Heh. Actually, that's still too much work for the typical (l)user, as shown by the fact that a lot of them don't respond properly to phishing pages by clicking when we want them to.
But when the web tools have access to all of your machine, even that one click becomes unnecessary. The code in the page you just downloaded will simply look around your file system, find the information it wants, and send it back home. No need for you to waste your time with clicks.
Mr Kelly, the author of the article in question, clearly believes this is the future of web software. And he may be right, for people using Microsoft systems. (Gotta get in a bit of MS bashing here.;-) For the rest of us, our systems will keep the security that blocks downloaded code from running automatically, and if we run it, will block access outside a limited sandbox.
Kelly and others like him will, of course, consider our computer systems to be backwards and incompatible with the Windows "standard". But we'll be reasonably safe from him and his cohorts' attempts to take over our computers.
There will be a cost, though. We'll have to click on things to make them run. If that's too much effort, you should buy a Windows box so the phishing code can run without your click.
The downside is that browsers don't give programmers full access to a computer's resources such as memory, process power and hard disk space
Are you kidding me? How is this a bad thing?
Heh. The "downside" he's talking about is to the programmers at the commercial web sites. It's fairly clear that he views things like security as limits on what web-site owners can do with your computer. This is all true, of course, but you are probably under the mistaken impression that you should be the one that decides what your computer is to be used for. He's just trying to explain to you why you're wrong, and how much better things will be when your machine is fully available to people who know better than you how to take full advantage of its capabilities.
You see, the goal is to make things simpler for you. Instead of laboriously going through all those complicated web forms to order stuff online, this will all be automated. When you click on a link to a commercial site, your browser will download code that automatically fills in all the credit-card and address information for you, sends it back. This will complete the purchase without any need to waste your time with boring forms that you're tired of filling in over and over.
Think of how much more efficient and productive this will be.
Slowly getting annoyed with what seemed to me mistakes, I finally ran into the howler that explained it all:
Now, in a dictatorship, the trains run on time.
There have been a number of studies of this claim, with fairly consistent results. Dictatorships have a very poor record of making trains, or anything else, run on time. In particular, records from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are available in archives. Their trains had a rather poor record.
This sort of claim is based on ideology and social beliefs, not on actual data. And anyone who has ever worked in a power-structured organization understands why it doesn't work. Top-down command systems have an inherent weakness: Problems are best diagnosed and fixed by the people who see and understand them, and those are the people who are working closely with the systems. Commands about technical details that come from the top are at best vague feel-good guidelines. But all too they often are misguided and incorrect because of poor technical understanding by the people at the top. The underlings are then forced to make the best of commands that they know are wrong. This can't ever work very well.
Recently, an almost-funny example of this came out, from the people studying the state of world fisheries. They'd been noticing an apparent anomaly, with growing reports of depleted fish stocks while the total world catch was growing. They finally got funding to do extensive studies, and found the explanation: A large part of the world's fishing fleet is now run by China, and they had reported increasing catches for several decades. These reports turned out to be total fiction, with totals several orders of magnitude greater than the actual catch. What happened in the top-down Chinese fishing industry was that management decreed increasing catches, and punished anyone who submitted unacceptable reports. Their underlings understood, and repeatedly submitted reports showing catches that increased slowly. The numbers were simply made up, and the reports satisfied their superiors, who probably still believe in these huge catches.
This is, unfortunately, a very normal state of affairs in top-down command heirarchies. It leads to belief that the trains run on time, when in fact they are an unreliable mess.
Methinks that with the "trains ran on time" claim, Mr Kelly gave away his basic misconceptions about how the world works. We should take his prognostication as being as reliable as those trains.
If you consider the object of jail time "to punish a criminal", it is very hard to likewise punish a corporation;...
One very real problem with any punishment scheme (such as suspending operations): A standard method for dealing with such things is for the company to sell off its assets to a newly-formed corporation, and then dissolve. This is a conventional way of getting out of debts such as retirement obligations. It can be as easily used for making moot any sort of legal "jail" terms imposed on the corporation.
When a corporation uses this approach, the top management and major shareholders usually profit handsomely, while employees and minor shareholders lose everything.
There's really no way to handle this except by punishing the responsible managers. Corporations exist to insulate management from legal action, after all. That's why corporations were invented. As long as top management is immune to legal action and can profit by dissolving the corporation, there's no way you can ever punish the corporation itself for its wrongdoings.
American hospitals can't turn you away if you have some serious problem: even if they know you are broke,...
Right you are. They treat you. Then they send you a bill for double what they'd charge an insurance company. Then they sue you into bankruptcy and homelessness.
I've heard a number of discussions among medical people, who are sorely bothered by the elevated charges to uninsured people. But there's not a lot they can do about it; that's the way The System works these days.
Some states do have laws protecting homes from seizure. But this isn't much consolation if everything else you have is taken by the courts, and the only way to get food money is to sell the house.
But the whole System is on the verge of collapse. Medical prices are rising fast. They can't pass 100% of the GDP. That's not too far in the future, so we can expect a radical reorg before then.
(My wife works for an HMO. They're having lots of behind-the-scenes discussions of such things these days. They don't have solutions, either, since they are merely financiers to a system driven by others. They don't expect the current system to survive many more years, and are busy trying to divine the direction it will head as the crisis deepens.)
Not giving spoilers a matter of politeness; legislating for that is hopeless.
But there is a social approach that some of Harry's fans have used to good effect: Disinformation.
I've already seen a number of t-shirts that say "XXX died!", where XXX was a random major Harry Potter character. People have also used this approach in online discussions, by posting messages about the death of random character XXX, followed by a number of apparently-serious replies from co-conspirators.
If enough people do this, you can't separate the spoilers from the fakes.
I've been thinking of getting a t-shirt made that reads "Aragog died!" Now, that was a touching couple of scenes. Nobody warned us that there would be two funerals in the book.
An availability of 94.8% means once in twenty times when you pick up the phone, there's no dialtone.
Not necessarily. One serious problem with this discussion is that there are lots and lots of ways that people (and companies) define "availability".
Back when I had a POTS line (now DSL) I saw numerous cases where the phone system was in some failure mode. Usually it did give a dial tone, but all calls would fail. Sometimes I could make a call, but I'd always get a busy signal - even when I called my neighbor who was waiting by his phone for the call. Sometimes I'd punch in the numbers and get absolutely no response at all. Sometimes I'd get an ongoing dial tone after I dialed, as if I hadn't dialed at all. Usually all my neighbors had the same problem at the same time.
So I'd check, and sure enough, the phone company's official reports claimed 100% availability for the entire exchange for that month.
They obviously define "availability" differently than I do. They can be 100% up and "available", but not completing any phone calls. They consider that uptime. I don't.
In any case, at least here in the US, chances are that any call you make outside your local exchange is now using VoIP for at least part of the connection. The phone companies have been switching everything past your local loop to IP for years now. Of course, it's not usually over the public Internet; they have their own dedicated lines. But still, once you realize this, the ongoing debate about whether you'll use VoIP does seem a bit moot. You're likely using VoIP whether you realize it or not.
But you're paying for a POTS "land line".;-)
And those "availability" statistics come from managers and marketers; not from engineers who will define the term properly.
Linux has no anti-Microsoft strategy yet people are migrating from Windows to Linux.
On the contrary; the linux gang has a strong anti-Microsoft strategy, and it's one of the most insidious, subversive strategies of all.
They've been providing a cheap, reliable system with no licensing or other legal hassles, which does much of what its users want it to do. It doesn't provide easy entry to viruses, spyware, or other evil stuff, and you aren't tricked into needless upgrades.
Can you imagine the effect on the corporate world if this sort of thing became widespread? It's clear why they'd want to stop it now, before people get the idea that everything might be like this.
It's not the first time such things have happened. Remember back in the 1970's, when the Japanese auto makers started rejecting the traditional "planned obsolescence" scheme that the auto industry depended on for their income. The result was an economic disaster to the rest of the industry, especially American auto companies. Many companies never recovered; others now have profit margins that are a fraction of what they were before this attack (taking into account inflation, of course). American roads are now filled with vehicles that often keep going for 250,000 miles or more before they need to be replaced. In 1960, you had to replace most cars after 50,000 miles. This huge drop in sales was and still is a disaster to the auto industry.
Linux is a similar threat to the computer industry. It runs very nicely on old, obsolete computers, eliminating much of the profit of selling replacement computers every 2 or 3 years. I personally have a linux gateway/firewall running very smoothly on 6-year-old hardware, and see no reason to replace it.
This sort of thing is already starting to impact computer sales in the US. If linux (or *BSD) were to become widespread in industry, it would be a financial disaster comparable to what happened to the American auto industry. It's easy to understand why the folks at Microsoft feel that they must stop it at any cost.
Google Middle Earth, both maps and satellite views?
Of course, if they'd really been on the ball, on Saturday they would have announced the password that when used with the UK google maps, would unmask all the places in the Harry Potter books.
So yes, there are people out there who set up websites just for fun, and not for the money. So if this is a good thing, why do so many people tell me I am stupid for doing it?
No mystery there. Lots of people believe that you should only do things that are profitable, and by "profitable" they mean you get money. They don't understand that there are other kinds of profit.
Much of this can be understood as the "economic" model of human behavior. Some years ago, my wife was working toward a degree in economics, and she liked to describe a discussion topic that kept popping up at school: One way that scientific theories are tested is by using them to make predictions, and see which predictions come true. Most economic models aren't very good at prediction. Some are a bit better, and those are the ones that include things like fame and power as motivating forces. These don't translate easily to/from money, but they can be independently measured, so they can be used in models. Such theories aren't politically acceptable, however, because they're considered "Marxist".
Myself, I like another illustration: If you consider it stupid to do things for fun and not for money, you would never have children. If humans actually worked that way, our species would be extinct within a century. This hasn't happened. So at least a significant minority of us must not have money as our only motivation. In fact, if you look at the costs of raising children, you have to conclude that some humans are stongly motivated to do some things that are financially really stupid. Most economists would call such people irrational. But without them, we would be extinct.
Nope. The government claims to represent me. But I can tell you for a fact that it doesn't, on most topics.
Perhaps it might in a few limited cases, where the issue was something that was actually on a ballot, and I personally voted for the current administration's position. But I don't recall very many times this has happened.
Thus, I defy you to find a ballot anywhere in recent US or UK elections that mentioned words such as "war" or "Iraq". But those governments claim a "mandate" from their citizens to fight that war.
Not from this citizen, they don't. And not really from any others, either, since we weren't permitted to vote on the subject.
(*) I am German and in German (and in Latin..)its even more awful because there are masculine and feminine forms of almost all words that refer to (groups of) persons; besides having the he/she problem,...
So do Germans ever use the old English approach of using plural as an indefinite gender? I don't know German well enough to know.
One of the funnier "grammar nazi" items in English is the frequent objection to this use of they/their/them for a single person of indefinite sex. This sounds like a reasonable objection, because "they" is called "3rd person plural". But usually in such discussions, some language historian speaks up with the observation that this usage goes back to the earliest English texts that we have. Not only did Shakespeare do this, but there are a lot of citations from his predecessors.
This doesn't stop the discussion, of course, possibly because a lot of people don't really want a solution. But arguments tend to fizzle when someone points out that this isn't a modern "corruption" of English grammar.
Anyway, at least with prepositions, the same trick should work in German. And there's already the semi-parallel of using 2nd-person plural as a formal singular pronoun.
Fixing the nouns would be a bit trickier, of course.
The real solution would be for all of Europe to adopt Finnish, which has no gender at all, not even in the pronouns.
(Linguistic trivia question: Which other languages spoken in Europe have this property?)
That question is not as relevant as the question of WHY the webcam can be turned on by unknown entities in the first place.
Well, a few years ago I worked in a lab that was developing video conferencing software. One of the guys had a cool tool that he liked to demo. He's ask you if your machine had a camera, and if so, what's the hostname or IP address. He'd type it into his program's "host" widget, and if it was a Windows machine, a few seconds later the view from the camera would appear on his screen. It didn't matter whether the camera was on or off; his program remotely turned it on. It also turned on the microphone, if there was one.
You can probably imagine the effect this had on a lot of users.
One fun thing was the people who would ask if there's anything that can be done about it. He would basically say "Well, I know how to remotely turn the camera off, if that's what you mean. But that doesn't do you a lot of good, because someone else can come along and just turn it back on, if they know what I know." He'd also say that his code only works with Windows machines; no other system that he knew of had the glaring security holes that allowed such remote access.
All this came out of a few guys' research into what it took to get their conferencing software running on Windows.
Dunno if it still works, though. It's been a few years.
What I think would be fun to see in cases like this would be for some (a lot of?) Windows users to use the software, and declare the price of their PC as a deduction. After all, they had to buy a Windows box to use the government-approved tax software, right? So the box's price was a government-required cost of using this government-approved software.
If anyone tries it, let us know how it works out.
Apparently this wouldn't work in places like Canada or Brazil. But Australians and Poles should definitely try it.
On my web site, I have a number of small software "tools". The usual sort of motley collection that a lot of programmers have. Scripts in various scripting languages. Real programs in random languages. library routines. Since I've done a lot of work in C, I have a sizeable C debugging package that I've collected/written. It's pretty much all labelled as "open source", GPL or otherwise.
My primary motive for putting it online is that I find myself working on lots of different computers, and I often find myself wanting one of the tools in my collection. Now that Internet access is becoming universal (at least wherever there's a computer;-), I can easily just download something and use it.
So, for my primary (selfish) purpose, I could claim that this collection of open-source software is successful. I can access it when I need it.
There's also another benefit of putting it online. Other programmers find it and download stuff. Occasionally I get email from them with patches. I thank them and add their changes to my collection. I do the same for them of course, since a lot of my stuff came from other programmers' online collections.
This is clearly a benefit to all of us. So as a way of developing and enhancing such a collection, putting it online as open source is successful. It leads to occasional improvements in such collections.
Now, it's obvious that, from a commercial perspective, this hasn't been "profitable". I haven't made any money from sales at all. However, I have enhanced my own value as a programmer. Various employers have been duly impressed by my collection. I do point out that I will use any of my stuff on their projects, but any enhancements that I make will go back into my collection (which I carefully keep separate from the code I'm developing for them). So far no employer has had a problem with this. They're all smart enough to understand how they profit from such practices.
I think that a lot of the disagreement here is the common understanding of "success" as "profitable sales". But there are other kinds of profit, and other kinds of success. I doubt if any of the tools in my collection could be sold commercially. Most people would be baffled by a description of almost everything there, since most of it makes sense only to programmers or system managers. There's little point in attempting to make it commercial, as few computer users would ever buy any of it. But I'd claim that it's a "success" at what it's there for.
So should we programmers not be permitted to put useful stuff online unless it's commercially successful? This strikes me as rather foolish.
Funny thing... I just wasted an hour or so discovering the same problem, and finally getting the toolbar uninstalled.
One question: Is there any way to tell what things in firefox (or mozilla) are running what cpu-eating things? I've got the Prefbar and Flashblock installed; I'm blocking image animation, java, javascript and flash, and still FF and mozilla are each eating 10% to 20% of my cpu.
It likely has something to do with a lot of tabs I have open to sites that I'm following. Presumably the cpu usage is the result of particular things in particular tabs. But I haven't found anything that can tell me "This tab is using 1.7% of your cpu because it's running Foo". If I could find such things, I could kill those tabs. And send email to the sites explaining why I'm no longer one of their fans.
Is there some way of profiling FF or mozilla, in a way that gives clues about the cpu eaters?
I seem to have succeeded in deleting the damned google toolbar. I even found the info in the google toolbar docs (using another browser, of course, since FF was a zombie).
And they didn't work. There were two ways listed, and both failed for the same reason. They seemed to want to pop up a new window to handle the job - and the window never appeared. Not even after 15 minutes of letting the "busy" icon spin.
Furthermore, attempting to get such a window put FF into an even more bizarre state that I've never seen before: Almost everything I tried got the "Bonk!" noise that signifies refusal. And then nothing worked in FF, not even moving the window or clicking to bring it to the top. These just got a "Bonk!" refusal. But if I clicked another window and brought it on top of FF, then I could do one operation in FF, e.g. grabbing the titlebar and moving the FF window worked. But just once; releasing the button and trying a second move got another "Bonk!" refusal, until I brought another window to the top and then re-selected FF. Very bizarre.
And, of course, FF refused to exit. So I did a "Forced Quit", which thankfully worked.
On starting a new FF, the google-toolbar install window appeared again, though I'd already done it. It refuses to take "No" for an answer; your only choice is whether to enable the PageRank display. After checking one of those, the only thing that works is the "Install" button. So I did. And, happily, the instructions for uninstalling google toolbar now produced the window with the list of extensions, which seems to have worked.
I certainly won't try that experiment again.
(And yes, I did dig around in google's docs to see if my problem is mentioned. Couldn't find any clues at all. Maybe I'll send a link to these two messages to google's support people, and see what they make of it. Probably something somewhere wrong on my machine. But there were no clues at all. Nothing at all like a warning or error message. The only symptom was that FF became utterly unusable. Now the/. pages once again download in a few seconds and display fine. In fact, I typed this into a FF window.)
... and finally learn how to uninstall these damned things.
I made the mistake of deciding to give it a try on my Mac Powerbook (10.3.9). Bad mistake. This was typed to the Camino browser, because now my FF is all but unusable.
To use an example that/. users can appreciate, I fired up a FF window that has two tabs, with the expected slashdot.org and slashdot.org/users.pl in them. I then opened a third tab with the Google Toolbar discussion, and waited for its busy wheel to stop spinning... and waited... and waited... until finally, after several minutes the spinning froze. Another minute, and it hadn't moved. I hit the little stop-sign icon, and after a while, FF sorta came back.
So I tried opening a new FF window, using CMD-N as usual. Nothing. I tried it a few more times. Nada. No errors, no windows. I guessed that CMD-N was dead.
So I started playing with a few other things in the/. window. CMD-click did open a couple more tabs, all of which hung in the "frozen busy" state. I tried a few ways of getting menus; none worked. Clicking on a tab would bring it to the front, but click-hold never produced a menu. Neither did click-hold inside a tab.
WTF?
Then, after maybe 10 minutes, a set of blank windows suddenly appeared. So CMD-N isn't dead; it just takes 10 minutes. Now, I'd gotten used to FF taking 30 seconds on OSX, unlike my (slower;-) linux box where it takes between 2 and 3 seconds. But 10 minutes is way past what I'd call marginally usable.
Then, a few minutes later I saw a whole lot of menus flashing above the FF window where I was viewing/., meaning that the menus aren't dead, either. They're just so slow as to be unusable.
So it looks like I'll have to hunt down this Toolbar and excise it. Too bad I didn't get a chance to try it. Well, actually, I did. I typed in a search string and hit Return - and the window became a zombie. And my cpu was pegged at 100%, with Activity Monitor saying that Firefox was hung. I got my cpu back by hitting the little 'x' "close" icon for the window, and after a minute or so it went away, and cpu usage dropped.
I wonder where I can find the docs on removing the little monster? I'd sure like my firefox back.
There is a very, very real danger in students using free software- they may develop a crazy idea that information should be accesible to everyone, and reasonably priced and GASP even free!!!
Yeah; if we're not careful, they might also discover that there are these subversive places called "libraries", where you can read entire books for free. They've been operating in the open for years, despite all the efforts of the publishing industry to shut them down.
Wouldn't want those kids getting any radical ideas about learning stuff for free, now would we?
Heh. I've sometimes wondered what sort of reactions I'd get from a few possible comments.
"So tell me about your Neanderthal ancestors."
"Has anyone ever said how Neanderthal you look?"
I'd assume that most people who have the Neandert[h]al physical features are not aware of the fact. I think that if I had them, I'd take a "Hey, how 'bout dat?" attitude. I don't actually have any of the features, and I was actually a bit disappointed to learn this. I think it'd be fun to tell people that I'm part Neanderthal. But I'd guess that some people might react differently.
Oh, well; I can always use another of my explantions: When people ask me what I "do", I like to tell them that I'm an anthropologist. I'm stationed on Earth to study humans. Very interesting newly-discovered species, y'know. Gotta document them thoroughly while they're still in their primitive, single-planet state, and before they exterminate themselves.
It's especially fun, when they ask me if I'm not violating some secrecy rule, to tell them that there isn't any such rule. After all, you can tell humans the absolute truth, and they don't believe you. The very few who do are dismissed by the rest as nut cases. You don't believe me, do you? So why should we bother with secrecy?
Asians and especially sub-Saharan Africans would show no Neanderthal genes, while caucasians would, if there was interbreeding.
Some years ago, I read an interesting article on the topic; it's too bad that I don't recall where. It was a takeoff on the old suggestion that if you were to take a typical Neandertal, dress him/her up in modern clothes, and drop him/her down anywhere in Europe, nobody would notice anything at all odd about the visitor.
Part of the article was a list of the major physical features of the Neandertals. Most of these features appear individually in modern humans everywhere, but you find combinations of most of them only in Europeans. This is suggestive of interbreeding, but not convincing. These features could all be adaptive in Europe for reasons we don't fully understand, and the Cro Magnon invaders could have developed them independently for the same reasons.
Anyway, since then I've sorta been on the lookout for individuals that show most of the list of Neandertal features. Since I live in the Boston area, that's mostly where I've looked. I do tend to forget about it most of the time, but when someone with the right features shows up, my subconscious does tend to bring it to my attention. Sort of a subtle (and somewhat silly) social game.
A couple of years ago, while driving down Commonwealth Ave (near Cleveland Circle), while stopped at a light, I noticed an attractive womon in the crosswalk. Nothing odd there. But the "Neanderthal!" flag went off, and I looked closer. She showed pretty much all the features, and might have passed in Neandertal Europe 100,000 years ago (except for the clothes). She even had faint brow ridges, unusual for modern human females. And was she ever sexy. A bit on the "zaftig" side, as one might expect. But well worth a third or fourth look. So much for the "primitive brute" image. And if she had met a Cro-Magnon male 100,000 years ago, I know exactly how he would have reacted.
I was tempted to walk over and introduce myself. But a common Boston problem intervened: There was no parking space visible anywhere. Oh, well; so much for that idea.
Anyway, it's a fun game. Probably not significant of much. But the fact that good matches so far have all been white people is a bit suggestive that it's not totally coincidence when these features come together.
(I do have a couple of friends who match most of the feature set. I haven't told any of them. Maybe I should some day.)
Slashdot Mirror
Who decides what is a reasonable period time?
This is an easy one for Congress: Just copy the "reasonable time" limit from the copyright laws.
So you'll have to produce a working model within 70 years of your death.
Heh. Actually, that's still too much work for the typical (l)user, as shown by the fact that a lot of them don't respond properly to phishing pages by clicking when we want them to.
;-) For the rest of us, our systems will keep the security that blocks downloaded code from running automatically, and if we run it, will block access outside a limited sandbox.
But when the web tools have access to all of your machine, even that one click becomes unnecessary. The code in the page you just downloaded will simply look around your file system, find the information it wants, and send it back home. No need for you to waste your time with clicks.
Mr Kelly, the author of the article in question, clearly believes this is the future of web software. And he may be right, for people using Microsoft systems. (Gotta get in a bit of MS bashing here.
Kelly and others like him will, of course, consider our computer systems to be backwards and incompatible with the Windows "standard". But we'll be reasonably safe from him and his cohorts' attempts to take over our computers.
There will be a cost, though. We'll have to click on things to make them run. If that's too much effort, you should buy a Windows box so the phishing code can run without your click.
Yeah; I think you've figured it out.
The downside is that browsers don't give programmers full access to a computer's resources such as memory, process power and hard disk space
Are you kidding me? How is this a bad thing?
Heh. The "downside" he's talking about is to the programmers at the commercial web sites. It's fairly clear that he views things like security as limits on what web-site owners can do with your computer. This is all true, of course, but you are probably under the mistaken impression that you should be the one that decides what your computer is to be used for. He's just trying to explain to you why you're wrong, and how much better things will be when your machine is fully available to people who know better than you how to take full advantage of its capabilities.
You see, the goal is to make things simpler for you. Instead of laboriously going through all those complicated web forms to order stuff online, this will all be automated. When you click on a link to a commercial site, your browser will download code that automatically fills in all the credit-card and address information for you, sends it back. This will complete the purchase without any need to waste your time with boring forms that you're tired of filling in over and over.
Think of how much more efficient and productive this will be.
Slowly getting annoyed with what seemed to me mistakes, I finally ran into the howler that explained it all:
Now, in a dictatorship, the trains run on time.
There have been a number of studies of this claim, with fairly consistent results. Dictatorships have a very poor record of making trains, or anything else, run on time. In particular, records from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are available in archives. Their trains had a rather poor record.
This sort of claim is based on ideology and social beliefs, not on actual data. And anyone who has ever worked in a power-structured organization understands why it doesn't work. Top-down command systems have an inherent weakness: Problems are best diagnosed and fixed by the people who see and understand them, and those are the people who are working closely with the systems. Commands about technical details that come from the top are at best vague feel-good guidelines. But all too they often are misguided and incorrect because of poor technical understanding by the people at the top. The underlings are then forced to make the best of commands that they know are wrong. This can't ever work very well.
Recently, an almost-funny example of this came out, from the people studying the state of world fisheries. They'd been noticing an apparent anomaly, with growing reports of depleted fish stocks while the total world catch was growing. They finally got funding to do extensive studies, and found the explanation: A large part of the world's fishing fleet is now run by China, and they had reported increasing catches for several decades. These reports turned out to be total fiction, with totals several orders of magnitude greater than the actual catch. What happened in the top-down Chinese fishing industry was that management decreed increasing catches, and punished anyone who submitted unacceptable reports. Their underlings understood, and repeatedly submitted reports showing catches that increased slowly. The numbers were simply made up, and the reports satisfied their superiors, who probably still believe in these huge catches.
This is, unfortunately, a very normal state of affairs in top-down command heirarchies. It leads to belief that the trains run on time, when in fact they are an unreliable mess.
Methinks that with the "trains ran on time" claim, Mr Kelly gave away his basic misconceptions about how the world works. We should take his prognostication as being as reliable as those trains.
If you consider the object of jail time "to punish a criminal", it is very hard to likewise punish a corporation; ...
One very real problem with any punishment scheme (such as suspending operations): A standard method for dealing with such things is for the company to sell off its assets to a newly-formed corporation, and then dissolve. This is a conventional way of getting out of debts such as retirement obligations. It can be as easily used for making moot any sort of legal "jail" terms imposed on the corporation.
When a corporation uses this approach, the top management and major shareholders usually profit handsomely, while employees and minor shareholders lose everything.
There's really no way to handle this except by punishing the responsible managers. Corporations exist to insulate management from legal action, after all. That's why corporations were invented. As long as top management is immune to legal action and can profit by dissolving the corporation, there's no way you can ever punish the corporation itself for its wrongdoings.
American hospitals can't turn you away if you have some serious problem: even if they know you are broke, ...
Right you are. They treat you. Then they send you a bill for double what they'd charge an insurance company. Then they sue you into bankruptcy and homelessness.
I've heard a number of discussions among medical people, who are sorely bothered by the elevated charges to uninsured people. But there's not a lot they can do about it; that's the way The System works these days.
Some states do have laws protecting homes from seizure. But this isn't much consolation if everything else you have is taken by the courts, and the only way to get food money is to sell the house.
But the whole System is on the verge of collapse. Medical prices are rising fast. They can't pass 100% of the GDP. That's not too far in the future, so we can expect a radical reorg before then.
(My wife works for an HMO. They're having lots of behind-the-scenes discussions of such things these days. They don't have solutions, either, since they are merely financiers to a system driven by others. They don't expect the current system to survive many more years, and are busy trying to divine the direction it will head as the crisis deepens.)
Not giving spoilers a matter of politeness; legislating for that is hopeless.
But there is a social approach that some of Harry's fans have used to good effect: Disinformation.
I've already seen a number of t-shirts that say "XXX died!", where XXX was a random major Harry Potter character. People have also used this approach in online discussions, by posting messages about the death of random character XXX, followed by a number of apparently-serious replies from co-conspirators.
If enough people do this, you can't separate the spoilers from the fakes.
I've been thinking of getting a t-shirt made that reads "Aragog died!" Now, that was a touching couple of scenes. Nobody warned us that there would be two funerals in the book.
A version I ran across yesterday:
Knock, knock!
Who's there?
Under the terms of the Patriot Act, I don't have to tell you.
An availability of 94.8% means once in twenty times when you pick up the phone, there's no dialtone.
;-)
Not necessarily. One serious problem with this discussion is that there are lots and lots of ways that people (and companies) define "availability".
Back when I had a POTS line (now DSL) I saw numerous cases where the phone system was in some failure mode. Usually it did give a dial tone, but all calls would fail. Sometimes I could make a call, but I'd always get a busy signal - even when I called my neighbor who was waiting by his phone for the call. Sometimes I'd punch in the numbers and get absolutely no response at all. Sometimes I'd get an ongoing dial tone after I dialed, as if I hadn't dialed at all. Usually all my neighbors had the same problem at the same time.
So I'd check, and sure enough, the phone company's official reports claimed 100% availability for the entire exchange for that month.
They obviously define "availability" differently than I do. They can be 100% up and "available", but not completing any phone calls. They consider that uptime. I don't.
In any case, at least here in the US, chances are that any call you make outside your local exchange is now using VoIP for at least part of the connection. The phone companies have been switching everything past your local loop to IP for years now. Of course, it's not usually over the public Internet; they have their own dedicated lines. But still, once you realize this, the ongoing debate about whether you'll use VoIP does seem a bit moot. You're likely using VoIP whether you realize it or not.
But you're paying for a POTS "land line".
And those "availability" statistics come from managers and marketers; not from engineers who will define the term properly.
Linux has no anti-Microsoft strategy yet people are migrating from Windows to Linux.
On the contrary; the linux gang has a strong anti-Microsoft strategy, and it's one of the most insidious, subversive strategies of all.
They've been providing a cheap, reliable system with no licensing or other legal hassles, which does much of what its users want it to do. It doesn't provide easy entry to viruses, spyware, or other evil stuff, and you aren't tricked into needless upgrades.
Can you imagine the effect on the corporate world if this sort of thing became widespread? It's clear why they'd want to stop it now, before people get the idea that everything might be like this.
It's not the first time such things have happened. Remember back in the 1970's, when the Japanese auto makers started rejecting the traditional "planned obsolescence" scheme that the auto industry depended on for their income. The result was an economic disaster to the rest of the industry, especially American auto companies. Many companies never recovered; others now have profit margins that are a fraction of what they were before this attack (taking into account inflation, of course). American roads are now filled with vehicles that often keep going for 250,000 miles or more before they need to be replaced. In 1960, you had to replace most cars after 50,000 miles. This huge drop in sales was and still is a disaster to the auto industry.
Linux is a similar threat to the computer industry. It runs very nicely on old, obsolete computers, eliminating much of the profit of selling replacement computers every 2 or 3 years. I personally have a linux gateway/firewall running very smoothly on 6-year-old hardware, and see no reason to replace it.
This sort of thing is already starting to impact computer sales in the US. If linux (or *BSD) were to become widespread in industry, it would be a financial disaster comparable to what happened to the American auto industry. It's easy to understand why the folks at Microsoft feel that they must stop it at any cost.
(That's at any cost to the customer of course.)
Google Middle Earth, both maps and satellite views?
Of course, if they'd really been on the ball, on Saturday they would have announced the password that when used with the UK google maps, would unmask all the places in the Harry Potter books.
So yes, there are people out there who set up websites just for fun, and not for the money. So if this is a good thing, why do so many people tell me I am stupid for doing it?
No mystery there. Lots of people believe that you should only do things that are profitable, and by "profitable" they mean you get money. They don't understand that there are other kinds of profit.
Much of this can be understood as the "economic" model of human behavior. Some years ago, my wife was working toward a degree in economics, and she liked to describe a discussion topic that kept popping up at school: One way that scientific theories are tested is by using them to make predictions, and see which predictions come true. Most economic models aren't very good at prediction. Some are a bit better, and those are the ones that include things like fame and power as motivating forces. These don't translate easily to/from money, but they can be independently measured, so they can be used in models. Such theories aren't politically acceptable, however, because they're considered "Marxist".
Myself, I like another illustration: If you consider it stupid to do things for fun and not for money, you would never have children. If humans actually worked that way, our species would be extinct within a century. This hasn't happened. So at least a significant minority of us must not have money as our only motivation. In fact, if you look at the costs of raising children, you have to conclude that some humans are stongly motivated to do some things that are financially really stupid. Most economists would call such people irrational. But without them, we would be extinct.
Maybe you're one of these people.
Yes, the government represents you as a citizen.
Nope. The government claims to represent me. But I can tell you for a fact that it doesn't, on most topics.
Perhaps it might in a few limited cases, where the issue was something that was actually on a ballot, and I personally voted for the current administration's position. But I don't recall very many times this has happened.
Thus, I defy you to find a ballot anywhere in recent US or UK elections that mentioned words such as "war" or "Iraq". But those governments claim a "mandate" from their citizens to fight that war.
Not from this citizen, they don't. And not really from any others, either, since we weren't permitted to vote on the subject.
(*) I am German and in German (and in Latin..)its even more awful because there are masculine and feminine forms of almost all words that refer to (groups of) persons; besides having the he/she problem, ...
So do Germans ever use the old English approach of using plural as an indefinite gender? I don't know German well enough to know.
One of the funnier "grammar nazi" items in English is the frequent objection to this use of they/their/them for a single person of indefinite sex. This sounds like a reasonable objection, because "they" is called "3rd person plural". But usually in such discussions, some language historian speaks up with the observation that this usage goes back to the earliest English texts that we have. Not only did Shakespeare do this, but there are a lot of citations from his predecessors.
This doesn't stop the discussion, of course, possibly because a lot of people don't really want a solution. But arguments tend to fizzle when someone points out that this isn't a modern "corruption" of English grammar.
Anyway, at least with prepositions, the same trick should work in German. And there's already the semi-parallel of using 2nd-person plural as a formal singular pronoun.
Fixing the nouns would be a bit trickier, of course.
The real solution would be for all of Europe to adopt Finnish, which has no gender at all, not even in the pronouns.
(Linguistic trivia question: Which other languages spoken in Europe have this property?)
That question is not as relevant as the question of WHY the webcam can be turned on by unknown entities in the first place.
Well, a few years ago I worked in a lab that was developing video conferencing software. One of the guys had a cool tool that he liked to demo. He's ask you if your machine had a camera, and if so, what's the hostname or IP address. He'd type it into his program's "host" widget, and if it was a Windows machine, a few seconds later the view from the camera would appear on his screen. It didn't matter whether the camera was on or off; his program remotely turned it on. It also turned on the microphone, if there was one.
You can probably imagine the effect this had on a lot of users.
One fun thing was the people who would ask if there's anything that can be done about it. He would basically say "Well, I know how to remotely turn the camera off, if that's what you mean. But that doesn't do you a lot of good, because someone else can come along and just turn it back on, if they know what I know." He'd also say that his code only works with Windows machines; no other system that he knew of had the glaring security holes that allowed such remote access.
All this came out of a few guys' research into what it took to get their conferencing software running on Windows.
Dunno if it still works, though. It's been a few years.
What I think would be fun to see in cases like this would be for some (a lot of?) Windows users to use the software, and declare the price of their PC as a deduction. After all, they had to buy a Windows box to use the government-approved tax software, right? So the box's price was a government-required cost of using this government-approved software.
If anyone tries it, let us know how it works out.
Apparently this wouldn't work in places like Canada or Brazil. But Australians and Poles should definitely try it.
On my web site, I have a number of small software "tools". The usual sort of motley collection that a lot of programmers have. Scripts in various scripting languages. Real programs in random languages. library routines. Since I've done a lot of work in C, I have a sizeable C debugging package that I've collected/written. It's pretty much all labelled as "open source", GPL or otherwise.
;-), I can easily just download something and use it.
My primary motive for putting it online is that I find myself working on lots of different computers, and I often find myself wanting one of the tools in my collection. Now that Internet access is becoming universal (at least wherever there's a computer
So, for my primary (selfish) purpose, I could claim that this collection of open-source software is successful. I can access it when I need it.
There's also another benefit of putting it online. Other programmers find it and download stuff. Occasionally I get email from them with patches. I thank them and add their changes to my collection. I do the same for them of course, since a lot of my stuff came from other programmers' online collections.
This is clearly a benefit to all of us. So as a way of developing and enhancing such a collection, putting it online as open source is successful. It leads to occasional improvements in such collections.
Now, it's obvious that, from a commercial perspective, this hasn't been "profitable". I haven't made any money from sales at all. However, I have enhanced my own value as a programmer. Various employers have been duly impressed by my collection. I do point out that I will use any of my stuff on their projects, but any enhancements that I make will go back into my collection (which I carefully keep separate from the code I'm developing for them). So far no employer has had a problem with this. They're all smart enough to understand how they profit from such practices.
I think that a lot of the disagreement here is the common understanding of "success" as "profitable sales". But there are other kinds of profit, and other kinds of success. I doubt if any of the tools in my collection could be sold commercially. Most people would be baffled by a description of almost everything there, since most of it makes sense only to programmers or system managers. There's little point in attempting to make it commercial, as few computer users would ever buy any of it. But I'd claim that it's a "success" at what it's there for.
So should we programmers not be permitted to put useful stuff online unless it's commercially successful? This strikes me as rather foolish.
Thanks. I'd never heard of safe mode. I'll experiment with it and see how it works.
Funny thing ... I just wasted an hour or so discovering the same problem, and finally getting the toolbar uninstalled.
One question: Is there any way to tell what things in firefox (or mozilla) are running what cpu-eating things? I've got the Prefbar and Flashblock installed; I'm blocking image animation, java, javascript and flash, and still FF and mozilla are each eating 10% to 20% of my cpu.
It likely has something to do with a lot of tabs I have open to sites that I'm following. Presumably the cpu usage is the result of particular things in particular tabs. But I haven't found anything that can tell me "This tab is using 1.7% of your cpu because it's running Foo". If I could find such things, I could kill those tabs. And send email to the sites explaining why I'm no longer one of their fans.
Is there some way of profiling FF or mozilla, in a way that gives clues about the cpu eaters?
I seem to have succeeded in deleting the damned google toolbar. I even found the info in the google toolbar docs (using another browser, of course, since FF was a zombie).
/. pages once again download in a few seconds and display fine. In fact, I typed this into a FF window.)
And they didn't work. There were two ways listed, and both failed for the same reason. They seemed to want to pop up a new window to handle the job - and the window never appeared. Not even after 15 minutes of letting the "busy" icon spin.
Furthermore, attempting to get such a window put FF into an even more bizarre state that I've never seen before: Almost everything I tried got the "Bonk!" noise that signifies refusal. And then nothing worked in FF, not even moving the window or clicking to bring it to the top. These just got a "Bonk!" refusal. But if I clicked another window and brought it on top of FF, then I could do one operation in FF, e.g. grabbing the titlebar and moving the FF window worked. But just once; releasing the button and trying a second move got another "Bonk!" refusal, until I brought another window to the top and then re-selected FF. Very bizarre.
And, of course, FF refused to exit. So I did a "Forced Quit", which thankfully worked.
On starting a new FF, the google-toolbar install window appeared again, though I'd already done it. It refuses to take "No" for an answer; your only choice is whether to enable the PageRank display. After checking one of those, the only thing that works is the "Install" button. So I did. And, happily, the instructions for uninstalling google toolbar now produced the window with the list of extensions, which seems to have worked.
I certainly won't try that experiment again.
(And yes, I did dig around in google's docs to see if my problem is mentioned. Couldn't find any clues at all. Maybe I'll send a link to these two messages to google's support people, and see what they make of it. Probably something somewhere wrong on my machine. But there were no clues at all. Nothing at all like a warning or error message. The only symptom was that FF became utterly unusable. Now the
... and finally learn how to uninstall these damned things.
/. users can appreciate, I fired up a FF window that has two tabs, with the expected slashdot.org and slashdot.org/users.pl in them. I then opened a third tab with the Google Toolbar discussion, and waited for its busy wheel to stop spinning ... and waited ... and waited ... until finally, after several minutes the spinning froze. Another minute, and it hadn't moved. I hit the little stop-sign icon, and after a while, FF sorta came back.
/. window. CMD-click did open a couple more tabs, all of which hung in the "frozen busy" state. I tried a few ways of getting menus; none worked. Clicking on a tab would bring it to the front, but click-hold never produced a menu. Neither did click-hold inside a tab.
;-) linux box where it takes between 2 and 3 seconds. But 10 minutes is way past what I'd call marginally usable.
/., meaning that the menus aren't dead, either. They're just so slow as to be unusable.
I made the mistake of deciding to give it a try on my Mac Powerbook (10.3.9). Bad mistake. This was typed to the Camino browser, because now my FF is all but unusable.
To use an example that
So I tried opening a new FF window, using CMD-N as usual. Nothing. I tried it a few more times. Nada. No errors, no windows. I guessed that CMD-N was dead.
So I started playing with a few other things in the
WTF?
Then, after maybe 10 minutes, a set of blank windows suddenly appeared. So CMD-N isn't dead; it just takes 10 minutes. Now, I'd gotten used to FF taking 30 seconds on OSX, unlike my (slower
Then, a few minutes later I saw a whole lot of menus flashing above the FF window where I was viewing
So it looks like I'll have to hunt down this Toolbar and excise it. Too bad I didn't get a chance to try it. Well, actually, I did. I typed in a search string and hit Return - and the window became a zombie. And my cpu was pegged at 100%, with Activity Monitor saying that Firefox was hung. I got my cpu back by hitting the little 'x' "close" icon for the window, and after a minute or so it went away, and cpu usage dropped.
I wonder where I can find the docs on removing the little monster? I'd sure like my firefox back.
There is a very, very real danger in students using free software- they may develop a crazy idea that information should be accesible to everyone, and reasonably priced and GASP even free!!!
Yeah; if we're not careful, they might also discover that there are these subversive places called "libraries", where you can read entire books for free. They've been operating in the open for years, despite all the efforts of the publishing industry to shut them down.
Wouldn't want those kids getting any radical ideas about learning stuff for free, now would we?
Heh. I've sometimes wondered what sort of reactions I'd get from a few possible comments.
"So tell me about your Neanderthal ancestors."
"Has anyone ever said how Neanderthal you look?"
I'd assume that most people who have the Neandert[h]al physical features are not aware of the fact. I think that if I had them, I'd take a "Hey, how 'bout dat?" attitude. I don't actually have any of the features, and I was actually a bit disappointed to learn this. I think it'd be fun to tell people that I'm part Neanderthal. But I'd guess that some people might react differently.
Oh, well; I can always use another of my explantions: When people ask me what I "do", I like to tell them that I'm an anthropologist. I'm stationed on Earth to study humans. Very interesting newly-discovered species, y'know. Gotta document them thoroughly while they're still in their primitive, single-planet state, and before they exterminate themselves.
It's especially fun, when they ask me if I'm not violating some secrecy rule, to tell them that there isn't any such rule. After all, you can tell humans the absolute truth, and they don't believe you. The very few who do are dismissed by the rest as nut cases. You don't believe me, do you? So why should we bother with secrecy?
Asians and especially sub-Saharan Africans would show no Neanderthal genes, while caucasians would, if there was interbreeding.
Some years ago, I read an interesting article on the topic; it's too bad that I don't recall where. It was a takeoff on the old suggestion that if you were to take a typical Neandertal, dress him/her up in modern clothes, and drop him/her down anywhere in Europe, nobody would notice anything at all odd about the visitor.
Part of the article was a list of the major physical features of the Neandertals. Most of these features appear individually in modern humans everywhere, but you find combinations of most of them only in Europeans. This is suggestive of interbreeding, but not convincing. These features could all be adaptive in Europe for reasons we don't fully understand, and the Cro Magnon invaders could have developed them independently for the same reasons.
Anyway, since then I've sorta been on the lookout for individuals that show most of the list of Neandertal features. Since I live in the Boston area, that's mostly where I've looked. I do tend to forget about it most of the time, but when someone with the right features shows up, my subconscious does tend to bring it to my attention. Sort of a subtle (and somewhat silly) social game.
A couple of years ago, while driving down Commonwealth Ave (near Cleveland Circle), while stopped at a light, I noticed an attractive womon in the crosswalk. Nothing odd there. But the "Neanderthal!" flag went off, and I looked closer. She showed pretty much all the features, and might have passed in Neandertal Europe 100,000 years ago (except for the clothes). She even had faint brow ridges, unusual for modern human females. And was she ever sexy. A bit on the "zaftig" side, as one might expect. But well worth a third or fourth look. So much for the "primitive brute" image. And if she had met a Cro-Magnon male 100,000 years ago, I know exactly how he would have reacted.
I was tempted to walk over and introduce myself. But a common Boston problem intervened: There was no parking space visible anywhere. Oh, well; so much for that idea.
Anyway, it's a fun game. Probably not significant of much. But the fact that good matches so far have all been white people is a bit suggestive that it's not totally coincidence when these features come together.
(I do have a couple of friends who match most of the feature set. I haven't told any of them. Maybe I should some day.)