I recently went through a related exercise with my daughter. I showed her ponycorns because it's exactly the kind of game she already likes. She got the idea that we could create a game too, since I'm also a programmer and she's a whole two years older than Sissy. At that age I'm not about to teach her actual programming, but I thought it might be a good way for her to see the creative process at a higher level - plus we'd end up with something that she could enjoy and show off to her friends. We had a lot of fun with her drawing the characters which I then turned into sprites, and recording audio, and brainstorming about what puzzles would be in the game. Now the effort has stalled, mostly for lack of a decent framework. I mean, all we need is basic point-and-click stuff, maybe even an inventory and stuff like that, but it would sure be nice to have the characters actually *move* smoothly from one place to another instead of just disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Oh, it would be extra nice to have something open source, or at least runnable on Linux. I looked at dozens of frameworks that I found on http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html and elsewhere, and very few could meet those simple requirements without getting into full-out 2D suitable for side-scrollers and platformers - meaning that they're way more complicated than I need and generally don't "scale down" to the simpler stuff very well. I tried Adventure Maker but quickly ran into its limitations even with a project as simple as this. I might try GameMaker next, even though it's also Windows-centric (I can use my wife's machine if I have to), because the other offerings out there seem so incredibly thin.
The point is not that I personally need help finding a tool with which to make this particular game - though suggestions would certainly be welcome. The problem is that the "state of play" is just so incredibly piss-poor overall. Forget about finding something that even an older child could use *themselves* to create a game that doesn't totally suck. It's hard enough to find something that a *professional programmer* (albeit not a game programmer like Sissy's dad) can stand to work with long enough to get such a result. Something just good enough to let parents and kids put together a simple adventure/puzzle game on par with ponycorns, to give them something that's fun and that just barely hints at what you can do if you can program, would go a long way toward making them want to learn more. As far as I can tell, such a thing doesn't exist.
Thanks for the mention. To be quite clear on this, the at-rest encryption that's currently in CloudFS is not as secure as we'd like it to be, or as secure as it will be when it's released. To put it another way, it's more secure than Dropbox or Jungledisk have proven to be, it's probably more secure than a couple of dozen other similar cloud-storage options (it's hard to tell since so many are not open source), but it does have flaws. To be more specific, it's secure against inspection by someone who only has the ciphertext - such as your cloud provider. However, it is not secure against transparent modification (flipping a bit in the ciphertext flips the corresponding bit in the plaintext). Also, since it's currently CTR-mode encryption, if someone has both ciphertext and plaintext for the same part of a file then that part of the file becomes readable from just ciphertext thereafter. These flaws are not acceptable; the current code is only a stopgap. This is exactly why I made the point on Twitter recently that even the strongest ciphers with long keys can still result in weak protection if used improperly. I'm sick of seeing cloud-storage providers crow about how strong their transport encryption is but say nothing about on-disk encryption, or mention using "military grade AES-256" on disk but say nothing about how. Worst of all are the ones -who require that you give them keys - which for all you know will be stored unprotected right next to the data.
The good news is that I've been consulting with some real crypto experts - I admit I'm not one myself - on this. We've worked out a block-based scheme that all involved believe will address the above flaws, while also handling concurrent writes correctly (something most "personal backup" alternatives fail to do). The performance cost is more than I'd like, but I think it's no more than necessary and the parallelism inherent in the underlying system should still yield more-than-adequate performance. I've already begun implementation, and will fully disclose all the details once I get a bit further along.
You've decided to permanently archive only your side of the record and he never got the privilege of adding his defense (or eventual outcome) to it.
Not true. Even aside from the fact that anyone can get their own blog, he has commented on my site and I have allowed him to. If he wants to add more in his own defense, he may and he knows that.
You've decided to permanently archive only your side of the record and he never got the privilege of adding his defense (or eventual outcome) to it.
"Sociopathically"? You certainly can think what you want, but I'm not the one posting like a sociopath.
I should take lessons in civility from someone who joins the conversation with "You're a dick"? I don't think so. It's hardly a surprise that someone who acts like that would take an extreme "forget what happened" attitude, either. Very self-serving of you. Maybe an argument for people to be kind and forgiving shouldn't be delivered with such jarring contrast to your own behavior.
For what it's worth, I don't want to punish this guy forever. That's why I made the post un-searchable, helping him "move past the idiot stage" as I hope someone will do for you someday. It does have a little to do with accurate historical documentation, though I don't think there's anything fucked up or fanatical about that. I don't believe in censorship or revisionism. It was part of the public record once, and it should remain so. I've seen the power to edit the record used for ill *far* more often than I've seen it used for good, and I'm not going to start down that path. Once posted, everything on my site stays posted. It's my site, so deal with it.
The key point here is that you don't have to forget in order to forgive. If this had reached the courts, which it nearly did, that would be part of the public record and would remain so with nothing I could do about it even if I wanted to. It would also, rightly, be considered part of the *past* once the offender had been punished or made reparations appropriately. We need to teach people to forgive *without* forgetting, because forgetting is antithetical to learning.
I've long since gotten used to the idea that everything I say online - going back to Usenet days and even before - will stay with me forever. Some times you just have to remind people that it was X years ago and people/opinions change. Would you take advice from someone in mid-life whose opinions hadn't changed since their teens?
That's all garden-variety stuff by now, but I did have a more interesting case come up on my website. I had occasion to write about someone who was trying to scam people with an online "contest" that was rigged. Yes, I named names, especially after the guy (who went by more than one name BTW) tried to intimidate me with fake legal threats. Years later, I got email saying that he'd reformed, he was trying to get a job, but potential employers would Google for his name and find my site. Tough luck, I thought, and continued to think as the pleas kept coming every few months for years. What finally got my attention was when he mentioned that he now had a family. This little piece of history, no matter how valid, was now starting to affect *other people* who were completely innocent. While I don't believe in censorship, I do believe in the validity of the "statute of limitations" concept so I decided on a compromise. The article about this guy is still on my site, you can even find it by searching there, but you can't find it by searching on Google. (Robots.txt plus referer blocking specific to that post, for those who care.)
The lesson is that the existence of information and the ease with which it may be looked up are two different things. Dirt is just too easy to find, for the same reasons that gold is too hard: search engines' evaluation of "importance" or "relevance" doesn't always match any sane human's. While it should be *possible* to find someone's decade-old forum posts, perhaps it's not quite right for the most inflammatory thing they ever said to be the very first thing that shows up in a casual search . . . and it often will be, because controversy drives higher rankings. Making stuff just a little bit harder to find, like we all do here with low-rated comments and like I basically did in this little anecdote, deserves more frequent consideration as an alternative to deletion.
Thank you for making that point. Marketing and finance and such are all wonderful optimizations of the wealth-creation process, but there has to be some actual wealth-creation to optimize. How many people in the US are actually creating wealth, instead of figuring out how to persuade others to spend some of theirs? It's no wonder we have booms and busts, when 90% of the "wealth" out there is total speculative bovine-excrement. BTW, I do know not all readers here are from the US, but I am referring here specifically to the US; as a citizen here all my life, I'm painfully aware that just about every other country has a much more realistic view of the relationship between real value and mere dollar signs. As far as I can tell, Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both turning the US into a big Golgafrincham Ark, full of people whose much-vaunted skills are only of value within a totally inbred economic system increasingly divorced from the actual needs or wants of anyone not born into that economic and sociopolitical environment.
JeffH (disclaimer: we've met) had it right: that sucks. Even if we don't personally have the skills to do things that result in direct benefits *somewhere* on a sane Maslow Hierarchy, we can at least turn those skills toward taking the tools that have been developed to serve the vapid goals of "social" media and try to re-orient them toward more productive purposes.
...is that *no* single-figure-of-merit benchmark is going to be worth anything. Sandia's "Graph 500" Johnny-come-lately isn't going to be any better than Linpack that way, and will just skew the results towards a different not-generally-useful architecture. A far better idea has been around for over five years: the HPC Challenge benchmark. It consists of seven different tests (Linpack is just one) which stress different aspects of system design. Anybody who knows anything about building big systems would identify some mix of these tests that best approximates their own workload, use that as a starting point for looking at likely alternatives, and then remember that it's just a starting point. The only benchmark that really matters is the one that you run yourself on your own application, but that can be a very expensive and time-consuming exercise so these lists can be a good way to figure out which systems deserve that more extended analysis. Linpack, on the other hand, isn't even useful for that. What's sad is that some people either didn't know (which says something about how we train engineers) or didn't care until a Chinese system found its way to the top (which says something even worse).
This is one reason why we should insist on the source code to all firmware - or reverse engineer write new firmware ourselves.
"We" should reverse-engineer more firmware "ourselves" eh? When I see them at lunch, I'll let the subset of "we" who actually do such things know that somebody with an Ubuntu address said so. That'll be good for a few laughs.
Knowing how to recast a search to get results that are similar but not exactly the same is a skill unto itself, and thinking it doesn't apply to search engines is simply wrong.
"Recasting a search" is a useful skill, but it's no substitute for other non-search-engine methods of finding related information. As our friend AC pointed out, Google might not be the right tool for the job. Lacking knowledge of the world beyond his screen, though, he failed to apprehend that Wikipedia and Amazon might not be any better. All textual searches, whether embedded in a site like Amazon or presented for general use on a site like Google, share some features and limitations, and your suggestion to "recast a search" is exactly the tool-centric myopia the original article was about. Those kinds of searches are great at yielding other links that contain the same words, but what about synonyms? If you know a synonym then you can do a second search, but what about the synonym or related word/concept you didn't already know? Consider my African education example. If I'd been looking at a book about the educational system in Ghana, how would I have known to search for "Ivory Coast" next time? As it turns out, the two systems are often compared. That connection was obvious using "old fashioned" methods, but search engines and search boxes would by their very nature have been very unlikely to show it.
Text search is just one useful kind of search. Nobody knows that better than those who've implemented text search. Sometimes, though, you're better off with an index or a catalog which slices and dices information a fundamentally different way. Would you eschew all keys or indices in a database in favor of text search? Of course not, but it's the same principle. The whole point here is that those who are too accustomed to typing text into boxes are losing the ability to make effective use of other knowledge-retrieval methods, and all you've done is demonstrate that.
May I suggest that you RTFA? It was about the specific methods people use to find information, not the information itself, and even explicitly calls out Google as a culprit. That's the context in which I was responding, so stop being an asshole.
The sad fact is that making something convenient *does* impact people's ability to use less convenient methods. That can be a problem when the less convenient method is unavailable, or has other benefits. With respect to the first point, there's a lot of information that hasn't made its way into Google yet - e.g. legal case histories, medical records, lots of historical archive material. Some of that information is subject to privacy concerns and should *never* be on Google or Wikipedia. If you want to use those sources effectively, you have to develop skills like using the local classification system (e.g. Dewey/LoC or domain-specific) and indexing methods, skimming pages quickly to sort out the wheat from the chaff, etc. You get better by doing, and if what you've been doing is honing your Google skills instead then you simply will be less productive in these other environments than someone who is used to them. S2BU if that turns out to be part of your job, and you might be surprised how often it is.
With respect to the second point, I'll give another example. One of my work-study jobs in college was to develop a bibliography on African education. One of the critical skills in that job was to read the bibliography in one book to find other titles and authors, but that's more to the previous point. The other thing that really helped was to go to the shelves to find one book I knew about, and then *look around* to find others that might be of interest. Try that on Google. The kind of search they offer is too focused, or perhaps not focused properly, to allow that kind of browsing. I get the same experience every time I use an old-fashioned paper encyclopedia; I find all sorts of other information "along the way" that's utterly useless in my current search but more often than not comes in handy - even if it's only as a conversational gambit - some other time. Those are secondary benefits that I don't get by using the major online sources, though I get some by wandering through low-profile blogs and other sites. To the extent that some people never stray more than a link or two away from Google (or Slashdot), that's a loss and it's sad.
The web can broaden our horizons (TBL's initial vision) or narrow them. Sadly, the current directions we're taking tend more toward the latter.
Oh, you mean the Puritans who arrived well over a hundred years before the revolution, by which time they were a small minority of those who were involved? If you really knew your history, you'd know that our founding documents were based primarily on the Pennsylvania and Virginia models, explicitly rejecting many Puritan notions. The *vast* majority of those fighting and writing at the time were, as I said, not in favor of religious discrimination. Go take your meds.
That's a stunningly bad analogy. It's not very credible to claim that petting your cat will incite violence from a Slashdotter. By way of complete contrast, we already have examples of such grievous insults to Islam leading directly to real terrorist violence. The violence is predictable, and promised already. How would you like to be the one telling the family of a US soldier killed in Afghanistan that you were fighting for freedom of speech and religion by supporting Dove? How very noble of you.
If I insult some thug's girlfriend in a bar, he takes a swing at me and a brawl ensues, who is legally responsible for the fight and the property damages? Answer: the guy who took a swing at me. I may have been offensive and insulting, but I was not asking the guy to start a fight.
Why does it have to be 100% on any one party? Everything that follows from such a false premise is invalid. Yes, the vast bulk of the blame should go to the guy who took a swing, but if that was an entirely predictable consequence of your action then yes, you do bear some portion of the blame as well. So might the girlfriend.;)
What, are the world's Muslims such infantilized, brainwashed children that we're absolving them responsibility for their actions?
Not at all. Nobody's saying give them a free pass. Try them, punish them, bomb them, whatever in proportion to their own actions. That does not in any way preclude also holding accountable other parties who knowingly and deliberately contributed to the escalating hostility and violence, and it certainly does not require supporting or enabling those parties' actions.
As a free hint, that last bit is something the Taliban says.
You know what else the Taliban say? They say it's OK to hold other religions in disgrace, to harass their members, to trash things they consider sacred. Your well-poisoning/appeal-to-authority fails, because real Americans oppose Taliban behavior in their own churches.
That's exactly what I meant by hair-splitting about what "violation of law" means. I don't give a fart whether Dove's discrimination against Muslims (their status as a church exempt from the anti-discrimination laws that bind businesses is itself a legal distinction) or someone planting an IED in Iraq qualifies as a "violation of law" to a US court interpreting a free-speech precedent. Either is a violation of *principle* - tolerance in one case, non-violence in the other - and that matters far more to me. There are things that are legal but shouldn't be (e.g. churches discriminating or acting politically) and things that are illegal but shouldn't be (e.g. porn or pot). Freedom of religion doesn't mean allowing members of one religion to harass another, and elevating (one warped interpretation of) the constitution to the status or a religion isn't very helpful either.
Actually, this shows that freedom of speech and religion are still alive and well. The politically correct thing and expedient thing to do in this election year is to support people like Dove in their disparagement of other religions, to show how Christian you are. The hard choice is to oppose that, and to protect the freedoms of people who don't happen to be Christian.
So you are basically saying that the United States should simply roll over
Roll over? Hell, no. I'm saying it shouldn't put Dove's right to disparage religion and incite violence above Rackspace's right to run their business as they see fit. Rackspace has every right to enforce its AUP, to avoid becoming embroiled in disputes involving one customer which are very likely to result in other customers being affected. The Civil Rights Act argument is a total red herring because Rackspace is not in any way discriminating against Dove because of Dove's religion (Christianity). They are acting based on Dove's behavior. Dove's behavior might be motivated by antipathy toward another religion (Islam) but that should be neither Rackspace's concern nor ours.
Thank god that your ancestors had more stones, or they'd never have been able to win you the right (with their blood) to that freedom in the first place.
They weren't fighting for the right of one religion to oppress another, that's for sure, and since you brought "stones" into it I don't think it requires any to parrot what the majority is already saying. Try supporting *unpopular* speech some time. I do.
What Dove's doing is not just distasteful but harmful and wrong. Nobody should feel bound to support or enable it, even out of concern for civil liberties. Since you're talking about fighting for liberty, what have you done for the cause lately other than post on Slashdot? Do you support civil liberties for Muslims, or only for Christians? Come on, Brave Man, let's see you distinguish your position from that of the worst enemy of free speech/religion at Dove.
I stand corrected on the choice of terms. Thank you. AFAICT, though, the logical outcome is the same. Dove's actions not only pose a clear and present danger, but also incite a violation of law that is both imminent and likely. IANAL so I don't know if there's still a hair to be split regarding who is being incited to do what and whether a military or terrorist action is considered a "violation of law" in this context, but *morally* the principle remains the same. Dove acts, people die as a predictable consequence, even most civil libertarians would consider it unacceptable to demand that the victims pay that price in the name of free-speech absolutism.
(1) The constitution is binding on the *government*, not private parties. Rackspace may deny service to anyone, just as Dove World Outrage Center may. (2) There's a legal and moral distinction between being insulting or derogatory speech (Westergaard, Onion) and inciting violence (Dove). (3) "Clear and present danger" is a recognized exception to free speech. Don't yell fire in a crowded theatre, etc. The *predictable* result of Dove's action is a sharply increased risk of retaliatory attacks killing US soldiers.
IMO any of these three reasons alone is sufficient to say that Rackspace's action is no affront to free speech. In combination, they're sufficient for me to say that anyone who protests Rackspace's actions more than Dove's is exhibiting a lack of understanding and/or perspective so serious that it's the domain of psychiatry rather than philosophy. I say that as a card-carrying monthly-dues-paying ACLU member, by the way. The actual advancement of civil liberties is only harmed by such ridiculous positions.
If Maureen O'Gara was fired from Sys-Con (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050510114214525) then why is she still able to spout disparaging crap there (http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1318133)?
Rackspace has picked up the Drizzle team that Oracle cast off when it acquired Sun...
Rackspace evidently wants its new boys, who were not the core pillars of the MySQL engineering team...
Kicked out of Oracle they say
(emphasis mine)
Each individual comment might be justifiable, but with that much repetition she's clearly trying quite hard to cast the Drizzle crew in a bad light. Why? Take a look at this gem too.
The smart money is betting that even if a good number of high-volume web sites go down this route, an even higher number such as Facebook and Google will continue with relational databases, primarily MySQL.
Uh, yeah. You mean the Google that created BigTable, and the Facebook that created Cassandra? How could someone write a story that's partly about Cassandra and still predict that Cassandra's creator would "stick with" MySQL? What would motivate such behavior?
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that O'Gara will gladly smear whoever someone asks her to smear. The only question in my mind is: who asked this time? Serial plagiarist and SEO shop Sys-Con is clearly complicit too, and the idea that they would ever fire anyone for ethical reasons is just laughable.
At first I thought this sounded like the very definition of hubris on Google's part, but then I read TFA. Nobody really said anything about leaving the rest of the industry starved for talent. All they said is that a particular group of engineers were more useful to Google where they were than they would be if brought in. It's actually not an uncommon situation, as having talented and like-minded people at other companies can be great for forming partnerships and communities. If everybody working on XYZ was at Google, two problems could occur: groupthink inside, and antipathy outside. A more Machiavellian engineer might even have suggested sending current Google employees to evangelize and facilitate partnerships elsewhere. Recognizing that a like-minded person elsewhere can be more valuable than a hire seems rather insightful to me.
People were mostly excited by instant response times, which couldn't be replicated over a 1200 baud modem, and by whizzy graphical user interfaces, which couldn't be delivered over the networks of the time.
Exactly. Personal computing was more appealing because the user experience was much better, and people accepted the administrative burden for the sake of that because that was the tradeoff at the time. The tradeoffs have changed. Whenever advances in technology - especially networking - have allowed people to retain the superior user experience while freeing them from the administrative burden, they've tended to seize the opportunity. We've seen it already with networked printers and file servers. Now we're seeing it with applications, and potentially the OS itself, while also capturing other benefits such as dynamic scaling and easy sharing with others. Yes, the security/privacy issues need to be looked after, and can be looked after, but the existence of problems to be solved (or solved better) is no excuse for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. All those nay-sayers would be better off spending their time helping that baby thrive than hoping it'll go away.
Abstract concepts cannot exist, but a statement about one can nonetheless be true. "Red" does not exist, but I can make statements about the relationship between red and green and have those statements be meaningful. So it is with sequential execution and scalability. Both are concepts, neither can exist in the real world, but there is a relationship between them and it's one of opposition. To say otherwise is to deny that any logical statement of the form "for any x..." can be valid, and there's no conversation to be had with someone who has turned their back on logic like that. "Concepts can't be scalable" is nothing more than a silly little slogan that you thought would help you avoid the need for real argument, and apparently you can't bring yourself to step away from it no matter how painful it becomes. Good luck with that OCD.
You're confusing performance with scalability. Don't worry, though; it's a common rookie mistake. Saying that there's no limit to how fast a Turing machine can process its tape is a comment about performance and is totally irrelevant to the already-stated definition of scalability. Talking about scalability in terms of infinitely fast components is just silly, because no such component can ever exist. All reasonable discussion of scalability must be grounded in ratios of load offered vs. load handled. Please spend less time picking which laughably self-referential insult to sling, and more time actually thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently went through a related exercise with my daughter. I showed her ponycorns because it's exactly the kind of game she already likes. She got the idea that we could create a game too, since I'm also a programmer and she's a whole two years older than Sissy. At that age I'm not about to teach her actual programming, but I thought it might be a good way for her to see the creative process at a higher level - plus we'd end up with something that she could enjoy and show off to her friends. We had a lot of fun with her drawing the characters which I then turned into sprites, and recording audio, and brainstorming about what puzzles would be in the game. Now the effort has stalled, mostly for lack of a decent framework. I mean, all we need is basic point-and-click stuff, maybe even an inventory and stuff like that, but it would sure be nice to have the characters actually *move* smoothly from one place to another instead of just disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Oh, it would be extra nice to have something open source, or at least runnable on Linux. I looked at dozens of frameworks that I found on http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html and elsewhere, and very few could meet those simple requirements without getting into full-out 2D suitable for side-scrollers and platformers - meaning that they're way more complicated than I need and generally don't "scale down" to the simpler stuff very well. I tried Adventure Maker but quickly ran into its limitations even with a project as simple as this. I might try GameMaker next, even though it's also Windows-centric (I can use my wife's machine if I have to), because the other offerings out there seem so incredibly thin.
The point is not that I personally need help finding a tool with which to make this particular game - though suggestions would certainly be welcome. The problem is that the "state of play" is just so incredibly piss-poor overall. Forget about finding something that even an older child could use *themselves* to create a game that doesn't totally suck. It's hard enough to find something that a *professional programmer* (albeit not a game programmer like Sissy's dad) can stand to work with long enough to get such a result. Something just good enough to let parents and kids put together a simple adventure/puzzle game on par with ponycorns, to give them something that's fun and that just barely hints at what you can do if you can program, would go a long way toward making them want to learn more. As far as I can tell, such a thing doesn't exist.
(NB: I'm the founder/lead for CloudFS)
Thanks for the mention. To be quite clear on this, the at-rest encryption that's currently in CloudFS is not as secure as we'd like it to be, or as secure as it will be when it's released. To put it another way, it's more secure than Dropbox or Jungledisk have proven to be, it's probably more secure than a couple of dozen other similar cloud-storage options (it's hard to tell since so many are not open source), but it does have flaws. To be more specific, it's secure against inspection by someone who only has the ciphertext - such as your cloud provider. However, it is not secure against transparent modification (flipping a bit in the ciphertext flips the corresponding bit in the plaintext). Also, since it's currently CTR-mode encryption, if someone has both ciphertext and plaintext for the same part of a file then that part of the file becomes readable from just ciphertext thereafter. These flaws are not acceptable; the current code is only a stopgap. This is exactly why I made the point on Twitter recently that even the strongest ciphers with long keys can still result in weak protection if used improperly. I'm sick of seeing cloud-storage providers crow about how strong their transport encryption is but say nothing about on-disk encryption, or mention using "military grade AES-256" on disk but say nothing about how. Worst of all are the ones -who require that you give them keys - which for all you know will be stored unprotected right next to the data.
The good news is that I've been consulting with some real crypto experts - I admit I'm not one myself - on this. We've worked out a block-based scheme that all involved believe will address the above flaws, while also handling concurrent writes correctly (something most "personal backup" alternatives fail to do). The performance cost is more than I'd like, but I think it's no more than necessary and the parallelism inherent in the underlying system should still yield more-than-adequate performance. I've already begun implementation, and will fully disclose all the details once I get a bit further along.
Not true. Even aside from the fact that anyone can get their own blog, he has commented on my site and I have allowed him to. If he wants to add more in his own defense, he may and he knows that.
"Sociopathically"? You certainly can think what you want, but I'm not the one posting like a sociopath.
I should take lessons in civility from someone who joins the conversation with "You're a dick"? I don't think so. It's hardly a surprise that someone who acts like that would take an extreme "forget what happened" attitude, either. Very self-serving of you. Maybe an argument for people to be kind and forgiving shouldn't be delivered with such jarring contrast to your own behavior.
For what it's worth, I don't want to punish this guy forever. That's why I made the post un-searchable, helping him "move past the idiot stage" as I hope someone will do for you someday. It does have a little to do with accurate historical documentation, though I don't think there's anything fucked up or fanatical about that. I don't believe in censorship or revisionism. It was part of the public record once, and it should remain so. I've seen the power to edit the record used for ill *far* more often than I've seen it used for good, and I'm not going to start down that path. Once posted, everything on my site stays posted. It's my site, so deal with it.
The key point here is that you don't have to forget in order to forgive. If this had reached the courts, which it nearly did, that would be part of the public record and would remain so with nothing I could do about it even if I wanted to. It would also, rightly, be considered part of the *past* once the offender had been punished or made reparations appropriately. We need to teach people to forgive *without* forgetting, because forgetting is antithetical to learning.
Valid questions. Yes, I did some homework to convince myself that the story was valid, but that would have made the anecdote too long. ;)
I've long since gotten used to the idea that everything I say online - going back to Usenet days and even before - will stay with me forever. Some times you just have to remind people that it was X years ago and people/opinions change. Would you take advice from someone in mid-life whose opinions hadn't changed since their teens?
That's all garden-variety stuff by now, but I did have a more interesting case come up on my website. I had occasion to write about someone who was trying to scam people with an online "contest" that was rigged. Yes, I named names, especially after the guy (who went by more than one name BTW) tried to intimidate me with fake legal threats. Years later, I got email saying that he'd reformed, he was trying to get a job, but potential employers would Google for his name and find my site. Tough luck, I thought, and continued to think as the pleas kept coming every few months for years. What finally got my attention was when he mentioned that he now had a family. This little piece of history, no matter how valid, was now starting to affect *other people* who were completely innocent. While I don't believe in censorship, I do believe in the validity of the "statute of limitations" concept so I decided on a compromise. The article about this guy is still on my site, you can even find it by searching there, but you can't find it by searching on Google. (Robots.txt plus referer blocking specific to that post, for those who care.)
The lesson is that the existence of information and the ease with which it may be looked up are two different things. Dirt is just too easy to find, for the same reasons that gold is too hard: search engines' evaluation of "importance" or "relevance" doesn't always match any sane human's. While it should be *possible* to find someone's decade-old forum posts, perhaps it's not quite right for the most inflammatory thing they ever said to be the very first thing that shows up in a casual search . . . and it often will be, because controversy drives higher rankings. Making stuff just a little bit harder to find, like we all do here with low-rated comments and like I basically did in this little anecdote, deserves more frequent consideration as an alternative to deletion.
Thank you for making that point. Marketing and finance and such are all wonderful optimizations of the wealth-creation process, but there has to be some actual wealth-creation to optimize. How many people in the US are actually creating wealth, instead of figuring out how to persuade others to spend some of theirs? It's no wonder we have booms and busts, when 90% of the "wealth" out there is total speculative bovine-excrement. BTW, I do know not all readers here are from the US, but I am referring here specifically to the US; as a citizen here all my life, I'm painfully aware that just about every other country has a much more realistic view of the relationship between real value and mere dollar signs. As far as I can tell, Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both turning the US into a big Golgafrincham Ark, full of people whose much-vaunted skills are only of value within a totally inbred economic system increasingly divorced from the actual needs or wants of anyone not born into that economic and sociopolitical environment. JeffH (disclaimer: we've met) had it right: that sucks. Even if we don't personally have the skills to do things that result in direct benefits *somewhere* on a sane Maslow Hierarchy, we can at least turn those skills toward taking the tools that have been developed to serve the vapid goals of "social" media and try to re-orient them toward more productive purposes.
...is that *no* single-figure-of-merit benchmark is going to be worth anything. Sandia's "Graph 500" Johnny-come-lately isn't going to be any better than Linpack that way, and will just skew the results towards a different not-generally-useful architecture. A far better idea has been around for over five years: the HPC Challenge benchmark. It consists of seven different tests (Linpack is just one) which stress different aspects of system design. Anybody who knows anything about building big systems would identify some mix of these tests that best approximates their own workload, use that as a starting point for looking at likely alternatives, and then remember that it's just a starting point. The only benchmark that really matters is the one that you run yourself on your own application, but that can be a very expensive and time-consuming exercise so these lists can be a good way to figure out which systems deserve that more extended analysis. Linpack, on the other hand, isn't even useful for that. What's sad is that some people either didn't know (which says something about how we train engineers) or didn't care until a Chinese system found its way to the top (which says something even worse).
"We" should reverse-engineer more firmware "ourselves" eh? When I see them at lunch, I'll let the subset of "we" who actually do such things know that somebody with an Ubuntu address said so. That'll be good for a few laughs.
"Recasting a search" is a useful skill, but it's no substitute for other non-search-engine methods of finding related information. As our friend AC pointed out, Google might not be the right tool for the job. Lacking knowledge of the world beyond his screen, though, he failed to apprehend that Wikipedia and Amazon might not be any better. All textual searches, whether embedded in a site like Amazon or presented for general use on a site like Google, share some features and limitations, and your suggestion to "recast a search" is exactly the tool-centric myopia the original article was about. Those kinds of searches are great at yielding other links that contain the same words, but what about synonyms? If you know a synonym then you can do a second search, but what about the synonym or related word/concept you didn't already know? Consider my African education example. If I'd been looking at a book about the educational system in Ghana, how would I have known to search for "Ivory Coast" next time? As it turns out, the two systems are often compared. That connection was obvious using "old fashioned" methods, but search engines and search boxes would by their very nature have been very unlikely to show it.
Text search is just one useful kind of search. Nobody knows that better than those who've implemented text search. Sometimes, though, you're better off with an index or a catalog which slices and dices information a fundamentally different way. Would you eschew all keys or indices in a database in favor of text search? Of course not, but it's the same principle. The whole point here is that those who are too accustomed to typing text into boxes are losing the ability to make effective use of other knowledge-retrieval methods, and all you've done is demonstrate that.
May I suggest that you RTFA? It was about the specific methods people use to find information, not the information itself, and even explicitly calls out Google as a culprit. That's the context in which I was responding, so stop being an asshole.
The sad fact is that making something convenient *does* impact people's ability to use less convenient methods. That can be a problem when the less convenient method is unavailable, or has other benefits. With respect to the first point, there's a lot of information that hasn't made its way into Google yet - e.g. legal case histories, medical records, lots of historical archive material. Some of that information is subject to privacy concerns and should *never* be on Google or Wikipedia. If you want to use those sources effectively, you have to develop skills like using the local classification system (e.g. Dewey/LoC or domain-specific) and indexing methods, skimming pages quickly to sort out the wheat from the chaff, etc. You get better by doing, and if what you've been doing is honing your Google skills instead then you simply will be less productive in these other environments than someone who is used to them. S2BU if that turns out to be part of your job, and you might be surprised how often it is.
With respect to the second point, I'll give another example. One of my work-study jobs in college was to develop a bibliography on African education. One of the critical skills in that job was to read the bibliography in one book to find other titles and authors, but that's more to the previous point. The other thing that really helped was to go to the shelves to find one book I knew about, and then *look around* to find others that might be of interest. Try that on Google. The kind of search they offer is too focused, or perhaps not focused properly, to allow that kind of browsing. I get the same experience every time I use an old-fashioned paper encyclopedia; I find all sorts of other information "along the way" that's utterly useless in my current search but more often than not comes in handy - even if it's only as a conversational gambit - some other time. Those are secondary benefits that I don't get by using the major online sources, though I get some by wandering through low-profile blogs and other sites. To the extent that some people never stray more than a link or two away from Google (or Slashdot), that's a loss and it's sad.
The web can broaden our horizons (TBL's initial vision) or narrow them. Sadly, the current directions we're taking tend more toward the latter.
Oh, you mean the Puritans who arrived well over a hundred years before the revolution, by which time they were a small minority of those who were involved? If you really knew your history, you'd know that our founding documents were based primarily on the Pennsylvania and Virginia models, explicitly rejecting many Puritan notions. The *vast* majority of those fighting and writing at the time were, as I said, not in favor of religious discrimination. Go take your meds.
That's a stunningly bad analogy. It's not very credible to claim that petting your cat will incite violence from a Slashdotter. By way of complete contrast, we already have examples of such grievous insults to Islam leading directly to real terrorist violence. The violence is predictable, and promised already. How would you like to be the one telling the family of a US soldier killed in Afghanistan that you were fighting for freedom of speech and religion by supporting Dove? How very noble of you.
Why does it have to be 100% on any one party? Everything that follows from such a false premise is invalid. Yes, the vast bulk of the blame should go to the guy who took a swing, but if that was an entirely predictable consequence of your action then yes, you do bear some portion of the blame as well. So might the girlfriend. ;)
Not at all. Nobody's saying give them a free pass. Try them, punish them, bomb them, whatever in proportion to their own actions. That does not in any way preclude also holding accountable other parties who knowingly and deliberately contributed to the escalating hostility and violence, and it certainly does not require supporting or enabling those parties' actions.
You know what else the Taliban say? They say it's OK to hold other religions in disgrace, to harass their members, to trash things they consider sacred. Your well-poisoning/appeal-to-authority fails, because real Americans oppose Taliban behavior in their own churches.
That's exactly what I meant by hair-splitting about what "violation of law" means. I don't give a fart whether Dove's discrimination against Muslims (their status as a church exempt from the anti-discrimination laws that bind businesses is itself a legal distinction) or someone planting an IED in Iraq qualifies as a "violation of law" to a US court interpreting a free-speech precedent. Either is a violation of *principle* - tolerance in one case, non-violence in the other - and that matters far more to me. There are things that are legal but shouldn't be (e.g. churches discriminating or acting politically) and things that are illegal but shouldn't be (e.g. porn or pot). Freedom of religion doesn't mean allowing members of one religion to harass another, and elevating (one warped interpretation of) the constitution to the status or a religion isn't very helpful either.
Actually, this shows that freedom of speech and religion are still alive and well. The politically correct thing and expedient thing to do in this election year is to support people like Dove in their disparagement of other religions, to show how Christian you are. The hard choice is to oppose that, and to protect the freedoms of people who don't happen to be Christian.
Roll over? Hell, no. I'm saying it shouldn't put Dove's right to disparage religion and incite violence above Rackspace's right to run their business as they see fit. Rackspace has every right to enforce its AUP, to avoid becoming embroiled in disputes involving one customer which are very likely to result in other customers being affected. The Civil Rights Act argument is a total red herring because Rackspace is not in any way discriminating against Dove because of Dove's religion (Christianity). They are acting based on Dove's behavior. Dove's behavior might be motivated by antipathy toward another religion (Islam) but that should be neither Rackspace's concern nor ours.
They weren't fighting for the right of one religion to oppress another, that's for sure, and since you brought "stones" into it I don't think it requires any to parrot what the majority is already saying. Try supporting *unpopular* speech some time. I do.
What Dove's doing is not just distasteful but harmful and wrong. Nobody should feel bound to support or enable it, even out of concern for civil liberties. Since you're talking about fighting for liberty, what have you done for the cause lately other than post on Slashdot? Do you support civil liberties for Muslims, or only for Christians? Come on, Brave Man, let's see you distinguish your position from that of the worst enemy of free speech/religion at Dove.
I stand corrected on the choice of terms. Thank you. AFAICT, though, the logical outcome is the same. Dove's actions not only pose a clear and present danger, but also incite a violation of law that is both imminent and likely. IANAL so I don't know if there's still a hair to be split regarding who is being incited to do what and whether a military or terrorist action is considered a "violation of law" in this context, but *morally* the principle remains the same. Dove acts, people die as a predictable consequence, even most civil libertarians would consider it unacceptable to demand that the victims pay that price in the name of free-speech absolutism.
(1) The constitution is binding on the *government*, not private parties. Rackspace may deny service to anyone, just as Dove World Outrage Center may.
(2) There's a legal and moral distinction between being insulting or derogatory speech (Westergaard, Onion) and inciting violence (Dove).
(3) "Clear and present danger" is a recognized exception to free speech. Don't yell fire in a crowded theatre, etc. The *predictable* result of Dove's action is a sharply increased risk of retaliatory attacks killing US soldiers.
IMO any of these three reasons alone is sufficient to say that Rackspace's action is no affront to free speech. In combination, they're sufficient for me to say that anyone who protests Rackspace's actions more than Dove's is exhibiting a lack of understanding and/or perspective so serious that it's the domain of psychiatry rather than philosophy. I say that as a card-carrying monthly-dues-paying ACLU member, by the way. The actual advancement of civil liberties is only harmed by such ridiculous positions.
(emphasis mine) Each individual comment might be justifiable, but with that much repetition she's clearly trying quite hard to cast the Drizzle crew in a bad light. Why? Take a look at this gem too.
Uh, yeah. You mean the Google that created BigTable, and the Facebook that created Cassandra? How could someone write a story that's partly about Cassandra and still predict that Cassandra's creator would "stick with" MySQL? What would motivate such behavior? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that O'Gara will gladly smear whoever someone asks her to smear. The only question in my mind is: who asked this time? Serial plagiarist and SEO shop Sys-Con is clearly complicit too, and the idea that they would ever fire anyone for ethical reasons is just laughable.
At first I thought this sounded like the very definition of hubris on Google's part, but then I read TFA. Nobody really said anything about leaving the rest of the industry starved for talent. All they said is that a particular group of engineers were more useful to Google where they were than they would be if brought in. It's actually not an uncommon situation, as having talented and like-minded people at other companies can be great for forming partnerships and communities. If everybody working on XYZ was at Google, two problems could occur: groupthink inside, and antipathy outside. A more Machiavellian engineer might even have suggested sending current Google employees to evangelize and facilitate partnerships elsewhere. Recognizing that a like-minded person elsewhere can be more valuable than a hire seems rather insightful to me.
Exactly. Personal computing was more appealing because the user experience was much better, and people accepted the administrative burden for the sake of that because that was the tradeoff at the time. The tradeoffs have changed. Whenever advances in technology - especially networking - have allowed people to retain the superior user experience while freeing them from the administrative burden, they've tended to seize the opportunity. We've seen it already with networked printers and file servers. Now we're seeing it with applications, and potentially the OS itself, while also capturing other benefits such as dynamic scaling and easy sharing with others. Yes, the security/privacy issues need to be looked after, and can be looked after, but the existence of problems to be solved (or solved better) is no excuse for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. All those nay-sayers would be better off spending their time helping that baby thrive than hoping it'll go away.
Abstract concepts cannot exist, but a statement about one can nonetheless be true. "Red" does not exist, but I can make statements about the relationship between red and green and have those statements be meaningful. So it is with sequential execution and scalability. Both are concepts, neither can exist in the real world, but there is a relationship between them and it's one of opposition. To say otherwise is to deny that any logical statement of the form "for any x..." can be valid, and there's no conversation to be had with someone who has turned their back on logic like that. "Concepts can't be scalable" is nothing more than a silly little slogan that you thought would help you avoid the need for real argument, and apparently you can't bring yourself to step away from it no matter how painful it becomes. Good luck with that OCD.
You're confusing performance with scalability. Don't worry, though; it's a common rookie mistake. Saying that there's no limit to how fast a Turing machine can process its tape is a comment about performance and is totally irrelevant to the already-stated definition of scalability. Talking about scalability in terms of infinitely fast components is just silly, because no such component can ever exist. All reasonable discussion of scalability must be grounded in ratios of load offered vs. load handled. Please spend less time picking which laughably self-referential insult to sling, and more time actually thinking.