spell checker? email? Bah, vim 8 will be rewritten in a functional scripting language that only cs majors have ever heard of, will have a built in usenet client, and the ability to display inline images. It will also feature inline evaluation of its scripting language, be completely confirguarable, but only by writing scripts in that language, and pretty much any kind of extension whatsoever through modules written in that language. It will feature every feature in every application ever. It will be a combination, IDE, movie player, web browswer, word processor.
Vim 8 will be the bastard child of emacs, MPW, and cyberdog. All the advantages of an entire operating system, with all of the advantages of running everything in the same process and address space.
Does microsoft really have any chance to overtake google? Their shareholders sure don't seem to think so, or so the share drop indicates...
A cursory glance at msn shows me a portal, the likes of which I might have seen in the late 90s. A million different sites compacted into one, totally unintelligable.
What's sad is you can go here http://search.msn.com/ for a major improvement. How does it improvement? It looks exactly like google, that's how.
How exactly do they plan to innovate, aside from copy things that google has already done? Microsoft is dumping all this money into a "fight" with google, but do they actually have a business plan? Massive R&D without any overall direction other than "beat google" will do nothing. What are they going to do anyway? Release a version of mail that looks exactly like gmail? Release microsoft earth? Bah. Microsofts main strength when expanding into new markets lies in their ability to integrate with other microsoft products, but with the web, that's not particularly helpful.
As a stockholder, I don't want them to waste any more money that I don't think they can recoup. They are dumping billions into a business (msn) which has maybe 100 million profit a year? And no real guarantee to ever go beyond that? This mindless expansion in every direction is just going to hurt them in the long run, when the profits on windows and office can no longer cover the massive losses on *all* of their other products. I want them to make their business *profitable* and to focus on doing well in their key markets. Microsoft seems to think that they only way to defend windows, is to conquer every other market on the planet as well, which is just stupid. They can't do it, and it they thought about it they'd realize that.
Meanwhile, Apple has carefully manuevered into a position where they can take a chunk out of microsofts ass. I'm not saying they will, but if they don't it's not because the potential isn't there. I'd like to see them spend that research money on getting OS releases out faster and higher quality, so that they can deal with emerging competition. In many ways (aside from marketshare of course) microsoft is playing catch up with apple in the OS game, and that's kind of a dangerous situation now considering that apple could start selectively chewing into their market with mac clones, or an osx server release that supports some third party manufacturer's hardware.
but VLC seems to work much better overall. At least the interface seems quite a bit better on the platforms I've tried it on. VLC does crash sometimes that mplayer doens't though, and mplayers performance is was quite a bit better than VLC for a while, so I guess its a toss up.
Also, last time I used mplayer, the required that you compile everything from source (no binaries available) for legal reasons. When I did this, by default a bunch of support for various codecs wasn't turned on by default. I remember complaining about that to someone who was extolling the virtues of mplayer, and they just told me to install it over portage. It wasn't particularly helpful, as I don't have portage *on my mac*.
Overall, VLC has impressed me as having vastly better usability and simplicity than any of the other video players (WMP, quicktime, mplayer, etc). Windows media player in particular, doesn't seem to understand that I just want it to dump the video to the screen, and not give me a bunch of bullshit playlists, and a menu bar that pops up whenever my mouse gets jostled during a movie... Really, all I need is an intuitive and non-distracting-by-popping-up-during-a-movie way to seek video and adjust volume, and yet many players insist on giving me soo much more than I need or want.
Really, how often do you make playlists of *videos*? That is a feature that needs to be off by default.
Newspapers are a good news source in the sense that there are numerous good newspapers and widely read newspapers.
Television is a poor news source since the 24 hour news channels are all utterly so worthless. I suppose the nightly news might still be good, but I wonder how many people still tune into that? It's just not that convenient for me.
When we say "class of things x is good," we mean that the well known elements are good. The elements that are most likely to effect anything are what they are judged by. If there is a really excellent news channel, but no one watches it, for practical purposes there might as well not be such a channel.
This is a different kind of reasoning than the reasoning that you *personally* use to turn into a news channel. It doens't matter to *you* if no one else watches your news channel, but when you pick *that news channel* you aren't making any kind of judgement whatsoever about the form of media in *general*. If you were making such a general judgement, you'd be discussing something different, and you'd probably use the measure above.
Not many news sources these days make an effort to do any investigative reporting, or to actually educate the public on matters important to them... Television and internet sources are generally the worst. I can go through all of CNN and FOX new's sites without finding an article that isn't essentially fluff. People talk about fox news being bad, and it is. However, they miss the real, much bigger problem, that *all* of the 24 hour news channels are generally filled with uninformative crap and sensationalistic nonsense. FOX news is just the worst (a real shitstorm of misinformation, staged interviews, and sensationalism).
What really bugs me, is just what kind of uninsightful hacks they have anchoring CNN, FOX, and MSNBC. I want the news to report politics, not to get political. These guys don't seem to get that, and think that to report politics means they have to pick a side, and demonize whatever party they don't like. I want them to report all the pertinent *events that actually happen* and let me make my own judgements. Anchors can render their own judgement on a situation when appropriate, but there's a clear distinction between that and the constant political hackery that goes on. Don't even get me started on the interviews they give...
Really, newspapers are the best source that I've seen, but not all newspapers. The Seattle Times is a really good paper, and family run so that they aren't totally beholden to corporate interests. They do a lot of investigative reporting, and I rarely see them putting sensationalistic trash (celebrity murders, hyped up disasters that aren't actually that important, etc) on their front page like many other sources. Many people across the country seem to read the New York Times, but I'm a little iffy on them. It seems that their reporters have been caught lying, and doing other unscrupulous things a number of times.
I haven't been listening to NPR recently, but I remember they used to give really good interviews.
I'm wondering how this would compare to an internship, considering that's what college students such as myself would otherwise be doing with our time.
On the con side, the pay seems slightly low. You work from home only talk to your mentor over the internet, which seems like it might distract from the learning experience. I've telecommuted before, and while it might seem convenient at first, there are numerous related to communication, and being able to go home at the end of the day and be a psycologically non-work space that detract from those advantages. Probably the biggest problem is staying in touch with people who are in different time zones, or who merely have different working schedules. In a telecommuting situation, some people work at odd hours.
Maybe someone who worked on the summer of code previously could comment on how easy or hard it was to keep in touch with his mentor? Were there many mentors who basically ignored partipants (no need to name names)? How helpful were they in general?
Overall, as I see it the strong benefit is to be able to come up with your own project, and to be able to work on open source. Those kind of go hand in hand to give the participants a lot of freedom in what they do. For me, this would be worth the negatives mentioned above.
I guess one last factor to address, that might be merely a tie breaker for some people or a deal breaker for others, is just how good it will look on a resume. College students looking for internships are looking for work experience, but also an opportunity to break into the industry. Will future employers look at there resume's and think, "He worked for a big name company over this summer, came up with his own project and executed it." Alternatively, an employer might wonder about time spent in such an unstructured way, and wonder if participants goofed off all summer. I sincerely doubt this, but its something to consider and maybe something someone in a hiring position in industry could comment on.
>The reason they're able to find, report, and get it fixed in a week is the fact that it's OSS. On the other hand, because its OSS now all of the machines that remain unpatched have an exploit that is not only known, but but publicized by the developer, with diffs showing *exactly* what line of code the error is on.
Here's a trick if you want to break into someone's computer. Find out what version of apache (or whatever service) they are running, go to apache.org, check the known vulnerabilities for that version, get the diff from their CVS repository marked as fixing that bug. The bug will of course still exist on your target.
Of course, you *should* patch your software regularly, similar information (without diffs) is often available for some commercial software, etc. However, we live in a world such that we must take mistakes into account in all of our decisions, and hedge all our bets.
The point isn't that open source is more insecure than other software, which to my knowledge it isn't, but that it does make some kind of attacks more convenient, and open source developers should be taking special measures to defend themselves. Maybe not everyone should get anonymous cvs access to every iteration of the code? Maybe only major releases should be available and patch comments hidden from people not on the dev team. Other rules determining how security information is disseminated to people not on the primary dev team could be put into place. Of course, none of them come without inconvenience for the dev team. Certainly, no one wants to watch their mouth on their developer's list.
>That's something to be admired, especially when you consider how impractical what RMS was >demanding was when he created the GPL.
Just because someone is an "idealist" doesn't mean they deserve praise automatically. Sometimes people's ideal worlds are a horrible place to live. Communism is generally considered to be one of those ideals...
I *do* understand Stallman's ideas, it is you who do not. You are confusing his "ideals" with the general will of the open source community. Stallman tends to favor the "everything should be open source" model without qualification. The open source community at large would never support such an idea, and believes strongly that developers have the right to make open source, or commercial software as they see fit to benefit themselves. Most open source developers see open source as a business model, and not a moral act. Stallman on the other hand tries to suggest that there's some kind of *obligation* on the part of the developer to put all software out there under the GPL (and preferably under the FSF)
As a human being, I may have a moral obligation to *charity in general,* but I have no obligation to you in particular, and no obligation to give charity in terms of software. I can decide I don't want to give charity to you because say... you are impudent and ugly.
That may sound harsh, but I have little doubt you have applied the same principle in your own life. Have you ever ignored a hobo asking for money? Why? If you think about it, it doesn't matter why. Maybe you have some obligation to give to charity, but there are a million hobos, and you don't have to give to that one in particular. That might seem unfair... but fairness is an obligation that comes into play in specific circumstances. Only children expect everyone to be fair to them, and only because "parents are supposed to treat their children fairly" is one of the few times where that obligation comes into play.
Anyway, getting back on track, I can say I'll give charity to Jill, but I still have no obligation to give Jill a copy of my software an the right to redistribute it. I can give her something that is not software, or only limited rights to my software. If Jill only needs software from me... I guess I don't have to give to her at all, but find someone else who needs something other than software.
*WHY* not give software to Jill? Maybe I will give software to Jill, but I'm a developer. I have to be able to make money off of at least some of my software to survive.
Now, this is a point where you could raise a lot of objections about alternative business models, or the fact that some people do make money off of open source software. However, that would be to miss the point. If you did these things, it would no longer be charity. It would no longer be a moral action at all. If some company *pays* you an hourly wage to write OSS, you are no longer fulfilling your moral obligation to charity. You are just doing a job.
Additionally, if you write software just for fun, like Linus Torvalds did, you also aren't giving to charity. Although I admire Torvalds as a developer, I don't give him any kind of moral praise for giving away his software, because I know exactly why he did it, and it wasn't charity.
When *do* people give software as charity then? It's called freeware. Free as in beer freeware. Open source software falls under that category, but to say that it alone is the "moral way to distribute software" is to deny that freeware distributed without source has moral value. Open source may have *greater* moral value, in the sense that you are giving *more*, but that is quite beyond your moral obligation. The extents of your moral obligation to charity could be argued, and expanded beyond what is the generally accepted minimum... which is quite low, but I doubt that giving away the fruits of one's livelihood will ever be argued into that category.
>It was a GWB bash-o-thon disguised as humor. Even if it was Bill Clinton, I still wouldn't have found it funny.
Right on man. If he had lampooned Clinton for screwing up the war in Iraq, having a low approval rating, or generally being incompetent, no one would have found it funny. It's such a total double standard that it doesn't apply the other way around.
Seriously though, you don't need to *disguise* a GWB bash-o-thon as humor. It *is* humor.
this should definitely be a feature attached to the video card. Either that, or they should bundle physics accelerators with graphics accelerators. Also, like others have mentioned, its important that we get a standard API for this for it to catch on...
Really, it would have been a lot better to introduce this technology on a console than on the PC. If the ps3, for instance were to come with this, developers would get a chance to play around with it in earnest and prove its usefullness, if any, to the consumer. As it is, I doubt there will be real strong support for it, and uptake will probably be pretty slow.
He's entertaining sometimes, but his worlview is pretty moronic. The best way to some up heinlein is that he's a fascist who thinks that humor is immoral.
Also, the physical size of something is not the limiting factor in property rights... the issue is a bit more complicted than that.
I would like to see some serious punishment for some members of the administration after they leave office... People are talking about impeachment if the democrats get control of congress... but that seems like kind of a slap on the wrist, and would only effect bush himself.
It seems like more than anything else, what has characterized this administration is the desire for power. The wiretaps don't piss me off because I think they are unjust. They piss me off, because wiretaps without any kind of oversight seem likely to be used against the administrations political enemies. The administration has already openly abused its power to try to destroy its such enemies numerous times... they've been hunting down the people that leaked the warantless wiretapping stufff forever (didn't they find one guy?) and will probably try to bring some kind of trumped up charge against their obviously legitimate whistlebloying. Who is to say they weren't tapping democratic campaign headquarters in the 2004 election? I'm not sure that, with the character the administration has itself to have recently, that I can say that is beneath them.
At some point if the power of the executive branch isn't checked, the presidential office itself, could become a threat to the country. With the kind of power that the president has, how difficult would it be to just refuse to step down after your term was up? This president has shown no regard for the law, and a willingness to make up paper thin excuses for his abuse of power. Maybe Bush wouldn't, or couldn't take power like that, but if we set a precedent where we allow the president to break the law, and grab power like crazy all through his administration just like this one did, what's to stop someone more ambitious than him from going further in the future?
I'd like to see congress put some mechanisms in place for checking the execute branch. Specifically, I'd like whatever authority that the administration *imagines* gives them the power to do warantless wiretaps specifically removed. Power to spy on whomever it pleases the administration, without even having to tell anyone in the other branches about it, is clearly a threat to the checks and balance system. Maybe a constitutional amendment needs to be made laying out the powers of the executive branch more specifically, and limiting the power to spy on anyone without oversight from the judicial, and maybe the legislative branch.
and cringely is an idiot for seriously suggesting it, but if it did happen, it would be *totally* *sweet*.
Adobe sucks balls at supporting the mac, which confuses me greatly, seeing as pretty much every person who I know that uses photoshop, uses it on the mac. It's the same software package on windows or mac, but for some reason, all the photographers I know *shudder* at the idea of running it on a PC, and buy their macs for the *sole purpose* of running photoshop on them. Maybe there's some additional graphics software, or drivers, that's only available on the mac... but it seems strange to me.
Adobe has been guilty *twice* now, of utterly botching a mac platform shift. First from os9 to osx, which wasn't so bad because you could just reboot from os9 to osx... and now from ppc to x86, which *is* really bad because you just can't run their software at a practical speed on the latest hardware. Both times they've blamed their problems on apple... this time because apple's IDE, xcode, "wasn't ready for prime time," so they chose to continue using the discontinued metrowerks compiler codewarrior, which will never support x86 mac compilation. When they make this excuse, the don't mention that there's absolutely *nothing* compelling them to use xcode to compile their stuff on gcc...
Its clear that Adobe doesn't know what's in their own best interest. I don't know if I'd want *apple* running adobe, but you'd think that some shakeups in management would happen after mistakes like these were made. If Adobe actually *had* a real competitor, they'd have eaten them alive in the mac market by now.
the "hobbyist programmer" has to deal with an overcomplicated environment. To be quite honest, just using a computer, for day to day things is a bit more complicated than *programming* it originally was. Computers are no longer tools for hobbyists, that come with the original basic on rom.
Now there's just a lot more computer to program, which is intimidating to a total newb, and a lot more *fun things for kids to do on a computer* than program. When I was 10, writing scripts in apple basic was about an equivalent amount of fun to playing the original oregon trail. If I had oblivion and starcraft on the same computer, would I have spent so much time screwing around with the computer itself? Probably not.
Now to even get started, you have to find and install a bunch of complicated software. For a kid, whose parents know nothing about computers, how is he even going to find out about python or gcc? Windows doesn't *come* with a development environment. Mac and linux do, but frankly most of the tools are pretty complicated by the standards of a 10 year old. Probably the simplest tool is python... but even python will require you go hunt through tons of documentation before you even *choose* what graphics library you want to work with. The SDL is the right answer, but how long will it take to figure that out? and is pygame installed? of course not. Graphics are important for keeping kids interested in programming... really, the only genuinely interesting projects that kids can work on are games.
The truth is, computers by and large are now professional tools and entertainment devices, and no longer hobbiest devices in the purest sense. Now we need classes to introduce kids to programming. Kids who go to high school in a fairly wealthy neighborhood may be able to take an AP computer science class in high school (my neighborhood was *not* one of those)... but by that point it seems too late to me. The point of kids programming to me is introducing them to the wonder of the art before they get caught up in the business and science of the thing.
We could easily fit some simple programming classes in gradeschool... but frankly, our school's are so unimaginably crappy, that everything before high school, and much of high school... is pretty much just day care. We could easily cut things out, like teaching kids cursive, and accelerate other things (like not waiting until 9th fricken grade before teaching algebra), to fit in some basic programming lessons, and maybe even a little logic and philosophy (golly gee!). However, the school's are run so incompetently in most places, and teachers are so concerned with keeping kids from dropping out (let em!), that public schools aren't willing to make the effort to teach anything of value.
Cynicism aside, what's the right thing to do in this situation?
On the one hand, in seems like the people who own the pipes should be able to do whatever they want with them. If we say they can't prioritize traffic of people that pay them good money to do it, aren't we violating their right to property?
On the other hand, if they start charging individual sites they could potentially hamper the economy, which would be against the public good. The problem is something like if all the roads in the country were privately owned and had toll booths everywhere...
Maybe the answer is that bandwidth should become a public utility. The companies who own it should be granted a monopoly, but then should be severely regulated along the lines power is. Its obvious that internet connectivity is as important to the public good as water and power. We need uniform access to these services across the country. Any part of the country that doesn't have access because its not profitable for verizon to provide it, simply can't economically develop. Also, realistically speaking, this would be *vastly* easier to do than power.
I'm sure that the existing bandwidth providers would have to be pulled into this kicking and screaming... but frankly the exact same thing happened with power providers. Originally, power companies didn't want to be forced to do things like run lines out to rural areas. This was unfortunate, because electric lighting is pretty important in agriculture. Eventually, when it was evident that the interest of the power companies came so strongly in conflict with the public interest, the regulations we have today were set up.
I don't know if this is necessary for bandwidth. It hasn't really come up so far, primarily because its a new thing, and because it didn't take them that long to make the internet accessible from pretty much everywhere in the country, by some means or another. Of course, that's just my anecdotal impression. Are there some places where its impossible to get a T1 line at a reasonable price? Are even businesses stuck with satellite in many places? If that's the case, it would be a strong argument to regulate the ISPs in some ways.
However, as far as I know aside from just generally failing to get home broadband to work on their first try, the ISPs seem to have done a pretty good job of getting everyone internet access. I think they must be somewhat aware of what could happen to them in terms of regulation if they abuse the public good too much. I'm sure they will follow a very fine line, but I'm happy to wait to see if they cross it before I consider regulation a good option. As a rule, its best to do nothing if you can. However, prioritized traffic is probably something we have to stop, depending on how strong the prioritization is. If they insure a certain level of quality for all traffic, it probably won't be an issue... but I suspect that they won't if they can get away with it.
>I am not making fun of RMS here - I greatly admire his principals Why?
Seriously, he's not Ghandi. He just doesn't *pay for software* That doesn't exactly make him a saint.
I like open source too, but these are not the grand principles he makes them out to be. It's just a way of distributing *computer software*, which isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. Computers in general are not a major source of tyranny in the world.
I admire the EFF because they are trying to fix some broken laws. To the extent that I admire RMS, it is because he started the FSF, which has turned out some great software. To the extent that I *revile* RMS, it is because he tries to spread this nonsense that software development is a *social movement*.
Just because a few lawyers do pro bono work some of the time, doesn't mean that all lawyers want to work for free all the time. Additionally, just because some people write software and *essentially donate it to the public* doesn't mean that they intend to, or are obligated to, always do such a thing. Open Source is *Not* *NOT *NOT* a social movement. Developers are highly skilled professionals, and they are free to use their skills to make whatever software, and distribute it by whatever means they feel will benefit them the most personally.
RMS is the only person in open source development *that I know of* that actually thinks there's some kind of *moral obligation* to make software free. Its great to use open source software... but by refusing to use *any* software that is commercial, you aren't helping anyone. Certainly not developers.
at penny arcade expo. They had two lcds, one for each DS screen. I don't recall seeing a camera on theirs... I think they just rigged some kind of video out. Maybe they had special DS units for that though... but I bet that the ones on the market could be made that way.
If I actually *had* a DS, I'd just bug nintendo to release their official solution, which seemed like a much better design overall.
Today Trevor Chan, developer of the acclaimed game Capitalism II where the player manages a corporate empire, today announced that he will be "localizing" the game to the emerging Chinese video game market, and renaming it Communism II.
As the communism referenced in Communism II is chinese communism and not marxist communism, Communism II will be exactly the same as Capitalism II except said Chan, "You don't get to vote, and the military owns a quarter of your stock."
Slashdot Mirror
spell checker? email?
Bah, vim 8 will be rewritten in a functional scripting language that only cs majors have ever heard of, will have a built in usenet client, and the ability to display inline images. It will also feature inline evaluation of its scripting language, be completely confirguarable, but only by writing scripts in that language, and pretty much any kind of extension whatsoever through modules written in that language. It will feature every feature in every application ever. It will be a combination, IDE, movie player, web browswer, word processor.
Vim 8 will be the bastard child of emacs, MPW, and cyberdog. All the advantages of an entire operating system, with all of the advantages of running everything in the same process and address space.
>Why not an accelerometer?
it's in a cell phone?
hopefully the new graphics will be a little bit better than shadowrun for the snesh adowrn.htm
http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/s
quite possibly the worst looking game for that system...
Does microsoft really have any chance to overtake google? Their shareholders sure don't seem to think so, or so the share drop indicates...
A cursory glance at msn shows me a portal, the likes of which I might have seen in the late 90s. A million different sites compacted into one, totally unintelligable.
What's sad is you can go here http://search.msn.com/ for a major improvement. How does it improvement? It looks exactly like google, that's how.
How exactly do they plan to innovate, aside from copy things that google has already done? Microsoft is dumping all this money into a "fight" with google, but do they actually have a business plan? Massive R&D without any overall direction other than "beat google" will do nothing. What are they going to do anyway? Release a version of mail that looks exactly like gmail? Release microsoft earth? Bah. Microsofts main strength when expanding into new markets lies in their ability to integrate with other microsoft products, but with the web, that's not particularly helpful.
As a stockholder, I don't want them to waste any more money that I don't think they can recoup. They are dumping billions into a business (msn) which has maybe 100 million profit a year? And no real guarantee to ever go beyond that? This mindless expansion in every direction is just going to hurt them in the long run, when the profits on windows and office can no longer cover the massive losses on *all* of their other products. I want them to make their business *profitable* and to focus on doing well in their key markets. Microsoft seems to think that they only way to defend windows, is to conquer every other market on the planet as well, which is just stupid. They can't do it, and it they thought about it they'd realize that.
Meanwhile, Apple has carefully manuevered into a position where they can take a chunk out of microsofts ass. I'm not saying they will, but if they don't it's not because the potential isn't there. I'd like to see them spend that research money on getting OS releases out faster and higher quality, so that they can deal with emerging competition. In many ways (aside from marketshare of course) microsoft is playing catch up with apple in the OS game, and that's kind of a dangerous situation now considering that apple could start selectively chewing into their market with mac clones, or an osx server release that supports some third party manufacturer's hardware.
but VLC seems to work much better overall. At least the interface seems quite a bit better on the platforms I've tried it on. VLC does crash sometimes that mplayer doens't though, and mplayers performance is was quite a bit better than VLC for a while, so I guess its a toss up.
Also, last time I used mplayer, the required that you compile everything from source (no binaries available) for legal reasons. When I did this, by default a bunch of support for various codecs wasn't turned on by default. I remember complaining about that to someone who was extolling the virtues of mplayer, and they just told me to install it over portage. It wasn't particularly helpful, as I don't have portage *on my mac*.
Overall, VLC has impressed me as having vastly better usability and simplicity than any of the other video players (WMP, quicktime, mplayer, etc). Windows media player in particular, doesn't seem to understand that I just want it to dump the video to the screen, and not give me a bunch of bullshit playlists, and a menu bar that pops up whenever my mouse gets jostled during a movie... Really, all I need is an intuitive and non-distracting-by-popping-up-during-a-movie way to seek video and adjust volume, and yet many players insist on giving me soo much more than I need or want.
Really, how often do you make playlists of *videos*? That is a feature that needs to be off by default.
you were walking on the wrong side of the stree?
Seriously though, some younger people do that just to be annoying. Highschoolers especially. They didn't think you were a bum.
Newspapers are a good news source in the sense that there are numerous good newspapers and widely read newspapers.
Television is a poor news source since the 24 hour news channels are all utterly so worthless. I suppose the nightly news might still be good, but I wonder how many people still tune into that? It's just not that convenient for me.
When we say "class of things x is good," we mean that the well known elements are good. The elements that are most likely to effect anything are what they are judged by. If there is a really excellent news channel, but no one watches it, for practical purposes there might as well not be such a channel.
This is a different kind of reasoning than the reasoning that you *personally* use to turn into a news channel. It doens't matter to *you* if no one else watches your news channel, but when you pick *that news channel* you aren't making any kind of judgement whatsoever about the form of media in *general*. If you were making such a general judgement, you'd be discussing something different, and you'd probably use the measure above.
Not many news sources these days make an effort to do any investigative reporting, or to actually educate the public on matters important to them... Television and internet sources are generally the worst. I can go through all of CNN and FOX new's sites without finding an article that isn't essentially fluff. People talk about fox news being bad, and it is. However, they miss the real, much bigger problem, that *all* of the 24 hour news channels are generally filled with uninformative crap and sensationalistic nonsense. FOX news is just the worst (a real shitstorm of misinformation, staged interviews, and sensationalism).
What really bugs me, is just what kind of uninsightful hacks they have anchoring CNN, FOX, and MSNBC. I want the news to report politics, not to get political. These guys don't seem to get that, and think that to report politics means they have to pick a side, and demonize whatever party they don't like. I want them to report all the pertinent *events that actually happen* and let me make my own judgements. Anchors can render their own judgement on a situation when appropriate, but there's a clear distinction between that and the constant political hackery that goes on. Don't even get me started on the interviews they give...
Really, newspapers are the best source that I've seen, but not all newspapers. The Seattle Times is a really good paper, and family run so that they aren't totally beholden to corporate interests. They do a lot of investigative reporting, and I rarely see them putting sensationalistic trash (celebrity murders, hyped up disasters that aren't actually that important, etc) on their front page like many other sources. Many people across the country seem to read the New York Times, but I'm a little iffy on them. It seems that their reporters have been caught lying, and doing other unscrupulous things a number of times.
I haven't been listening to NPR recently, but I remember they used to give really good interviews.
I'm wondering how this would compare to an internship, considering that's what college students such as myself would otherwise be doing with our time.
On the con side, the pay seems slightly low. You work from home only talk to your mentor over the internet, which seems like it might distract from the learning experience. I've telecommuted before, and while it might seem convenient at first, there are numerous related to communication, and being able to go home at the end of the day and be a psycologically non-work space that detract from those advantages. Probably the biggest problem is staying in touch with people who are in different time zones, or who merely have different working schedules. In a telecommuting situation, some people work at odd hours.
Maybe someone who worked on the summer of code previously could comment on how easy or hard it was to keep in touch with his mentor? Were there many mentors who basically ignored partipants (no need to name names)? How helpful were they in general?
Overall, as I see it the strong benefit is to be able to come up with your own project, and to be able to work on open source. Those kind of go hand in hand to give the participants a lot of freedom in what they do. For me, this would be worth the negatives mentioned above.
I guess one last factor to address, that might be merely a tie breaker for some people or a deal breaker for others, is just how good it will look on a resume. College students looking for internships are looking for work experience, but also an opportunity to break into the industry. Will future employers look at there resume's and think, "He worked for a big name company over this summer, came up with his own project and executed it." Alternatively, an employer might wonder about time spent in such an unstructured way, and wonder if participants goofed off all summer. I sincerely doubt this, but its something to consider and maybe something someone in a hiring position in industry could comment on.
>The reason they're able to find, report, and get it fixed in a week is the fact that it's OSS.
On the other hand, because its OSS now all of the machines that remain unpatched have an exploit that is not only known, but but publicized by the developer, with diffs showing *exactly* what line of code the error is on.
Here's a trick if you want to break into someone's computer. Find out what version of apache (or whatever service) they are running, go to apache.org, check the known vulnerabilities for that version, get the diff from their CVS repository marked as fixing that bug. The bug will of course still exist on your target.
Of course, you *should* patch your software regularly, similar information (without diffs) is often available for some commercial software, etc. However, we live in a world such that we must take mistakes into account in all of our decisions, and hedge all our bets.
The point isn't that open source is more insecure than other software, which to my knowledge it isn't, but that it does make some kind of attacks more convenient, and open source developers should be taking special measures to defend themselves. Maybe not everyone should get anonymous cvs access to every iteration of the code? Maybe only major releases should be available and patch comments hidden from people not on the dev team. Other rules determining how security information is disseminated to people not on the primary dev team could be put into place. Of course, none of them come without inconvenience for the dev team. Certainly, no one wants to watch their mouth on their developer's list.
but only if you play a ghost. Only they can launched nuclear weapons.
>That's something to be admired, especially when you consider how impractical what RMS was
>demanding was when he created the GPL.
Just because someone is an "idealist" doesn't mean they deserve praise automatically. Sometimes people's ideal worlds are a horrible place to live. Communism is generally considered to be one of those ideals...
I *do* understand Stallman's ideas, it is you who do not. You are confusing his "ideals" with the general will of the open source community. Stallman tends to favor the "everything should be open source" model without qualification. The open source community at large would never support such an idea, and believes strongly that developers have the right to make open source, or commercial software as they see fit to benefit themselves. Most open source developers see open source as a business model, and not a moral act. Stallman on the other hand tries to suggest that there's some kind of *obligation* on the part of the developer to put all software out there under the GPL (and preferably under the FSF)
As a human being, I may have a moral obligation to *charity in general,* but I have no obligation to you in particular, and no obligation to give charity in terms of software. I can decide I don't want to give charity to you because say... you are impudent and ugly.
That may sound harsh, but I have little doubt you have applied the same principle in your own life. Have you ever ignored a hobo asking for money? Why? If you think about it, it doesn't matter why. Maybe you have some obligation to give to charity, but there are a million hobos, and you don't have to give to that one in particular. That might seem unfair... but fairness is an obligation that comes into play in specific circumstances. Only children expect everyone to be fair to them, and only because "parents are supposed to treat their children fairly" is one of the few times where that obligation comes into play.
Anyway, getting back on track, I can say I'll give charity to Jill, but I still have no obligation to give Jill a copy of my software an the right to redistribute it. I can give her something that is not software, or only limited rights to my software. If Jill only needs software from me... I guess I don't have to give to her at all, but find someone else who needs something other than software.
*WHY* not give software to Jill? Maybe I will give software to Jill, but I'm a developer. I have to be able to make money off of at least some of my software to survive.
Now, this is a point where you could raise a lot of objections about alternative business models, or the fact that some people do make money off of open source software. However, that would be to miss the point. If you did these things, it would no longer be charity. It would no longer be a moral action at all. If some company *pays* you an hourly wage to write OSS, you are no longer fulfilling your moral obligation to charity. You are just doing a job.
Additionally, if you write software just for fun, like Linus Torvalds did, you also aren't giving to charity. Although I admire Torvalds as a developer, I don't give him any kind of moral praise for giving away his software, because I know exactly why he did it, and it wasn't charity.
When *do* people give software as charity then? It's called freeware. Free as in beer freeware. Open source software falls under that category, but to say that it alone is the "moral way to distribute software" is to deny that freeware distributed without source has moral value. Open source may have *greater* moral value, in the sense that you are giving *more*, but that is quite beyond your moral obligation. The extents of your moral obligation to charity could be argued, and expanded beyond what is the generally accepted minimum... which is quite low, but I doubt that giving away the fruits of one's livelihood will ever be argued into that category.
>It was a GWB bash-o-thon disguised as humor. Even if it was Bill Clinton, I still wouldn't have found it funny.
Right on man. If he had lampooned Clinton for screwing up the war in Iraq, having a low approval rating, or generally being incompetent, no one would have found it funny. It's such a total double standard that it doesn't apply the other way around.
Seriously though, you don't need to *disguise* a GWB bash-o-thon as humor. It *is* humor.
this should definitely be a feature attached to the video card. Either that, or they should bundle physics accelerators with graphics accelerators. Also, like others have mentioned, its important that we get a standard API for this for it to catch on...
Really, it would have been a lot better to introduce this technology on a console than on the PC. If the ps3, for instance were to come with this, developers would get a chance to play around with it in earnest and prove its usefullness, if any, to the consumer. As it is, I doubt there will be real strong support for it, and uptake will probably be pretty slow.
He's entertaining sometimes, but his worlview is pretty moronic. The best way to some up heinlein is that he's a fascist who thinks that humor is immoral.
Also, the physical size of something is not the limiting factor in property rights... the issue is a bit more complicted than that.
I would like to see some serious punishment for some members of the administration after they leave office... People are talking about impeachment if the democrats get control of congress... but that seems like kind of a slap on the wrist, and would only effect bush himself.
It seems like more than anything else, what has characterized this administration is the desire for power. The wiretaps don't piss me off because I think they are unjust. They piss me off, because wiretaps without any kind of oversight seem likely to be used against the administrations political enemies. The administration has already openly abused its power to try to destroy its such enemies numerous times... they've been hunting down the people that leaked the warantless wiretapping stufff forever (didn't they find one guy?) and will probably try to bring some kind of trumped up charge against their obviously legitimate whistlebloying. Who is to say they weren't tapping democratic campaign headquarters in the 2004 election? I'm not sure that, with the character the administration has itself to have recently, that I can say that is beneath them.
At some point if the power of the executive branch isn't checked, the presidential office itself, could become a threat to the country. With the kind of power that the president has, how difficult would it be to just refuse to step down after your term was up? This president has shown no regard for the law, and a willingness to make up paper thin excuses for his abuse of power. Maybe Bush wouldn't, or couldn't take power like that, but if we set a precedent where we allow the president to break the law, and grab power like crazy all through his administration just like this one did, what's to stop someone more ambitious than him from going further in the future?
I'd like to see congress put some mechanisms in place for checking the execute branch. Specifically, I'd like whatever authority that the administration *imagines* gives them the power to do warantless wiretaps specifically removed. Power to spy on whomever it pleases the administration, without even having to tell anyone in the other branches about it, is clearly a threat to the checks and balance system. Maybe a constitutional amendment needs to be made laying out the powers of the executive branch more specifically, and limiting the power to spy on anyone without oversight from the judicial, and maybe the legislative branch.
and cringely is an idiot for seriously suggesting it, but if it did happen, it would be *totally* *sweet*.
Adobe sucks balls at supporting the mac, which confuses me greatly, seeing as pretty much every person who I know that uses photoshop, uses it on the mac. It's the same software package on windows or mac, but for some reason, all the photographers I know *shudder* at the idea of running it on a PC, and buy their macs for the *sole purpose* of running photoshop on them. Maybe there's some additional graphics software, or drivers, that's only available on the mac... but it seems strange to me.
Adobe has been guilty *twice* now, of utterly botching a mac platform shift. First from os9 to osx, which wasn't so bad because you could just reboot from os9 to osx... and now from ppc to x86, which *is* really bad because you just can't run their software at a practical speed on the latest hardware. Both times they've blamed their problems on apple... this time because apple's IDE, xcode, "wasn't ready for prime time," so they chose to continue using the discontinued metrowerks compiler codewarrior, which will never support x86 mac compilation. When they make this excuse, the don't mention that there's absolutely *nothing* compelling them to use xcode to compile their stuff on gcc...
Its clear that Adobe doesn't know what's in their own best interest. I don't know if I'd want *apple* running adobe, but you'd think that some shakeups in management would happen after mistakes like these were made. If Adobe actually *had* a real competitor, they'd have eaten them alive in the mac market by now.
That post title promised quite a bit more than the article delivered didn't it?
heh.. microsoft going to war. with who? china?
who do you think would win?
the "hobbyist programmer" has to deal with an overcomplicated environment. To be quite honest, just using a computer, for day to day things is a bit more complicated than *programming* it originally was. Computers are no longer tools for hobbyists, that come with the original basic on rom.
Now there's just a lot more computer to program, which is intimidating to a total newb, and a lot more *fun things for kids to do on a computer* than program. When I was 10, writing scripts in apple basic was about an equivalent amount of fun to playing the original oregon trail. If I had oblivion and starcraft on the same computer, would I have spent so much time screwing around with the computer itself? Probably not.
Now to even get started, you have to find and install a bunch of complicated software. For a kid, whose parents know nothing about computers, how is he even going to find out about python or gcc? Windows doesn't *come* with a development environment. Mac and linux do, but frankly most of the tools are pretty complicated by the standards of a 10 year old. Probably the simplest tool is python... but even python will require you go hunt through tons of documentation before you even *choose* what graphics library you want to work with. The SDL is the right answer, but how long will it take to figure that out? and is pygame installed? of course not. Graphics are important for keeping kids interested in programming... really, the only genuinely interesting projects that kids can work on are games.
The truth is, computers by and large are now professional tools and entertainment devices, and no longer hobbiest devices in the purest sense. Now we need classes to introduce kids to programming. Kids who go to high school in a fairly wealthy neighborhood may be able to take an AP computer science class in high school (my neighborhood was *not* one of those)... but by that point it seems too late to me. The point of kids programming to me is introducing them to the wonder of the art before they get caught up in the business and science of the thing.
We could easily fit some simple programming classes in gradeschool... but frankly, our school's are so unimaginably crappy, that everything before high school, and much of high school... is pretty much just day care. We could easily cut things out, like teaching kids cursive, and accelerate other things (like not waiting until 9th fricken grade before teaching algebra), to fit in some basic programming lessons, and maybe even a little logic and philosophy (golly gee!). However, the school's are run so incompetently in most places, and teachers are so concerned with keeping kids from dropping out (let em!), that public schools aren't willing to make the effort to teach anything of value.
Democracy? Is this just another file sharing application?
Cynicism aside, what's the right thing to do in this situation?
On the one hand, in seems like the people who own the pipes should be able to do whatever they want with them. If we say they can't prioritize traffic of people that pay them good money to do it, aren't we violating their right to property?
On the other hand, if they start charging individual sites they could potentially hamper the economy, which would be against the public good. The problem is something like if all the roads in the country were privately owned and had toll booths everywhere...
Maybe the answer is that bandwidth should become a public utility. The companies who own it should be granted a monopoly, but then should be severely regulated along the lines power is. Its obvious that internet connectivity is as important to the public good as water and power. We need uniform access to these services across the country. Any part of the country that doesn't have access because its not profitable for verizon to provide it, simply can't economically develop. Also, realistically speaking, this would be *vastly* easier to do than power.
I'm sure that the existing bandwidth providers would have to be pulled into this kicking and screaming... but frankly the exact same thing happened with power providers. Originally, power companies didn't want to be forced to do things like run lines out to rural areas. This was unfortunate, because electric lighting is pretty important in agriculture. Eventually, when it was evident that the interest of the power companies came so strongly in conflict with the public interest, the regulations we have today were set up.
I don't know if this is necessary for bandwidth. It hasn't really come up so far, primarily because its a new thing, and because it didn't take them that long to make the internet accessible from pretty much everywhere in the country, by some means or another. Of course, that's just my anecdotal impression. Are there some places where its impossible to get a T1 line at a reasonable price? Are even businesses stuck with satellite in many places? If that's the case, it would be a strong argument to regulate the ISPs in some ways.
However, as far as I know aside from just generally failing to get home broadband to work on their first try, the ISPs seem to have done a pretty good job of getting everyone internet access. I think they must be somewhat aware of what could happen to them in terms of regulation if they abuse the public good too much. I'm sure they will follow a very fine line, but I'm happy to wait to see if they cross it before I consider regulation a good option. As a rule, its best to do nothing if you can. However, prioritized traffic is probably something we have to stop, depending on how strong the prioritization is. If they insure a certain level of quality for all traffic, it probably won't be an issue... but I suspect that they won't if they can get away with it.
>I am not making fun of RMS here - I greatly admire his principals
Why?
Seriously, he's not Ghandi. He just doesn't *pay for software* That doesn't exactly make him a saint.
I like open source too, but these are not the grand principles he makes them out to be. It's just a way of distributing *computer software*, which isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. Computers in general are not a major source of tyranny in the world.
I admire the EFF because they are trying to fix some broken laws. To the extent that I admire RMS, it is because he started the FSF, which has turned out some great software. To the extent that I *revile* RMS, it is because he tries to spread this nonsense that software development is a *social movement*.
Just because a few lawyers do pro bono work some of the time, doesn't mean that all lawyers want to work for free all the time. Additionally, just because some people write software and *essentially donate it to the public* doesn't mean that they intend to, or are obligated to, always do such a thing. Open Source is *Not* *NOT *NOT* a social movement. Developers are highly skilled professionals, and they are free to use their skills to make whatever software, and distribute it by whatever means they feel will benefit them the most personally.
RMS is the only person in open source development *that I know of* that actually thinks there's some kind of *moral obligation* to make software free. Its great to use open source software... but by refusing to use *any* software that is commercial, you aren't helping anyone. Certainly not developers.
for the *irony*.
Also, what's with the free Zarathustra thing at the beginning of the trailer? What does Neitzsche have to do with intellectual property rights?
at penny arcade expo. They had two lcds, one for each DS screen. I don't recall seeing a camera on theirs... I think they just rigged some kind of video out. Maybe they had special DS units for that though... but I bet that the ones on the market could be made that way.
If I actually *had* a DS, I'd just bug nintendo to release their official solution, which seemed like a much better design overall.
Today Trevor Chan, developer of the acclaimed game Capitalism II where the player manages a corporate empire, today announced that he will be "localizing" the game to the emerging Chinese video game market, and renaming it Communism II.
As the communism referenced in Communism II is chinese communism and not marxist communism, Communism II will be exactly the same as Capitalism II except said Chan, "You don't get to vote, and the military owns a quarter of your stock."