if I understand correctly, SHA-1 is a similiar algorithm to MD5, which is commonly used to uniquely identify files
That's because the certificate was not issued for that host. This is a configuration problem on that server, not a guarantee of any sort. If pypal.com registers a certificate for pypal.com, then your browser will gladly accept it, since it matches the domain. The only safeguard there is that it might be hard for them to get a certificate under such an obviously scam-oriented name... HOWEVER, you do not want the security of your site's e-commerce and customer reputation to rely on all CAs everywhere being immune to bribery....
The probelm is that almost all of.Net is a product of the Java-likeization of technologies that came out of Microsoft Research and significantly pre-date other uses of many of those technologies.
Patents that cover.Net may not have been applied for as ".Net technologies" per se. They just have to be patents that MS happens to hold.
Re:May be a big deal...
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 5, Informative
if I understand correctly, SHA-1 is a similiar algorithm to MD5, which is commonly used to uniquely identify files
You do not quite understand correctly. MD5 and SHA-1 are hashing algorithms, and as such it is expected (and accepted) that there are collisions. That is, you might find that your/etc/passwd and/bin/ls files have the same MD5 hash. The value in MD5 and other such hashes is that the probability of that happening is so remote that as a first approximation, comparing hashes is just as good as comparing files.
That is, you can either keep a backup copy of your filesystem to compare against or you can keep a list of hashes, and mathematically, all this "break" has demonstrated is that the chances are 1:590295810358705651712 not 1:1208925819614629174706176 of a collision. In other words, don't lose sleep.
Now, for secure cryptographic signatures, the implications are much more unpleasant. It's not the end of the world, but this is that big red light that says: switch to SHA-512 (or something equally secure) ASAP!
I don't think Java or Python developers have much to fear from MS despite the many conceptual similarities.
I'd really love it if you could note that comment somewhere off-line. Please include the date and time you made it.
Refer back to it in about 5-10 years once Microsoft is starting to bleed money (speaking purely from the standpoint of recent articles in non-tech media that indicate MS is starting to "rot") and sees litigation as an "out". When you go back to your note, I wonder what you'll think....
What the future holds for MMOGs is uncertain, as you say, but it certainly will not involve SOE unless they do something dramatic to demonstrate to the gamers of the world that they have changed.
I played EverQuest for four years, and in that time it went from a fairly story-driven game with GMs who at least made an effort to incorporate players into the storyline to a pay-per-dungeon-crawl that had almsot no GMs and very little customer-focus (they changed this a bit just before I quit, but it was far too little, far too late).
When EQ2 came out, almost everyone I knew was in one of two camps: the "I've never played EQ, so I don't need to start" camp and the "another SOE game?!" camp.
For those who wish to learn from SOE's mistakes: yes, customers whine, cheat and otherwise behave poorly, but keep in mind that that ill behaved mass of complaints is your revenue stream, and treating them without a modicum of respect, and more importantly treating them GAME without a great deal of respect is the fastest, easiest way to lose your player base to the next game to come along.
Hope this is helpful to those of you working on the next generaion of game.
Well, it seems you have some strong opinions. Good luck with that.
However, one thing rubs me the wrong way: in every posting, I've pointed out that I enjoy the show, and that these are all minor nots. Yet, you persist in saying things like, "you'll find you enjoy "Galactica" a lot more if you quit worrying about [...]"
You do get that I'm not sitting there with pen and paper in hand writing down "bad stuff" right? These are just things that kind of bugged me about and otherwise decent (for TV SF) show.
Then again, if you really thought the plotline of Babylon 5 was "stupid", I guess we don't have much common ground to have a discussion anyway.
So what you're saying is that if Wikipedia ever gets more traffic than they can support, they might have to play by someone else's rules in order to get bandwidth... well, yeah of course. The good part about this is that if they're ever in that spot, google is a fairly good choice of company to be beholden to.
Stop making day trips into planetary systems at sub-light speed
That's never happened.
Sadly, you're wrong. The whole fleet is outside of a system in one episode and starfuries are flying back-and-forth to the low atmosphere of a particular planet which Starbuck is downed on and has hours of air left....
Stop mis-using the camera work.
Meh. It's obviously a matter of opinion, but sometimes the difference between the right opinion and the wrong opinion is pretty clear.
My definition of mis-using is manyfold, but in this case it's entirely about using the hand-held thing so much that it no longer has any impact on the telling of the story. At first it gave the miniseries a sense of urgency to everything, but as the show wore on, they used it so much that that wore off.
I of course, went into this a bit, but you clipped that.
The human is surprised, and yet still manages to pull off the first shot.
Has it ever occurred to you that the cylon was there to take Helo alive? Or, better, that he was there merely to...
And here is where you convince me that you really didn't read what I wrote. I said as much in my posting.
Never, ever, show someone stopping up a hole in a spacecraft with a boot or whatever that was, and then flying into space. That's just awful science.
Actually, it's perfect science. It wasn't a boot; it was a part of Kara's pressure suit. Obviously a pressure suit is air-tight. She wedged it into the hole to form a seal. Once in space, the pressure of the air inside (pushing at about 5 pounds psi, probably; that's about how we pressurized the Apollo spacecraft) will hold the patch in place.
No, sadly it's not perfect science. Problems with this abound, but we can start from the top:
The suit isn't designed to make such a seal (which is why you use sealant, or whatever futuristic thing they use), and the materials used are almost certainly designed to avoid just that problem (sealing against an opening)
The suit is flexible, so the pressure would just push it right through the hole into space.
The suit will do nothing for temperature... perhaps the cylon ship can cope with that much heat loss, and perhaps she did not destroy the temperature control system... still, a stretch.
There are a bunch of other really minor problems, almost all of which can be explained away by saying that the tech level is REALLY uneven.
Actually, they can be explained away by saying that it's a television show and that all things serve the story.
No story is ever served by a lack of believability. Sound effects in space sucked me right out my suspension of disbelief in almost all TV shows (note BG does a good job of muting the sounds such that it really does seem like you're hearing from the INSIDE of the ship you're looking at).
Overall I like this show, but if you're unable to acknowledge the flaws, then perhaps you're doing yourself a disservice. I know that my enthusiasm for B5 made be blind to most of its flaws at the time, and in retrospect, I think I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't spending so much time NOT wincing at the really stupid stuff.
So here's the important question: has the "nv" driver gained access to enough of the modern NVidia cards that I can stop using the binary-only driver to play Neverwinter Nights?
Problems with this series are legion, and I'm definitly in the "the camera silliness is vastly overused" camp. However, I would also agree that it's the best SF on TV right now.
Things I wish they'd do, only because I actually like the show, and would like to see it be better than it is:
* Stop making day trips into planetary systems at sub-light speed. If you're outside of a system, and you want to send a ship to the nth planet, that's a minimum of days worth of travel given obscene graviational tech and near-light travel (we'll ignore the relativistic implications).
* Stop mis-using the camera work. I like the funky camera work in space for the most part. It makes it feel more realistic, but inside the ship it adds an emphasis to everything that's difficult to sustain. After a while, it just becomes "that annoying camera technique." Use it sparingly indoors and slightly more in space... then your viewers won't cringe.
* Think carefully about the capabilities of a cylon. There's one scene where one of the warrior type cylons encounters a human. The human is surprised, and yet still manages to pull off the first shot. Perhaps that was intentional, and in which case this example is a poor one, but the point holds: it seems like the show runners aren't staying on top of what cylons are exactly capable of at times.
* Never, ever, show someone stopping up a hole in a spacecraft with a boot or whatever that was, and then flying into space. That's just awful science.
There are a bunch of other really minor problems, almost all of which can be explained away by saying that the tech level is REALLY uneven. I'm ok with most of it, and I like the story, so what can ya do?:)
There's also the good:
* Camera work in space stresses the vast scale on which space craft operate.
* Cylons aren't just a generic villan
* The president who really isn't ready to be leader of the last of the human race.
* Everything about the relationship between Adama, Starbuck and Apollo.
* People who don't wear their duty uniforms off-duty.
Overall it's the best of the orginal show (IMHO) and quite a bit more... with blemishes.
Orwell had an important point. He taught us that even governments making innocuous comments still need to be watched. But the quoter who links an organization to 1984 because they sound the same is not making a cogent argument.
Well, of course not. However, I do think that there's value in pointing out the (realatively) obvious parallels between fiction and reality. It is the basis for continued discussion, not the discussion itself.
what is someone trying to do when they quote 1984 and compare it to a statement a company or a government made? The quoter is taking the comment as evidence that the company resembles a totalitarian outfit.
Hrm... that's not how I read it. First off, I read it as, at least, slightly humorous. Second, I read it as a dig against Microsoft's constant stream of revisionist press-releases. It is true that MS revises history to suit their needs. Of course, that's not shocking, as that is one of the fundamental functions of a PR department in any company.
Again, we cannot take this parallel as a thesis unto itself, but we can certainly use it to change our perspective and re-examine the way that we view corporate PR for sake of discussion.
Interesting that people get so focused on the government control aspect of 1984 that they forget so many other attributes of the book....
There's a catch in thinking only of being served with a warrant for logs.
The much more common case is a civil suit where logs are requested in discovery. Woefully, failing to produce logs for a particular period can weigh heavily against your side of the case in a civil matter. I know of several companies that keep email forever for example, only because defending themselves in a suit might rely on being able to demonstrate that actions were taken at a particular time. Saying "yeah, we did that then, but we don't have the paper-trail any more," simply does not cut it.
Being concerned about big brother is one side of the coin, and while you should not lose sight of it, it's always important to remeber that there are other consequences of your actions.
I think you're stuck on the ignorance thing. Take as given that 90% of english speakers are ignorant of at least 90% of the language's detail (that is, strict definitions, rules of grammar, etc.)
You say that "if more people [knew the defintion] they would likely choose another way of saying [it]," and yet you miss your own point: they don't know. More to the point, they do not care to know and never will. Is this because they are dullards and beneath our notice? Hardly, they simply don't care as much about the specifics of language as they do about conveying a specific point.
The real problem is that the phrase "begging the question" relies on an archaic usage of "beg". You still hear "beg off" occasionally, but certainly it is no longer common usage. THIS is why the phrase is ultimately doomed to become a niche phrase used by debate instructors. It simply doesn't make sense in modern english, and when read literally it means exactly what people use it to mean.
It would probably be more productive to push for a replacement phrase that means what begging the question used to mean.
You seem to be making several orthoganal points. Some of them I even agree with, but to tie them together I think you'll need a bit more glue.
First off the correct (IMHO) bits:
Somebody who reads 1984 and thinks that he then has something insightful to say about language or society is like somebody who reads Beat to Quarters and thinks that he then can sail a tall ship around Cape Horn.
Well, of course. I'm not sure that you're making a non-obvious point here, but ok. Of course, someone might read 1984 and then have something insightful to say about language or society... but that's no more or less likely than reading it and having something insightful to say about 20th century authors.
No, 1984 is not "one of the most important books ever written," unless you expand your list to include tens of thousands of books
Obviously you are just as correct as the grandparent who claimed the opposite. This is purely a matter of opinion, unless you're going to assign a quantitative definition to "most important books".
Too many people point to 1984 as an illustration of the insidiousness of totalitarianism
Here you lose me. It's not that this might not be a valid statement, but you place it in the center of a response to a post which makes no such claim. Thus, this can only be catagorized as a strawman.
However, to take up the challenge, I'll argue that 1984 is not an illustration of the insidiousness of totalitarianism, but rather a illustration of the abstract nature of totalitarianism and the ability for the average member of such a society to lie to themselves about the choices they are making.
Of course, we see this sort of book all the time, just not always about politics. Books about women who persist in abusive relationships, criminals who look in the mirror and see a hero, and any number of other common themes are all expressions of this. 1984 simply happens to be one example of this sub-genre where the average reader tends to "get it".
Does 1984 beg the question of the insidiousness of totalitarianism? I don't think so. It shows us what the author thinks people are capable of, lets the readers own sense of the human condition demonstrate its truth. Most of us on reading 1984 come away a bit frightened. Not all of us realize why, but years after reading it, I realized that it was because nothing in the book was terribly difficult to imagine. People DO behave this way, and it's important for us to come to terms with that.
Now, you can say that 1984 isn't important, but here's why I think it was: it opened up a dialog that we had with each other. Many other books have been written since -- some scholarly, some novels like 1984 -- but all further exploring this theme. Certainly philosophers had beat the idea of man's inhumanity to man around for a long time, but Orwell brought a language in which to frame the discussion to the common man, and in this I think we can rightly say that he was an important and influential author.
By way of exmample, Asimov and Feynman didn't write the General and Specifc theories of relativity, but each of them produced clear, understandable and engaging information for people outside of the field that gave us the tools to intelligently disucss these complicated matters. This, in many ways, is just as important a step as introducing the concept to the scientific community.
So, I'll put 1984 somewhere on that list of yours, but I suspect that I'm placing it quite a lot higher than you are.
Well, it comes down to this: we know Revenge of the Sith is slated to be out before then, so the marketing tie-ins are probably going to push MS to go with this release date. The initial boot sound is going to be, "Your upgrade is complete. Arise my apprentice," as spoken by Bill Gates!
Yet again, you're falling into the correctness trap. Language is not an ISO standard. Language is a consensual thing, which varries by region. If you looked at the number of words or phrases that any modern language uses that derived from words or phrases in the same or other languages, and yet mean exactly the opposite... you'd be stunned.
The fact of the matter is that the mainstream of english speakers (the vast majority of english-speaking humans on the planet, that is) use the phrase "begs the question" to mean "raises the question". This is the case on Slashdot and even in the mainstream media. It's just as unfortunate for the people who study debate as it was for computer programmers that "hacker" came to mean "person who breaks into computers". But, there is no way to turn back the change. At least, there is no way that has ever been shown to work to the best of my knowledge.
Before you get too high on that "Slashdot sucks" horse, why don't you go see what definition of "begs the question" the mainstream online news media is using... perhaps then you will get a sense of how language changes over time:
http://news.google.com/news?q=%22begs%20the%20qu es tion%22&hl=en&lr=&sa=N&tab=wn
You're looking at it upside down. The phrase "begs the question", as it is used in modern, colloquial, American english means "raises the question". Slashdot makes a point of using a modern, colloquial, American english dialect, as spoken by its target audience.
So while you may have feelings one way or the other about a news site that uses the dialect of its target audience, the usage is not incorrect, even if it REALLY bothers you.
And answers like this [...] are why Linux has made few inroads on corporate desktops
No, vendor lock-in is why Linux has made so few inroads.
That said, you're in the wrong place to be pushing this opinion. Reading the article, we see that the question was about ADMINISTRATORS, and not your average user. For such users, it is quite reasonable to discuss the mertis of administrative-competence over distribution quirks.
If the question had been, "What is the best distribution for clueless users," I think the answer would have been much different. I know that my answer would have been: well, Mandrake is a good option, but really you're going to want to select a hardware vendor that supports a Linux distribution, NOT a Linux distribution. That is, you could go to IBM or HP and say, "I want a Linux laptop/desktop/whatever," and they will tell you what your options (if any) are.
These options are the supported distribution for their hardware, and that means you don't have to do integration (e.g. "how do I get this Neato2000 graphics card to work under x.org's server?"), which end-users should not have to know how to do.
What's more, you're looking at Linux all wrong. Linux distributions are not flavors, they are competing products. If you think in this way, the percieved confusion melts away, and you are left looking at a market just like any other with Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, MacOS, SuSE, etc. End-users do not need to think about the fact that Debian and Mandrake have the same kernel any more than they have to think about the parts that a Tarus and Jaguar share in common. They choose between those two cars based on a set of criteria that have nothing at all to do with those parts, and everything to do with how well the final product suits their needs.
Now, Debian and Red Hat may not be competitors in the strictest sense, but to an end-user, there is no need to make that kind of distinction.
The idea is that the record (obtained from trees, ice, and direct observation) of global temperatures seems to indicate that in the middle part of the 20th century, a period of warming that matched models for solar and geothermal activity, suddenly (at least in geological terms) spiked without a corresponding spike in the model's prediction. Why is this? Obviously it's because there's something that the model did not account for.
Is that something human activity? Could be. Could also be a step-function in the way solar activity interacts with the climate or any number of other things. Humans are just particularly fond of jumping to the conclusion that they are the culprits.
These are strategic and/or tactical and/or resource management games (with varying degrees of skill required), and have absolutely nothing to do with any kind of role playing at all.
Problem solving games (e.g. Mastermind, Clue) are also not role playing, though you could say that there's a "role" to be played in Clue, but that role is a conceit, used to establish the rules, and ignored from there on.
Now, role playing games are another story. They are free-form, lacking the rigid rule system of a board game, and are built around story-telling. Role playing games are also nearly universally not zero-sum games, which is VERY rare among board games (I'm at a loss to name one, but I'm sure I could if I sat down and thought about it).
From personal experience, I can tell you that leadership is not the only issue.
Take the massive boondoggle that was the Air Traffic Control revamp in the 90s, which IBM eventually defaulted on. The problem was not with IBM, nor with the leadership of the project. The problem was in the specification. The project was to replace an aging and broken ATC system with... the same system.
The specification was an excruciating description of the existing system, right down to the shape of the displays. IBM was actually forced, at one point, to provide circular masks for the displays so that they would look like the old scopes on which controlers would manage traffic. That example might be humerous in retrospect, but it demonstrates the deeply entrenched fear of replacing the old system, and how it crippled any attempt to actually do so.
What SHOULD have been done, and what often DOES work in corporate and government settings is to create a small, well-defined pilot program to replace pieces of the environment. One controler could have been set up on a new display that took data from the old system. One new radar tracking system could be installed in an airport with a system in place that allowed the old displays to use it. At each stage, incremental progress could be made, and the ultimate goal of removing the need to ever resort to little paper-and-tape airplanes on displays when the system went down could be achived.
I suspect that the FBI went the same way. An attempt to replace their entire case-management system was likely too large, and not modularly speced. This, of course, results in several problems. First off, you can't observe early that a single piece is not going well, fire the contractor and re-bid that part without impacting the whole project. You also cannot re-plan parts that appear to be unweildy without having to freeze the spec for the entire project.
Project management is a lot like programming. Keep it modular, keep it simple, make sure it works at every stage. The same rules apply. The same solutions work.
Open source software should NOT concern itself with corporate acceptance, only with the quality and usability of the software. If you don't want to use Firefox because there's a reference to hemp cookies somewhere, you're welcome to go use IE or Opera or get a Mac and run Safari. Firefox need not be all things to all people. If the vibrant atmosphere of laid-back development breeds better software, then by all means, continue to do so, and let the corporate world figure out the value proposition for itself. The cool thing about business is that the pressure to succede is vastly more powerful than any other force, and so if Firefox enhances one's ability to succede, then it will eventually be accepted. If not... well, they'll always have hemp cookies;-)
Slashdot Mirror
if I understand correctly, SHA-1 is a similiar algorithm to MD5, which is commonly used to uniquely identify files
That's because the certificate was not issued for that host. This is a configuration problem on that server, not a guarantee of any sort. If pypal.com registers a certificate for pypal.com, then your browser will gladly accept it, since it matches the domain. The only safeguard there is that it might be hard for them to get a certificate under such an obviously scam-oriented name... HOWEVER, you do not want the security of your site's e-commerce and customer reputation to rely on all CAs everywhere being immune to bribery....
The probelm is that almost all of .Net is a product of the Java-likeization of technologies that came out of Microsoft Research and significantly pre-date other uses of many of those technologies.
.Net may not have been applied for as ".Net technologies" per se. They just have to be patents that MS happens to hold.
Patents that cover
if I understand correctly, SHA-1 is a similiar algorithm to MD5, which is commonly used to uniquely identify files
/etc/passwd and /bin/ls files have the same MD5 hash. The value in MD5 and other such hashes is that the probability of that happening is so remote that as a first approximation, comparing hashes is just as good as comparing files.
You do not quite understand correctly. MD5 and SHA-1 are hashing algorithms, and as such it is expected (and accepted) that there are collisions. That is, you might find that your
That is, you can either keep a backup copy of your filesystem to compare against or you can keep a list of hashes, and mathematically, all this "break" has demonstrated is that the chances are 1:590295810358705651712 not 1:1208925819614629174706176 of a collision. In other words, don't lose sleep.
Now, for secure cryptographic signatures, the implications are much more unpleasant. It's not the end of the world, but this is that big red light that says: switch to SHA-512 (or something equally secure) ASAP!
If [Wikipedia] got a huge amount of extra capacity and then lost it again it would have a BIG problem.
Why? Would that not reduce the user-base down to whatever level was sustainable after some period of being DoSed by their previous traffic load?
I don't think Java or Python developers have much to fear from MS despite the many conceptual similarities.
I'd really love it if you could note that comment somewhere off-line. Please include the date and time you made it.
Refer back to it in about 5-10 years once Microsoft is starting to bleed money (speaking purely from the standpoint of recent articles in non-tech media that indicate MS is starting to "rot") and sees litigation as an "out". When you go back to your note, I wonder what you'll think....
What the future holds for MMOGs is uncertain, as you say, but it certainly will not involve SOE unless they do something dramatic to demonstrate to the gamers of the world that they have changed.
I played EverQuest for four years, and in that time it went from a fairly story-driven game with GMs who at least made an effort to incorporate players into the storyline to a pay-per-dungeon-crawl that had almsot no GMs and very little customer-focus (they changed this a bit just before I quit, but it was far too little, far too late).
When EQ2 came out, almost everyone I knew was in one of two camps: the "I've never played EQ, so I don't need to start" camp and the "another SOE game?!" camp.
For those who wish to learn from SOE's mistakes: yes, customers whine, cheat and otherwise behave poorly, but keep in mind that that ill behaved mass of complaints is your revenue stream, and treating them without a modicum of respect, and more importantly treating them GAME without a great deal of respect is the fastest, easiest way to lose your player base to the next game to come along.
Hope this is helpful to those of you working on the next generaion of game.
-Perlmonkey AKA Deepone
It's like you're saying that the show sucks
Yep, that's pretty much exactly what I never said.
Carry on.
Well, it seems you have some strong opinions. Good luck with that.
However, one thing rubs me the wrong way: in every posting, I've pointed out that I enjoy the show, and that these are all minor nots. Yet, you persist in saying things like, "you'll find you enjoy "Galactica" a lot more if you quit worrying about [...]"
You do get that I'm not sitting there with pen and paper in hand writing down "bad stuff" right? These are just things that kind of bugged me about and otherwise decent (for TV SF) show.
Then again, if you really thought the plotline of Babylon 5 was "stupid", I guess we don't have much common ground to have a discussion anyway.
So what you're saying is that if Wikipedia ever gets more traffic than they can support, they might have to play by someone else's rules in order to get bandwidth... well, yeah of course. The good part about this is that if they're ever in that spot, google is a fairly good choice of company to be beholden to.
That's never happened.
Sadly, you're wrong. The whole fleet is outside of a system in one episode and starfuries are flying back-and-forth to the low atmosphere of a particular planet which Starbuck is downed on and has hours of air left....
Stop mis-using the camera work.
Meh. It's obviously a matter of opinion, but sometimes the difference between the right opinion and the wrong opinion is pretty clear.
My definition of mis-using is manyfold, but in this case it's entirely about using the hand-held thing so much that it no longer has any impact on the telling of the story. At first it gave the miniseries a sense of urgency to everything, but as the show wore on, they used it so much that that wore off.
I of course, went into this a bit, but you clipped that.
The human is surprised, and yet still manages to pull off the first shot.
Has it ever occurred to you that the cylon was there to take Helo alive? Or, better, that he was there merely to
And here is where you convince me that you really didn't read what I wrote. I said as much in my posting.
Never, ever, show someone stopping up a hole in a spacecraft with a boot or whatever that was, and then flying into space. That's just awful science.
Actually, it's perfect science. It wasn't a boot; it was a part of Kara's pressure suit. Obviously a pressure suit is air-tight. She wedged it into the hole to form a seal. Once in space, the pressure of the air inside (pushing at about 5 pounds psi, probably; that's about how we pressurized the Apollo spacecraft) will hold the patch in place.
No, sadly it's not perfect science. Problems with this abound, but we can start from the top:
There are a bunch of other really minor problems, almost all of which can be explained away by saying that the tech level is REALLY uneven.
Actually, they can be explained away by saying that it's a television show and that all things serve the story.
No story is ever served by a lack of believability. Sound effects in space sucked me right out my suspension of disbelief in almost all TV shows (note BG does a good job of muting the sounds such that it really does seem like you're hearing from the INSIDE of the ship you're looking at).
Overall I like this show, but if you're unable to acknowledge the flaws, then perhaps you're doing yourself a disservice. I know that my enthusiasm for B5 made be blind to most of its flaws at the time, and in retrospect, I think I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't spending so much time NOT wincing at the really stupid stuff.
So here's the important question: has the "nv" driver gained access to enough of the modern NVidia cards that I can stop using the binary-only driver to play Neverwinter Nights?
Problems with this series are legion, and I'm definitly in the "the camera silliness is vastly overused" camp. However, I would also agree that it's the best SF on TV right now.
:)
Things I wish they'd do, only because I actually like the show, and would like to see it be better than it is:
* Stop making day trips into planetary systems at sub-light speed. If you're outside of a system, and you want to send a ship to the nth planet, that's a minimum of days worth of travel given obscene graviational tech and near-light travel (we'll ignore the relativistic implications).
* Stop mis-using the camera work. I like the funky camera work in space for the most part. It makes it feel more realistic, but inside the ship it adds an emphasis to everything that's difficult to sustain. After a while, it just becomes "that annoying camera technique." Use it sparingly indoors and slightly more in space... then your viewers won't cringe.
* Think carefully about the capabilities of a cylon. There's one scene where one of the warrior type cylons encounters a human. The human is surprised, and yet still manages to pull off the first shot. Perhaps that was intentional, and in which case this example is a poor one, but the point holds: it seems like the show runners aren't staying on top of what cylons are exactly capable of at times.
* Never, ever, show someone stopping up a hole in a spacecraft with a boot or whatever that was, and then flying into space. That's just awful science.
There are a bunch of other really minor problems, almost all of which can be explained away by saying that the tech level is REALLY uneven. I'm ok with most of it, and I like the story, so what can ya do?
There's also the good:
* Camera work in space stresses the vast scale on which space craft operate.
* Cylons aren't just a generic villan
* The president who really isn't ready to be leader of the last of the human race.
* Everything about the relationship between Adama, Starbuck and Apollo.
* People who don't wear their duty uniforms off-duty.
Overall it's the best of the orginal show (IMHO) and quite a bit more... with blemishes.
Orwell had an important point. He taught us that even governments making innocuous comments still need to be watched. But the quoter who links an organization to 1984 because they sound the same is not making a cogent argument.
Well, of course not. However, I do think that there's value in pointing out the (realatively) obvious parallels between fiction and reality. It is the basis for continued discussion, not the discussion itself.
what is someone trying to do when they quote 1984 and compare it to a statement a company or a government made? The quoter is taking the comment as evidence that the company resembles a totalitarian outfit.
Hrm... that's not how I read it. First off, I read it as, at least, slightly humorous. Second, I read it as a dig against Microsoft's constant stream of revisionist press-releases. It is true that MS revises history to suit their needs. Of course, that's not shocking, as that is one of the fundamental functions of a PR department in any company.
Again, we cannot take this parallel as a thesis unto itself, but we can certainly use it to change our perspective and re-examine the way that we view corporate PR for sake of discussion.
Interesting that people get so focused on the government control aspect of 1984 that they forget so many other attributes of the book....
There's a catch in thinking only of being served with a warrant for logs.
The much more common case is a civil suit where logs are requested in discovery. Woefully, failing to produce logs for a particular period can weigh heavily against your side of the case in a civil matter. I know of several companies that keep email forever for example, only because defending themselves in a suit might rely on being able to demonstrate that actions were taken at a particular time. Saying "yeah, we did that then, but we don't have the paper-trail any more," simply does not cut it.
Being concerned about big brother is one side of the coin, and while you should not lose sight of it, it's always important to remeber that there are other consequences of your actions.
I think you're stuck on the ignorance thing. Take as given that 90% of english speakers are ignorant of at least 90% of the language's detail (that is, strict definitions, rules of grammar, etc.)
You say that "if more people [knew the defintion] they would likely choose another way of saying [it]," and yet you miss your own point: they don't know. More to the point, they do not care to know and never will. Is this because they are dullards and beneath our notice? Hardly, they simply don't care as much about the specifics of language as they do about conveying a specific point.
The real problem is that the phrase "begging the question" relies on an archaic usage of "beg". You still hear "beg off" occasionally, but certainly it is no longer common usage. THIS is why the phrase is ultimately doomed to become a niche phrase used by debate instructors. It simply doesn't make sense in modern english, and when read literally it means exactly what people use it to mean.
It would probably be more productive to push for a replacement phrase that means what begging the question used to mean.
You seem to be making several orthoganal points. Some of them I even agree with, but to tie them together I think you'll need a bit more glue.
First off the correct (IMHO) bits:
Somebody who reads 1984 and thinks that he then has something insightful to say about language or society is like somebody who reads Beat to Quarters and thinks that he then can sail a tall ship around Cape Horn.
Well, of course. I'm not sure that you're making a non-obvious point here, but ok. Of course, someone might read 1984 and then have something insightful to say about language or society... but that's no more or less likely than reading it and having something insightful to say about 20th century authors.
No, 1984 is not "one of the most important books ever written," unless you expand your list to include tens of thousands of books
Obviously you are just as correct as the grandparent who claimed the opposite. This is purely a matter of opinion, unless you're going to assign a quantitative definition to "most important books".
Too many people point to 1984 as an illustration of the insidiousness of totalitarianism
Here you lose me. It's not that this might not be a valid statement, but you place it in the center of a response to a post which makes no such claim. Thus, this can only be catagorized as a strawman.
However, to take up the challenge, I'll argue that 1984 is not an illustration of the insidiousness of totalitarianism, but rather a illustration of the abstract nature of totalitarianism and the ability for the average member of such a society to lie to themselves about the choices they are making.
Of course, we see this sort of book all the time, just not always about politics. Books about women who persist in abusive relationships, criminals who look in the mirror and see a hero, and any number of other common themes are all expressions of this. 1984 simply happens to be one example of this sub-genre where the average reader tends to "get it".
Does 1984 beg the question of the insidiousness of totalitarianism? I don't think so. It shows us what the author thinks people are capable of, lets the readers own sense of the human condition demonstrate its truth. Most of us on reading 1984 come away a bit frightened. Not all of us realize why, but years after reading it, I realized that it was because nothing in the book was terribly difficult to imagine. People DO behave this way, and it's important for us to come to terms with that.
Now, you can say that 1984 isn't important, but here's why I think it was: it opened up a dialog that we had with each other. Many other books have been written since -- some scholarly, some novels like 1984 -- but all further exploring this theme. Certainly philosophers had beat the idea of man's inhumanity to man around for a long time, but Orwell brought a language in which to frame the discussion to the common man, and in this I think we can rightly say that he was an important and influential author.
By way of exmample, Asimov and Feynman didn't write the General and Specifc theories of relativity, but each of them produced clear, understandable and engaging information for people outside of the field that gave us the tools to intelligently disucss these complicated matters. This, in many ways, is just as important a step as introducing the concept to the scientific community.
So, I'll put 1984 somewhere on that list of yours, but I suspect that I'm placing it quite a lot higher than you are.
Well, it comes down to this: we know Revenge of the Sith is slated to be out before then, so the marketing tie-ins are probably going to push MS to go with this release date. The initial boot sound is going to be, "Your upgrade is complete. Arise my apprentice," as spoken by Bill Gates!
Yet again, you're falling into the correctness trap. Language is not an ISO standard. Language is a consensual thing, which varries by region. If you looked at the number of words or phrases that any modern language uses that derived from words or phrases in the same or other languages, and yet mean exactly the opposite... you'd be stunned.
The fact of the matter is that the mainstream of english speakers (the vast majority of english-speaking humans on the planet, that is) use the phrase "begs the question" to mean "raises the question". This is the case on Slashdot and even in the mainstream media. It's just as unfortunate for the people who study debate as it was for computer programmers that "hacker" came to mean "person who breaks into computers". But, there is no way to turn back the change. At least, there is no way that has ever been shown to work to the best of my knowledge.
Language changes. Deal.
Before you get too high on that "Slashdot sucks" horse, why don't you go see what definition of "begs the question" the mainstream online news media is using... perhaps then you will get a sense of how language changes over time:
u es tion%22&hl=en&lr=&sa=N&tab=wn
http://news.google.com/news?q=%22begs%20the%20q
You're looking at it upside down. The phrase "begs the question", as it is used in modern, colloquial, American english means "raises the question". Slashdot makes a point of using a modern, colloquial, American english dialect, as spoken by its target audience.
So while you may have feelings one way or the other about a news site that uses the dialect of its target audience, the usage is not incorrect, even if it REALLY bothers you.
And answers like this [...] are why Linux has made few inroads on corporate desktops
No, vendor lock-in is why Linux has made so few inroads.
That said, you're in the wrong place to be pushing this opinion. Reading the article, we see that the question was about ADMINISTRATORS, and not your average user. For such users, it is quite reasonable to discuss the mertis of administrative-competence over distribution quirks.
If the question had been, "What is the best distribution for clueless users," I think the answer would have been much different. I know that my answer would have been: well, Mandrake is a good option, but really you're going to want to select a hardware vendor that supports a Linux distribution, NOT a Linux distribution. That is, you could go to IBM or HP and say, "I want a Linux laptop/desktop/whatever," and they will tell you what your options (if any) are.
These options are the supported distribution for their hardware, and that means you don't have to do integration (e.g. "how do I get this Neato2000 graphics card to work under x.org's server?"), which end-users should not have to know how to do.
What's more, you're looking at Linux all wrong. Linux distributions are not flavors, they are competing products. If you think in this way, the percieved confusion melts away, and you are left looking at a market just like any other with Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, MacOS, SuSE, etc. End-users do not need to think about the fact that Debian and Mandrake have the same kernel any more than they have to think about the parts that a Tarus and Jaguar share in common. They choose between those two cars based on a set of criteria that have nothing at all to do with those parts, and everything to do with how well the final product suits their needs.
Now, Debian and Red Hat may not be competitors in the strictest sense, but to an end-user, there is no need to make that kind of distinction.
I'm at a loss to find a really good reference to the "hockey stick" research, but here's a BBC article about it:
0 4. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/35696
The idea is that the record (obtained from trees, ice, and direct observation) of global temperatures seems to indicate that in the middle part of the 20th century, a period of warming that matched models for solar and geothermal activity, suddenly (at least in geological terms) spiked without a corresponding spike in the model's prediction. Why is this? Obviously it's because there's something that the model did not account for.
Is that something human activity? Could be. Could also be a step-function in the way solar activity interacts with the climate or any number of other things. Humans are just particularly fond of jumping to the conclusion that they are the culprits.
Most board games have some sort of Role-Playing element to them
Eh? Scrabble, Chess, Checkers, Go, Candyland, Chutes'n'Ladders, Sorry, Othello, Risk, etc., etc.
These are strategic and/or tactical and/or resource management games (with varying degrees of skill required), and have absolutely nothing to do with any kind of role playing at all.
Problem solving games (e.g. Mastermind, Clue) are also not role playing, though you could say that there's a "role" to be played in Clue, but that role is a conceit, used to establish the rules, and ignored from there on.
Now, role playing games are another story. They are free-form, lacking the rigid rule system of a board game, and are built around story-telling. Role playing games are also nearly universally not zero-sum games, which is VERY rare among board games (I'm at a loss to name one, but I'm sure I could if I sat down and thought about it).
From personal experience, I can tell you that leadership is not the only issue.
... the same system.
Take the massive boondoggle that was the Air Traffic Control revamp in the 90s, which IBM eventually defaulted on. The problem was not with IBM, nor with the leadership of the project. The problem was in the specification. The project was to replace an aging and broken ATC system with
The specification was an excruciating description of the existing system, right down to the shape of the displays. IBM was actually forced, at one point, to provide circular masks for the displays so that they would look like the old scopes on which controlers would manage traffic. That example might be humerous in retrospect, but it demonstrates the deeply entrenched fear of replacing the old system, and how it crippled any attempt to actually do so.
What SHOULD have been done, and what often DOES work in corporate and government settings is to create a small, well-defined pilot program to replace pieces of the environment. One controler could have been set up on a new display that took data from the old system. One new radar tracking system could be installed in an airport with a system in place that allowed the old displays to use it. At each stage, incremental progress could be made, and the ultimate goal of removing the need to ever resort to little paper-and-tape airplanes on displays when the system went down could be achived.
I suspect that the FBI went the same way. An attempt to replace their entire case-management system was likely too large, and not modularly speced. This, of course, results in several problems. First off, you can't observe early that a single piece is not going well, fire the contractor and re-bid that part without impacting the whole project. You also cannot re-plan parts that appear to be unweildy without having to freeze the spec for the entire project.
Project management is a lot like programming. Keep it modular, keep it simple, make sure it works at every stage. The same rules apply. The same solutions work.
Open source software should NOT concern itself with corporate acceptance, only with the quality and usability of the software. If you don't want to use Firefox because there's a reference to hemp cookies somewhere, you're welcome to go use IE or Opera or get a Mac and run Safari. Firefox need not be all things to all people. If the vibrant atmosphere of laid-back development breeds better software, then by all means, continue to do so, and let the corporate world figure out the value proposition for itself. The cool thing about business is that the pressure to succede is vastly more powerful than any other force, and so if Firefox enhances one's ability to succede, then it will eventually be accepted. If not... well, they'll always have hemp cookies ;-)