The comment that we "almost never can be skilled enough" is quite accurate, and it's due to a curious phenomenon in IT hiring. The current example is that headhunters are now seeing job reqs that ask for three years experience with Windows Vista.
This isn't at all a new thing. I've worked with computers for about 3 decades now, and this has been a part of job hunts for as long as I've been looking for jobs. It is a source of a bit of humor, but if you're facing the HR guys that don't get the joke, it's not quite as funny.
It is a bit funny that someone would suggest more H-1B visas as a solution to this problem. Does he think that there are people in India with three years experience with Windows Vista? Of course, if his background is in IT management, he probably does think that.
Indeed, just supplying email would be useful. But this probably isn't any easier. The simplest approach would be to just supply IP connectivity via a basic internet hookup. Email, wikipedia, google, and everything else would follow from that with no extra effort.
I have seen firsthand the effect that email can have, though. For example, in the early 90's I was in Finland and visited some relatives of friends. They lived on a small farm way up north. They had just decided that it was time to harvest a field of cabbage. So they did what small farmers in their area had learned to do: They sent out email asking for bids on the crop. Later that day, they had sold the crop to a local grocery supply company and arranged for it to be picked up a few days later. Then they went to work picking the cabbage and piling it onto their truck.
They also commented that they were looking forward to the advent of wireless. Not because they really wanted it themselves. It was for the benefit of the guy who would pick up the crop. A few years before, he had worked for a big national trucking firm. With the advent of email, he had bought himself a truck, and started his own local business. He knew all the growers in the area, and most of the grocers, and they all trusted each other. But his business would be easier if he could have a small computer with wireless email in his truck. That way, he wouldn't have to stop off at home several times a day to check his email.
I'd bet that the OLPC effort could easily lead to this sort of thing all over, as the children grew up knowing how to use their tiny wireless computer. If it supplied cheap, portable email, people like these farmers and truckers could set up their own local businesses and give fast local service to their area in a way that few big companies could manage.
But as useful as email is, it's just one useful tool. Imagine the benefits of being able to use google the way we're doing now. Such local operations could really benefit from being able to do an "end run" around their local entrenched political powers, and deal directly with the outside world without all the barriers that exist now.
Of course, a certain skepticism is in order. They'll all have to learn about internet scams, just as we have.
Just because we don't know what "junk DNA" is for doesn't mean it's not useful.
Researchers are starting to point this out.
A recent example: The sequencing of the DNA of the domestic chicken found a 20,000-base-pair "non-coding" (i.e., "junk") sequence that is very nearly identical with a sequence in human DNA. For such a long sequence to be preserved is highly unlikely unless it has a strong adaptive advantage. We don't have any idea what it does, but the only reasonable conclusion is that it's very important to both chickens and humans. That's the only way it could have been preserved for the roughly 180 million years since our last common ancestor.
Either that, or it's a retrovirus that infects both species and recently invaded both genomes. Possible, but a lot less likely.
As an interesting aside, the people looking at the genes behind regeneration and scarring have explained that they are basically the same set of genes. What Ma Nature did was to "retarget" the regeneration mechanism, tweaking it to give us a quick-and-dirty mode that isn't quite healing or regeneration, but which quickly seals over a wound with scar tissue.
This isn't really good news for us, because it means that we can't just reactivate the original genes. They aren't there any more; they've been modified to work differently. Messing with the current genes will probably lead to poor healing in the first few thousand test animals. Introducing regeneration in mammals will probably require developing a parallel set of genes that can be added to our genome. It will be based on both the reptilian regeneration genes and the mammalian scarring genes, but won't be quite the same as either. And developing this will take a lot of work.
So don't expect that we'll have regeneration of lost limbs anytime soon.
Why not at least make those we tread on daily (with or without our knowledge) have slightly more meaningful lives and give them one of the best resources around - knowledge.
Actually, there's a straightforward answer to such rhetorical questions. Much of the explanation for the abject poverty in many parts of the world is a local social/political system that keeps the people in poverty. And the main tool for doing this is ignorance. People in power tend to understand the old "Knowledge is power" saying, and maintain their hold by blocking general access to information from the outside world.
Those who object to the OLPC project are basically arguing for keeping the people in ignorance by maintaining their lack of access to knowledge.
Granted, people need food, shelter, medicine, etc. Giving such things does help them in the short term. But unless you can also fight the local power structure by giving the people access to information and knowledge, your charity is only short-term, and doesn't address the underlying problems. It's the old "Give a man a fish..." saying.
Of course, the OLPC laptop isn't itself a total solution. It also needs the infrastructure to deliver information. Unless it is accompanied by the hardware needed for Net access, it won't accomplish nearly its full potential. So rather than discussing why we should give the people food and medicine, which existing relief organizations know how to do, we computer geeks should be discussing how we can also bring them Internet connectivity.
Along with the (linux-based) OLPC laptops, with their wireless mesh comm hardware, we need to find the local proto-geeks and supply them with (linux-based?) server machines that can function as gateways. And we need to figure out how to link those servers to the Internet. The best way would be to do what we can to help those local geeks manage it all themselves.
If we can pull this off, the local power structures won't know what hit them until it's too late. This is happening in places like China right now, where the local powers are fighting their rearguard actions against the likes of google and wikipedia, in the ongoing battle to keep their people ignorant. With a bit of effort, we can bring this to the rest of the world.
Try to send a file to a machine that is turned off or not connected to the net and see what you get?
What you get is called "Usenet", and it's been doing just that quite successfully for a few decades now.;-)
Usenet originally ran mainly on top of UUCP, invented at Bell Labs back in the 1970s. UUCP implemented the same sort of scheme some years before the Internet came into existence. The general term is "store-and-forward".
It's all covered in many "intro to networking" courses.
BBN has developed a network protocol and code that moves information from node to node as connections become available, and can hold information in persistent storage until a connection is available.
Wow... what can I say ? - over 8 million bucks to re-discover or re-invent SMTP...
Funny, but maybe a bit mistargeted. The idea behind SMTP really was to do email via a direct end-to-end TCP link. Caching when the destination couldn't be reached was a "temporary" kludge that was grudgingly added because the Internet wasn't yet reliable enough for end-to-end connectivity.
The email system that really was designed as store-and-forward was UUCP. Its first incarnation worked via the phone system, before even many universities had IP connectivity.
It is sort of funny that, as UUCP moved onto the Internet, and then just sorta merged with SMTP, SMTP had to adapt to the world of ISPs that intentionally block end-to-end SMTP connectivity and force users to relay their messages via the ISP's servers (which all too often are flakey as hell - and then there's hotmail and yahoo;-).
But yeah; the major reaction of older geeks with a bit of knowledge is that we're just laboriously re-inventing things that were invented long ago. The computer biz doesn't seem to have much memory, does it? You take something done decades ago, describe it with slightly tweaked terminology, and you get/. coverage for your great new idea.
And here in the US, you can probably even patent your idea, and then use your patent to extort money from people who have been violating your patent for 10 or 20 years.
Of course, sometimes it's wise to carefully examine purported generous gifts from Microsoft. They have a bit of a history of giving "gifts" that cost the recipients more than they were expecting.
Not that Bill's gifts are always like this, I suppose. But this sort of thing has been reported often enough that one might want to do some careful investigating before accepting anything "free" from him and his colleagues.
It should also be noted that the purported value of such gifts is often wildly exaggerated. It's generally calculated by deciding on a "list price" for the software that is often a lot more than any customer has ever actually paid for it. The actual cost to Bill & Co. is generally quite a bit lower than claimed. In some cases, the actual cost of a multi-million-dollar gift has turned out to be a couple hundred dollars for the CDs and shipping.
As far as I can tell, Warren Buffet actually gives out money, not free software licenses. But I could be wrong. In the case of Bill Gates, one should try to verify that the recipients actually received money, not some "in kind" gift. I've found that it's usually extraordinarily difficult to verify this from the new reports.
[T]hey have no evidence that osama had anything to do with the 9-11 attacks.
In a lot of the world, this seems to be a conventional explanation of why the US hasn't captured Osama. With him "in the wild", he's a good propaganda target. But if they had him in a court, his lawyers would totally rip apart the prosecution's case, because the US government has no actual evidence against him, and he'd walk out of court a free man. This would, of course, be a major hit to the US's image, since years of PR would be shown false.
Actually, it would probably be even worse. He might not be allowed to walk out of court at all. He'd be held for prosecution on other crimes. It would slowly become clear that even if never convicted of anything, he'd never be free again. This would really hurt the American image, but the US government wouldn't be able back down. How often to governments ever admit they were wrong about something?
So it's better (from the US government's viewpoint) that he remain free and untried. That way, he's a convenient scapegoat any time anyone commits some atrocity somewhere in the world.
Anyway, this is a widely held theory. Maybe it's accurate; maybe not. It'd be interesting to know about actual evidence in the hands of US investigators. But we might not ever see it even if it exists. Osama is tremendously useful for PR purposes.
While it's silly to compare the Boston Tea Party to the World Trade Center attack, I've read a number of comparisons between the Boston Tea Party and the Iraq war.
The Boston Tea Party happpened in response to the UK government giving exclusive licenses to a few companies to trade with the colonies. This effectively locked out businesses in the colonies from engaging in foreign trade. The Boston Tea Party was to send a message like "We won't buy from your companies; we want to run our own companies that hire our people as workers."
It turns out there's a direct parallel to this in Iraq. The US government has spent a lot of money of "reconstruction", but has refused to hire local contractors who know local conditions and could do the job cheaply with local labor. Rather, the money has gone mostly to big American corporations. Part of the intent of Bush's crowd was to bankrupt the local companies, so that American corporations could buy them cheaply, and Americans would then own much of the Iraqi economy.
But it has't worked that way. The Iraqis understand quite well what's being done to their economy, and when a company has to lay people off due to lack of business, a significant number of the workers have gone into the resistance. They understand, as did the American revolutionaries, that if their local economy ends up owned and operated by remote corporations, the result will be permanent poverty and servitude. They are primarily fighting a war for their own economic independence.
American politicians see what they're doing as a "war on terror", but much of the Middle East sees it as an attempted takeover of the Iraqi economy by powerful foreign corporations. This is very much like the story of the Boston Tea Party.
Just last week, Bush made a comment in a speech that has been ignored by the American media, but widely noticed in the Middle East. He explained that the US has to control the Iraqi oil fields, because otherwise the "terrorists" will end up in control, and they'll be able to affect the US's oil supply. Actually, this remark was noticed in a lot of the world. For example, it might be a tipoff that the US will occupy the Venezuelan oil fields in the near future. (And maybe the North Sea fields after that.;-) It's further evidence that the war is partly about the economy.
In both of these historic wars, the actual story is a lot more complex than the grade-school "us against evil them" categorization that you hear in so much politica rhetoric. Political and social independence is part of it, but people have often fought for economic independence, too.
China is described as the pioneer of internet censors,...
Not even close. Back around 1990, when the commercial world was first discovering that new interweb thing, lots of local ISPs (and a few big ones) were forming rapidly in North America and Europe. Right off, there were widespread reports of ISPs that blocked or seriously interfered with their customers' attempts to access competitors' web sites.
China is now doing the same sort of thing, where "competitor" is meant partly in a political sense. But they're hardly pioneers in the task.
And note that here in the US, we're still fighting the battle. Except now the hot new buzz phrase is "network neutrality". Changing the terminology is a good way to obscure the fact that we're just talking about yet another scheme for the rich and powerful to restrict their subjects' access to information.
Or are you operating under the assumption that voting machine errors always favor Republicans?
Not in Chicago, they don't.
And not here in Massachusetts, either.;-)
Fact is that almost every party to every election will try whatever tricks are within their power to win. This is why so many of us are interested in every little failure of the voting process, no matter how insignificant. If this one guys vote can be ignored or redirected, then the same equipment can do the same anywhere it's used. We want to know about such things. And we want someone to fix the probem.
Telling us that that one guy's vote didn't affect the outcome is utterly irrelevant to the issue. If it can happen to him, it can happen to you and me and thousands of others, just enough of us to throw the election.
Why the fuck can we not have E-Voting machines for those people that want to use the pieces of shit and then the same old paper ballots that we have used for thousands of years for the people that know they are pointless and crooked?
That's how it worked last week in this precinct. They had electronic voting machines, and also paper ballots. I didn't see anyone using the electronic machines. I was slightly tempted to use the machine, but I used a paper ballot, too. It was just too important to "send a message" to the politicians that some of us weren't happy with the way things were being run.
I'm still not sure the message got through, though. I did hear an excerpt of a George Bush speech in which he said that the voters were unhappy that the Iraq war hadn't been won yet. I'm not sure that was exactly the message that some of us were trying to get across.
Build us a reliable, verfiable voting machine/system. Go
Actually, in the Real World[TM], what management orders is very slightly different:
Build us a reliable, verifable voting machine/system. It must run on MS Windows, and must be delivered 3 weeks from now. Go...
The major problem here isn't really that it must run on Windows. It's that it must run on proprietary stuff that the programmers aren't allowed to examing in detail. When this is true, the programmer can't logically be held responsible for its correct behavior, since their code is vulnerable to whatever has been programmed into the invisible lower layers. MS Windows is the most common proprietary platform, but the same problem exists in any proprietary system.
With most important products such as transportation equipment, we wouldn't accept the engineers designing something without access to the detailed specs of all the components, and the ability to take things apart to the lowest level for testing. Would you drive (or fly in) a vehicle whose designers had no access to the inner workings of the components? But with software, we can and do intentionally hide the low-level details from the programmers. Software design "experts" even tout this as a desirable part of the design. People working at one "level" are routinely denied access to the details of other levels. It shouldn't be a puzzle to anyone why software turns out so unreliable.
As a programmer, I've often tracked a bug down to something in "the system" that didn't behave the way the docs seemed to say it would behave. Often the system component wasn't documented to the level of detail that I needed. When I ask what was going on, I've often been told "That's proprietary; we can't tell you." I've pointed out repeatedly that this effectively prevents me from building reliable software. The response of management is usually (in effect) that they'll blame me for the problems or the late delivery anyway. The decision to use that particular proprietary system has been made, and "can't be changed at this late date"; it's my job to deliver the software by the due date.
I conclude that people don't actually want software that works correctly. I'd also suggest that sales data clearly supports this conclusion.
Yah, but it's not really a "CLI" problem as such. It's more the result of command-line languages with fuzzy, confused quoting rules.
Actually, my favorite solution is to write lots of little perl and python apps. I can understand the quoting rules there, and I never seem to run into problems with funny file names being misinterpreted. Same in C, though of course that tends to take a bit longer to program.
And I've seen some curious F-ups in GUI tools when file names contain unusual characters.
I don't think I'd call myself a fanboy of anything. I can't think of a computer that I've used that didn't have some utterly stupid failures. I do tend to like linux, but I don't call it good; I'd rather call it the best of a bad lot.
I've been having fun lately with text that mixes languages. Teaching texts, for example. You can get some really hilarious misbehavior when you try to put English, Chinese and Arabic together in the same line.;-) I've yet to find a system to handles all my test text files right.
I agree. There is nothing wrong with MS charging more for their product. They are not a complete monopoly seeing how Linux and OSX are both alternatives.
Actually, MS's approach is one example of a standard anti-free-market practice that monopolies, duopolies, cartels and such have used for centuries.
It's not a secret that hardly any of the distributors pay "list price" for Windows. The usual sort of anti-competitive contract is used: You get a "special" lower price if you don't sell any competing products. The list price is made high enough that all the distributors take the contract. This effectively locks out startups from the distribution channels.
A textbook example in the US is the way that so many stores and gas stations have either Coke or Pepsi vending machines, but not both. A retail outlet that tries to provide both can be hit with a higher wholesale price for both.
Some US states have outlawed this sort of contract, and in those states, you can get more choice and competition. But there are limits to how effective any but the largest states can be. With companies the size of Microsoft and Dell, such a state law is rather meaningless.
Anyway, MS's management doesn't expect to get list price for Windows from hardly anyone but retail customers trying to upgrade. The main point of such prices is to maintain the lock on retail distribution channels via "special" discounts to distributors.
With computers, a "free market" has never existed, and probably never will. We've always had one 800-pound-gorilla with the ability to lock out most of the competition, except for specialized niche markets that don't much interest the big guy. In such a situation, competition can never develop, at least not without government "interference" via pro-market laws.
[I]f you submit a story to Slashdot about a new technology bill making denial of service attacks illegal, and the Governments site referenced in the article gets Slashdotted.... are you, by the new law, responsible?
I'll bet a lot of/. readers are wondering about this. If not, they should be. And it could be a problem for any kind of news site. One thing about online news is that it's possible to provide links to original documents. But a lot of readers clicking on a link could easily be interpreted as a DDoS attack. So a law like this could encourage journalists to retreat to the old print approach, just bare text with no links. This would materially cut back on one of the main values of hypertext.
I wonder if news.google.com could fall afoul of this law?
You're right, of course. I do routinely use xargs like this, to avoid spawning a process for every file. But this only works on my linux and *BSD machines, where people have generally had the sense to avoid blanks in file names. In particular, I use it with my own files, because I don't use blanks in file names.
Then when I got a Mac, I had to teach myself to think before using xargs, because there's nothing I can do to sanitize the filenames generated by Mac apps, and getting file names quoted correctly is insanely difficult. Not only do a lot of them contain spaces (and tabs), but some contain quotes, and I ran across one file a while back that had a newline in its name.
Of course, the Mac fanboys would just say that I shouldn't be using the CLI; I should only use the GUI like Steve^WGod intended.;-)
Yeah, me too. I've known a number of people who simply use alias to define their most common typos. This can save you a lot of keystrokes over the years.
Does this mean people can be prosecuted for installing Windows onto a computer system?
Maybe. But more likely it means you can be prosecuted for installing a browser. The only purpose of a browser is to use the bandwidth and cpu time of some other computer. That obviously interferes with anything running on that computer, impairing it for all other users.
preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer
What is ''operation of data''? I don't think we had that in CS.
Well, on a unix-like system, the meaning is pretty obvious: Any file permissions other than 777 are now illegal. So to comply, you should run the following commands:
umask 0 find / | xargs chmor ugo+rwx
Also, in any programs that create files, you should change the permission arg to 0777.
Lessee, what have I forgotten?
(I suppose you should also turn off any firewall software you may have running, just to be on the safe side.)
Slashdot Mirror
The comment that we "almost never can be skilled enough" is quite accurate, and it's due to a curious phenomenon in IT hiring. The current example is that headhunters are now seeing job reqs that ask for three years experience with Windows Vista.
This isn't at all a new thing. I've worked with computers for about 3 decades now, and this has been a part of job hunts for as long as I've been looking for jobs. It is a source of a bit of humor, but if you're facing the HR guys that don't get the joke, it's not quite as funny.
It is a bit funny that someone would suggest more H-1B visas as a solution to this problem. Does he think that there are people in India with three years experience with Windows Vista? Of course, if his background is in IT management, he probably does think that.
Indeed, just supplying email would be useful. But this probably isn't any easier. The simplest approach would be to just supply IP connectivity via a basic internet hookup. Email, wikipedia, google, and everything else would follow from that with no extra effort.
I have seen firsthand the effect that email can have, though. For example, in the early 90's I was in Finland and visited some relatives of friends. They lived on a small farm way up north. They had just decided that it was time to harvest a field of cabbage. So they did what small farmers in their area had learned to do: They sent out email asking for bids on the crop. Later that day, they had sold the crop to a local grocery supply company and arranged for it to be picked up a few days later. Then they went to work picking the cabbage and piling it onto their truck.
They also commented that they were looking forward to the advent of wireless. Not because they really wanted it themselves. It was for the benefit of the guy who would pick up the crop. A few years before, he had worked for a big national trucking firm. With the advent of email, he had bought himself a truck, and started his own local business. He knew all the growers in the area, and most of the grocers, and they all trusted each other. But his business would be easier if he could have a small computer with wireless email in his truck. That way, he wouldn't have to stop off at home several times a day to check his email.
I'd bet that the OLPC effort could easily lead to this sort of thing all over, as the children grew up knowing how to use their tiny wireless computer. If it supplied cheap, portable email, people like these farmers and truckers could set up their own local businesses and give fast local service to their area in a way that few big companies could manage.
But as useful as email is, it's just one useful tool. Imagine the benefits of being able to use google the way we're doing now. Such local operations could really benefit from being able to do an "end run" around their local entrenched political powers, and deal directly with the outside world without all the barriers that exist now.
Of course, a certain skepticism is in order. They'll all have to learn about internet scams, just as we have.
Just because we don't know what "junk DNA" is for doesn't mean it's not useful.
Researchers are starting to point this out.
A recent example: The sequencing of the DNA of the domestic chicken found a 20,000-base-pair "non-coding" (i.e., "junk") sequence that is very nearly identical with a sequence in human DNA. For such a long sequence to be preserved is highly unlikely unless it has a strong adaptive advantage. We don't have any idea what it does, but the only reasonable conclusion is that it's very important to both chickens and humans. That's the only way it could have been preserved for the roughly 180 million years since our last common ancestor.
Either that, or it's a retrovirus that infects both species and recently invaded both genomes. Possible, but a lot less likely.
As an interesting aside, the people looking at the genes behind regeneration and scarring have explained that they are basically the same set of genes. What Ma Nature did was to "retarget" the regeneration mechanism, tweaking it to give us a quick-and-dirty mode that isn't quite healing or regeneration, but which quickly seals over a wound with scar tissue.
This isn't really good news for us, because it means that we can't just reactivate the original genes. They aren't there any more; they've been modified to work differently. Messing with the current genes will probably lead to poor healing in the first few thousand test animals. Introducing regeneration in mammals will probably require developing a parallel set of genes that can be added to our genome. It will be based on both the reptilian regeneration genes and the mammalian scarring genes, but won't be quite the same as either. And developing this will take a lot of work.
So don't expect that we'll have regeneration of lost limbs anytime soon.
Why not at least make those we tread on daily (with or without our knowledge) have slightly more meaningful lives and give them one of the best resources around - knowledge.
..." saying.
Actually, there's a straightforward answer to such rhetorical questions. Much of the explanation for the abject poverty in many parts of the world is a local social/political system that keeps the people in poverty. And the main tool for doing this is ignorance. People in power tend to understand the old "Knowledge is power" saying, and maintain their hold by blocking general access to information from the outside world.
Those who object to the OLPC project are basically arguing for keeping the people in ignorance by maintaining their lack of access to knowledge.
Granted, people need food, shelter, medicine, etc. Giving such things does help them in the short term. But unless you can also fight the local power structure by giving the people access to information and knowledge, your charity is only short-term, and doesn't address the underlying problems. It's the old "Give a man a fish
Of course, the OLPC laptop isn't itself a total solution. It also needs the infrastructure to deliver information. Unless it is accompanied by the hardware needed for Net access, it won't accomplish nearly its full potential. So rather than discussing why we should give the people food and medicine, which existing relief organizations know how to do, we computer geeks should be discussing how we can also bring them Internet connectivity.
Along with the (linux-based) OLPC laptops, with their wireless mesh comm hardware, we need to find the local proto-geeks and supply them with (linux-based?) server machines that can function as gateways. And we need to figure out how to link those servers to the Internet. The best way would be to do what we can to help those local geeks manage it all themselves.
If we can pull this off, the local power structures won't know what hit them until it's too late. This is happening in places like China right now, where the local powers are fighting their rearguard actions against the likes of google and wikipedia, in the ongoing battle to keep their people ignorant. With a bit of effort, we can bring this to the rest of the world.
There's also ACP (Avian Carrier Protocol), described in RFC 1149 back in 1990.
Try to send a file to a machine that is turned off or not connected to the net and see what you get?
;-)
What you get is called "Usenet", and it's been doing just that quite successfully for a few decades now.
Usenet originally ran mainly on top of UUCP, invented at Bell Labs back in the 1970s. UUCP implemented the same sort of scheme some years before the Internet came into existence. The general term is "store-and-forward".
It's all covered in many "intro to networking" courses.
BBN has developed a network protocol and code that moves information from node to node as connections become available, and can hold information in persistent storage until a connection is available.
;-).
/. coverage for your great new idea.
Wow... what can I say ? - over 8 million bucks to re-discover or re-invent SMTP...
Funny, but maybe a bit mistargeted. The idea behind SMTP really was to do email via a direct end-to-end TCP link. Caching when the destination couldn't be reached was a "temporary" kludge that was grudgingly added because the Internet wasn't yet reliable enough for end-to-end connectivity.
The email system that really was designed as store-and-forward was UUCP. Its first incarnation worked via the phone system, before even many universities had IP connectivity.
It is sort of funny that, as UUCP moved onto the Internet, and then just sorta merged with SMTP, SMTP had to adapt to the world of ISPs that intentionally block end-to-end SMTP connectivity and force users to relay their messages via the ISP's servers (which all too often are flakey as hell - and then there's hotmail and yahoo
But yeah; the major reaction of older geeks with a bit of knowledge is that we're just laboriously re-inventing things that were invented long ago. The computer biz doesn't seem to have much memory, does it? You take something done decades ago, describe it with slightly tweaked terminology, and you get
And here in the US, you can probably even patent your idea, and then use your patent to extort money from people who have been violating your patent for 10 or 20 years.
I was under the impression you could be speaking Japanese and it would still work. Not the case?
Japanese is probably its native language. Either that or Cantonese.
He's not really good for PR. The fact that he still lives makes the war on terrorism look like a failure to many people.
;-)
Yeah, but only to the smart ones.
Bill is awesome for giving as much as he did.
Of course, sometimes it's wise to carefully examine purported generous gifts from Microsoft. They have a bit of a history of giving "gifts" that cost the recipients more than they were expecting.
Not that Bill's gifts are always like this, I suppose. But this sort of thing has been reported often enough that one might want to do some careful investigating before accepting anything "free" from him and his colleagues.
It should also be noted that the purported value of such gifts is often wildly exaggerated. It's generally calculated by deciding on a "list price" for the software that is often a lot more than any customer has ever actually paid for it. The actual cost to Bill & Co. is generally quite a bit lower than claimed. In some cases, the actual cost of a multi-million-dollar gift has turned out to be a couple hundred dollars for the CDs and shipping.
As far as I can tell, Warren Buffet actually gives out money, not free software licenses. But I could be wrong. In the case of Bill Gates, one should try to verify that the recipients actually received money, not some "in kind" gift. I've found that it's usually extraordinarily difficult to verify this from the new reports.
[T]hey have no evidence that osama had anything to do with the 9-11 attacks.
In a lot of the world, this seems to be a conventional explanation of why the US hasn't captured Osama. With him "in the wild", he's a good propaganda target. But if they had him in a court, his lawyers would totally rip apart the prosecution's case, because the US government has no actual evidence against him, and he'd walk out of court a free man. This would, of course, be a major hit to the US's image, since years of PR would be shown false.
Actually, it would probably be even worse. He might not be allowed to walk out of court at all. He'd be held for prosecution on other crimes. It would slowly become clear that even if never convicted of anything, he'd never be free again. This would really hurt the American image, but the US government wouldn't be able back down. How often to governments ever admit they were wrong about something?
So it's better (from the US government's viewpoint) that he remain free and untried. That way, he's a convenient scapegoat any time anyone commits some atrocity somewhere in the world.
Anyway, this is a widely held theory. Maybe it's accurate; maybe not. It'd be interesting to know about actual evidence in the hands of US investigators. But we might not ever see it even if it exists. Osama is tremendously useful for PR purposes.
While it's silly to compare the Boston Tea Party to the World Trade Center attack, I've read a number of comparisons between the Boston Tea Party and the Iraq war.
;-) It's further evidence that the war is partly about the economy.
The Boston Tea Party happpened in response to the UK government giving exclusive licenses to a few companies to trade with the colonies. This effectively locked out businesses in the colonies from engaging in foreign trade. The Boston Tea Party was to send a message like "We won't buy from your companies; we want to run our own companies that hire our people as workers."
It turns out there's a direct parallel to this in Iraq. The US government has spent a lot of money of "reconstruction", but has refused to hire local contractors who know local conditions and could do the job cheaply with local labor. Rather, the money has gone mostly to big American corporations. Part of the intent of Bush's crowd was to bankrupt the local companies, so that American corporations could buy them cheaply, and Americans would then own much of the Iraqi economy.
But it has't worked that way. The Iraqis understand quite well what's being done to their economy, and when a company has to lay people off due to lack of business, a significant number of the workers have gone into the resistance. They understand, as did the American revolutionaries, that if their local economy ends up owned and operated by remote corporations, the result will be permanent poverty and servitude. They are primarily fighting a war for their own economic independence.
American politicians see what they're doing as a "war on terror", but much of the Middle East sees it as an attempted takeover of the Iraqi economy by powerful foreign corporations. This is very much like the story of the Boston Tea Party.
Just last week, Bush made a comment in a speech that has been ignored by the American media, but widely noticed in the Middle East. He explained that the US has to control the Iraqi oil fields, because otherwise the "terrorists" will end up in control, and they'll be able to affect the US's oil supply. Actually, this remark was noticed in a lot of the world. For example, it might be a tipoff that the US will occupy the Venezuelan oil fields in the near future. (And maybe the North Sea fields after that.
In both of these historic wars, the actual story is a lot more complex than the grade-school "us against evil them" categorization that you hear in so much politica rhetoric. Political and social independence is part of it, but people have often fought for economic independence, too.
China is described as the pioneer of internet censors, ...
Not even close. Back around 1990, when the commercial world was first discovering that new interweb thing, lots of local ISPs (and a few big ones) were forming rapidly in North America and Europe. Right off, there were widespread reports of ISPs that blocked or seriously interfered with their customers' attempts to access competitors' web sites.
China is now doing the same sort of thing, where "competitor" is meant partly in a political sense. But they're hardly pioneers in the task.
And note that here in the US, we're still fighting the battle. Except now the hot new buzz phrase is "network neutrality". Changing the terminology is a good way to obscure the fact that we're just talking about yet another scheme for the rich and powerful to restrict their subjects' access to information.
Or are you operating under the assumption that voting machine errors always favor Republicans?
;-)
Not in Chicago, they don't.
And not here in Massachusetts, either.
Fact is that almost every party to every election will try whatever tricks are within their power to win. This is why so many of us are interested in every little failure of the voting process, no matter how insignificant. If this one guys vote can be ignored or redirected, then the same equipment can do the same anywhere it's used. We want to know about such things. And we want someone to fix the probem.
Telling us that that one guy's vote didn't affect the outcome is utterly irrelevant to the issue. If it can happen to him, it can happen to you and me and thousands of others, just enough of us to throw the election.
Why the fuck can we not have E-Voting machines for those people that want to use the pieces of shit and then the same old paper ballots that we have used for thousands of years for the people that know they are pointless and crooked?
That's how it worked last week in this precinct. They had electronic voting machines, and also paper ballots. I didn't see anyone using the electronic machines. I was slightly tempted to use the machine, but I used a paper ballot, too. It was just too important to "send a message" to the politicians that some of us weren't happy with the way things were being run.
I'm still not sure the message got through, though. I did hear an excerpt of a George Bush speech in which he said that the voters were unhappy that the Iraq war hadn't been won yet. I'm not sure that was exactly the message that some of us were trying to get across.
Build us a reliable, verfiable voting machine/system.
...
Go
Actually, in the Real World[TM], what management orders is very slightly different:
Build us a reliable, verifable voting machine/system. It must run on MS Windows, and must be delivered 3 weeks from now. Go
The major problem here isn't really that it must run on Windows. It's that it must run on proprietary stuff that the programmers aren't allowed to examing in detail. When this is true, the programmer can't logically be held responsible for its correct behavior, since their code is vulnerable to whatever has been programmed into the invisible lower layers. MS Windows is the most common proprietary platform, but the same problem exists in any proprietary system.
With most important products such as transportation equipment, we wouldn't accept the engineers designing something without access to the detailed specs of all the components, and the ability to take things apart to the lowest level for testing. Would you drive (or fly in) a vehicle whose designers had no access to the inner workings of the components? But with software, we can and do intentionally hide the low-level details from the programmers. Software design "experts" even tout this as a desirable part of the design. People working at one "level" are routinely denied access to the details of other levels. It shouldn't be a puzzle to anyone why software turns out so unreliable.
As a programmer, I've often tracked a bug down to something in "the system" that didn't behave the way the docs seemed to say it would behave. Often the system component wasn't documented to the level of detail that I needed. When I ask what was going on, I've often been told "That's proprietary; we can't tell you." I've pointed out repeatedly that this effectively prevents me from building reliable software. The response of management is usually (in effect) that they'll blame me for the problems or the late delivery anyway. The decision to use that particular proprietary system has been made, and "can't be changed at this late date"; it's my job to deliver the software by the due date.
I conclude that people don't actually want software that works correctly. I'd also suggest that sales data clearly supports this conclusion.
Yah, but it's not really a "CLI" problem as such. It's more the result of command-line languages with fuzzy, confused quoting rules.
;-) I've yet to find a system to handles all my test text files right.
Actually, my favorite solution is to write lots of little perl and python apps. I can understand the quoting rules there, and I never seem to run into problems with funny file names being misinterpreted. Same in C, though of course that tends to take a bit longer to program.
And I've seen some curious F-ups in GUI tools when file names contain unusual characters.
I don't think I'd call myself a fanboy of anything. I can't think of a computer that I've used that didn't have some utterly stupid failures. I do tend to like linux, but I don't call it good; I'd rather call it the best of a bad lot.
I've been having fun lately with text that mixes languages. Teaching texts, for example. You can get some really hilarious misbehavior when you try to put English, Chinese and Arabic together in the same line.
I agree. There is nothing wrong with MS charging more for their product. They are not a complete monopoly seeing how Linux and OSX are both alternatives.
Actually, MS's approach is one example of a standard anti-free-market practice that monopolies, duopolies, cartels and such have used for centuries.
It's not a secret that hardly any of the distributors pay "list price" for Windows. The usual sort of anti-competitive contract is used: You get a "special" lower price if you don't sell any competing products. The list price is made high enough that all the distributors take the contract. This effectively locks out startups from the distribution channels.
A textbook example in the US is the way that so many stores and gas stations have either Coke or Pepsi vending machines, but not both. A retail outlet that tries to provide both can be hit with a higher wholesale price for both.
Some US states have outlawed this sort of contract, and in those states, you can get more choice and competition. But there are limits to how effective any but the largest states can be. With companies the size of Microsoft and Dell, such a state law is rather meaningless.
Anyway, MS's management doesn't expect to get list price for Windows from hardly anyone but retail customers trying to upgrade. The main point of such prices is to maintain the lock on retail distribution channels via "special" discounts to distributors.
With computers, a "free market" has never existed, and probably never will. We've always had one 800-pound-gorilla with the ability to lock out most of the competition, except for specialized niche markets that don't much interest the big guy. In such a situation, competition can never develop, at least not without government "interference" via pro-market laws.
[I]f you submit a story to Slashdot about a new technology bill making denial of service attacks illegal, and the Governments site referenced in the article gets Slashdotted.... are you, by the new law, responsible?
/. readers are wondering about this. If not, they should be. And it could be a problem for any kind of news site. One thing about online news is that it's possible to provide links to original documents. But a lot of readers clicking on a link could easily be interpreted as a DDoS attack. So a law like this could encourage journalists to retreat to the old print approach, just bare text with no links. This would materially cut back on one of the main values of hypertext.
I'll bet a lot of
I wonder if news.google.com could fall afoul of this law?
You're right, of course. I do routinely use xargs like this, to avoid spawning a process for every file. But this only works on my linux and *BSD machines, where people have generally had the sense to avoid blanks in file names. In particular, I use it with my own files, because I don't use blanks in file names.
;-)
Then when I got a Mac, I had to teach myself to think before using xargs, because there's nothing I can do to sanitize the filenames generated by Mac apps, and getting file names quoted correctly is insanely difficult. Not only do a lot of them contain spaces (and tabs), but some contain quotes, and I ran across one file a while back that had a newline in its name.
Of course, the Mac fanboys would just say that I shouldn't be using the CLI; I should only use the GUI like Steve^WGod intended.
Yeah, me too. I've known a number of people who simply use alias to define their most common typos. This can save you a lot of keystrokes over the years.
Does this mean people can be prosecuted for installing Windows onto a computer system?
Maybe. But more likely it means you can be prosecuted for installing a browser. The only purpose of a browser is to use the bandwidth and cpu time of some other computer. That obviously interferes with anything running on that computer, impairing it for all other users.
Damn! Even with preview, I didn't spot the obvious typo.
s/chmor/chmod/
Obviously.
I wonder what typo is in this message.
preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer
What is ''operation of data''? I don't think we had that in CS.
Well, on a unix-like system, the meaning is pretty obvious: Any file permissions other than 777 are now illegal. So to comply, you should run the following commands:
umask 0
find / | xargs chmor ugo+rwx
Also, in any programs that create files, you should change the permission arg to 0777.
Lessee, what have I forgotten?
(I suppose you should also turn off any firewall software you may have running, just to be on the safe side.)