"Open source is the ultimate communist and ultimate capitalist tool."
I think it's a mistake to try to mash political ideologies into open source. The interesting thing about open source is that it denies the realities of politics in the physical world. Things like manufacture and distribution costs don't exist. Read Marx sometime and keep your eye on how much of his Communist Manifesto wouldn't have any meaning if you could produce goods for free, and it cost nothing (or near nothing) to distribute them.
Capitalism is about the intrinsic value of goods. When they have no real value, and the creative process and reputation are the only things that have value, it's a very different ball game.
Open source is a true meritocracy and cannot be compared to physical political systems.
"You're absolutely right, families that have only one parent are more likely to have a lot of other problem"
Well, no I didn't say that. What I said was the odds might be skewed by abusive two-parent families that get divorced. Since a) abuse is more often a male phenomenon and b) single parents are more often female, this would taint measurements of single-parent statistics. It's really the two-parent homes that are causing that particular part of the problem, but the statistics will show up on the single-parent side.
If you then use those stats to say that "traditional families" are good, you're wrong, since it was the "traditional family" that caused the problem.
Absolutely! Open source software is not about social change or politics or multinationals or even business. It's about scratching an itch and sharing the result. Huge companies like IBM or 15 year-old kids in Mexico can both do this, and have the same access to the tools of the trade. It's the ultimate fair playing field, and everyone gets something good out of it.
"Well, kids do better when raised by two parents as opposed to one parent."
Do they?! I'd love to see some figures on that. Last I'd heard, that was not the case. Of course, it depends on how you define "do better", but I'd be willing to take crime, substance abuse, life expectancy, likelihood to be the victim of child abuse, and perhaps even divorce rate as indicators.
Of course, perhaps if you look at divorced parents, you'll tend to select for famillies that had problems to start (e.g. there may have been abuse, which is why they split up), and that will skew the odds....
If you can demonstrate that those are higher for single-parent kids, then I'll buy it, but until then my gut tells me that two-parent famillies are more likely to have a father-figure, and most of the above are usually linked to some sort of male influence, aren't they?
"WTF is a "space opera" anyway? That's not a genre."
Strange that you went on for a while about how this wasn't space opera before getting to this question....
I just assumed that you knew, sorry. Space opera is a class of SF storytelling that's based around action rather than speculation about science, technology or the future.
Hope that helps.
"They've all founded their own effects houses, and what you see is just as much the product of their creative output as any other part of the movie.
I.e., they bought the effects."
No. I'm sorry, but while money goes into the process, you can look at dozens of examples of people using similar technology to produce something that no one will ever refer to as "amazing" or "beautiful". You don't say that a directory "just bought the cinematography", even when the lenses and cameras cost a significant fraction of the cost of the film, so why would you say this about CG effects? It's just a tool. If great things are done with it, it's because the tool was used by a master.
Every single Star Wars movie has been greeted with the old, "the special effects were amazing, but you expect that." I guess the ultimate compliment you can pay Lucas is to say that he makes it look easy. All of the utter trash I see in most movies with CG in them tells me that he has a rare talent.
Well, the point to their previous sinks was actually not the size of the cooling surfaces, but of the fan. Because the fan was so large, it was possible to have it rotate very slowly and still move the same volume of air as a regular heatsink fan. This means quieter operation for the same cooling, which is a very hot market right now.
And this is why you should use Gnutella instead. Simply search by name, SHA1 or extension and download what you need.
I've never had to check to see how many people are seeding something, and within 1-3 seconds of kicking off a download, I've usually discovered 2-500 other people who are actively downloading and sharing the result.
Want a searchable BitTorrent? It's spelled Gnutella.
"Where do bad jokes, ex post facto justifications, surreal physics (battle cruiser gravity changing according to position of a spacecraft, in space; the nefarious spacewind; others), and juevenile theater dialog fit into that?"
They don't. Did you read my post?
"The only thing awe-inspiring is the special effects, and let's be honest with ourselves--Lucas simply bought those."
You're joking, right? Lucas, Cameron and Jackson are three of the VERY small number of directors for whom that simply is NOT true. They've all founded their own effects houses, and what you see is just as much the product of their creative output as any other part of the movie. What ILM and its spin-offs (e.g. Pixar) have done for the art of film-making is no less than revolutionary. It's THE ONLY AREA in whcih Lucas is considered to be one of the truly great film makers by his peers, and rightly so.
"Today films have ever more realistic special effects and are getting better at avoiding the pitfals of terminally stupid characters. (except lucas;pasdlkfja)"
You didn't just say that.... No.... Have you seen Are We There Yet?!
And, are "terminally stupid" characters always bad? I hear the lines of Pvt. Hudson (Bill Paxton) from Aliens being quoted with fondness all the time, and his had to be the very definition of "terminally stupid"! I think you have to look deeper for your answers....
"The fad today seems to be 'Accessable language' no attempt is made at proper english (USAian or UKian). Instead, popular idioms are used who's meaning is obvious and far from deep [...] It only served to remind me how much better Lady Macbeth's dialog was in shakespeare's play."
Shakespear's plays were absolutely LOADED with popular idioms! What's more, if your only complaint about any given movie is that the dialog didn't live up to Shakespear, then I'd say it's probably a good movie.
"I definately agree that the "first three" serve to make the universe and events of the "original three" seem smaller and less significant."
I think time has already done that, and you're looking for a reason that the magic has gone. Long before the new movies came out, I heard people who loved the first three movies saying that they'd gone back to re-watch them, and while they were still fond of them, the flaws were MUCH more obvious. Luke's dialog is... well, it's Lucas dialog. Most of the great lines of the film seem a bit more silly today. The dramatic moments are a little forced. It's still a fun set of films, but it's full of the kind of dialog that makes you wonder how they became some of the most loved films of all time.
If you went into RoTS expecting BETTER, you were setting yourself up for a fall that was rather obvious. If you relaxed and enjoyed the movie and appreciated the very obviously Lucas-written dialog for its blunt charms, then it was actually a lot of fun.
This question really torqued me off, not because it was a stupid question that abused the word "terrorist" to mean someone who does something that hurts someone else deliberately, but because it uses the same bad math that has begun to sink into every news story I read.
So this movie caused, "a $627 million loss in American Productivity," eh? And that's because a bunch of people left work to see it, right? Ok, so let's take a look at that. Most of those people will have called in sick. Those people are using sick time that was allocated by, and accounted for by their company. No loss there unless you start playing with probability of employees not using all of their sick time, but even THEN, there's certainly a lot less than 100% of that time off you can count as "loss".
Next, there's folks like me who chose to schedule a day off as vacation. I would have used that day either way, so there's absolutely zero loss there.
Next, there's the companies that will buy time in a theater and go en masse to see it. Those companies are doing so in order to build morale on the theory that this will improve productivity. If it works, there's a net GAIN in productivity.
Bottom line: you cannot possibly measure absoulute numbers of dollars lost.
Ok, now on to the next part:
"The box-office take was $158.5 million. That leaves a $468.5 cost to the U.S. Economy."
And yet we know (based on the fact that Lucas got rich of it) that merchandising, licensing and video is where movies make their money. What's more, the success at the box office -- which is enhanced by having the two-day lead-in during the week which enhances weekend sales by word-of-mouth -- means that that secondary cash-flow will be much larger.
In the end, I would be truly shocked to find that ANYTHING capable of motivating that many people to go spend money comes out as a net loss.
Still, there is no excuse for using the word "terrorist" to refer to a person releasing a movie. That's plain foolish.
Ebert didn't say he was comparing to any particular other films. He said that it, "returned to the space opera roots of the original film and succeeded on that level."
That is to say, you don't take Who Framed Roger Rabbit and say that it's a failure because the dramatic tension isn't up to the standards of The Godfather.
Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is one of the best space operas to hit the movie screen, IMHO. That doesn't mean it has great dialog because dialog isn't what that genre is about. It's about sense of wonder, action, visual prestidigitation and the use of the awe-inspiring scale of space as a cinematic tool.
Also, what's this nonsense about movies being considered in absolute terms?! I've never heard such silliness. There are NO ABSOLUTES in film-making. I've heard real-life conversations that make every line of dialog in RoTS sound like Robert Frost, but that doesn't mean that RoTS is "better than real life", it just means that there is a quality of dialog that pleases my ear and sensibilities that is found more so in RoTS than in some real-life conversation, and even more so in many films. This is, and can only be, a relative comparison. There's no metric unit of good dialog or indeed of movies as a whole. If there were, no one would debate the outcome of the Oscars.
"We (the security-loving Internet elite) want maximal transparency for all of our systems, cryptographic and otherwise"
Inject the word "security" and I'm cool with that. I don't want maximal transparency for everything. I want to know how my data is protected, but Google doesn't have to tell me how page ranking works in order for me to get that... on the other hand, if they did tell me, I could help them. That's their choice.
Yes, he made a silly mistake, and I'm kind of stunned that he said what he did. Oh well. Stupid interview quotes are a dime a dozen. Good search engines are rare.... I wonder if I thought of that, or if I'm quoting something... hold on, I'll just Google it.
His whole argument goes out the window if you look at the history of the Web and P2P systems like Gnutella and BitTorrent.
The flip-side of this is that if BitKeeper were an open source product, you could brush it off as "non-innovative" just by saying that it's a source code control system, and there are tons of those out there. The innovation is incremental, and that's important to remember. Now go look at all of the Open Source projects whose innovations are incremental. A few that come to mind are gcc, Gnome, The Gimp, Perl, Python, Bash, Gnu fileutils, ReiserFS (well ok, not so incremental), BSD's IP Firewall (ok, again not so incremental).... there are dozens of other examples with significant, but incremental innovations.
The problem that he REALLY has is that open source as a BUSINESS MODEL is fundamentally different from that of proprietary software, and he's right: he'd be out of business in a week if he went open source. That's something that the market will figure out in time, and I think the correct answer is that software as a commodity just took several steps down the ladder in terms of total value.
I'm good with that, and in fact as a conusumer, I'm thrilled.
Re:reason for, reason not for
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I type about 35 WPM on technical text and about 44 WPM on normal English text (probably a bit more on modern english text, as a timed myself on Project Gutenberg, but then I got in some good reading at the same time:)
I do this (including correcting mistakes) without ever having learned to properly touch-type.
Sure, I might be able to get up to 60 or 80 WPM if I typed correctly, but I actually doubt it. Most of what takes me extra time is not missing keys, but losing conentration as I think about what I'm typing instead of typing it, and thus pausing to remember where I am in typing what word.
I don't think I need a new keyboard (tried a few like TouchStream and Kinesis), but a more regular language to type;-)
Thinking a bit more about this, after the above post, I should point out a scenario by which this ruling DOES make sense:
If the prosecution had encrypted files in hand that they had some way of demonstrating the contents of (e.g. they got his private key and decrypted them or he surrendered their contents), and then they pointed to the PGP installation and said, "look here, he installed PGP 2 years ago, which means that he was thinking about the ramifications of the discovery of his actions, even then." -- then I can see the judge's ruling making sense. It's not PROOF of any intent, but it's evidence of such intent (and evidence comes in many degrees of reliability, which courts have to contend with all the time, so that much I trust).
"IBM's extremely popular AS/400, in its "i5 server" version, uses DB2"
I don't know AS/400s, but I think you'll find that DB2 has special support for acting as a filesystem and/or caching metadata in a vnode-like system, and you're not performing true relational operations in order to find your file and look up its modification time.
"Reiser adds RDBMS features with every release, and might evolve into a true DB/FS hybrid. At the very least it proves both the concept, and its appropriateness to actual apps."
No, that's evidence that the model that I was suggesting is practical (hence the reason that I linked to Reiser). What you want is a low-level that supports the semantics that routine filesystem use AND databases can take advantage of so that your filesystem's data is available to the database and visa versa. This is what Reiser is doing, and it's, IMHO, the next logical evolution of the filesystem without taking a giant performance hit from having a relational database for a filesystem.
More to the point, the presence of PGP (or clone thereof) indicates that you probably have a run-of-the-mill Linux distribution installed. I haven't installed such an OS in the last 4 years that didn't come with one by default.
If it was a Windows box (most likely), then there's a case for saying, "he planned to hide something," but even then I'm not sure that can be considered evidence of criminal intent. For example, I might have a safe in my house. Is the safe evidence that I plan to have expensive jewelry, or is it evidence that I plan to have legal documents that I care about?
Same goes for PGP. I might want to use it to confirm signatures in email or store kiddie porn safe from authorities or encrypt my credit card info to mail to a mail-order house that doesn't have a Web site (done that twice in my life so far).
Nother point for the defense: Almost all computers come with software that does roughly the same thing, but isn't stand-alone. The libraries that Web browsers use to do e-commerce do just about exactly the same thing as PGP, and can easily be used by anyone with some basic programming skills to hide anything from kiddie porn to the Christian Bible from your dissaproving athiest family.
"Enough stuffing metadata into filenames. Enough shoehorning all data into a file/folder/cabinet model, now less familiar to people than the networked infosystems that mimic them."
Well, that seems fine, except for the fact that you want your filesystems to PERFORM well. You think nothing of launching 10,000 "queries" at your filesystem, but when it comes to dealing with a relational database, you have to back off and think about caching strategies because the database is expensive.
Why? Because that flexibility requires abstraction, which costs cycles and memory.
Instead, why not re-design the filesystem to handle the most basic operations required by both databases and the infosystems that resemble, but are not databases... fortunately, someone has already done much of that for you.
"pick any forum on any web site anywhere in the world and look at the discussions of outsourcing to the third world and the devastating quality, communication and reputational problems that companies that make the mistake of outsourcing to India and similar third world countries suffer. Look at the standing joke that IBM, Dell, and Telstra technical support have become as a direct and specific result of their corporate decision to outsource to India."
Well, this doesn't really speak poorly of India, so much as it does of outsourcing to the lowest bidder. How many times have you heard of a *US* company that was the low bidder on a project turning out to be a horrible choice? Does that mean that US companies are incompetent? Hardly.
In the same way, Indian companies that are selling the "we can offer cheap labor pools" line, are probably a craps shoot, and may or may not be good companies. Add to that the difficulty of coordinating across physical, language and time-zone barriers, and you begin to get a sense of how likely it is that any given relationship will go well.
It has NOTHING to do with the quality of the education or raw talent of the people in India (which I've found to be excellent in my dealings with a number of folks from that part of the world).
That said, there is a very large difference between outsourcing and opening a branch office in another country, which is what I understand OSDL is interesting in doing. You might call it "offshoring", but if you're hiring locals and making them part of your business, that's not outsourcing.
"Making a copy of yourself doesn't avoid death for you, it just means ongoing life for a copy of you."
If I'm unaware of the distinction, then -- for many reasonable purposes -- there is none. This is true in the same way that I'm not a different person now from the person I was when I was younger, even though most of my body has been replaced over the years, including some parts of my brain (though most CNS features do not regenerate).
I would be just fine accepting electronic storage as an acceptable step toward immortality (it's not really immortality because it only expands the time-frame about which you are concerned, but many factors still threaten your conciousness), providing that it was demonstrated to be a complete copy (hard to do, since we don't have a complete definition of what it is we're copying) and it was demonstrated that the copy could function in ways comparable to the ways in which I function (can reason, communicate, experience emotional states, etc.)
"Yeah, but is it mod_perl or cgi? If you're using fastcgi, is there still a big performance gain by switching to mod_perl?"
If you're still thinking in terms of CGI, then it's close to a wash.
However, mod_perl isn't about CGI. mod_perl is about exposing the Apache API to you. Want to build a caching system that doesn't require a single line of code to be executed for 90% of incoming requests? You can do that with mod_perl. Want to proxy some requests based on the protocol version the browser uses? mod_perl can do that long before you get to the point of even trying to find a cgi program on disk.
mod_perl lets you do far more than any lightly coupled tool can, and thus it is the building block upon which you build a real CMS (like bricolage) or other high-level Web tool (like TTK, which is what Slashdot uses).
They are just as much trolls as posts replying to a Gnome article with C flames would be, or C++ flames in response to a KDE article. The tool is not about the lanugage. mod_perl has a great deal going for it as a Web tool. If you don't like Perl, then fine, but that's off topic with respect to mod_perl itself.
"Truth be told, the cold war was the last vestige of a long age of war. Remember, WWI was primarily about nobility attempting to maintain power in a modern world, while WWII was about Eugenics and superiority through control of genetics. (Since proven to be absolute garbage.)"
What the heck?!
WWII was about no such thing. WWII was a backlash from Germany in response to the amazingly harsh conditions and essentially enforced depression that the country was placed under after WWI. The fact that they elected a nutjob like Hitler should be a measure of how desperate they were.
Germany, under Hitler engaged in Eugenics research and killed millions of people in (and often before even reaching) concentration camps (including Jews, Romani, homosexual men and political prisoners (which includes lesbians who were considered subversives, not sex offenders like homosexual men)), but that was NOT what the war was about at all.
Of course, you could say that Hitler's belief that he could win the war and establish his third reich (a new Roman Empire) was based on his conviction in the superiority of the "Arian race", but to say that the war was "about" that is reaching. The war was about political and economic power, not Eugenics.
Slashdot Mirror
"Open source is the ultimate communist and ultimate capitalist tool."
I think it's a mistake to try to mash political ideologies into open source. The interesting thing about open source is that it denies the realities of politics in the physical world. Things like manufacture and distribution costs don't exist. Read Marx sometime and keep your eye on how much of his Communist Manifesto wouldn't have any meaning if you could produce goods for free, and it cost nothing (or near nothing) to distribute them.
Capitalism is about the intrinsic value of goods. When they have no real value, and the creative process and reputation are the only things that have value, it's a very different ball game.
Open source is a true meritocracy and cannot be compared to physical political systems.
"You're absolutely right, families that have only one parent are more likely to have a lot of other problem"
Well, no I didn't say that. What I said was the odds might be skewed by abusive two-parent families that get divorced. Since a) abuse is more often a male phenomenon and b) single parents are more often female, this would taint measurements of single-parent statistics. It's really the two-parent homes that are causing that particular part of the problem, but the statistics will show up on the single-parent side.
If you then use those stats to say that "traditional families" are good, you're wrong, since it was the "traditional family" that caused the problem.
"more people convicted of crimes are from single parent home"
Right, and what I'm saying is I've heard exactly the opposite, so show me the numbers.
Absolutely! Open source software is not about social change or politics or multinationals or even business. It's about scratching an itch and sharing the result. Huge companies like IBM or 15 year-old kids in Mexico can both do this, and have the same access to the tools of the trade. It's the ultimate fair playing field, and everyone gets something good out of it.
"Well, kids do better when raised by two parents as opposed to one parent."
Do they?! I'd love to see some figures on that. Last I'd heard, that was not the case. Of course, it depends on how you define "do better", but I'd be willing to take crime, substance abuse, life expectancy, likelihood to be the victim of child abuse, and perhaps even divorce rate as indicators.
Of course, perhaps if you look at divorced parents, you'll tend to select for famillies that had problems to start (e.g. there may have been abuse, which is why they split up), and that will skew the odds....
If you can demonstrate that those are higher for single-parent kids, then I'll buy it, but until then my gut tells me that two-parent famillies are more likely to have a father-figure, and most of the above are usually linked to some sort of male influence, aren't they?
"WTF is a "space opera" anyway? That's not a genre."
Strange that you went on for a while about how this wasn't space opera before getting to this question....
I just assumed that you knew, sorry. Space opera is a class of SF storytelling that's based around action rather than speculation about science, technology or the future.
Hope that helps.
" They've all founded their own effects houses, and what you see is just as much the product of their creative output as any other part of the movie.
I.e., they bought the effects."
No. I'm sorry, but while money goes into the process, you can look at dozens of examples of people using similar technology to produce something that no one will ever refer to as "amazing" or "beautiful". You don't say that a directory "just bought the cinematography", even when the lenses and cameras cost a significant fraction of the cost of the film, so why would you say this about CG effects? It's just a tool. If great things are done with it, it's because the tool was used by a master.
Every single Star Wars movie has been greeted with the old, "the special effects were amazing, but you expect that." I guess the ultimate compliment you can pay Lucas is to say that he makes it look easy. All of the utter trash I see in most movies with CG in them tells me that he has a rare talent.
Well, the point to their previous sinks was actually not the size of the cooling surfaces, but of the fan. Because the fan was so large, it was possible to have it rotate very slowly and still move the same volume of air as a regular heatsink fan. This means quieter operation for the same cooling, which is a very hot market right now.
And this is why you should use Gnutella instead. Simply search by name, SHA1 or extension and download what you need.
I've never had to check to see how many people are seeding something, and within 1-3 seconds of kicking off a download, I've usually discovered 2-500 other people who are actively downloading and sharing the result.
Want a searchable BitTorrent? It's spelled Gnutella.
"Where do bad jokes, ex post facto justifications, surreal physics (battle cruiser gravity changing according to position of a spacecraft, in space; the nefarious spacewind; others), and juevenile theater dialog fit into that?"
They don't. Did you read my post?
"The only thing awe-inspiring is the special effects, and let's be honest with ourselves--Lucas simply bought those."
You're joking, right? Lucas, Cameron and Jackson are three of the VERY small number of directors for whom that simply is NOT true. They've all founded their own effects houses, and what you see is just as much the product of their creative output as any other part of the movie. What ILM and its spin-offs (e.g. Pixar) have done for the art of film-making is no less than revolutionary. It's THE ONLY AREA in whcih Lucas is considered to be one of the truly great film makers by his peers, and rightly so.
"Today films have ever more realistic special effects and are getting better at avoiding the pitfals of terminally stupid characters. (except lucas ;pasdlkfja)"
You didn't just say that.... No.... Have you seen Are We There Yet?!
And, are "terminally stupid" characters always bad? I hear the lines of Pvt. Hudson (Bill Paxton) from Aliens being quoted with fondness all the time, and his had to be the very definition of "terminally stupid"! I think you have to look deeper for your answers....
"The fad today seems to be 'Accessable language' no attempt is made at proper english (USAian or UKian). Instead, popular idioms are used who's meaning is obvious and far from deep [...] It only served to remind me how much better Lady Macbeth's dialog was in shakespeare's play."
Shakespear's plays were absolutely LOADED with popular idioms! What's more, if your only complaint about any given movie is that the dialog didn't live up to Shakespear, then I'd say it's probably a good movie.
"I definately agree that the "first three" serve to make the universe and events of the "original three" seem smaller and less significant."
I think time has already done that, and you're looking for a reason that the magic has gone. Long before the new movies came out, I heard people who loved the first three movies saying that they'd gone back to re-watch them, and while they were still fond of them, the flaws were MUCH more obvious. Luke's dialog is... well, it's Lucas dialog. Most of the great lines of the film seem a bit more silly today. The dramatic moments are a little forced. It's still a fun set of films, but it's full of the kind of dialog that makes you wonder how they became some of the most loved films of all time.
If you went into RoTS expecting BETTER, you were setting yourself up for a fall that was rather obvious. If you relaxed and enjoyed the movie and appreciated the very obviously Lucas-written dialog for its blunt charms, then it was actually a lot of fun.
This question really torqued me off, not because it was a stupid question that abused the word "terrorist" to mean someone who does something that hurts someone else deliberately, but because it uses the same bad math that has begun to sink into every news story I read.
So this movie caused, "a $627 million loss in American Productivity," eh? And that's because a bunch of people left work to see it, right? Ok, so let's take a look at that. Most of those people will have called in sick. Those people are using sick time that was allocated by, and accounted for by their company. No loss there unless you start playing with probability of employees not using all of their sick time, but even THEN, there's certainly a lot less than 100% of that time off you can count as "loss".
Next, there's folks like me who chose to schedule a day off as vacation. I would have used that day either way, so there's absolutely zero loss there.
Next, there's the companies that will buy time in a theater and go en masse to see it. Those companies are doing so in order to build morale on the theory that this will improve productivity. If it works, there's a net GAIN in productivity.
Bottom line: you cannot possibly measure absoulute numbers of dollars lost.
Ok, now on to the next part:
"The box-office take was $158.5 million. That leaves a $468.5 cost to the U.S. Economy."
And yet we know (based on the fact that Lucas got rich of it) that merchandising, licensing and video is where movies make their money. What's more, the success at the box office -- which is enhanced by having the two-day lead-in during the week which enhances weekend sales by word-of-mouth -- means that that secondary cash-flow will be much larger.
In the end, I would be truly shocked to find that ANYTHING capable of motivating that many people to go spend money comes out as a net loss.
Still, there is no excuse for using the word "terrorist" to refer to a person releasing a movie. That's plain foolish.
Ebert didn't say he was comparing to any particular other films. He said that it, "returned to the space opera roots of the original film and succeeded on that level."
That is to say, you don't take Who Framed Roger Rabbit and say that it's a failure because the dramatic tension isn't up to the standards of The Godfather.
Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is one of the best space operas to hit the movie screen, IMHO. That doesn't mean it has great dialog because dialog isn't what that genre is about. It's about sense of wonder, action, visual prestidigitation and the use of the awe-inspiring scale of space as a cinematic tool.
Also, what's this nonsense about movies being considered in absolute terms?! I've never heard such silliness. There are NO ABSOLUTES in film-making. I've heard real-life conversations that make every line of dialog in RoTS sound like Robert Frost, but that doesn't mean that RoTS is "better than real life", it just means that there is a quality of dialog that pleases my ear and sensibilities that is found more so in RoTS than in some real-life conversation, and even more so in many films. This is, and can only be, a relative comparison. There's no metric unit of good dialog or indeed of movies as a whole. If there were, no one would debate the outcome of the Oscars.
"We (the security-loving Internet elite) want maximal transparency for all of our systems, cryptographic and otherwise"
Inject the word "security" and I'm cool with that. I don't want maximal transparency for everything. I want to know how my data is protected, but Google doesn't have to tell me how page ranking works in order for me to get that... on the other hand, if they did tell me, I could help them. That's their choice.
Yes, he made a silly mistake, and I'm kind of stunned that he said what he did. Oh well. Stupid interview quotes are a dime a dozen. Good search engines are rare.... I wonder if I thought of that, or if I'm quoting something... hold on, I'll just Google it.
His whole argument goes out the window if you look at the history of the Web and P2P systems like Gnutella and BitTorrent.
The flip-side of this is that if BitKeeper were an open source product, you could brush it off as "non-innovative" just by saying that it's a source code control system, and there are tons of those out there. The innovation is incremental, and that's important to remember. Now go look at all of the Open Source projects whose innovations are incremental. A few that come to mind are gcc, Gnome, The Gimp, Perl, Python, Bash, Gnu fileutils, ReiserFS (well ok, not so incremental), BSD's IP Firewall (ok, again not so incremental).... there are dozens of other examples with significant, but incremental innovations.
The problem that he REALLY has is that open source as a BUSINESS MODEL is fundamentally different from that of proprietary software, and he's right: he'd be out of business in a week if he went open source. That's something that the market will figure out in time, and I think the correct answer is that software as a commodity just took several steps down the ladder in terms of total value.
I'm good with that, and in fact as a conusumer, I'm thrilled.
I type about 35 WPM on technical text and about 44 WPM on normal English text (probably a bit more on modern english text, as a timed myself on Project Gutenberg, but then I got in some good reading at the same time :)
;-)
I do this (including correcting mistakes) without ever having learned to properly touch-type.
Sure, I might be able to get up to 60 or 80 WPM if I typed correctly, but I actually doubt it. Most of what takes me extra time is not missing keys, but losing conentration as I think about what I'm typing instead of typing it, and thus pausing to remember where I am in typing what word.
I don't think I need a new keyboard (tried a few like TouchStream and Kinesis), but a more regular language to type
Thinking a bit more about this, after the above post, I should point out a scenario by which this ruling DOES make sense:
If the prosecution had encrypted files in hand that they had some way of demonstrating the contents of (e.g. they got his private key and decrypted them or he surrendered their contents), and then they pointed to the PGP installation and said, "look here, he installed PGP 2 years ago, which means that he was thinking about the ramifications of the discovery of his actions, even then." -- then I can see the judge's ruling making sense. It's not PROOF of any intent, but it's evidence of such intent (and evidence comes in many degrees of reliability, which courts have to contend with all the time, so that much I trust).
"IBM's extremely popular AS/400, in its "i5 server" version, uses DB2"
I don't know AS/400s, but I think you'll find that DB2 has special support for acting as a filesystem and/or caching metadata in a vnode-like system, and you're not performing true relational operations in order to find your file and look up its modification time.
"Reiser adds RDBMS features with every release, and might evolve into a true DB/FS hybrid. At the very least it proves both the concept, and its appropriateness to actual apps."
No, that's evidence that the model that I was suggesting is practical (hence the reason that I linked to Reiser). What you want is a low-level that supports the semantics that routine filesystem use AND databases can take advantage of so that your filesystem's data is available to the database and visa versa. This is what Reiser is doing, and it's, IMHO, the next logical evolution of the filesystem without taking a giant performance hit from having a relational database for a filesystem.
More to the point, the presence of PGP (or clone thereof) indicates that you probably have a run-of-the-mill Linux distribution installed. I haven't installed such an OS in the last 4 years that didn't come with one by default.
If it was a Windows box (most likely), then there's a case for saying, "he planned to hide something," but even then I'm not sure that can be considered evidence of criminal intent. For example, I might have a safe in my house. Is the safe evidence that I plan to have expensive jewelry, or is it evidence that I plan to have legal documents that I care about?
Same goes for PGP. I might want to use it to confirm signatures in email or store kiddie porn safe from authorities or encrypt my credit card info to mail to a mail-order house that doesn't have a Web site (done that twice in my life so far).
Nother point for the defense: Almost all computers come with software that does roughly the same thing, but isn't stand-alone. The libraries that Web browsers use to do e-commerce do just about exactly the same thing as PGP, and can easily be used by anyone with some basic programming skills to hide anything from kiddie porn to the Christian Bible from your dissaproving athiest family.
"Enough stuffing metadata into filenames. Enough shoehorning all data into a file/folder/cabinet model, now less familiar to people than the networked infosystems that mimic them."
Well, that seems fine, except for the fact that you want your filesystems to PERFORM well. You think nothing of launching 10,000 "queries" at your filesystem, but when it comes to dealing with a relational database, you have to back off and think about caching strategies because the database is expensive.
Why? Because that flexibility requires abstraction, which costs cycles and memory.
Instead, why not re-design the filesystem to handle the most basic operations required by both databases and the infosystems that resemble, but are not databases... fortunately, someone has already done much of that for you.
"pick any forum on any web site anywhere in the world and look at the discussions of outsourcing to the third world and the devastating quality, communication and reputational problems that companies that make the mistake of outsourcing to India and similar third world countries suffer. Look at the standing joke that IBM, Dell, and Telstra technical support have become as a direct and specific result of their corporate decision to outsource to India."
Well, this doesn't really speak poorly of India, so much as it does of outsourcing to the lowest bidder. How many times have you heard of a *US* company that was the low bidder on a project turning out to be a horrible choice? Does that mean that US companies are incompetent? Hardly.
In the same way, Indian companies that are selling the "we can offer cheap labor pools" line, are probably a craps shoot, and may or may not be good companies. Add to that the difficulty of coordinating across physical, language and time-zone barriers, and you begin to get a sense of how likely it is that any given relationship will go well.
It has NOTHING to do with the quality of the education or raw talent of the people in India (which I've found to be excellent in my dealings with a number of folks from that part of the world).
That said, there is a very large difference between outsourcing and opening a branch office in another country, which is what I understand OSDL is interesting in doing. You might call it "offshoring", but if you're hiring locals and making them part of your business, that's not outsourcing.
"Making a copy of yourself doesn't avoid death for you, it just means ongoing life for a copy of you."
If I'm unaware of the distinction, then -- for many reasonable purposes -- there is none. This is true in the same way that I'm not a different person now from the person I was when I was younger, even though most of my body has been replaced over the years, including some parts of my brain (though most CNS features do not regenerate).
I would be just fine accepting electronic storage as an acceptable step toward immortality (it's not really immortality because it only expands the time-frame about which you are concerned, but many factors still threaten your conciousness), providing that it was demonstrated to be a complete copy (hard to do, since we don't have a complete definition of what it is we're copying) and it was demonstrated that the copy could function in ways comparable to the ways in which I function (can reason, communicate, experience emotional states, etc.)
"Yeah, but is it mod_perl or cgi? If you're using fastcgi, is there still a big performance gain by switching to mod_perl?"
If you're still thinking in terms of CGI, then it's close to a wash.
However, mod_perl isn't about CGI. mod_perl is about exposing the Apache API to you. Want to build a caching system that doesn't require a single line of code to be executed for 90% of incoming requests? You can do that with mod_perl. Want to proxy some requests based on the protocol version the browser uses? mod_perl can do that long before you get to the point of even trying to find a cgi program on disk.
mod_perl lets you do far more than any lightly coupled tool can, and thus it is the building block upon which you build a real CMS (like bricolage) or other high-level Web tool (like TTK, which is what Slashdot uses).
They are just as much trolls as posts replying to a Gnome article with C flames would be, or C++ flames in response to a KDE article. The tool is not about the lanugage. mod_perl has a great deal going for it as a Web tool. If you don't like Perl, then fine, but that's off topic with respect to mod_perl itself.
"Truth be told, the cold war was the last vestige of a long age of war. Remember, WWI was primarily about nobility attempting to maintain power in a modern world, while WWII was about Eugenics and superiority through control of genetics. (Since proven to be absolute garbage.)"
What the heck?!
WWII was about no such thing. WWII was a backlash from Germany in response to the amazingly harsh conditions and essentially enforced depression that the country was placed under after WWI. The fact that they elected a nutjob like Hitler should be a measure of how desperate they were.
Germany, under Hitler engaged in Eugenics research and killed millions of people in (and often before even reaching) concentration camps (including Jews, Romani, homosexual men and political prisoners (which includes lesbians who were considered subversives, not sex offenders like homosexual men)), but that was NOT what the war was about at all.
Of course, you could say that Hitler's belief that he could win the war and establish his third reich (a new Roman Empire) was based on his conviction in the superiority of the "Arian race", but to say that the war was "about" that is reaching. The war was about political and economic power, not Eugenics.
It's posts like this that make me want the "+10 Informative, and mod down everything else" option... Oh well.