Imagine a world populated by people who
live in farms, or in a nomadic tribe somewhere. The most advanced form of transportation
is the horse.
Now you come up
with this invention called a "car" and want to
sell it, or just persuade all your friends that
they should use it. What would you do?
Obviously, you'll outfit the car with bridle,
reins and saddle, and a mechanical whip instead
of the gas pedal.
Then you'd tell all your friends: "just ride it like a horse! It's easy!
You don't have to know how it works, the car looks and feels just like a horse, so off you go!"
Gasoline would be made to look like oats, or
whatever it is that horses eat. So every once
in a while you'll just stop by a gas station
to "feed" your horse.
Obviously, this is not how cars work. A horse is a shitty metaphor for a car because it is a) possibly
dangerous and b) probably dumb in the long run.
a) Unlike oats,
gasoline explodes if you're not careful --and it may kill you if you try to drink it instead of "feeding" it to your "horse". You think it's clearly a win, but
the dangers of gasoline perhaps need to be dealt with. (There
are no lawyers in this primitive world but there
are tribal vendettas, which are almost
as unpleasant).
So you add a well
trained monkey, that comes with every car. The idea is, this creature will remain
hidden unless you try to put some gas in your
mouth, and which point the monkey jumps right
in front of your face and says: "are you sure?
oats are for horses! not for people!".
Having gone through the trouble of training the monkey it's hard to resist
the temptation to add value to the user
experience by teaching the monkey to do
other helpful things at random times, which thinking
leads directly to the dancing-paperclip-from-hell-that-won't-go-away-no- matter-what
which is going to drive you completely insane,
unless you happen to like monkeys --which of
course some people do.
b) By treating the car as a horse, the user remains ignorant of important stuff like gas
being toxic; and also ignorant of the car's
full potential b/c a car can do things that
no horse can.
And as intuitive as the car may be to us
21st-century western folk, its interface
(ignition switch, gas and brake pedals and
so on) is far from intuitive to a horse-only
person. All of us who "just want to drive"
have had to learn how to do it; and despite
claims to the contrary the modern desktop GUI
also has to be learned and taught.
Trying to deny that there is a learning curve
with GUIs leads to more and more bloat (wizards,
assistants, dialog boxes and whatnot --lots of
monkeys). Worse,
it seems to persuade even sensible people that
everything the computer does should be understandable without mental effort. As a sysadmin,
I've been amazed at seeing many users,
highly intelligent and successful people, go through a personality change of sorts the
minute they have a problem with their computer and
become infantile and almost helpless in dealing
with the machine. In my experience, the fancy
GUI liberates the user for mundane tasks.
For interesting or slightly more difficult ones
the user tends to become more, not less, dependent on other
people to show them how the computer works.
I don't mean to condemn "the GUI" in general, but certainly
the current desktop environments --all of them--
try so hard to be intuitive that they end of
being even more complex and overloaded.
As a wise old BOFH said: the only intuitive
interface is the nipple. It's all learned
behavior after that.
Lawsuits dig a deeper financial hole for SCO?
on
More on Recent SCOings On
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Motley Fool thinks so. Money quote:
In addition to the horrific, self-inflicted damage to its reputation, the licensing-lawsuit strategy is delivering a one-two punch to SCO's bottom line. Efforts to license Linux cost SCO $3.4 million in the first quarter. That's right, one-third of total revenue was wiped out. The payback? Twenty thousand dollars. That's not a typo. I know guys who make that much mowing lawns for a summer. Moreover, the balance sheet already currently lists $8 million in liabilities to legal firms. That number is likely to increase with the company's new lawsuit against AutoZone
Translation: every new lawsuit that SCO initiates costs SCO money in legal
fees (and you know Boies doesn't work cheap)
and other costs.
Re:Russion mission aborted because of "smell"
on
Meet the Nasalnaut
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Also,
this
guy, a Japanese journalist who was the first
"space tourist" (before Tito) went up to Mir in 1990 and made live reports to Japanese TV about
his experience.
IIRC he complained a lot about the
awful smell. Although I couldn't find anything
directly related to that, in this
report he talks about related problems
(vomiting, waste disposal).
The box claimed to take AA batteries, but they don't work properly. You need to purchase Kodak's proprietary batteries.
That's a revealing quote, and is the big reason
behind Kodak's troubles for a long time, way before
the advent of digital photography.
A couple of decades ago, Kodak was king of the
market with its InstaMatic camera. It was widely
popular, but the film cartridges it used were
propietary. This meant Kodak had a lock on the
market, and they made billions.
Then, 35mm SLRs became available to the masses.
35mm film had a slightly larger negative size
than Kodak's film, which gave it higher quality.
More importanty, 35mm was not a propietary
technology so the film worked with cameras from
any number of manufacturers, and the film itself
could be made by anyone.
Kodak could not, or would not, adapt to this
situation; and they've been looking for the next
InstaMatic ever since. Next thing they tried
was 110 film: smaller negative size, and still
propietary. Serious amateurs, and pros, didn't
go for it.
Then came several other films (like clockwork,
every couple of years during the 80s there'd
be some new "system" from Kodak with a new
film format). The last one was, I believe,
Advantix. The theme was always the same:
Kodak wanted again to lock-in consumers with
propietary films, and 35mm users weren't buying.
So all Kodak cameras since the InstaMatic
have flopped. And thanks to open competition,
they got their clocks cleaned on 35mm film
by the likes of Fuji, etc.
So this is a company who still thinks it
can capture significant segments of the imaging
market by introducing propietary technologies.
In the digital market it's obvious to the
Slashdot crowd that won't work; but the point
is, in conventional photo it also had not
been working for a l-o-n-g time and Kodak
cannot, or will not, see that. They are
still looking for the next InstaMatic
and that's going to kill them eventually.
The company is still so huge that it will take
some time for it to die off, but unless they
change their whole philosophy, they'll be gone.
You are not alone, and the problem is not with
the movies (which are very well crafted) but with the story itself. From what I thought was a
good article on the subject:
But finally it is what is left out of The Lord of the Rings that makes
one wonder if this is really a book for adults. Tolkien invented his
own mythological world, but it lacks the dignity and the sinew of a
real mythology, for it is without religion and essentially without
sex.
Hobbits may have fur at the bottom of their legs, but they have
seem to have no balls at the top; and that pretty much goes for the
rest of Middle-earth, too. The women in The Lord of the Rings are few
and pallid, while The Hobbit has no female characters at all [... ] The film of The Lord of the Rings seems to
have tried to beef up the female quotient; but it was surely an uphill
struggle.
If one is to regard The Lord of the Rings as a book for
adults, what disturbs is not so much the absence of women [... ] as the absence of
desire. In this work that presents itself as the representation of a
whole world, there is hardly any awareness that we are sexual beings.
[... ] even if it can be shown that The Lord
of the Rings is religious as a book and I doubt whether even this is
true [... ] the objection is that the people within the story
have no religious beliefs or practices, and are thus unlike any real
human society. Tolkien always insisted, and rightly, that his work was
not an allegory, but the construction of a self-subsistent world with
its own history. The trouble is that it is an emotionally impoverished
world, in which the blood runs very thin.
[... ]
Tolkien, in sum, was unable to develop his hero. Frodo has learned
nothing: he is essentially the same person that he was when the
adventure started, except that now he is depressed. All that Tolkien
can imagine is regress, a return by the hobbits to the darling little
Beatrix Potter world from which they began. Admittedly, Frodo is no
longer at ease in this world, but Tolkien is unable to convey anything
beyond the fact of a psychic wound: no enlargement or transformation of
experience, and no philosophy of grand disillusionment, either. He is
merely a person who has had a terrible time, and of course you cannot
expect him not to be a little queer after all he has endured. As for
Sam, the faithful retainer, he settles back quietly into tubby
rusticity and picturesque anecdotage as though nothing much had
happened. Contrast Parsifal, to turn to Wagner again: the hero of that
opera starts as a man without experience, but he learns and changes.
He discovers sexuality and self-mastery, compassion and understanding.
All such growth is beyond Tolkien's range.
If all this sounds interesting (or at least
controversial)
the
whole article is worth reading.
Challenges in flight automation vs. complexity
on
The Future of Flight
·
· Score: 1
Airplanes are becoming more automated already,
and we can hope software will become more reliable
in the future (really?), but as the article points out, in fully
automated civil flight the individual aircraft will be
only a piece of a larger systems puzzle:
But the practicality, and safety, of doing away with the pilot altogether
could eventually become obvious to all as, in 20 or 30 years, the
military begins to use pilotless vehicles to airlift soldiers, and
UAVs start moving cargo routinely around the world. And small UAVs,
some say, might one day buzz around cities in place of the Fedex
delivery van.
To exploit the availability of such smaller aircraft, the entire
air-transport system will have to be overhauled. The number of
domestic air travellers in America, for example, is expected to triple
within 20 years according to an aeronautics blueprint by America's
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). But if this is
to happen, many more of America's 5,000 regional airports will have to
be used. Currently, only 64 airports carry 85% of the country's civil
air traffic. Yet in the past decade, only one large hub airport and
seven new runways have been opened. Given the constraints, few new big
hub airports are likely to be built.
So the bigger picture will include a radically "overhauled" traffic control system One with more traffic, doing more
kinds of different things than today (such
as free flight for example). And the question
(in my mind) is: how does a fully
automated airplane fit into this picture?
The airplane's computers will have to interact
in non-trivial ways with the traffic control
computers and --in the free flight scenario--
with the computers on nearby aircraft. These
in turn will interact with other ancillary
computer systems providing things like weather,
data link, etc.
Suppose there are only 2 aircraft (A and B) in the sky in a given area. Computer A needs to
interact with Computer B, and vice versa, so
there are two interactions going on here. Add
a third aircraft and since they all need to interact with one another the number leaps to
6 paths (A to B and C, C to B and A, B to A and C). Add an air traffic control computer (and
yes, there will still be need for those even
with free flight) and now we have 9 paths
and so on. As more elements are added to
the system, the complexity grows geometrically.
And with it, the probability of a software
error somewhere in this system also grows
geometrically. There would also be a higher
potential for cascading errors propagating
through the system.
I think that getting a handle on that kind
of complexity is likely to
be a big challenge; even the 20 to 30
year time horizon the article mentions might
be too optimistic.
Already being done. There are a number of
moored balloons already in use for weather radar, and for coastal
and border surveillance (e.g. trying to catch drug
runners) in the USA.
The practical benefit is such a prohibition is questionable:
Viruses pre-date the web. They had no trouble at all propagating
then. So I don't think that posting virus code on a web site
substantially increases their impact,
just like posting the formula for cyanide doesn't
increase the chances of my creditors poisoning me.
Likewise, making such public posting illegal
would have little impact on the creation of viruses. The information gets out through many
channels, including 0wn3d sites.
Benefits of posting virus code publicly:
More people become aware of what the viruses
can do; and more people have a chance to develop
countermeasures.
IANAL, but it seems to me the law should
contemplate prohibiting or limiting speech
(which source code is) by weighing the
pros and cons to society. Society gains very
little from such a prohibition (the activity
would carry on clandestinely anyway), but
loses some valuable information in the process.
This definitely wouldn't seem to justify
a legal prohibition to posting source code
publicly.
I think I can easily show that Canadians
understand snowmobiles better than Egyptians.
Duh! Well I should hope so. But that does
not say anything at all about the mechanical
abilities of either group. It does say something
about the fact that: a) there is more snow in
Canada than Egypt; b) Canadian standard of living can better afford such toys. And that's all.
So unless the survey tried to use statistical controls,
its data are completely meaningless -worse, misleading. Just a couple of hypothetical examples off the top of my head:
Asians and the internet Control for age and education (Asians have
higher proportions of college students; who can
certainly be expected to be internet-savvy), otherwise
you haven't shown anything.
Blacks and Hispanics and cellphones Control for poverty (poor people living in
urban areas are less likely to have a landline, ergo more likely to
use a cellphone or payphone; hence more likely to
understand how it works --out of necessity--; and since there is higher poverty among blacks and
hispanics...), otherwise you haven't shown anything.
(Notice I didn't compare Canadians to Floridians,
as some would argue these two groups are one and the same).
The analogy with Columbus fails on a couple of respects, like the risk vs.
benefit calculation.
Columbus new that the risks in his mission were
manageable, and the immediate payoff was high.
(Of course, Spain went on to become a gold-based
economy, importing pretty much all manufactured goods and got their clocks cleaned by British wool
and things like that; quickly losing its world status, but that's another story).
The risks of a manned Mars mission are unknown in
some pretty important areas, all having to do with long-term exposure to space, for both humans and
machines.
Consider the moon landing. 10 Apollo spacecraft
came before the one that made it. One of those (Apollo 3)
burned horribly on the launch pad. And thanks to Hollywood we all know that Apollo 13
also failed to reach the moon. That's 2 failures in 13 missions; a 15% failure rate, and only considering technical failures, since the risks in the human biology area for that kind of mission were understood reasonably well by then, thanks to a succession of manned orbital flights.
Now consider a Mars mission. We don't know what effects on human bodies (and minds!) will result from prolonged exposure to radiation and zero gravity for a mission that lasts that long, except they
all look pretty bad. And while unmanned space
probes have continued functioning for decades
in space, they don't have life-support systems so
we don't know what the risks are in that area either.
So it seems to me that advocating a manned Mars
mission now is not very rational. We would simply be praying we get lucky, but the odds right
now don't look very good.
We (the world, not just the US) need to know
a whole lot more about what's involved before making any kind of vaguely rational decision to go to Mars. Use the Space Station to the max. Also put another one in orbit around the Moon for a few years. Learn what the glitches are likely to be and then decide.
Some of you may disagree with me, but Sun has contriubuted a lot to the OpenSource community. They have programmers working on the Mozilla, GNOME and most especially OpenOffice projects.
Don't forget Jeff Bonwick's slab allocator which is used for memory allocation in the Linux kernel.
Ukraine is a country with major problems. It is still suffering from the aftermath of Chernobyl. Privatization efforts have failed. And it is being ruled by an anti-democratic, authoritarian president who quite possibly has
ordered the murder of journalists
And what kind of response do they get from the international community? Never mind help in promoting more political or economic reform, just please the media conglomerates.
Could you comment on the enforceability of the Gnu General Public License? That is, if a violation is found and cannot be resolved amicably, what kind of legal action can effectively be pursued against the violators, particularly when the original product is not being licensed for money? Also, to which jurisdictions do you think the GPL applies?
While many of the people who post here want information to be free as in freedom; and a small segment wants it also to be "free" as in beer, this is NOT what is making web ads less effective, because Slashdotters are not typical of the web-browsing public at large, so you are attacking the wrong target.
I would bet you that empirically, you could easily verify that the vast majority of people who browse the web do so without blocking filters in place, and have only the vaguest notion of what Javascript is, let alone being willing and able to disable it.
Thus the vast majority of ads are being seen. But their effectiveness is diminished. Whose fault is that?
It better not be the fault of people who browse your pages, because if you are in business it makes no sense to blame your customers for anything. That is a stupid attitude, it goes against common sense and business sense, and it won't gain you any sales.
Customers should be persuaded --seduced even-- into liking what you have to offer them. And it's up to you as a business, and whomever creates the ads that give you revenue, to come up with ads that seduce your customers, not repel them.
So it is up to the content provider to make "us" want to view the ads. "We" are the consumers, your potential customers and we don't have to give you our money if we don't want to; especially if you are going to annoy us, or worse yet, use ads as a hidden way of tracking people (doubleclick anyone?)
Morality doesn't enter the picture. Accusing your potential customers of being a bunch of freeloaders is just plain silly.
Sheilding your children from violence is another bad move.
But on a game you can be violent without consequence. If you blow somebody up, they come back in a short while. If somebody blows you up, you come right back from the dead, just with less points.
In real life, violence leads to pain, suffering and loss --and death is permanent. So you could argue that games "shield" kids from the consequences of the simulated violence onscreen, no?
I use Slackware on 7 servers (including one
running Oracle) and 2 workstations (one a laptop).
Rock-solid stable, and elegant in its simplicity.
It doesn't try to do everything for you, and
that's a definite plus if you want/need to know
what's going on in your system and want to make
your own choices.
The default installation leave the machine open on a wide variety of services (rpc, anoymous ftp, telnet, etc.) Slackware is not alone in this, all distributions do it. But this leaves the machine open to all sorts of exploits.
Wouldn't it be better to have all such daemons turned off by default (esp. for installations geared towards home users)? The choice to open up services should be a positive choice on the part of the users, perhaps after a short warning about the security implications of running network daemons.
I've written a project (20,000 lines of Delphi code) that's been pretty well received; and I can tell you that if your company's product, whatever it is, is something I end up using under an open license, I would love to submit bugfixes and such, time permitting. Thus one potential big benefit of open-sourcing a project: more robust code.
No guarantees of course. The product would have to appeal to developers (not just your ordinary users) somehow, because they're the ones who would want to "scratch an itch" and have the wherewithal (sp?) to do so.
Your company should also have a system, an infrastructure in place, so that the eventual code contributions result in some positive feedback to the contributors. I.e., you should treat your code contributors as part of a "community", whatever that means.
As to the question "how to make sure the contributions get back to the company" for inclusion in future releases, the answer IMHO would be: gratify the ego of your contributors. The section on code forks in The Cathedral and the Bazar is also good reading.
I'm working in education and have been gathering feedback for awhile on which programming language to introduce to middle school students.
Guido van Rossum, Python's author, has a project called Computer Programming for Everybody which you may want to keep an eye on (although it's still in its early stages).
I haven't read the story (the site is slashdotted) so this is just in response to many messages in this thread, and to the news of the attacks themselves.
The fact of the matter is that most Linux distributions install out of the box with way to many ports open and exposes them to attack.
Yeah, so do Windows boxes, yadda, yadda, but who gives a shit? I care about making Linux better, not about Windows being worse.
Item No. 1: At my LUG somebody this week asked for help after his RH 6.1 box was cracked. Guess what, his install had left his machine running BIND (the version with the known exploit!), Samba, nntpd, ftpd (with anonymous ftp enabled!) and all sorts of other crazy things. Why in the hell does an installation for a home machine open all this crap? (It's the same for Slackware, and for all the other big distros). This is crazy and totally irresponsible.
Item No.2: Where I work I'm in charge of security and we get our daily ration of port scans and such. Ocasionally I discretely run nmap back at the source. Granted I don't do this always, but when I do the fact is that the vast majority of those machines turn out to be running Linux and are wide open, listening on all sorts of ports that home machines have no business listening on.
Linux is becoming more popular; and that's wonderful. But in the short term this just means that more machines are sitting ducks, really. The way the default installations leave the machines so open it's a sad joke, combined with more high-bandwidth connections means that there are more potential slaves out there for distributed DoS and it's incredibly easy to break them wide open without the owner ever noticing.
And I don't care if Windows is even easier to crack. That's a f*ing lame excuse. If we're committed to Linux we should react to stories like this by asking "what can Linux do to avoid being part of the problem"? rather than shouting "BackOrifice, nyah, nyah!" or some other pointless diatribe. That's FUD in reverse and any Linux fan should be embarrassed for engaging in it.
Hell, at work I've advocated Linux to the point where we're running many important servers on it, despite some reluctance of management (and a good amount of FUD from vendors who were cut out:-) ) But I'm not talking about whether theoretically Windows is more crackable than Linux; I'm talking about what I see almost every time I take a close look at who's portscanning our firewall and most of the time it's a Linux box; and you know what? It's embarassing and there's no good reason for it to happen.
The proper response, IMHO, is to petition the makers of all the popular distributions to adopt a closed configuration for their default install, with users having to explicitly open services after been given a short blurb on security and the risks of running unattended network daemons. That's more productive than wondering about a conspiracy that Microsoft could't pull off even if they wanted to.
Big pluses for Usenet: it's reliable; it's free to the point of near-anarchy, and it does not have a corporate (or state) identity. And I don't get to see pretty pictures unless I want to.
Big minus: flamewars crossposted to hell and back. But the killfile can take care of many of those also.
Usenet is remarkably adaptable. In roughly 10 years I've seen it successfully handle many annoying things:
Clueless Newbies: Many (particularly those coming from AOL) were treated with unremitting hostility; and they soon fled Usenet for more welcoming environments.
SPAM: Thanks to Canter & Siegel and "Make money fast!" cancelbots were invented.
S*rd*r *rg*c and the like: A combination of cancelbots and kill files handles this very nicely.
Binaries: It's easy enough to filter them out of non-binary newsgroups.
The key to its adaptability has been the presence of somewhat clued-in individuals (admins. and users) who can proactively take measures to filter out the annoyances. Only if such individuals leave will it be in trouble.
All my passwords consist of random, but readable, strings of characters that alternate each hand on the keyboard. That way I can type them a) quickly, and b) with a sort of rythmn in my hands and fingers.
Initially I remember the way these fake words "sound" (I also keep them written down for a while) but after a couple of weeks my hands remember them better than my mind.
OSS apps. get written because of programmers wanting to "scratch an itch". The great OSS developers have written software that they want to use --to paraphrase something you've written.
But a programmer's desires are not necessarily the same as that of the mythical "average user", and if you buy that premise one could worry about OSS leading in the so-called useability area (KDE and GNOME look very nice, but they are IMHO derivative of the "desktop" concept).
In fact, this argument -valid or not- can be the basis for more FUD against Linux, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a world populated by people who live in farms, or in a nomadic tribe somewhere. The most advanced form of transportation is the horse.
Now you come up with this invention called a "car" and want to sell it, or just persuade all your friends that they should use it. What would you do?
Obviously, you'll outfit the car with bridle, reins and saddle, and a mechanical whip instead of the gas pedal.
Then you'd tell all your friends: "just ride it like a horse! It's easy! You don't have to know how it works, the car looks and feels just like a horse, so off you go!"
Gasoline would be made to look like oats, or whatever it is that horses eat. So every once in a while you'll just stop by a gas station to "feed" your horse.
Obviously, this is not how cars work. A horse is a shitty metaphor for a car because it is a) possibly dangerous and b) probably dumb in the long run.
a) Unlike oats, gasoline explodes if you're not careful --and it may kill you if you try to drink it instead of "feeding" it to your "horse". You think it's clearly a win, but the dangers of gasoline perhaps need to be dealt with. (There are no lawyers in this primitive world but there are tribal vendettas, which are almost as unpleasant).
So you add a well trained monkey, that comes with every car. The idea is, this creature will remain hidden unless you try to put some gas in your mouth, and which point the monkey jumps right in front of your face and says: "are you sure? oats are for horses! not for people!".
Having gone through the trouble of training the monkey it's hard to resist the temptation to add value to the user experience by teaching the monkey to do other helpful things at random times, which thinking leads directly to the dancing-paperclip-from-hell-that-won't-go-away-no- matter-what
which is going to drive you completely insane,
unless you happen to like monkeys --which of
course some people do.
b) By treating the car as a horse, the user remains ignorant of important stuff like gas being toxic; and also ignorant of the car's full potential b/c a car can do things that no horse can.
And as intuitive as the car may be to us 21st-century western folk, its interface (ignition switch, gas and brake pedals and so on) is far from intuitive to a horse-only person. All of us who "just want to drive" have had to learn how to do it; and despite claims to the contrary the modern desktop GUI also has to be learned and taught.
Trying to deny that there is a learning curve with GUIs leads to more and more bloat (wizards, assistants, dialog boxes and whatnot --lots of monkeys). Worse, it seems to persuade even sensible people that everything the computer does should be understandable without mental effort. As a sysadmin, I've been amazed at seeing many users, highly intelligent and successful people, go through a personality change of sorts the minute they have a problem with their computer and become infantile and almost helpless in dealing with the machine. In my experience, the fancy GUI liberates the user for mundane tasks. For interesting or slightly more difficult ones the user tends to become more, not less, dependent on other people to show them how the computer works.
I don't mean to condemn "the GUI" in general, but certainly the current desktop environments --all of them-- try so hard to be intuitive that they end of being even more complex and overloaded.
As a wise old BOFH said: the only intuitive interface is the nipple. It's all learned behavior after that.
Translation: every new lawsuit that SCO initiates costs SCO money in legal fees (and you know Boies doesn't work cheap) and other costs.
The whole article is here.
IIRC he complained a lot about the awful smell. Although I couldn't find anything directly related to that, in this report he talks about related problems (vomiting, waste disposal).
That's a revealing quote, and is the big reason behind Kodak's troubles for a long time, way before the advent of digital photography.
A couple of decades ago, Kodak was king of the market with its InstaMatic camera. It was widely popular, but the film cartridges it used were propietary. This meant Kodak had a lock on the market, and they made billions.
Then, 35mm SLRs became available to the masses. 35mm film had a slightly larger negative size than Kodak's film, which gave it higher quality. More importanty, 35mm was not a propietary technology so the film worked with cameras from any number of manufacturers, and the film itself could be made by anyone.
Kodak could not, or would not, adapt to this situation; and they've been looking for the next InstaMatic ever since. Next thing they tried was 110 film: smaller negative size, and still propietary. Serious amateurs, and pros, didn't go for it.
Then came several other films (like clockwork, every couple of years during the 80s there'd be some new "system" from Kodak with a new film format). The last one was, I believe, Advantix. The theme was always the same: Kodak wanted again to lock-in consumers with propietary films, and 35mm users weren't buying.
So all Kodak cameras since the InstaMatic have flopped. And thanks to open competition, they got their clocks cleaned on 35mm film by the likes of Fuji, etc.
So this is a company who still thinks it can capture significant segments of the imaging market by introducing propietary technologies. In the digital market it's obvious to the Slashdot crowd that won't work; but the point is, in conventional photo it also had not been working for a l-o-n-g time and Kodak cannot, or will not, see that. They are still looking for the next InstaMatic and that's going to kill them eventually. The company is still so huge that it will take some time for it to die off, but unless they change their whole philosophy, they'll be gone.
If all this sounds interesting (or at least controversial) the whole article is worth reading.
Airplanes are becoming more automated already, and we can hope software will become more reliable in the future (really?), but as the article points out, in fully automated civil flight the individual aircraft will be only a piece of a larger systems puzzle:
So the bigger picture will include a radically "overhauled" traffic control system One with more traffic, doing more kinds of different things than today (such as free flight for example). And the question (in my mind) is: how does a fully automated airplane fit into this picture?
The airplane's computers will have to interact in non-trivial ways with the traffic control computers and --in the free flight scenario-- with the computers on nearby aircraft. These in turn will interact with other ancillary computer systems providing things like weather, data link, etc.
Suppose there are only 2 aircraft (A and B) in the sky in a given area. Computer A needs to interact with Computer B, and vice versa, so there are two interactions going on here. Add a third aircraft and since they all need to interact with one another the number leaps to 6 paths (A to B and C, C to B and A, B to A and C). Add an air traffic control computer (and yes, there will still be need for those even with free flight) and now we have 9 paths and so on. As more elements are added to the system, the complexity grows geometrically. And with it, the probability of a software error somewhere in this system also grows geometrically. There would also be a higher potential for cascading errors propagating through the system.
I think that getting a handle on that kind of complexity is likely to be a big challenge; even the 20 to 30 year time horizon the article mentions might be too optimistic.
For the technically inclined, the page on Computer-Related Incidents with Commercial Aircraft makes interesting reading.
Already being done. There are a number of moored balloons already in use for weather radar, and for coastal and border surveillance (e.g. trying to catch drug runners) in the USA.
The practical benefit is such a prohibition is questionable:
Benefits of posting virus code publicly:
IANAL, but it seems to me the law should contemplate prohibiting or limiting speech (which source code is) by weighing the pros and cons to society. Society gains very little from such a prohibition (the activity would carry on clandestinely anyway), but loses some valuable information in the process. This definitely wouldn't seem to justify a legal prohibition to posting source code publicly.
The article was shallow as shit, BTW
The CIA World Factbook is my friend for that.
Duh! Well I should hope so. But that does not say anything at all about the mechanical abilities of either group. It does say something about the fact that: a) there is more snow in Canada than Egypt; b) Canadian standard of living can better afford such toys. And that's all.
So unless the survey tried to use statistical controls, its data are completely meaningless -worse, misleading. Just a couple of hypothetical examples off the top of my head:
Control for age and education (Asians have higher proportions of college students; who can certainly be expected to be internet-savvy), otherwise you haven't shown anything.
Control for poverty (poor people living in urban areas are less likely to have a landline, ergo more likely to use a cellphone or payphone; hence more likely to understand how it works --out of necessity--; and since there is higher poverty among blacks and hispanics...), otherwise you haven't shown anything.
(Notice I didn't compare Canadians to Floridians, as some would argue these two groups are one and the same).
Columbus new that the risks in his mission were manageable, and the immediate payoff was high. (Of course, Spain went on to become a gold-based economy, importing pretty much all manufactured goods and got their clocks cleaned by British wool and things like that; quickly losing its world status, but that's another story). The risks of a manned Mars mission are unknown in some pretty important areas, all having to do with long-term exposure to space, for both humans and machines.
Consider the moon landing. 10 Apollo spacecraft came before the one that made it. One of those (Apollo 3) burned horribly on the launch pad. And thanks to Hollywood we all know that Apollo 13 also failed to reach the moon. That's 2 failures in 13 missions; a 15% failure rate, and only considering technical failures, since the risks in the human biology area for that kind of mission were understood reasonably well by then, thanks to a succession of manned orbital flights.
Now consider a Mars mission. We don't know what effects on human bodies (and minds!) will result from prolonged exposure to radiation and zero gravity for a mission that lasts that long, except they all look pretty bad. And while unmanned space probes have continued functioning for decades in space, they don't have life-support systems so we don't know what the risks are in that area either.
So it seems to me that advocating a manned Mars mission now is not very rational. We would simply be praying we get lucky, but the odds right now don't look very good.
We (the world, not just the US) need to know a whole lot more about what's involved before making any kind of vaguely rational decision to go to Mars. Use the Space Station to the max. Also put another one in orbit around the Moon for a few years. Learn what the glitches are likely to be and then decide.
Don't forget Jeff Bonwick's slab allocator which is used for memory allocation in the Linux kernel.
Ukraine is a country with major problems. It is still suffering from the aftermath of Chernobyl. Privatization efforts have failed. And it is being ruled by an anti-democratic, authoritarian president who quite possibly has
ordered the murder of journalists
And what kind of response do they get from the international community? Never mind help in promoting more political or economic reform, just please the media conglomerates.
Could you comment on the enforceability of the Gnu General Public License? That is, if a violation is found and cannot be resolved amicably, what kind of legal action can effectively be pursued against the violators, particularly when the original product is not being licensed for money? Also, to which jurisdictions do you think the GPL applies?
While many of the people who post here want information to be free as in freedom; and a small segment wants it also to be "free" as in beer, this is NOT what is making web ads less effective, because Slashdotters are not typical of the web-browsing public at large, so you are attacking the wrong target.
I would bet you that empirically, you could easily verify that the vast majority of people who browse the web do so without blocking filters in place, and have only the vaguest notion of what Javascript is, let alone being willing and able to disable it.
Thus the vast majority of ads are being seen. But their effectiveness is diminished. Whose fault is that?
It better not be the fault of people who browse your pages, because if you are in business it makes no sense to blame your customers for anything. That is a stupid attitude, it goes against common sense and business sense, and it won't gain you any sales.
Customers should be persuaded --seduced even-- into liking what you have to offer them. And it's up to you as a business, and whomever creates the ads that give you revenue, to come up with ads that seduce your customers, not repel them.
So it is up to the content provider to make "us" want to view the ads. "We" are the consumers, your potential customers and we don't have to give you our money if we don't want to; especially if you are going to annoy us, or worse yet, use ads as a hidden way of tracking people (doubleclick anyone?)
Morality doesn't enter the picture. Accusing your potential customers of being a bunch of freeloaders is just plain silly.
But on a game you can be violent without consequence. If you blow somebody up, they come back in a short while. If somebody blows you up, you come right back from the dead, just with less points.
In real life, violence leads to pain, suffering and loss --and death is permanent. So you could argue that games "shield" kids from the consequences of the simulated violence onscreen, no?
I use Slackware on 7 servers (including one
running Oracle) and 2 workstations (one a laptop).
Rock-solid stable, and elegant in its simplicity.
It doesn't try to do everything for you, and
that's a definite plus if you want/need to know
what's going on in your system and want to make
your own choices.
The PostScript version of this paper can be found here
Hi Patrick:
The default installation leave the machine open on a wide variety of services (rpc, anoymous ftp, telnet, etc.) Slackware is not alone in this, all distributions do it. But this leaves the machine open to all sorts of exploits.
Wouldn't it be better to have all such daemons turned off by default (esp. for installations geared towards home users)? The choice to open up services should be a positive choice on the part of the users, perhaps after a short warning about the security implications of running network daemons.
How about Slackware taking the lead in this area?
I've written a project (20,000 lines of Delphi code) that's been pretty well received; and I can tell you that if your company's product, whatever it is, is something I end up using under an open license, I would love to submit bugfixes and such, time permitting. Thus one potential big benefit of open-sourcing a project: more robust code.
No guarantees of course. The product would have to appeal to developers (not just your ordinary users) somehow, because they're the ones who would want to "scratch an itch" and have the wherewithal (sp?) to do so.
Your company should also have a system, an infrastructure in place, so that the eventual code contributions result in some positive feedback to the contributors. I.e., you should treat your code contributors as part of a "community", whatever that means.
As to the question "how to make sure the contributions get back to the company" for inclusion in future releases, the answer IMHO would be: gratify the ego of your contributors. The section on code forks in The Cathedral and the Bazar is also good reading.
In fact, all of The Cathedral and the Bazaar is recommended reading for your bosses. Good luck.
Computer Programming for Everybody which you may want to keep an eye on (although it's still in its early stages).
I haven't read the story (the site is slashdotted) so this is just in response to many messages in this thread, and to the news of the attacks themselves.
:-) )
The fact of the matter is that most Linux distributions install out of the box with way to many ports open and exposes them to attack.
Yeah, so do Windows boxes, yadda, yadda, but who gives a shit? I care about making Linux better, not about Windows being worse.
Item No. 1: At my LUG somebody this week asked for help after his RH 6.1 box was cracked. Guess what, his install had left his machine running BIND (the version with the known exploit!), Samba, nntpd, ftpd (with anonymous ftp enabled!) and all sorts of other crazy things. Why in the hell does an installation for a home machine open all this crap? (It's the same for Slackware, and for all the other big distros). This is crazy and totally irresponsible.
Item No.2: Where I work I'm in charge of security and we get our daily ration of port scans and such. Ocasionally I discretely run nmap back at the source. Granted I don't do this always, but when I do the fact is that the vast majority of those machines turn out to be running Linux and are wide open, listening on all sorts of ports that home machines have no business listening on.
Linux is becoming more popular; and that's wonderful. But in the short term this just means that more machines are sitting ducks, really. The way the default installations leave the machines so open it's a sad joke, combined with more high-bandwidth connections means that there are more potential slaves out there for distributed DoS and it's incredibly easy to break them wide open without the owner ever noticing.
And I don't care if Windows is even easier to crack. That's a f*ing lame excuse. If we're committed to Linux we should react to stories like this by asking "what can Linux do to avoid being part of the problem"? rather than shouting "BackOrifice, nyah, nyah!" or some other pointless diatribe. That's FUD in reverse and any Linux fan should be embarrassed for engaging in it.
Hell, at work I've advocated Linux to the point where we're running many important servers on it, despite some reluctance of management (and a good amount of FUD from vendors who were cut out
But I'm not talking about whether theoretically Windows is more crackable than Linux; I'm talking about what I see almost every time I take a close look at who's portscanning our firewall and most of the time it's a Linux box; and you know what? It's embarassing and there's no good reason for it to happen.
The proper response, IMHO, is to petition the makers of all the popular distributions to adopt a closed configuration for their default install, with users having to explicitly open services after been given a short blurb on security and the risks of running unattended network daemons. That's more productive than wondering about a conspiracy that Microsoft could't pull off even if they wanted to.
Big minus: flamewars crossposted to hell and back. But the killfile can take care of many of those also.
Usenet is remarkably adaptable. In roughly 10 years I've seen it successfully handle many annoying things:
The key to its adaptability has been the presence of somewhat clued-in individuals (admins. and users) who can proactively take measures to filter out the annoyances. Only if such individuals leave will it be in trouble.
All my passwords consist of random, but readable, strings of characters that alternate each hand on the keyboard. That way I can type them a) quickly, and b) with a sort of rythmn in my hands and fingers.
Initially I remember the way these fake words "sound" (I also keep them written down for a while) but after a couple of weeks my hands remember them better than my mind.
OSS apps. get written because of programmers wanting to "scratch an itch". The great OSS developers have written software that they want to use --to paraphrase something you've written.
But a programmer's desires are not necessarily the same as that of the mythical "average user", and if you buy that premise one could worry about OSS leading in the so-called useability area (KDE and GNOME look very nice, but they are IMHO derivative of the "desktop" concept).
In fact, this argument -valid or not- can be the basis for more FUD against Linux, for example.
Should OSS advocates worry more about this?