From what I read, it mainly means that PRC can now expect to lose most of their broadcast transmitters to American cruise missles in the first hour of any action against Taiwan. Ditto Taiwan. Or am I missing something here?
Call it a wakeup call...to both folks like Carmack and ourselves.
To Carmack et al, a warning: open-source is a state of mind as well as a distribution method. Up-front disclosure will get you far more cooperation than stealth, along with sharply reduced incidents of villagers with pitchforks storming the castle.
To us: Even though ID's little surprise didn't have nefarious motives and methods, both subsequent copycats and those already doing it whom we haven't yet noticed probably will. Carmack and company have done us the offhand favor of reintroducing, with new urgency, the game of spot-the-packet, coming soon to an eth0 near you.
The pentagram goes back at least to Sumer IIRC. I don't have the reference handy, but you might find the relevant text wherever you find the Book of Shadows of the Riders of the Crystal Wind.
I've had occasion to use computers in ritual. The key factor appears to be where human attention is paid. A script that simply scrolls text could just as well be doing repeated directory reads. A script that has its human invoker reading the screen, actively paying attention, for the first few cycles, and mentally "helping it along" does seem to have an effect. It apparently acts as an "attention amplifier" in this regard (just like every other common ritual tool), a kind of electronic Prayer Wheel. As with just about everything associated with Witchcraft, further research, using the appropriate tooling, is needed, and of course YMMV: if you're firmly convinced that it won't work for you then you're absolutely right, it won't, because that's the intent that you're intent on amplifying.
My opinion, of course, and I'm migrating to Linux, but I think plenty of Win32 developers and users, unwilling or unable for business reasons to abandon the Windows platform, would be glad to be able to wade in and fix things that have been particularly in their own way. If the codebase was GPL'd, everybody could patch in the results of such individuals scratching their particular itches, and I suppose M$ could issue the recompiled results. Just think: service packs that fixed more than they broke...
Nothing says that easy to memorize has to mean easy to guess.
Take a common household phrase..
ash nazg gimbatul
..apply 31337 to it..
@Sh N@5g G!Mb@tU1
..now table it...
@ShN @5gG !Mb@ tU1
..and unwind that.
@@!tS5MUhgb1NG@
...that's something that can be memorized in source form as long as the 31337 rules are consistent and the table is near-orthagonal. It can be regenerated on a scrap of paper or, with a smudged-off-afterward marker, on a countertop.
...the Slash code was enhanced such that any post within the first 50 per article which contained the words "first post", in that order, in the topic, was automatically deprecated to -2?
One SF idea I've played with for a while (mere files on disk so far) is the consequences to organized religion of an engineered virus which corrects the doomsday genes of living humans... a plague of life.
Nice to see that someone else noticed the connection.
...for the First Programming Language hereabouts to go OpenSource?
Then again, this is not something we can trust to a proprietary system (cf. articles on cnn.com concerning "terminator" seeds, and compare to the "remote-shutdown licensing agreement" discussions here on slashdot)... so who's the relevant standards body, and how do we get downloadable copies of the RFCs?
I can answer this. If feels like the love you feel for an adopted child, only moreso because the love you share with the child's mother potentiates the bond.
In the end, the issue of the genetics of parenthood largely come down to dating compatibility, susceptibilities in the bloodlines and bone-marrow-donor pairings, all othe concerns are irrevelant when staring into the eyes of a child who shares a loving parent-child bond with you.
And yes, I have fathered two children by the same woman, so I have a basis for comparison... the love is the same. Souls have no bloodlines.
Microstepping an XYZ gantry to move a vacuum-needle pick-'n-place, with a single-jet droplet depositor for flux coming before and a hot-air solderer coming after, more or less on the same toolhead... definitely the kind of thing a linux box can be programmed to drive (with a couple of dirt-cheap MCUs -- 8052? -- for the critical-timing stuff such as the actual pulses and the microstepper control)..
Yeah, I could see something like that in the freehold utility room:)
Seriously, whikle this stuff will be as pervasive as present surface-mount is now (it's just SMD taken all the way), clunky old thru-hole devices won't go away entirely, they'll just get pricy, probably, because they'll be used mainly for prototyping.
If I visualize this correctly, one downside to the naked chip-on-board technique these packages use is thermal-related fracture: the silicon has far less flex than the leadframe it replaces, so the board the package is bonded onto better have the same thermal expansion as the chip, the chip will fracture or tear loose a few bonding-blobs otherwise.
This whole handhelds-with-plugins trend is familiar ground for anybody who's ever owned an HP-41C. Lots more processing power (and shorter battery life), but the same design attitude.
With UPC scanning, the Palms can do shopping-list stuff WITHOUT having to manage a cart, a toddler and keeping the point on the screen all at once. SWIPE - the item is checked off.
btw Are there any decent barcode scanners for Linux systems in the home? A machine in the kitchen could use one to complete the loop, scanning and listing pantry goods as used. Although I suppose the Palm could be chained in to do that...
I've seen Halon installations (at one wire-pulling job, a very large PBX switch with battery pile had a hard-piped Halon setup: "no smoking in here, gents, unless you want to walk out through an oxygen-free cloud.."), but it's less appropriate than you'd think for computer equipment. Quite aside from any effect on the ozone layer, the stuff can delaminate circuit boards. Computers don't run so good that way.
And, Nate, now you know why even nonsmokers should carry lighters.
Somebody please MODERATE UP the parent post to this reply. Informative, interesting, it shouldn't get lost in the noise. This kind of well-thought correction I can take anyday.
Hmm... "Nazi"...someone with better fingertip access to the records can correct me on this, but isn't that short for National Socialist Worker's Party?
Seems to me there's some equivalence built in right there, without even mentioning pogroms, purges and stalags.
GPL Win32. The whole thing. Forcibly, under RICO if possible (with attendant penalties... that house would fetch a decent price at auction). Then have FTC stand ready to have Federal troops swoops down to remove from retail shelves and warehouses and destroy any MS OS product found by DOJ (with FSF advice) to have any non-GPL'd components (APIs in particular).
A win in this case proves monopolistic behavior and opens MS up for the kind of successive waves of lawsuits that can destroy an incorrigible company, so I'm not worried if the initial financial penalties aren't too severe; over time they will be, never fear.
GPLing all of Win32, though, forces them to enough of a semi-level playing-field that they'll never again have the total domination they once had. They'll be able to compete on quality, consumers will benefit from the ability of those who actually honestly need the stuff to work to be able to find and fix bugs and cruft, particularly the cruft caused by imperatives from Marketing and Billy-Gee, so that the product will actually improve over time, and MS will no longer be able to charge highway-robbery prices for the product because to do so would erase their invented-here and brandname-loyalty advantages to the point where viable competing distributions might emerge and flourish, something that would destroy them in short order.
The ENIAC story actually has a vague precedent: the obstructive holder of a critical patent was punished for onerous behavior by having their patent lifted, for the sake of progress and common weal. This solution is somewhat less Draconian, thanks (again) to Richard Stallman's greatest achievement, the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I read, it mainly means that PRC can now expect to lose most of their broadcast transmitters to American cruise missles in the first hour of any action against Taiwan. Ditto Taiwan. Or am I missing something here?
Call it a wakeup call ...to both folks like Carmack and ourselves.
To Carmack et al, a warning: open-source is a state of mind as well as a distribution method. Up-front disclosure will get you far more cooperation than stealth, along with sharply reduced incidents of villagers with pitchforks storming the castle.
To us: Even though ID's little surprise didn't have nefarious motives and methods, both subsequent copycats and those already doing it whom we haven't yet noticed probably will. Carmack and company have done us the offhand favor of reintroducing, with new urgency, the game of spot-the-packet, coming soon to an eth0 near you.
The pentagram goes back at least to Sumer IIRC. I don't have the reference handy, but you might find the relevant text wherever you find the Book of Shadows of the Riders of the Crystal Wind.
I've had occasion to use computers in ritual. The key factor appears to be where human attention is paid. A script that simply scrolls text could just as well be doing repeated directory reads. A script that has its human invoker reading the screen, actively paying attention, for the first few cycles, and mentally "helping it along" does seem to have an effect. It apparently acts as an "attention amplifier" in this regard (just like every other common ritual tool), a kind of electronic Prayer Wheel.
As with just about everything associated with Witchcraft, further research, using the appropriate tooling, is needed, and of course YMMV: if you're firmly convinced that it won't work for you then you're absolutely right, it won't, because that's the intent that you're intent on amplifying.
My opinion, of course, and I'm migrating to Linux, but I think plenty of Win32 developers and users, unwilling or unable for business reasons to abandon the Windows platform, would be glad to be able to wade in and fix things that have been particularly in their own way. If the codebase was GPL'd, everybody could patch in the results of such individuals scratching their particular itches, and I suppose M$ could issue the recompiled results. Just think: service packs that fixed more than they broke...
Nothing says that easy to memorize has to mean easy to guess.
Take a common household phrase..
ash nazg gimbatul
..apply 31337 to it..
@Sh N@5g G!Mb@tU1
..now table it...
@ShN
@5gG
!Mb@
tU1
..and unwind that.
@@!tS5MUhgb1NG@
...that's something that can be memorized in source form as long as the 31337 rules are consistent and the table is near-orthagonal. It can be regenerated on a scrap of paper or, with a smudged-off-afterward marker, on a countertop.
Give it a coupla years and somebody will patent "fire" and the damfool PTO, ignoring prior art, will let em do it.
...the Slash code was enhanced such that any post within the first 50 per article which contained the words "first post", in that order, in the topic, was automatically deprecated to -2?
Save this one to disk as a model for Slashdot reporting!
One SF idea I've played with for a while (mere files on disk so far) is the consequences to organized religion of an engineered virus which corrects the doomsday genes of living humans... a plague of life.
Nice to see that someone else noticed the connection.
Come to think of it, the game starts when someone hooks up a nucleotide sequencer to that site.
...for the First Programming Language hereabouts to go OpenSource?
Then again, this is not something we can trust to a proprietary system (cf. articles on cnn.com concerning "terminator" seeds, and compare to the "remote-shutdown licensing agreement" discussions here on slashdot)... so who's the relevant standards body, and how do we get downloadable copies of the RFCs?
I can answer this. If feels like the love you feel for an adopted child, only moreso because the love you share with the child's mother potentiates the bond.
In the end, the issue of the genetics of parenthood largely come down to dating compatibility, susceptibilities in the bloodlines and bone-marrow-donor pairings, all othe concerns are irrevelant when staring into the eyes of a child who shares a loving parent-child bond with you.
And yes, I have fathered two children by the same woman, so I have a basis for comparison... the love is the same. Souls have no bloodlines.
..it all sounds like Performance Art to me
Yeah, but then she can get you for parent infringement.
Microstepping an XYZ gantry to move a vacuum-needle pick-'n-place, with a single-jet droplet depositor for flux coming before and a hot-air solderer coming after, more or less on the same toolhead... definitely the kind of thing a linux box can be programmed to drive (with a couple of dirt-cheap MCUs -- 8052? -- for the critical-timing stuff such as the actual pulses and the microstepper control)..
:)
Yeah, I could see something like that in the freehold utility room
Seriously, whikle this stuff will be as pervasive as present surface-mount is now (it's just SMD taken all the way), clunky old thru-hole devices won't go away entirely, they'll just get pricy, probably, because they'll be used mainly for prototyping.
If I visualize this correctly, one downside to the naked chip-on-board technique these packages use is thermal-related fracture: the silicon has far less flex than the leadframe it replaces, so the board the package is bonded onto better have the same thermal expansion as the chip, the chip will fracture or tear loose a few bonding-blobs otherwise.
This whole handhelds-with-plugins trend is familiar ground for anybody who's ever owned an HP-41C. Lots more processing power (and shorter battery life), but the same design attitude.
With UPC scanning, the Palms can do shopping-list stuff WITHOUT having to manage a cart, a toddler and keeping the point on the screen all at once. SWIPE - the item is checked off.
btw Are there any decent barcode scanners for Linux systems in the home? A machine in the kitchen could use one to complete the loop, scanning and listing pantry goods as used. Although I suppose the Palm could be chained in to do that...
This is basically the "delphing" he described in The Shockwave Rider IIRC.
Hmm, time to dive back into my copy and see what else he mapped out that might be nearby.
Microsoft? Adobe? With the prices they charge for their shrinkwrapped products?
There were pirates at that event all day, but they never bothered to look in the mirror.
I've seen Halon installations (at one wire-pulling job, a very large PBX switch with battery pile had a hard-piped Halon setup: "no smoking in here, gents, unless you want to walk out through an oxygen-free cloud.."), but it's less appropriate than you'd think for computer equipment. Quite aside from any effect on the ozone layer, the stuff can delaminate circuit boards. Computers don't run so good that way.
And, Nate, now you know why even nonsmokers should carry lighters.
Somebody please MODERATE UP the parent post to this reply. Informative, interesting, it shouldn't get lost in the noise. This kind of well-thought correction I can take anyday.
Thanks for the context, AC.
stormr
Hmm... "Nazi" ...someone with better fingertip access to the records can correct me on this, but isn't that short for National Socialist Worker's Party?
Seems to me there's some equivalence built in right there, without even mentioning pogroms, purges and stalags.
GPL Win32. The whole thing. Forcibly, under RICO if possible (with attendant penalties... that house would fetch a decent price at auction). Then have FTC stand ready to have Federal troops swoops down to remove from retail shelves and warehouses and destroy any MS OS product found by DOJ (with FSF advice) to have any non-GPL'd components (APIs in particular).
A win in this case proves monopolistic behavior and opens MS up for the kind of successive waves of lawsuits that can destroy an incorrigible company, so I'm not worried if the initial financial penalties aren't too severe; over time they will be, never fear.
GPLing all of Win32, though, forces them to enough of a semi-level playing-field that they'll never again have the total domination they once had. They'll be able to compete on quality, consumers will benefit from the ability of those who actually honestly need the stuff to work to be able to find and fix bugs and cruft, particularly the cruft caused by imperatives from Marketing and Billy-Gee, so that the product will actually improve over time, and MS will no longer be able to charge highway-robbery prices for the product because to do so would erase their invented-here and brandname-loyalty advantages to the point where viable competing distributions might emerge and flourish, something that would destroy them in short order.
The ENIAC story actually has a vague precedent: the obstructive holder of a critical patent was punished for onerous behavior by having their patent lifted, for the sake of progress and common weal. This solution is somewhat less Draconian, thanks (again) to Richard Stallman's greatest achievement, the GPL.
This item should have been posted with the Humorous Foot Icon.