This is an example of where free software is certainly ahead of the commercial equivalents. Both Kopete and Gaim have had options to encrypt using PGP for quite some time. (Gaim for significantly longer, iirc)
By delegating the authentication and validation to PGP, they are potentially as-secure-as PGP. By doing in-house certification, ala. Trillian & AIM, the identification and encryption is an internal mechanism, and I would argue (successfully) that it is more difficult to prove its potential to be secure.
Not only does open source appear to have the feature first, it seems to do it provably better.
This doesn't sit well with me. Should students at a University be studying, developing, and releasing improved methods with which to launch DOS attacks..?
Most certainly yes. Others are studying it with purely malevolent intentions. The incentive of the University is benevolent. Carefully consider the consequences of not having public knowledge reflecting the capabilities of those with malicious intentions.
The onus is now upon the vendors to adhere to adequate standards, rather than resting upon public conformity and goodwill (which we both know is non-existent).
I agree that the skin-dance scene felt incomplete. But I also believe it was intended to show value in human existence beyond function, to show life as valuable in and of itself, as opposed to the machines who have a very "cause and effect" existence.
Although the dance may be interpreted on some sublime level as necessary for our psyche and happiness, I am not bound to that belief, and I think it was the point of that scene to show that our organic existence has some higher meaning beyond survival, in turn giving providing the reason and wherewithal to survive where the machines would not.
That's a very philosophical interpretation, but I think the brothers meant for the movie to have such a perspective for certain members of the audience to reflect upon. As such, I felt the skin-dance scene played an important part in producing the deep-thought aspect of the story.
Sometimes I wonder if the Star Wars franchise was intentionally undermined by George Lucas as a way to responsibly curtail the religion that it could never become, in his eyes. The latest two Star Wars movies are by no means the epic they came from, IMHO. Not having released those movies would have just as equally preserved the environment in which this faith is fostered. Only by releasing shoddy Hollywood knockoffs could he effect this sort of disdain.
Being the creator, I am sure that Mr. Lucas would have a very different perspective of the whole franchise than the fans, and I wonder what his view of the most fanatical fans are. I suspect his interpretation is not far from Alec Guinness'.
Sure, this is what I recollect; I can't go into too much detail, but I can give you a gloss over some of the cruxes we encountered.
The software in question was a combination of IIS, SQL Server, and Windows NT. First, as a startup, the cost of this software was enormous. The money we spent on licensing alone would have afforded us another 6-9 developers (there were only 10 at peak, IIRC) for a year. I should point out that developers were subsidized by the federal government for our work and cost the company roughly $24,000 annually. Let me only imply the time lost to development from the overhead of administrating these machines.
Given our choice of software, we were unable to distribute our database across multiple machines, for security, cost and technical reasons (according to paid technical support from Microsoft), and as such we had a single point of failure. We designed with this expectation, and had hoped for reasonable monolithic vertical expansion with more customers.
Let me explain the process of running data locally. My contribution was a transparent OpenBSD bridge/firewall, which served as an ingress filter to our paying clients and TCP filter to relevant ports, without which we would have suffered tremendously from the worms of passing (particularly the SQL worm) and plethora of root exploits in NT/IIS at the time. We did suffer from some of these worms, and we spent many an hour overnight reinstalling our live box. Our choice of Microsoft software precluded a choice to use fewer boxes, and in particular, one large production server rather than multiple redundant and swappable smaller ones.
One large local box was a tremendous cost in that we were forced on more than one occasion to cut off paying clients as a result of it going down. This did not happen often, mind you. But when it went down, it went down hard. I recall several occasions of it going down with a GPF in IIS, and no application or reapplication of restarting IIS would bring it back up, so we would have to reboot, a process that took no less than 10 minutes. This does not bode well when investors come asking your trial clients their impressions. This application was 24x7x365 for very specific paying clients who indeed demanded, for their own livelihood, 24x7x365 service.
Given the design of the software we had chosen, it quickly became obvious that it would not scale vertically. Our $40,000 box would accomodate *maybe* 150 clients. The insanity of this began to sink in, as our target market was in the hundreds of thousands of clients. In a vain effort to save our development, we explored alternatives. We ported a good chunk of what we did to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php), and based on what we could ascertain on the limited, but fairly indicative, subset of our software, it would scale much better, on an order of 200x. Better still, LAMP could be spread horizontally, across a farm of boxes, at no cost beyond hardware. The other alternative, which was even more successful, but harder to explain in this limited context was J2EE/JBoss. A port to J2EE/JBoss did not take place, but had we started with it, we would not have needed to explore alternatives, I can assure you. We also explored IBM solutions (less than I would have liked, mind you), and Oracle (more than I would have liked). They both came up short, for lack of our and their efforts, respectively.
At this point, however, having precluded that we would only ever be a monolithic operation due to the cost of the software we run upon, a total redesign would have been necessary to split out into an alternative. Our investors pulled out (and rightly so), and the company was liquidated. It sold its assets for around $150,000 on $1.5 million in development. Active Server Pages do not have much redeeming value beyond function, I must add. Had we used Java, I must emphasize, we would have gotten much closer to the investment price, in the reusability and design inherent. There would have been little, i
Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.
A company's choice of server OS, web server, and database may, in my experience, significantly contribute to their untimely demise.
To follow this thread, up to your argument: 1. (original thread) Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft. 2. (my reply) Companies have gone bankrupt for buying Microsoft. 3. (your reply) Companies don't go bankrupt for buying MS Word.
Do you not see any logical fallacy here? That being, your implication that the only software Microsoft offers that may possibly contribute to a company's demise is the choise of word processor. This is most certainly not the case.
What's more, your assertion that MS Word would not contribute to a company's demise is unsatisfied; I find it fairly likely that MS Word would cost more than any other word processing solution given the plethora of bugs, crashes, worms and viri targeting it. In a competitive scenario, a company not hindered by these costs would have a strategic, and hence competitive, advantage over one that is, and hence have greater survivability. Most (All?) Federal Banks use Lotus Notes for a damned fine reason (it's not a big target).
The way I see it, AMD chips will always be faster than Intel at x86 stuff. And when everyone is changing over, that's CRITICAL.
I think you are right, but not necessarily about what you think. It is "CRITICAL" because it is "The way [you] see it". I believe it is not the speed that is important here, but the perception.
The revenue from the fees would be split up among the creators according to a formula, based on how many times each work was downloaded or played. If you do the math, the fees can be pretty small while still replacing the revenue the music and movie industries would otherwise lose.
This is a dangerous assumption, and I have lobbied against the instantiation of such a system as being too easily abused, ignoring independent artists, and lacks adequate measurements.
Let's start with the 3rd point, that it is too hard to measure. In the Napster universe, this might have been possible, but in a truly peer-to-peer universe like Kazaa, there is no way to adequately measure the downloads. And even if there were, there is no way to associate a download with the semantically acquisition worthy of remuneration; if I download something I already own, rather than burn it again, does that indicate demand? Worse, it is possible to spoof acquisition to boost perceived demand through which remuneration is measured; record companies would just set up Vanatu companies and download copyrights of vested interests.
We have two problems: how to measure downloads that are valid and worth remuneration, and how to not measure downloads that are not valid and worth remuneration. I have proven, I think, in the mathematical sense (I am a mathematician), that these problems cannot be solved in peer to peer like Gnutella; that no application of encryption, authentication and verification can guarantee valid measurements, while still retaining the policies of open peer to peer (ie. no centralization). The question then becomes: If one restricts peer to peer to closed or centralized models that cost money, why would people not just use free open peer-to-peer? It is a question, then, of incentive to use my bandwidth to facilitate a distributed commercial download model, which undermines (mostly) the ability to uniquely distribute end-point secure copyrighted materials; one inherently has the ability to redistribute. Content industries want to control the content, but to implement peer to peer, with download accounting, they must facilitate the one control they most wish to restrict: copying. It seems like flying in the face of a dragon.
The ignoring of independent artists and abuse of the system tie together in that conglomerates can monopolize the remuneration much like they monopolize radio, as a result of the spoofing mentioned above. This happens now, in Canada, as the CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Collective) bases remuneration to the copyright industry from a levy on CD's, tapes, etc., based on radio play time. But radio play time is a function of multinational conglomerates such as ClearChannel, which in turn prohibits independent artists inasmuch as it artificially promotes artists of vested interest.
Quothe the raven: People like to apply words like evolution to any developmental process presumable for the coolness factor, and in the literal sense they are right (change over time). But it's just silly to imply that CG has evolved in a darwinian sense.
I disagree. The CG that is in use to day was naturally selected from all the CG developed, including and pointedly that tech which is no longer in use. Darwinin evolution, by definition, yes?
It may be a stretch in the literal sense (although I don't think so), but an analogy is most certainly validated in ensuring that the average reader can associate the changes with processes widely understood. The analogy extends to a greater lingo, permitting, at little expense, a greater descriptive vocabulary otherwise not available.
One could go around using the "developed" or "enhanced" or "extended" lingo, but they do not adequately encapsulate the "evolutionary" meaning, in the sense that the technology does things now that it could not before, which makes it superior to previous "generations". There is a plateau of stability, where feature sets are frozen, associated with a "generation" of CG, also leaning towards this analogy.
Or at least, that's my take. I don't mean to belittle the engineers (like myself), but I am not so certain that an engineer's thought process is that functionally different from natural selection. And from that precept, I have come to this disagreement with your assertion.
who play out every possible permutation of your life choices
The implication therein is that human choice is reflected on precisely the level that our universe branches into a multiverse at. Not all choices, I would imagine, as some are less choices and more an incantation of our biological (ie. fight or flight).
But certainly the wide and uncaught assumption of humanity, epitomized by your statement, is that certain choices are reflected by creating a new universe. Seems a tad narcissistic, when put that way, doesn't it?
... In another universe I choose not to post this.
You're the kind of guy that, if Twinkies were recalled because they caused cancer, you'd rush out to buy them all before they're gone and criticize Hostess. I think that was a Simpsons or Family Guy episode...
Exactly what are you talking about? Presumption of self-destructive behavior based on my assessment that a biography of George Bush had interesting, if not downright fascinating and controversial, context? I believe your quote is sorely out of place.
I can assure you, and provide references to the effect, that my assumption of personal responsibility towards myself and society is nothing short of stellar. Perhaps you should re-evaluate your means of character judgement.
On the other hand, where I made factual statements about interesting context, you have made an unsubstantiated claim that is both controversial and unqualified. If the book was full of half-truths and outright lies, why would the author be personally attacked? It is easy to defend against lies by claiming them so; incredible authors are transparent and their work tends to supply itself with a grain of salt. The reaction to this book I have observed only happens when claims hit close to the mark, and are hence a genuine threat.
I also humbly suggest a reevaluation of your means of argument; reference is infinitely superior to hand waiving. At the same time as you demonstrate questionable judgement of character you espouse unsubstantiated claims with some expectation of credibility? Probably not worth my time to reply, but I thought you might benefit from knowing how your comments came across.
I wish Fortunate Son was required reading as well...
Unlikely, since I believe the USA has burned 70,000 copies of this, several publishers (five?) have started and stopped its printing, and the author, J.W. Hatfield a credible author and father, has committed suicide as a result. Very interesting text, though; I would be far less inclined to believe it reflected some truth if so much effort had not gone into preventing its dissemination.
I believe the expression is "for the love of God", not "for the love of me". Unless you are God, in which case, Hi God, I beg your pardon, and thanks for the babel fish.
/me thinks ROT13? WTF is that. /me googles ROT13. /me finds http://www.alliancestudio.com/cgi-bin/rot13.cgi /me sends:ROT13 SPOILER: Na rzcgl cnffjbeq jvyy cnff guvf purpx orpnhfr gur pbqr hfrf gur yratgu bs gur hfre ragel, abg gur yratgu bs gur pbeerpg cnffjbeq. Bgure cbgragvny ceboyrzf (ohssre biresybjf, rgp.) ner yrsg nf na rkrepvfr sbe gur ernqre. [Funzryrff cyht: Vs lbh rawbl ceboyrzf yvxr guvf, unir fgebat frphevgl rkcrevrapr, pbzzhavpngr jryy, naq jnag n wbo ng n sha (naq cebsvgnoyr) pbzcnal, ivfvg uggc://jjj.pelcgbtencul.pbz/pbzcnal/pnerref.ugzy.] /me receives english translation. /me acquires 31337ness. /me goes to shameless plug for job, only to find it slashdotted. DAMNIT /me feels 31337 status drain away.
I seem to recall that OpenBSD was developed exclusively outside the USA because of export restrictions on crypto. Now it is being funded by DARPA? I am little confused on the matter, but thought that it was an interesting enough point to post.
Least with Open Source other people can vet the code to make sure there isn't any backdoors.
Not strictly true - the single point of failure is the compiler. If the Intel or gcc compiler has a smart 'exploit', (1) they can backdoor specific or general programs without an exploit in source, and (2) this exploit can self-propagate in the compiler, as the backdoor compiler compiles the new compiler, so once written the source for the self-propagating compiler exploit can be deleted. Donald Knuth did this with gcc(?), iirc.
Good references; some potential gems in there. The replies to my above comment seem to think I was being serious. This was not the case.:p
For POD (plain old data), w/o pointers, it's actually a fine code snippet, albeit slightly too general in the event of arbitrary operators '<<' and '>>' overloading. There are several methods to get around pointers and references -- many of which are outlined in design patterns "memento"'s, collectively with "compositors" and "decorators", to implicitly (in terms of design choices) create serialization.
Another often useful reference, C++ FAQ Lite, Serialization is also a gem, I believe, although I had never bothered to read that section.
I am looking at some of the swizzling googles, now.
It's unfortunate that I discovered A Tale in the Desert last week... I was quite looking forward to MOO3, but I just don't have the time for two games. I'm sure MOO3 will be around for some time, but right now ATITD fills in all those psychological voids that society is otherwise unable to provide.;)
Slashdot Mirror
This is an example of where free software is certainly ahead of the commercial equivalents. Both Kopete and Gaim have had options to encrypt using PGP for quite some time. (Gaim for significantly longer, iirc)
By delegating the authentication and validation to PGP, they are potentially as-secure-as PGP. By doing in-house certification, ala. Trillian & AIM, the identification and encryption is an internal mechanism, and I would argue (successfully) that it is more difficult to prove its potential to be secure.
Not only does open source appear to have the feature first, it seems to do it provably better.
This doesn't sit well with me. Should students at a University be studying, developing, and releasing improved methods with which to launch DOS attacks..?
Most certainly yes. Others are studying it with purely malevolent intentions. The incentive of the University is benevolent. Carefully consider the consequences of not having public knowledge reflecting the capabilities of those with malicious intentions.
The onus is now upon the vendors to adhere to adequate standards, rather than resting upon public conformity and goodwill (which we both know is non-existent).
I thought it was actually the 7th incarnation of the city -- 6 saviors came before, after all.
Also, maybe they were trying to give you a hint that zion is actually babylon.
...
...)
Or Iraq
(Cradle of civilization and all
This may act as a spoiler, for the uninitiated. :)
I agree that the skin-dance scene felt incomplete. But I also believe it was intended to show value in human existence beyond function, to show life as valuable in and of itself, as opposed to the machines who have a very "cause and effect" existence.
Although the dance may be interpreted on some sublime level as necessary for our psyche and happiness, I am not bound to that belief, and I think it was the point of that scene to show that our organic existence has some higher meaning beyond survival, in turn giving providing the reason and wherewithal to survive where the machines would not.
That's a very philosophical interpretation, but I think the brothers meant for the movie to have such a perspective for certain members of the audience to reflect upon. As such, I felt the skin-dance scene played an important part in producing the deep-thought aspect of the story.
Sometimes I wonder if the Star Wars franchise was intentionally undermined by George Lucas as a way to responsibly curtail the religion that it could never become, in his eyes. The latest two Star Wars movies are by no means the epic they came from, IMHO. Not having released those movies would have just as equally preserved the environment in which this faith is fostered. Only by releasing shoddy Hollywood knockoffs could he effect this sort of disdain.
Being the creator, I am sure that Mr. Lucas would have a very different perspective of the whole franchise than the fans, and I wonder what his view of the most fanatical fans are. I suspect his interpretation is not far from Alec Guinness'.
Please give more information.
Sure, this is what I recollect; I can't go into too much detail, but I can give you a gloss over some of the cruxes we encountered.
The software in question was a combination of IIS, SQL Server, and Windows NT. First, as a startup, the cost of this software was enormous. The money we spent on licensing alone would have afforded us another 6-9 developers (there were only 10 at peak, IIRC) for a year. I should point out that developers were subsidized by the federal government for our work and cost the company roughly $24,000 annually. Let me only imply the time lost to development from the overhead of administrating these machines.
Given our choice of software, we were unable to distribute our database across multiple machines, for security, cost and technical reasons (according to paid technical support from Microsoft), and as such we had a single point of failure. We designed with this expectation, and had hoped for reasonable monolithic vertical expansion with more customers.
Let me explain the process of running data locally. My contribution was a transparent OpenBSD bridge/firewall, which served as an ingress filter to our paying clients and TCP filter to relevant ports, without which we would have suffered tremendously from the worms of passing (particularly the SQL worm) and plethora of root exploits in NT/IIS at the time. We did suffer from some of these worms, and we spent many an hour overnight reinstalling our live box. Our choice of Microsoft software precluded a choice to use fewer boxes, and in particular, one large production server rather than multiple redundant and swappable smaller ones.
One large local box was a tremendous cost in that we were forced on more than one occasion to cut off paying clients as a result of it going down. This did not happen often, mind you. But when it went down, it went down hard. I recall several occasions of it going down with a GPF in IIS, and no application or reapplication of restarting IIS would bring it back up, so we would have to reboot, a process that took no less than 10 minutes. This does not bode well when investors come asking your trial clients their impressions. This application was 24x7x365 for very specific paying clients who indeed demanded, for their own livelihood, 24x7x365 service.
Given the design of the software we had chosen, it quickly became obvious that it would not scale vertically. Our $40,000 box would accomodate *maybe* 150 clients. The insanity of this began to sink in, as our target market was in the hundreds of thousands of clients. In a vain effort to save our development, we explored alternatives. We ported a good chunk of what we did to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php), and based on what we could ascertain on the limited, but fairly indicative, subset of our software, it would scale much better, on an order of 200x. Better still, LAMP could be spread horizontally, across a farm of boxes, at no cost beyond hardware. The other alternative, which was even more successful, but harder to explain in this limited context was J2EE/JBoss. A port to J2EE/JBoss did not take place, but had we started with it, we would not have needed to explore alternatives, I can assure you. We also explored IBM solutions (less than I would have liked, mind you), and Oracle (more than I would have liked). They both came up short, for lack of our and their efforts, respectively.
At this point, however, having precluded that we would only ever be a monolithic operation due to the cost of the software we run upon, a total redesign would have been necessary to split out into an alternative. Our investors pulled out (and rightly so), and the company was liquidated. It sold its assets for around $150,000 on $1.5 million in development. Active Server Pages do not have much redeeming value beyond function, I must add. Had we used Java, I must emphasize, we would have gotten much closer to the investment price, in the reusability and design inherent. There would have been little, i
Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.
A company's choice of server OS, web server, and database may, in my experience, significantly contribute to their untimely demise.
To follow this thread, up to your argument:
1. (original thread) Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.
2. (my reply) Companies have gone bankrupt for buying Microsoft.
3. (your reply) Companies don't go bankrupt for buying MS Word.
Do you not see any logical fallacy here? That being, your implication that the only software Microsoft offers that may possibly contribute to a company's demise is the choise of word processor. This is most certainly not the case.
What's more, your assertion that MS Word would not contribute to a company's demise is unsatisfied; I find it fairly likely that MS Word would cost more than any other word processing solution given the plethora of bugs, crashes, worms and viri targeting it. In a competitive scenario, a company not hindered by these costs would have a strategic, and hence competitive, advantage over one that is, and hence have greater survivability. Most (All?) Federal Banks use Lotus Notes for a damned fine reason (it's not a big target).
Cheers.
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
...
Yeah but lots of companies went out of business for doing it (one of my former included)
The way I see it, AMD chips will always be faster than Intel at x86 stuff. And when everyone is changing over, that's CRITICAL.
I think you are right, but not necessarily about what you think. It is "CRITICAL" because it is "The way [you] see it". I believe it is not the speed that is important here, but the perception.
'our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community'
Perhaps they haven't seen innovation from the open source community precisely because they are customers locked in to Microsoft products?
At least it is carefully worded so as to be potentially truthful.
The revenue from the fees would be split up among the creators according to a formula, based on how many times each work was downloaded or played. If you do the math, the fees can be pretty small while still replacing the revenue the music and movie industries would otherwise lose.
This is a dangerous assumption, and I have lobbied against the instantiation of such a system as being too easily abused, ignoring independent artists, and lacks adequate measurements.
Let's start with the 3rd point, that it is too hard to measure. In the Napster universe, this might have been possible, but in a truly peer-to-peer universe like Kazaa, there is no way to adequately measure the downloads. And even if there were, there is no way to associate a download with the semantically acquisition worthy of remuneration; if I download something I already own, rather than burn it again, does that indicate demand? Worse, it is possible to spoof acquisition to boost perceived demand through which remuneration is measured; record companies would just set up Vanatu companies and download copyrights of vested interests.
We have two problems: how to measure downloads that are valid and worth remuneration, and how to not measure downloads that are not valid and worth remuneration. I have proven, I think, in the mathematical sense (I am a mathematician), that these problems cannot be solved in peer to peer like Gnutella; that no application of encryption, authentication and verification can guarantee valid measurements, while still retaining the policies of open peer to peer (ie. no centralization). The question then becomes: If one restricts peer to peer to closed or centralized models that cost money, why would people not just use free open peer-to-peer? It is a question, then, of incentive to use my bandwidth to facilitate a distributed commercial download model, which undermines (mostly) the ability to uniquely distribute end-point secure copyrighted materials; one inherently has the ability to redistribute. Content industries want to control the content, but to implement peer to peer, with download accounting, they must facilitate the one control they most wish to restrict: copying. It seems like flying in the face of a dragon.
The ignoring of independent artists and abuse of the system tie together in that conglomerates can monopolize the remuneration much like they monopolize radio, as a result of the spoofing mentioned above. This happens now, in Canada, as the CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Collective) bases remuneration to the copyright industry from a levy on CD's, tapes, etc., based on radio play time. But radio play time is a function of multinational conglomerates such as ClearChannel, which in turn prohibits independent artists inasmuch as it artificially promotes artists of vested interest.
Great QA, btw.
Quothe the raven:
People like to apply words like evolution to any developmental process presumable for the coolness factor, and in the literal sense they are right (change over time). But it's just silly to imply that CG has evolved in a darwinian sense.
I disagree. The CG that is in use to day was naturally selected from all the CG developed, including and pointedly that tech which is no longer in use. Darwinin evolution, by definition, yes?
It may be a stretch in the literal sense (although I don't think so), but an analogy is most certainly validated in ensuring that the average reader can associate the changes with processes widely understood. The analogy extends to a greater lingo, permitting, at little expense, a greater descriptive vocabulary otherwise not available.
One could go around using the "developed" or "enhanced" or "extended" lingo, but they do not adequately encapsulate the "evolutionary" meaning, in the sense that the technology does things now that it could not before, which makes it superior to previous "generations". There is a plateau of stability, where feature sets are frozen, associated with a "generation" of CG, also leaning towards this analogy.
Or at least, that's my take. I don't mean to belittle the engineers (like myself), but I am not so certain that an engineer's thought process is that functionally different from natural selection. And from that precept, I have come to this disagreement with your assertion.
who play out every possible permutation of your life choices
... In another universe I choose not to post this.
The implication therein is that human choice is reflected on precisely the level that our universe branches into a multiverse at. Not all choices, I would imagine, as some are less choices and more an incantation of our biological (ie. fight or flight).
But certainly the wide and uncaught assumption of humanity, epitomized by your statement, is that certain choices are reflected by creating a new universe. Seems a tad narcissistic, when put that way, doesn't it?
Very good reference; this certainly sheds light on that side of the controversy. As you noted, Google seems to turn up nothing to this end.
You're the kind of guy that, if Twinkies were recalled because they caused cancer, you'd rush out to buy them all before they're gone and criticize Hostess. I think that was a Simpsons or Family Guy episode ...
Exactly what are you talking about? Presumption of self-destructive behavior based on my assessment that a biography of George Bush had interesting, if not downright fascinating and controversial, context? I believe your quote is sorely out of place.
I can assure you, and provide references to the effect, that my assumption of personal responsibility towards myself and society is nothing short of stellar. Perhaps you should re-evaluate your means of character judgement.
On the other hand, where I made factual statements about interesting context, you have made an unsubstantiated claim that is both controversial and unqualified. If the book was full of half-truths and outright lies, why would the author be personally attacked? It is easy to defend against lies by claiming them so; incredible authors are transparent and their work tends to supply itself with a grain of salt. The reaction to this book I have observed only happens when claims hit close to the mark, and are hence a genuine threat.
I also humbly suggest a reevaluation of your means of argument; reference is infinitely superior to hand waiving. At the same time as you demonstrate questionable judgement of character you espouse unsubstantiated claims with some expectation of credibility? Probably not worth my time to reply, but I thought you might benefit from knowing how your comments came across.
I wish Fortunate Son was required reading as well ...
Unlikely, since I believe the USA has burned 70,000 copies of this, several publishers (five?) have started and stopped its printing, and the author, J.W. Hatfield a credible author and father, has committed suicide as a result. Very interesting text, though; I would be far less inclined to believe it reflected some truth if so much effort had not gone into preventing its dissemination.
Of course, it's Google. It's got both quality and enormous brand recognition - not an easy target, not even for Microsoft
%s/Google/Palm/
Indeed, the inferiority of the products and the difficulty of the target have not proven to be successful deterrants to the Microsoft machine.
I believe the expression is "for the love of God ", not "for the love of me ". Unless you are God, in which case, Hi God, I beg your pardon, and thanks for the babel fish.
DAMNIT
I seem to recall that OpenBSD was developed exclusively outside the USA because of export restrictions on crypto. Now it is being funded by DARPA? I am little confused on the matter, but thought that it was an interesting enough point to post.
Least with Open Source other people can vet the code to make sure there isn't any backdoors.
;)
Not strictly true - the single point of failure is the compiler. If the Intel or gcc compiler has a smart 'exploit', (1) they can backdoor specific or general programs without an exploit in source, and (2) this exploit can self-propagate in the compiler, as the backdoor compiler compiles the new compiler, so once written the source for the self-propagating compiler exploit can be deleted. Donald Knuth did this with gcc(?), iirc.
Just FYI.
Good references; some potential gems in there. The replies to my above comment seem to think I was being serious. This was not the case. :p
For POD (plain old data), w/o pointers, it's actually a fine code snippet, albeit slightly too general in the event of arbitrary operators '<<' and '>>' overloading. There are several methods to get around pointers and references -- many of which are outlined in design patterns "memento"'s, collectively with "compositors" and "decorators", to implicitly (in terms of design choices) create serialization.
Another often useful reference, C++ FAQ Lite, Serialization is also a gem, I believe, although I had never bothered to read that section.
I am looking at some of the swizzling googles, now.
It's unfortunate that I discovered A Tale in the Desert last week ... I was quite looking forward to MOO3, but I just don't have the time for two games. I'm sure MOO3 will be around for some time, but right now ATITD fills in all those psychological voids that society is otherwise unable to provide. ;)