I don't think I'm American bashing. It's fun, but I tend to bite my tounge when I get tempted:-P. I think it's quite a rude thing to do, sort of like bashing a person's ethnicity. But when Hollywood puts out a series of sci-fi movies which contain stories about the U.S. saving the world again and again, how is that not "Americans-save-the-world propeganda?"
I think everyone who matters knows that it isn't to be taken seriously.... but in Europe, my cousin once asked "Do Americans really think that way? The way they behave in movies?" With movies like Blackhawk down, Disney's Pearl Harbour, U251(if that's the number), Rambo, Rambo and more Rambo, then all these disaster movies, I would have to say that America does all the best American bashing.
Beautiful in the irony that the complete absense of any sci-fi will make it better sci-fi for the geek crowd.
Think about it, one of two things will happen if they explained the disaster to a geek audience:
They'll devise an implausible disaster scenario which will just ruin the movie
Some geek will find a solution for their problem.. also ruining the movie
Better just to write around it. Besides, part of the movie is that hope is long gone. Just deal with the fact that it's hopeless.
Back when Armageddon, Deep Impact, and other Americans-save-the-world propeganda was flying around, there was a great little Canadian film called "Last night"
The situation is... a little while ago scientists figured out the world was going to end. They tried to do something about it, but realized it was utterly futile. People panicked a bit after that... but that didn't change anything. Yep, the world is going to end and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. It's great:-)
http://users.aol.com/aleong1631/lastnight.html
What makes it extra beautiful for the geeky crowd is that it doesn't even touch the sci-fi aspects. It just ignores that stuff... they don't even really get into why or how the world is going to end. It's just some un-discussed astronomical disaster.
Oh, and the review is a little off... it's not that the world ends at the end of the millenium, it is that they adjust the clocks and calendars so that the world ends at that point. No trite, sucky 'fate' or religious apocolypse overtones...
Yep. Notebooks are the only thing I buy extended warranties on. They're far too expensive to repair and they die from natural causes far too frequently (worn out keyboard, flakey hinges, systemboard gone nuts, bad display etc...)
Worship the machine though, and buy through a reputable dealer... it's far too easy for some dopehead to claim that you abused it. When it comes down to it, it is your word against theirs.
Windows is a programming platform for applications and drivers.
Linux is an operating system with heaps of stuff on it.
Windows happens to have an operating system in it, but nobody really cares about it. The programming platform is the important part.
Linux's greatest obstacle to widespread desktop acceptance is standardizing on a set of libraries and calls to turn it into a platform. Then application developers could do wild stuff like cut-and-paste graphics, or plug into the menu system, or.... adjust the volume on the soundcard.
Cost of living and average salaries are lower in India. The American worker has to feed his family too.
At the extreme end of the spectrum, sending work overseas to countries with lower cost of living is self-destructive. Your workers are your customers' customers. If your workers can't afford a U.S. lifestyle in the U.S., then your customers have fewer customers... which means they don't need your products.
But... it's a screwed up game that happens again and again in capitalism. It is to everyone's mutual bennefit in the U.S. if the jobs stay in the country. However, the first corporation which can export the jobs has an unfair advantage, allowing them to squash the competition while reaping huge profits. If there is nothing there to stop them, they can't be blamed for doing it. It is as much self-defense as corruption.
The same forces unfortunately apply to government too... the first governor who takes the kickbacks for allowing such a thing to take place could be made be rich enough that they don't have to care how poorly the country fares.
I'm sure that if I knew anything about economics, I would know a name for this pattern.
Ungrateful relative, 2:00am: "Hey Bob, you know that land you let me hunt on? Well, there was this bog and I wasn't sure if I should go around it or not, so I tried to go through it. My truck is stuck in the mud. Will you come over and pull it out for me? I'll cook you dinner?"
Bob: "What were you doing driving off-road at 2:00am through a swamp?"
Ungrateful relative: "Of course I know how to use a comp^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H hunt! It's not my fault your land is covered in bogs."
Bob: "I'll be right over..."
Three days later...
dinner time: **ring**, **ring** Ungrateful relative: "The toilet in your cottage is plugged. I'm not sure how to work one of these things."
Bob: "Do you see a plunger?"
Ungrateful relative: "Is that the one with with the twirly 'e'?"
Bob: "I'll be right over..."
The next day..
Ungrateful relative: "I was trying to drive out of your camp but my truck won't start. I think your bog screwed it up?"
A lawyer doesn't need to pick them apart. The GPL is an inappropriate license for a library... unless you're developing only GPL software.
QT needs to be LGPL before Troll Tech's control over closed-source commercial development in KDE goes away.
Developing for KDE is more legally restricive than developing for Win32 (barring non-development related clauses of the requisite MS EULA's).
Moreover, the free-QT agreements only protect the GPL status of the library. They don't protect closed commercial development.
So... For example... when you tell your boss that you have this great idea for a in-house app utilizing proprietary technology, be prepared to pay $2000 for each developer before writing a stitch of the code. Oh and you're not allowed to use free-QT to develop then purchase commercial-QT afterwards.
But if you were doing the same thing on Windows, you could use the Win32 api with free development tools.
Trolltech knows what they're doing. They have control over commercial development in KDE. They didn't offer the GPL'd code out of the goodness of their hearts.
Linux also unifies pretty much all of IBM's hardware. It demonstrates much of what Java promised... write once, (compile and) run on any hardware platform.
So a small shop can develop a web commerce site on a $500 Linux machine and cleanly scale it up to an AS/400 without redeveloping.
TCO is a bizzare figure in this arena, the costs of the services are better compared to the cost of downtime and the track record at stuff like reliability, failover, disaster recovery etc.
Pretty much every major program is in the package list. The ones that aren't are relatively obscure things, and even those often have.debs available.
Mozilla is still at 1.0 for Debian stable.
You only have a lot of choices if you're running Testing or Unstable... otherwise everything really new has a dependency on one of those testing or unstable libraries.
I shouldn't have to upgrade my shared libraries to unstable to install the latest Mozilla deb.
On the other hand, some security vulnerabilities could be carefully engineered or intentionally neglected by a malicious developer. Written carefully enough they could even look like an honest mistake... like the latest buffer-overflow in Sendmail for example?
Naw, quantum computing is damned odd. It really has nothing to do with conventional computing.
Maybe a quantum coprocessor or API (calling on a network resource) for stuff like cracking encyryption keys or well... has anybody come up with a legitimate application yet?
To abuse the paint-by-number analogy, I'd put it a little closer to painting from a photograph than to painting by number. There aren't any lines, you just know what the original was supposed to be. Your own skill and interpretation lets you do whatever you want with it.
Plenty of students paint from photos. It's fun. I suppose this guy will just have to live with the fact that these crazy people aren't hurting anybody.
For that matter, who cares if anybody paints by number? It beats T.V., it's certainly less predictable than pro wrestling. And if I could paint something that looked like a Van Gough by painting by number, I would be damn proud to put it on my wall. That'd just be cool.
It does mean that every robber can safely ignore the response that "I don't know my PIN number" when they keep you hostage in your home for weeks, sucking the maximum withdrawal day after day while your family is home at gunpoint.
Whatever happened to distress PIN numbers? You can't do a distress eyeball because all a robber has to do is follow you home from an ATM to know what bank you go to, what your balance is(it's on those slips they spit everywhere), and which eyeball you use to access your money.
This is just stupid. Get some $7/hr tellers back behind the counters. The banks aren't going broke any day soon.
I don't really like the idea of trusting the MTA admins/owners to administer such a system. It would just be a matter of time before everyone is lulled into a false sense of security and AOL or some other big ISP starts selling paid advertising.
I would rather see a web of trust based on individuals. Then Joe-user could trust all employees of an ISP, but they could always un-trust their ISP's trusts... and build their own list of trusts.
I guess I just like the idea of the solution to SPAM being to develop the world-wide average-Joe use of cryptography.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I'm American bashing. It's fun, but I tend to bite my tounge when I get tempted :-P. I think it's quite a rude thing to do, sort of like bashing a person's ethnicity. But when Hollywood puts out a series of sci-fi movies which contain stories about the U.S. saving the world again and again, how is that not "Americans-save-the-world propeganda?"
I think everyone who matters knows that it isn't to be taken seriously.... but in Europe, my cousin once asked "Do Americans really think that way? The way they behave in movies?" With movies like Blackhawk down, Disney's Pearl Harbour, U251(if that's the number), Rambo, Rambo and more Rambo, then all these disaster movies, I would have to say that America does all the best American bashing.
Beautiful in the irony that the complete absense of any sci-fi will make it better sci-fi for the geek crowd. Think about it, one of two things will happen if they explained the disaster to a geek audience:
Better just to write around it. Besides, part of the movie is that hope is long gone. Just deal with the fact that it's hopeless.
Back when Armageddon, Deep Impact, and other Americans-save-the-world propeganda was flying around, there was a great little Canadian film called "Last night"
The situation is... a little while ago scientists figured out the world was going to end. They tried to do something about it, but realized it was utterly futile. People panicked a bit after that... but that didn't change anything. Yep, the world is going to end and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. It's great :-)
http://users.aol.com/aleong1631/lastnight.html
What makes it extra beautiful for the geeky crowd is that it doesn't even touch the sci-fi aspects. It just ignores that stuff... they don't even really get into why or how the world is going to end. It's just some un-discussed astronomical disaster.
Oh, and the review is a little off... it's not that the world ends at the end of the millenium, it is that they adjust the clocks and calendars so that the world ends at that point. No trite, sucky 'fate' or religious apocolypse overtones...
Yep. Notebooks are the only thing I buy extended warranties on. They're far too expensive to repair and they die from natural causes far too frequently (worn out keyboard, flakey hinges, systemboard gone nuts, bad display etc...)
Worship the machine though, and buy through a reputable dealer... it's far too easy for some dopehead to claim that you abused it. When it comes down to it, it is your word against theirs.
Windows is a programming platform for applications and drivers.
Linux is an operating system with heaps of stuff on it.
Windows happens to have an operating system in it, but nobody really cares about it. The programming platform is the important part.
Linux's greatest obstacle to widespread desktop acceptance is standardizing on a set of libraries and calls to turn it into a platform. Then application developers could do wild stuff like cut-and-paste graphics, or plug into the menu system, or.... adjust the volume on the soundcard.
I got Windows 3.0 to run on high-resolution CGA graphics :-)
640x200x1
You can simulate the effect by wrapping bug screen and wax paper over your monitor and cranking the brightness up all the way.
(That's 'bug' as in insect, 'screen' as in window screen and 'window' as in a hole in the wall generally covered with glass)
Cost of living and average salaries are lower in India. The American worker has to feed his family too.
At the extreme end of the spectrum, sending work overseas to countries with lower cost of living is self-destructive. Your workers are your customers' customers. If your workers can't afford a U.S. lifestyle in the U.S., then your customers have fewer customers... which means they don't need your products.
But... it's a screwed up game that happens again and again in capitalism. It is to everyone's mutual bennefit in the U.S. if the jobs stay in the country. However, the first corporation which can export the jobs has an unfair advantage, allowing them to squash the competition while reaping huge profits. If there is nothing there to stop them, they can't be blamed for doing it. It is as much self-defense as corruption.
The same forces unfortunately apply to government too... the first governor who takes the kickbacks for allowing such a thing to take place could be made be rich enough that they don't have to care how poorly the country fares.
I'm sure that if I knew anything about economics, I would know a name for this pattern.
You mean BNF is for humans!?
Ungrateful relative, 2:00am: "Hey Bob, you know that land you let me hunt on? Well, there was this bog and I wasn't sure if I should go around it or not, so I tried to go through it. My truck is stuck in the mud. Will you come over and pull it out for me? I'll cook you dinner?"
Bob: "What were you doing driving off-road at 2:00am through a swamp?"
Ungrateful relative: "Of course I know how to use a comp^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H hunt! It's not my fault your land is covered in bogs."
Bob: "I'll be right over..."
Three days later...
dinner time: **ring**, **ring** Ungrateful relative: "The toilet in your cottage is plugged. I'm not sure how to work one of these things."
Bob: "Do you see a plunger?"
Ungrateful relative: "Is that the one with with the twirly 'e'?"
Bob: "I'll be right over..."
The next day..
Ungrateful relative: "I was trying to drive out of your camp but my truck won't start. I think your bog screwed it up?"
Bob: "Did you leave the lights on?"
Ungrateful relative: "Why, does that matter?"
Bob: "I'll be right over..."
etc...
Vision system, like a stereo camera hooked up to a Linux box (this is where I'm at a loss. I don't think I could do this software).
If you could, I think DARPA would want to hear from you. Maybe they could find these people by running some kind of contest... oh wait...
I think the general idea behind having to pull the trigger for each shot is that you have to aim at your target.
That's communist!
It says they're using a 150kW generator, but it doesn't say that they're generating 150kW.
A lawyer doesn't need to pick them apart. The GPL is an inappropriate license for a library... unless you're developing only GPL software.
QT needs to be LGPL before Troll Tech's control over closed-source commercial development in KDE goes away.
Developing for KDE is more legally restricive than developing for Win32 (barring non-development related clauses of the requisite MS EULA's).
Moreover, the free-QT agreements only protect the GPL status of the library. They don't protect closed commercial development.
So... For example... when you tell your boss that you have this great idea for a in-house app utilizing proprietary technology, be prepared to pay $2000 for each developer before writing a stitch of the code. Oh and you're not allowed to use free-QT to develop then purchase commercial-QT afterwards.
But if you were doing the same thing on Windows, you could use the Win32 api with free development tools.
Trolltech knows what they're doing. They have control over commercial development in KDE. They didn't offer the GPL'd code out of the goodness of their hearts.
It's not superior to Java, it's just different and working well today.
Yes, .Net is a threat and Java is useful. Oddly, Java is especially useful on Linux because it makes configuration and setup more uniform... :-)
And if you need performance, just write a native Linux app... all your servers are running it anyways.
Umm...
I was talking about what Linux does today. Not what .Net will do tomorrow, nor what Java has been promising for roughly a decade.
Linux also unifies pretty much all of IBM's hardware. It demonstrates much of what Java promised... write once, (compile and) run on any hardware platform.
So a small shop can develop a web commerce site on a $500 Linux machine and cleanly scale it up to an AS/400 without redeveloping.
TCO is a bizzare figure in this arena, the costs of the services are better compared to the cost of downtime and the track record at stuff like reliability, failover, disaster recovery etc.
Pretty much every major program is in the package list. The ones that aren't are relatively obscure things, and even those often have .debs available.
Mozilla is still at 1.0 for Debian stable.
You only have a lot of choices if you're running Testing or Unstable... otherwise everything really new has a dependency on one of those testing or unstable libraries.
I shouldn't have to upgrade my shared libraries to unstable to install the latest Mozilla deb.
On the other hand, some security vulnerabilities could be carefully engineered or intentionally neglected by a malicious developer. Written carefully enough they could even look like an honest mistake... like the latest buffer-overflow in Sendmail for example?
Then I suppose the incentive comes into play.
Naw, quantum computing is damned odd. It really has nothing to do with conventional computing.
Maybe a quantum coprocessor or API (calling on a network resource) for stuff like cracking encyryption keys or well... has anybody come up with a legitimate application yet?
To abuse the paint-by-number analogy, I'd put it a little closer to painting from a photograph than to painting by number. There aren't any lines, you just know what the original was supposed to be. Your own skill and interpretation lets you do whatever you want with it.
Plenty of students paint from photos. It's fun. I suppose this guy will just have to live with the fact that these crazy people aren't hurting anybody.
For that matter, who cares if anybody paints by number? It beats T.V., it's certainly less predictable than pro wrestling. And if I could paint something that looked like a Van Gough by painting by number, I would be damn proud to put it on my wall. That'd just be cool.
It does mean that every robber can safely ignore the response that "I don't know my PIN number" when they keep you hostage in your home for weeks, sucking the maximum withdrawal day after day while your family is home at gunpoint.
Whatever happened to distress PIN numbers? You can't do a distress eyeball because all a robber has to do is follow you home from an ATM to know what bank you go to, what your balance is(it's on those slips they spit everywhere), and which eyeball you use to access your money.
This is just stupid. Get some $7/hr tellers back behind the counters. The banks aren't going broke any day soon.
I don't really like the idea of trusting the MTA admins/owners to administer such a system. It would just be a matter of time before everyone is lulled into a false sense of security and AOL or some other big ISP starts selling paid advertising.
I would rather see a web of trust based on individuals. Then Joe-user could trust all employees of an ISP, but they could always un-trust their ISP's trusts... and build their own list of trusts.
I guess I just like the idea of the solution to SPAM being to develop the world-wide average-Joe use of cryptography.
"We were doing something they couldn't get... "
"I was not arrogant..."
You have to admit, it's an interesting choice of words.
I need to find a goatse.cx link to wipe that from my mind.