If I remember right Collossus was also mainly operated by women, for similar reasons, although I dont think they wrote the programs. This means that initially the female Geeks out numbered the male ones.
Collosus was designed and built by Tommy Flowers, who must surely be the most forgottten pioneer of the computer age.
Theres a Chandra image of Cassiopia A on Astronomy Picture of the day (27/8/99) which is desktop sized. No doubt they'll have other ones over the next few days.
Brown Dwarfs are small, not quite big enough to become stars, type objects (maybe 50 times the size of Jupiter to about 0.08 times the size of the sun) and so wouldn't have the gravitational pull to cause those sort of speeds (and if they did they'd gain so much mass that the would become proper sdtars fairly quickly anyway).
A neutron star is a bit more possible but again they dont have the gravitational pull talked about in the article, and again a neutron star that accreted matter in the sorts of quantities that are detectable would pretty soon collapse into a black hole anyway.
I guess they figure out the gravitational force needed to cause these sorts of masses of gass to move at these sorts of speeds then figure out the mass of the object needed to cause that force, if its above a certain amount (100 times that of the sun?) then the object would collapse under its own gravity and become a black hole.
Disclaimer: Some of the numbers might be wrong, I'm at work and my books are at home.
> People that I know who live in "depressed" areas (Appalachia in the top 20 poorest US counties) LIKE where they are at because you DON'T need all the crap that the rich folks need to get along.
Poor people are poor because they like it???? Have you ever been poor????? I guess your idea of poor is not being able to afford the latest P-III 550 duel processor, or whatever your latest fad is, never mind I'm sure mommy and daddy'll get you one for christmas.
>And another thing, Jon, A right on some else's part is not a right if it produces an obligation on my part. It is then just a wish.
So the right to (say) free education, is just a wish because it oblige's you to pay taxes to pay for it, or the right to life is only wish because it places an obligation on everyone else not to kill you. Interesting point of view. I'm glad I dont live in your world.
>Socialism doesn't work! If capitalism produces people like you then give me socialism anyday. Anyone know the lyrics to the "Red Flag"?
ISDN costs as much as it does to persuade people not to use it. ISDN (Home Highway) uses much more switch capacity then a normal 64kbps line, so if it was cheap enough that everyone had it (or even just the portion of the population wanting fast internet access) would require a massive investment in new switches, which would drive up the cost again. With the pricing as it is, enough people can get it to make it profitable, but few enough to minimise the capacity problems on the switches.
bil
More to unions then strikes.
on
GEEK Unions?
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· Score: 1
Strikes are a very small part of what unions do, most of their effort goes into things like lobbying the government foir or against laws that effect the membership(the minimum wage law recently introduced in the UK owes a lot to union campaigns), providing legal advice for members, providing represetation in disciplinary cases, fighting unfair dismissal, and as thousand and one other things that nobody really notices untill they need them (my union is thinking of setting up a dating agency !! Not sure what that says about its members:) )
Imagine if a large well organised "International Geek Federation" representing tens of thousands of IT workers worldwide from new graduates to managers launched a press/lobbying campaign saying "This new encryption law will cost jobs and destroy the internet, here our well reasoned facts and figures to back up our claim", and compare the effect to that of a few hundred people sending emails to a member of the government who doesn't understand the subject.
While we remain a fragmented community linked only by a comman love of computers and divided by such religious issues as which distro is best we will have no say in how the internet and IT in general develops leaving agendas to be set by big business and politicians . By forming a union or such like (the Institute of Geeks and Allied Trades anyone?) we at least stand some chance of influencing the future of that which we love.
The Colossus was designed by Tommy Flowers (who died late last year) from the Post Office Research Department. This department is now British Telecom Research Labs based in Ipswich. So why do I (working ( allegedly:) ) at BT Labs) hear this first on/. ??? Oh well. Hooray for us anyway! The BBC have a write up that claims Ian Flemming was there for a time as well.
The laws only apply to BT so there is a growing sector that rents bandwidth from BT at (Regulator fixed) wholesale prices, and resells it at (unregulated) prices that undercut BT even after the addition of a healthy profit. This is mainly done for international voice calls where BT has gone from the only provider to a minority player in the matter of a few years, while it still carries the vast majority of the traffic.
"The school was cliquish and extremely divided. There was a lot of tension between groups. It was almost continuous conflict between each one. The abuse from the jocks was physical and verbal: rocks and soft drink cans were thrown from passing cars on the way to school. Theydid it to everyone. Then the jocks began to focus on the Trenchcoat Mafia as the year went on because they were different..." Words from a member of the Trenchcoat Mafia as quoted in todays Guardian newspaper
It seems to me that the school had a lot more problems then a few people with internet access playing doom.
Following all the debate about "is RedHat the new Microsoft" that has been going around, it can only be good that Corel have chosen a non-RH disto to use. Dont get me wrong I like RH (I use RH5.2) but a big name backing a different distro (even if its only so they can rip of the best bits for themselves) will mean that for people moving to linux there is now more then one choice of big name supplier (and Corel is a big name), and so nobody will be able to gain a monopoly position in the market. This can only help to keep everybody honest:) .
I suppose it depends on what you mean by value. If freedom is valuable because it makes you feel good then yes, but if freedom is valuable because it lets you do things then no, but seeing as being able to do the things you want to do will make you good it encompasses (at least in part) mental happiness.
Personally I'd say that freedom to do what I want is far more important because 1) it makes me feel good to do what I want to do and I am happy to live my life the way I want to even with all the character flaws I'm sure I have, and 2) because it allows me to help other people achieve freedom thus giving other people the chance to be happy.
Only having mental freedom means I can accept who and what I am and be happy in myself, but I cant pass that happiness on without freedom of action.
But surely part of doing the "good I want to do" relies on me having freedom from outside authority. I cant do good if I am forced to do evil by external forces, or if those forces restrain me with chains. Yes, a free heart and mind are important but unless they go hand in hand with a more phuysical freedom they are limited to the intention and do not effect the act. External freedom without mental freedom, or mental freedom without external freedom, are both mere shadows of what they could (and should) be.
JonKatz gets a lot of stick around here but its nice to read an article like this every once in a while. It does you good lift your head from the daily grind and take a broader view of where you're going every once in a while.
Of course wether he's right and the net is the new enlightenment we wont know for a long time to come, but it seems to me that this revolution is a lot less to do with the philosophy of freedom and a lot more to do with acheiving it (at least within the infosphere). A change of time, a change of emphisis.
>I bet 90% of the people who bitch and moan about this barely write code themselves.
To wander off the topic for a bit...
It seems to me that a lot of these people would like to get involved with coding open source stuff partially to gain some recognition as a programmer, but mainly to increase their skills. The best way to learn about programming is to practice, practice, practice, and open source provides a good way to do this however most projects around are already well developed and so you already need to be a competant coder to understand them let alone to find bugs and fix them. I for one come into this category, I've learnt enough C to take my beyond the "teach yourself C" books but dont have enough experience to do anything usefull (I do a lot of awk/unix scripting at work but no C etc).
It seems to me that what would be usefull for those of us in this situation (and you were all there once) would be a kind of "linux training academy" to provide a set of small and / or simple (but non-trivial) ideas that can be developed by relative newcomers to give them a start towards code guruhood. These wouldn't have to be new ideas but could just be new takes on old ideas (implement a version of 'ls' that prints the first line of text files so you know whats in them, or a version that lists all files the dont match a regular expression etc). Stuff that would be usefull but is not a real priority, or stuff that has been done before but can be redeveloped for new platforms, or to run better, or to take advantage of new functionality from other programs etc etc
University gave me three years studying a subject I enjoy, in a place I love, working hours that I chose and it taught me a lot more then just the subject I studied (like how to drink beer, cook chilli, and appreciate good music).
Ok at the end of it I still couldn't get a job (not much call for astrophysicists round here), but that was just a good excuse to go back and do another year.
There is more to college/ university then getting a job at the end of it, people who only see the money are missing all the best bits.
If you have a steady threashold for becoming a moderator (say get 5 points and you automatically become one), and each moderator has a fixed number of points to allocate a day you'll end up with a snowball effect where you start to get more and more moderators, so more and more posts get marked up leading to more and more people hitting the 5 point threashold and becoming moderators, so there are more points being alloctaed (no. of points allocated = no. of moderators * points per moderator) leading to more people acumulating 5 points and becoming moderators leading to more points being allocated.... etc etc etc
In the end, the majority of people will end up being moderators (not necesarily a bad thing) or you'll have to increase the number of points needed to become a moderator, which will only put of the inevitable.
Ok so a lot of moderators will mark up the same things, but I would only have to persuade 5 (or however many) moderators that my inane ramblings are worth a point to get moderator status, which seeing as they dont all have to be for the same post wouldn't be too hard.
Yes they're not the greatest computers ever made, but there is one good reason why a linux port to them is cool: People buy iMacs.
Alphas and pIII's may be better/faster/ have more geek credibility, but if linux wants to gain users in the mainstream computing sector then making it run on mainstream (high profile, popular, generally cool) machines.
If you dont like them, dont buy 'em, but its still a usefull addition to the Linux stable.
Yeah. It seems that Apple have tried to open source Darwin in a way that protects them from somebody (not mentioning names;) ) adding patented code to it and then suing them for distributing thee code without a license, while at the same time maximising their return (in code improvements) for their investment.
Maybe if they had asked more people then just ESR they could have got it right first time.
I did read that Apple were "open to suggestions" on improevments to the license, so maybe they'll manage to sort it out.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember right Collossus was also mainly operated by women, for similar reasons, although I dont think they wrote the programs. This means that initially the female Geeks out numbered the male ones.
Collosus was designed and built by Tommy Flowers, who must surely be the most forgottten pioneer of the computer age.
bil
Theres a Chandra image of Cassiopia A on Astronomy Picture of the day (27/8/99) which is desktop sized. No doubt they'll have other ones over the next few days.
Brown Dwarfs are small, not quite big enough to become stars, type objects (maybe 50 times the size of Jupiter to about 0.08 times the size of the sun) and so wouldn't have the gravitational pull to cause those sort of speeds (and if they did they'd gain so much mass that the would become proper sdtars fairly quickly anyway).
A neutron star is a bit more possible but again they dont have the gravitational pull talked about in the article, and again a neutron star that accreted matter in the sorts of quantities that are detectable would pretty soon collapse into a black hole anyway.
I guess they figure out the gravitational force needed to cause these sorts of masses of gass to move at these sorts of speeds then figure out the mass of the object needed to cause that force, if its above a certain amount (100 times that of the sun?) then the object would collapse under its own gravity and become a black hole.
Disclaimer: Some of the numbers might be wrong, I'm at work and my books are at home.
Bil
> People that I know who live in "depressed" areas (Appalachia in the top 20 poorest US counties) LIKE where they are at because you DON'T need all the crap that the rich folks need to get along.
Poor people are poor because they like it???? Have you ever been poor????? I guess your idea of poor is not being able to afford the latest P-III 550 duel processor, or whatever your latest fad is, never mind I'm sure mommy and daddy'll get you one for christmas.
>And another thing, Jon, A right on some else's part is not a right if it produces an obligation on my part. It is then just a wish.
So the right to (say) free education, is just a wish because it oblige's you to pay taxes to pay for it, or the right to life is only wish because it places an obligation on everyone else not to kill you. Interesting point of view. I'm glad I dont live in your world.
>Socialism doesn't work!
If capitalism produces people like you then give me socialism anyday.
Anyone know the lyrics to the "Red Flag"?
Bil
From what I've seen the TV series (at least Wyrd sisters I've not seen the others) is a pale imitation of the books, so dont judge them by it.
Even the worst of the books is at least as funny as the series.
Bil
ISDN costs as much as it does to persuade people not to use it. ISDN (Home Highway) uses much more switch capacity then a normal 64kbps line, so if it was cheap enough that everyone had it (or even just the portion of the population wanting fast internet access) would require a massive investment in new switches, which would drive up the cost again. With the pricing as it is, enough people can get it to make it profitable, but few enough to minimise the capacity problems on the switches.
bil
Strikes are a very small part of what unions do, most of their effort goes into things like lobbying the government foir or against laws that effect the membership(the minimum wage law recently introduced in the UK owes a lot to union campaigns), providing legal advice for members, providing represetation in disciplinary cases, fighting unfair dismissal, and as thousand and one other things that nobody really notices untill they need them (my union is thinking of setting up a dating agency !! Not sure what that says about its members :) )
Imagine if a large well organised "International Geek Federation" representing tens of thousands of IT workers worldwide from new graduates to managers launched a press/lobbying campaign saying "This new encryption law will cost jobs and destroy the internet, here our well reasoned facts and figures to back up our claim", and compare the effect to that of a few hundred people sending emails to a member of the government who doesn't understand the subject.
While we remain a fragmented community linked only by a comman love of computers and divided by such religious issues as which distro is best we will have no say in how the internet and IT in general develops leaving agendas to be set by big business and politicians . By forming a union or such like (the Institute of Geeks and Allied Trades anyone?) we at least stand some chance of influencing the future of that which we love.
Bil
The Colossus was designed by Tommy Flowers (who died late last year) from the Post Office Research Department. This department is now British Telecom Research Labs based in Ipswich. :) ) at BT Labs) hear this first on /. ???
So why do I (working ( allegedly
Oh well. Hooray for us anyway!
The BBC have a write up that claims Ian Flemming was there for a time as well.
The laws only apply to BT so there is a growing sector that rents bandwidth from BT at (Regulator fixed) wholesale prices, and resells it at (unregulated) prices that undercut BT even after the addition of a healthy profit.
This is mainly done for international voice calls where BT has gone from the only provider to a minority player in the matter of a few years, while it still carries the vast majority of the traffic.
"The school was cliquish and extremely divided. There was a lot of tension between groups. It was almost continuous conflict between each one. The abuse from the jocks was physical and verbal: rocks and soft drink cans were thrown from passing cars on the way to school. Theydid it to everyone. Then the jocks began to focus on the Trenchcoat Mafia as the year went on because they were different..."
Words from a member of the Trenchcoat Mafia as quoted in todays Guardian newspaper
It seems to me that the school had a lot more problems then a few people with internet access playing doom.
Following all the debate about "is RedHat the new Microsoft" that has been going around, it can only be good that Corel have chosen a non-RH disto to use. :) .
Dont get me wrong I like RH (I use RH5.2) but a big name backing a different distro (even if its only so they can rip of the best bits for themselves) will mean that for people moving to linux there is now more then one choice of big name supplier (and Corel is a big name), and so nobody will be able to gain a monopoly position in the market. This can only help to keep everybody honest
I suppose it depends on what you mean by value. If freedom is valuable because it makes you feel good then yes, but if freedom is valuable because it lets you do things then no, but seeing as being able to do the things you want to do will make you good it encompasses (at least in part) mental happiness.
Personally I'd say that freedom to do what I want is far more important because 1) it makes me feel good to do what I want to do and I am happy to live my life the way I want to even with all the character flaws I'm sure I have, and 2) because it allows me to help other people achieve freedom thus giving other people the chance to be happy.
Only having mental freedom means I can accept who and what I am and be happy in myself, but I cant pass that happiness on without freedom of action.
But surely part of doing the "good I want to do" relies on me having freedom from outside authority. I cant do good if I am forced to do evil by external forces, or if those forces restrain me with chains. Yes, a free heart and mind are important but unless they go hand in hand with a more phuysical freedom they are limited to the intention and do not effect the act. External freedom without mental freedom, or mental freedom without external freedom, are both mere shadows of what they could (and should) be.
JonKatz gets a lot of stick around here but its nice to read an article like this every once in a while. It does you good lift your head from the daily grind and take a broader view of where you're going every once in a while.
Of course wether he's right and the net is the new enlightenment we wont know for a long time to come, but it seems to me that this revolution is a lot less to do with the philosophy of freedom and a lot more to do with acheiving it (at least within the infosphere). A change of time, a change of emphisis.
>I bet 90% of the people who bitch and moan about this barely write code themselves.
To wander off the topic for a bit...
It seems to me that a lot of these people would like to get involved with coding open source stuff partially to gain some recognition as a programmer, but mainly to increase their skills. The best way to learn about programming is to practice, practice, practice, and open source provides a good way to do this however most projects around are already well developed and so you already need to be a competant coder to understand them let alone to find bugs and fix them. I for one come into this category, I've learnt enough C to take my beyond the "teach yourself C" books but dont have enough experience to do anything usefull (I do a lot of awk/unix scripting at work but no C etc).
It seems to me that what would be usefull for those of us in this situation (and you were all there once) would be a kind of "linux training academy" to provide a set of small and / or simple (but non-trivial) ideas that can be developed by relative newcomers to give them a start towards code guruhood. These wouldn't have to be new ideas but could just be new takes on old ideas (implement a version of 'ls' that prints the first line of text files so you know whats in them, or a version that lists all files the dont match a regular expression etc). Stuff that would be usefull but is not a real priority, or stuff that has been done before but can be redeveloped for new platforms, or to run better, or to take advantage of new functionality from other programs etc etc
Just an idea
University gave me three years studying a subject I enjoy, in a place I love, working hours that I chose and it taught me a lot more then just the subject I studied (like how to drink beer, cook chilli, and appreciate good music).
Ok at the end of it I still couldn't get a job (not much call for astrophysicists round here), but that was just a good excuse to go back and do another year.
There is more to college/ university then getting a job at the end of it, people who only see the money are missing all the best bits.
If you have a steady threashold for becoming a moderator (say get 5 points and you automatically become one), and each moderator has a fixed number of points to allocate a day you'll end up with a snowball effect where you start to get more and more moderators, so more and more posts get marked up leading to more and more people hitting the 5 point threashold and becoming moderators, so there are more points being alloctaed (no. of points allocated = no. of moderators * points per moderator) leading to more people acumulating 5 points and becoming moderators leading to more points being allocated.... etc etc etc
In the end, the majority of people will end up being moderators (not necesarily a bad thing) or you'll have to increase the number of points needed to become a moderator, which will only put of the inevitable.
Ok so a lot of moderators will mark up the same things, but I would only have to persuade 5 (or however many) moderators that my inane ramblings are worth a point to get moderator status, which seeing as they dont all have to be for the same post wouldn't be too hard.
Yes they're not the greatest computers ever made, but there is one good reason why a linux port to them is cool: People buy iMacs.
Alphas and pIII's may be better/faster/ have more geek credibility, but if linux wants to gain users in the mainstream computing sector then making it run on mainstream (high profile, popular, generally cool) machines.
If you dont like them, dont buy 'em, but its still a usefull addition to the Linux stable.
Yeah. ;) ) adding patented code to it and then suing them for distributing thee code without a license, while at the same time maximising their return (in code improvements) for their investment.
It seems that Apple have tried to open source Darwin in a way that protects them from somebody (not mentioning names
Maybe if they had asked more people then just ESR they could have got it right first time.
I did read that Apple were "open to suggestions" on improevments to the license, so maybe they'll manage to sort it out.
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