Have seen that - but none of it mentions the killer feature that WinFS promised (and that even the Opera browser has managed to apply to my Gigabytes of email but not one OS vendor has managed to apply to even just my "documents" filesystem in a practical way) - file tagging and database-backed storage.
When I can do "Find all files on Project X dated last week" and have the query return as quickly as an SQL statement would execute WITHOUT needing indexing daemons, trawling over the disk, specific file organsiation, etc. to do so, then I'll consider WinFS as having arrived.
We need to kill off "directories/folders" and move to a label/tag-based database system instead. You can do it with Gigs of spam made of tiny 1kb files - why can't you do it with my filesystem indexes?
Don't have a TomTom then? Or one of the thousands of set-top boxes that use it? Don't have a TV from a big-name manufacturer (e.g. Sony to name one) with media capabilities? Don't have a Kindle? Don't have an Android phone?
Seems to me that Sony, Kindle, Android, TomTom are all big-names and all in the consumer market where almost everyone has at least one themselves, or certainly know someone with one. That's without even trying to dig for more information, too.
1) "The OpenPandora Method": Where things run along the lines of (but not this isn't *exactly* what happened to the OP): There's a delay, and then another, and then there's a problem, and the price rises, and we have only limited stock, and there's a component change, and a tax we forgot to add, and the stock has sunk into the ocean, and we need more money to complete the next batch, and the guy ran off with the components, and one of them melted and we need to do a recall, and, and...
2) The "Apple Ipad" Method: Stock turns up. Is sold out. Every time I go to buy one, the window of opportunity is about 14 and a half seconds right in the middle of the busiest part of the working day before the website crashes and Slashdotters buy up all the stock. After six months of trying to buy one, I give up.
I'm hoping for the second - at least that gives me *some* sort of chance if I'm quick and lucky.
Lie detector tests are inadmissable in any sensible court in the world.
Being a smartarse can still end up with you in jail. The letter of the law says that you were required to provide the password and didn't. The excuse doesn't matter by that point, or they wouldn't have used that law against you anyway.
The fact is: They think you had the password, for good reason, "beyond reasonable doubt". They've ordered you to provide it. You failing to provide it when ordered is, in the US and UK I believe, an offence. Thus you will go to jail. Maybe not for as long as the evidence on that device would have meant, but long enough that you don't "get away" if you were trying to hide something.
The law is enforced by humans. If those humans think you have the key and don't believe your excuses, the letter of the law says they can jail you. You can argue it, of course, but that takes years. Being a smartarse doesn't help you at all.
And when the filesystem history of your PC shows logs of you inserting that serial-numbered USB key into your PC last week, and using filesystem encryption tools to access it? And sure, you can combat that, but there's always another way to get caught out that you might not have considered. Hell, they can probably tell you the last time you touched the device itself, or inserted it, and into what computer you inserted it by various bog-standard forensic evidence (scratches on the USB connector, fingerprints, etc.).
You don't even know if they haven't been *watching* you insert that USB key by that point (and if they've raided you, there's a good chance they *have* been watching first). They won't tell you that until AFTER you've already denied ever knowing where it was. You've just stamped "guilty" on your own head by being a smartarse.
You can be a smartarse if you really want to, but nothing in the world is clever enough to stop "reasonable doubt" when you play games like that, especially if you're that confrontational. All that will do is make them WANT to put you away rather than plant doubt in their heads.
After a police raid, they'll just have all your possessions. Sure, it'll take a while to catalogue them all but they will. They actually have to. Not only that, they'll know the serial number of every one and maybe even the purchase origin. While you're sitting in an interview room being a smartarse, they're sending out court orders based on your PC and ISP evidence and forensically recording your Slashdot comments (and the above, in the wrong context, could be enough to convict you even in ten years time if that DOES happen!).
You missed the whole point of the article - the US, and the UK, have laws that if they even THINK you really have the key and haven't forgotten it, they'll throw you in a cell until you remember. Be as smart-arse as you like but people have already been convicted and jailed over it because of "reasonable doubt" that they weren't innocent. The law is there, it's written, it's enforceable (whether it's SENSIBLE is another matter and one that takes decades to argue in court) and if they suspect for a moment that you're being a smartarse, they'll use it.
This is how the law works. If you're stopped by a policeman in the UK, he'll pay you zero attention if you're polite, genuine, "I know, officer, I was speeding. It's a fair cop." about it. Start being pricky towards them for no reason and they'll have you for your tyre wear, the rear light, the slightly-covered number plate, look up your insurance, your license, run a check on your name, look through the car for anything you shouldn't have, etc.
It has to be said that it's not an unsuccessful method of law enforcement and anyone with brain enough to be respectful and polite and co-operative will "get away" with things that the idiots who's taking their badge number and threatening them won't. The same applies from the police up to the courts. Hire a good lawyer, be co-operative and polite, play by the rules and you'll get the best result. Be pricky about it and they'll do what they can to dig deeper and inconvenience you.
I can think of ways you could reasonably consider to have good reason to have lots of encrypted USB sticks about that you don't know the passwords too. But being the smartarse will end up with you in jail, whether you "did" anything or not. You can argue about it as much as you like but if the judge takes a dislike to your attitude or methods, they'll put you away at least until your successful appeal.
What do you do? You provide all the information you have and be as co-operative as possible. Why? The laws on that are worded so that co-operation is the better of the two options so that you're *forced* to co-operate or go to jail.
You can argue about self-incrimination, free-speech, etc. afterwards - when the judge KNOWS that you've been 100% co-operative. You can still have evidence stricken, ask for a mis-trial, appeal, etc. but you've been co-ope
Been digging since 1974. That's 344 feet a year, or a foot per day. Hell, *I* could have dug quicker than that!
Or maybe they just had lots of problems, costs, setbacks, etc. associated with a 13,000 foot-long drill through a substance that nobody has ever drilled 13,000 down through?
Replace "gay" with "black", "female", "uneducated", "from a third-world country", "Muslim", "Christian", "Jewish", "foreign", "weird", "Down's", etc. or any other of a million adjectives and the same has been true throughout history.
Though the government are treading extremely cautiously, they are never denying that he worked wonders - see their statements on this issue from the BBC and other news outlets. That's an unusual step - they would normally avoid the superlatives when discussing things like this but they don't. They're just questioning if they're going to get a million copycat pardon applications for everything under the sun, or somehow be seen to be "pardoning" illegal activity (justified in a modern time or not).
Being gay, at the time, was illegal. He knew that. He was convicted of practising homosexual acts (no matter how abhorrent the law, it was still the law, and he knew that - I disagree with the law against assisted suicide but it doesn't mean anyone should go and break it JUST because they disagree with it). It's an indisputable fact that you cannot fix. He followed the legal path of the time and they came to the conclusion that any fair judgement would have HAD to come to at the time. He broke the law, as written, deliberately.
In the same way that today it's illegal in the UK to view certain types of pornographic material even if it pictures only consenting adults AND NOBODY ELSE. It's still illegal. You still have to break the law to be convicted of it. You can claim that the law needs to be changed but not that the law doesn't apply to you.
And whatever you do now, you are trying to recognise his contributions, not "pardon" him because he was gay and mistreated - and I think that's always been the case. A pardon actually "tidies up" the matter and puts a close to it. Maybe we shouldn't do that, in the same way that we shouldn't forget what's happening in Guantanamo Bay still.
Nobody doubts his contribution - the fact that we all still know his bloody name for starters. Anybody who cares will know how he died. The pardon is only a gesture that has legal issues surrounding it (which might affect still-living persons). Give it another 50 years and then do it. His memory will wait patiently.
I signed the petition myself, but I can't say I disagree with the stance the government has taken. If the government was a friend it would be one of those "My hands are tied, but you *KNOW* I feel the same and want to help you" situations. (And I have no political leanings at all because I can't stand politics or, especially, politicians of any party).
I'd rather remember him as a great mathematician than as someone excused from breaking the law because it was changed years after his death. The pride of the man was in his own work after all - that's what should be remembered.
I think it can be easily argued that the Libre and Open codebases are so similar that a patch for one IS a patch for another. The differences are minor at this stage and more to do with what features they want in rather than what patches can be ported.
That said, LibreOffice has over a year's headstart and they are much more pushing towards the "Let's clear out the crap" philosophy - and doing a good job. They also have almost all the original OO.org developers contributing too.
I think it's OO that's going to die off quicker than you think. It's going to be EGCS/GCC again - the fork runs off, gets a headstart against a project that has a delay in evolving and eventually "becomes" and takes over from the original project. Given a few years, I see OO basically sucking in 99% of the LibreOffice work. Until then, they are a year ahead in cleaning up and understanding the code and a significant proportion of the new features are patches that work on both Libre and OO with little effort.
So what you're saying is that Ubisoft don't already have a hot-backup to these database that is customer- and business-critical and needs to be up 24/7? They don't have a testing regime with a live copy of the dataset to test against? They couldn't have performed the migration piecemeal? They couldn't have done the migration in the background while the main servers take the brunt of the traffic and then - when and only when it was tested and working - started the background database serving queries instead?
Don't talk shit. This is a large system - millions of customers, always on, etc.etc. It's cost millions of dollars. If you need to take it down for more than a day (especially for PLANNED maintenance), it means you didn't implement it properly, don't test it properly, didn't even spec it properly, don't manage it properly and don't care about your customers. This is why redundant systems exist - for exactly these sorts of systems.
Do maintenance by all means, but taking it OFFLINE to do so with no backup system? That's just shoddy whether you're migrating a handful of MySQL instances or the back end of a large bank.
Recruitment agencies are worthless, no matter the country or the profession. Reed, the largest recruitment company in the UK, has an horrendous reputation precisely because they know NOTHING about the areas they dabble in. Anyone who uses someone like Reed exclusively is not someone you want to work for.
When I left uni, I started my own business. When the time came to start a "real job" (as my mother called it), I merely put word out. I did sign onto some websites, agencies etc. but got nothing worthwhile back at all.
The first recruiter to call offering me a job? It was for a car sales firm, liaising with their shops to make sure the mother company was doing everything it could for them. Not IT-related at all. I have *no* idea how they narrowed me into their final candidates for interview but they did. The quote, mid-way through the interview was "Ah, f***ing Reed. Working their magic again". The company concerned were just as pissed off as I was and, ironically, offered me the job. I politely declined. I was basically shoved into the interview under false pretences in order to fulfil their quota of candidates. Needless to say, I removed myself from their records rather harshly.
My girlfriend - she's a genetic scientist. She went to Reed Healthcare to get her first job (been studying, researching, etc. right up until she turned 32). They specialise in fulfilling medical positions. The Reed interviewer asked her what genetic meant, and if she was a nurse.
It's not just that particular company, though, they are all like it. They only have one thing in mind - getting their fee / commission by providing enough candidates for interview. If they can do it without being totally laughed out of the room, even better, but the people who use agencies don't get to see what the agency rejected (so they can just lie and say there was nobody else suitable).
And if you're looking for work, most agencies don't understand what you do for a living anyway, don't know what to look for, and do little that you couldn't do yourself. Even the HR department probably doesn't know but unless they CARE about the position, they won't CARE about whether their requirements are suitable or not.
Hell, my brother (a Mathematics and Astrophysics graduate with good IT skills) was told by an agency to apply for an IT tech suppport position - but didn't bother to check if he had a driving licence which the position required. The VERY LAST question on the interview mentioned it obliquely, he queried it, then had to apologise for wasting their time.
If a company uses a recruitment agency it's either to fill up their numbers (i.e. we already know we'll hire internally, but this way we can say we advertised the position), or because they don't care about getting the best person for the job. If they did care, they'd do the job themselves (that's the point of a HR department!). If they do the job themselves and are blinkered by things like basic IT certifications, it means they don''t care about hiring a person good for the job, but one that ticks the boxes for some manager somewhere.
I have no certifications. I have actively refused to take them (I consider them a vendor-specific waste-of-money that functions only as an advertisement for the vendor). I have never had a problem finding work (except where Reed are involved!) and have sometimes been hired precisely BECAUSE I was the person who had more experience than certifications. I've ever been hired via a recruitment agency that specialised in IT. But there, the recruitment agent probably knew more about IT than I did - he certainly pressed me for lots of obscure technical details! And even in that case, I found him for a specific job he had advertised, not the other way around.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you hire badly, you'll only ever hire bad people (i.e. those with certs over experience), and nobody "good" will want to work with you. If you hire well you'll only ever hire good people and the good people will want to work with you.
The only consistent factor in how people learn is that everyone is different. Modern teaching recognises this, though whether it teaches while "believing" it is another matter entirely. Some learn by doing, some by seeing others do, some by turning something into a narrative, some just by hearing, etc. and the technique used vastly depends on the things you're trying to learn.
Learning a physical skill? Best to watch an expert and then try it yourself, or maybe just struggle along on your own starting from scratch depending on what makes the best brain-links for yourself, or maybe read up on the subject beforehand so you go in prepared, or maybe you have to imagine yourself doing it first, or maybe... ?
Learning a language? Probably best to hear it and speak it. Might be helpful to tie it in to other languages you know. Maybe the grammar can be learned from a book or you can just struggle through being corrected all the time by a native speaker. Or maybe you just absorb it if you immerse yourself in the language and rely on the reward of successfully catching a word you know in their babble to help you reinforce your knowledge of that success?
The point is that everything you do is wholly reliant on what you want to learn, who's teaching you and how you want to learn it. I have an ATROCIOUS memory. It really is awful. But I can tell you pi to 32 decimal places off the top of my head and know 50-60 strong passwords without hesitation. My memory is actually pretty damn good and near-perfect but I have to WANT to remember something and have a trigger GIVEN to me to recall it (don't ask why I wanted to know pi to 32 decimal places!).
The automatic cruft-filters on my brain will mean that I won't remember what I had for lunch - it's trivia, it doesn't matter and it's not useful to recall it later. But if you told me it was important to remember it, I would be able to produce that data on demand 30 years later. I still know the number plate of a hire car that my ex-father-in-law rented for a week ten years ago. Because there was a need to remember it at one point, and ever since it won't leave my brain.
Equally, if you *never* asked me to produce that data, I would never remember to do it myself (i.e. "Meet me on the top of the Eiffel Tower in 2020" - not a chance that I'll remember to actually DO SO, but will always be able to remember being asked to do so!). Memory: perfect, when put into a specific training mode when the information needs to be memorised, and requires SOMETHING ELSE to trigger it to recall. Otherwise, forget it. Write things in a diary? I'd never remember to look inside it to find them (I'm not joking, either!)
How do you even understand that without being me? I can remember hundred of random facts if necessary, but I can't learn through association with weird images like some people can, so that form of memory technique doesn't work at all for me.
I'm struggling to learn Italian at the moment but the bits I *do* learn, I learn by tying to a word of Latin origin that has an equivalent in English (i.e. to eat, is "mangiare", from the Latin "mandere", but I only link it to "mandible" which is your lower jaw). I have no knowledge of Latin at all, but weird links like that make me learn the Italian and a tiny bit of Latin at the same time - it's easier for me to do a "harder" mental task than necessary!
Other words I learn by daft association - the Italian for "Where" is "dove" (with an accent on the E that I can't type), but to me it sounds more like a combination between the English words dove and "duvet". Where's the dove? Under the duvet. Bang, I have learned it and won't forget it.
Some people do learn by intense study. Some people do learn by repetition. To me, repeating things endlessly in a class environment is the worst way to learn. I spent months in school learning how to solve simultaneous equations. Literally months. I had it after the first week, and the intellectual leaps to apply the principles to more difficult
How about having a day off from your geekiness in order to concentrate on your future wife?
All the fancy stuff will be ignored by anyone over X years old (and lead to things like "I haven't had an invite, just this thing in an envelope", people getting lost, etc.). All the geeks will play with it for precisely two and a half seconds and then do what they would have done anyway (i.e. Facebook or SMS their RSVP or whatever).
It's like CV's - you *can* send them to me on a micro-SD card embedded into a credit-card sized business card if you really want to. I'll put them on my "erase and reuse" pile. Or you could have just sent me a piece of paper with all the necessary details on (and maybe make a website with all the details on too but in my experience people either bring the paper with them or forget the website and don't have the paper on them to find out and end up phoning you anyway).
Wanna be a geek? Stick a lego toy on each table, or have a friend start burning CD's / DVD's of the ceremony as soon as possible and give them out to people as they leave as a memento, or make sure ALL your wedding photos are uploaded the next day (including the "professional" ones) so others can see it.
Think what your 86-year-old granny's cousin will do with the invite. If it's anything other than read it and reply, you're doing it wrong. Save the fancy tech for your friends parties where you don't expect dozens of random people you don't know to turn up.
If someone steps on your foot, that's an accident that you/they can negotiate on. If a corporation designs a toy which steps on children's feet every time they use it, that's a different matter entirely.
The problem here is that liability switches from personal (i.e. you hit their car) to corporate (i.e. our cars killed people). That's a messy area to get into, as evidenced by any health and safety policy or risk assessment you'll ever see. Corporations won't want to take it on without government backing or huge liability disclaimers. Once you have those, it doesn't matter if your cars kill 49,999 people a year - that's an improvement on before! And putting corporations in charge of your life is not really a good idea.
If someone goes out and murders people by driving deliberately carelessly, you can punish them and throw them in jail. If a corporation does it, it all becomes about money. Compensation, lawyer's fees, fines, settlements, etc. Someone would now have to put a price on millions of people's lives. That in itself is nothing new, but it's really a substantial change to the way things work currently.
Fast forward to this utopia. A driving license is a waste of time, so no-one has one. Nobody drives trucks any more because - well, what's the point. Taxi drivers are gone. Couriers are gone. The post office is gone (stick your letter in a car and tell it where to go!). Public transport dies. Air travel dies (sleep in the car from London, wake up in Milan). Kids take themselves to school.
Now think how much that's changed the world, how much legislation needs to change to allow it, what it does to cities, and much it costs to implement, account for, replace jobs, etc. It's a big change. And not one that'll happen cheaply. It almost certainly won't be the US that leads the way - some tiny European country will. But there isn't even one of those doing it yet.
The money is costs is the only thing that corporations will care about. Even if they run less people over, it will cost them a LOT more. They won't take the risk without some government policy to help them. And any government policy that does, is basically encouraging their sloppiness and putting a price on a human life.
Sorry but "that" screenshot just destroys their case for them. The Zynga version has more options, extremely different options, totally different graphics, different UI, everything.
I don't think they have a case here, and it's NOT like their game was new and building a genre of its own (I hereby give you SimTower / Yoot Tower, which lets you upgrade elevators and put shops on the floors too - from fecking 1994).
You expect me to get all riled about Zygna ripping off your game, but actually I'm more riled that you *THINK* they are ripping off something that you *THINK* is somehow *your* game. They're not, and it isn't.
There are plenty of situations that you can account for, but the problem is that you have to account for them each specifically. This is probably computing's biggest problem. When a human runs up against a problem they've never experienced before, they have a pretty good stab at solving it without needing to be told what to do. They might get it wrong or right (chip pan fires - what do you do?) but they have a go and it *usually* works. An autonomous vehicle can't really do such things.
Even if you assume that they become like the London Dockland's Light Railway (a completely autonomous subway system), where those sorts of circumstances don't arise, you still have problems that you never foresaw. The DLR scrapped all human drivers - and then had to put human "assistants" back onto those same autonomous trains to manage passengers in an accident and deal with emergency situations.
What if - the bridge is out because it's collapsed / bombed? Does the car know that there's nothing ahead of it? Is that a standard part of their testing regime, how to detect a huge great void ahead of you at 70mph, or will it just think it's a downhill run because it's sensors don't detect any obstacle ahead? Will the following cars follow suit too, so that one bomb on an autonomous bridge causes people to be driven to their deaths en masse until someone stops them all (which may be harder than you think if they are all independently controlled)?
What if a squirrel runs in front of an autonomous car and won't move? Do you bring the entire transit system to an automatic halt because no car will pass the obstacle, or be able to pass one that has? Do you then need all your humans to get out to shoo the squirrel away for your motorway to start working again? Now what happens when you have schoolchildren who work this out and like to play games with the radar signals?
Or will those cars basically become a railway? Each car following the next on a specially designated road? In that case, why not build a railway so they *can't* veer off to other lanes? Autonomous railways are not new, in either industry or mass transit, but neither are they perfect. If you have to build special roads for them, and they have to follow special paths, and nobody is allowed to drive a non-autonomous car on those roads or be a pedestrian there, then you've basically reinvented the railway. If not, then you have BILLIONS of potential hazards at all times, and you only have to miss one to cause your autonomous vehicle company more legal expense than it cost to produce all your cars.
Autonomous cars really are the most ridiculous thing. Call them what they really are: Personal railway carriages. You won't be in control of them, you will be tied to the manufacturer's control, you might be able to go where you want (provided the special road has been built there) but you're paying the car premium to do so.
Maybe in 100 years or so, your car will have an "autonomous road" button - you drive to a station, press the button and it takes you along the "railway" to somewhere nearer work, you get out and back on a real road, turn it off and drive yourself the rest of the way. Maybe. But claiming that all roads will become like that and/or that they'll be able to cope in real-world driving without the possibility of liability is ridiculous. Even if they work PERFECTLY the cost of them + their insurance (either your own or the manufacturer's to cover their arse) + their fuel will work out to be impractical and that's assuming the government or industry pay BILLIONS to run specialised roads alongside normal ones to even a handful of the most populous cities.
Not really that new. Most telephone systems allow it too.
The Samsung OfficeServ I have, I'm pretty sure I read in the manual about a "silent auto-answer pickup" you can do to a remote phone to tap into the speakerphone and hear anything said in the room WITHOUT indication of what you're doing on the target phone. All you need is the right passcode (which is easy if you're the IT guy) and the phone extension and you can hear whatever is said in the that room.
Given that phones are much more prevalent, much less prominent, and much more unexpected to be "hacked", I think you'd always have had greater success that way. And modern telecoms is all managed on the LAN and sometimes even remotely, so it's just as at risk as anything else.
The number one rule, of course, is don't let third-parties have access to your network, and don't have those sorts of "features" turned on.
Especially given that both HP and Google are funding it, one of which probably has an interest in a non-open OS being trounced by an open one, and the other of which supports both types of OS on its hardware (and isn't really "competing" or "allied" with Apple in those terms either).
Lots of things take courage, including throwing yourself off a building. It doesn't mean it's a good idea.
My first thought was actually:
"For fuck's sake. No another attempted 'paradigm' shift on how my users are supposed to run the only program they use and print a document from it."
Seriously, innovation is all well and good. But can someone please innovate around getting a system that increase productivity by NOT requiring retraining. Every "new" way to do things costs money and customers. Whereas a lot of people would pay a lot of money for a system that operates pretty much like Windows 95 did, but without the bugs and other horrendous ideas it had like Active Desktop.
Sorry, but I take offence (as much as I can over an anonymous Internet post, anyway). I grew up with BBC Micros in schools, ZX Spectrum at home and in an era where a kid could easily get their code published in a national magazine or put on a covertape that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I was programming before I was even able to have my own bedroom. I'm not Knuth, but I'm no cynic either. But I *do* work in schools, and I do practise IT and (specifically) some form of programming every single day of my working life (from shell scripts to batch files to C programs to Java applets to Python snippets to you-name-it).
The Raspberry Pi is a fabulous idea (you can check my comment history if you like). But so was the BBC Micro, and the ZX Spectrum, and they came about in an era ripe for computer exploitation and we won't match that era in terms of getting kids into programming (at least not for a very long time). But it won't make a child a programmer, and those it leads to programming would have been lead anyway (it's not like there's a shortage of devices they can program nowadays and the Pi *isn't* as open as you think - *cough* graphics drivers / bootloader *cough* - and doesn't, I'd like to point out, exist for sale yet. I know, I'm waiting for it!).
The "black box" you bemoan is actually how we all got started. The only thing it changes is *where* you suddenly hit a limit that's difficult to cross. To get there, to be limited by lack of source code access to your PC's BIOS or operating system, you have to be a pretty damn experienced programmer for a kid anyway.
With the BBC Micro, you had to reverse engineer the firmware. With the ZX Spectrum, even that which you built yourself, the ROM code was hidden until a third party published a book on it (unless you *wanted* to disassemble the whole damn thing by hand). Nowhere does that hinder a programmer until they start down that track (and the number of children who'll be modifying their Pi's firmware or base OS is going to be minimal).
You've confused "teaching your kids to program" with some Open Source / FSF philosophy and totally ignored the *education* side of things. Kids today will be a million times more impressed and enthralled at writing an iOS indie game, or a DSi homebrew than they will be with many other things they could be programming. They will learn later about the restrictions that come from such actions but the openness is not necessary in the least. The fact is, most schools do not have the time, money, staff, training or capability to even approach such things and those that do won't create *significantly* more programmers than any other. I know. I've worked in them.
Hell, I spent two years when I was still a kid pushing my own peer group through a computer programming class by taking the fecking lessons (with permission) whenever the teacher struggled. I got the whole year group started on playing Z80 assembler games on a TI-85 (as in they went out and bought one because they'd seen what I could do and I showed them how to do the same). None of that requires open-source. None of that requires specific hardware (the TI-85 is pretty closed to tinkering).
The hurdle with getting kids to program is having someone to teach them and having the ability to learn themselves. Either is sufficient. The hardware/software available is nothing but a sideline - they will *find* something to program on, compulsorily taught or not. I learnt, as a child, on widely denigrated programming languages running on closed-source systems with little contact with any reliable information, datasheets, or even other programmers.
If you want kids to be programmers, you can only give them more class time on that (which in turn requires more staff hours of experienced staff, and generates a demand for such). All the fancy hardware in the world won't turn them into programmers or unleash their talents any more than a challenge and bit of easily-available home electronics can. But making programming compulsory
I agree - it's like trying to teach lab work using a computer program (which is an increasingly common trend - I've seen more "virtual" bunsen burners than real ones in the schools I work in).
But if anybody thinks that it means they'll fall in love with Shakespeare, or even plays, rather than the highlight being that the fat bloke looked like their geography teacher, they're sadly mistaken. And it'll still be the geeks who do.
I think you're mistaken here, although your question is certainly relevant.
Kids grow up to loathe Shakespeare even when it's taught correctly. They loathe it because it's hard. I still struggle to spot a joke in a Shakespeare "comedy" (and while I agree they should be exposed to it, far too much emphasis is placed on its educational importance). Maths is hard. Computer science is hard. Programming is, for the majority of people, hard because it involves quite a bit of maths.
Try explaining to the average ten-year-old about matrix transformations and 3D graphics. Or your average 30-year-old, come to that. Sure, they will all enjoy it if you can do it nicely but very, very, very, few will have a natural interest in the subject with any teacher (even themselves).
Kids will always prefer the things that are easy and fun. I bet it's about a 50-50 split between those who loved sports at school and those who loathed it, if not better. You really think that 50% of kids would ever love maths?
Few people "love" geography when they are a kid until it involves going out into a field and falling in a river. Because geography can be hard, but falling in a river is fun and nothing to do with geography. English, maths and science are the most hated subjects because they are the hardest, and the ones that are most important and hence get most of the class time.
Geography, history, religious education/studies, etc. are loathed too, sometimes more, but we don't consider them as important and shove them down children's throats half as much as we do maths, for example. Look at the hatred for a subject in context of just how much time we devote to teaching our kids it - kids hate maths because we *KNOW* it's important so we teach a lot more of it than anything else and STILL they hate it and STILL a lot of them will never grasp it.
ICT is different, however, and can be "easy" for kids these days but that's "computing", not "computer science". Programming, though, is on the "harder" side of things - more computer science - unless you're doing really baby steps. Out of all the fellow students that I met in university, doing Maths and Computer Science, I found two that had ever programmed "seriously" before going there - and they were both mathematicians. In all the schools I work in, and out of all the teachers I know, I found one former COBOL programmer, a couple who knew FORTRAN (mainly mathematicians) and that's *IT*. I actually know more bursar's who have programmed in the past than I do teachers.
Programming is not something that you can just "teach better". You can teach more, certainly (and I think they should) but you can't create a generation of programmers that way. Whether we consider it's something they will need in the future, that's a different matter - I think English, maths and science are much more important than them growing up programming (especially when it's so reliant on concepts from those three - grammars, algebras and computer science!).
Programming will always be "nerdy" because it's difficult, niche and not particular relevant to modern computing (most people will end up using programs rather than writing them by ENORMOUS ratios - we don't need millions of programmers). You can't make it fun or hip or popular past a few basic lessons except among those who WANT to take it further.
You can't teach it mainstream without a LOT of time dedicated to it (How much do you think you can teach in, say, an hour a week for a single semester? Now how much do you think the AVERAGE teacher can teach?) or it'll just end up how I was taught - a few hours on LOGO and BASIC and then never touch on it in lessons again (thank god for home computers!).
Raspberry Pi etc. will sell. People will knock up apps. Kids will do basic things. But you won't get *programmers* out of it, or even more-educated computer users. Programming is *exactly* like Shakespeare. It takes a lot of understanding to scratch beyond the surface, a lot of insight, more time than can
Slashdot Mirror
Perl.
Have seen that - but none of it mentions the killer feature that WinFS promised (and that even the Opera browser has managed to apply to my Gigabytes of email but not one OS vendor has managed to apply to even just my "documents" filesystem in a practical way) - file tagging and database-backed storage.
When I can do "Find all files on Project X dated last week" and have the query return as quickly as an SQL statement would execute WITHOUT needing indexing daemons, trawling over the disk, specific file organsiation, etc. to do so, then I'll consider WinFS as having arrived.
We need to kill off "directories/folders" and move to a label/tag-based database system instead. You can do it with Gigs of spam made of tiny 1kb files - why can't you do it with my filesystem indexes?
I thought that was called the Microsoft Windows Method.
Still waiting on my WinFS, you know.
Psychological disorder is called "Being English".
Smart-arse.
Troll, but:
Don't have a TomTom then?
Or one of the thousands of set-top boxes that use it?
Don't have a TV from a big-name manufacturer (e.g. Sony to name one) with media capabilities?
Don't have a Kindle?
Don't have an Android phone?
Seems to me that Sony, Kindle, Android, TomTom are all big-names and all in the consumer market where almost everyone has at least one themselves, or certainly know someone with one. That's without even trying to dig for more information, too.
P.S. How's Windows Phone coming along?
One of two things will happen:
1) "The OpenPandora Method": Where things run along the lines of (but not this isn't *exactly* what happened to the OP): There's a delay, and then another, and then there's a problem, and the price rises, and we have only limited stock, and there's a component change, and a tax we forgot to add, and the stock has sunk into the ocean, and we need more money to complete the next batch, and the guy ran off with the components, and one of them melted and we need to do a recall, and, and...
2) The "Apple Ipad" Method: Stock turns up. Is sold out. Every time I go to buy one, the window of opportunity is about 14 and a half seconds right in the middle of the busiest part of the working day before the website crashes and Slashdotters buy up all the stock. After six months of trying to buy one, I give up.
I'm hoping for the second - at least that gives me *some* sort of chance if I'm quick and lucky.
Lie detector tests are inadmissable in any sensible court in the world.
Being a smartarse can still end up with you in jail. The letter of the law says that you were required to provide the password and didn't. The excuse doesn't matter by that point, or they wouldn't have used that law against you anyway.
The fact is: They think you had the password, for good reason, "beyond reasonable doubt". They've ordered you to provide it. You failing to provide it when ordered is, in the US and UK I believe, an offence. Thus you will go to jail. Maybe not for as long as the evidence on that device would have meant, but long enough that you don't "get away" if you were trying to hide something.
The law is enforced by humans. If those humans think you have the key and don't believe your excuses, the letter of the law says they can jail you. You can argue it, of course, but that takes years. Being a smartarse doesn't help you at all.
And when the filesystem history of your PC shows logs of you inserting that serial-numbered USB key into your PC last week, and using filesystem encryption tools to access it? And sure, you can combat that, but there's always another way to get caught out that you might not have considered. Hell, they can probably tell you the last time you touched the device itself, or inserted it, and into what computer you inserted it by various bog-standard forensic evidence (scratches on the USB connector, fingerprints, etc.).
You don't even know if they haven't been *watching* you insert that USB key by that point (and if they've raided you, there's a good chance they *have* been watching first). They won't tell you that until AFTER you've already denied ever knowing where it was. You've just stamped "guilty" on your own head by being a smartarse.
You can be a smartarse if you really want to, but nothing in the world is clever enough to stop "reasonable doubt" when you play games like that, especially if you're that confrontational. All that will do is make them WANT to put you away rather than plant doubt in their heads.
After a police raid, they'll just have all your possessions. Sure, it'll take a while to catalogue them all but they will. They actually have to. Not only that, they'll know the serial number of every one and maybe even the purchase origin. While you're sitting in an interview room being a smartarse, they're sending out court orders based on your PC and ISP evidence and forensically recording your Slashdot comments (and the above, in the wrong context, could be enough to convict you even in ten years time if that DOES happen!).
You missed the whole point of the article - the US, and the UK, have laws that if they even THINK you really have the key and haven't forgotten it, they'll throw you in a cell until you remember. Be as smart-arse as you like but people have already been convicted and jailed over it because of "reasonable doubt" that they weren't innocent. The law is there, it's written, it's enforceable (whether it's SENSIBLE is another matter and one that takes decades to argue in court) and if they suspect for a moment that you're being a smartarse, they'll use it.
This is how the law works. If you're stopped by a policeman in the UK, he'll pay you zero attention if you're polite, genuine, "I know, officer, I was speeding. It's a fair cop." about it. Start being pricky towards them for no reason and they'll have you for your tyre wear, the rear light, the slightly-covered number plate, look up your insurance, your license, run a check on your name, look through the car for anything you shouldn't have, etc.
It has to be said that it's not an unsuccessful method of law enforcement and anyone with brain enough to be respectful and polite and co-operative will "get away" with things that the idiots who's taking their badge number and threatening them won't. The same applies from the police up to the courts. Hire a good lawyer, be co-operative and polite, play by the rules and you'll get the best result. Be pricky about it and they'll do what they can to dig deeper and inconvenience you.
I can think of ways you could reasonably consider to have good reason to have lots of encrypted USB sticks about that you don't know the passwords too. But being the smartarse will end up with you in jail, whether you "did" anything or not. You can argue about it as much as you like but if the judge takes a dislike to your attitude or methods, they'll put you away at least until your successful appeal.
What do you do? You provide all the information you have and be as co-operative as possible. Why? The laws on that are worded so that co-operation is the better of the two options so that you're *forced* to co-operate or go to jail.
You can argue about self-incrimination, free-speech, etc. afterwards - when the judge KNOWS that you've been 100% co-operative. You can still have evidence stricken, ask for a mis-trial, appeal, etc. but you've been co-ope
Or we could just teach the Norwegians to shoot straight, and maybe take some helicopter flying lessons.
13,100 feet to the lake.
Been digging since 1974. That's 344 feet a year, or a foot per day. Hell, *I* could have dug quicker than that!
Or maybe they just had lots of problems, costs, setbacks, etc. associated with a 13,000 foot-long drill through a substance that nobody has ever drilled 13,000 down through?
Replace "gay" with "black", "female", "uneducated", "from a third-world country", "Muslim", "Christian", "Jewish", "foreign", "weird", "Down's", etc. or any other of a million adjectives and the same has been true throughout history.
Though the government are treading extremely cautiously, they are never denying that he worked wonders - see their statements on this issue from the BBC and other news outlets. That's an unusual step - they would normally avoid the superlatives when discussing things like this but they don't. They're just questioning if they're going to get a million copycat pardon applications for everything under the sun, or somehow be seen to be "pardoning" illegal activity (justified in a modern time or not).
Being gay, at the time, was illegal. He knew that. He was convicted of practising homosexual acts (no matter how abhorrent the law, it was still the law, and he knew that - I disagree with the law against assisted suicide but it doesn't mean anyone should go and break it JUST because they disagree with it). It's an indisputable fact that you cannot fix. He followed the legal path of the time and they came to the conclusion that any fair judgement would have HAD to come to at the time. He broke the law, as written, deliberately.
In the same way that today it's illegal in the UK to view certain types of pornographic material even if it pictures only consenting adults AND NOBODY ELSE. It's still illegal. You still have to break the law to be convicted of it. You can claim that the law needs to be changed but not that the law doesn't apply to you.
And whatever you do now, you are trying to recognise his contributions, not "pardon" him because he was gay and mistreated - and I think that's always been the case. A pardon actually "tidies up" the matter and puts a close to it. Maybe we shouldn't do that, in the same way that we shouldn't forget what's happening in Guantanamo Bay still.
Nobody doubts his contribution - the fact that we all still know his bloody name for starters. Anybody who cares will know how he died. The pardon is only a gesture that has legal issues surrounding it (which might affect still-living persons). Give it another 50 years and then do it. His memory will wait patiently.
I signed the petition myself, but I can't say I disagree with the stance the government has taken. If the government was a friend it would be one of those "My hands are tied, but you *KNOW* I feel the same and want to help you" situations. (And I have no political leanings at all because I can't stand politics or, especially, politicians of any party).
I'd rather remember him as a great mathematician than as someone excused from breaking the law because it was changed years after his death. The pride of the man was in his own work after all - that's what should be remembered.
I think it can be easily argued that the Libre and Open codebases are so similar that a patch for one IS a patch for another. The differences are minor at this stage and more to do with what features they want in rather than what patches can be ported.
That said, LibreOffice has over a year's headstart and they are much more pushing towards the "Let's clear out the crap" philosophy - and doing a good job. They also have almost all the original OO.org developers contributing too.
I think it's OO that's going to die off quicker than you think. It's going to be EGCS/GCC again - the fork runs off, gets a headstart against a project that has a delay in evolving and eventually "becomes" and takes over from the original project. Given a few years, I see OO basically sucking in 99% of the LibreOffice work. Until then, they are a year ahead in cleaning up and understanding the code and a significant proportion of the new features are patches that work on both Libre and OO with little effort.
So what you're saying is that Ubisoft don't already have a hot-backup to these database that is customer- and business-critical and needs to be up 24/7? They don't have a testing regime with a live copy of the dataset to test against? They couldn't have performed the migration piecemeal? They couldn't have done the migration in the background while the main servers take the brunt of the traffic and then - when and only when it was tested and working - started the background database serving queries instead?
Don't talk shit. This is a large system - millions of customers, always on, etc.etc. It's cost millions of dollars. If you need to take it down for more than a day (especially for PLANNED maintenance), it means you didn't implement it properly, don't test it properly, didn't even spec it properly, don't manage it properly and don't care about your customers. This is why redundant systems exist - for exactly these sorts of systems.
Do maintenance by all means, but taking it OFFLINE to do so with no backup system? That's just shoddy whether you're migrating a handful of MySQL instances or the back end of a large bank.
Recruitment agencies are worthless, no matter the country or the profession. Reed, the largest recruitment company in the UK, has an horrendous reputation precisely because they know NOTHING about the areas they dabble in. Anyone who uses someone like Reed exclusively is not someone you want to work for.
When I left uni, I started my own business. When the time came to start a "real job" (as my mother called it), I merely put word out. I did sign onto some websites, agencies etc. but got nothing worthwhile back at all.
The first recruiter to call offering me a job? It was for a car sales firm, liaising with their shops to make sure the mother company was doing everything it could for them. Not IT-related at all. I have *no* idea how they narrowed me into their final candidates for interview but they did. The quote, mid-way through the interview was "Ah, f***ing Reed. Working their magic again". The company concerned were just as pissed off as I was and, ironically, offered me the job. I politely declined. I was basically shoved into the interview under false pretences in order to fulfil their quota of candidates. Needless to say, I removed myself from their records rather harshly.
My girlfriend - she's a genetic scientist. She went to Reed Healthcare to get her first job (been studying, researching, etc. right up until she turned 32). They specialise in fulfilling medical positions. The Reed interviewer asked her what genetic meant, and if she was a nurse.
It's not just that particular company, though, they are all like it. They only have one thing in mind - getting their fee / commission by providing enough candidates for interview. If they can do it without being totally laughed out of the room, even better, but the people who use agencies don't get to see what the agency rejected (so they can just lie and say there was nobody else suitable).
And if you're looking for work, most agencies don't understand what you do for a living anyway, don't know what to look for, and do little that you couldn't do yourself. Even the HR department probably doesn't know but unless they CARE about the position, they won't CARE about whether their requirements are suitable or not.
Hell, my brother (a Mathematics and Astrophysics graduate with good IT skills) was told by an agency to apply for an IT tech suppport position - but didn't bother to check if he had a driving licence which the position required. The VERY LAST question on the interview mentioned it obliquely, he queried it, then had to apologise for wasting their time.
If a company uses a recruitment agency it's either to fill up their numbers (i.e. we already know we'll hire internally, but this way we can say we advertised the position), or because they don't care about getting the best person for the job. If they did care, they'd do the job themselves (that's the point of a HR department!). If they do the job themselves and are blinkered by things like basic IT certifications, it means they don''t care about hiring a person good for the job, but one that ticks the boxes for some manager somewhere.
I have no certifications. I have actively refused to take them (I consider them a vendor-specific waste-of-money that functions only as an advertisement for the vendor). I have never had a problem finding work (except where Reed are involved!) and have sometimes been hired precisely BECAUSE I was the person who had more experience than certifications. I've ever been hired via a recruitment agency that specialised in IT. But there, the recruitment agent probably knew more about IT than I did - he certainly pressed me for lots of obscure technical details! And even in that case, I found him for a specific job he had advertised, not the other way around.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you hire badly, you'll only ever hire bad people (i.e. those with certs over experience), and nobody "good" will want to work with you. If you hire well you'll only ever hire good people and the good people will want to work with you.
The only consistent factor in how people learn is that everyone is different. Modern teaching recognises this, though whether it teaches while "believing" it is another matter entirely. Some learn by doing, some by seeing others do, some by turning something into a narrative, some just by hearing, etc. and the technique used vastly depends on the things you're trying to learn.
Learning a physical skill? Best to watch an expert and then try it yourself, or maybe just struggle along on your own starting from scratch depending on what makes the best brain-links for yourself, or maybe read up on the subject beforehand so you go in prepared, or maybe you have to imagine yourself doing it first, or maybe... ?
Learning a language? Probably best to hear it and speak it. Might be helpful to tie it in to other languages you know. Maybe the grammar can be learned from a book or you can just struggle through being corrected all the time by a native speaker. Or maybe you just absorb it if you immerse yourself in the language and rely on the reward of successfully catching a word you know in their babble to help you reinforce your knowledge of that success?
The point is that everything you do is wholly reliant on what you want to learn, who's teaching you and how you want to learn it. I have an ATROCIOUS memory. It really is awful. But I can tell you pi to 32 decimal places off the top of my head and know 50-60 strong passwords without hesitation. My memory is actually pretty damn good and near-perfect but I have to WANT to remember something and have a trigger GIVEN to me to recall it (don't ask why I wanted to know pi to 32 decimal places!).
The automatic cruft-filters on my brain will mean that I won't remember what I had for lunch - it's trivia, it doesn't matter and it's not useful to recall it later. But if you told me it was important to remember it, I would be able to produce that data on demand 30 years later. I still know the number plate of a hire car that my ex-father-in-law rented for a week ten years ago. Because there was a need to remember it at one point, and ever since it won't leave my brain.
Equally, if you *never* asked me to produce that data, I would never remember to do it myself (i.e. "Meet me on the top of the Eiffel Tower in 2020" - not a chance that I'll remember to actually DO SO, but will always be able to remember being asked to do so!). Memory: perfect, when put into a specific training mode when the information needs to be memorised, and requires SOMETHING ELSE to trigger it to recall. Otherwise, forget it. Write things in a diary? I'd never remember to look inside it to find them (I'm not joking, either!)
How do you even understand that without being me? I can remember hundred of random facts if necessary, but I can't learn through association with weird images like some people can, so that form of memory technique doesn't work at all for me.
I'm struggling to learn Italian at the moment but the bits I *do* learn, I learn by tying to a word of Latin origin that has an equivalent in English (i.e. to eat, is "mangiare", from the Latin "mandere", but I only link it to "mandible" which is your lower jaw). I have no knowledge of Latin at all, but weird links like that make me learn the Italian and a tiny bit of Latin at the same time - it's easier for me to do a "harder" mental task than necessary!
Other words I learn by daft association - the Italian for "Where" is "dove" (with an accent on the E that I can't type), but to me it sounds more like a combination between the English words dove and "duvet". Where's the dove? Under the duvet. Bang, I have learned it and won't forget it.
Some people do learn by intense study. Some people do learn by repetition. To me, repeating things endlessly in a class environment is the worst way to learn. I spent months in school learning how to solve simultaneous equations. Literally months. I had it after the first week, and the intellectual leaps to apply the principles to more difficult
How about having a day off from your geekiness in order to concentrate on your future wife?
All the fancy stuff will be ignored by anyone over X years old (and lead to things like "I haven't had an invite, just this thing in an envelope", people getting lost, etc.). All the geeks will play with it for precisely two and a half seconds and then do what they would have done anyway (i.e. Facebook or SMS their RSVP or whatever).
It's like CV's - you *can* send them to me on a micro-SD card embedded into a credit-card sized business card if you really want to. I'll put them on my "erase and reuse" pile. Or you could have just sent me a piece of paper with all the necessary details on (and maybe make a website with all the details on too but in my experience people either bring the paper with them or forget the website and don't have the paper on them to find out and end up phoning you anyway).
Wanna be a geek? Stick a lego toy on each table, or have a friend start burning CD's / DVD's of the ceremony as soon as possible and give them out to people as they leave as a memento, or make sure ALL your wedding photos are uploaded the next day (including the "professional" ones) so others can see it.
Think what your 86-year-old granny's cousin will do with the invite. If it's anything other than read it and reply, you're doing it wrong. Save the fancy tech for your friends parties where you don't expect dozens of random people you don't know to turn up.
If someone steps on your foot, that's an accident that you/they can negotiate on. If a corporation designs a toy which steps on children's feet every time they use it, that's a different matter entirely.
The problem here is that liability switches from personal (i.e. you hit their car) to corporate (i.e. our cars killed people). That's a messy area to get into, as evidenced by any health and safety policy or risk assessment you'll ever see. Corporations won't want to take it on without government backing or huge liability disclaimers. Once you have those, it doesn't matter if your cars kill 49,999 people a year - that's an improvement on before! And putting corporations in charge of your life is not really a good idea.
If someone goes out and murders people by driving deliberately carelessly, you can punish them and throw them in jail. If a corporation does it, it all becomes about money. Compensation, lawyer's fees, fines, settlements, etc. Someone would now have to put a price on millions of people's lives. That in itself is nothing new, but it's really a substantial change to the way things work currently.
Fast forward to this utopia. A driving license is a waste of time, so no-one has one. Nobody drives trucks any more because - well, what's the point. Taxi drivers are gone. Couriers are gone. The post office is gone (stick your letter in a car and tell it where to go!). Public transport dies. Air travel dies (sleep in the car from London, wake up in Milan). Kids take themselves to school.
Now think how much that's changed the world, how much legislation needs to change to allow it, what it does to cities, and much it costs to implement, account for, replace jobs, etc. It's a big change. And not one that'll happen cheaply. It almost certainly won't be the US that leads the way - some tiny European country will. But there isn't even one of those doing it yet.
The money is costs is the only thing that corporations will care about. Even if they run less people over, it will cost them a LOT more. They won't take the risk without some government policy to help them. And any government policy that does, is basically encouraging their sloppiness and putting a price on a human life.
Sorry but "that" screenshot just destroys their case for them. The Zynga version has more options, extremely different options, totally different graphics, different UI, everything.
I don't think they have a case here, and it's NOT like their game was new and building a genre of its own (I hereby give you SimTower / Yoot Tower, which lets you upgrade elevators and put shops on the floors too - from fecking 1994).
You expect me to get all riled about Zygna ripping off your game, but actually I'm more riled that you *THINK* they are ripping off something that you *THINK* is somehow *your* game. They're not, and it isn't.
There are plenty of situations that you can account for, but the problem is that you have to account for them each specifically. This is probably computing's biggest problem. When a human runs up against a problem they've never experienced before, they have a pretty good stab at solving it without needing to be told what to do. They might get it wrong or right (chip pan fires - what do you do?) but they have a go and it *usually* works. An autonomous vehicle can't really do such things.
Even if you assume that they become like the London Dockland's Light Railway (a completely autonomous subway system), where those sorts of circumstances don't arise, you still have problems that you never foresaw. The DLR scrapped all human drivers - and then had to put human "assistants" back onto those same autonomous trains to manage passengers in an accident and deal with emergency situations.
What if - the bridge is out because it's collapsed / bombed? Does the car know that there's nothing ahead of it? Is that a standard part of their testing regime, how to detect a huge great void ahead of you at 70mph, or will it just think it's a downhill run because it's sensors don't detect any obstacle ahead? Will the following cars follow suit too, so that one bomb on an autonomous bridge causes people to be driven to their deaths en masse until someone stops them all (which may be harder than you think if they are all independently controlled)?
What if a squirrel runs in front of an autonomous car and won't move? Do you bring the entire transit system to an automatic halt because no car will pass the obstacle, or be able to pass one that has? Do you then need all your humans to get out to shoo the squirrel away for your motorway to start working again? Now what happens when you have schoolchildren who work this out and like to play games with the radar signals?
Or will those cars basically become a railway? Each car following the next on a specially designated road? In that case, why not build a railway so they *can't* veer off to other lanes? Autonomous railways are not new, in either industry or mass transit, but neither are they perfect. If you have to build special roads for them, and they have to follow special paths, and nobody is allowed to drive a non-autonomous car on those roads or be a pedestrian there, then you've basically reinvented the railway. If not, then you have BILLIONS of potential hazards at all times, and you only have to miss one to cause your autonomous vehicle company more legal expense than it cost to produce all your cars.
Autonomous cars really are the most ridiculous thing. Call them what they really are: Personal railway carriages. You won't be in control of them, you will be tied to the manufacturer's control, you might be able to go where you want (provided the special road has been built there) but you're paying the car premium to do so.
Maybe in 100 years or so, your car will have an
"autonomous road" button - you drive to a station, press the button and it takes you along the "railway" to somewhere nearer work, you get out and back on a real road, turn it off and drive yourself the rest of the way. Maybe. But claiming that all roads will become like that and/or that they'll be able to cope in real-world driving without the possibility of liability is ridiculous. Even if they work PERFECTLY the cost of them + their insurance (either your own or the manufacturer's to cover their arse) + their fuel will work out to be impractical and that's assuming the government or industry pay BILLIONS to run specialised roads alongside normal ones to even a handful of the most populous cities.
Not really that new. Most telephone systems allow it too.
The Samsung OfficeServ I have, I'm pretty sure I read in the manual about a "silent auto-answer pickup" you can do to a remote phone to tap into the speakerphone and hear anything said in the room WITHOUT indication of what you're doing on the target phone. All you need is the right passcode (which is easy if you're the IT guy) and the phone extension and you can hear whatever is said in the that room.
Given that phones are much more prevalent, much less prominent, and much more unexpected to be "hacked", I think you'd always have had greater success that way. And modern telecoms is all managed on the LAN and sometimes even remotely, so it's just as at risk as anything else.
The number one rule, of course, is don't let third-parties have access to your network, and don't have those sorts of "features" turned on.
Mmm, that's odd, I have to agree.
Especially given that both HP and Google are funding it, one of which probably has an interest in a non-open OS being trounced by an open one, and the other of which supports both types of OS on its hardware (and isn't really "competing" or "allied" with Apple in those terms either).
Weird.
Courage: Yes.
Sense: No.
Lots of things take courage, including throwing yourself off a building. It doesn't mean it's a good idea.
My first thought was actually:
"For fuck's sake. No another attempted 'paradigm' shift on how my users are supposed to run the only program they use and print a document from it."
Seriously, innovation is all well and good. But can someone please innovate around getting a system that increase productivity by NOT requiring retraining. Every "new" way to do things costs money and customers. Whereas a lot of people would pay a lot of money for a system that operates pretty much like Windows 95 did, but without the bugs and other horrendous ideas it had like Active Desktop.
Where is the "Productive Desktop Distro"?
Sorry, but I take offence (as much as I can over an anonymous Internet post, anyway). I grew up with BBC Micros in schools, ZX Spectrum at home and in an era where a kid could easily get their code published in a national magazine or put on a covertape that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I was programming before I was even able to have my own bedroom. I'm not Knuth, but I'm no cynic either. But I *do* work in schools, and I do practise IT and (specifically) some form of programming every single day of my working life (from shell scripts to batch files to C programs to Java applets to Python snippets to you-name-it).
The Raspberry Pi is a fabulous idea (you can check my comment history if you like). But so was the BBC Micro, and the ZX Spectrum, and they came about in an era ripe for computer exploitation and we won't match that era in terms of getting kids into programming (at least not for a very long time). But it won't make a child a programmer, and those it leads to programming would have been lead anyway (it's not like there's a shortage of devices they can program nowadays and the Pi *isn't* as open as you think - *cough* graphics drivers / bootloader *cough* - and doesn't, I'd like to point out, exist for sale yet. I know, I'm waiting for it!).
The "black box" you bemoan is actually how we all got started. The only thing it changes is *where* you suddenly hit a limit that's difficult to cross. To get there, to be limited by lack of source code access to your PC's BIOS or operating system, you have to be a pretty damn experienced programmer for a kid anyway.
With the BBC Micro, you had to reverse engineer the firmware. With the ZX Spectrum, even that which you built yourself, the ROM code was hidden until a third party published a book on it (unless you *wanted* to disassemble the whole damn thing by hand). Nowhere does that hinder a programmer until they start down that track (and the number of children who'll be modifying their Pi's firmware or base OS is going to be minimal).
You've confused "teaching your kids to program" with some Open Source / FSF philosophy and totally ignored the *education* side of things. Kids today will be a million times more impressed and enthralled at writing an iOS indie game, or a DSi homebrew than they will be with many other things they could be programming. They will learn later about the restrictions that come from such actions but the openness is not necessary in the least. The fact is, most schools do not have the time, money, staff, training or capability to even approach such things and those that do won't create *significantly* more programmers than any other. I know. I've worked in them.
Hell, I spent two years when I was still a kid pushing my own peer group through a computer programming class by taking the fecking lessons (with permission) whenever the teacher struggled. I got the whole year group started on playing Z80 assembler games on a TI-85 (as in they went out and bought one because they'd seen what I could do and I showed them how to do the same). None of that requires open-source. None of that requires specific hardware (the TI-85 is pretty closed to tinkering).
The hurdle with getting kids to program is having someone to teach them and having the ability to learn themselves. Either is sufficient. The hardware/software available is nothing but a sideline - they will *find* something to program on, compulsorily taught or not. I learnt, as a child, on widely denigrated programming languages running on closed-source systems with little contact with any reliable information, datasheets, or even other programmers.
If you want kids to be programmers, you can only give them more class time on that (which in turn requires more staff hours of experienced staff, and generates a demand for such). All the fancy hardware in the world won't turn them into programmers or unleash their talents any more than a challenge and bit of easily-available home electronics can. But making programming compulsory
I agree - it's like trying to teach lab work using a computer program (which is an increasingly common trend - I've seen more "virtual" bunsen burners than real ones in the schools I work in).
But if anybody thinks that it means they'll fall in love with Shakespeare, or even plays, rather than the highlight being that the fat bloke looked like their geography teacher, they're sadly mistaken. And it'll still be the geeks who do.
I think you're mistaken here, although your question is certainly relevant.
Kids grow up to loathe Shakespeare even when it's taught correctly. They loathe it because it's hard. I still struggle to spot a joke in a Shakespeare "comedy" (and while I agree they should be exposed to it, far too much emphasis is placed on its educational importance). Maths is hard. Computer science is hard. Programming is, for the majority of people, hard because it involves quite a bit of maths.
Try explaining to the average ten-year-old about matrix transformations and 3D graphics. Or your average 30-year-old, come to that. Sure, they will all enjoy it if you can do it nicely but very, very, very, few will have a natural interest in the subject with any teacher (even themselves).
Kids will always prefer the things that are easy and fun. I bet it's about a 50-50 split between those who loved sports at school and those who loathed it, if not better. You really think that 50% of kids would ever love maths?
Few people "love" geography when they are a kid until it involves going out into a field and falling in a river. Because geography can be hard, but falling in a river is fun and nothing to do with geography. English, maths and science are the most hated subjects because they are the hardest, and the ones that are most important and hence get most of the class time.
Geography, history, religious education/studies, etc. are loathed too, sometimes more, but we don't consider them as important and shove them down children's throats half as much as we do maths, for example. Look at the hatred for a subject in context of just how much time we devote to teaching our kids it - kids hate maths because we *KNOW* it's important so we teach a lot more of it than anything else and STILL they hate it and STILL a lot of them will never grasp it.
ICT is different, however, and can be "easy" for kids these days but that's "computing", not "computer science". Programming, though, is on the "harder" side of things - more computer science - unless you're doing really baby steps. Out of all the fellow students that I met in university, doing Maths and Computer Science, I found two that had ever programmed "seriously" before going there - and they were both mathematicians. In all the schools I work in, and out of all the teachers I know, I found one former COBOL programmer, a couple who knew FORTRAN (mainly mathematicians) and that's *IT*. I actually know more bursar's who have programmed in the past than I do teachers.
Programming is not something that you can just "teach better". You can teach more, certainly (and I think they should) but you can't create a generation of programmers that way. Whether we consider it's something they will need in the future, that's a different matter - I think English, maths and science are much more important than them growing up programming (especially when it's so reliant on concepts from those three - grammars, algebras and computer science!).
Programming will always be "nerdy" because it's difficult, niche and not particular relevant to modern computing (most people will end up using programs rather than writing them by ENORMOUS ratios - we don't need millions of programmers). You can't make it fun or hip or popular past a few basic lessons except among those who WANT to take it further.
You can't teach it mainstream without a LOT of time dedicated to it (How much do you think you can teach in, say, an hour a week for a single semester? Now how much do you think the AVERAGE teacher can teach?) or it'll just end up how I was taught - a few hours on LOGO and BASIC and then never touch on it in lessons again (thank god for home computers!).
Raspberry Pi etc. will sell. People will knock up apps. Kids will do basic things. But you won't get *programmers* out of it, or even more-educated computer users. Programming is *exactly* like Shakespeare. It takes a lot of understanding to scratch beyond the surface, a lot of insight, more time than can