Yeah, I've read TMMM. I've also seen lots of attempts to (blindly;-) put its advice into practice. I haven't been impressed by the results.
I also remember questions like "If one woman can make one baby in nine months, how many babies can twelve women make in three months?" back in the 1950s. The point back then was to satirize the man-hour (or person-hour) concept that was so widely used by industrial "efficiency experts". But we still use such measures. We also still measure programmer productivity by lines of code produced, with results that are well understood by most programmers.
It's always seemed to me that such advice books should have contributed to our understanding, but it's not obvious that this can even be tested in any meaningful fashion. It does seem clear that the computer field is still as poorly managed as it was decades ago, so maybe we haven't learned all that much about organization or design.
OTOH, we probably have a lot more people with strongly-held beliefs in the subject.;-)
I've used '+' (and '-') in google searches a lot, but I've been finding lately that it doesn't help as much as it used to. As an extreme case, I was recently looking for some tunes that happened to be reels, but with ordinary words in the titles. I found that when I included "reel" (with or without the quotes), it matched "real", which of course is a much more common word. I tried saying "+reel" (with and without the quotes, and it didn't make a significant change; it still showed matches with real in bold letters.
I think that google has been trying to handle common mispellings (;-), and as a result, it's a lot more difficult to find matches for words that are similar to common words. Anyway, it's getting frustrating, wading through bigger piles of unrelated junk to find the actual matches.
Maybe it's time that we started working on a less "intelligent" search site...
And, of course, a book written by a designer of OS/360 would be useful mainly to people who want to learn to design things the way that OS/360 was designed. To those of us who have used OS/360, Brooks' name on a book is a red flag saying to stay far away from the book or any ideas that it might contain.
Unfortunately, lots of managers are likely to pick up on this book and push it on their designers. If you look at the design of much commercial software, you'd conclude that this has already happened. You'd be wrong, of course, since this book has just been published. But other books along the same line have existed for some time.
(Out of curiosity, has Brooks been involved in the design of things that we might want to emulate? Presumably OS/360 isn't the only thing he's had a hand in, but the review doesn't seem to mention anything else.)
Lately I've been noticing that I get a lot more google matches that are utterly irrelevant to what I was looking for, and on examination, they usually don't even contain any of the keywords that I typed. This is presumably part of the same problem, due to the growing success of marketers in "attracting eyes" by tricking the search sites into sending people to the marketers' sites.
Perhaps a useful approach would be for the search sites to allow us to "ban" a site, similarly to what a lot of email and news readers have done for years. This could be done in a browser, of course, but it should work even better if the search site got the information. They could then use readers' banning as part of the ranking, because they'd know that a site is not a good match for someone looking for keywords X, Y and Z, despite what it may look like to the search bot.
Another approach might be to see if the courts would go along with applying "truth in advertising" laws to stuff online. You'd think this would be obvious, but we're still in the stage at which the inclusion of words like "computer" or "online" immediately cancels all precedent, and centuries of lessons must be relearned for the new computer/network environment. It's probably still some years before false advertising online can be challenged and prosecuted as easily as with false and misleading print or broadcast ads.
I do a fair amount of web testing, to make sure that pages (and sites) work on all the common browsers. I have several machines, each of which has lots of browsers installed, and I use them all for testing. This is a potential insanity situation, because of course it's utterly impossible to make a page look identical on all of them. Rather, my usual goal is to make them at least readable, and at best not too horrible looking, on all the browsers. On this Macbook, I currently have Camino, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Sunrise open, of the 11 installed browsers. I have two linux boxes, and my wife has two Windows boxes ("for work") with other browsers. I have a G1 phone and she has an iPhone, giving us a few more browsers, though testing against "smartphones" is a growing problem.
A major problem during testing is "OK, how do I do task T on browser B?" It's true that all the browsers are configurable - to some degree. But their method of doing this vary wildly, so I have to have notes on hand, to remind me how to find the config stuff and type things in for all the browsers. And every update potentially breaks some of these notes, as clever new config approaches are discovered by the programmers. But the worst part is that no browser is (to my knowledge) completely configurable. All of them have some UI things that are hard-coded, or have the config stuff hidden so well that I can't find it easily. So there are irreducible differences in what you have to type to get browser B to do task T. And these differences change over time, without notice, any time you let a browser upgrade itself.
For a long time, I had opera at near the end of my test list, because its GUI was so wildly different from the common set of key commands that the browser "community" was developing. This isn't saying that opera was bad. It's approach may well have been better than the others. But since I had to use all of them, and I couldn't easily remember what it took to tell opera to do task T (and I couldn't find much UI config stuff), using opera was too time consuming to use frequently. I'd spend too much time saying "Damn!" as I realized that I'd typed the common command to do T, but opera required typing something different, so I'd have to dig it up from browser notes. Eventually, opera changed to mostly use the conventional keys for the common tasks, and I moved it to my list of first-test browsers.
Anyway, for anyone concerned with making web sites usable everywhere, UI configuration can easily become a full-time job, due to the wild inconsistencies among the browsers. The most reasonable approach is to mainly use the default settings, and keep notes for how to do the less common things that you need to use. A few config things are worth learning, but you don't want to sink too much time into it, if you want to get on with your work.
It would really help if the browser writers would work on a consistent scheme for configuring the UI settings. But I don't see this happening in my lifetime.
(One of the main annoyances during testing is that many of the common browsers, including FF, don't seem to have any way to say "open in a new tab/window" for buttons. Most now accept shift-ctl/cmd-click to open a link in a new tab, but the same thing works with buttons in only a few browsers, and this is rarely configurable. Similarly, the show-source command is bound to different key combos and is rarely configurable. Opera seems to insist on showing the source in a new tab, so you can't see it next to the rendered page, which is a major hassle for debugging. You'd think that browser writers would do enough testing that they'd have made all this easily configurable, but if so, they haven't chosen to tell us developers how to do it.)
(And yes, I do still have a machine with IE6 installed. It's horrible, but there are still a lot of people using it. I don't care whether a page looks good on it, since nothing ever looks
What's needed is for a group of guys who are into older women to set up a clone of the CougarLife.com site from their viewpoint. Then see if google will let them advertise. If google accepts them, then it'll be obvious that they're just a bunch of misogynists.
Of course, by now any of them who read/. have already visited CougarLife.com, so maybe/. has done for them what google refuses to do.;-)
But I suppose this would only satisfy the cougars out there who are looking for geeks and nerds, so it's not really a fix for the problem.
This is an ex post facto law [fyngyrz.com]. No way around it.
Actually, there is a way around it - but it may be even worse. You simply take them at their word, that they're trying to prevent a future crime. They've done this by jailing someone who by current law should be set free, and their reasoning uses what that person might do in the future, not his past crime.
So they've approved a precedent for jailing a person on the basis of what that person might do some time in the future. One could argue that this is worse than an ex post facto law. Consider how someone might apply that approach to you.
Or maybe not; maybe they're both equally evil. I don't know much about how to properly measure evils and compare them.
The real crazies are the ones who think that Newton was divinely inspired, and they don't want none of Einstein's "Relativist" jew-physics...
Actually, this isn't especially new. One of the nice historical ironies is that Hitler & friends were actively trying to develop atomic weapons while persecuting Jewish physicists. For reasons that aren't too clear, a surprisingly large part of the physicists in Europe during the 1940s were Jewish. A lot of them became refugees in England and the US, taking their expertise with them, and persuading the UK and US governments to take the idea seriously. If they hadn't been persecuting Jews, it's highly likely that Germany would have developed the atomic bomb in the early 1940s. But then, if they hadn't been persecuting Jews (and Gypsies and...) back then, they wouldn't have been the Nazis that they were.
There is a fair amount of history of a combination of religion+politics leading people to deny observable facts. When those facts become as subtle and difficult to verify as, say, the Michelson-Morley experiments, it's easy for people to deny them. Einstein's real achievement, after all, was to come up with a set of mathematical equations that reconciled the "impossible" results of such experiments with a set of mathematical equations that described a consistent universe which did such bizarre things as give the same speed of light no matter how you were moving when you measured it. But even today, only a tiny fraction of the human population understands what he did.
Here on/., we occasionally read discussions in which people obviously don't understand relativistic (or quantum-mechanical) behavior, and we're mostly scientifically literate here. It shouldn't be surprising if a government (or a school board) is similarly ignorant of facts about the world, or treats them as opinion rather than fact.
Still, all people involved are long dead and there's no point whining about it now.
Sure, there is. It's summarized by the well known saying "Those ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it". If you haven't learned about the bad parts of your country's history, you have little defense against people trying to repeat those parts.
It is good to hear that the Dutch are currently teaching a warts-and-all version of their history. It probably won't last, but such honest periods can leave behind teaching documents that are useful to people interested in honest histories.
The Texas story is really about a return to the historically "normal" way of teaching history, complete with the usual biases showing "our kind of people" as angels.
I mean seriously, a car's ECU is airgapped from the outside world and has decent physical security.
Maybe it's time to start harrassing people to use the term "airgap" with the implication that it means "secure". That's so 1990s. Nowadays, "airgap" means "wireless accesss".
And by "access", we now mean "access from the outside".
Are there any laptops, netbooks, tablets, or handhelds these days that don't have wireless access as a standard feature? If so, such models are rapidly disappearing. And "airgap" now means that anyone within range can talk to your device without any sort of physical connection. This includes many (perhaps most) new model cars.
Well, i guess it is time to check if no-ip.com has hosts ending in.edu and set-up a home mail server:)
Even better: Set up your own home degree-program-via-email. Then you can legitimately apply for a.edu domain, and you can make a bunch of money off the suckers.
Of course, if you're a typical/. reader, you'll probably set up an actual online education web site for some topic that you're really interested in (but doesn't pay well). In that case, you're not making money off of "suckers", because they'll be other people with the same noncommercial interests as you.
Doesn't that sound like more fun that what you're doing now to earn a paycheck?
(For starters, you might set up a wiki dedicated to your interest, and then your "students" will supply you with a lot of your educational material - and pay you a bit for the honor of doing so. Of course, you'll probably be stuck with the job of keeping it all organized and free of spam, so it won't be a casual undertaking. You just might earn your.edu domain.)
Unfortunately, "not a realistic threat" won't be the part people remember, any more than it was the part that got into the/. headline. "Your car's computer is not secure" is the fearful phrase,...
Yeah, and we know from a couple of decades with the public Internet that the world is full of people who get a kick out of connecting to a random computer system and vandalizing it. Not to mention the people who want to take over and add your machine to a botnet. And we might also mention again the rootkit that Sony was recently caught delivering on a CD. This is a prototype for what competitive auto makers well might be working on doing to their competitors' machines, to make them look bad.
Consider also that various recent makes of cars have had a "feature" of reporting back to the manufacturer. This is described as helping service the car when you take it in to the dealer. But it's an admission that the car is on a wireless network, and accessible from the outside at all times.
One obvious conjecture might be that the recent Toyota problems have been because of something like this. Do the affected models have wireless connectivity? And even if they don't, such things will happen in the near future.
Hey, it's standard practice to respond to alpha "proof of concept" examples by ignoring the achievement and picking apart the cosmetic details.
An experienced developer will take this as meaning "We're really impressed by what you've shown us, but we can't admit that (for some unstated reason), and we can't find anything consequential to criticise, so we'll attack you for not having delivered a polished, finished product." I.e., it's really high praise camouflaged as criticism.
Well, we do have a parrot in our house (a blue-crowned conure), but I've never heard her say "Arr". We do tell people that she's shouting out "IRAQ!" in an attempt to get a political discussion going.
(Usually when I say that within her earshot, she does say "IRAQ!", but it mostly just gets laughs, not a political discussion.)
Well, at least here in the US, when the "wi-fi" part of the spectrum was opened up, the explanation was that it was to be "open", public spectrum. They expected that developers (lots of us here on/.) would use this public spectrum to implement interesting and useful stuff, without the need to satisfy the bureaucracy (and the huge license price) that applies to other parts of the spectrum.
I'd think that a requirement that wi-fi always be encrypted would be a direct violation of the original intent in opening it up to the public. An open access point should be considered exactly how that part of the spectrum was supposed to be used.
Of course, things might be different in Germany. It's entirely possible that the wi-fi portion of the spectrum isn't legally "open" there. It's also possible that the above explanation was just PR in the US, and the wi-fi spectrum really isn't "open" here, either. Anyone know? Or is this another one of those things where all you can say is "We have to wait for the courts to decide"?
Actually, we did that back in the late 90s. We left IE as del'd fragments on millions of disk drives around the world. The result was that hordes of zombie IEs arose from their remains on those disks, and chewed on the brains of managers around the world, until they adopted a policy of enforcing an IE-only policy in their organization. And, like all software, a new clone of IE can be cheaply produced in under a second by a mere copy operation. Of course, the clone won't run on the same machine as the original, but that's as planned, since the intent was to install the clones on more millions of new machines as the default browser.
The Internet is living (if you can call it that) with the results. IRL, it's a lot harder to eradicate a zombie horde than it is in the movies.
My thought exactly. I've seen my wife park the Mini in spaces with less than a foot clearance on either end. The car in that video was at least 6 feet from the front pylons.
I'm impressed that they programmed a robot to do that controlled slide, but I'm not impressed by the supposedly small size of the target space.
Nah; it was just as stated: a charset conversion screwup. The pages I get say <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> in the header section. Do yours say UTF-8 or some other Unicode charset?
It would be nice to be able to quote things in non-Western languages here, especially now that China+Korea+Japan are the majority of the Internet, and where most of our hardware is now produced. But I guess it'll still be a while before those of us dealing with non-Western languages are permitted to join in US-based forums. Or use standard mathematical symbols in tech forums like/.
Still, you'd think they'd be able to get a simple 'ß' character right. I wonder where the screwup was this time.
Well, my id number is 6 digits, FWIW (which I suppose isn't much).
I also have a congenital problem of having my tongue stuck in my cheek, which seems to be a handicap in a forum where most readers seem to lack a humor gene. This is two posts in one day that got no "Funny" mods, just serious things like "Insightful" or "Informative". I'm tempted to add a "Whoosh!" reply, but more and more I just figure, why bother?
I mean, "fixing" a runaway oil well with a nuke would seem like an irresistable straight line for anyone with any pretensions to comedy, right?
I promise to amend my ways and delete all pirated software and replace them with Linux and Linux equivalent products. From now on, It's Linux all the way:-)
And we might point out that the linux crowd long ago solved the software piracy problem. The piracy rate for linux and other FOSS software has been close to zero for years. (It's slightly nonzero due to the corporate users who violate the license.)
You'd think that the RIAA/MPAA/etc. would have noticed that the Free Software crowd has no problem with piracy, and would want to adopt their successful tactics. Anyone know why they don't?
I clicked on the "Read More..." link expecting to find a discussion of the pros and cons of using nukes as engineering tools. And all I find so far is a discussion that should have been Godwinned out of existence long before it reached its current state.
Over the past half century, there have been some interesting proposals for engineering uses of nukes. One of my favorites was only a short distance south of the current record-setting oil spill: The proposed sea-level canal across Central America.
There have been several analyses of the possibility of such a canal. It could be much wider, deeper and cheaper than the current Panama canal, which is too small for many of the largest ships these days. Most of the proposed sites go across southern Nicaragua, where the passes through the mountains are lowest and widest. Several of the proposals amounted to burying a chain of nukes in a line through the area, and setting them off. The result would be a chain of interlocking craters with bottoms below sea level. A bit more work with large bulldozers to even out the shore line, and we'd have a canal.
There were various reasons why funding for these projects (through the US Congress, of course) was eventually rejected. One of the funnier ones came from research biologists. They pointed out that the Caribbean is a few meters higher than the east Pacific, so there would be a slow but significant east-to-west current in the canal. This would carry not just water, but lots of biological material, from the Caribbean to the Pacific. (The other direction would also happen, but would be limited to a few good swimmers).
The biologists thought this was too good a scientific opportunity to pass up, and started submitting grant proposals to do the Pacific-wide baseline population studies that would be needed to understand the ecological catastrophe that would follow. They argued that we missed a good opportunity by not doing the studies before the Saint Lawrence Seaway was built, so we were unable to track in detail the catastrophe that exterminated the Great Lakes' fishing industry, as the sea lamprey ate up all the fish in the lakes. They didn't want to lose out on all the valuable biological data that would follow the much larger catastrophe after the seal-level canal in Central America pumped thousands of new species into the tropical Pacific.
After enough of these grant proposals were submitted and Congress learned about them, the funding proposals for the canal were quietly "misplaced" and no longer discussed. Some of the biologists followed up by talking about their great disappointment that they would not be able to study such a large-scale biological "experiment". They didn't much lament the loss to engineers by the loss of a project to do large-scale nuclear construction, though I suppose in private a lot of civil engineers must have also been shedding crocodile tears over this loss to their profession.
Using a nuke on the BP well wouldn't do anything so biologically spectacular, of course. But I can see biologists hurriedly asking for funding to study the effects on the Gulf ecology. If it could be done right, we could get a lot of useful information out of the experiment.
Anyway, I'm still hoping to read lots of comments about nuclear construction...
(Lessee; do I need a smiley to deflect the moderators who lack the humor gene?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I've read TMMM. I've also seen lots of attempts to (blindly;-) put its advice into practice. I haven't been impressed by the results.
I also remember questions like "If one woman can make one baby in nine months, how many babies can twelve women make in three months?" back in the 1950s. The point back then was to satirize the man-hour (or person-hour) concept that was so widely used by industrial "efficiency experts". But we still use such measures. We also still measure programmer productivity by lines of code produced, with results that are well understood by most programmers.
It's always seemed to me that such advice books should have contributed to our understanding, but it's not obvious that this can even be tested in any meaningful fashion. It does seem clear that the computer field is still as poorly managed as it was decades ago, so maybe we haven't learned all that much about organization or design.
OTOH, we probably have a lot more people with strongly-held beliefs in the subject. ;-)
I've used '+' (and '-') in google searches a lot, but I've been finding lately that it doesn't help as much as it used to. As an extreme case, I was recently looking for some tunes that happened to be reels, but with ordinary words in the titles. I found that when I included "reel" (with or without the quotes), it matched "real", which of course is a much more common word. I tried saying "+reel" (with and without the quotes, and it didn't make a significant change; it still showed matches with real in bold letters.
I think that google has been trying to handle common mispellings (;-), and as a result, it's a lot more difficult to find matches for words that are similar to common words. Anyway, it's getting frustrating, wading through bigger piles of unrelated junk to find the actual matches.
Maybe it's time that we started working on a less "intelligent" search site ...
And, of course, a book written by a designer of OS/360 would be useful mainly to people who want to learn to design things the way that OS/360 was designed. To those of us who have used OS/360, Brooks' name on a book is a red flag saying to stay far away from the book or any ideas that it might contain.
Unfortunately, lots of managers are likely to pick up on this book and push it on their designers. If you look at the design of much commercial software, you'd conclude that this has already happened. You'd be wrong, of course, since this book has just been published. But other books along the same line have existed for some time.
(Out of curiosity, has Brooks been involved in the design of things that we might want to emulate? Presumably OS/360 isn't the only thing he's had a hand in, but the review doesn't seem to mention anything else.)
Lately I've been noticing that I get a lot more google matches that are utterly irrelevant to what I was looking for, and on examination, they usually don't even contain any of the keywords that I typed. This is presumably part of the same problem, due to the growing success of marketers in "attracting eyes" by tricking the search sites into sending people to the marketers' sites.
Perhaps a useful approach would be for the search sites to allow us to "ban" a site, similarly to what a lot of email and news readers have done for years. This could be done in a browser, of course, but it should work even better if the search site got the information. They could then use readers' banning as part of the ranking, because they'd know that a site is not a good match for someone looking for keywords X, Y and Z, despite what it may look like to the search bot.
Another approach might be to see if the courts would go along with applying "truth in advertising" laws to stuff online. You'd think this would be obvious, but we're still in the stage at which the inclusion of words like "computer" or "online" immediately cancels all precedent, and centuries of lessons must be relearned for the new computer/network environment. It's probably still some years before false advertising online can be challenged and prosecuted as easily as with false and misleading print or broadcast ads.
(Or does this mean I get a slashdot street-cred point for not knowing who this person is? Or do I lose one? I can never keep track these days.)
It's easy: You lose points for not just [f***ing] googling the name.
Not everyone wants to dig deep.
And some of us can't afford to.
I do a fair amount of web testing, to make sure that pages (and sites) work on all the common browsers. I have several machines, each of which has lots of browsers installed, and I use them all for testing. This is a potential insanity situation, because of course it's utterly impossible to make a page look identical on all of them. Rather, my usual goal is to make them at least readable, and at best not too horrible looking, on all the browsers. On this Macbook, I currently have Camino, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Sunrise open, of the 11 installed browsers. I have two linux boxes, and my wife has two Windows boxes ("for work") with other browsers. I have a G1 phone and she has an iPhone, giving us a few more browsers, though testing against "smartphones" is a growing problem.
A major problem during testing is "OK, how do I do task T on browser B?" It's true that all the browsers are configurable - to some degree. But their method of doing this vary wildly, so I have to have notes on hand, to remind me how to find the config stuff and type things in for all the browsers. And every update potentially breaks some of these notes, as clever new config approaches are discovered by the programmers. But the worst part is that no browser is (to my knowledge) completely configurable. All of them have some UI things that are hard-coded, or have the config stuff hidden so well that I can't find it easily. So there are irreducible differences in what you have to type to get browser B to do task T. And these differences change over time, without notice, any time you let a browser upgrade itself.
For a long time, I had opera at near the end of my test list, because its GUI was so wildly different from the common set of key commands that the browser "community" was developing. This isn't saying that opera was bad. It's approach may well have been better than the others. But since I had to use all of them, and I couldn't easily remember what it took to tell opera to do task T (and I couldn't find much UI config stuff), using opera was too time consuming to use frequently. I'd spend too much time saying "Damn!" as I realized that I'd typed the common command to do T, but opera required typing something different, so I'd have to dig it up from browser notes. Eventually, opera changed to mostly use the conventional keys for the common tasks, and I moved it to my list of first-test browsers.
Anyway, for anyone concerned with making web sites usable everywhere, UI configuration can easily become a full-time job, due to the wild inconsistencies among the browsers. The most reasonable approach is to mainly use the default settings, and keep notes for how to do the less common things that you need to use. A few config things are worth learning, but you don't want to sink too much time into it, if you want to get on with your work.
It would really help if the browser writers would work on a consistent scheme for configuring the UI settings. But I don't see this happening in my lifetime.
(One of the main annoyances during testing is that many of the common browsers, including FF, don't seem to have any way to say "open in a new tab/window" for buttons. Most now accept shift-ctl/cmd-click to open a link in a new tab, but the same thing works with buttons in only a few browsers, and this is rarely configurable. Similarly, the show-source command is bound to different key combos and is rarely configurable. Opera seems to insist on showing the source in a new tab, so you can't see it next to the rendered page, which is a major hassle for debugging. You'd think that browser writers would do enough testing that they'd have made all this easily configurable, but if so, they haven't chosen to tell us developers how to do it.)
(And yes, I do still have a machine with IE6 installed. It's horrible, but there are still a lot of people using it. I don't care whether a page looks good on it, since nothing ever looks
What's needed is for a group of guys who are into older women to set up a clone of the CougarLife.com site from their viewpoint. Then see if google will let them advertise. If google accepts them, then it'll be obvious that they're just a bunch of misogynists.
Of course, by now any of them who read /. have already visited CougarLife.com, so maybe /. has done for them what google refuses to do. ;-)
But I suppose this would only satisfy the cougars out there who are looking for geeks and nerds, so it's not really a fix for the problem.
This is an ex post facto law [fyngyrz.com]. No way around it.
Actually, there is a way around it - but it may be even worse. You simply take them at their word, that they're trying to prevent a future crime. They've done this by jailing someone who by current law should be set free, and their reasoning uses what that person might do in the future, not his past crime.
So they've approved a precedent for jailing a person on the basis of what that person might do some time in the future. One could argue that this is worse than an ex post facto law. Consider how someone might apply that approach to you.
Or maybe not; maybe they're both equally evil. I don't know much about how to properly measure evils and compare them.
The real crazies are the ones who think that Newton was divinely inspired, and they don't want none of Einstein's "Relativist" jew-physics...
Actually, this isn't especially new. One of the nice historical ironies is that Hitler & friends were actively trying to develop atomic weapons while persecuting Jewish physicists. For reasons that aren't too clear, a surprisingly large part of the physicists in Europe during the 1940s were Jewish. A lot of them became refugees in England and the US, taking their expertise with them, and persuading the UK and US governments to take the idea seriously. If they hadn't been persecuting Jews, it's highly likely that Germany would have developed the atomic bomb in the early 1940s. But then, if they hadn't been persecuting Jews (and Gypsies and ...) back then, they wouldn't have been the Nazis that they were.
There is a fair amount of history of a combination of religion+politics leading people to deny observable facts. When those facts become as subtle and difficult to verify as, say, the Michelson-Morley experiments, it's easy for people to deny them. Einstein's real achievement, after all, was to come up with a set of mathematical equations that reconciled the "impossible" results of such experiments with a set of mathematical equations that described a consistent universe which did such bizarre things as give the same speed of light no matter how you were moving when you measured it. But even today, only a tiny fraction of the human population understands what he did.
Here on /., we occasionally read discussions in which people obviously don't understand relativistic (or quantum-mechanical) behavior, and we're mostly scientifically literate here. It shouldn't be surprising if a government (or a school board) is similarly ignorant of facts about the world, or treats them as opinion rather than fact.
Still, all people involved are long dead and there's no point whining about it now.
Sure, there is. It's summarized by the well known saying "Those ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it". If you haven't learned about the bad parts of your country's history, you have little defense against people trying to repeat those parts.
It is good to hear that the Dutch are currently teaching a warts-and-all version of their history. It probably won't last, but such honest periods can leave behind teaching documents that are useful to people interested in honest histories.
The Texas story is really about a return to the historically "normal" way of teaching history, complete with the usual biases showing "our kind of people" as angels.
So what's the difference?
(You knew someone had to ask that, right? ;-)
I mean seriously, a car's ECU is airgapped from the outside world and has decent physical security.
Maybe it's time to start harrassing people to use the term "airgap" with the implication that it means "secure". That's so 1990s. Nowadays, "airgap" means "wireless accesss".
And by "access", we now mean "access from the outside".
Are there any laptops, netbooks, tablets, or handhelds these days that don't have wireless access as a standard feature? If so, such models are rapidly disappearing. And "airgap" now means that anyone within range can talk to your device without any sort of physical connection. This includes many (perhaps most) new model cars.
Well, i guess it is time to check if no-ip.com has hosts ending in .edu and set-up a home mail server :)
Even better: Set up your own home degree-program-via-email. Then you can legitimately apply for a .edu domain, and you can make a bunch of money off the suckers.
Of course, if you're a typical /. reader, you'll probably set up an actual online education web site for some topic that you're really interested in (but doesn't pay well). In that case, you're not making money off of "suckers", because they'll be other people with the same noncommercial interests as you.
Doesn't that sound like more fun that what you're doing now to earn a paycheck?
(For starters, you might set up a wiki dedicated to your interest, and then your "students" will supply you with a lot of your educational material - and pay you a bit for the honor of doing so. Of course, you'll probably be stuck with the job of keeping it all organized and free of spam, so it won't be a casual undertaking. You just might earn your .edu domain.)
[T]hey all had sharp knees.
Hey, that's a fetish I've never even heard of! (So I learned something from slashdot today. ;-)
Unfortunately, "not a realistic threat" won't be the part people remember, any more than it was the part that got into the /. headline. "Your car's computer is not secure" is the fearful phrase, ...
Yeah, and we know from a couple of decades with the public Internet that the world is full of people who get a kick out of connecting to a random computer system and vandalizing it. Not to mention the people who want to take over and add your machine to a botnet. And we might also mention again the rootkit that Sony was recently caught delivering on a CD. This is a prototype for what competitive auto makers well might be working on doing to their competitors' machines, to make them look bad.
Consider also that various recent makes of cars have had a "feature" of reporting back to the manufacturer. This is described as helping service the car when you take it in to the dealer. But it's an admission that the car is on a wireless network, and accessible from the outside at all times.
One obvious conjecture might be that the recent Toyota problems have been because of something like this. Do the affected models have wireless connectivity? And even if they don't, such things will happen in the near future.
Hey, it's standard practice to respond to alpha "proof of concept" examples by ignoring the achievement and picking apart the cosmetic details.
An experienced developer will take this as meaning "We're really impressed by what you've shown us, but we can't admit that (for some unstated reason), and we can't find anything consequential to criticise, so we'll attack you for not having delivered a polished, finished product." I.e., it's really high praise camouflaged as criticism.
I've seen it over and over.
Well, we do have a parrot in our house (a blue-crowned conure), but I've never heard her say "Arr". We do tell people that she's shouting out "IRAQ!" in an attempt to get a political discussion going.
(Usually when I say that within her earshot, she does say "IRAQ!", but it mostly just gets laughs, not a political discussion.)
Well, at least here in the US, when the "wi-fi" part of the spectrum was opened up, the explanation was that it was to be "open", public spectrum. They expected that developers (lots of us here on /.) would use this public spectrum to implement interesting and useful stuff, without the need to satisfy the bureaucracy (and the huge license price) that applies to other parts of the spectrum.
I'd think that a requirement that wi-fi always be encrypted would be a direct violation of the original intent in opening it up to the public. An open access point should be considered exactly how that part of the spectrum was supposed to be used.
Of course, things might be different in Germany. It's entirely possible that the wi-fi portion of the spectrum isn't legally "open" there. It's also possible that the above explanation was just PR in the US, and the wi-fi spectrum really isn't "open" here, either. Anyone know? Or is this another one of those things where all you can say is "We have to wait for the courts to decide"?
IE, meanwhile should be taken out back and shot.
Actually, we did that back in the late 90s. We left IE as del'd fragments on millions of disk drives around the world. The result was that hordes of zombie IEs arose from their remains on those disks, and chewed on the brains of managers around the world, until they adopted a policy of enforcing an IE-only policy in their organization. And, like all software, a new clone of IE can be cheaply produced in under a second by a mere copy operation. Of course, the clone won't run on the same machine as the original, but that's as planned, since the intent was to install the clones on more millions of new machines as the default browser.
The Internet is living (if you can call it that) with the results. IRL, it's a lot harder to eradicate a zombie horde than it is in the movies.
My thought exactly. I've seen my wife park the Mini in spaces with less than a foot clearance on either end. The car in that video was at least 6 feet from the front pylons.
I'm impressed that they programmed a robot to do that controlled slide, but I'm not impressed by the supposedly small size of the target space.
So how do we know whether it's this story or the previous one that's the fake?
Nah; it was just as stated: a charset conversion screwup. The pages I get say <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> in the header section. Do yours say UTF-8 or some other Unicode charset?
It would be nice to be able to quote things in non-Western languages here, especially now that China+Korea+Japan are the majority of the Internet, and where most of our hardware is now produced. But I guess it'll still be a while before those of us dealing with non-Western languages are permitted to join in US-based forums. Or use standard mathematical symbols in tech forums like /.
Still, you'd think they'd be able to get a simple 'ß' character right. I wonder where the screwup was this time.
Are you new here?
Well, my id number is 6 digits, FWIW (which I suppose isn't much).
I also have a congenital problem of having my tongue stuck in my cheek, which seems to be a handicap in a forum where most readers seem to lack a humor gene. This is two posts in one day that got no "Funny" mods, just serious things like "Insightful" or "Informative". I'm tempted to add a "Whoosh!" reply, but more and more I just figure, why bother?
I mean, "fixing" a runaway oil well with a nuke would seem like an irresistable straight line for anyone with any pretensions to comedy, right?
I promise to amend my ways and delete all pirated software and replace them with Linux and Linux equivalent products. From now on, It's Linux all the way :-)
And we might point out that the linux crowd long ago solved the software piracy problem. The piracy rate for linux and other FOSS software has been close to zero for years. (It's slightly nonzero due to the corporate users who violate the license.)
You'd think that the RIAA/MPAA/etc. would have noticed that the Free Software crowd has no problem with piracy, and would want to adopt their successful tactics. Anyone know why they don't?
I clicked on the "Read More ..." link expecting to find a discussion of the pros and cons of using nukes as engineering tools. And all I find so far is a discussion that should have been Godwinned out of existence long before it reached its current state.
Over the past half century, there have been some interesting proposals for engineering uses of nukes. One of my favorites was only a short distance south of the current record-setting oil spill: The proposed sea-level canal across Central America.
There have been several analyses of the possibility of such a canal. It could be much wider, deeper and cheaper than the current Panama canal, which is too small for many of the largest ships these days. Most of the proposed sites go across southern Nicaragua, where the passes through the mountains are lowest and widest. Several of the proposals amounted to burying a chain of nukes in a line through the area, and setting them off. The result would be a chain of interlocking craters with bottoms below sea level. A bit more work with large bulldozers to even out the shore line, and we'd have a canal.
There were various reasons why funding for these projects (through the US Congress, of course) was eventually rejected. One of the funnier ones came from research biologists. They pointed out that the Caribbean is a few meters higher than the east Pacific, so there would be a slow but significant east-to-west current in the canal. This would carry not just water, but lots of biological material, from the Caribbean to the Pacific. (The other direction would also happen, but would be limited to a few good swimmers).
The biologists thought this was too good a scientific opportunity to pass up, and started submitting grant proposals to do the Pacific-wide baseline population studies that would be needed to understand the ecological catastrophe that would follow. They argued that we missed a good opportunity by not doing the studies before the Saint Lawrence Seaway was built, so we were unable to track in detail the catastrophe that exterminated the Great Lakes' fishing industry, as the sea lamprey ate up all the fish in the lakes. They didn't want to lose out on all the valuable biological data that would follow the much larger catastrophe after the seal-level canal in Central America pumped thousands of new species into the tropical Pacific.
After enough of these grant proposals were submitted and Congress learned about them, the funding proposals for the canal were quietly "misplaced" and no longer discussed. Some of the biologists followed up by talking about their great disappointment that they would not be able to study such a large-scale biological "experiment". They didn't much lament the loss to engineers by the loss of a project to do large-scale nuclear construction, though I suppose in private a lot of civil engineers must have also been shedding crocodile tears over this loss to their profession.
Using a nuke on the BP well wouldn't do anything so biologically spectacular, of course. But I can see biologists hurriedly asking for funding to study the effects on the Gulf ecology. If it could be done right, we could get a lot of useful information out of the experiment.
Anyway, I'm still hoping to read lots of comments about nuclear construction ...
(Lessee; do I need a smiley to deflect the moderators who lack the humor gene? ;-)