Is a migration to Linux going to mean lower cost of government operation and lower taxes? Or is the money that they save just going to go to some other bloated government program?
If I were a European taxpayer, I sure would
feel better to have my money safely tucked into
Microsoft's gleaming $40B cash stockpile
than to have it wasted on some
local pork-barrel program. That beautiful
pile of money gives the entire world something
to aspire too, and I would feel proud to do
my part to make sure it's kept big, strong
and safe from shareholders, Europeans and other freeloaders.
What right has the govt. to interfere in the trade of individuals within the US?
If the government would just stop interfering with
peoples' rights to duplicate and trade copies of
any shiny plastic disks they may have, this whole
Microsoft issue would go away instantly.
It's also worth learning just because it's one
of the few languages that is simple enough
that you can actually
understand the implementation top-to-bottom.
You could write a simple Forth interpreter in
assembly language in a couple of days, just
to educate yourself on how languages work.
(I did this once for 16-bit X86s about 15 years ago).
Forth is also an excellent example of "emergent
behavior". Even though the language implementation
is simple, the dynamic behavior can quickly
becom mind blowing. I still have a hard time
completely understanding the way some of the
compiling "words" (which dynamically
add syntax to the language similar to Lisp
macros) work in Forth.
If nothing else, Forth will teach you to
factor your code into small procdures, because
making a function longer than about 5 lines quickly becomes
unreadable:).
Re:The original idea of All Hallow's Eve...
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The original story is that people were trying to keep the spirits away from your house. I don't understand why people dress up to go to others houses. This is nothing more than the candy manufacturers way of getting extra dough into their pockets.
In reality, the origins of Halloween is much more
complex that that. Check out
this article to find out more. In
particular:
In medieval times, one popular All Souls' Day practice was to make "soul cakes," simple bread desserts with a currant topping. In a custom called "souling," children would go door-to-door begging for the cakes, much like modern trick-or-treaters.
It's funny that the whole Halloweeen thing
may be an early example of "embrace and extend".
The early church rescheduled All Saint's Day
to coincide with an older pagan holiday, then
told people to go ahead and have fun on the new
enhanced hybrid holiday.
Re:Inflation != Multiple Universes
on
One of Many
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
A different universe would have different laws of physics altogether.
... And different fashion norms. For example, there
could be a universe where most men in
positions of authority wear goatees.
That sounds really bloody useful... I can't do anything with my computer; and even if I could there's nothing I could do it to.
I don't know about Z-OS, but I've read a little
about EROS. EROS doesn't need
a filesystem. That's because everything in
EROS is persistent. The system saves a complete
snapshot of its virtual memory to disk every
couple of minutes. There is no "rebooting" of
the OS. If you pull the plug, it comes back up
exactly in the state of the last snapshot.
For me, it took a little while for that concept to
sink in. They're saying that there's no need to
redundantly keep information in permanent
storage and volatile storage. Just make it all
permanent, and you don't need the filesystem
concept at all. In one step, you eliminate
whole classes of bugs (parsing, file
permissions, sharing files, filesystem
namespace problems, etc.)
Their authority model also makes sense.
Think of your system as a large building.
Normal OSes treat security like doors with
electronic badge readers; you're allowed to do things
based on who you are. Naturally, a lot
of doors must be programmed to let you through
if you're going to get around the building to do
your work. It's hard to ensure that each person
is never able to get into a room that they shouldn't
be in.
EROS is more like a building full of unique old-fashioned
key locks. You have no automatic authority
to go through any door. You must obtain
the individual key for each door. You get
these keys on an as-needed by the people
in various rooms you interact with
as you do your work. Each person with keys
to hand out individually determines if you are
worthy to go through the next door.
Reading up on EROS really expanded
my view of how an OS could work. You
can check it out at
www.eros-os.org.
The real reason that hardware vendors
were forced to put the turbo switch on PCs
was because of the first outbreak of
"digital rights management" technology.
Spreadsheets were the killer app that
caused the PC to take off, and Lotus 123
came with a super-annoying floppy-based
copy protection scheme. They intentionally
misformatted the floppy, then the program
verified that it was an original by doing low-level
tricks with the floppy controller.
The most ridiculous and shortsighted part
was that they used CPU-based timing loops to do the
timing for their stupid floppy tricks. Of course,
these were calibrated to the only CPU speed
available at the time, 4.77MHz. As a consequence,
if a PC was going to run Lotus 123, it needed
to be able to slow down to the original 4.77MHz
speed while it read the Lotus floppy. IIRC,
Compaq had a nifty patent that automatically
slowed the PC whenever the floppy controller
was in use. Others had to make do with
a manual switch.
The cost to society for this DRM fiasco,
hundreds of millions of useless bezel switches,
undoubtedly was far greater than any revenue
that Lotus made by thwarting piracy. (In fact,
their revenue from DRM might be negative, because they
were eventually displaced by non copy-protected
comptetiters.)
Speaking of Commodore 64 drives, I still
have one in my basement. I'm guessing it was the only
floppy drive in history that was bigger, heavier and sported
more CPU horsepower than the computer
it attached to. (IIRC, it had its very own 6502).
Despite this, for some unknown reason, it was
at least an order of magnitude slower than comparable
PC drives. I had to pay good money for an
aftermarket ROM cartridge that had no function
other than speed up the floppy interface by 5X
by fixing the serial communication protocol.
That drive is just about the finest example
of overdesigned hardware I've ever seen.
In most states, the law says that if you order goods from
out of state, then it is your responsibility
to report and pay the "use tax". If you aren't
doing that already, you're a common criminal.
If you order a CD from Amazon and don't pay
your use tax, you're cheating your state out of
more money than the artist would lose if
you downloaded the CD from Napster.
Don't try to rationalize. You're all thieves.
Bow your heads in shame.
(I have to make myself stop here. It's just too fun to spew out righteous indignation.)
For some more than others. Sadly, the more bandwidth limited are the least likely to realize this.
Actually, I'm a low bandwidth person, and I'm
very aware of it. What I mean is that while
I am IMHO brilliant, my brain has noticeably less I/O
bandwidth than most people. I guess more of
my brain functions got allocated to high level
processing, and less to DSP-like tasks.
This bugs the hell out of my wife because I just
can't effectively talk or listen while I'm trying
to do or think about something else.
She thinks that I'm intentionally tuning her out
when often I wasn't even aware that I should
be tuning her in.
Even
though I have excellent hearing as rated by
hearing tests, I've always had a hard time
picking out conversations in noisy environments
such as bars. Not enough noise rejection circutry.
Since cellphone calls usually have poor
quality and lots of noise, I often find it hard
to decode what the other person is saying
in real time even if I'm doing nothing else.
A big problem with cellphones and driving
in general is that it seems to take up much more
of your brain's low level I/O functions to
recover the conversation signal out of
a crappy cellphone speaker than it does
to just talk to a passenger normally.
I am a good driver, so I think that I have plenty
of geometry and physics processing ability.
It seems to me, though, once your
low level audio processing has failed
to successfully decode the message, the brain can pull in cycles
(inefficently) from higher level areas. You use
more of the language and logic processing
centers to error correct what you're hearing
at a higher semantic layer.
I think that this can starve the portion of your
logic ability that's needed to support the
low level driving tasks.
Basically, regardless of how the handset
works, I think cellphones will be dangerous
for driving until they significantly clean up
the audio quality.
But are most linux users concerned with fonts. I guess this is where linux is divided among those who like eyecandy and those who don't.
Readable fonts are not eyecandy. Fonts are the
primary mechanism for translating computer information
into a form compatible with your brain. They are
therefore the most important visual part of the UI.
Going the other direction, you wouldn't accuse
of a good quality keyboard as being "fingercandy".
If readable fonts weren't important, bookstores
wouldn't sell anything more expensive to print
per word than the stock listings section of a newspaper.
Overpriced compared to what, exactly? Some beige box held together with duct tape?
Hey, my beige boxes are not together
by duct tape, and I avoid nettlesome screws
when I can.
I mostly use simple
elegant gravity and friction to hold them together.
That's right, there's still no cure for cancer.
And you have the gall to sit there wasting time
reading blogs. You, sir, are wasting precious
seconds that should be devoted to finding
a cure. One person dies on this planet every
second, many of those from cancer! There is
no time to read about Tetris!
Now, get up off your ass, get into the lab,
and start researching. I don't want you to come
out of there until every cancer cell on this planet
has been stamped out.
And don't think your work is done when you've
finished with cancer. People are still going to
die of something else. We've got to figure out
a way to totally prevent death, before it's too late.
This ongoing crisis -- MILLIONS dead every
month -- just has to be stopped!
Kerberos is a three-headed dog that guards
the gates of hell. A flaw in Kerberos is a serious
situation because if it fails, all hell
could break loose.
Re:when I was little
on
ECCp-109 Solved
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, does this cryptography cracking have a point? We know that the algorithm will be cracked when the right key is hit.
I think that the point is that a lot of PHBs and policymakers
won't believe that a given encryption
technology will ever be crackable until they
see that it actually has been cracked.
There are a lot of people in this world who
refuse to believe that anything that is still
"theoretical" is either possible or important.
But then why not just leave the ban in effect and force people to use the existing credit-card-activated air phones?
If they're really going to implement a technology
to "block" cellphones, they'll probably leave
it turned on all the time, even when you're at the
gate. That will force you to "roam" on their
network at $3.99 per minute, even if you are
in your own service area.
On a lot of flights, adding up departure
and arrival times, you spend a total of 40 minutes
or so sitting at the gate
(especially if you're sitting near the back
of the plane).
You see
a lot of cellphone calls going on during this time.
The airlines probably see this as a huge waste
of a captive revenue source.
Or to put it another way, somehow you have to rise above the noise.
There has to be some system to select the best
artists. Today we have one system, but it requires
the artists sign over the vast majority of their
earnings to a cartel.
That cartel arose because of the characteristics
of mid 20th century media technology (i.e., the
cheapest and most effecitve way to distribute
music was plastic disks and plastic tape).
Now that technology has advanced, it might
be possible to create a better system. Maybe
something along the lines of EBay. It's still
a cartel or "natural monopoly", but at least
anybody could participate without signing
away all their rights, and the system might only skim 15% or
so. The best music could be determined
by customers' moderation points.
I know there have been many attempts at this
kind of thing, but none have yet hit the critical
mass needed to stamp out the old cartel. One
big reason for this is that almost all of the current popular
artists are locked into long term exclusive contracts.
The old cartel thus perpetuates itself even though
it could be replaced by an alternative that would
be more efficient for both artists and consumers.
These contracts are set by the US contracting agencies so that the US owns rights to the binaries (This was standard for a long time, I am not sure now). The US takes the binaries and then tries to sell them to the same countries we are trying to sell to. Guess our own competition is our own software.
Under these terms, the government is essentially
buying your software outright. They can do
what they please with it. Therefore, you should only
bid on the contract if you will recover all of your
costs through that contract. If they are buying
redistribution rights to your product for 5% of
its cost, that's pretty much unfair. You'd be
foolish to agree to that, and nobody's forcing
you to work for them. If nobody was foolish
the policy would change.
If you knowingly resold the redistribution rights,
you should not be surprised to be "competing"
with your own software. You're lucky that
that the contract lets you keep any rights to
the software that you were hired to develop.
However, don't forget that you sold part
of the ownership of the software, so you can't
expect to still have exclusive control over it
in the market.
I don't agree. Maintaining and testing two UI's on your product is considerably more difficult that maintaining one.
Then why don't you save yourself a bunch of
work and only put up the "low bandwidth" site?
I don't think that I've ever seen a bloated website
where the additional "functionality" was worth
the slower downloads (even with
broadband) and browser bugs (even with IE).
They are ranking possible states by trying to find states that have low voter turnout
There's probably nothing better for increasing voter
turnout than having a bunch of whacko anarchist
carpetbaggers move to your state and try to take over.
Hand-tuned assembler is always faster/smaller/better than C code, except when it comes to portability.
Maybe in theory. In practice, once your
program gets too big to fit it all in your head
at once, you're going to run out of the
mental energy required to stay ahead of the
C compiler (and remain bug-free).
If you've disassembled the output of a good
optimizing compiler lately, you'd see that it
usually produces pretty good code. Except
for the inner loops of numerical algorithms, I doubt
that anyone will consistently be able to produce
code that is more than 25% faster than the C compiler.
The thing is, the compiler is able to spit out this
code at thousands of lines per minute all day
long. It doesn't get tired. The human programmer
is going to get tired of the boredom, and will
start creating higher level abstractions in assembly.
He'll start using macros. He'll use a simplified
parameter passing
protocol so that he doesn't have to inline and
hand-allocate the registers for every little subroutine
call.
Before long, he's fallen behind, and the
C code will run faster overall. And the C program will have
taken less time to write, as well.
Refusing to sell windows would probably be a credible threat.
About 5 minutes after Microsoft refuses to sell
Windows to a particular country, that country
would probably pass a law rescinding copyright protection
on any operating system that has a name
starting with the letter 'W'. Problem solved.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were a European taxpayer, I sure would feel better to have my money safely tucked into Microsoft's gleaming $40B cash stockpile than to have it wasted on some local pork-barrel program. That beautiful pile of money gives the entire world something to aspire too, and I would feel proud to do my part to make sure it's kept big, strong and safe from shareholders, Europeans and other freeloaders.
If the government would just stop interfering with peoples' rights to duplicate and trade copies of any shiny plastic disks they may have, this whole Microsoft issue would go away instantly.
Forth is also an excellent example of "emergent behavior". Even though the language implementation is simple, the dynamic behavior can quickly becom mind blowing. I still have a hard time completely understanding the way some of the compiling "words" (which dynamically add syntax to the language similar to Lisp macros) work in Forth.
If nothing else, Forth will teach you to factor your code into small procdures, because making a function longer than about 5 lines quickly becomes unreadable :).
In reality, the origins of Halloween is much more complex that that. Check out this article to find out more. In particular:
It's funny that the whole Halloweeen thing may be an early example of "embrace and extend". The early church rescheduled All Saint's Day to coincide with an older pagan holiday, then told people to go ahead and have fun on the new enhanced hybrid holiday.
I don't know about Z-OS, but I've read a little about EROS. EROS doesn't need a filesystem. That's because everything in EROS is persistent. The system saves a complete snapshot of its virtual memory to disk every couple of minutes. There is no "rebooting" of the OS. If you pull the plug, it comes back up exactly in the state of the last snapshot.
For me, it took a little while for that concept to sink in. They're saying that there's no need to redundantly keep information in permanent storage and volatile storage. Just make it all permanent, and you don't need the filesystem concept at all. In one step, you eliminate whole classes of bugs (parsing, file permissions, sharing files, filesystem namespace problems, etc.)
Their authority model also makes sense. Think of your system as a large building. Normal OSes treat security like doors with electronic badge readers; you're allowed to do things based on who you are. Naturally, a lot of doors must be programmed to let you through if you're going to get around the building to do your work. It's hard to ensure that each person is never able to get into a room that they shouldn't be in.
EROS is more like a building full of unique old-fashioned key locks. You have no automatic authority to go through any door. You must obtain the individual key for each door. You get these keys on an as-needed by the people in various rooms you interact with as you do your work. Each person with keys to hand out individually determines if you are worthy to go through the next door.
Reading up on EROS really expanded my view of how an OS could work. You can check it out at www.eros-os.org.
Spreadsheets were the killer app that caused the PC to take off, and Lotus 123 came with a super-annoying floppy-based copy protection scheme. They intentionally misformatted the floppy, then the program verified that it was an original by doing low-level tricks with the floppy controller.
The most ridiculous and shortsighted part was that they used CPU-based timing loops to do the timing for their stupid floppy tricks. Of course, these were calibrated to the only CPU speed available at the time, 4.77MHz. As a consequence, if a PC was going to run Lotus 123, it needed to be able to slow down to the original 4.77MHz speed while it read the Lotus floppy. IIRC, Compaq had a nifty patent that automatically slowed the PC whenever the floppy controller was in use. Others had to make do with a manual switch.
The cost to society for this DRM fiasco, hundreds of millions of useless bezel switches, undoubtedly was far greater than any revenue that Lotus made by thwarting piracy. (In fact, their revenue from DRM might be negative, because they were eventually displaced by non copy-protected comptetiters.)
Despite this, for some unknown reason, it was at least an order of magnitude slower than comparable PC drives. I had to pay good money for an aftermarket ROM cartridge that had no function other than speed up the floppy interface by 5X by fixing the serial communication protocol.
That drive is just about the finest example of overdesigned hardware I've ever seen.
If you order a CD from Amazon and don't pay your use tax, you're cheating your state out of more money than the artist would lose if you downloaded the CD from Napster.
Don't try to rationalize. You're all thieves. Bow your heads in shame.
(I have to make myself stop here. It's just too fun to spew out righteous indignation.)
Actually, I'm a low bandwidth person, and I'm very aware of it. What I mean is that while I am IMHO brilliant, my brain has noticeably less I/O bandwidth than most people. I guess more of my brain functions got allocated to high level processing, and less to DSP-like tasks.
This bugs the hell out of my wife because I just can't effectively talk or listen while I'm trying to do or think about something else. She thinks that I'm intentionally tuning her out when often I wasn't even aware that I should be tuning her in.
Even though I have excellent hearing as rated by hearing tests, I've always had a hard time picking out conversations in noisy environments such as bars. Not enough noise rejection circutry.
Since cellphone calls usually have poor quality and lots of noise, I often find it hard to decode what the other person is saying in real time even if I'm doing nothing else. A big problem with cellphones and driving in general is that it seems to take up much more of your brain's low level I/O functions to recover the conversation signal out of a crappy cellphone speaker than it does to just talk to a passenger normally.
I am a good driver, so I think that I have plenty of geometry and physics processing ability. It seems to me, though, once your low level audio processing has failed to successfully decode the message, the brain can pull in cycles (inefficently) from higher level areas. You use more of the language and logic processing centers to error correct what you're hearing at a higher semantic layer. I think that this can starve the portion of your logic ability that's needed to support the low level driving tasks.
Basically, regardless of how the handset works, I think cellphones will be dangerous for driving until they significantly clean up the audio quality.
Readable fonts are not eyecandy. Fonts are the primary mechanism for translating computer information into a form compatible with your brain. They are therefore the most important visual part of the UI. Going the other direction, you wouldn't accuse of a good quality keyboard as being "fingercandy".
If readable fonts weren't important, bookstores wouldn't sell anything more expensive to print per word than the stock listings section of a newspaper.
Hey, my beige boxes are not together by duct tape, and I avoid nettlesome screws when I can. I mostly use simple elegant gravity and friction to hold them together.
That's right, there's still no cure for cancer. And you have the gall to sit there wasting time reading blogs. You, sir, are wasting precious seconds that should be devoted to finding a cure. One person dies on this planet every second, many of those from cancer! There is no time to read about Tetris!
Now, get up off your ass, get into the lab, and start researching. I don't want you to come out of there until every cancer cell on this planet has been stamped out.
And don't think your work is done when you've finished with cancer. People are still going to die of something else. We've got to figure out a way to totally prevent death, before it's too late. This ongoing crisis -- MILLIONS dead every month -- just has to be stopped!
Kerberos is a three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell. A flaw in Kerberos is a serious situation because if it fails, all hell could break loose.
I think that the point is that a lot of PHBs and policymakers won't believe that a given encryption technology will ever be crackable until they see that it actually has been cracked. There are a lot of people in this world who refuse to believe that anything that is still "theoretical" is either possible or important.
If they're really going to implement a technology to "block" cellphones, they'll probably leave it turned on all the time, even when you're at the gate. That will force you to "roam" on their network at $3.99 per minute, even if you are in your own service area.
On a lot of flights, adding up departure and arrival times, you spend a total of 40 minutes or so sitting at the gate (especially if you're sitting near the back of the plane). You see a lot of cellphone calls going on during this time. The airlines probably see this as a huge waste of a captive revenue source.
Maybe some of these people have nice cars or swimming pools. If so, I'd like to make those part of my economic model.
But NASA would have finally achieved the alchemists' dream of converting lead to gold. (Or at least making it many times more expensive than gold.)
There has to be some system to select the best artists. Today we have one system, but it requires the artists sign over the vast majority of their earnings to a cartel.
That cartel arose because of the characteristics of mid 20th century media technology (i.e., the cheapest and most effecitve way to distribute music was plastic disks and plastic tape).
Now that technology has advanced, it might be possible to create a better system. Maybe something along the lines of EBay. It's still a cartel or "natural monopoly", but at least anybody could participate without signing away all their rights, and the system might only skim 15% or so. The best music could be determined by customers' moderation points.
I know there have been many attempts at this kind of thing, but none have yet hit the critical mass needed to stamp out the old cartel. One big reason for this is that almost all of the current popular artists are locked into long term exclusive contracts. The old cartel thus perpetuates itself even though it could be replaced by an alternative that would be more efficient for both artists and consumers.
Under these terms, the government is essentially buying your software outright. They can do what they please with it. Therefore, you should only bid on the contract if you will recover all of your costs through that contract. If they are buying redistribution rights to your product for 5% of its cost, that's pretty much unfair. You'd be foolish to agree to that, and nobody's forcing you to work for them. If nobody was foolish the policy would change.
If you knowingly resold the redistribution rights, you should not be surprised to be "competing" with your own software. You're lucky that that the contract lets you keep any rights to the software that you were hired to develop. However, don't forget that you sold part of the ownership of the software, so you can't expect to still have exclusive control over it in the market.
Having listened to the CB radio on a few road trips, I get the impression that most big rig drivers enthusiastically agree with that statement.
Then why don't you save yourself a bunch of work and only put up the "low bandwidth" site? I don't think that I've ever seen a bloated website where the additional "functionality" was worth the slower downloads (even with broadband) and browser bugs (even with IE).
There's probably nothing better for increasing voter turnout than having a bunch of whacko anarchist carpetbaggers move to your state and try to take over.
Maybe in theory. In practice, once your program gets too big to fit it all in your head at once, you're going to run out of the mental energy required to stay ahead of the C compiler (and remain bug-free).
If you've disassembled the output of a good optimizing compiler lately, you'd see that it usually produces pretty good code. Except for the inner loops of numerical algorithms, I doubt that anyone will consistently be able to produce code that is more than 25% faster than the C compiler.
The thing is, the compiler is able to spit out this code at thousands of lines per minute all day long. It doesn't get tired. The human programmer is going to get tired of the boredom, and will start creating higher level abstractions in assembly. He'll start using macros. He'll use a simplified parameter passing protocol so that he doesn't have to inline and hand-allocate the registers for every little subroutine call.
Before long, he's fallen behind, and the C code will run faster overall. And the C program will have taken less time to write, as well.
About 5 minutes after Microsoft refuses to sell Windows to a particular country, that country would probably pass a law rescinding copyright protection on any operating system that has a name starting with the letter 'W'. Problem solved.