OK, I know I'm nitpicking.... Exactly who's indigenous is very complex.
Yeah, especially when you consider us mongrels. Like maybe 20% of the American population, I'm partly "indigenous", 1/8 Ojibwa. The rest of my ancestors are from all over Europe. So maybe I'm 1/8 "indigene" and 7/8 "invader".
OTOH, my parents migrated 2000 miles from the Ojibwa area (western Great Lakes) to the West Coast, where I was born. So maybe I'm 100% "invader" from a Chinook or Kwakiutl viewpoint. And now I live 3000 miles from there (but still in the same country;-).
It's probably more useful to dismiss such social/political terms as empty of meaning, and just work out the details of the migrations of ancestors. We'll all turn out to be mongrels, even the ones still living in the ancestral homeland of 60K years ago.
We already know enough to dismiss most of the racial and ethnic classifications as biologically useless. That in itself has social and political uses. As we pin down more and more of the details, it's likely that the usual simpleminded classifications will be shown even less meaningful than they seem now. This can only be bad news for the bigots and racists amongst us.
Yeah; this reminds me of the old weirdness that Sony's 1/8-inch plugs were almost but not quite the same as the industry standard. Sometimes you could plug a Sony gadget into another brand's gadget and both channels would work; sometimes not.
This was a fairly clear case of "We don't want our customers to connect our stuff to our competitors' stuff; everyone should just by Sony stuff". Not exactly an unusual attitude among market leaders, but it does show a certain amount of contempt for what customers want.
Their munging of the MP3 standard is pretty much the same deal. "We support MP3. Well, actually, it's not quite MP3, but it's almost the same thing. We've just tweaked it a bit so our stuff won't interoperate with other MP3 stuff."
The best approach would be to tell them that you're not buying their gadget because it's not compatible with your other gadgets. While you're at it, say the same thing to Microsoft and any other company you can find that's doing this sort of thing to you. What we want is a world where everything connects to everything else, and anything you buy works anywhere that you want to use it.
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program."
Yeah; that's a great Niven quote.
Of course, it isn't technically accurate, since dinosaurs aren't extinct. In fact, there are more dinosaur species (around 8000) than mammal species (around 3500) alive now, and they inhabit a somewhat larger part of the biosphere than we mammals.
This is based on the current understanding that birds are in fact theropod dinosaurs. At least a half dozen species survived the big impact. Only a few more mammal species than that survived. They were all little generalists, like rats and crows. By some chance, the second time around things ended up with the mammals the big, dominant species while the dinosaurs are mostly small. This was probably because the dinosaur survivors were mostly fliers, and if you're flying, being small and light gives you a strong survival advantage.
Actually, I have a dinosaur perched on my shoulder as I type this. He's a white-face cockatiel. Cute little devil. He doesn't know about his giant distant relatives. But he shared the roasted chicken we had for dinner. I also have a couple of nice pictures of him chomping on a beef steak. So don't believe the pet books when they tell you that cockatiels are strictly seed eaters. Imagine instead a flock of hundreds descending on a cow and ripping it to pieces.
Anyway, some day after we've wiped ourselves out, his descendents may again be terrorizing the planet. And one of them will suggest that the big mammals became extinct because they didn't have the brains to colonize other planets.
Niven turned the issue upside down and said, "The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program."
And, of course, any number of science fiction writers have written stories based on a plot in which a dinosaur species did develop a space program and colonized a number of planets of nearby stars. And, to make an interesting story, what you do is have them send some explorers back to Earth to see what has happened here since the big disaster wiped out their relatives on the home world.
A number of good stories have been written with such plots.
Anyone got a favorite "Dinosaurs Return to Earth" story?
There's also Orson Scott Card's "Homecoming" series, about the return of humans' descendents to the Earth 40 million years in the future, including their coming to terms with the two intelligent species that have evolved in the millions of years since humans were wiped out. Another good tale on the general topic.
Heh. There's even more precedent than that. Remember that Linus started using minix temporarily to bootstrap his own unix (posix actually) kernel. If you read Andy Tannenbaum's comments on why he started the minix project, one of his main motivations was the growing difficulty in getting AT&T's permission for his students to read the unix souce. For a university professor teaching an operating systems course, this was a real killer situation. Unix was the OS of choice for such classes partly because of it's advanced capabilities and design, but especially because the source code was available. And AT&T was slowly taking it private. What to do?
Tanenbaum's solution was what you'd expect a comp-sci prof to do: He set his own students to work re-implementiing it from scratch, with no AT&T input. What could be a better project for his students? And note that minix is in fact a rather successful OS, considering its primary niche as a teaching tool.
This is pretty much the same situation that BK has presented the linux development community, though on a somewhat smaller scale. A major value of linux is its role as a completely open OS that is accessible to students, developers and corporations that aren't especially wealthy. Granted, the source-code control system (SCS) is somewhat peripheral to the main topic. But the SCS is a part of what you need to develop and maintain something as inherently complex as an OS, and for linux to satisfy its core educational role, the SCS must also be available to the students and develpers. BK is taking it private, as AT&T took unix private. So it's time to "pull a Linus" and re-implement it from scratch, in a totally free and open form.
I'd guess that this is why Tridge is quiet. He's busy. And he just might be looking for a few good volunteers to get the job rolling...
A bit of pickiness is in order here. Strictly speaking, linux was an independent implementation of POSIX, not Unix(TM). Yes, POSIX was a rubber-stamping of Unix Sys/V as an industry standard. But the distinction is important, legally and ethically. When governments require that you follow an official standard if you are to sell to them, it's really not right to tell me that I can't follow the standard without getting into legal trouble with some corporation. Publishing a spec as an official standard should give me permission to build tools to the standard. This is what Linux did, and everyone outside SCO seems to agree that it was legal.
Saying it's "reverse engineering" to implement a published, official standard stretches the meaning of the phrase so far that it becomes nearly meaningless. Next I expect to hear that if I use meters or grams, I'm "reverse engineering" a measurement system.
Of course, this doesn't really apply to the current discussion, since BK isn't exactly a published standard.
I'm still looking for an explanation of exactly what Tridge did that qualifies as "reverse engineering". TFA and other supposed explanations don't seem to explaining anything. I can't tell what the offending code actually did, and why it's considered "reverse engineering". Tridge seems to say that it did something that BK didn't do already. Or am I misreading something?
The fossil record has already shown us a number of cases where colonizing new territory has saved species from extinction.
The best known is probably the horse. This species evolved in North America. 10,000 or so years ago, this continent was hit with an invading super-predator, humans. Shortly thereafter, horses were extinct in North America. But luckily, a small population of horses had already managed to cross the Bering land bridge and colonize Eurasia. Those colonizers managed to for a symbiotic relationship with - irony alert - humans. The Asian humans found their horses useful for much more than food, and the developed a strong, long-lasting partnership. And eventually, the horses used their companion humans to recolonize North America.
Sounds like something that a science-fiction writer might use for a plot. But there are a number of stories like this in the history of life on this planet.
In our case, it's more likely that we'll be wiped out by a micro-organism, possibly of our own making. There are other less likely disasters, any of which could wipe out all humans on Earth. If we want to survive, spreading out to other niches is one important strategy.
Of course, if there are other living things Out There, they may not welcome us.
My thoughts, too. So far, I haven't seen any explanation of why the phrase "reverse engineering" is being used. If Tridge's comments are correct, the phrase just doesn't seem to apply.
Usually, "reverse engineering" means that I've written code that does what someone else's code does, and I wrote it after studying the other code's behavior but not the code itself. Now, maybe Tridge saw the BK code, maybe he didn't; I can't tell. But it seems that what he wrote doesn't really mimic what BK did. He was adding a new capability as a sort of add-on. So his work fails to satisfy the first part of the definition, and isn't "reverse engineering".
But I haven't really seen much in the way of details.
Could someone who says that "reverse engineering" is involved please explain 1) how you define the phrase, and 2) why it applies in this case?
It's always good to get a common definition of terms before we start condemning someone for doing something that they say they didn't do.
You cannot call something scientific unless you can have reproduceable experiments,
Nonsense. Astronomy is generally considered among the hardest of the hard sciences, and astronomers very rarely perform experiments at all. Reproducible experiments are almost unknown.
You've been reading too much high-school science. Experiment is important in many sciences. But that's hardly the full extent of scientific method. There are a numer of "observational" sciences, and astronomy is the prime example.
Actually, observational sciences do tend to have a lot in common with forensics. The problems of, for example, the fossil record have a lot in common with a criminal investigation. Except that all the participants are dead and unable to testify.
Wikipedia is useless in getting true information in most cases,...
Oh, I dunno about that. I just recently dug around for sites that listed the assorted physical and orbital numbers for a lot of bodies in the solar system. I found that Wikipedia was among the best-organized and most-complete sites. And the pages are quite consistent in their layout, making for rapid location of the data.... it only demonstrates the folly of trying to achieve truth by group consensus.
Actually, much of the scientific enterprise works by a sort of "group consensus". This is at the heart of the problems the religious folks have with it. You can't just make up your own scientific methods, and publish your results with yourself as the authority. You have to convince others working on topics closely related to yours that you're right. And even if they're convinced, they'll still often insist on independent confirmation. This is groupthink to the core, and has worked a whole lot better than most other approaches.
Wikipedia does have problems with "controversial" topics. Scientists generally don't. So, while Wikipedia does seem like a good start, it still has some kinks to work out. Maybe they can work it out as time goes by. If they do, chances they'll have mostly rediscovered scientific methods. But it won't be easy or fast. People have been trying for a century or more to be scientific about fields like psychology, politics, history, economics, and so on, with limited success.
Much of the problem is in working out ways of allowing free speech while implementing schemes to inform readers of reliability. This isn't too difficult, when dealing with things like the mass, albedo, or orbital parameters of Enceladus. Few people have any emotional attachment to the numbers, and no religious theories make prediction about such a body. But there are factual situations where religious people get involved, and they can shout down the scientists in most public arenas. Maybe the wikipedia folks can solve this problem. Maybe not.
Yeah; I was thinking the same thing. In particular, I noticed that
"you grant Microsoft permission to use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission."
My immediate thought was: Does Microsoft grant me the same rights to use an article that I submit? If so, will they continue to do so N years from now?
I suspect that I can guess the answer.
There's a difference between working free for a corporation that will own all rights to my output, and working free for a nonprofit whose contents I can then use freely.
I thought I'd read about the topic before, so I googled for "solar-powered airplane". It found some 50,000 matches, including this one from 1973. The first few matches do seem to have a rather light load limit, so it doesn't look like we're talking about heavy air freight. But if you're just carrying a couple of cameras and some comm electronics, it looks fairly practical. Some of the web pages describe practical uses, mostly aerial photography.
Of course, doing it with a tiny airplane like the one in the article is somewhat impressive.
Yeah, but English does have close relatives of "libre". Of course, in the current American political climate, terms like "liberal" and "liberation" are somewhat out of favor. So maybe we'd better be careful. If we start using French words like those in public, we'll end up being declared enemy combatants.
(Hmmm... Maybe this can get both a "funny" and "flamebait" rating.;-)
How recharge batteries in the middle of battlefield?
My first thought on seeing the picture was that the top-front wing area looks a whole lot like an array of solar cells. Wouldn't work too well at night, but during the day could give enough power to significantly extend the flight time.
Man, people just keep adding on a letter until their heads explode... what does the "L" stand for?
Heh. It's mostly just wordplay. But I've seen a useful suggestion: the 'L' stands for "legal".
The reason this is useful is a discussion that is persuading much of the poorer parts of the world to go with this Open Source stuff. There's a real problem with most commercial software: You really don't buy it; you just lease it. You have no rights. If it doesn't quite fit your needs, tough luck; it's illegal for you to modify it. You can't legally get the source code. You are restricted to using it on N machines, and if you even accidentally install it on more, you're a criminal.
But GPL'd software is legal. You can install in wherever you like. You can pass it to friends without being labelled a "pirate". You can modify it to fit your needs without being labelled a "hacker". You can get the source code to make modification easy. You can chop out pieces and use them in your own programs. (OK, you are becoming a hacker, in the tech sense.;-) It's all legal, and no big American corporation will file charges against you for trying to use the software to handle your needs.
And the only "cost" to you is that you share your improvements with other users of the software.
It's easy to understand why a lot of people, especially poorer people, might find this attractive. If you have people and time, but not much money, it's very attractive. And the fact that it's legal is an important part of all this. If you're trying to start up your own computer operations, one thing you don't need is a big American (or European) corporation suing you into bankruptcy because you tried to fix the software to fit your needs.
I think I prefer the term "open source",
Yeah, me too. Actually, RMS's term "free" is more to the point. But there's this bug in the English language: "free" has several unrelated meanings. To businessmen who think only of money, they only hear the "no cost" meaning, and don't understand the "legal and unrestricted" meaning. So "free" isn't a good marketing term in this case. Sure, we like not having to pay, but we want a way to get across the other benefits. The phrase "open source" does a better job of communicating the "unrestricted" part of the GPL.
FLOSS is a bit redundant, but it's cute. You can then explain that "free", "legal", and "open" are all Good Things. Except to the big corporations that don't want you to use such tools.
Do you read articles about new studies concerning the use of various grains in dry cat foods? Why not?
Nope. Because, due to my wife's allergies to most things furry, we don't have a cat or a dog.
However, I have read a number of articles on grains, nuts, and other things found in commercial bird food. We have four small parrots.
Last year there were a couple of interesting articles in the scientific press about the different reactions of mammals and birds to capsaicin, the "hot" ingredient in peppers. It seems that peppers are explicitly adapted to having their seeds spread by birds, not mammals. Capsaicin's function is to persuade mammals to not eat the pepper. Birds barely taste it. The plant actually evolved a molecule that distinguishes between the heat sensors in birds and mammals, and attacks one but not the other.
The real irony is that hot peppers have in recent centuries been spread around the entire world by a mammal.
Then there's the amusing fact that American pet stores routinely sell hemp (i.e., marijuana) seed in their bird-food section. Unfortunately, it's all pasteurized...
You come across a word you don't know. What do you do? Google for it (define: foo) or dictionary.com or whatever.
So I've just come across this new word, JSJ1TG. I google for "define:JSJ1TG". It says there's no match, and asks if I want to search for it. Sure. It finds about 56 matches. All are uses; no defnition. I look at dictionary.com and a few acronym sites, and they don't have it.
So how to I get to understand those 56 uses of the word?
I think I'll start injecting a few strings of random letters and digits into my KrV3X text...
How far will you go in investigating the validity of this offer?
When the purported survey was for some organization that I've had dealings with, I've generally wanted to help them. So I fire off a message to them (using the address in my own records of course), asking whether the offer is legit. This has happened maybe a half dozen times. Only one has turned out to be bogus so far.
If I haven't dealt with the organization before, I simply classify their message as spam.
True. And note that in the middle of the article we find:
A Trojan is a malicious piece of software which installs itself on a person's computer without their knowledge.
Um, no; that's not what a Trojan is at all. This means that the author not only misunderstands the term, but also doesn't understand the historical metaphor behind it.
Funny thing is that there's a better definition earlier. Still not really correct, but better, and showing some understanding of the metaphor.
Perhaps there were several authors of this article (and no editor;-).
feel this is a problem that most software has, too many unimportant dialog boxes. Give me one page where I can set everything up...
Actually, this observation goes way back. In fact, it was widely described as one of the major technical advances of the first unix systems.
Back in the 1970's, there were a lot of the fancy new "time-sharing" systems coming out for what we now call "mainframe" computers. They all came with lots of applications, each of which had its own fancy tools for configuration and management. Learning to use these was a major time sinkhole, because every one of them was different.
The guys at Bell Labs came up with a much better approach: The apps didn't have configuration or management tools. Rather, they had "config files" that were read whenever a program started. All config files were plain text, and you only needed one tool to handle them: your favorite editor. Any editor would work. The config files conventionally contained examples of all the possible settings, mostly commented out. A few might be "live", and would show the default setting.
This was a major advance in usability. You could install, configure, and manage everything with a single tool, a text editor. After dealing with the config/management mess on commercial systems, unix's scheme was a huge relief, and won lots of converts.
Unfortunately, we're still fighting this battle. People seem to have the idea that a complex, flashy tool that's different for every program is better than a simple, consistent tool. And in the GUI area, this means zillions of little windows popping up, each dealing with just one feature of one program, using language that's totally ad hoc and often gives the user few clues about the correct choices.
But it's nothing new. It was bad design 30 years ago, and it's bad design now. Flashy, colorful, maybe. But still bad design.
And some people will just ignore the Check Engine light. If they do that, they are taking the risk that a bigger problem will occur down the road. Those are the idiots.
Or maybe they've just listened to their mechanic.
I remember well a couple of decades ago, when I took my car in because of a vague warning light on the dashboard. They fixed the problem, and I drove off - and noticed that the warning light was still on. I took it back. The guy said "Oh, we just forgot to reset it." My "?" reaction got the explanation that the light goes off after so many miles; they just have to reset its counter to zero.
A bit of checking found that this was in fact common. So that light didn't indicate any problem at all. It was just a way to get me to take the car in for some random work that they could charge me for.
This was a valuable lesson about how such things work. And, now that I'm a "computer expert", I'm well aware that lots of computer warnings are provided in exactly the same spirit.
I don't blame users at all for using them. The blame belongs with the culture of business arrogance towards customers that results in such bogus, vague, misleading indicators. A cynical attitude among customers is to be expected. All it takes is one slipup that lets a customer know what's really going on, and all trust is gone.
With computers, this sort of informative slipup usually happens really early on...
All we can do is keep educating, and hope that they listen.
True, but the article (or should I say TFA?;-) doesn't really help much. If you read the list of definitions, you'll find that most are in fact not definitions at all, and don't edutcate the reader about the problems.
A proper definition tells the reader how to recognize the thing when they see it. These don't do the job. Consider, for example:
Spyware: Small programs that secretly monitor sites visited, potentially violating privacy and slowing computers
Even knowing what the term means, I can't make sense of this "definition". There are about a zillion programs on each of my computers. How would I apply this definition to one of them to determine whether it's an example of spyware? Do I look at the program's size? The first word in the definition is "Small", so a large program isn't spyware, right? For that matter, is it programs on my computer that I have to worry about? The definitions gives no clue. If I connect to a remote program, e.g. via a browser, could the remote program be spyware? This definition doesn't help answer this question, either.
Similarly with the other definitions. As I type this, the letters appear in the browser's window, so it is obviously tracking my keystrokes to gather information. So it looks like the browser is a keylogger, right? By the article's definition, it is. Well, OK, I didn't type a password or a credit card number, but that's not the browser's fault; if I had, it would have logged them.
This article doesn't do a lot of useful educating.
I could date my neighborhood to within the last 1.5 years on the basis of a neighbor's construction. And it was obviously early spring from the colors of various trees. So it was about a year ago.
Then I checked the house I lived in during high school. Nope, just vague, fuzz, with nothing identifiable. But the high school, about a mile away, had good detail. Oh, well.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I know I'm nitpicking. ... Exactly who's indigenous is very complex.
;-).
Yeah, especially when you consider us mongrels. Like maybe 20% of the American population, I'm partly "indigenous", 1/8 Ojibwa. The rest of my ancestors are from all over Europe. So maybe I'm 1/8 "indigene" and 7/8 "invader".
OTOH, my parents migrated 2000 miles from the Ojibwa area (western Great Lakes) to the West Coast, where I was born. So maybe I'm 100% "invader" from a Chinook or Kwakiutl viewpoint. And now I live 3000 miles from there (but still in the same country
It's probably more useful to dismiss such social/political terms as empty of meaning, and just work out the details of the migrations of ancestors. We'll all turn out to be mongrels, even the ones still living in the ancestral homeland of 60K years ago.
We already know enough to dismiss most of the racial and ethnic classifications as biologically useless. That in itself has social and political uses. As we pin down more and more of the details, it's likely that the usual simpleminded classifications will be shown even less meaningful than they seem now. This can only be bad news for the bigots and racists amongst us.
Yeah; this reminds me of the old weirdness that Sony's 1/8-inch plugs were almost but not quite the same as the industry standard. Sometimes you could plug a Sony gadget into another brand's gadget and both channels would work; sometimes not.
This was a fairly clear case of "We don't want our customers to connect our stuff to our competitors' stuff; everyone should just by Sony stuff". Not exactly an unusual attitude among market leaders, but it does show a certain amount of contempt for what customers want.
Their munging of the MP3 standard is pretty much the same deal. "We support MP3. Well, actually, it's not quite MP3, but it's almost the same thing. We've just tweaked it a bit so our stuff won't interoperate with other MP3 stuff."
The best approach would be to tell them that you're not buying their gadget because it's not compatible with your other gadgets. While you're at it, say the same thing to Microsoft and any other company you can find that's doing this sort of thing to you. What we want is a world where everything connects to everything else, and anything you buy works anywhere that you want to use it.
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program."
Yeah; that's a great Niven quote.
Of course, it isn't technically accurate, since dinosaurs aren't extinct. In fact, there are more dinosaur species (around 8000) than mammal species (around 3500) alive now, and they inhabit a somewhat larger part of the biosphere than we mammals.
This is based on the current understanding that birds are in fact theropod dinosaurs. At least a half dozen species survived the big impact. Only a few more mammal species than that survived. They were all little generalists, like rats and crows. By some chance, the second time around things ended up with the mammals the big, dominant species while the dinosaurs are mostly small. This was probably because the dinosaur survivors were mostly fliers, and if you're flying, being small and light gives you a strong survival advantage.
Actually, I have a dinosaur perched on my shoulder as I type this. He's a white-face cockatiel. Cute little devil. He doesn't know about his giant distant relatives. But he shared the roasted chicken we had for dinner. I also have a couple of nice pictures of him chomping on a beef steak. So don't believe the pet books when they tell you that cockatiels are strictly seed eaters. Imagine instead a flock of hundreds descending on a cow and ripping it to pieces.
Anyway, some day after we've wiped ourselves out, his descendents may again be terrorizing the planet. And one of them will suggest that the big mammals became extinct because they didn't have the brains to colonize other planets.
Niven turned the issue upside down and said, "The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program."
And, of course, any number of science fiction writers have written stories based on a plot in which a dinosaur species did develop a space program and colonized a number of planets of nearby stars. And, to make an interesting story, what you do is have them send some explorers back to Earth to see what has happened here since the big disaster wiped out their relatives on the home world.
A number of good stories have been written with such plots.
Anyone got a favorite "Dinosaurs Return to Earth" story?
There's also Orson Scott Card's "Homecoming" series, about the return of humans' descendents to the Earth 40 million years in the future, including their coming to terms with the two intelligent species that have evolved in the millions of years since humans were wiped out. Another good tale on the general topic.
Heh. There's even more precedent than that. Remember that Linus started using minix temporarily to bootstrap his own unix (posix actually) kernel. If you read Andy Tannenbaum's comments on why he started the minix project, one of his main motivations was the growing difficulty in getting AT&T's permission for his students to read the unix souce. For a university professor teaching an operating systems course, this was a real killer situation. Unix was the OS of choice for such classes partly because of it's advanced capabilities and design, but especially because the source code was available. And AT&T was slowly taking it private. What to do?
...
Tanenbaum's solution was what you'd expect a comp-sci prof to do: He set his own students to work re-implementiing it from scratch, with no AT&T input. What could be a better project for his students? And note that minix is in fact a rather successful OS, considering its primary niche as a teaching tool.
This is pretty much the same situation that BK has presented the linux development community, though on a somewhat smaller scale. A major value of linux is its role as a completely open OS that is accessible to students, developers and corporations that aren't especially wealthy. Granted, the source-code control system (SCS) is somewhat peripheral to the main topic. But the SCS is a part of what you need to develop and maintain something as inherently complex as an OS, and for linux to satisfy its core educational role, the SCS must also be available to the students and develpers. BK is taking it private, as AT&T took unix private. So it's time to "pull a Linus" and re-implement it from scratch, in a totally free and open form.
I'd guess that this is why Tridge is quiet. He's busy. And he just might be looking for a few good volunteers to get the job rolling
Linux is basically a reverse engineered Unix.
A bit of pickiness is in order here. Strictly speaking, linux was an independent implementation of POSIX, not Unix(TM). Yes, POSIX was a rubber-stamping of Unix Sys/V as an industry standard. But the distinction is important, legally and ethically. When governments require that you follow an official standard if you are to sell to them, it's really not right to tell me that I can't follow the standard without getting into legal trouble with some corporation. Publishing a spec as an official standard should give me permission to build tools to the standard. This is what Linux did, and everyone outside SCO seems to agree that it was legal.
Saying it's "reverse engineering" to implement a published, official standard stretches the meaning of the phrase so far that it becomes nearly meaningless. Next I expect to hear that if I use meters or grams, I'm "reverse engineering" a measurement system.
Of course, this doesn't really apply to the current discussion, since BK isn't exactly a published standard.
I'm still looking for an explanation of exactly what Tridge did that qualifies as "reverse engineering". TFA and other supposed explanations don't seem to explaining anything. I can't tell what the offending code actually did, and why it's considered "reverse engineering". Tridge seems to say that it did something that BK didn't do already. Or am I misreading something?
The fossil record has already shown us a number of cases where colonizing new territory has saved species from extinction.
The best known is probably the horse. This species evolved in North America. 10,000 or so years ago, this continent was hit with an invading super-predator, humans. Shortly thereafter, horses were extinct in North America. But luckily, a small population of horses had already managed to cross the Bering land bridge and colonize Eurasia. Those colonizers managed to for a symbiotic relationship with - irony alert - humans. The Asian humans found their horses useful for much more than food, and the developed a strong, long-lasting partnership. And eventually, the horses used their companion humans to recolonize North America.
Sounds like something that a science-fiction writer might use for a plot. But there are a number of stories like this in the history of life on this planet.
In our case, it's more likely that we'll be wiped out by a micro-organism, possibly of our own making. There are other less likely disasters, any of which could wipe out all humans on Earth. If we want to survive, spreading out to other niches is one important strategy.
Of course, if there are other living things Out There, they may not welcome us.
My thoughts, too. So far, I haven't seen any explanation of why the phrase "reverse engineering" is being used. If Tridge's comments are correct, the phrase just doesn't seem to apply.
Usually, "reverse engineering" means that I've written code that does what someone else's code does, and I wrote it after studying the other code's behavior but not the code itself. Now, maybe Tridge saw the BK code, maybe he didn't; I can't tell. But it seems that what he wrote doesn't really mimic what BK did. He was adding a new capability as a sort of add-on. So his work fails to satisfy the first part of the definition, and isn't "reverse engineering".
But I haven't really seen much in the way of details.
Could someone who says that "reverse engineering" is involved please explain 1) how you define the phrase, and 2) why it applies in this case?
It's always good to get a common definition of terms before we start condemning someone for doing something that they say they didn't do.
You cannot call something scientific unless you can have reproduceable experiments,
Nonsense. Astronomy is generally considered among the hardest of the hard sciences, and astronomers very rarely perform experiments at all. Reproducible experiments are almost unknown.
You've been reading too much high-school science. Experiment is important in many sciences. But that's hardly the full extent of scientific method. There are a numer of "observational" sciences, and astronomy is the prime example.
Actually, observational sciences do tend to have a lot in common with forensics. The problems of, for example, the fossil record have a lot in common with a criminal investigation. Except that all the participants are dead and unable to testify.
Wikipedia is useless in getting true information in most cases, ...
... it only demonstrates the folly of trying to achieve truth by group consensus.
Oh, I dunno about that. I just recently dug around for sites that listed the assorted physical and orbital numbers for a lot of bodies in the solar system. I found that Wikipedia was among the best-organized and most-complete sites. And the pages are quite consistent in their layout, making for rapid location of the data.
Actually, much of the scientific enterprise works by a sort of "group consensus". This is at the heart of the problems the religious folks have with it. You can't just make up your own scientific methods, and publish your results with yourself as the authority. You have to convince others working on topics closely related to yours that you're right. And even if they're convinced, they'll still often insist on independent confirmation. This is groupthink to the core, and has worked a whole lot better than most other approaches.
Wikipedia does have problems with "controversial" topics. Scientists generally don't. So, while Wikipedia does seem like a good start, it still has some kinks to work out. Maybe they can work it out as time goes by. If they do, chances they'll have mostly rediscovered scientific methods. But it won't be easy or fast. People have been trying for a century or more to be scientific about fields like psychology, politics, history, economics, and so on, with limited success.
Much of the problem is in working out ways of allowing free speech while implementing schemes to inform readers of reliability. This isn't too difficult, when dealing with things like the mass, albedo, or orbital parameters of Enceladus. Few people have any emotional attachment to the numbers, and no religious theories make prediction about such a body. But there are factual situations where religious people get involved, and they can shout down the scientists in most public arenas. Maybe the wikipedia folks can solve this problem. Maybe not.
My immediate thought was: Does Microsoft grant me the same rights to use an article that I submit? If so, will they continue to do so N years from now?
I suspect that I can guess the answer.
There's a difference between working free for a corporation that will own all rights to my output, and working free for a nonprofit whose contents I can then use freely.
I thought I'd read about the topic before, so I googled for "solar-powered airplane". It found some 50,000 matches, including this one from 1973. The first few matches do seem to have a rather light load limit, so it doesn't look like we're talking about heavy air freight. But if you're just carrying a couple of cameras and some comm electronics, it looks fairly practical. Some of the web pages describe practical uses, mostly aerial photography.
Of course, doing it with a tiny airplane like the one in the article is somewhat impressive.
Yeah, but English does have close relatives of "libre". Of course, in the current American political climate, terms like "liberal" and "liberation" are somewhat out of favor. So maybe we'd better be careful. If we start using French words like those in public, we'll end up being declared enemy combatants.
... Maybe this can get both a "funny" and "flamebait" rating. ;-)
(Hmmm
How recharge batteries in the middle of battlefield?
My first thought on seeing the picture was that the top-front wing area looks a whole lot like an array of solar cells. Wouldn't work too well at night, but during the day could give enough power to significantly extend the flight time.
"FLOSS"
;-) It's all legal, and no big American corporation will file charges against you for trying to use the software to handle your needs.
Man, people just keep adding on a letter until their heads explode... what does the "L" stand for?
Heh. It's mostly just wordplay. But I've seen a useful suggestion: the 'L' stands for "legal".
The reason this is useful is a discussion that is persuading much of the poorer parts of the world to go with this Open Source stuff. There's a real problem with most commercial software: You really don't buy it; you just lease it. You have no rights. If it doesn't quite fit your needs, tough luck; it's illegal for you to modify it. You can't legally get the source code. You are restricted to using it on N machines, and if you even accidentally install it on more, you're a criminal.
But GPL'd software is legal. You can install in wherever you like. You can pass it to friends without being labelled a "pirate". You can modify it to fit your needs without being labelled a "hacker". You can get the source code to make modification easy. You can chop out pieces and use them in your own programs. (OK, you are becoming a hacker, in the tech sense.
And the only "cost" to you is that you share your improvements with other users of the software.
It's easy to understand why a lot of people, especially poorer people, might find this attractive. If you have people and time, but not much money, it's very attractive. And the fact that it's legal is an important part of all this. If you're trying to start up your own computer operations, one thing you don't need is a big American (or European) corporation suing you into bankruptcy because you tried to fix the software to fit your needs.
I think I prefer the term "open source",
Yeah, me too. Actually, RMS's term "free" is more to the point. But there's this bug in the English language: "free" has several unrelated meanings. To businessmen who think only of money, they only hear the "no cost" meaning, and don't understand the "legal and unrestricted" meaning. So "free" isn't a good marketing term in this case. Sure, we like not having to pay, but we want a way to get across the other benefits. The phrase "open source" does a better job of communicating the "unrestricted" part of the GPL.
FLOSS is a bit redundant, but it's cute. You can then explain that "free", "legal", and "open" are all Good Things. Except to the big corporations that don't want you to use such tools.
Has anyone point out to Mr Schwartz that he is under no legal obligation to accept the GPL?
He always has the option of rejecting it, and instead using the fair-use permissions that copyright gives to everyone.
Somehow I suspect this isn't what he wants, though.
When people don't even understand the typewriter paradigm, ...
So what's this "typewriter" thing I keep reading about?
I think I saw a jpeg of one once. It looked something like a computer, but there was no display.
Do you read articles about new studies concerning the use of various grains in dry cat foods? Why not?
...
Nope. Because, due to my wife's allergies to most things furry, we don't have a cat or a dog.
However, I have read a number of articles on grains, nuts, and other things found in commercial bird food. We have four small parrots.
Last year there were a couple of interesting articles in the scientific press about the different reactions of mammals and birds to capsaicin, the "hot" ingredient in peppers. It seems that peppers are explicitly adapted to having their seeds spread by birds, not mammals. Capsaicin's function is to persuade mammals to not eat the pepper. Birds barely taste it. The plant actually evolved a molecule that distinguishes between the heat sensors in birds and mammals, and attacks one but not the other.
The real irony is that hot peppers have in recent centuries been spread around the entire world by a mammal.
Then there's the amusing fact that American pet stores routinely sell hemp (i.e., marijuana) seed in their bird-food section. Unfortunately, it's all pasteurized
You come across a word you don't know. What do you do? Google for it (define: foo) or dictionary.com or whatever.
...
So I've just come across this new word, JSJ1TG. I google for "define:JSJ1TG". It says there's no match, and asks if I want to search for it. Sure. It finds about 56 matches. All are uses; no defnition. I look at dictionary.com and a few acronym sites, and they don't have it.
So how to I get to understand those 56 uses of the word?
I think I'll start injecting a few strings of random letters and digits into my KrV3X text
How far will you go in investigating the validity of this offer?
When the purported survey was for some organization that I've had dealings with, I've generally wanted to help them. So I fire off a message to them (using the address in my own records of course), asking whether the offer is legit. This has happened maybe a half dozen times. Only one has turned out to be bogus so far.
If I haven't dealt with the organization before, I simply classify their message as spam.
True. And note that in the middle of the article we find:
;-).
A Trojan is a malicious piece of software which installs itself on a person's computer without their knowledge.
Um, no; that's not what a Trojan is at all. This means that the author not only misunderstands the term, but also doesn't understand the historical metaphor behind it.
Funny thing is that there's a better definition earlier. Still not really correct, but better, and showing some understanding of the metaphor.
Perhaps there were several authors of this article (and no editor
feel this is a problem that most software has, too many unimportant dialog boxes. Give me one page where I can set everything up ...
Actually, this observation goes way back. In fact, it was widely described as one of the major technical advances of the first unix systems.
Back in the 1970's, there were a lot of the fancy new "time-sharing" systems coming out for what we now call "mainframe" computers. They all came with lots of applications, each of which had its own fancy tools for configuration and management. Learning to use these was a major time sinkhole, because every one of them was different.
The guys at Bell Labs came up with a much better approach: The apps didn't have configuration or management tools. Rather, they had "config files" that were read whenever a program started. All config files were plain text, and you only needed one tool to handle them: your favorite editor. Any editor would work. The config files conventionally contained examples of all the possible settings, mostly commented out. A few might be "live", and would show the default setting.
This was a major advance in usability. You could install, configure, and manage everything with a single tool, a text editor. After dealing with the config/management mess on commercial systems, unix's scheme was a huge relief, and won lots of converts.
Unfortunately, we're still fighting this battle. People seem to have the idea that a complex, flashy tool that's different for every program is better than a simple, consistent tool. And in the GUI area, this means zillions of little windows popping up, each dealing with just one feature of one program, using language that's totally ad hoc and often gives the user few clues about the correct choices.
But it's nothing new. It was bad design 30 years ago, and it's bad design now. Flashy, colorful, maybe. But still bad design.
And some people will just ignore the Check Engine light. If they do that, they are taking the risk that a bigger problem will occur down the road. Those are the idiots.
...
Or maybe they've just listened to their mechanic.
I remember well a couple of decades ago, when I took my car in because of a vague warning light on the dashboard. They fixed the problem, and I drove off - and noticed that the warning light was still on. I took it back. The guy said "Oh, we just forgot to reset it." My "?" reaction got the explanation that the light goes off after so many miles; they just have to reset its counter to zero.
A bit of checking found that this was in fact common. So that light didn't indicate any problem at all. It was just a way to get me to take the car in for some random work that they could charge me for.
This was a valuable lesson about how such things work. And, now that I'm a "computer expert", I'm well aware that lots of computer warnings are provided in exactly the same spirit.
I don't blame users at all for using them. The blame belongs with the culture of business arrogance towards customers that results in such bogus, vague, misleading indicators. A cynical attitude among customers is to be expected. All it takes is one slipup that lets a customer know what's really going on, and all trust is gone.
With computers, this sort of informative slipup usually happens really early on
All we can do is keep educating, and hope that they listen.
;-) doesn't really help much. If you read the list of definitions, you'll find that most are in fact not definitions at all, and don't edutcate the reader about the problems.
True, but the article (or should I say TFA?
A proper definition tells the reader how to recognize the thing when they see it. These don't do the job. Consider, for example:
Spyware: Small programs that secretly monitor sites visited, potentially violating privacy and slowing computers
Even knowing what the term means, I can't make sense of this "definition". There are about a zillion programs on each of my computers. How would I apply this definition to one of them to determine whether it's an example of spyware? Do I look at the program's size? The first word in the definition is "Small", so a large program isn't spyware, right? For that matter, is it programs on my computer that I have to worry about? The definitions gives no clue. If I connect to a remote program, e.g. via a browser, could the remote program be spyware? This definition doesn't help answer this question, either.
Similarly with the other definitions. As I type this, the letters appear in the browser's window, so it is obviously tracking my keystrokes to gather information. So it looks like the browser is a keylogger, right? By the article's definition, it is. Well, OK, I didn't type a password or a credit card number, but that's not the browser's fault; if I had, it would have logged them.
This article doesn't do a lot of useful educating.
I could date my neighborhood to within the last 1.5 years on the basis of a neighbor's construction. And it was obviously early spring from the colors of various trees. So it was about a year ago.
Then I checked the house I lived in during high school. Nope, just vague, fuzz, with nothing identifiable. But the high school, about a mile away, had good detail. Oh, well.