected to the VGA port, not the keyboard port.
I chuckle a bit when people talk about letting the user choose what time to shutdown the entire machine for 30 minutes while Windows updates whatever - the color picker dialog and the wifi UI or whatever.
Twenty years ago, tou used to have to rebuild Linux if you updated the KERNEL. Only the kernel ever needed a reboot. Anything else, the update just saves the new version of the file to disk. If it's a running service you.want to update, restart that service. Updating the file sharing service means you restart file sharing, which takes three seconds. Why in the world do Microsoft programmers find it necessary to shut down the machine, and then extract the new version of the file? Do they really not know how to save a file on a system that is running?
Ten or fifteen years ago, Linux got live kernel updates. No need to reboot to activate the new kernel. Most people probably reboot into a new kernel out of habit and inertia, but that's the only time you'd reboot a Linux box related to an update. I had a machine up for eight years until I moved. It stayed updated.
Windows got multi-user security (DAC) 10-20 years after Unix and Linux. Windows got modern security, MAC (or at least a watered down simulation of it) about 10 years after Linux. Windows gets a lot of things 10-20 years after Linux does. Maybe it'll get the ability to update a file without shutting down the entire machine, in a few years.
Deflation is very much not a good thing. That's why central banks pretty much make sure it doesn't happen. The rare cases where deflation has occurred are generally associated with economic depressions.
There are several problems with deflation, involving different aspects, but here's one of the simpler problems, one that is easy to explain:
You go to work today and earn $100.
Two weeks from now, when you get paid, it's only worth $90.
You have to trim your spending by $10.
EVERYONE ELSE had the same thing happen.
Everybody's paycheck is worth less, so everybody has to cut their spending.
Your boss tells you sales are down by 10% (of value), so he has to cut expenses. He cuts your hours by 10%.
That cuts your next paycheck by 10% due to fewer hours, ans another 10% due to more deflation.
You have to cut your spending by 20%.
Everybody else is in the same situation - everybody's paycheck is worth 20% less.
Everybody buys 20% less stuff, so your boss needs fewer workers ans cuts your hours by 20%.
Around around it goes, everybody's hours getting cut, paychecks getting smaller and smaller.
That's way economists want to see a few percent inflation - to guard against the wreckage that comes when you slip into deflation.
That's funny. The endangered species list definitely does a good of making sure people are quiet about finding any on their property. Just discreetly get rid of them and make sure nobody ever finds out they were there.
So you're thinking still sell them to the highest bidder, the change would be you need a PhD to bid?
> it wouldn't be hard to find a mechanism for distribution.
Sure, you can distribute them by leaving them on the curb and someone will pick them up.
Distributing each one to the "most deserving" person, for somebody's opinion of most deserving, is a more interesting question. If one proposes to shut down the current distribution channels and replace it with one that is "better", I'd expect the person proposing that to state which "better" mechanism they want to switch to.
Based on the article, it sounds like they want the fossils to go "scientists and museums", or generally to whomever will.make best use of them. There is no mention of how they propose to decide who gets them, though. I'm a citizen scientist, do I get one?
Apparently in order to get them I do *not* need to contribute toward the costs involved in finding and preserving them. I would also NOT need to show that I have a compelling reason to have one by putting my money where my mouth is. So what's the proposal?
The court in this case I bound by precedent of the US Supreme Court. SCOTUS ruled that the state can regulate and prohibit obscenity.
One could argue that SCOTUS should reverse that ruling, but a local county court can't.
To summarize my thoughts on the matter:
If you just point out the CompuServe post, you've shown the term was in use prior to the meeting. You win.
If instead you make bullshit statements like saying Bruce claims to have coined the term, anyone reading that will likely see that you are full of shit and stop reading before they even get to see the CompuServe link. You lose the argument because your evidence is never seen and you just look like an asshole.
> First you don't like what you think I said about Bruce,
That's right, I don't like lying - and it seriously distracts from any valid point you might have, mixed in with lies and half-truths.
The 1993 post not only uses "open source" as a stand-alone term, it's also capitalized, assuming the caps are there in the original rather than being adddd by you. Names get capitalized, so that look like "Open Source" is being used as the name of some particular thing. Not just happened to have both words (with separate meaning), but the capitalization suggested it's a combined noun phrase "open source".
Btw I was around back then too. I have no illusions that my memory of 20 years ago is more reliable than thr written record.
My post post might have been more clear if I had said "name" rather than "noun phrase".
"Source code" is the name of a specific thing.
There is a huge difference between spelling a url "h t t p colon slash slash ..." versus using "colonslash.org" as the name of a particular thing.
Neither Peterson nor anyone else claims to have been first to the words "open" and "source". It is generally believed they *named* something "open source".
> agree with you that Perens didn't claim to have coined the term
That's great we agree on that point, thank you.
I may not have made myself clear regarding the Caldera headline. "Source code" has been a well-known term for many years, well before the period being discussed. It's a noun phrase with a specific meaning. That noun "source code" was and still is often described with many adjectives. You could could "messy code", "elegant source code", "corrupted source code", "open source code", "long source code".
Today we have another noun phrase "open source". Open source is a thing. Headlines say "open source more popular than ever".
The Caldera headline, while interesting, did not use rhe term "open source" as noun, a thing. It would have been far more interesting if the Caldera post said "Caldera is now open source". Instead, it used thr well-established noun phrase "source code", with historical usage indicating they used the adjective "open" to describe the "source code". Certainly an interesting link, but it would be far more interesting if the well-established term "source code" wasn't there, making "open source" the noun.
Note also that Christine Peterson has stated she brought the term "open source" to the meeting where they decided to switch to a new term, and doesn't remember hearing the name elsewhere, but it's possible. So it would be inappropriate to attack Ms. Peterson based on you thinking that she might be right when she says she could have heard it elsewhere.
I understand you remember certain things. I've also really enough of your posts to know you are pretty smart. Smart enough to know that at times we can be certain we remember something from 20 years ago - and we DO remember it, but it never happened. My mom gets very frustrated when that happens to her (often) and there is indisputable proof that her clear memory is in fact no re-membering (re-assembling) the event, but in fact assembling it.
So far I have seen your single citation of somebody saying "source code" was "open" - "open source code". If there were more than one such instance it would seem to be a term in use. Give only one, it seems most likely that by random chance someone used the adjective "open" to describe the noun "source code". Pick any two words and someone, somewhere, will have used them together by random chance - once or twice. I haven't seen any reference to a thing called "open source" until the famous meeting.
Unfortunately archive.org is throwing a 502 error right now, so I can see the video you linked. Is it someone describing source code as open? Or someone using "open source" as a noun?
Thanks for the link and your research.
You have, however, misrepresented the statement Bruce Perens made. This unfortunate fact turns your work from useful to bullshit. I'm not sure why you would put in all that time, then produce a lie. You could have lied without doing ANY research.
Bruce's statement is consistent with everyone else's. Bruce, ESR, Christine Peterson, et all discussed it and agreed upon that term. *Bruce then took the responsibility for drafting and maintaining a definition based upon the Debian document.* Perens never claimed to have originally coined the term, and your claim that he did is crap. Not only is it crap, but it's OBVIOUS bullshit, to anyone and everyone who has a basic grasp of the English language. What a waste of time and valuable research.
Your attempt to present it as of there is disagreement between the people involved in similarly bull. Neither Perens, nor ESR, not Stallman, nor any other person claims to have originated the term, only to have discussed ans agreed to it at the meeting with Christine Peterson, where she says she brought it up. Nobody disagrees with that. Trying to portray it as an argument between the people who were present is disingenuous.
You did find a single instance of someone talking about source code that is open; a subject line using the words "open" and "source code" together. That is interesting. It would be more interesting if it weren't buried in bullshit. It would have been more interesting if they said "open source software", but they didn't.
It would also be more interesting had they used the combined term "open source" as a noun. They used the noun phrase "source code" with the adjective "open", which may seem like a subtle difference. There is a world of difference between mentioning your tube and naming something You Tube, though.
You've misrepresented what Bruce said. He never claimed to have coined the term. He stated, correctly, that he took responsibility for putting together a definition document for the new term based on the Debian document. That is an undisputable fact. You've falsely misrepresented the different aspects of the story related by the people present as if they were fighting about it. That isn't the case. What a waste of your time and ours.
> provably in use before the leading lights of the OSI claimed to have coined it
Do you have any shred of evidence whatsoever that the term was in use prior to the February 1998 meeting, or are you talking out of your butt?
BTW OSI has trademarks for various "Open Source *", terms so they *do* get to define it, legally.
> Most highly intelligent people will be anti war.
Yes, normal people don't want to be fighting.
And virtually all mammals know what ends a fight. You seem to be missing that particular insight.
Hint - singing a song does not stop an attack.
> Is the Unix philosophy really the best option for everything though?
Some people prefer the Unix philosophy, some people prefer the Windows philosophy. Today I'm not going to argue that either is wrong. There is an operating system for people who like the Windows way.
You crammed a lot of good ideas into a short post.
I'm sending my team at work a link to your post.
You mentioned code can data. Linus Torvalds had this to say:
"I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful [â¦] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important."
"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
I'm inclined to agree. Once the data structure is right, the code oftem almost writes itself. It'll be easy to write and easy to read because it's obvious how one would handle data structured in that elegant way.
Writing the code necessary to transform the data from the input format into the right structure can be non-obvious, but it's normally worth it.
Zero Bugs & Program Faster is an interesting book. It's a collection of single-page ideas. It's the kind of thing to have on your desk (or in your bathroom) to read five minutes a day and let idea sink in.
I believe the author may be a Slashdot member.