It's interesting that the academic world has understood the value of a stable, permanent email address, while the commercial world doesn't believe it's anything valuable.
I've also changed ISPs every few years, though often it was actually the same ISP but the name changed due to a buyout or merger or for marketing reasons. Notifying all my contacts of the name change each time was a royal PITA. We also had a change of phone area code here some years back, which had a partial result of a significant number of customers shutting down their land line and switching to cell-phone-only mode.
Meanwhile, I got a university email address back in the 1980s, and it still works fine. They actually changed the official FQDN about a decade ago, but they made sure that the old one still worked (by forwarding to the your new address). It still works, though most people now have email to the old address classified as spam, since the marketing folks are the only ones who still use it after 10 years;-).
The usual ideologies would have us believe that it would be the commercial world that would give their customers what they want, and would provide stable email addresses. In fact, they have pretty much universally not done this. Meanwhile, the impractical "ivory tower" people in academia saw the value immediately, and have provided it, usually for free, to anyone ever associated with the institution. This really goes against what the ideologues all "know" about both the commercial and academic worlds.
Maybe we should revise our ideologies a bit, so that they can explain why in this case, it's the academic world that gives (literally, at no charge) the customers what they want, while the commercial world continues to refuse to do something so easy and so useful, even when people are willing to pay for it. I don't know how to explain this anomalous result, though. Maybe some economist or sociologist can explain it?
(There's also the further irony that one very commercial corporation, google, has taken the academic approach and provided free email with a stable address to anyone who fills out their form. But I guess they're not what anyone would call a typical corporation.;-)
There's so many better, richer alternatives out there now for connecting with masses of people with the same interests.
Name one and I'll explain to you how it sucks and how in contrast usenet is far better and has been for decades.
One point that is sometimes made about those "better, richer alternatives" is that they typically cause a serious problem that usenet has solved from the beginning: Most of them are web-based, and as such, every online forum has its own unique user interface. You have to learn a new GUI for nearly every one of them. With usenet, you can install one news reader and use it to read all the newsgroups that you subscribe to. Someone else can write a different interface, of course, but you don't have to use it if you don't like it. You can just continue to use the one that you like. With web-based forums, however, you must use the web site(s) that it's on, and they decide how the user interaction works. Many of them even require javascript, and they use it to break the browser's behavior, sometimes producing really bizarre, user-hostile behavior such as disabling the browser's Back button.
Now that the ISPs are abandoning usenet, we should be explaining how the open-source usenet software works, and restoring the older site-to-site distribution system. It's usually far superior to the browser-based forum implementations.
So, if you really want it, pay for it. The pay-for Usenet providers exist because the ISPs wanted to limit or eliminate this service and have have done so for years.
Alternatively, we might note that the usenet code originated as one of those "open source" projects, and the code is all available. It was originally designed to distribute individual newsgroups via site-to-site links (first phone lines, then TCP links), and the code is still capable of doing that.
It's quite feasible for geeks and nerds like us to grab the software, find other subscribers to the newsgroups you want, and arrange for your machines to "mirror" the newsgroups that you want. There's no need to pay a big company to do it for you. And if you do that, you'll have much faster access to your newsgroups, since they'll be residing in a corner of that 500-GB disk that you got for your nice new server last year. And instead of reading via a clumsy, bloated browser, you can pick up one of the nice plain-text news readers. You can also write your own programs for playing with the newsgroups, extracting stuff for your database, etc.
This should be easy for anyone who reads/., right?
It's somewhat of a shame that the corporate world managed to take over what arose as a distributed news system stored on users' machines, and then charge (some of) us for what was designed to be a freely shared, user-supported system. Maybe now that the ISPs are trying to scuttle it (and not lower our monthly fee to compensate for the loss of a service), we should be seriously talking about taking it back from them.
presumably, there would be a certified compiler or interpreter that would be used to run the code in question, and only results from the certified compiler would be acceptable to the SEC.
It would only be available in binary form, and would only run on MS Windows.
(I almost typed a smiley, but realized that it wouldn't be appropriate.;-)
i suspect its because its not about bandwidth, but the number of connections. it could very well be that the ISPs have calculated maybe 1-3 connections pr account (a web connection is only active while a page is downloading, same with mail and such), and so have grabbed cheap gear that can handle only that many connections at a time.
Huh? Why would they do that? A TCP connection doesn't send packets when idle, unless you have keepalive turned on, and even then, the packets are small and rare. The only places where it would matter how many connections you have would be on the machines at both ends of the connection, since they need a data structure for each TCP connection. For the intermediate machines, keeping track of your connections would require extra (and totally unnecessary) software, for no purpose other than counting your connections. Cheap gear wouldn't be doing this; it would be done only by "fancy" gear that's doing more with the traffic than just getting the packets to their destination address.
So why would they be counting connections? The only reasons I can think of involve spying on your traffic. That's not necessary for the networking to work; it's only done because someone wants to know about your traffic.
Of course I suppose that to most lawyers, any programming language will look like cuneiform anyway.
This could be viewed as payback for what the legal system did to software by allowing software patents. Such patents are written in legalese, and don't require a "working model", i.e., a runnable implementation in some programming language. So it's impossible for software developers to read the patents and understand whether their own code is a patent violation. We can only determine whether we're violating a patent by "asking the court system", a method that takes years and millions of dollars, and is thus inaccessible to anyone but governments and the largest corporations.
From a software geek's viewpoint, it's fun to think of the reverse system, in which programmers must be hired to determine the actual meaning of a new law, and the programmers do this by writing the tests in a form incomprehensible to lawyers.
I wouldn't bet any money on such a change actually being implemented in our lifetime. Remember that laws are written and voted on by legislators, who are overwhelmingly lawyers. Very few software developers have been elected to any legislative bodies anywhere.
2) Badly written laws can just as easily be written in Python as they can be in some human language. Judges etc are normally far more familiar with the official language of the courts.
Yes, but there's a very practical difference here. It's all too common for lawyers to respond to questions about a new law's actual meaning with "We don't know yet; we'll have to ask the court system". This can be and is done; it's not unusual for new laws to trigger a number of court tests to determine the actual legal meaning of the law.
The problem is that this can be expensive, in both time and money. Court tests can take years and millions of dollars.
If the "spec" for a law were coded in Python (or some other language with a public spec and implementation), tests of such laws could be conducted in minutes, with negligible cost. Of course, this would require paying expert programmers who are familiar with the language. But a few hours of such a programmer's time would be orders of magnitude cheaper than months or years of legal costs.
This is really the same argument as the reason that most business computing is now done by computers. Yes, all the calculations could be done by hand, by human accountants using pencil and paper. But this would mean paying large teams of professional accountants for months of work to do what a computer can do in a few seconds for a few dollars (when amortized over the computer's lifetime;-).
There are, of course, a lot of practical problems with software "solutions" to legal problems. We're all familiar with the difficulty of writing bug-free software. But again, this is not materially different from the difficulties in writing bug-free legislation. The difference is mostly that the software form could be testable in seconds rather than years, for a few dollars rather than millions of dollars.
And, of course, the opportunity for bribery and fraud in the software testing is nonzero. This is similar to the possibility of bribery and fraud in the legal system. It's just faster and cheaper.
A major difference is that a software process is (in principle) totally documentable. This isn't true of the legal system, most of which is hidden from public view and unknowable to those not directly involved. Software tests can easily be recorded and published.
What part of the internet does Apple control, precisely? Apple control *their store*, and that is all. They are no different to any other retailer.
Actually, they control a bit more than that. They control the distribution channel to what's turning into a significant part of the software "market". So they not only control what's sold in their stores, but also how their customers can use the things they've "bought" from Apple.
Others have pointed out some obvious parallels: Imagine that you bought a new stove, and found that it could only be used to cook food from vendors approved by the stove's manufacturer. Or, if you prefer the canonical/. automotive parallel: Imagine you bought a new car, and found that it had a new feature: It could examine the people and things in the car, and would refuse to move unless all the car's contents were on the manufacturer's approved list.
Now, stove and auto manufacturers haven't figured out how to do this (yet), but Apple is demoing how it can be done with computers. And when you consider that almost all new cars sold now contain one or more small computers (i.e., processor chips and digital comm gear), it's probably only a matter of time before we learn of an auto manufacturer that has implemented a few such restrictions in their new models.
We do have a related example, of rental cars that contain GPS and comm equipment, which are used to implement "no go" clauses in the contract's fine print that impose a surcharge if the vehicle is driven into areas that don't meet with the rental company's approval. It wouldn't be much of a surprise if your next car's warranty were voided by driving into a high-crime neighborhood , or outside your country, or into an independent mechanic's garage, or into a neighborhood populated by liberals, or....
And when this is reported, we can expect to read exactly the same arguments here on/. as we're reading now, explaining how it's the manufacturer's legal right to impose such restrictions on the uses of their products.
(It's funny that I haven't yet read any satire based on this scenario. I suppose it's just a matter of time. Or maybe someone here has links to such satire.)
Heh. I spent a bunch of time this morning coding some networking stuff in perl. I understand that that's also on the/forbidden list for those hot little iWhatevers.
(But the problem's a lot more pervasive than just flash or perl. I can't count the number of times while coding I've had the thought "This would be so much easier in prolog.".;-)
And they also don't accept apps written in brainfuck or intercal. How can we ever expect to make real progress in the software industry with such constraints?
A corporation does not have the power to forbid you to express yourself.
They certainly do, and they've done so for ages. One of the interesting things about the advent of the Internet was that it seemed for a while to end the stranglehold that a lot of "distribution" companies had over the ability of people like artists and political commentators to reach their audiences. Apple has simply demonstrated that it has the power to establish such a stranglehold over a part of the Internet, and can block even a Pulitzer-prize-winning artist from reaching the part of the Internet that Apple controls.
Of course, this political cartoonist has really just been blocked the same way that millions of good musicians that you've never heard of have been blocked. Until recently, even some top-selling musicians in one part of the world have been utterly unknown in other parts, because the companies that control distribution have decided not to permit sales of their music outside the area that they're popular. Nowadays, it's fairly easy to learn about and listen to music from all over the world.
But if Apple's lead stands, we may be seeing the start of the imposition of similar controls all over the Internet. We can forget about "net neutrality" and all that stuff; the companies that "own" the Internet's distribution channels decide what we are allowed to see, read, and listen to.
First of all my penis is of adequate size! Secondly, I am not looking for casual sex. And Lastly, I am not Black! Not that there is anything wrong with that....
Heh. My wife has become quite, uh, bemused by how the ad folks target her. She seems to get a lot of ads aimed at gay guys. NTTAWWT, of course, and some of our best friends are gay (to invoke yet another popular meme). As near as she and our gay friends can determine, this is because she subscribes to netflix and orders lots of old, 20's and 30's movies. This seems to be classified by the marketers as a gay male characteristic. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that she semi-regularly invites other like-minded (mostly female) friends over to watch old movies, and they all report getting lots of similar gay/male ads.
Actually, I've noticed a lot of similar "weird targeting", in that I often get bursts of similar ads that she doesn't, and they seem unrelated to anything that I'd find interesting or useful. The details aren't probably very interesting, other than the many times I've got adjacent ads for penis and breast enlargement. Is there really a "hermaphrodite" classification in the targeted-ad business?
But what I've been thinking is that discussions like this seem to always ignore something curious: The ad folks often seem to be remarkably off target. It's frequently obvious when they've classified you somehow, because you suddenly start seeing a lot of similar ads that people next to you aren't seeing. But they're also usually way off target.
Some people here have said that they like the idea of ads that are useful to them. But my experience, and a lot of other people's experience, is that ad targeting isn't even vaguely accurate, and doesn't seem to be getting any better. So it isn't improving our "experience" with the ads, and probably isn't doing much to improve sales.
My suspicion is that it's yet another case of marketing that is really quite crappy, but continues because the ad agencies are pretty good at one target market: They know how to target the corporate marketing folks who pay for the ads.
(I've recently terminated the use of google ads on several web sites that I help organize, because we don't see any ads on those sites that are at all relevant or interesting to the "audience" that uses those sites. So much for google's vaunted expertise in ad targeting. We even load the headers with all the relevant keywords we know, and it doesn't help.;-)
now you can order iPad direct from china through apple.com
Nothing new here. When I ordered this Macbook Pro last year, I was able to follow online its progress from the warehouse in Shanghai to my porch. Apple is now effectively a delivery and customer-support service for Asian manufacturers.
Maybe eventually they will cut out the middleman, as IBM did a while ago with its Thinkpad laptops. Now you order them directly from Lenovo, which is a Chinese firm. The pretense that they were an IBM product has ended.
Sometimes I just don't understand how the hell we've made it to superpower status...
Well, we might note that "superpower status" is in great measure made up of things like nuclear weapons, which the general population had no part in producing. There's also an economic component to that status, but again, those were built under the guidance of a rather tiny portion of the population (and regulated so that they wouldn't shoot themselves and the rest of us in our collective feet by a small population of anti-trust regulators;-). The general population had little input to all this power.
The American anti-science, anti-intellectual attitude is a property of the masses; our super-power status is a property of the actions of a small minority of thinkers and doers. There's no difficulty understanding how we could have both.
Of course, most of the American industrial power seems to have been outsourced over the past decades, so we might be seeing the end of it all. And our government is more and more in the hands of know-nothings who are proud of their willful ignorance. So that superpower status may be reaching the status of "polite fiction". America's primary remaining power might be its military, which is more and more dependent on outsourced technology, and that's not a very stable situation.
Stick around and find out how it all develops. Maybe you'll live to see who inherits the top-dawg position among nations.
Only ones with Java enabled, something I've never needed.
Yeah, but somehow, people never seem to pick up on the idea that it's never a good idea to allow your software to automatically run code downloaded from some outside machine. Even linux systems' browsers come with java and javascript enabled, and the user has to know enough to turn them off. We geeks know that this is a good idea, but the other 99.99% of humanity generally doesn't.
It is sorta stupid. We knew very well by 1980 that accepting code from strangers and blindly executing it just wasn't a very good idea. This has been quite well publicised by all the security "experts" (and it doesn't really take much expertise to understand the concept;-). It's a bit of a disappointment that computer software is still being produced (and accepted by users) that get this really simple security concept wrong.
Not everyone even knows what an IP address is, and expecting every single person on the planet to understand the concept is ludicrous.
How so? People everywhere seem to be easily able to understand the concept of a phone number and how to use it. I just comment that the equivalent thing for the Internet is called an "IP address", and it works exactly the same. Then I add that one advantage the Internet has over the phone system is that the Internet comes with a builtin "phone book" called the DNS system, so you don't actually have to have your own Internet "phone book". But you can use IP addresses instead of names if you like, just like you can dial phone numbers by hand. And you can build your own IP phone book; you just have to know that it's called a "host file" Everyone except Microsoft uses the file/etc/hosts, and if you look at it, you won't even need a manual, because its format is obvious once you recognize it as a name number list. You can edit it with any editor you like. You can block access to any site you like by giving it a number like 0.0.0.0.
This seems to be understood by even the most computer-intimidated, no matter how much they've accepted the idea that it's all beyond their understanding.
Of course, you could obfuscate it, and make it difficult to understand. But if you use a simple description, I'd really doubt that you'd have much trouble getting the idea across to anyone who can use a phone.
Immediate need for programmer with 10 years experience developing Objective C 2.0 for the iPad.
Actually, this sort of impossible requirement isn't always due to simple stupidity. I've seen cases where it was done knowingly. The goal was to have an excuse to reject every application from knowledgeable programmers. If they claimed the "required" experience, the HR people knew they were lying, and trashed their resume.
The actual goal was to be able to say "See, I told you there'd be no qualified applicants. So we now have grounds to hire that H1B guy we like." Or, in other cases, they had grounds to hire entry-level applicants and train them. This can happen when upper management refuses to pay for training your people on new stuff, and just wants you to hire new people who've already been trained by others. Forcing people to change employers to get training is one of the common disfunctionalities in current business practice.
OTOH, such requirements usually are just due to stupidity and ignorance. Lots of companies have a standard policy of requiring N years relevant experience, and upper management can't be bothered to make exceptions for new technology.
...judging by the Microsoft engineers i've met (who were nearly all from the Mac Business Unit), they really don't have a shortage of coding talent over there. What they have is a mind-boggling surplus of bad management, starting with Ballmer.
That's something that MS doesn't have a patent on.
One of my favorite examples, that gets knowing looks from lots of good programmers: Some years back, I was hired to implement a specific standard (which one isn't important here, but you'd recognize the name). When I started, I was bemused to see written orders that explicitly included not implementing a critical part of the standard, because "it isn't needed in our system". So I did the sensible thing: I implemented the entire standard, but included a switch that disabled the part they didn't want. I was also a bit annoyed by the fact that they explicitly denied me the use of a downloadable compliance test package (which was even free).
After a while, the project was working well enough that they delivered the first release to several customers. Among the bug reports, every customer included the fact that my part didn't pass their compliance test (which was the one I'd been denied access to), and they explicitly noted the one part that didn't work at all, which was of course the part I'd been ordered not to implement. Every customer said they wouldn't accept the product until that part was working. I got a "top priority" request asking how quickly I could implement the missing feature. I flipped the switch in my test setup, thoroughly tested it, and reported a few days later that it was ready for delivery. My managers were duly impressed by how quickly I'd done it, and the customers all accepted it.
A few months later, they were setting up for the product's "2.0" project. I noted that my standard was included, and that they again explicitly required that I not implement that one part that they "didn't need".
I sent my resume around, and a few weeks later, told them that I wouldn't be working on release 2.0.
It's interesting how many of the good programmers that I know have stories very similar to this. And most of them don't work for Microsoft.
Some recent studies have shown that the ability to digest lactose (as an adult) seems to have evolved (at least) four times in humans. Examination of the enzymes involved showed four different processes in for populations. The best known (and maybe the oldest) is in northern Europe, whose descendants have of course populated and interbred with the locals in several other parts of the world. The other three populations are all in Africa.
A large majority of the human adults are still unable to digest milk. This is understood to be the "normal" situation in humans and most other mammals, who normally lose the lactase enzyme as they mature. Consuming milk as an adult is one of the textbook examples of neoteny, which seems to have happened four times in humans, presumably as a side effect of domesticating ungulates.
But note that this is a bit off-topic here. TFA is about a group of humans digesting seaweed with the assist of novel intestinal bacteria. Digesting lactose is done with enzymes that we produce ourselves.
But then it makes no sense to say they acquired it from bacteria. Genes don't transfer from bacteria to mammals. Genes transfer between bacteria, via exchange of plasmids.
It's more accurate to say that we don't know of gene transfer between bacteria and mammals (or eukaryotes in general). It may happen, but it's probably not common.
But what the article is about is gene transfer between bacteria in the gut. This is something that's well understood in medical circles, but not in the general population. Our digestive system depends on a lot of bacteria to provide many of our digestive enzymes. We do produce digestive enzymes ourselves, but not nearly enough, and we'd get a lot less value from our food without the assistance of all those bacteria.
The suggestion is that the enzymes to digest seaweeds came from bacteria that were ingested along with the seaweeds, and in Japan, those bacteria exchanged some genes with the more common human digestive bacteria, so that the bacteria that are adapted to our gut picked up the seaweed-digesting enzymes. From what is known about bacterial genetics, this isn't a radical suggestion. It's what you'd expect to happen when a human population adopts some new food stuff that's difficult to digest.
It is possible that the genes that make some of those seaweed-digesting enzymes have also transferred into the human genome in Japan. But it's a lot less likely. That's the sort of job that our digestive system prefers to farm out to subcontracting bacteria.
So where can we get the list of all the atomic clocks in the universe? I'm sure that lots of researchers here on Earth would like to read it.
I am a bit surprised to read that none of the other technological civilizations out there have ever built a clock better than ours. Does this mean that we've reached the best possible clock, and we'll never build a better one?
If you don't take some control over the focus system of an SLR, the camera will very often focus on the completely wrong thing.
How true. One of my frustrations with trying out digital cameras is the ongoing problems with focus. Thus, I have number of very well-focused pictures of nondescript bushes, with a fuzzy out-of-focus bird in the center of the picture. The camera I've mostly used does have a manual focus, but I've found in practice that it's impossibly slow for things like wildlife photos.
I've found it rather difficult to even learn about manual focusing with digital cameras. I was considering buying one recently when I read glowing descriptions of its manual focus, until I ran across a description of what the manufacturer called "manual focus": a menu that requires several "clicks" to find, and lets you choose among 7 different fixed focal lengths. I crossed that one off my list.
So is there a way of learning which digital cameras accept a lens with a focus ring? I don't seem to see that mentioned in any camera description. When I ask their support people, I just get a bunch of PR-style BS that quickly makes it clear that they're either obfuscating or don't even know what I'm talking about.
It's even more annoying when I ask in online forums and get the same BS non-answers.
I'd also wonder: What percent of those linux boxes were bought with MS Windows installed, and are thus also counted a satisfied customers by Microsoft?
(And they must be satisfied, since they aren't calling Customer Support.;-)
Actually, one of my two linux boxes is running Ubuntu, but it actially came with Ubuntu installed. The other was a castoff Windows machine from my wife ("required for work"), and is running a rather old Debian. It works fine as a gateway/router/server machine, even if it does have less than a GB of memory. Some of us benefit from MS's upgrade process that encourages customers to buy new hardware so often. But it does sorta rankle that MS and their fanboys count our machines as Windows machines.
It's not at all uncommon for a group of players to define their own rules. I was once in a game that required only place names, defined as any name recognized by any of the popular online map sites (and Google Earth). I saw people play a game that only permitted words that alternated consonants and vowels. I've been in Scrabble games that required only obscene words, defined liberally, in that any of several online dictionaries included a sexual of excretory definition.
If this change is made to the official rules (i.e., those included in new Scrabble sets), I can imagine people deciding to play "Scrabble Classic" and not allow proper nouns.
Possibly the most unusual Scrabble I've played was with some friends who had a Russian Scrabble set. They mixed the tiles with the English set, and played with both. The rules were that a tile that looked like a letter in either language could be used in both languages. So the Russian S, which looks like a Roman C, could be used as either (or both for intersecting words. The H tiles could all be used for both its Russian meaning (N) and as an English H. For example, HOBO is also a Russian word (short-form accusative neuter "new"). And so on. They gave double credit for words that were valid in both languages. For example, HOBO is also a Russian word (short-form accusative neuter "new"). But that's difficult to do with longer words, so it wasn't much of a benefit. They used the score on the tile, so the Russian H tile is only 1 point, even if used as an English H. It was fun, even if I didn't win too often due to my smaller Russian vocabulary.
The company may be able to publish a set of rules and declare them "official", but that doesn't necessarily affect the people actually playing.
Hey, if the Faux News Network would send out suggestions that people get the hell away from the beach area, I'd certainly encourage them.;-)
Of course, they'd probably be the ones that also respond to the occasional false alarm by ridiculing the "government scientists" who gave them the unnecessary warning. We've seen the effect this has had on, for example, geologists whose models said that a big quake was imminent. The widespread denunciation by most of the mass media, not just the "conservative", effectively got across the news that it's better to keep quiet about such things, while being prepared to collect lots of data during the event.
OTOH, the proposed measurement of tsunami waves from space is potentially more reliable than earthquake warnings. So if it were implemented, it might have a lower false-positive rate, and make the (conservative;-) public more accepting of the occasional false warning.
Slashdot Mirror
I use my alma mater for my permanent address.
It's interesting that the academic world has understood the value of a stable, permanent email address, while the commercial world doesn't believe it's anything valuable.
I've also changed ISPs every few years, though often it was actually the same ISP but the name changed due to a buyout or merger or for marketing reasons. Notifying all my contacts of the name change each time was a royal PITA. We also had a change of phone area code here some years back, which had a partial result of a significant number of customers shutting down their land line and switching to cell-phone-only mode.
Meanwhile, I got a university email address back in the 1980s, and it still works fine. They actually changed the official FQDN about a decade ago, but they made sure that the old one still worked (by forwarding to the your new address). It still works, though most people now have email to the old address classified as spam, since the marketing folks are the only ones who still use it after 10 years ;-).
The usual ideologies would have us believe that it would be the commercial world that would give their customers what they want, and would provide stable email addresses. In fact, they have pretty much universally not done this. Meanwhile, the impractical "ivory tower" people in academia saw the value immediately, and have provided it, usually for free, to anyone ever associated with the institution. This really goes against what the ideologues all "know" about both the commercial and academic worlds.
Maybe we should revise our ideologies a bit, so that they can explain why in this case, it's the academic world that gives (literally, at no charge) the customers what they want, while the commercial world continues to refuse to do something so easy and so useful, even when people are willing to pay for it. I don't know how to explain this anomalous result, though. Maybe some economist or sociologist can explain it?
(There's also the further irony that one very commercial corporation, google, has taken the academic approach and provided free email with a stable address to anyone who fills out their form. But I guess they're not what anyone would call a typical corporation. ;-)
One point that is sometimes made about those "better, richer alternatives" is that they typically cause a serious problem that usenet has solved from the beginning: Most of them are web-based, and as such, every online forum has its own unique user interface. You have to learn a new GUI for nearly every one of them. With usenet, you can install one news reader and use it to read all the newsgroups that you subscribe to. Someone else can write a different interface, of course, but you don't have to use it if you don't like it. You can just continue to use the one that you like. With web-based forums, however, you must use the web site(s) that it's on, and they decide how the user interaction works. Many of them even require javascript, and they use it to break the browser's behavior, sometimes producing really bizarre, user-hostile behavior such as disabling the browser's Back button.
Now that the ISPs are abandoning usenet, we should be explaining how the open-source usenet software works, and restoring the older site-to-site distribution system. It's usually far superior to the browser-based forum implementations.
So, if you really want it, pay for it. The pay-for Usenet providers exist because the ISPs wanted to limit or eliminate this service and have have done so for years.
Alternatively, we might note that the usenet code originated as one of those "open source" projects, and the code is all available. It was originally designed to distribute individual newsgroups via site-to-site links (first phone lines, then TCP links), and the code is still capable of doing that.
It's quite feasible for geeks and nerds like us to grab the software, find other subscribers to the newsgroups you want, and arrange for your machines to "mirror" the newsgroups that you want. There's no need to pay a big company to do it for you. And if you do that, you'll have much faster access to your newsgroups, since they'll be residing in a corner of that 500-GB disk that you got for your nice new server last year. And instead of reading via a clumsy, bloated browser, you can pick up one of the nice plain-text news readers. You can also write your own programs for playing with the newsgroups, extracting stuff for your database, etc.
This should be easy for anyone who reads /., right?
It's somewhat of a shame that the corporate world managed to take over what arose as a distributed news system stored on users' machines, and then charge (some of) us for what was designed to be a freely shared, user-supported system. Maybe now that the ISPs are trying to scuttle it (and not lower our monthly fee to compensate for the loss of a service), we should be seriously talking about taking it back from them.
presumably, there would be a certified compiler or interpreter that would be used to run the code in question, and only results from the certified compiler would be acceptable to the SEC.
It would only be available in binary form, and would only run on MS Windows.
(I almost typed a smiley, but realized that it wouldn't be appropriate. ;-)
i suspect its because its not about bandwidth, but the number of connections. it could very well be that the ISPs have calculated maybe 1-3 connections pr account (a web connection is only active while a page is downloading, same with mail and such), and so have grabbed cheap gear that can handle only that many connections at a time.
Huh? Why would they do that? A TCP connection doesn't send packets when idle, unless you have keepalive turned on, and even then, the packets are small and rare. The only places where it would matter how many connections you have would be on the machines at both ends of the connection, since they need a data structure for each TCP connection. For the intermediate machines, keeping track of your connections would require extra (and totally unnecessary) software, for no purpose other than counting your connections. Cheap gear wouldn't be doing this; it would be done only by "fancy" gear that's doing more with the traffic than just getting the packets to their destination address.
So why would they be counting connections? The only reasons I can think of involve spying on your traffic. That's not necessary for the networking to work; it's only done because someone wants to know about your traffic.
Of course I suppose that to most lawyers, any programming language will look like cuneiform anyway.
This could be viewed as payback for what the legal system did to software by allowing software patents. Such patents are written in legalese, and don't require a "working model", i.e., a runnable implementation in some programming language. So it's impossible for software developers to read the patents and understand whether their own code is a patent violation. We can only determine whether we're violating a patent by "asking the court system", a method that takes years and millions of dollars, and is thus inaccessible to anyone but governments and the largest corporations.
From a software geek's viewpoint, it's fun to think of the reverse system, in which programmers must be hired to determine the actual meaning of a new law, and the programmers do this by writing the tests in a form incomprehensible to lawyers.
I wouldn't bet any money on such a change actually being implemented in our lifetime. Remember that laws are written and voted on by legislators, who are overwhelmingly lawyers. Very few software developers have been elected to any legislative bodies anywhere.
2) Badly written laws can just as easily be written in Python as they can be in some human language. Judges etc are normally far more familiar with the official language of the courts.
Yes, but there's a very practical difference here. It's all too common for lawyers to respond to questions about a new law's actual meaning with "We don't know yet; we'll have to ask the court system". This can be and is done; it's not unusual for new laws to trigger a number of court tests to determine the actual legal meaning of the law.
The problem is that this can be expensive, in both time and money. Court tests can take years and millions of dollars.
If the "spec" for a law were coded in Python (or some other language with a public spec and implementation), tests of such laws could be conducted in minutes, with negligible cost. Of course, this would require paying expert programmers who are familiar with the language. But a few hours of such a programmer's time would be orders of magnitude cheaper than months or years of legal costs.
This is really the same argument as the reason that most business computing is now done by computers. Yes, all the calculations could be done by hand, by human accountants using pencil and paper. But this would mean paying large teams of professional accountants for months of work to do what a computer can do in a few seconds for a few dollars (when amortized over the computer's lifetime ;-).
There are, of course, a lot of practical problems with software "solutions" to legal problems. We're all familiar with the difficulty of writing bug-free software. But again, this is not materially different from the difficulties in writing bug-free legislation. The difference is mostly that the software form could be testable in seconds rather than years, for a few dollars rather than millions of dollars.
And, of course, the opportunity for bribery and fraud in the software testing is nonzero. This is similar to the possibility of bribery and fraud in the legal system. It's just faster and cheaper.
A major difference is that a software process is (in principle) totally documentable. This isn't true of the legal system, most of which is hidden from public view and unknowable to those not directly involved. Software tests can easily be recorded and published.
What part of the internet does Apple control, precisely? Apple control *their store*, and that is all. They are no different to any other retailer.
Actually, they control a bit more than that. They control the distribution channel to what's turning into a significant part of the software "market". So they not only control what's sold in their stores, but also how their customers can use the things they've "bought" from Apple.
Others have pointed out some obvious parallels: Imagine that you bought a new stove, and found that it could only be used to cook food from vendors approved by the stove's manufacturer. Or, if you prefer the canonical /. automotive parallel: Imagine you bought a new car, and found that it had a new feature: It could examine the people and things in the car, and would refuse to move unless all the car's contents were on the manufacturer's approved list.
Now, stove and auto manufacturers haven't figured out how to do this (yet), but Apple is demoing how it can be done with computers. And when you consider that almost all new cars sold now contain one or more small computers (i.e., processor chips and digital comm gear), it's probably only a matter of time before we learn of an auto manufacturer that has implemented a few such restrictions in their new models.
We do have a related example, of rental cars that contain GPS and comm equipment, which are used to implement "no go" clauses in the contract's fine print that impose a surcharge if the vehicle is driven into areas that don't meet with the rental company's approval. It wouldn't be much of a surprise if your next car's warranty were voided by driving into a high-crime neighborhood , or outside your country, or into an independent mechanic's garage, or into a neighborhood populated by liberals, or ....
And when this is reported, we can expect to read exactly the same arguments here on /. as we're reading now, explaining how it's the manufacturer's legal right to impose such restrictions on the uses of their products.
(It's funny that I haven't yet read any satire based on this scenario. I suppose it's just a matter of time. Or maybe someone here has links to such satire.)
And ha, I just realised he codes in Flash.
Heh. I spent a bunch of time this morning coding some networking stuff in perl. I understand that that's also on the /forbidden list for those hot little iWhatevers.
(But the problem's a lot more pervasive than just flash or perl. I can't count the number of times while coding I've had the thought "This would be so much easier in prolog.". ;-)
And they also don't accept apps written in brainfuck or intercal. How can we ever expect to make real progress in the software industry with such constraints?
A corporation does not have the power to forbid you to express yourself.
They certainly do, and they've done so for ages. One of the interesting things about the advent of the Internet was that it seemed for a while to end the stranglehold that a lot of "distribution" companies had over the ability of people like artists and political commentators to reach their audiences. Apple has simply demonstrated that it has the power to establish such a stranglehold over a part of the Internet, and can block even a Pulitzer-prize-winning artist from reaching the part of the Internet that Apple controls.
Of course, this political cartoonist has really just been blocked the same way that millions of good musicians that you've never heard of have been blocked. Until recently, even some top-selling musicians in one part of the world have been utterly unknown in other parts, because the companies that control distribution have decided not to permit sales of their music outside the area that they're popular. Nowadays, it's fairly easy to learn about and listen to music from all over the world.
But if Apple's lead stands, we may be seeing the start of the imposition of similar controls all over the Internet. We can forget about "net neutrality" and all that stuff; the companies that "own" the Internet's distribution channels decide what we are allowed to see, read, and listen to.
First of all my penis is of adequate size! Secondly, I am not looking for casual sex. And Lastly, I am not Black! Not that there is anything wrong with that....
Heh. My wife has become quite, uh, bemused by how the ad folks target her. She seems to get a lot of ads aimed at gay guys. NTTAWWT, of course, and some of our best friends are gay (to invoke yet another popular meme). As near as she and our gay friends can determine, this is because she subscribes to netflix and orders lots of old, 20's and 30's movies. This seems to be classified by the marketers as a gay male characteristic. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that she semi-regularly invites other like-minded (mostly female) friends over to watch old movies, and they all report getting lots of similar gay/male ads.
Actually, I've noticed a lot of similar "weird targeting", in that I often get bursts of similar ads that she doesn't, and they seem unrelated to anything that I'd find interesting or useful. The details aren't probably very interesting, other than the many times I've got adjacent ads for penis and breast enlargement. Is there really a "hermaphrodite" classification in the targeted-ad business?
But what I've been thinking is that discussions like this seem to always ignore something curious: The ad folks often seem to be remarkably off target. It's frequently obvious when they've classified you somehow, because you suddenly start seeing a lot of similar ads that people next to you aren't seeing. But they're also usually way off target.
Some people here have said that they like the idea of ads that are useful to them. But my experience, and a lot of other people's experience, is that ad targeting isn't even vaguely accurate, and doesn't seem to be getting any better. So it isn't improving our "experience" with the ads, and probably isn't doing much to improve sales.
My suspicion is that it's yet another case of marketing that is really quite crappy, but continues because the ad agencies are pretty good at one target market: They know how to target the corporate marketing folks who pay for the ads.
(I've recently terminated the use of google ads on several web sites that I help organize, because we don't see any ads on those sites that are at all relevant or interesting to the "audience" that uses those sites. So much for google's vaunted expertise in ad targeting. We even load the headers with all the relevant keywords we know, and it doesn't help. ;-)
now you can order iPad direct from china through apple.com
Nothing new here. When I ordered this Macbook Pro last year, I was able to follow online its progress from the warehouse in Shanghai to my porch. Apple is now effectively a delivery and customer-support service for Asian manufacturers.
Maybe eventually they will cut out the middleman, as IBM did a while ago with its Thinkpad laptops. Now you order them directly from Lenovo, which is a Chinese firm. The pretense that they were an IBM product has ended.
Sometimes I just don't understand how the hell we've made it to superpower status...
Well, we might note that "superpower status" is in great measure made up of things like nuclear weapons, which the general population had no part in producing. There's also an economic component to that status, but again, those were built under the guidance of a rather tiny portion of the population (and regulated so that they wouldn't shoot themselves and the rest of us in our collective feet by a small population of anti-trust regulators ;-). The general population had little input to all this power.
The American anti-science, anti-intellectual attitude is a property of the masses; our super-power status is a property of the actions of a small minority of thinkers and doers. There's no difficulty understanding how we could have both.
Of course, most of the American industrial power seems to have been outsourced over the past decades, so we might be seeing the end of it all. And our government is more and more in the hands of know-nothings who are proud of their willful ignorance. So that superpower status may be reaching the status of "polite fiction". America's primary remaining power might be its military, which is more and more dependent on outsourced technology, and that's not a very stable situation.
Stick around and find out how it all develops. Maybe you'll live to see who inherits the top-dawg position among nations.
Only ones with Java enabled, something I've never needed.
Yeah, but somehow, people never seem to pick up on the idea that it's never a good idea to allow your software to automatically run code downloaded from some outside machine. Even linux systems' browsers come with java and javascript enabled, and the user has to know enough to turn them off. We geeks know that this is a good idea, but the other 99.99% of humanity generally doesn't.
It is sorta stupid. We knew very well by 1980 that accepting code from strangers and blindly executing it just wasn't a very good idea. This has been quite well publicised by all the security "experts" (and it doesn't really take much expertise to understand the concept ;-). It's a bit of a disappointment that computer software is still being produced (and accepted by users) that get this really simple security concept wrong.
Not everyone even knows what an IP address is, and expecting every single person on the planet to understand the concept is ludicrous.
How so? People everywhere seem to be easily able to understand the concept of a phone number and how to use it. I just comment that the equivalent thing for the Internet is called an "IP address", and it works exactly the same. Then I add that one advantage the Internet has over the phone system is that the Internet comes with a builtin "phone book" called the DNS system, so you don't actually have to have your own Internet "phone book". But you can use IP addresses instead of names if you like, just like you can dial phone numbers by hand. And you can build your own IP phone book; you just have to know that it's called a "host file" Everyone except Microsoft uses the file /etc/hosts, and if you look at it, you won't even need a manual, because its format is obvious once you recognize it as a name number list. You can edit it with any editor you like. You can block access to any site you like by giving it a number like 0.0.0.0.
This seems to be understood by even the most computer-intimidated, no matter how much they've accepted the idea that it's all beyond their understanding.
Of course, you could obfuscate it, and make it difficult to understand. But if you use a simple description, I'd really doubt that you'd have much trouble getting the idea across to anyone who can use a phone.
Immediate need for programmer with 10 years experience developing Objective C 2.0 for the iPad.
Actually, this sort of impossible requirement isn't always due to simple stupidity. I've seen cases where it was done knowingly. The goal was to have an excuse to reject every application from knowledgeable programmers. If they claimed the "required" experience, the HR people knew they were lying, and trashed their resume.
The actual goal was to be able to say "See, I told you there'd be no qualified applicants. So we now have grounds to hire that H1B guy we like." Or, in other cases, they had grounds to hire entry-level applicants and train them. This can happen when upper management refuses to pay for training your people on new stuff, and just wants you to hire new people who've already been trained by others. Forcing people to change employers to get training is one of the common disfunctionalities in current business practice.
OTOH, such requirements usually are just due to stupidity and ignorance. Lots of companies have a standard policy of requiring N years relevant experience, and upper management can't be bothered to make exceptions for new technology.
...judging by the Microsoft engineers i've met (who were nearly all from the Mac Business Unit), they really don't have a shortage of coding talent over there. What they have is a mind-boggling surplus of bad management, starting with Ballmer.
That's something that MS doesn't have a patent on.
One of my favorite examples, that gets knowing looks from lots of good programmers: Some years back, I was hired to implement a specific standard (which one isn't important here, but you'd recognize the name). When I started, I was bemused to see written orders that explicitly included not implementing a critical part of the standard, because "it isn't needed in our system". So I did the sensible thing: I implemented the entire standard, but included a switch that disabled the part they didn't want. I was also a bit annoyed by the fact that they explicitly denied me the use of a downloadable compliance test package (which was even free).
After a while, the project was working well enough that they delivered the first release to several customers. Among the bug reports, every customer included the fact that my part didn't pass their compliance test (which was the one I'd been denied access to), and they explicitly noted the one part that didn't work at all, which was of course the part I'd been ordered not to implement. Every customer said they wouldn't accept the product until that part was working. I got a "top priority" request asking how quickly I could implement the missing feature. I flipped the switch in my test setup, thoroughly tested it, and reported a few days later that it was ready for delivery. My managers were duly impressed by how quickly I'd done it, and the customers all accepted it.
A few months later, they were setting up for the product's "2.0" project. I noted that my standard was included, and that they again explicitly required that I not implement that one part that they "didn't need".
I sent my resume around, and a few weeks later, told them that I wouldn't be working on release 2.0.
It's interesting how many of the good programmers that I know have stories very similar to this. And most of them don't work for Microsoft.
Some recent studies have shown that the ability to digest lactose (as an adult) seems to have evolved (at least) four times in humans. Examination of the enzymes involved showed four different processes in for populations. The best known (and maybe the oldest) is in northern Europe, whose descendants have of course populated and interbred with the locals in several other parts of the world. The other three populations are all in Africa.
A large majority of the human adults are still unable to digest milk. This is understood to be the "normal" situation in humans and most other mammals, who normally lose the lactase enzyme as they mature. Consuming milk as an adult is one of the textbook examples of neoteny, which seems to have happened four times in humans, presumably as a side effect of domesticating ungulates.
But note that this is a bit off-topic here. TFA is about a group of humans digesting seaweed with the assist of novel intestinal bacteria. Digesting lactose is done with enzymes that we produce ourselves.
But then it makes no sense to say they acquired it from bacteria. Genes don't transfer from bacteria to mammals. Genes transfer between bacteria, via exchange of plasmids.
It's more accurate to say that we don't know of gene transfer between bacteria and mammals (or eukaryotes in general). It may happen, but it's probably not common.
But what the article is about is gene transfer between bacteria in the gut. This is something that's well understood in medical circles, but not in the general population. Our digestive system depends on a lot of bacteria to provide many of our digestive enzymes. We do produce digestive enzymes ourselves, but not nearly enough, and we'd get a lot less value from our food without the assistance of all those bacteria.
The suggestion is that the enzymes to digest seaweeds came from bacteria that were ingested along with the seaweeds, and in Japan, those bacteria exchanged some genes with the more common human digestive bacteria, so that the bacteria that are adapted to our gut picked up the seaweed-digesting enzymes. From what is known about bacterial genetics, this isn't a radical suggestion. It's what you'd expect to happen when a human population adopts some new food stuff that's difficult to digest.
It is possible that the genes that make some of those seaweed-digesting enzymes have also transferred into the human genome in Japan. But it's a lot less likely. That's the sort of job that our digestive system prefers to farm out to subcontracting bacteria.
So where can we get the list of all the atomic clocks in the universe? I'm sure that lots of researchers here on Earth would like to read it.
I am a bit surprised to read that none of the other technological civilizations out there have ever built a clock better than ours. Does this mean that we've reached the best possible clock, and we'll never build a better one?
I hope you die.
I probably will. And so will you.
(That was a remarkably opaque non-reply. It doesn't contain a clue as to what triggered it. ;-)
If you don't take some control over the focus system of an SLR, the camera will very often focus on the completely wrong thing.
How true. One of my frustrations with trying out digital cameras is the ongoing problems with focus. Thus, I have number of very well-focused pictures of nondescript bushes, with a fuzzy out-of-focus bird in the center of the picture. The camera I've mostly used does have a manual focus, but I've found in practice that it's impossibly slow for things like wildlife photos.
I've found it rather difficult to even learn about manual focusing with digital cameras. I was considering buying one recently when I read glowing descriptions of its manual focus, until I ran across a description of what the manufacturer called "manual focus": a menu that requires several "clicks" to find, and lets you choose among 7 different fixed focal lengths. I crossed that one off my list.
So is there a way of learning which digital cameras accept a lens with a focus ring? I don't seem to see that mentioned in any camera description. When I ask their support people, I just get a bunch of PR-style BS that quickly makes it clear that they're either obfuscating or don't even know what I'm talking about.
It's even more annoying when I ask in online forums and get the same BS non-answers.
I'd also wonder: What percent of those linux boxes were bought with MS Windows installed, and are thus also counted a satisfied customers by Microsoft?
(And they must be satisfied, since they aren't calling Customer Support. ;-)
Actually, one of my two linux boxes is running Ubuntu, but it actially came with Ubuntu installed. The other was a castoff Windows machine from my wife ("required for work"), and is running a rather old Debian. It works fine as a gateway/router/server machine, even if it does have less than a GB of memory. Some of us benefit from MS's upgrade process that encourages customers to buy new hardware so often. But it does sorta rankle that MS and their fanboys count our machines as Windows machines.
It's not at all uncommon for a group of players to define their own rules. I was once in a game that required only place names, defined as any name recognized by any of the popular online map sites (and Google Earth). I saw people play a game that only permitted words that alternated consonants and vowels. I've been in Scrabble games that required only obscene words, defined liberally, in that any of several online dictionaries included a sexual of excretory definition.
If this change is made to the official rules (i.e., those included in new Scrabble sets), I can imagine people deciding to play "Scrabble Classic" and not allow proper nouns.
Possibly the most unusual Scrabble I've played was with some friends who had a Russian Scrabble set. They mixed the tiles with the English set, and played with both. The rules were that a tile that looked like a letter in either language could be used in both languages. So the Russian S, which looks like a Roman C, could be used as either (or both for intersecting words. The H tiles could all be used for both its Russian meaning (N) and as an English H. For example, HOBO is also a Russian word (short-form accusative neuter "new"). And so on. They gave double credit for words that were valid in both languages. For example, HOBO is also a Russian word (short-form accusative neuter "new"). But that's difficult to do with longer words, so it wasn't much of a benefit. They used the score on the tile, so the Russian H tile is only 1 point, even if used as an English H. It was fun, even if I didn't win too often due to my smaller Russian vocabulary.
The company may be able to publish a set of rules and declare them "official", but that doesn't necessarily affect the people actually playing.
Hey, if the Faux News Network would send out suggestions that people get the hell away from the beach area, I'd certainly encourage them. ;-)
Of course, they'd probably be the ones that also respond to the occasional false alarm by ridiculing the "government scientists" who gave them the unnecessary warning. We've seen the effect this has had on, for example, geologists whose models said that a big quake was imminent. The widespread denunciation by most of the mass media, not just the "conservative", effectively got across the news that it's better to keep quiet about such things, while being prepared to collect lots of data during the event.
OTOH, the proposed measurement of tsunami waves from space is potentially more reliable than earthquake warnings. So if it were implemented, it might have a lower false-positive rate, and make the (conservative ;-) public more accepting of the occasional false warning.