the application has to do with harmonics. For example the classic problem is that bridge that collapsed under wind load in the 40's. It collapsed partly because harmonics from the wind,...
People keep saying things like this, but the example doesn't make sense. If you look at the wikipedia article, the first 6-length optimal Golomb sequence is (0 1 4 10 12 17). We can see by inspection there are two adjacent segments, 4-10 and 10-12, whose lengths are in a 3:1 ratio. Thus, the latter's fundamental resonant frequency is equal to the second harmonic of the former's. Having one segment vibrating at a harmonic of another segment is what you're trying to avoid, and in this case, a Golumb sequence produces exactly that resonance.
So either you (and others) are wrong about this application, or I'm badly misinterpreting something. Which is it? How would using a Golumb Ruler help you avoid what it obviously produces in this case?
Now, I did notice that you wrote "pick your structural members to be just a little "off" using proportions from this list". But you could do that using pretty much any sequence, and get incommensurable results just as easily. For example, start with segments all the same length, and vary each length by a different amount. Or, using the properties of irrational numbers, you could make six segments have lengths proportional to the square roots of 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 and 36, thus guaranteeing no common harmonics to the limit of the precision of your measurements. It's not obvious that using a Golomb sequence instead of a list of integers gives you any advantage here.
So the user decides not to pay attention to where the file was saved
Of course the user paid attention to where the file was saved: it was saved in Word, inside the Save As... dialog. But when she tried to recover the file using the Open..., the file was no longer there.
Heh. That's gotta be one of the clearest statements of the problem in the whole discussion. Too bad I used up my mod points yesterday.
I might add that, even if you have a good understanding of the underlying system, you can still be surprised by what a GUI app's Save window does. On both my Mac and my linux machines, I've often thought I understood where I'd saved a file, but when I went to look for it, it wasn't there. So I open a terminal window, fire up a "find" command to locate it, and it's off in some other place that I just can't explain. Presumably the developers had some good (to them) reason for ignoring what I typed and putting it there, often with a modified name. But I can't read the developers' minds. I can't even find what (if any) docs they may have written that explain it. And sometimes I never can find any files with names that contain the string that I typed into the "Save as..." widget.
Occasionally, I've googled for an explanation, but this is rarely successful. GUI app just have weird, flaky misbehaviors like this, and there's not much I can do about it.
What's really frustrating is finding all the files that I sometimes can't even identify that are littering some of my own working directories. More and more, they appear at random. When I look into them, sometimes I can identify the app that put them there, but usually not. Sometimes they're copies of files of mine from other directories, with different names. My general theory is that this is "intelligent" apps going crazy, i.e., doing what their developers programmed them to do. Sometimes when I delete them, I later learn what app wanted them there when it suddenly tells me it can't find the file with that name. Then the puzzle is why it decided to put its file in some directory that I created for my own use.
Maybe it's all done intentionally, to keep us users on our toes. Or to give us things to puzzle over when we're trying to figure out where all the space on our disks went.
Then there are the files named '&1' or sometimes '&2' in a lot of my directories. I suspect I know how that name was created, but finding the culprit that wrote the file can be rather difficult. I always delete them, but they tend to reappear weeks or months later.
Why did the user lose the file? Maybe it would be good for the user to learn how to remember filenames,...
Funny example: A couple of weeks ago, while downloading and installing something, it asked where I wanted it saved. Naturally, I typed in a file name, starting with a couple of directories with slashes between them, and hit the Save button. Then I went to that directory to look at the file - and it wasn't there! I looked around in all the obvious places, and didn't find it.
Now, I can see some people snickering at a "dump Windows user". But this was on linux. So I did what y'all would eventually do, I ran a "find / "*foo*" command, where "foo" was part of the file name. After a good while, it found it. It was in my home directory (not the one in the save window's Directory widget), and its name had all the slashes changed to colons.
My reaction, of course, was "WTF???" I did a couple more tests, and got the same insane misbehavior. The app was obviously intentionally programmed (with malice aforethought) to do this to pathnames.
Lesson: On any system, linux included, an app can do utterly insane things like this that no sensible user would ever expect. Some apps seem designed to do such things in the worst possible way, perhaps to challenge the sucker^Wuser to figure it out.
It is, of course, all part of the popular GUI culture, in which the user isn't supposed to worry their pretty little head about such details. Users are assumed ignorant and illiterate, the details should be hidden from them, and the app can decide for itself what things are called and where they should reside.
It's part of why the more intelligent people eventually migrate to the CLI environment, which has far fewer such insanities as roadblocks to getting things done. But even there, the attitude that "the user is an idiot" is spreading. And the CLI environment isn't for everyone, since it requires a good level of literacy. So we can expect such things to continue, and probably get worse, for a long time.
Anyway, I have one more item on my long list of things developers can do to make life difficult for users.
The writer does have some radically new definitions of a few terms. Thus, calling either a biological cell or cloud computing "efficient" is totally bizarre, unless you are using the term in a way that's different from any dictionary definition. Biologists would just laugh a the idea. Then they'd probably go into either a list of all the known inefficiencies in the basic biochemistry, or they'd try to explain that the evolutionary process doesn't care much about efficiency. All that matters is relative survival. And the process itself is dependent on random mutation that are usually (but not always) detrimental to the organism.
Similarly, anyone who has looked at the low-level details of the Internet (i.e., various protocols) will tell you that it's far from efficient. Like biological systems, it has won out and thrived not because it's perfect, but it's better in several important ways than any of its competitors. The major reason, of course, is its free/open nature. Anyone can download any of the specs and implement them without permission from anyone else.
Thus, back in the 1980s, I worked on a number of OSI projects. Repeatedly, what would happen is that we'd order the docs we needed to start implementing, going through the usual purchasing red tape that every company has, fire off the purchase order, and wait. While we were waiting, we'd play around with our ideas on IP. We'd fetch the docs and have them in a few minutes. By the time we got the docs we needed, we'd already had our ideas up and running on IP. We usually had IP-based deliverable before we could even start coding for OSI. Eventually, the idea got through to even the most dimwitted managers.
I also sat through a number of explanations of why DECnet was superior to IP. Maybe it was, but as a developer, I found that (even when working on contract to DEC), I couldn't get at the low-level details of DECnet that I needed. With IP, all the information was available in minutes with no bureaucratic hassle. So it didn't matter if DECnet was technically superior; it was sufficiently hidden from developers like me that I couldn't write (semi-)reliable code for it like I could for IP.
Efficiency is useful and desirable, but it's not the first concern for either biological or electronic systems. First, you have to function well in your environment. Then you can worry about efficiency. A good designer will think about both in parallel, of course; even the idiotic evolutionary process "understands" that. But unless it works in the real-world environment, it doesn't matter how efficient it is.
For free as in beer we have, off the top of my head, costless and gratis, both of them in use in English for ~600 years.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "costless". Of course, it's an English word, and any reasonably fluent speaker will be able to parse it into its two morphemes. That's why I said "... neither can be naturally expressed in English with a single word." Yes, you can construct the single word "costless", but (at least here in the US), it's not a word you normally hear, and the resulting sentence would sound stilted to native speakers' ears. Maybe it's in use in other English-speaking countries.
And "gratis" isn't really an English word; it's a Spanish word that is sometimes used in explanations like we read here. You do hear it in the US, probably because around 20% to 25% of the population is reasonably familiar with Spanish. But it's more in the class of "Spanish words that most Americans know", rather than an English word. Sorta like like "gracias", "taco" and "cerveza".;-)
But the real problem in this case is that the most natural translation of both the Russian words is "free", which is an English word with several essentially unrelated meanings. I sorta like to add the third example: "free as in disk space". And there are a number of other possible meanings of "free". It's clear in this discussion that most of the people either didn't read TFA or couldn't read the Russian, and they assumed the wrong meaning for "free".
(Actually, I sorta suspect that the Russian agency in question was looking at the price, even if they wrote "svobodnovo". You can't often trust any bureaucratic agency to tell you what their real motivation is. And I wish/. would switch to UTF-8, so I could have used the right spelling, copied from the Russian text.)
... if it's "free" software they're after, what's to stop MS from just giving Windows to them for free on some kind of "educational deal".
Ah, but you and others are getting an entirely wrong idea due to a simple (and probably intentional) mistranslation. The Russian government's order and the original article were not written in English, they were in Russian. As someone else point out in another message, the Russian text describes the software as "svobodniy", not "bezplatniy". Both of these words translate to English as "free", but their meanings are totally different, and neither can be naturally expressed in English with a single word. The morpheme "svobod-" means free as in liberty or freedom. The root "bezplat-" is two morphemes, "bez-" meaning without, and "plat-" meaning cost or price.
They aren't ordering schools to use software that they don't have to pay for. They're ordering the schools to use software that's unencumbered by legal restrictions and, for example, can be taken apart and studied by students that are interesting in software or by school employees looking for backdoors and other security holes. It so happens that much "svobodniy" software is available at no cost and without legal restrictions, but that wasn't the adjectivee that was used, and wasn't the intent of the government's order.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan's famous claim that the Russian language has no word for freedom, the translators in this case missed the fact that English has no word for "svobodniy". Rather, English has a word "free" that means both "svobodniy" and "bezplatniy", two unrelated concepts that English speakers typically confuse. One can, of course, express these concepts in English, using short multi-word phrases. But in this case, the translators chose not to do this, and instead went with the one-word translation that is misinterpreted by most English readers.
This is, of course, an old trick of propagandists. If you're familiar with the technique, you're probably amused to see it in use, and to see so many people falling for it so publicly.
The word used in the russian article was "svobodnovo", which means free as in liberty.
But, but... Ronald Reagan assured us that Russian doesn't have a word for freedom.
(You can find lots of good reading on this topic by asking google for "doesn't have a word for" and/or "has no word for", with the quotes. Many of the matches are from linguists discussing the ways in which this phrase is (mis)used for various misleading purposes. My favorite recent instance was George Bush's claim that French has no word for entrepreneur.;-)
It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.
Yeah, and that's pretty much their tactic in the US now, too, since they became one of the biggest "campaign contributors" back in the 2000 elections.
Anyway, slashing prices is difficult in a country where most "customers" get Windows for free. To beat that, MS would have to start paying people to use their software. Of course, for government agencies, it can be a bit more difficult to get away with using pirated software. Your records may be accessible to the politicians who are on the take, and they have ways of punishing people who don't buy from their campaign contributors.
But there may well be a bigger reason: Maybe the Russian government's IT folks are finally getting across the idea that there are serious problems with trusting any binary-only software that comes from a big American corporation. Consider the story discussed here a while back, about the fact that Vista (and apparently XP, too) will sometimes ignore config settings having to do with updates, and automatically update things even when you have explicitly told it not to. This is a giant "backdoor", as the security folks call it. Not only can the software you buy have all sorts of extra code in it that they didn't tell you about ("special for the Russian market"); Windows may at any time replace parts of your system with a new version that has even more "special" code tailored just for you. That's gotta be making a lot of people a bit nervous.
This nervousness is probably encouraged by the widespread interpretation of the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion, as the result of sabotage by American software. That's an Australian site, but you can find lots of descriptions of this event online, and most of them give the same explanation. This story is a good illustration for why you don't want to run unanalyzable binaries in the controls for critical infrastructure. And maybe you don't want to run binary-only software anywhere. ("Think of the children" comes to mind here.;-)
Note that "free" software is usually also open source. That means you can hire your own hackers to study the code, and remove any backdoors they find. And you can do clean compiles, to ensure that the binaries you're running actually correspond to the code. This should be sufficient to convince anyone with a grain of sense. We don't know whether access to the source code would have prevented the above explosion, but we can safely say that lack of the source code does pretty much prevent finding and fixing such problems.
without changed a bit of code make it 50 million or 50 thousand.
Anyone who can do that is a GOD considering the Linux kernel code itself is 6 Million lines of code...
I'm a bit puzzled by that. My reaction was that I could write a little perl script to do either in a few minutes, and it'd probably work correctly the first time. But I don't consider myself any sort of God. Neither would any other competent perl or python programmer. Most people who know the rudiments of either language would include the word "trivial" in their response.
It's true that the order-of-magnitude increase in lines would be easier than the decrease. This is because you'd have to do a basic lexical parse, because in C you can only introduce newlines between tokens, and that's slightly more difficult that recognizing which newlines can be removed. But recognizing a C token can be done in perl or python with a single simple pattern, so the only thing nontrivial is knowing enough about REs to write the pattern.
There's the fun extra syntactic gimmick that the rewrite rules would be slightly different for lines starting with '#' than for lines without an initial '#', but again, most perl or python programmers would just shrug, mutter "trivial", and write it.
If you don't know any language with good text-munging tools, you might find the task difficult. But since Snobol appeared back in the 1960s, we've developed a lot of languages that can handle simple text formatting trivially. And once you've written the few lines of code, running 6 million lines through it on modern machines can be done while you go out for lunch.
(Actually, I have written a few such conversion programs, usually a bit more complicated than adding or deleting newlines, and fed them millions of lines of input while I went off and did something else. In each case, it worked fine, and was as easy as I thought it would be. And I don't make any claims to godhood of any sort.)
Are you implying that the majority of people are creationists?
Well, actually, if you take the number of people that qualify as "biologists", the number of believing creationists could easily be 100 times that, and still be a minority of the more than 6 billion people on the planet. This is especially true if you include the people who say they accept evolution, but think that it's guided by their God.
There really aren't all that many scientists in the human population. They just have an impact much greater than their numbers might suggest. Similarly, there aren't all that many fundamentalist Christian preachers, but they also have much greater influence (especially in the US) than the average human. And the latter minority is outspokenly opposed to the former minority, while the former minority tends to ignore the dispute and quietly go about their research.
Creationism is a rather useful test case for things like what wikipedia is attempting to do. It's a fairly clear case where you can't reliably go with the majority concensus. Biologists are a small minority of the human population, and religious people outnumber them by orders of magnitude. So any attempt to use concensus reasoning is doomed to epic failure in this case.
But note the "weasel words" that wikipedia uses: It depends on "reliable sources" to verify its facts. It's fairly obvious that a faith-based belief in something passed down from a nebulous authority that doesn't permit any testing can't possibly be a reliable source for anything. So they can happily go ahead and ignore the majority in this case, and go with the small minority that has done actual testing, evidence collecting, etc.
Similarly, physicists and geologists are even tinier minorities, but easily qualify as "reliable sources" in subjects like determining the age of the Earth, the structure of the Solar System, etc., while religious texts fail the basic tests for reliability in such subject areas.
It doesn't really take all that much thought to figure this stuff out.
Of course, in areas like politics and other social subject areas, it's a bit more difficult to determine which sources might be reliable.
I've read a number of stories about people who have been doing that routinely, for years. The original motivation was the sorry record of most airlines for "losing" luggage. The postal system has a much better record, and usually delivers a package to your destination well before you arrive.
Mailing your luggage makes even more sense, now that your luggage can be opened and its contents stolen or damaged by the TSA. The postal system, on the other hand, will insure the contents and will usually pay off if anything is damaged or "lost". It makes even more sense with the airlines that are charging extra for luggage.
The sensible thing to do now, if you have anything of value in your luggage, is to send it separately via any of the package carriers, and only take a small carryon with you. It works. People have been doing it for years, and are usually happy with the results.
(Of course, when you write about mailing your "shit", I'm assuming that you're speaking metaphorically. Though I once worked with a zoologist who was doing field work in a remote part of the world, and did fly packages of feces samples back to his lab. But they were various wild animals' shit, not his own, and were packed in dry ice.;-)
If they are open to serious security discussions, one tactic might be to try to get across a fundamental rule that pretty much all computer security people have been saying for decades:
If you're serious about security, you don't run any software unless you have the source, your people have studied it, and you've compiled it yourself.
If you don't do this, you can't claim to be serious about security, because the people you got the software from could have added all sorts of extra "features", and you have no way of knowing about them until they bite you.
This applies to all software from any source. The main thing different about open-source software is that the code is available to all its users, and they can share information about it without the vendor's permission. Another advantage is that, if you have the source, you can fix a problem that your people find; you don't have to wait for the vendor to get around to fixing it for you.
But you might not want to use the phrase "open source" at the start. Chances are that any manager who hates the idea is really just reacting to PR about the name, and has no idea what it means. After all, it obviously can't hurt you to have the source. At worst, you can just ignore it, and you'll be no worse off that with closed-source software. It's also possible that there's a confusion between "open source" and "free" software, since those concepts often go together. If so, you might work on getting them to understand the difference (and that "free" in this case doesn't mean "zero price";-).
Of course, it could be that the person in question is forbidding open-source because they're on the take, and are actively bringing in software with backdoors. This is a very real possibility in some organizations. You might try to find ways of figuring out whether this is the situation, and if it is, get the hell out of there. In the meantime, you might remind yourself occasionally that there's a chance that this person knows what they're doing, and talking about this could be dangerous to your health.
If this were Microsoft there would be fiery brimstone falling on Redmond from every blog in the world,...
No, there wasn't. This very thing has been discussed here about Vista in the past month or so, and various people pointed out that it's been in Windows at least since XP. There have been discussions of this on assorted other online forums. So far, there has been no sign whatsoever that Windows users are gathering their pitchforks. The outrage here on/. was rather muted and polite, compared to other/. discussions.
M$ can't delete MY software and neither can AT&T =)
Are you sure? A lot of people were shocked (shocked!) to learn that Vista has a backdoor that lets MS disable apps on a customer's machines. Then the discussions here and elsewhere brought out the apparent fact that this has been an undocumented "feature" of Windows since at least XP. This news spread in online forums like/. earlier this year, and I've found it fun to mention it to Windows users. I've yet to find anyone who had ever heard of it.
If your WM phone has such a "kill switch", you probably won't hear about it until they use it.
Actually, it's common in the smart-phone part of the industry. A few years ago, a project I was working on bought me a Blackberry, and one of the first things I did was to install a real browser on it. A year or so later, the browser suddenly stopped working. When I investigated, I finally found someone at the vendor who told me that my license to use it had been disabled. He wouldn't say who did it or why. But I never got it to work again. So such a "kill switch" is implemented on Blackberries. Various discussions I've seen since then have made it clear that if you have a smart-phone, it's highly likely that this can be done to you, too, either by the software vendor or by the cell-phone company.
So far, I haven't heard of it on desktop computers, except for MS Windows. But again, I wouldn't be surprised.
Nah; she thought I'd destroyed the clock, and was pissed. Although it was an old one that wasn't in use any more, I didn't have any business taking it apart and playing with the pieces. It didn't occur to her that I might be able to put it back together. If I'd said that I had, I'd have been called a liar. And I don't think she'd have challenged me to try it, because I might succeed, making her look like a fool. This wasn't a friendly, helpful exchange, and she wasn't thinking of my future economic welfare. I was just a bratty kid who'd destroyed a clock.
There are a lot of parents like that in this world.
And thank God all those bureaucrats aren't working together. It's hard to imagine a world more terrifying than one big DMV.
Actually, I've seen an interesting theory to the effect that the best world would make all the military organizations into the best (i.e., the worst) bureaucracies possible. That way, when the politicial leaders tried to start a war, the militaries on both sides would take so long to do all the paperwork to get it going that the politicians would have all died of old age and the pretexts for the war would have been forgotten by all but historians.
We don't seem to be able to end war by any other approach; maybe we should give that one a try.
That must be why the[y] made it illegal to use the phone while driving, because it's so safe.
Maybe where you live. But here in the US, most of the laws on the topic actually only outlaw holding a phone while driving. They usually make this explicit by stating that "hands-free" phones are legal.
Studies of the topic have shown that hands-free phones are just as dangerous as hand-held phones. This comes up in all such discussions as this, and the legislators can't be ignorant of the studies. So we must conclude that the actual (as opposed to the publicly stated) reason for such laws hasn't been safety concerns. We must look for the actual differences between hands-free and hand-held phones. The only real difference is that you have to buy some extra gadgetry to use a hands-free phone. So the conclusion is that the laws' actual intent is to increase sales of cell-phone gadgetry (while leaving safety unaffected).
What in the Constitution would give the Government the power to regulate where and when I can use my cell phone?
The "interstate commerce" clause. Google for it. Cell phones work by using a network that is not just interstate; it's international. This is easily sufficient grounds for the US Supreme Court to decide that the federal government has the right to regulate cell phone use.
You and I and a few million others might think this is absurd, but far greater absurdities have been promulgated on "interstate commerce" grounds. Look up Gonzales v. Raich (case no. 03-1454) from 2005. This was a Supreme Court case concerning the right of states to legalize marijuana for medical use. The case was decided on interstate-commerce grounds. The argument was that a person in California growing their own pot in their back yard for personal consumption would decrease the sales of commercial marijuana, and much of the commercial marijuana business is interstate, often international. The Supreme Court agreed with this, and decided that the federal drug law overrides the state law.
Note that in the US, the commercial marijuana business is totally illegal under federal law. This was deemed irrelevant to the case. Legal or not, it's a profit-making business, and if you or I grow our own, we don't buy as much from the commercial suppliers. This impacts both interstate and international traffic, so under the US Constitution, Congress has the power to regulate our backyard crops. The legality of the commercial product isn't relevant.
The history of the interstate commerce clause is full of absurdities; this is merely one of the most recent. Compared to Gonzales v. Raich and other similar decisions, the question of federal regulation of your cell phone is quite straightforward. You can't even argue that your call records show only local calls. There's a good chance that the data packets are routed through a center in another state. Just yesterday, I called my daughter, who was just upstairs (two floors higher) in the same house here in Massachusetts. There's a very good chance that the call's packets went through a data center in New York. If we were in Rhode Island or Connecticut, the chance of such routing approaches certainty.
Since all those millionaires running our economy have done so well for us recently...
If you're talking about the US, it's been a long time since mere millionares were running the country. To the people really in charge, a millionaire would be classified among the poor people. To actually be rich and powerful in the US now, you have to count your dollars in units of a billion.
(OTOH, there is a theory that the people really running the country are the millions of unknown bureaucrats in both the government and corporate worlds, who routinely make hash of whatever decrees come down from on high. Those people are rarely if ever millionaries, except maybe for the few that have good rackets going on the side.;-)
Nah; 99% of the/. moderators would have no idea what the word means. They'd use it for articles that were sarcastic or merely deprecating, and think the mod was appropriate.
I remember back when I was in maybe the 4th or 5th grade, and I found an old mechanical clock in the house that wasn't being used. I took it apart, studied the pieces, and put it back together so it still worked. I did this several times, to figure out more about how the pieces worked. Then one day, my mother found me with the clock disassembled. She blew up, gave me a lecture about ruining the clock, took it away from me, and disposed of it.
If she had been around when I found the clock, I'd have never been permitted to take it apart, even though it wasn't being used. She didn't believe that kids like me were smart enough to handle something that she couldn't understand, not even when the teachers kept telling her how smart I was.
People don't have to give kids anything that's educational. Many people would prefer not to. The kids might get the idea that they can learn about such things on their own. We wouldn't want kids to get such ideas, would we?
This would include Open Office for productivity software
So they want the kids to be "productive" in the business-office sense right from the early grades.
Doesn't Australia have any child labor laws?
(This seemed like an obvious and cheap shot when we were discussing putting MS Windows on the OLPC. But when free/open systems like ubuntu are being pushed and one of the reasons is the availability of "office productivity" software, it's high time we start asking some pointed questions about what they're trying to do to the children. We expect that sort of thing from Microsoft, but not from the linux crowd. Especially not ubuntu.;-)
I say if you develop some tricky algorithm to make phones "work faster" than you should be allowed to patent it, and flog it off to the carriers.
Well, I say that if they have a tricky way to make my phone "faster", I don't want it in my phone. I'd rather hear the voice on the other end at the speed it was spoken, thank you very much.
Really, WTF does "work faster" mean in this case? If the phone can make calls and transfer data both ways as it's spoken, why would it need to be faster?
Granted, it'd be good if the network between the phones were faster. The delays when talking to someone on the other side of the world can be annoying. But this has nothing to do with the speed of the phone.
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the application has to do with harmonics. For example the classic problem is that bridge that collapsed under wind load in the 40's. It collapsed partly because harmonics from the wind, ...
People keep saying things like this, but the example doesn't make sense. If you look at the wikipedia article, the first 6-length optimal Golomb sequence is (0 1 4 10 12 17). We can see by inspection there are two adjacent segments, 4-10 and 10-12, whose lengths are in a 3:1 ratio. Thus, the latter's fundamental resonant frequency is equal to the second harmonic of the former's. Having one segment vibrating at a harmonic of another segment is what you're trying to avoid, and in this case, a Golumb sequence produces exactly that resonance.
So either you (and others) are wrong about this application, or I'm badly misinterpreting something. Which is it? How would using a Golumb Ruler help you avoid what it obviously produces in this case?
Now, I did notice that you wrote "pick your structural members to be just a little "off" using proportions from this list". But you could do that using pretty much any sequence, and get incommensurable results just as easily. For example, start with segments all the same length, and vary each length by a different amount. Or, using the properties of irrational numbers, you could make six segments have lengths proportional to the square roots of 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 and 36, thus guaranteeing no common harmonics to the limit of the precision of your measurements. It's not obvious that using a Golomb sequence instead of a list of integers gives you any advantage here.
What am I missing?
Heh. That's gotta be one of the clearest statements of the problem in the whole discussion. Too bad I used up my mod points yesterday.
I might add that, even if you have a good understanding of the underlying system, you can still be surprised by what a GUI app's Save window does. On both my Mac and my linux machines, I've often thought I understood where I'd saved a file, but when I went to look for it, it wasn't there. So I open a terminal window, fire up a "find" command to locate it, and it's off in some other place that I just can't explain. Presumably the developers had some good (to them) reason for ignoring what I typed and putting it there, often with a modified name. But I can't read the developers' minds. I can't even find what (if any) docs they may have written that explain it. And sometimes I never can find any files with names that contain the string that I typed into the "Save as ..." widget.
Occasionally, I've googled for an explanation, but this is rarely successful. GUI app just have weird, flaky misbehaviors like this, and there's not much I can do about it.
What's really frustrating is finding all the files that I sometimes can't even identify that are littering some of my own working directories. More and more, they appear at random. When I look into them, sometimes I can identify the app that put them there, but usually not. Sometimes they're copies of files of mine from other directories, with different names. My general theory is that this is "intelligent" apps going crazy, i.e., doing what their developers programmed them to do. Sometimes when I delete them, I later learn what app wanted them there when it suddenly tells me it can't find the file with that name. Then the puzzle is why it decided to put its file in some directory that I created for my own use.
Maybe it's all done intentionally, to keep us users on our toes. Or to give us things to puzzle over when we're trying to figure out where all the space on our disks went.
Then there are the files named '&1' or sometimes '&2' in a lot of my directories. I suspect I know how that name was created, but finding the culprit that wrote the file can be rather difficult. I always delete them, but they tend to reappear weeks or months later.
Why did the user lose the file? Maybe it would be good for the user to learn how to remember filenames, ...
Funny example: A couple of weeks ago, while downloading and installing something, it asked where I wanted it saved. Naturally, I typed in a file name, starting with a couple of directories with slashes between them, and hit the Save button. Then I went to that directory to look at the file - and it wasn't there! I looked around in all the obvious places, and didn't find it.
Now, I can see some people snickering at a "dump Windows user". But this was on linux. So I did what y'all would eventually do, I ran a "find / "*foo*" command, where "foo" was part of the file name. After a good while, it found it. It was in my home directory (not the one in the save window's Directory widget), and its name had all the slashes changed to colons.
My reaction, of course, was "WTF???" I did a couple more tests, and got the same insane misbehavior. The app was obviously intentionally programmed (with malice aforethought) to do this to pathnames.
Lesson: On any system, linux included, an app can do utterly insane things like this that no sensible user would ever expect. Some apps seem designed to do such things in the worst possible way, perhaps to challenge the sucker^Wuser to figure it out.
It is, of course, all part of the popular GUI culture, in which the user isn't supposed to worry their pretty little head about such details. Users are assumed ignorant and illiterate, the details should be hidden from them, and the app can decide for itself what things are called and where they should reside.
It's part of why the more intelligent people eventually migrate to the CLI environment, which has far fewer such insanities as roadblocks to getting things done. But even there, the attitude that "the user is an idiot" is spreading. And the CLI environment isn't for everyone, since it requires a good level of literacy. So we can expect such things to continue, and probably get worse, for a long time.
Anyway, I have one more item on my long list of things developers can do to make life difficult for users.
The writer does have some radically new definitions of a few terms. Thus, calling either a biological cell or cloud computing "efficient" is totally bizarre, unless you are using the term in a way that's different from any dictionary definition. Biologists would just laugh a the idea. Then they'd probably go into either a list of all the known inefficiencies in the basic biochemistry, or they'd try to explain that the evolutionary process doesn't care much about efficiency. All that matters is relative survival. And the process itself is dependent on random mutation that are usually (but not always) detrimental to the organism.
Similarly, anyone who has looked at the low-level details of the Internet (i.e., various protocols) will tell you that it's far from efficient. Like biological systems, it has won out and thrived not because it's perfect, but it's better in several important ways than any of its competitors. The major reason, of course, is its free/open nature. Anyone can download any of the specs and implement them without permission from anyone else.
Thus, back in the 1980s, I worked on a number of OSI projects. Repeatedly, what would happen is that we'd order the docs we needed to start implementing, going through the usual purchasing red tape that every company has, fire off the purchase order, and wait. While we were waiting, we'd play around with our ideas on IP. We'd fetch the docs and have them in a few minutes. By the time we got the docs we needed, we'd already had our ideas up and running on IP. We usually had IP-based deliverable before we could even start coding for OSI. Eventually, the idea got through to even the most dimwitted managers.
I also sat through a number of explanations of why DECnet was superior to IP. Maybe it was, but as a developer, I found that (even when working on contract to DEC), I couldn't get at the low-level details of DECnet that I needed. With IP, all the information was available in minutes with no bureaucratic hassle. So it didn't matter if DECnet was technically superior; it was sufficiently hidden from developers like me that I couldn't write (semi-)reliable code for it like I could for IP.
Efficiency is useful and desirable, but it's not the first concern for either biological or electronic systems. First, you have to function well in your environment. Then you can worry about efficiency. A good designer will think about both in parallel, of course; even the idiotic evolutionary process "understands" that. But unless it works in the real-world environment, it doesn't matter how efficient it is.
For free as in beer we have, off the top of my head, costless and gratis, both of them in use in English for ~600 years.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "costless". Of course, it's an English word, and any reasonably fluent speaker will be able to parse it into its two morphemes. That's why I said "... neither can be naturally expressed in English with a single word." Yes, you can construct the single word "costless", but (at least here in the US), it's not a word you normally hear, and the resulting sentence would sound stilted to native speakers' ears. Maybe it's in use in other English-speaking countries.
And "gratis" isn't really an English word; it's a Spanish word that is sometimes used in explanations like we read here. You do hear it in the US, probably because around 20% to 25% of the population is reasonably familiar with Spanish. But it's more in the class of "Spanish words that most Americans know", rather than an English word. Sorta like like "gracias", "taco" and "cerveza". ;-)
But the real problem in this case is that the most natural translation of both the Russian words is "free", which is an English word with several essentially unrelated meanings. I sorta like to add the third example: "free as in disk space". And there are a number of other possible meanings of "free". It's clear in this discussion that most of the people either didn't read TFA or couldn't read the Russian, and they assumed the wrong meaning for "free".
(Actually, I sorta suspect that the Russian agency in question was looking at the price, even if they wrote "svobodnovo". You can't often trust any bureaucratic agency to tell you what their real motivation is. And I wish /. would switch to UTF-8, so I could have used the right spelling, copied from the Russian text.)
... if it's "free" software they're after, what's to stop MS from just giving Windows to them for free on some kind of "educational deal".
Ah, but you and others are getting an entirely wrong idea due to a simple (and probably intentional) mistranslation. The Russian government's order and the original article were not written in English, they were in Russian. As someone else point out in another message, the Russian text describes the software as "svobodniy", not "bezplatniy". Both of these words translate to English as "free", but their meanings are totally different, and neither can be naturally expressed in English with a single word. The morpheme "svobod-" means free as in liberty or freedom. The root "bezplat-" is two morphemes, "bez-" meaning without, and "plat-" meaning cost or price.
They aren't ordering schools to use software that they don't have to pay for. They're ordering the schools to use software that's unencumbered by legal restrictions and, for example, can be taken apart and studied by students that are interesting in software or by school employees looking for backdoors and other security holes. It so happens that much "svobodniy" software is available at no cost and without legal restrictions, but that wasn't the adjectivee that was used, and wasn't the intent of the government's order.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan's famous claim that the Russian language has no word for freedom, the translators in this case missed the fact that English has no word for "svobodniy". Rather, English has a word "free" that means both "svobodniy" and "bezplatniy", two unrelated concepts that English speakers typically confuse. One can, of course, express these concepts in English, using short multi-word phrases. But in this case, the translators chose not to do this, and instead went with the one-word translation that is misinterpreted by most English readers.
This is, of course, an old trick of propagandists. If you're familiar with the technique, you're probably amused to see it in use, and to see so many people falling for it so publicly.
The word used in the russian article was "svobodnovo", which means free as in liberty.
But, but ... Ronald Reagan assured us that Russian doesn't have a word for freedom.
(You can find lots of good reading on this topic by asking google for "doesn't have a word for" and/or "has no word for", with the quotes. Many of the matches are from linguists discussing the ways in which this phrase is (mis)used for various misleading purposes. My favorite recent instance was George Bush's claim that French has no word for entrepreneur. ;-)
It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.
Yeah, and that's pretty much their tactic in the US now, too, since they became one of the biggest "campaign contributors" back in the 2000 elections.
Anyway, slashing prices is difficult in a country where most "customers" get Windows for free. To beat that, MS would have to start paying people to use their software. Of course, for government agencies, it can be a bit more difficult to get away with using pirated software. Your records may be accessible to the politicians who are on the take, and they have ways of punishing people who don't buy from their campaign contributors.
But there may well be a bigger reason: Maybe the Russian government's IT folks are finally getting across the idea that there are serious problems with trusting any binary-only software that comes from a big American corporation. Consider the story discussed here a while back, about the fact that Vista (and apparently XP, too) will sometimes ignore config settings having to do with updates, and automatically update things even when you have explicitly told it not to. This is a giant "backdoor", as the security folks call it. Not only can the software you buy have all sorts of extra code in it that they didn't tell you about ("special for the Russian market"); Windows may at any time replace parts of your system with a new version that has even more "special" code tailored just for you. That's gotta be making a lot of people a bit nervous.
This nervousness is probably encouraged by the widespread interpretation of the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion, as the result of sabotage by American software. That's an Australian site, but you can find lots of descriptions of this event online, and most of them give the same explanation. This story is a good illustration for why you don't want to run unanalyzable binaries in the controls for critical infrastructure. And maybe you don't want to run binary-only software anywhere. ("Think of the children" comes to mind here. ;-)
Note that "free" software is usually also open source. That means you can hire your own hackers to study the code, and remove any backdoors they find. And you can do clean compiles, to ensure that the binaries you're running actually correspond to the code. This should be sufficient to convince anyone with a grain of sense. We don't know whether access to the source code would have prevented the above explosion, but we can safely say that lack of the source code does pretty much prevent finding and fixing such problems.
I'm a bit puzzled by that. My reaction was that I could write a little perl script to do either in a few minutes, and it'd probably work correctly the first time. But I don't consider myself any sort of God. Neither would any other competent perl or python programmer. Most people who know the rudiments of either language would include the word "trivial" in their response.
It's true that the order-of-magnitude increase in lines would be easier than the decrease. This is because you'd have to do a basic lexical parse, because in C you can only introduce newlines between tokens, and that's slightly more difficult that recognizing which newlines can be removed. But recognizing a C token can be done in perl or python with a single simple pattern, so the only thing nontrivial is knowing enough about REs to write the pattern.
There's the fun extra syntactic gimmick that the rewrite rules would be slightly different for lines starting with '#' than for lines without an initial '#', but again, most perl or python programmers would just shrug, mutter "trivial", and write it.
If you don't know any language with good text-munging tools, you might find the task difficult. But since Snobol appeared back in the 1960s, we've developed a lot of languages that can handle simple text formatting trivially. And once you've written the few lines of code, running 6 million lines through it on modern machines can be done while you go out for lunch.
(Actually, I have written a few such conversion programs, usually a bit more complicated than adding or deleting newlines, and fed them millions of lines of input while I went off and did something else. In each case, it worked fine, and was as easy as I thought it would be. And I don't make any claims to godhood of any sort.)
Are you implying that the majority of people are creationists?
Well, actually, if you take the number of people that qualify as "biologists", the number of believing creationists could easily be 100 times that, and still be a minority of the more than 6 billion people on the planet. This is especially true if you include the people who say they accept evolution, but think that it's guided by their God.
There really aren't all that many scientists in the human population. They just have an impact much greater than their numbers might suggest. Similarly, there aren't all that many fundamentalist Christian preachers, but they also have much greater influence (especially in the US) than the average human. And the latter minority is outspokenly opposed to the former minority, while the former minority tends to ignore the dispute and quietly go about their research.
Creationism is a rather useful test case for things like what wikipedia is attempting to do. It's a fairly clear case where you can't reliably go with the majority concensus. Biologists are a small minority of the human population, and religious people outnumber them by orders of magnitude. So any attempt to use concensus reasoning is doomed to epic failure in this case.
But note the "weasel words" that wikipedia uses: It depends on "reliable sources" to verify its facts. It's fairly obvious that a faith-based belief in something passed down from a nebulous authority that doesn't permit any testing can't possibly be a reliable source for anything. So they can happily go ahead and ignore the majority in this case, and go with the small minority that has done actual testing, evidence collecting, etc.
Similarly, physicists and geologists are even tinier minorities, but easily qualify as "reliable sources" in subjects like determining the age of the Earth, the structure of the Solar System, etc., while religious texts fail the basic tests for reliability in such subject areas.
It doesn't really take all that much thought to figure this stuff out.
Of course, in areas like politics and other social subject areas, it's a bit more difficult to determine which sources might be reliable.
i'm mailing my shit next time.
I've read a number of stories about people who have been doing that routinely, for years. The original motivation was the sorry record of most airlines for "losing" luggage. The postal system has a much better record, and usually delivers a package to your destination well before you arrive.
Mailing your luggage makes even more sense, now that your luggage can be opened and its contents stolen or damaged by the TSA. The postal system, on the other hand, will insure the contents and will usually pay off if anything is damaged or "lost". It makes even more sense with the airlines that are charging extra for luggage.
The sensible thing to do now, if you have anything of value in your luggage, is to send it separately via any of the package carriers, and only take a small carryon with you. It works. People have been doing it for years, and are usually happy with the results.
(Of course, when you write about mailing your "shit", I'm assuming that you're speaking metaphorically. Though I once worked with a zoologist who was doing field work in a remote part of the world, and did fly packages of feces samples back to his lab. But they were various wild animals' shit, not his own, and were packed in dry ice. ;-)
If they are open to serious security discussions, one tactic might be to try to get across a fundamental rule that pretty much all computer security people have been saying for decades:
If you're serious about security, you don't run any software unless you have the source, your people have studied it, and you've compiled it yourself.
If you don't do this, you can't claim to be serious about security, because the people you got the software from could have added all sorts of extra "features", and you have no way of knowing about them until they bite you.
This applies to all software from any source. The main thing different about open-source software is that the code is available to all its users, and they can share information about it without the vendor's permission. Another advantage is that, if you have the source, you can fix a problem that your people find; you don't have to wait for the vendor to get around to fixing it for you.
But you might not want to use the phrase "open source" at the start. Chances are that any manager who hates the idea is really just reacting to PR about the name, and has no idea what it means. After all, it obviously can't hurt you to have the source. At worst, you can just ignore it, and you'll be no worse off that with closed-source software. It's also possible that there's a confusion between "open source" and "free" software, since those concepts often go together. If so, you might work on getting them to understand the difference (and that "free" in this case doesn't mean "zero price" ;-).
Of course, it could be that the person in question is forbidding open-source because they're on the take, and are actively bringing in software with backdoors. This is a very real possibility in some organizations. You might try to find ways of figuring out whether this is the situation, and if it is, get the hell out of there. In the meantime, you might remind yourself occasionally that there's a chance that this person knows what they're doing, and talking about this could be dangerous to your health.
If this were Microsoft there would be fiery brimstone falling on Redmond from every blog in the world, ...
No, there wasn't. This very thing has been discussed here about Vista in the past month or so, and various people pointed out that it's been in Windows at least since XP. There have been discussions of this on assorted other online forums. So far, there has been no sign whatsoever that Windows users are gathering their pitchforks. The outrage here on /. was rather muted and polite, compared to other /. discussions.
M$ can't delete MY software and neither can AT&T =)
Are you sure? A lot of people were shocked (shocked!) to learn that Vista has a backdoor that lets MS disable apps on a customer's machines. Then the discussions here and elsewhere brought out the apparent fact that this has been an undocumented "feature" of Windows since at least XP. This news spread in online forums like /. earlier this year, and I've found it fun to mention it to Windows users. I've yet to find anyone who had ever heard of it.
If your WM phone has such a "kill switch", you probably won't hear about it until they use it.
Actually, it's common in the smart-phone part of the industry. A few years ago, a project I was working on bought me a Blackberry, and one of the first things I did was to install a real browser on it. A year or so later, the browser suddenly stopped working. When I investigated, I finally found someone at the vendor who told me that my license to use it had been disabled. He wouldn't say who did it or why. But I never got it to work again. So such a "kill switch" is implemented on Blackberries. Various discussions I've seen since then have made it clear that if you have a smart-phone, it's highly likely that this can be done to you, too, either by the software vendor or by the cell-phone company.
So far, I haven't heard of it on desktop computers, except for MS Windows. But again, I wouldn't be surprised.
Nah; she thought I'd destroyed the clock, and was pissed. Although it was an old one that wasn't in use any more, I didn't have any business taking it apart and playing with the pieces. It didn't occur to her that I might be able to put it back together. If I'd said that I had, I'd have been called a liar. And I don't think she'd have challenged me to try it, because I might succeed, making her look like a fool. This wasn't a friendly, helpful exchange, and she wasn't thinking of my future economic welfare. I was just a bratty kid who'd destroyed a clock.
There are a lot of parents like that in this world.
If it catches on I expect it would be a virtually free feature in later models.
Of course it will. But those later models will cost $10 per month more. And you won't be able to opt out and get a $10 discount.
And thank God all those bureaucrats aren't working together. It's hard to imagine a world more terrifying than one big DMV.
Actually, I've seen an interesting theory to the effect that the best world would make all the military organizations into the best (i.e., the worst) bureaucracies possible. That way, when the politicial leaders tried to start a war, the militaries on both sides would take so long to do all the paperwork to get it going that the politicians would have all died of old age and the pretexts for the war would have been forgotten by all but historians.
We don't seem to be able to end war by any other approach; maybe we should give that one a try.
That must be why the[y] made it illegal to use the phone while driving, because it's so safe.
Maybe where you live. But here in the US, most of the laws on the topic actually only outlaw holding a phone while driving. They usually make this explicit by stating that "hands-free" phones are legal.
Studies of the topic have shown that hands-free phones are just as dangerous as hand-held phones. This comes up in all such discussions as this, and the legislators can't be ignorant of the studies. So we must conclude that the actual (as opposed to the publicly stated) reason for such laws hasn't been safety concerns. We must look for the actual differences between hands-free and hand-held phones. The only real difference is that you have to buy some extra gadgetry to use a hands-free phone. So the conclusion is that the laws' actual intent is to increase sales of cell-phone gadgetry (while leaving safety unaffected).
(What, me cynical? ;-)
What in the Constitution would give the Government the power to regulate where and when I can use my cell phone?
The "interstate commerce" clause. Google for it. Cell phones work by using a network that is not just interstate; it's international. This is easily sufficient grounds for the US Supreme Court to decide that the federal government has the right to regulate cell phone use.
You and I and a few million others might think this is absurd, but far greater absurdities have been promulgated on "interstate commerce" grounds. Look up Gonzales v. Raich (case no. 03-1454) from 2005. This was a Supreme Court case concerning the right of states to legalize marijuana for medical use. The case was decided on interstate-commerce grounds. The argument was that a person in California growing their own pot in their back yard for personal consumption would decrease the sales of commercial marijuana, and much of the commercial marijuana business is interstate, often international. The Supreme Court agreed with this, and decided that the federal drug law overrides the state law.
Note that in the US, the commercial marijuana business is totally illegal under federal law. This was deemed irrelevant to the case. Legal or not, it's a profit-making business, and if you or I grow our own, we don't buy as much from the commercial suppliers. This impacts both interstate and international traffic, so under the US Constitution, Congress has the power to regulate our backyard crops. The legality of the commercial product isn't relevant.
The history of the interstate commerce clause is full of absurdities; this is merely one of the most recent. Compared to Gonzales v. Raich and other similar decisions, the question of federal regulation of your cell phone is quite straightforward. You can't even argue that your call records show only local calls. There's a good chance that the data packets are routed through a center in another state. Just yesterday, I called my daughter, who was just upstairs (two floors higher) in the same house here in Massachusetts. There's a very good chance that the call's packets went through a data center in New York. If we were in Rhode Island or Connecticut, the chance of such routing approaches certainty.
Since all those millionaires running our economy have done so well for us recently...
If you're talking about the US, it's been a long time since mere millionares were running the country. To the people really in charge, a millionaire would be classified among the poor people. To actually be rich and powerful in the US now, you have to count your dollars in units of a billion.
(OTOH, there is a theory that the people really running the country are the millions of unknown bureaucrats in both the government and corporate worlds, who routinely make hash of whatever decrees come down from on high. Those people are rarely if ever millionaries, except maybe for the few that have good rackets going on the side. ;-)
+1 "Irony"
Nah; 99% of the /. moderators would have no idea what the word means. They'd use it for articles that were sarcastic or merely deprecating, and think the mod was appropriate.
You've got to give kids clocks to take apart.
No, you don't. ;-)
I remember back when I was in maybe the 4th or 5th grade, and I found an old mechanical clock in the house that wasn't being used. I took it apart, studied the pieces, and put it back together so it still worked. I did this several times, to figure out more about how the pieces worked. Then one day, my mother found me with the clock disassembled. She blew up, gave me a lecture about ruining the clock, took it away from me, and disposed of it.
If she had been around when I found the clock, I'd have never been permitted to take it apart, even though it wasn't being used. She didn't believe that kids like me were smart enough to handle something that she couldn't understand, not even when the teachers kept telling her how smart I was.
People don't have to give kids anything that's educational. Many people would prefer not to. The kids might get the idea that they can learn about such things on their own. We wouldn't want kids to get such ideas, would we?
This would include Open Office for productivity software
So they want the kids to be "productive" in the business-office sense right from the early grades.
Doesn't Australia have any child labor laws?
(This seemed like an obvious and cheap shot when we were discussing putting MS Windows on the OLPC. But when free/open systems like ubuntu are being pushed and one of the reasons is the availability of "office productivity" software, it's high time we start asking some pointed questions about what they're trying to do to the children. We expect that sort of thing from Microsoft, but not from the linux crowd. Especially not ubuntu. ;-)
I say if you develop some tricky algorithm to make phones "work faster" than you should be allowed to patent it, and flog it off to the carriers.
Well, I say that if they have a tricky way to make my phone "faster", I don't want it in my phone. I'd rather hear the voice on the other end at the speed it was spoken, thank you very much.
Really, WTF does "work faster" mean in this case? If the phone can make calls and transfer data both ways as it's spoken, why would it need to be faster?
Granted, it'd be good if the network between the phones were faster. The delays when talking to someone on the other side of the world can be annoying. But this has nothing to do with the speed of the phone.