I think you've got it straight. The university has let the students know that anyone attempting to tell the admins about security holes will be firmly punished.
Those security holes were put there for the benefit of the black-hat hackers and crackers, dammit! We can't just have mere students finding the holes and fixing them, can we?
Actually, being a "low" tech town should they not have more problems than the "high tech" cities? It isn't like there are experts all ovr the place.
If it's like most places I've seen, they have plenty of linux/unix "experts" available. Chances are that many of the techies supporting their MS operations run linux and/or OSX on their home machines.
Also, it's likely that those techies have quietly encouraged running MS Windows, because that means permanently paying lots of support people to keep the computer system running. They know from personal experience that if their department were running on any unix-like system, the computers would "just run", and there wouldn't be nearly as much need for support personnel.
I've heard comments about this from any number of friends who make their living by supporting Windows. The usual explanations is "Hey, if I install a linux or Mac or Sun box, I get paid for half a day's work, and we never hear from the client again until it's time for an upgrade. But the Windows clients call us in several times a week to fix problems or install patches. We'd be fools to recommend anything but Windows."
I first heard this years ago, as a joke. So I told it to some friends. Their reply was usually of the form "That's no joke; that's exactly how it works. Well, OK, it is funny. But it's not a joke."
The bit about a challenge to current theories is mostly journalistic sensationalism. The Science article makes no such claim; only that it's an interesting new fossil of a (semi-)aquatic mammal from around 164 million years ago.
You'd be hard put to find any paleontologist who has ever insisted that such a mammal didn't exist. The most you'd find is a lack of mention of such a mammal. But the fossil record is notoriously incomplete, and nobody with any understanding at all would claim that the fossil record shows that something has never existed. Never fossilized, perhaps, though usually the claim would be even weaker: not found.
Jumping from "has now been found" to "a challenge to current theories" is rather irresponsible reporting, IMHO. In this case, such a fossil has been found, and adds something to the store of knowledge: There was a mammal similar (but probably not ancestral) to the modern beaver and platypus 164 million years ago. This adds to the known mammalian divergence at that time, but really has no impact on any scientific theories.
Actually, there's nothing particularly unusual about Chinese fossil forgeries. This is a minor industry in many parts of the world. Fossils sell well in tourist shops, and it's often much easier to make them than to dig them out of rocks.
One of Stephen Jay Gould's many books was titled "The Lying Stones of Marrakech", and the first chapter dealt with this issue in his usual entertaining and informative style. The "lying stones" were fake commercial fossils from North Africa.
[D]o you consider FDR to be the "jackass" who failed to stop Pearl Harbor?
The main quibble here is the use of the word "the", which implies uniqueness. If you read the histories about the Pearl Harbor attack, you'll find that there's general agreement that there was widespread incompetence all along the US chain of command. They pretty much had the evidence in the hours before the attack, but a combination of failure to understand and failure to believe the evidence led to the disaster. But it wasn't one person's failure; it was failure of the entire system to use the information that it had.
This is similar to our current situation with 9/11, Katrina, the Iraq war, etc. George Bush isn't the sole "jackass" responsible for any of these. It's a systemic problem, with incompetence combined with corruption at all levels.
One of the clearest examples is the admission that they had tapes of the perpetrators' conversations days and weeks before the 9/11 attacks. But they didn't have enough translators fluent in Arabic to get them translated in time. This problem existed despite several decades of growing problems with Arabic-speaking radicals, including the earlier bombings of embassies, the Cole attack, and the earlier attempt to bomb the World Trade Center. Anyone competent saw the need for more Arabic translators, and there are at least a million Arabic-speaking Americans who could have been hired.
Further incompetence is shown by the fact that there aren't nearly as many Arabic-speaking Americans willing to do the job now. The widespread anti-Arab attacks and discrimination of the past few years have made sensible Arabic speakers very wary of getting involved with the US government. If you want a clear example of why, google for "Sibel Edmonds". Her story isn't an anomaly; it's a good example of a government agency attacking and driving out out of the people who could have done the most to help. There are a number of other similar stories.
But there isn't a single "jackass" responsible for this. It's a systemic problem that can't be solved by replacing just one high-up jackass.
(The widespread "English only" attitude of Americans is also part of the problem, but that's a different issue.)
I'm not sure why this is instantly regarded as some sort of conspiracy rather than either hardware problems or incompetent voting machine vendors.
Because the outcome of an election is important. All the parties in the election have very strong motives to do whatever it takes to win, and they will all "adjust" the results if given the opportunity. There's just too much at stake to not do this. If there's anything "funny", the first assumption should always be that it's not an accident.
Yes, sometimes problems are just equipment malfunctions or incompetent users. But that should never be the first assumption. It should be accepted only if there's very good evidence that there wasn't interference by any of the people with access to the equipment.
This is especially true if there's any secrecy about the equipment's workings. If they're hiding something from the public, there's a reason. Nobody honest would want such things hidden. Anyone interested in an honest election would want to know what's being hidden.
Given the shoddy history of elections, tinfoil-hatism is the only rational approach.
(I guess you could say "ruthlessly crush the competition"...)
Well, I'd say it differently: "Marketing".;-)
Recall that Microsoft started as a subcontractor to IBM, at a time when there were a zillion small startups selling "personal computers" that mostly ran CP/M. The IBM PC was really just a case of the 200-pound gorilla waking up, looking around, and saying "OK, you guys have shown that there's a market; now stand aside while a real businessman shows you how it's done."
There was universal agreement that PC/DOS was really just a ripoff of CPM, generally similar, but with the details different so that customers couldn't easily jump to the competition. People in the computer biz roundly denounced PC/DOS as technically inferior. IBM/Microsoft knew that, and didn't care, because they had something better than good software: a marketing budget of several humdred million dollars, and the three letters "IBM". The fact that their software was the crappiest on the market was utterly irrelevant, given that their ad budget was larger than the total operating budgets of all their competitors combined.
This has been the Microsoft story all along. Wait until the little guys show there's a demand for something new. Come out with a crappy, incompatible ripoff, and use your huge marketing budget (and control of the OS) to impose it on a market that really doesn't much know or care about quality.
This is a case where "innovate" literally means "make small changes in someone else's product, just enough to be incompatible". There's no reason to pioneer anything; that's risky. Much better to let someone else take the risk, and then buy them out, or take over their market if they have some silly idea that they can sell their own product in what's really your own market.
The computer biz has mostly worked this way for half a century now. There are few signs that it will change soon.
Historically, both Greek democracies and Roman republics were short-lived. These are just about our only other only other historic examples of such ruling systems.
OTOH, a few years ago Iceland celebrated the 1000th annual gathering of their parliament ("Ting" in Icelandic). This was, of course, firmly ignored by people in some other countries who like to think that they invented democracy, yadda, yadda. And Iceland isn't the only place with a democratic tradition older than the US.
The longest-lived systems are more along the lines of emperial monarchies, whose lines can stretch for millenia.
Well, maybe, but you won't find too many of them that have really lasted that long, without violent overthrow or more subtle assassinations by their relatives. Generally this took out a good part of the commoner population in the process. It's not easy to find a country with a ruling line that actually goes back even a single millennium. The main one seems to be Japan.
Human government seems to be inherently unstable. If you take a good look at the US government right now, you'd be hard put to declare it especially stable.
... the rather common case of a machine sold with Windows, which immediately had linux installed. In some cases, a dual-boot setup is done, mostly so that you can get support for hardware problems, and the vendor won't support you if you're running linux. But mostly, to get the machine you want, unless it's a high-end machine, it's difficult to buy it with linux installed. So you shrug, accept it with Windows, pop in the linux CD, and 20 minutes later you have the machine you really wanted. I've done this some uncounted number of times.
As far as I could tell, all those machines sold with Windows that are running linux are counted as Windows machines. I know that two of my three linux boxes upstairs are like this. And, since I haven't ever called MS support, Bill Gates lists me as a satisfied customer.
There's also the widespread phomenon of linux spreading via the old, cast-off Windows machines that will no longer run the latest required upgrades. These are often truly "free" linux machines, and they aren't in any sales statistics.
It's pretty easy to publish misleading numbers in this industry.
One of the problems in the US is that most of the population gets its "news" from television, and that has become quite superficial. A good illustration of how bad TV news is came out in the 2004 election, when surveys showed that the TV viewers most able to answer questions about the candidates were the people who watched The Daily Show - a news-satire program on the Comedy Channel.
OTOH, we've seen reports lately, including here on/., that the younger generation is abandoning TV for the Web. Now, we all know how silly much of the Web is, but it's also very easy for Web users to find acual facts, good analysis, and in-depth coverage. It's not even difficult. The problem, if you're interested, is not soaking up all your time following news.google.com links and the zillions of political blogs, some of them quite good. (OK, finding those "some of them" among the zillions can take time.;-)
It'll be interesting to see what effect this unfiltered access has on American politics over the next couple decades. We're already hearing people point out that we no longer have a good excuse for ignorance about the rest of the world.
Why aren't the muslims cleaning up their own house rather than attacking the media?
Actually, if you think they're not working on this, you are simply not paying attention. There's a lot more discussion of the problem in muslim circles than in the rest of the world. In any case, they mostly don't need to "clean up their own house". Suggesting this is merely attributing the actions of a few radical maniacs to the majority.
For a simple example, google for "terrorism fatwa". Right now this gets about 817,000 hits. Even a quick skim of the stories shows that there have been a lot of anti-terrorism fatwas issued, in every country with a significant muslim population. Many muslim clerics are fighting this issue.
Much of the image problem stems in part from the fact that Islam is about as organized as Christian Protestants, i.e., there is no central authority. Any Muslim cleric or semi-religious group can issue a fatwa. This makes it easy to pick out the actions of a few radical fundamentalists and attribute their actions to all their religious cohort. Here in the US, we don't often see the beliefs of a few Christian fundamentalists attributed to all Christians, but we constantly hear that all of Islam is a hotbed of terrorism. In the Middle East, of course, this is reversed.
It's all based on ignorance. This ignorance is no longer quite as excusable now that an online search can find you the facts.
people eventually realize they can vote other peoples rescources to themselves...
Funny, the American people don't seem to have realized that yet. The last couple of elections, they have voted their resources (and children's lives) to benefit a small number of super-rich, and there's little sign they're figuring this out. To a great degree, it's the lower classes who vote for the "military-industrial complex" leaders, while the better-off show a (slight) tendency to vote for the betterment of society as a whole.
It's possible to really change people's voting habits with a good PR campaign led by people who know how to take advantage of the "hot-button" issues and spin things in the right way.
It also helps if you can get unverifiable, easily-cracked voting equipment installed in a lot of districts. My favorite news story from the last election was the group that taught a chimp to enter fake election results into a Diebold system and then erase the audit trail.;-)
We have a Garmin GPS gadget, too, an iQue, and it's easy to see why users would often delay giving it a destination. When it wakes up, it can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes before it gets the satellites it needs, depending on things like the cloud cover and nearby tall buildings. And fairly often, if you tell it a destination, it displays a blank map until it has its satellites and has figured out a route. OTOH, if you let it run, at least it displays the local streets while it's searching for satellites.
So it quickly teaches you to wait until it has its satellites. You can start driving in the general direction or toward a nearby major highway. Then when it gets its satellites, you can pull over or let the passenger do the routing stuff (if they know the abstruse GUI stuff needed to do that).
I've ridden in a few cars with other brands of GPS nav tools, and I get the impression that all their UIs leave a lot to be desired.
Now if they'd hire me to work on it.;-) But of course they won't, for the usual reason that if you haven't already done it, you aren't qualified to do it.
[T]he more likely a user is to want to look it up (nobody uses Wikipedia to look up things they already know). But the more obscure facts are the ones with fewer people qualified to write about them and the ones with more people who don't fully understand them, so they are the least trustworthy.
Well, I dunno about that. A few days ago, I used wikipedia to look up info about the orbits of Titan, Enceladus, and a couple other Saturnian moons. I'd guess that almost everyone would consider this to be extremely obscure information. Most would probably say "worthless". And I might agree, with a grin.
But I'd also guess that the data I found was quite trustworthy. Such data is rarely provided by some n00b or politico. It usually comes from someone with the technical knowledge to get it right.
The articles on those bodies also contain a number of comments that some things aren't known. This I'd consider somewhat less trustworthy, since some astronomer might have found the info just yesterday. This doesn't bother me, of course, since any reasonably intelligent reader would understand this situation. And, if I stumble across the info somewhere else, I might just copy it over to the wikipedia article.
Anyone know WHY this was censored? That's just silly. It smacks more of stupidity than censorship...
IOW, it's very much like most censorship.
It's hardly a secret that most "national security" censorship (aka classification) is of the "cover our asses" variety. The main purpose is usually to prevent the citizenry from knowing how badly their own government has bungled things.
This one does seem especially silly, though. The explosion wouldn't rate very highly in Hollywood, and carries no useful information. All it shows is that someone set off an explosion in some dry land somewhere.
The only branch of humanity that was any good at all at hunting was the much-maligned Neanderthal.
It should be emphasized that this maligning was primarily the "popular" culture. Paleontologists have long viewed the Neanderthals as a subspecies that was superbly adapted to their niche, a major hunter in the difficult environment of ice-age Europe. The "cave man" image basically came from a European culture that really wanted to view itself as the most advanced and civilized on the planet. 18th- and 19th-century Europeans routinely represented all humans except themselves as brutes with little intelligence or culture. The popular image of Neanderthals was not very different from the popular images of other groups of people.
The general scientific image is more along the lines of the comment that if you were transport a typical Neanderthal to today, give him a shave and a haircut, dress him in modern clothes, and drop him off anywhere in Europe, nobody would give him a second glance. He would be somewhat taller, wider, and paler than the average European, but well within the modern norm. He'd look a lot like a modern Scot or Swede. And his diet would be only slightly more carnivorous than theirs.
An interesting aspect to the idea that early humans mostly killed small prey is that the studies of wild chimpanzees have turned up pretty much the same story. It seems that chimps typically get 5% to 20% of their protein from insects, small birds, and small mammals. Hunting of such small game is more of a "great ape" characteristic, and almost certainly pre-dates the hominid line. Simple tool use has been reported in chimps to help catch their prey, so we can't even count that as a "uniquely human" development. We're better at it, but we didn't invent the first hunting tools.
Of course, popular beliefs are often at odds with the scientific evidence.
1. A valid copyright is held on the original 2. The copier had access to the original 3. Substantial similarities occur between the original and the suspect
"Hello world" fails on 1 for the same reasons that SCO's claims fail. It is available through many sources that are "public domain".
The significant question here is: Was there a "Hello world" program in print before Kernigan & Ritchie published it back in the late 7's?
Now, this example is so simple that you'd think that the answer would be "Obviously, yes." But I recall a lot of discussion that implies that we really should check this.
The point of the discussion back then was the originality and elegance of this example. K&R quite rightly pointed out something that is still missed by the purveyors of most other programming languages: If you can make this simple example work, you have passed the major barriers to getting a program working in any language. You have learned to produce source code with an editor. You have successfully run the compiler. You have got the linker to link the program with libraries. You have told the OS to run the program. And you have seen actual output that verifies that the program ran correctly.
The ability to solve all these problems in a page or two of text was a radical technical advance at the time. It's still a radical development, as you can see by trying to do a "Hello world" program in most other languages. Especially if you use a sophisticated software development system. (Or if you're using java.;-)
So, given the evidence that this was a radical innovation when K&R published it, one might make a good legal argument that they held a valid copyright on the code. And, since the "C bible" is still in print, they probably still hold the copyright.
Actually, I'd hope not. And I'd expect them to reply by declaring the program public domain. But I wouldn't be too quick to claim that that program is public domain right now.
[H]ow do you teach programming without showing examples?... If all the ideas (hashing, tables, objects, etc) get copyrighted, then how do we teach the next generation of programmers?
Use "open-source" software [OSS].
Historically this has been one of the major motivations for OSS. It was a major part of the reason that the minix and linux systems came into existence.
The originator of minix, Andrew Tanenbaum, was (and is) a Computer-Science prof who described having more and more problems with getting permission from AT&T for his students to access the unix source that was one of his major teaching tools. Finally, he gave up, got together a bunch of his students and the POSIX standard, and set them to implementing. It was an excellent project for several classes, and he ended up with independently-developed source that could be freely shared with any future students.
Linus Torvalds' described his main motive as similar but more personal. He was a poor student who wanted to learn about an OS but couldn't afford the licenses. So he decided to try writing one himself, to run on his cheap PC hardware. "How difficult can it be?" He used the minix source for part of the task, to help learn, though he eventually rewrote all that because he wanted to do it differently. And, most important, all the code could be freely shared with people via the Net, so he quickly found himself at the center of a gang of hackers who wanted the same things he did - a system that they could learn from and work on.
Actually, the same thing happened independently with BSD unix. Growing license problems with its AT&T code eventually led to the decision to recode all the licensed part, so that Berkeley CS classes could freely use it as a teaching tool. This got a lot of cooperation from random hackers, who also wanted an unencumbered BSD kernel. So we have three major OS teaching tools whose code is open and accessible to everyone without signing an NDA.
You can't do things like this with proprietary source code. Even if you can afford a license, the NDAs will prevent sharing the task with other students. The sensible, practical approach is to use only open source. And use it mostly as a guide, while you (or your students) implement it all independently.
The SCO flap shows a further reason for using only OSS in teaching. Even if you can get a license now, as students graduate knowing a system and it is adopted widely, the code's owners are highly likely to see it as a profit center. And part of this is that they may decide to prosecute your students for using what they learned in your classes. This isn't a nice thing to have hanging over your students' heads.
But sensible teachers know that there is a solution to the problem.
Or, to combine the two ideas: If the data is close to sorted, and the mean distance between an item's pre- and post-sort position is less than about 25, then bubble sort is as good as any other sort, and often better.
The canonical example is time-stamped data coming in from a lot of sources, with the usual delays in delivery time. If you want the data sorted into strict time order, a short pipeline through a bubble sorted is quite efficient. Sometimes you may have to add a second pass later that looks for the few items that missed the pipeline and still need to be moved a bit, but that may be something that can be done in the background.
It's sorta funny how people aways seem to think that there has to be one sort that's "best", refusing to believe that this can be true only if you are never permitted any a-priori knowledge of non-randomness in any of your data. But in the real world, lots of data comes with known sorting biases, and that knowledge can often be used to chose a better sort than one designed for random data.
Slashdot Mirror
Jobs should have iTunes give not just the price, but also a list of how much goes to iTunes, the recording company, and to the artist.
That would get the message across really fast.
I think you've got it straight. The university has let the students know that anyone attempting to tell the admins about security holes will be firmly punished.
Those security holes were put there for the benefit of the black-hat hackers and crackers, dammit! We can't just have mere students finding the holes and fixing them, can we?
It's typical organization policy.
... as much as 70 percent of the purchase price now heading directly to the music industry.
...
How much of it ends up in the hands of the recording artists? I'm betting it's a lot less than 70%, probably around 1%.
But I could be an optimist here
Actually, being a "low" tech town should they not have more problems than the "high tech" cities? It isn't like there are experts all ovr the place.
If it's like most places I've seen, they have plenty of linux/unix "experts" available. Chances are that many of the techies supporting their MS operations run linux and/or OSX on their home machines.
Also, it's likely that those techies have quietly encouraged running MS Windows, because that means permanently paying lots of support people to keep the computer system running. They know from personal experience that if their department were running on any unix-like system, the computers would "just run", and there wouldn't be nearly as much need for support personnel.
I've heard comments about this from any number of friends who make their living by supporting Windows. The usual explanations is "Hey, if I install a linux or Mac or Sun box, I get paid for half a day's work, and we never hear from the client again until it's time for an upgrade. But the Windows clients call us in several times a week to fix problems or install patches. We'd be fools to recommend anything but Windows."
I first heard this years ago, as a joke. So I told it to some friends. Their reply was usually of the form "That's no joke; that's exactly how it works. Well, OK, it is funny. But it's not a joke."
The bit about a challenge to current theories is mostly journalistic sensationalism. The Science article makes no such claim; only that it's an interesting new fossil of a (semi-)aquatic mammal from around 164 million years ago.
You'd be hard put to find any paleontologist who has ever insisted that such a mammal didn't exist. The most you'd find is a lack of mention of such a mammal. But the fossil record is notoriously incomplete, and nobody with any understanding at all would claim that the fossil record shows that something has never existed. Never fossilized, perhaps, though usually the claim would be even weaker: not found.
Jumping from "has now been found" to "a challenge to current theories" is rather irresponsible reporting, IMHO. In this case, such a fossil has been found, and adds something to the store of knowledge: There was a mammal similar (but probably not ancestral) to the modern beaver and platypus 164 million years ago. This adds to the known mammalian divergence at that time, but really has no impact on any scientific theories.
Actually, there's nothing particularly unusual about Chinese fossil forgeries. This is a minor industry in many parts of the world. Fossils sell well in tourist shops, and it's often much easier to make them than to dig them out of rocks.
One of Stephen Jay Gould's many books was titled "The Lying Stones of Marrakech", and the first chapter dealt with this issue in his usual entertaining and informative style. The "lying stones" were fake commercial fossils from North Africa.
[I]t's like saying "It'd be great if Microsoft released all of their source code.
Nah; it'd only be like that if google and/or the National Archives made you sign an NDA before you were allowed to look at any of their stuff.
I thought it was funny, too, so I thought I'd share the thought with the /. crowd. ;-)
Actually, look up HHOS (Ha Ha Only Serious) in the jargon file.
[D]o you consider FDR to be the "jackass" who failed to stop Pearl Harbor?
The main quibble here is the use of the word "the", which implies uniqueness. If you read the histories about the Pearl Harbor attack, you'll find that there's general agreement that there was widespread incompetence all along the US chain of command. They pretty much had the evidence in the hours before the attack, but a combination of failure to understand and failure to believe the evidence led to the disaster. But it wasn't one person's failure; it was failure of the entire system to use the information that it had.
This is similar to our current situation with 9/11, Katrina, the Iraq war, etc. George Bush isn't the sole "jackass" responsible for any of these. It's a systemic problem, with incompetence combined with corruption at all levels.
One of the clearest examples is the admission that they had tapes of the perpetrators' conversations days and weeks before the 9/11 attacks. But they didn't have enough translators fluent in Arabic to get them translated in time. This problem existed despite several decades of growing problems with Arabic-speaking radicals, including the earlier bombings of embassies, the Cole attack, and the earlier attempt to bomb the World Trade Center. Anyone competent saw the need for more Arabic translators, and there are at least a million Arabic-speaking Americans who could have been hired.
Further incompetence is shown by the fact that there aren't nearly as many Arabic-speaking Americans willing to do the job now. The widespread anti-Arab attacks and discrimination of the past few years have made sensible Arabic speakers very wary of getting involved with the US government. If you want a clear example of why, google for "Sibel Edmonds". Her story isn't an anomaly; it's a good example of a government agency attacking and driving out out of the people who could have done the most to help. There are a number of other similar stories.
But there isn't a single "jackass" responsible for this. It's a systemic problem that can't be solved by replacing just one high-up jackass.
(The widespread "English only" attitude of Americans is also part of the problem, but that's a different issue.)
I'm not sure why this is instantly regarded as some sort of conspiracy rather than either hardware problems or incompetent voting machine vendors.
Because the outcome of an election is important. All the parties in the election have very strong motives to do whatever it takes to win, and they will all "adjust" the results if given the opportunity. There's just too much at stake to not do this. If there's anything "funny", the first assumption should always be that it's not an accident.
Yes, sometimes problems are just equipment malfunctions or incompetent users. But that should never be the first assumption. It should be accepted only if there's very good evidence that there wasn't interference by any of the people with access to the equipment.
This is especially true if there's any secrecy about the equipment's workings. If they're hiding something from the public, there's a reason. Nobody honest would want such things hidden. Anyone interested in an honest election would want to know what's being hidden.
Given the shoddy history of elections, tinfoil-hatism is the only rational approach.
What did Microsoft do extremely well?
...)
;-)
(I guess you could say "ruthlessly crush the competition"
Well, I'd say it differently: "Marketing".
Recall that Microsoft started as a subcontractor to IBM, at a time when there were a zillion small startups selling "personal computers" that mostly ran CP/M. The IBM PC was really just a case of the 200-pound gorilla waking up, looking around, and saying "OK, you guys have shown that there's a market; now stand aside while a real businessman shows you how it's done."
There was universal agreement that PC/DOS was really just a ripoff of CPM, generally similar, but with the details different so that customers couldn't easily jump to the competition. People in the computer biz roundly denounced PC/DOS as technically inferior. IBM/Microsoft knew that, and didn't care, because they had something better than good software: a marketing budget of several humdred million dollars, and the three letters "IBM". The fact that their software was the crappiest on the market was utterly irrelevant, given that their ad budget was larger than the total operating budgets of all their competitors combined.
This has been the Microsoft story all along. Wait until the little guys show there's a demand for something new. Come out with a crappy, incompatible ripoff, and use your huge marketing budget (and control of the OS) to impose it on a market that really doesn't much know or care about quality.
This is a case where "innovate" literally means "make small changes in someone else's product, just enough to be incompatible". There's no reason to pioneer anything; that's risky. Much better to let someone else take the risk, and then buy them out, or take over their market if they have some silly idea that they can sell their own product in what's really your own market.
The computer biz has mostly worked this way for half a century now. There are few signs that it will change soon.
Historically, both Greek democracies and Roman republics were short-lived. These are just about our only other only other historic examples of such ruling systems.
OTOH, a few years ago Iceland celebrated the 1000th annual gathering of their parliament ("Ting" in Icelandic). This was, of course, firmly ignored by people in some other countries who like to think that they invented democracy, yadda, yadda. And Iceland isn't the only place with a democratic tradition older than the US.
The longest-lived systems are more along the lines of emperial monarchies, whose lines can stretch for millenia.
Well, maybe, but you won't find too many of them that have really lasted that long, without violent overthrow or more subtle assassinations by their relatives. Generally this took out a good part of the commoner population in the process. It's not easy to find a country with a ruling line that actually goes back even a single millennium. The main one seems to be Japan.
Human government seems to be inherently unstable. If you take a good look at the US government right now, you'd be hard put to declare it especially stable.
... ...
Money
Especially paper money, now that it contains RFID chips.
But I suppose students with tinfoil wallets should be allowed to carry paper money. They've shown that they're smart enough to handle it safely.
... the rather common case of a machine sold with Windows, which immediately had linux installed. In some cases, a dual-boot setup is done, mostly so that you can get support for hardware problems, and the vendor won't support you if you're running linux. But mostly, to get the machine you want, unless it's a high-end machine, it's difficult to buy it with linux installed. So you shrug, accept it with Windows, pop in the linux CD, and 20 minutes later you have the machine you really wanted. I've done this some uncounted number of times.
As far as I could tell, all those machines sold with Windows that are running linux are counted as Windows machines. I know that two of my three linux boxes upstairs are like this. And, since I haven't ever called MS support, Bill Gates lists me as a satisfied customer.
There's also the widespread phomenon of linux spreading via the old, cast-off Windows machines that will no longer run the latest required upgrades. These are often truly "free" linux machines, and they aren't in any sales statistics.
It's pretty easy to publish misleading numbers in this industry.
One of the problems in the US is that most of the population gets its "news" from television, and that has become quite superficial. A good illustration of how bad TV news is came out in the 2004 election, when surveys showed that the TV viewers most able to answer questions about the candidates were the people who watched The Daily Show - a news-satire program on the Comedy Channel.
/., that the younger generation is abandoning TV for the Web. Now, we all know how silly much of the Web is, but it's also very easy for Web users to find acual facts, good analysis, and in-depth coverage. It's not even difficult. The problem, if you're interested, is not soaking up all your time following news.google.com links and the zillions of political blogs, some of them quite good. (OK, finding those "some of them" among the zillions can take time. ;-)
OTOH, we've seen reports lately, including here on
It'll be interesting to see what effect this unfiltered access has on American politics over the next couple decades. We're already hearing people point out that we no longer have a good excuse for ignorance about the rest of the world.
Why aren't the muslims cleaning up their own house rather than attacking the media?
Actually, if you think they're not working on this, you are simply not paying attention. There's a lot more discussion of the problem in muslim circles than in the rest of the world. In any case, they mostly don't need to "clean up their own house". Suggesting this is merely attributing the actions of a few radical maniacs to the majority.
For a simple example, google for "terrorism fatwa". Right now this gets about 817,000 hits. Even a quick skim of the stories shows that there have been a lot of anti-terrorism fatwas issued, in every country with a significant muslim population. Many muslim clerics are fighting this issue.
Much of the image problem stems in part from the fact that Islam is about as organized as Christian Protestants, i.e., there is no central authority. Any Muslim cleric or semi-religious group can issue a fatwa. This makes it easy to pick out the actions of a few radical fundamentalists and attribute their actions to all their religious cohort. Here in the US, we don't often see the beliefs of a few Christian fundamentalists attributed to all Christians, but we constantly hear that all of Islam is a hotbed of terrorism. In the Middle East, of course, this is reversed.
It's all based on ignorance. This ignorance is no longer quite as excusable now that an online search can find you the facts.
people eventually realize they can vote other peoples rescources to themselves...
;-)
Funny, the American people don't seem to have realized that yet. The last couple of elections, they have voted their resources (and children's lives) to benefit a small number of super-rich, and there's little sign they're figuring this out. To a great degree, it's the lower classes who vote for the "military-industrial complex" leaders, while the better-off show a (slight) tendency to vote for the betterment of society as a whole.
It's possible to really change people's voting habits with a good PR campaign led by people who know how to take advantage of the "hot-button" issues and spin things in the right way.
It also helps if you can get unverifiable, easily-cracked voting equipment installed in a lot of districts. My favorite news story from the last election was the group that taught a chimp to enter fake election results into a Diebold system and then erase the audit trail.
We have a Garmin GPS gadget, too, an iQue, and it's easy to see why users would often delay giving it a destination. When it wakes up, it can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes before it gets the satellites it needs, depending on things like the cloud cover and nearby tall buildings. And fairly often, if you tell it a destination, it displays a blank map until it has its satellites and has figured out a route. OTOH, if you let it run, at least it displays the local streets while it's searching for satellites.
;-) But of course they won't, for the usual reason that if you haven't already done it, you aren't qualified to do it.
So it quickly teaches you to wait until it has its satellites. You can start driving in the general direction or toward a nearby major highway. Then when it gets its satellites, you can pull over or let the passenger do the routing stuff (if they know the abstruse GUI stuff needed to do that).
I've ridden in a few cars with other brands of GPS nav tools, and I get the impression that all their UIs leave a lot to be desired.
Now if they'd hire me to work on it.
[T]he more likely a user is to want to look it up (nobody uses Wikipedia to look up things they already know). But the more obscure facts are the ones with fewer people qualified to write about them and the ones with more people who don't fully understand them, so they are the least trustworthy.
Well, I dunno about that. A few days ago, I used wikipedia to look up info about the orbits of Titan, Enceladus, and a couple other Saturnian moons. I'd guess that almost everyone would consider this to be extremely obscure information. Most would probably say "worthless". And I might agree, with a grin.
But I'd also guess that the data I found was quite trustworthy. Such data is rarely provided by some n00b or politico. It usually comes from someone with the technical knowledge to get it right.
The articles on those bodies also contain a number of comments that some things aren't known. This I'd consider somewhat less trustworthy, since some astronomer might have found the info just yesterday. This doesn't bother me, of course, since any reasonably intelligent reader would understand this situation. And, if I stumble across the info somewhere else, I might just copy it over to the wikipedia article.
Anyone know WHY this was censored? That's just silly. It smacks more of stupidity than censorship ...
IOW, it's very much like most censorship.
It's hardly a secret that most "national security" censorship (aka classification) is of the "cover our asses" variety. The main purpose is usually to prevent the citizenry from knowing how badly their own government has bungled things.
This one does seem especially silly, though. The explosion wouldn't rate very highly in Hollywood, and carries no useful information. All it shows is that someone set off an explosion in some dry land somewhere.
The only branch of humanity that was any good at all at hunting was the much-maligned Neanderthal.
It should be emphasized that this maligning was primarily the "popular" culture. Paleontologists have long viewed the Neanderthals as a subspecies that was superbly adapted to their niche, a major hunter in the difficult environment of ice-age Europe. The "cave man" image basically came from a European culture that really wanted to view itself as the most advanced and civilized on the planet. 18th- and 19th-century Europeans routinely represented all humans except themselves as brutes with little intelligence or culture. The popular image of Neanderthals was not very different from the popular images of other groups of people.
The general scientific image is more along the lines of the comment that if you were transport a typical Neanderthal to today, give him a shave and a haircut, dress him in modern clothes, and drop him off anywhere in Europe, nobody would give him a second glance. He would be somewhat taller, wider, and paler than the average European, but well within the modern norm. He'd look a lot like a modern Scot or Swede. And his diet would be only slightly more carnivorous than theirs.
An interesting aspect to the idea that early humans mostly killed small prey is that the studies of wild chimpanzees have turned up pretty much the same story. It seems that chimps typically get 5% to 20% of their protein from insects, small birds, and small mammals. Hunting of such small game is more of a "great ape" characteristic, and almost certainly pre-dates the hominid line. Simple tool use has been reported in chimps to help catch their prey, so we can't even count that as a "uniquely human" development. We're better at it, but we didn't invent the first hunting tools.
Of course, popular beliefs are often at odds with the scientific evidence.
You need 3 things to prove infringement.
;-)
1. A valid copyright is held on the original
2. The copier had access to the original
3. Substantial similarities occur between the original and the suspect
"Hello world" fails on 1 for the same reasons that SCO's claims fail. It is available through many sources that are "public domain".
The significant question here is: Was there a "Hello world" program in print before Kernigan & Ritchie published it back in the late 7's?
Now, this example is so simple that you'd think that the answer would be "Obviously, yes." But I recall a lot of discussion that implies that we really should check this.
The point of the discussion back then was the originality and elegance of this example. K&R quite rightly pointed out something that is still missed by the purveyors of most other programming languages: If you can make this simple example work, you have passed the major barriers to getting a program working in any language. You have learned to produce source code with an editor. You have successfully run the compiler. You have got the linker to link the program with libraries. You have told the OS to run the program. And you have seen actual output that verifies that the program ran correctly.
The ability to solve all these problems in a page or two of text was a radical technical advance at the time. It's still a radical development, as you can see by trying to do a "Hello world" program in most other languages. Especially if you use a sophisticated software development system. (Or if you're using java.
So, given the evidence that this was a radical innovation when K&R published it, one might make a good legal argument that they held a valid copyright on the code. And, since the "C bible" is still in print, they probably still hold the copyright.
Actually, I'd hope not. And I'd expect them to reply by declaring the program public domain. But I wouldn't be too quick to claim that that program is public domain right now.
After all, Happy Birthday is still copyrighted.
[H]ow do you teach programming without showing examples? ... If all the ideas (hashing, tables, objects, etc) get copyrighted, then how do we teach the next generation of programmers?
Use "open-source" software [OSS].
Historically this has been one of the major motivations for OSS. It was a major part of the reason that the minix and linux systems came into existence.
The originator of minix, Andrew Tanenbaum, was (and is) a Computer-Science prof who described having more and more problems with getting permission from AT&T for his students to access the unix source that was one of his major teaching tools. Finally, he gave up, got together a bunch of his students and the POSIX standard, and set them to implementing. It was an excellent project for several classes, and he ended up with independently-developed source that could be freely shared with any future students.
Linus Torvalds' described his main motive as similar but more personal. He was a poor student who wanted to learn about an OS but couldn't afford the licenses. So he decided to try writing one himself, to run on his cheap PC hardware. "How difficult can it be?" He used the minix source for part of the task, to help learn, though he eventually rewrote all that because he wanted to do it differently. And, most important, all the code could be freely shared with people via the Net, so he quickly found himself at the center of a gang of hackers who wanted the same things he did - a system that they could learn from and work on.
Actually, the same thing happened independently with BSD unix. Growing license problems with its AT&T code eventually led to the decision to recode all the licensed part, so that Berkeley CS classes could freely use it as a teaching tool. This got a lot of cooperation from random hackers, who also wanted an unencumbered BSD kernel. So we have three major OS teaching tools whose code is open and accessible to everyone without signing an NDA.
You can't do things like this with proprietary source code. Even if you can afford a license, the NDAs will prevent sharing the task with other students. The sensible, practical approach is to use only open source. And use it mostly as a guide, while you (or your students) implement it all independently.
The SCO flap shows a further reason for using only OSS in teaching. Even if you can get a license now, as students graduate knowing a system and it is adopted widely, the code's owners are highly likely to see it as a profit center. And part of this is that they may decide to prosecute your students for using what they learned in your classes. This isn't a nice thing to have hanging over your students' heads.
But sensible teachers know that there is a solution to the problem.
Well, Microsoft was certainly able to do a lot to Mike Rowe's software firm.
Or, to combine the two ideas: If the data is close to sorted, and the mean distance between an item's pre- and post-sort position is less than about 25, then bubble sort is as good as any other sort, and often better.
The canonical example is time-stamped data coming in from a lot of sources, with the usual delays in delivery time. If you want the data sorted into strict time order, a short pipeline through a bubble sorted is quite efficient. Sometimes you may have to add a second pass later that looks for the few items that missed the pipeline and still need to be moved a bit, but that may be something that can be done in the background.
It's sorta funny how people aways seem to think that there has to be one sort that's "best", refusing to believe that this can be true only if you are never permitted any a-priori knowledge of non-randomness in any of your data. But in the real world, lots of data comes with known sorting biases, and that knowledge can often be used to chose a better sort than one designed for random data.