Interesting side-discussion (maybe): How many c0derZ have similarly wide-ranging tastes (i.e. not just listening to one style of music)?
I'd probably agree that it's a lot of us. I do, and the few other real coders I know also have a broad taste. Personally, I like just about anything except manufactured pop (N-sync comes to mind) and bad country. Including opera (except for Wagner's opera; if I have to hear the Ring Cycle again I'll kill someone).
Disclaimer: This may look like a personal attack. It is not intended to be. Just as I would attempt to correct an article which misrepresented Linux or open source in a non-geek forum, I feel the need to touch on a few points here which misrepresent Christianity in this, a non-religious forum. So consider this a bugfix.:) Also, I use the term "you" often here; I mean the plural "you" (/. readers) and not the singular "you" (extrasolar). So, nothing personal, extrasolar.
I used to be a Chrisitian but....[snip]
This statement amuses me, almost as if he had said, "I used to be a poached egg but..." Let me throw down some terms, often confused by those who don't run in such circles (sort of akin to the whole hacker/cracker mess we see so often):
religion - a specific system of belief, worship, tradition, etc., often involving a code of ethics. Examples include Baha'i, Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Paganism, Satanism, Wicca, or what have you. Also includes subgroups of these to any granularity, from the coarse ("protestant") to the exceedingly fine ("Independent-Fundamental Baptist"). You may freely choose a group to associate with at any time. Though each particular religion may have its own entrance requirements, for the most part, you can join and withdraw at any time. The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of choice among these. So it could easily be the case that "I used to be a Catholic." I chose to associate with a certain religion and participate in their stuff because I shared their beliefs. But then I changed my mind, so I no longer affiliate with them. OTOH...
Christianity - a fundamental state of being resulting from a real transaction with God. This expresses a relationship between you and God; if I am a Christian, I can no more cease to be a Christian than I can cease to be my mother's son. I can stop acting like her son and never speak to her again, but this affects the quality of our relationship and not its existence; she is still my mother.
Though Christianity speaks to what you believe (certain fundamental beliefs have to be in place before the relationship exists) and how you should behave, it is primarily an expression of who you are, not how you worship or what you do. Those things are the domain of religion, which is personal, variable and often debatable within a certain spectrum. Thus if you become a Christian there's no going back; the deal is final.
(As an aside, though even the protestant religions vary quite a bit in their external appearance, those from different "denominations" I've met who have an extremely close, intimate relationship with God agree overwhelmingly on all but the smallest issues.)
And one more thing:
is it sin to view porn on the internet? Is that akin to adultery for those who are married?
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery'; but I say to you, that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." -- Matthew 5:27-28
Yep. I'd say Jesus said it pretty plainly. As another reader has already pointed out, it's all about the heart. Actions are merely external manifestations of an internal issue.
To take the obligatory jab at Microsoft which also happens to help illustrate my point: If you don't believe the internals are really what matters, why would you use Linux rather than Windows?
Just another nit pick from the guy who's really glad that humans aren't open source...
Suppose Windows dominion does end next year. Without the platform holding people back....
Keep in mind that operating systems are no longer truly applications; they have descended into the realm of infrastructure.
Thus a great benefit of the dominance of the x86/Windows platform has been that it has provided a common infrastructure. It benefits the market if programmers don't have to spend precious resources porting the same program to every architecture under the sun (Mac, alpha, linux, Win9x, NT, BSD, BeOS, etc). Those same dollars are invested in a single product for a single platform, and the quality is higher because of it. Consumers benefit. (Of course, it often makes for cleaner *code* when one has to write it so that it compiles on Solaris, BeOS, linux, BSD, MacOS X, and all the other unices, but this is tangential to my point.)
So Microsoft has been greatly beneficial in providing a platform that almost all computers can be assumed to have. It has gone a long way in making Win32 (be it 95, 98, or NT) a required infrastructure. Where they have failed consumers is that their infrastructure is bad. The UI is currently unparalleled, but the internals are a mess!
So though your analysis of potential OS fragmentation may be accurate, I don't think it will be A Good Thing. The software market needs to be able to write for a common platform.
OTOH, the processor market can fragment and competition will actually be beneficial. Especially if Open Source applications become the norm, compiler writers will hide the processor differences from the software developers. One can even envision a self-compiling program, much like a MS setup.exe or an rpm that would be distributed in source form and would automatically unpack, configure, compile, and install itself for the host environment just by double-clicking. When we all have 10GHz machines on our desk, compile time will be negligible.
Hate to perpetuate an offtopic thread, but this argument is intellectually unsound.
The problem is that the Bible itself has many morally "bad" passages, especially the Old Testament. You'll find God commanding His followers to rape, murder, pillage, etc.
When reading the Bible, it is important to understand the goal of various passages. Most of the morally "bad" passages you refer to are in historical books written to describe what happened. This is quite different from prescriptive passages which were intended to be instructional.
Despite saying in one place that killing is bad, God commands His followers to kill all the male children prisoners, and keep the female children prisoners for sex slaves.
Note the difference between murder - unlawful and malicious or premeditative slaying of another, and killing in wars where another country is being morally judged. A prohibition on murder by no means disallows war.
Finally, the directive to kill all males and keep women and children was designed for moral and religious purity. In male-dominated cultures, killing all the men prevented dilution of their religious views with "heathen" populations. And there's no indication that the females were to be used as "sex slaves"; they became members of the conquering nation (an accepted wartime practice of the day) and were married just like "native" women.
I think this quote from Michael J. Miller, editor-in-chief of PC Magazine is appropriate (from his opinion column of May 25, 1999). He is speaking about the Melissa virus:
"The biggest problem is that the architecture of Word and Excel, with their embedded macro capabilities, makes them great targets for virus writers. Visual Basic for Applications makes writing such macros easy, and in this context, that's the absolute worst news."
Certainly Windows 9x and other consumer-level products from Microsoft leave much to be desired in the way of security. In fact, the first time I discovered you could bypass the Windows 95 "login" by pressing Cancel, I nearly blew a gasket laughing.
Microsoft does user interfaces probably better than anyone. But despite what many consider to be a superior "look and feel", I won't use Internet Explorer because I don't like the inherent security risk associated with ActiveX components. Similarly, though it might be more convenient, I won't turn on embedded macros in any Office product because it's not worth the risk.
The great benefit of the Melissa virus for me is that the wipespread coverage got my students asking me about the virus. I was able to take a day explaining the nature of macros and why the fundamental design of Microsoft Office puts them at risk. Now at least those that paid attention are more cognizant of the security issues with the systems they use every day.
This report discusses something I have secretly hoped: MP3 (or any other format) won't make CDs go away. At least not anytime soon.
Now, I'm as nerdy as the next guy (nerdier if the next guy happens to be my brother). But I like having CDs, for reasons related to why I will probably never buy an eBook as long as paperbacks still exist. The physical medium just suits me. I like liner notes. It is important to me to hear an entire work from an artist (ten or so songs carefully ordered) instead of just merely the one hit the radio picks up.
I even like the fact that for the most part, you can't just get a single song at a time from an artist (I never buy singles). Often it is the other tracks on the CD I find myself listening to years later. Some examples from my own collection (which date me, I'm sure).
Bought the album for: Outshined; keep it for: Slaves and Bulldozers Bought the album for: Under the Bridge; keep it for: Funky Monks and Mellowship Slinky in B major Bought the album for: Alive and Jeremy; keep it for: Porch and Garden Bought the album for: What I Am; keep it for: Air of December and Now Bought the album for: head like a hole; keep it for: that's what i get and something i can never have
Now of course, there will be a market for online digital singles for one-hit wonders (Right Said Fred comes to mind; those guys should never have even been asked to come up with an album). And I'll use MP3 or the ubiquitious, lossy, high-quality audio compression format du-jour to make my purchased music more portable. But you can bet I won't be downloading all my music anytime soon.
Although, if MP3 manages to make record companies charge $5 per CD instead of $15 (something more in line with what they should cost, given manufacturing and distribution costs and reasonable royalties), you won't hear me complain....
Unlike self-styled Web journalists, with no distance between their thumb and the "enter" key...
This reminds me of a quote from Frank Herbert, in Dune:
"The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called
spannungsbogen -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing."
Deciding what not to say in an article is definitely the more difficult task.
(Of course, the ironic act of actually composing this comment - deciding what to say, or even whether or not I should submit - is not lost on me.)
> any "hacker" could easily bypass the > currently-installed OS and install their > own, be it NT, Linux, or MS-DOS 2.11.
This is true. However, he correctly assumes that it would be more difficult to install a hacked Windows NT similar enough to go unnoticed.
The open source model makes it reasonable that a normal user on a system could nab the current kernel source from/usr/src/linux/, add their malicious code, compile it at home, and then sneak back in to the console at night, boot off a rescue disk, and install their custom kernel without ever needing root access. This is of course just as possible with NT but more difficult.
So installing a custom kernel is not restricted to open-source systems, it would seem to be a bit easier. Of course, all modifications to open-source systems are easier; that's why we like them!
The moral of the story: boot SCSI-C-A; set a BIOS password, and keep those server closets locked. Oh, and use an open-source OS - teacher says.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting side-discussion (maybe): How many c0derZ have similarly wide-ranging tastes (i.e. not just listening to one style of music)?
I'd probably agree that it's a lot of us. I do, and the few other real coders I know also have a broad taste. Personally, I like just about anything except manufactured pop (N-sync comes to mind) and bad country. Including opera (except for Wagner's opera; if I have to hear the Ring Cycle again I'll kill someone).
Disclaimer: This may look like a personal attack. It is not intended to be. Just as I would attempt to correct an article which misrepresented Linux or open source in a non-geek forum, I feel the need to touch on a few points here which misrepresent Christianity in this, a non-religious forum. So consider this a bugfix. :) Also, I use the term "you" often here; I mean the plural "you" (/. readers) and not the singular "you" (extrasolar). So, nothing personal, extrasolar.
I used to be a Chrisitian but....[snip]
This statement amuses me, almost as if he had said, "I used to be a poached egg but..." Let me throw down some terms, often confused by those who don't run in such circles (sort of akin to the whole hacker/cracker mess we see so often):
Though Christianity speaks to what you believe (certain fundamental beliefs have to be in place before the relationship exists) and how you should behave, it is primarily an expression of who you are, not how you worship or what you do. Those things are the domain of religion, which is personal, variable and often debatable within a certain spectrum. Thus if you become a Christian there's no going back; the deal is final.
(As an aside, though even the protestant religions vary quite a bit in their external appearance, those from different "denominations" I've met who have an extremely close, intimate relationship with God agree overwhelmingly on all but the smallest issues.)
And one more thing:
is it sin to view porn on the internet? Is that akin to adultery for those who are married?
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery'; but I say to you, that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." -- Matthew 5:27-28
Yep. I'd say Jesus said it pretty plainly. As another reader has already pointed out, it's all about the heart. Actions are merely external manifestations of an internal issue.
To take the obligatory jab at Microsoft which also happens to help illustrate my point: If you don't believe the internals are really what matters, why would you use Linux rather than Windows?
Just another nit pick from the guy who's really glad that humans aren't open source...
Suppose Windows dominion does end next year. Without the platform holding people back ....
Keep in mind that operating systems are no longer truly applications; they have descended into the realm of infrastructure.
Thus a great benefit of the dominance of the x86/Windows platform has been that it has provided a common infrastructure. It benefits the market if programmers don't have to spend precious resources porting the same program to every architecture under the sun (Mac, alpha, linux, Win9x, NT, BSD, BeOS, etc). Those same dollars are invested in a single product for a single platform, and the quality is higher because of it. Consumers benefit. (Of course, it often makes for cleaner *code* when one has to write it so that it compiles on Solaris, BeOS, linux, BSD, MacOS X, and all the other unices, but this is tangential to my point.)
So Microsoft has been greatly beneficial in providing a platform that almost all computers can be assumed to have. It has gone a long way in making Win32 (be it 95, 98, or NT) a required infrastructure. Where they have failed consumers is that their infrastructure is bad. The UI is currently unparalleled, but the internals are a mess!
So though your analysis of potential OS fragmentation may be accurate, I don't think it will be A Good Thing. The software market needs to be able to write for a common platform.
OTOH, the processor market can fragment and competition will actually be beneficial. Especially if Open Source applications become the norm, compiler writers will hide the processor differences from the software developers. One can even envision a self-compiling program, much like a MS setup.exe or an rpm that would be distributed in source form and would automatically unpack, configure, compile, and install itself for the host environment just by double-clicking. When we all have 10GHz machines on our desk, compile time will be negligible.
Hate to perpetuate an offtopic thread, but this argument is intellectually unsound.
The problem is that the Bible itself has many morally "bad" passages, especially the Old Testament. You'll find God commanding His followers to rape, murder, pillage, etc.
When reading the Bible, it is important to understand the goal of various passages. Most of the morally "bad" passages you refer to are in historical books written to describe what happened. This is quite different from prescriptive passages which were intended to be instructional.
Despite saying in one place that killing is bad, God commands His followers to kill all the male children prisoners, and keep the female children prisoners for sex slaves.
Note the difference between murder - unlawful and malicious or premeditative slaying of another, and killing in wars where another country is being morally judged. A prohibition on murder by no means disallows war.
Finally, the directive to kill all males and keep women and children was designed for moral and religious purity. In male-dominated cultures, killing all the men prevented dilution of their religious views with "heathen" populations. And there's no indication that the females were to be used as "sex slaves"; they became members of the conquering nation (an accepted wartime practice of the day) and were married just like "native" women.
I think this quote from Michael J. Miller, editor-in-chief of PC Magazine is appropriate (from his opinion column of May 25, 1999). He is speaking about the Melissa virus:
Certainly Windows 9x and other consumer-level products from Microsoft leave much to be desired in the way of security. In fact, the first time I discovered you could bypass the Windows 95 "login" by pressing Cancel, I nearly blew a gasket laughing.
Microsoft does user interfaces probably better than anyone. But despite what many consider to be a superior "look and feel", I won't use Internet Explorer because I don't like the inherent security risk associated with ActiveX components. Similarly, though it might be more convenient, I won't turn on embedded macros in any Office product because it's not worth the risk.
The great benefit of the Melissa virus for me is that the wipespread coverage got my students asking me about the virus. I was able to take a day explaining the nature of macros and why the fundamental design of Microsoft Office puts them at risk. Now at least those that paid attention are more cognizant of the security issues with the systems they use every day.
One wonders if articles like this will result in more traffic toward operating systems built with security in mind like OpenBSD.
This report discusses something I have secretly hoped: MP3 (or any other format) won't make CDs go away. At least not anytime soon.
Now, I'm as nerdy as the next guy (nerdier if the next guy happens to be my brother). But I like having CDs, for reasons related to why I will probably never buy an eBook as long as paperbacks still exist. The physical medium just suits me. I like liner notes. It is important to me to hear an entire work from an artist (ten or so songs carefully ordered) instead of just merely the one hit the radio picks up.
I even like the fact that for the most part, you can't just get a single song at a time from an artist (I never buy singles). Often it is the other tracks on the CD I find myself listening to years later. Some examples from my own collection (which date me, I'm sure).
Bought the album for: Outshined; keep it for: Slaves and Bulldozers
Bought the album for: Under the Bridge; keep it for: Funky Monks and Mellowship Slinky in B major
Bought the album for: Alive and Jeremy; keep it for: Porch and Garden
Bought the album for: What I Am; keep it for: Air of December and Now
Bought the album for: head like a hole; keep it for: that's what i get and something i can never have
Now of course, there will be a market for online digital singles for one-hit wonders (Right Said Fred comes to mind; those guys should never have even been asked to come up with an album). And I'll use MP3 or the ubiquitious, lossy, high-quality audio compression format du-jour to make my purchased music more portable. But you can bet I won't be downloading all my music anytime soon.
Although, if MP3 manages to make record companies charge $5 per CD instead of $15 (something more in line with what they should cost, given manufacturing and distribution costs and reasonable royalties), you won't hear me complain....
Unlike self-styled Web journalists, with no distance between their thumb and the "enter" key...
This reminds me of a quote from Frank Herbert, in Dune:
Deciding what not to say in an article is definitely the more difficult task.
(Of course, the ironic act of actually composing this comment - deciding what to say, or even whether or not I should submit - is not lost on me.)
> any "hacker" could easily bypass the
> currently-installed OS and install their
> own, be it NT, Linux, or MS-DOS 2.11.
This is true. However, he correctly assumes that it would be more difficult to install a hacked Windows NT similar enough to go unnoticed.
The open source model makes it reasonable that a normal user on a system could nab the current kernel source from /usr/src/linux/, add their malicious code, compile it at home, and then sneak back in to the console at night, boot off a rescue disk, and install their custom kernel without ever needing root access. This is of course just as possible with NT but more difficult.
So installing a custom kernel is not restricted to open-source systems, it would seem to be a bit easier. Of course, all modifications to open-source systems are easier; that's why we like them!
The moral of the story: boot SCSI-C-A; set a BIOS password, and keep those server closets locked. Oh, and use an open-source OS - teacher says. :)