Take some poem, lyrics of a song, some text you know by heart.
Pick all first (last) letters of each word. Include all punctation marks when needed.
Convert to 31337 H4X0R speech.
On some specific pattern (i.e. first letter of every verse) add Shift.
Trivial to make up on the fly.
Even easier is to choose a common word and concatenate it with the month and year:
Nice0304
Nice0404
Nice0504
Nice0604
That way, when you're in a business environment where you have to juggle passwords on a billion different systems, with some of them expiring every 30 days, you can readily create new passwords and recall old ones.
Of course, sticky notes are pretty handy too...
And no... I'm not entirely joking. The more hostile corporate sysadmins get with expirations, reuse-prevention, pattern-matching, and account lockouts, the more I'm inclined to circumvent. Ha... and I used to use randomized passwords on my job...
OSHA fined the college for this because they didn't give the professor proper training. WTF!!.... If anybody should have known the properties of this chemical she should have!
Obviously, she knew the properties of the chemical; she probably knew several strategies for handling them safely too. What she obviously didn't know was the safety ethos. This is because abstract scientific knowledge does not directly transfer to practical safety techniques. Especially for absent-minded professors.
Translating knowledge of theory into safety techniques can be hard work. At a minimum, you have to identify dangers, design strategies to avoid them, and then implement these strategies while carrying out the task in such a way that you remain mindful of them. What can make this especially difficult for a theorist is that "safety design" requires a paranoia not suggested by the domain knowledge of the problem. The job of the scientist is to model the world. Models are simplifications that leave out "uninteresting" phenomena so that more interesting things can be explored. The trouble is, those "uninteresting" phenomena are a rich source of safety hazards. The translation can be done, but only if you're familiar with safety design techniques (redundancy, vigilance, continuous improvement, etc...).
In the case of a lab accident, the prof might not have to do that much thinking to avoid killing herself, but we're only human. This is where a good grounding in safety training and mentality can help us maintain our sense of caution even when one is just trying to mix a few test tubes together.
I'll give you an extended example of how the naieve application of theory can hurt safety practice: I have a friend--very smart--who believes (or believed) that it's safe to tailgate on the expressway with a 1/2 second following time. This is about 1 car length at 60-70 MPH. His reasoning? "My reaction time to breaking will be 1/4 second, and given approximately equal vehicle mass and breaking power, it is a FACT OF PHYSICS that two cars will come to a stop in the same amount of distance w/o colliding." [Emphasis his.]
My friend's theoretical model and proposed reaction time is accurate, but he made several mistakes in this analysis:
1/4 second is enough to react, but you'll need a lot longer to know how much to react [unless you have a policy of slamming on your brakes every time:-)]. Usually when we see tail lights, we assume it's a minor slow down and we do not brake that hard.
His model does not account for lapses in his own attention. Hey... we're human and we make bad judgement calls sometimes when we reach for the radio, adjust the AC, or just let our minds start wandering off the road.
His model assumes that the cars are moving in a fixed, single-file order w/o ability to swerve across lanes, cut people off, flip, or jackknife. 2 seconds following time would buy a lot of breathing room when a situation begins to happen. Do not underestimate this when you're riding through Atlanta in 6 lanes of traffic moving in the same direction.
His model does not account for debris and stopped cars in the road. I know of an incident where car 1 was tailgating car 2. Car 2 came up quickly on car 3, stalled in the middle lane. Car 2 swerved and avoided car 3 successfully, but car 1 had no time to react and nailed the broken-down vehicle [instantly making car 1 at-fault].
His model completely ignores reality when it assumes that all cars have approximately equal mass and braking power.
Finally, his model did not consider the social impact of tailgating: 1 or 2 seconds is not a bad price to pay for making your passengers more comfortable. (It also might prevent them from complaining about it years later on slashdot.;-) This is not a 'physical safety' consideration, but it does affect 'social safety'. (I guess you could piss off the guy in front of you and he might pull out a shotgun, in which case it becomes physical again.
if everybody simply followed this advice, it would be impossible for employers to make such insane demands on employees, because firing them would no longer be an option
And if everybody followed this advice, the U.S. would be like f*cking Italy before Mussolini made the trains run on time. Sometimes you gotta sacrifice for the job or things come to a halt.
The trick is to insist on a job where the sacrifice is reasonable. The occasional callout or on-call duty is okay if the pay is right and the management appreciative.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't have backbone though. And as for companies (or Universities) thinking they own the work you do purely on your own time (which this thread originally was talking about)... bullshit. What I do own my time is my own work. I don't care what any law or lawyer says... that's an intrinsic moral imperative.
Gnus in emacs is perhaps the most configurable email client ever.
Ahhh.. gosh. The headaches come rushing back. Gnus is the absolute f*cking worst "serious" mail client that I've ever used. I'm a big emacs fan, I'm very patient with technical documentation, and I am fairly experienced with all things programming, but Gnus was just too much.
Okay, okay... I exaggerate a little bit, but seriously... save your brain cells for something better. Like KMail running off an IMAP backend (which I also sneak into using mutt or squirrelmail when I'm limited to the console or web).
The good side is that laziness can help make programs more efficient.
My understanding was that, in general, the "efficency" of laziness is outweighed by the cost of the bookkeeping for it. After all, a function uses the parameters it is passed most of the time.
I'm a fan of functional programming, but lazy evaluation complicates the code and slows it down. That's one advantage of scheme's function-calling semantics over lisp's, IIRC (can anyone confirm?).
Marketing is anathema to free thought. "Marketing" is the application of psychological techniques to alter someone's percoptions or decision making process.
FSF has many preconceptions that it is trying to alter. If it wants to effectively reach a large audience and encourage people to consider new ideas, then hell... a slick logo is worth it.
I hate the marketing-saturated culture we live in, but FSF could communicate more effectively. (They're doing better in some aspects, actually...)
I think you are completely distorting the point when it comes to the distinction between open source and free software.
They're two sides of the same coin. FSF's emphasis is philosophical/social and OSI's emphasis is more on engineering/benefits, but both labels ("open source" and "free software") mean the same thing when applied to a piece of software: you can take it, modify the source, and redistribute it. That's what I meant by "practically speaking". There's absolutely no difference to the people who select, deploy, use, and support the software.
The two terms do not meaningful differentiate two pieces of software. You're never going to say "package foo is open source but not free software". You're never going to say "I would prefer to use free software here instead of open source". Among the categories of 'proprietary software', 'freeware', 'shareware', etc..., the terms 'open source' and 'free software' occupy a single entry.
My point is that the FSF will face a lot of difficulty forcing a distinction b/t the two terms outside of the geek community. FSF has got some complicated concepts to explain to legislators, CEO's, judges, journalists, and countless others. They should embrace the better branding ("open source") and emphasize the freedom aspect of it. I can understand how they are attached to the term 'Free Software' (especially since they came up with it long before OSI), but this is, IMO, not strategic.
"It's free software, it's not open source". He has a reason. This is the reason.
I have enough trouble getting my boss to distinguish b/t "open source" and "shareware". Throwing "free software" into the mix is going to hurt corporate adoption, not help civil liberties.
The thing that Bruce Perens, etc., understand that Stallman does not is "branding". "Open Source" is a distinct, brandable term. It has successfully fought off imitation brands like Microsoft's "Shared Source" concept. It even has a crisp, compact logo. The FSF does not understand this game, and they can't seem to produce a brand name w/o botching it up with recursive algorithms ("HURD"), semantic ambiguitiy ("free software"), or phonetic confusion ("GNU"). And their logo sprawls all over the place.
Furthermore, the FSF appears to have a touch of NIH syndrome ("not invented here"). Stallman tries to draw a distinction b/t the terms "free software" and "open source", but they mean the same thing, practically speaking. Why hair-split the semantics when you could present a unified, prepackaged concept to the world?
Sigh... enough ranting. I just want to see FSF do the little things that would help give it corporate cred.
FYI, the GNU homepage has a lot of actions you can take to support free software politically. Take a look.
The new button order is *easier* on people both physically and mentally.
Not when you've used KDE or Windows applications everyday for the past 7 years. There's this little thing called "backwards compatibility". While it's quite a pain for purist, it is sometimes worth it.
You should listen to your users: people are getting mad about the button order thing for valid reasons. How would you like me sneaking into your house and swapping out your QWERTY keyboard for a Dvorak one? You might find it pretty d*mn frustrating, especially when I casually reply that "it's better".
I'm all for moving the GUI experience forward, but only when "moving forward" is a meaningful experience, not an ad hoc piece of usability dogma that does not concern itself with feedback from real users.
men tend to perform better than women on tests of visuospatial ability
It's questionable whether this advantage would be measurable or not. That would be an intresting study. (Perk up, grant writers!)
The fact that the genders, in general, navigate differently could make for more intresting and diverse gameplay. E.g., at a deep and subtle level, this breaks up preconceptions that veteran game players may have about how to understand a space and how to anticipate movement in that space.
On a seperate note, I see a lot of people arguing that a separate league is unncessary because men and women can be equal competitors here. Whether equal or not, women may want a separate league just because male players can be fairly rude at times. Trying playing w/a female nickname and observe how other players treat you.... sometimes guys will level fairly crude stuff at females that goes beyond the normal in-game insults. I do not intrepret this to mean that female player are unwanted... to the contrary, the comments I see tend to be overt sexual overtures delivered with a cruditiy that would not be done in real life. This is just my observation... any women care to comment?
I have confidence that people can work within ethical limits and still find honorable ways to do the things they are now trying to do through cloning and abortion.
I agree with your premise ("this should be done in an ethical way"), but not your conclusion ("no cloning"). Instead of an all-or-nothing debate, I would like to see proposed guidelines for reviewing and approving cloning experiments, much like most universities require you to get approval before performing experiments on humans or animals.
You ask "When does life begin?" and you started by looking for a clear cut line. The question is deceptive: human life is a social construct. As a social construct, the actual location of the line is not important: it's that everybody agrees on the location. Some cultures have drawn the line at birth and some have drawn it at conception. There are extremes: some cultures have endorsed limited forms of infanticide while others have prohibited masturbation and condoms on the grounds that "every sperm is sacred". Practically all cultures have a birth ritual that signifies that a child is a full-fledged member of society that the parents will invest resources in substaining. Examples of such rituals included circumcision and infant baptism, and they were very important to societies where infant mortality rates are high...
Genetic cloning, even done carefully, will produce monsters and misery, but it will also extend life and perhaps even let us drive our biology in arbitrary directions. We need to proceed carefully and cautiously, with due attention paid to preventing problems/abuses and handling them when they do occur. We've been through this before (e.g., nuclear power), and we'll have to go through it again (e.g., nanotechnology, cloning, etc.). Progress is scary, inevitable, and ultimately desirable.
How the heck is the user supposed to know that the menu is there, or how to get at it?
The user is suppose to know that if he wants to do an unusual operation on any object, he can right click on it and get a full list of choices. I'll agree that this is not obvious the first time you use a computer, but "having a good UI" does not mean that "every user is able to use the software perfectly the first time he or she encounters it".
Once the user has learned the technique, the context menu is a *much* better location for the renaming operation than the system-wide menu bar you propose. The problem w/the system-wide (or application-wide) menu bar is that it does not narrow down the number of choices based on context... to rename under this arrangement, I have to "select" the file (thus enabling "invisible" functionality elsewhere), than I have to search the menus for a rename operation, and that's very costly. With the context menu, I know that my options just apply to the file I clicked on.
Consider this... maximum visibilty would be a bunch of buttons popping up around the file whenever you hover over it. But this would be annoying. Making the user explicitly ask for the buttons to come up removes the annoyance while adding a small learning cost.
But don't take my word for it... go conduct a usability test or look through the research to see what actually works for real users.
Right, because one nutcase person who feels like posting a rediculous, non-enforcable TOS agreement clearly speaks for all of the "American Empire".
Clearly, the U.S. has fallen into an overly-legalistic mindset that produces a tremendous drag on our economy. The nutcase TOS would make a good museum exhibit because it tipifies the excesses of our society. A good history museum captures the zeitgeist, the spirit of an age. A museum devoted to the 70's would dig up pictures of some hippy smoking pot, playing a guitar, surrounded by woman in loose billowy, fabric. Is this what the typical citizen in the 70's was spending their time doing? No, but it does help tell the story of that time period in America.
So yes, one nutcase does speak clearly for the "American Empire" because his behavior correlates with the excesses of society. There's a bit of spuriousness here, but individual examples tell a (historical, social) story better than plain statitics.
And I agree with you... "slide" is more likely than "fall".
Business has a lots of needs that OSS does not address. In part, this is probably because business coding is the most mind-numbing coding one can do, so volunteers don't take them on often. GNU Enterprise may eventually help here, but it's going to take a long time, and bringing the necessary expertise to the table will be difficult (if the gnue project even realizes it needs this expertise).
There are dozens of other highly generic needs that I haven't mentioned, but all take extensive effort to set up, customize, and integrate into a business environment. And these things are *mission critical*: millions of dollars can ride on the availability of the software. Open source can eventually get here, but it will have to (first) be written, (second) creep up through small business, and (third) be vetted and pushed by consultants who can make money from long-standing service contracts.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic about open source, but there are many unmet needs here. Don't expect to run a serious business without proprietary software. In fact, be as objective as possible when evaluating software needs for your business... pretend that you have to defend every decision in front of someone who doesn't care about the distiction b/t free and non-free software. Someone who only thinks in terms of money, growth potiential, implementation schedules, and risk. If OSS can't stand its ground here (even with the price advantage), drop it. Don't jeporadize your business, and (if you're working for someone else) don't give your boss a bad taste of what OSS is all about.
Stallman--as much as I support the guy--completely misses the real world when he says that "any business based on proprietary software deserves to fail". Deserving or not, any medium or large business that is not based on proprietary software will fail.
I hope open source can one day address these needs, especially for small businesses and start-ups, but I'm not too worried even if it can't. If Linux becomes good enough in other aspects, these proprietary apps will be made to run on Linux too (and some of them already do). "Mostly" free is good enough for me.
If a driver is proceeding along a fast road and, approaching an intersection, makes a fast left-hand turn into the wrong lane of oncoming traffic, what will happen to him? There will be a head-on collision and he will die. Will the traffic signals stop him from doing that? No. The car? No. The road? No. Henry Ford? No.
Good analogy, but keep in mind that humans have a large amount of circuitry dedicated to forming intuitions about mechanical systems. (Well, most of us at least.) These intuitions are somewhat crude, but they apply very directly to the single-minded task of driving.
By contrast, computers are full-fledged knowledge manipulators. This is a completely alien environment for most people, and even those of us who have mastered the crude basics have a tremendously hard time of finding ways to effectively communicate a package of knowledge-manpiulation tasks to a broad audience.
If you had to master a new vehicle (car, truck, kayak, train, hangglider, unicycle, ostrich...) everytime you wanted to go somewhere new, and if some of the vehicles obstructed your site of the ground or messed with your sense of gravity, and if you had to observe a different set of traffic signals and social behavior for each vehicle, then you too would get pretty frustrated at the stablehand who berates you for overtightening a cinch strap when you're running late to that promising job interview.
Of course, to be fair, our theoretical stablehand has new people coming in all day making the same basic mistakes over and over again. He's the one who has to take care of the sore horses, and it's a big pain to constantly deal with ignorant users.
The problem here is the sheer versatitily of computers: since they make things so efficent, we have, in a period of ~20 years, put one in front of damn near everybody with minimal preparation. The human rate is just not capable of adopting such tools without frustrating end-users (who become hostile) and tech support (who become condescending).
I've typed up a few long responses to your post, but let me cut to the chase: you're trying to solve a social problem with technological means. Yes, resource isolation can be an effective tool for improving security (I use it myself, frequently), but ***only when the user is adequately trained and committed to security***. Your suggestion of granular, per-application access is working on a very slippery "representational slope". The more granular your controls, the more technical the user is going to have to be to understand them, the more difficult it's going to be for the OS and the user to infer the intention of the application, and the more common those damn dialog boxes are going to occur.
Humans are complex social beings with many ingrained trust instincts. Introduce them to the trust implications of running a program and make an analogy b/t trusting code and trusting people. Equate "running a program" to leaving a stranger alone in their house. This will be easier and more effective than training them to assess whether it's reasonable for foo32.exe to want to access a shared memory segment set up by app woojah32.exe. Introduce advanced users to tools/techniques that can help them detect and isolate dangerous apps (including anti-virus software, sandboxing software, privelege seperation among different user ID's, etc.).
Finally, establish institutions to help users assess trust. This has already been done, really: you have anti-virus software makers (a reliable source of news about virii), code-signing mechanisms (which help establish identity), sanctioned repositories of applications (e.g., I trust official Debian packages over download.com stuff, and I trust download.com stuff over squirrly gag apps that my sister emails me), and software vendors (e.g., I trust GNU over Microsoft, and Microsoft over those pr0n sites that offer me free "history killer" software).
It's true that geeks have many social challenges, many of which they are not even aware of (and that's part of the problem). However, geeks have many reedeming qualities as well. For instance, how many volunteer man-hours have been invested in the ever growing collection of open source software? And wouldn't the social contributions of geeks (predominantly scientists and engineers) outrank the sometimes dubious achivements of lawyers, politicians, celebrities, religious leaders, and philosophers? I mean... maybe there's no scientific advance that outranks really important things like the "rule of law" or "inalienable rights" concepts, but the point is that other classes of people besides geeks have their own serious, systematic flaws. In fact, many of the flaws you identify (condecsion, hypocrisy) are common to all of humanity, and especially the adolecent male crowd.
Thanks for your well-written post. It's important that we as a community see our own flaws, but medicine goes down easier with sugar.
Instead of having this functionality, I am told that the solution is to only run "trusted binaries"? But come on, it's not like I can personally audit all the code I run; and even if that would be possible it is easy to miss small bugs that eventually will run 'rm -rf' in my home directory.
Trust is pretty much the basis from which you *have* to work here. There are three problems with your proposal: (1) it would be difficult/impossible to implement in a satisfactory manner; (2) users would be very prone just to OK their way through the warning messages [much like they do when they launch the attachment in the first place]; and (3) this would pose extra difficulties in production environments where code must run unattended or users must be handed quick-fixes in the form of batch files, etc.
#2 is trickier than it seems: the Java VM lets applets run in a sandboxed space. Applets can request elevated permissions, and the user must OK it manually. (This appears to be the level of granularity you are thinking about.) But users still just click their way through it w/o understanding the implications.
Microsoft maybe onto the right thing with signed binaries (as much as I'm suspicious of the concept). You do have a point... more native sandboxing capability might be a worthwhile thing to have.
The trick is to present data that makes sense to your MM. Don't tell him "we'll block 13432 incoming spam messages per day"; tell him "we'll block 13432 incoming spam messages per day that cost us $2300 per day in storage costs.
Thanks for the well-written response. At the end of the day, my boss and coworkers want to understand software proposals in terms of cost, benefits, and risk. Although I like Stallman's philosophy on software, I also know that my employeer is paying me for results, not principle.
As a side note, it's amazing how much open-source software IS NOT out there. Common stuff for warehousing, procurement, financials, work controls, human resources... It will be a long time before open source has something serious to offer here, I'm afraid.
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 5, Funny
if you have a website and want to participate in the boycott it's darn simple
You forgot a step. Before doing this, you should take a look at your own website. If the content is crap that nobody wants to read, you should block google's spider instead fo MSN's. That way, MSN search results turn out to be useless and frustrating.:-)
There is no such thing as a no-fault error in engineering.
Ahh... truly the human spirit: always find a place to point the mighty finger of blame.
...but perhaps it takes some of that to put shuttles up and down successfully. American culture is somewhat mired in its own fear and suscpicion though...
Dude... parent poster is just pointing out that jokes taken out of context are a political liability. There's been more than one occassion where comments from slashdot have been placed in front of a judge to support "the opposition".
And, I actually don't find this Sender Permitted From to be a very good solution if it means that you have to invoke some complex SMTP hack or something.
Once other people start using SPF to filter their mail, all you'll have to do is modify your DNS records so that your email will get through to them. That should be simple for you.
You won't have to patch postfix/exim/whatever unless you decide that you want to filter based on SPF right now. If you don't want to patch your mail server software, wait for a newer version that comes with it standard.
Really... this is the best solution I've ever heard of for the spam problem. It sounds neat and clean. No messy government legislation, no centralized handling of certificates [screw you, Verisign], no cumbersome approaches with crypto, no unweildy modifications to SMTP, no client-app changes, no silly "hard computational task" to waste CPU cycles, no lame micropayment systems. If SPF catches on, it will reduce spam to a manageable problem. The only real worry is that it will encourage spammers to try their hand at IP-spoofing and intrusive hacking.
On the GNU/Linux thing, Stallman's a pain in the ass (as usual), but he's right (as usual).
Stallman's "right" in the sense that FSF deserves credit for the philosophical, legal, and technical leadership it has contributed to the community.
But "GNU/Linux" is difficult to pronounce and market. The reason that people just say "Linux" is not to screw Stallman out of credit, but because it's linguistically preferable to most speakers.
Stallman's browbeating people to try and shape their language, but language doesn't really work that way unless you force it (like the poltical correctness movement). It's intresting that a lot of his initiatives seems to suffer from this sort of linguistically naivete... e.g,. why call it "Free Software Foundation" intead of "Software Freedom Foundation"? He's also fighting the term "Intellectual Property"... a good fight in my opinion, but he's still working again the grain of the language: there's a reason people find it convenient to lump Trademark, Patents, and Copyrights into the same bucket.
Slashdot Mirror
Even easier is to choose a common word and concatenate it with the month and year:
- Nice0304
- Nice0404
- Nice0504
- Nice0604
That way, when you're in a business environment where you have to juggle passwords on a billion different systems, with some of them expiring every 30 days, you can readily create new passwords and recall old ones.Of course, sticky notes are pretty handy too...
And no... I'm not entirely joking. The more hostile corporate sysadmins get with expirations, reuse-prevention, pattern-matching, and account lockouts, the more I'm inclined to circumvent. Ha... and I used to use randomized passwords on my job...
Obviously, she knew the properties of the chemical; she probably knew several strategies for handling them safely too. What she obviously didn't know was the safety ethos. This is because abstract scientific knowledge does not directly transfer to practical safety techniques. Especially for absent-minded professors.
Translating knowledge of theory into safety techniques can be hard work. At a minimum, you have to identify dangers, design strategies to avoid them, and then implement these strategies while carrying out the task in such a way that you remain mindful of them. What can make this especially difficult for a theorist is that "safety design" requires a paranoia not suggested by the domain knowledge of the problem. The job of the scientist is to model the world. Models are simplifications that leave out "uninteresting" phenomena so that more interesting things can be explored. The trouble is, those "uninteresting" phenomena are a rich source of safety hazards. The translation can be done, but only if you're familiar with safety design techniques (redundancy, vigilance, continuous improvement, etc...).
In the case of a lab accident, the prof might not have to do that much thinking to avoid killing herself, but we're only human. This is where a good grounding in safety training and mentality can help us maintain our sense of caution even when one is just trying to mix a few test tubes together.
I'll give you an extended example of how the naieve application of theory can hurt safety practice: I have a friend--very smart--who believes (or believed) that it's safe to tailgate on the expressway with a 1/2 second following time. This is about 1 car length at 60-70 MPH. His reasoning? "My reaction time to breaking will be 1/4 second, and given approximately equal vehicle mass and breaking power, it is a FACT OF PHYSICS that two cars will come to a stop in the same amount of distance w/o colliding." [Emphasis his.]
My friend's theoretical model and proposed reaction time is accurate, but he made several mistakes in this analysis:
And if everybody followed this advice, the U.S. would be like f*cking Italy before Mussolini made the trains run on time. Sometimes you gotta sacrifice for the job or things come to a halt.
The trick is to insist on a job where the sacrifice is reasonable. The occasional callout or on-call duty is okay if the pay is right and the management appreciative.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't have backbone though. And as for companies (or Universities) thinking they own the work you do purely on your own time (which this thread originally was talking about)... bullshit. What I do own my time is my own work. I don't care what any law or lawyer says... that's an intrinsic moral imperative.
Ahhh.. gosh. The headaches come rushing back. Gnus is the absolute f*cking worst "serious" mail client that I've ever used. I'm a big emacs fan, I'm very patient with technical documentation, and I am fairly experienced with all things programming, but Gnus was just too much.
Okay, okay... I exaggerate a little bit, but seriously... save your brain cells for something better. Like KMail running off an IMAP backend (which I also sneak into using mutt or squirrelmail when I'm limited to the console or web).
My understanding was that, in general, the "efficency" of laziness is outweighed by the cost of the bookkeeping for it. After all, a function uses the parameters it is passed most of the time.
I'm a fan of functional programming, but lazy evaluation complicates the code and slows it down. That's one advantage of scheme's function-calling semantics over lisp's, IIRC (can anyone confirm?).
FSF has many preconceptions that it is trying to alter. If it wants to effectively reach a large audience and encourage people to consider new ideas, then hell... a slick logo is worth it.
I hate the marketing-saturated culture we live in, but FSF could communicate more effectively. (They're doing better in some aspects, actually...)
Just my 2 cents...
They're two sides of the same coin. FSF's emphasis is philosophical/social and OSI's emphasis is more on engineering/benefits, but both labels ("open source" and "free software") mean the same thing when applied to a piece of software: you can take it, modify the source, and redistribute it. That's what I meant by "practically speaking". There's absolutely no difference to the people who select, deploy, use, and support the software.
The two terms do not meaningful differentiate two pieces of software. You're never going to say "package foo is open source but not free software". You're never going to say "I would prefer to use free software here instead of open source". Among the categories of 'proprietary software', 'freeware', 'shareware', etc..., the terms 'open source' and 'free software' occupy a single entry.
My point is that the FSF will face a lot of difficulty forcing a distinction b/t the two terms outside of the geek community. FSF has got some complicated concepts to explain to legislators, CEO's, judges, journalists, and countless others. They should embrace the better branding ("open source") and emphasize the freedom aspect of it. I can understand how they are attached to the term 'Free Software' (especially since they came up with it long before OSI), but this is, IMO, not strategic.
I have enough trouble getting my boss to distinguish b/t "open source" and "shareware". Throwing "free software" into the mix is going to hurt corporate adoption, not help civil liberties.
The thing that Bruce Perens, etc., understand that Stallman does not is "branding". "Open Source" is a distinct, brandable term. It has successfully fought off imitation brands like Microsoft's "Shared Source" concept. It even has a crisp, compact logo. The FSF does not understand this game, and they can't seem to produce a brand name w/o botching it up with recursive algorithms ("HURD"), semantic ambiguitiy ("free software"), or phonetic confusion ("GNU"). And their logo sprawls all over the place.
Furthermore, the FSF appears to have a touch of NIH syndrome ("not invented here"). Stallman tries to draw a distinction b/t the terms "free software" and "open source", but they mean the same thing, practically speaking. Why hair-split the semantics when you could present a unified, prepackaged concept to the world?
Sigh... enough ranting. I just want to see FSF do the little things that would help give it corporate cred.
FYI, the GNU homepage has a lot of actions you can take to support free software politically. Take a look.
Not when you've used KDE or Windows applications everyday for the past 7 years. There's this little thing called "backwards compatibility". While it's quite a pain for purist, it is sometimes worth it.
You should listen to your users: people are getting mad about the button order thing for valid reasons. How would you like me sneaking into your house and swapping out your QWERTY keyboard for a Dvorak one? You might find it pretty d*mn frustrating, especially when I casually reply that "it's better".
I'm all for moving the GUI experience forward, but only when "moving forward" is a meaningful experience, not an ad hoc piece of usability dogma that does not concern itself with feedback from real users.
It's questionable whether this advantage would be measurable or not. That would be an intresting study. (Perk up, grant writers!)
The fact that the genders, in general, navigate differently could make for more intresting and diverse gameplay. E.g., at a deep and subtle level, this breaks up preconceptions that veteran game players may have about how to understand a space and how to anticipate movement in that space.
On a seperate note, I see a lot of people arguing that a separate league is unncessary because men and women can be equal competitors here. Whether equal or not, women may want a separate league just because male players can be fairly rude at times. Trying playing w/a female nickname and observe how other players treat you.... sometimes guys will level fairly crude stuff at females that goes beyond the normal in-game insults. I do not intrepret this to mean that female player are unwanted... to the contrary, the comments I see tend to be overt sexual overtures delivered with a cruditiy that would not be done in real life. This is just my observation... any women care to comment?
I agree with your premise ("this should be done in an ethical way"), but not your conclusion ("no cloning"). Instead of an all-or-nothing debate, I would like to see proposed guidelines for reviewing and approving cloning experiments, much like most universities require you to get approval before performing experiments on humans or animals.
You ask "When does life begin?" and you started by looking for a clear cut line. The question is deceptive: human life is a social construct. As a social construct, the actual location of the line is not important: it's that everybody agrees on the location. Some cultures have drawn the line at birth and some have drawn it at conception. There are extremes: some cultures have endorsed limited forms of infanticide while others have prohibited masturbation and condoms on the grounds that "every sperm is sacred". Practically all cultures have a birth ritual that signifies that a child is a full-fledged member of society that the parents will invest resources in substaining. Examples of such rituals included circumcision and infant baptism, and they were very important to societies where infant mortality rates are high...
Genetic cloning, even done carefully, will produce monsters and misery, but it will also extend life and perhaps even let us drive our biology in arbitrary directions. We need to proceed carefully and cautiously, with due attention paid to preventing problems/abuses and handling them when they do occur. We've been through this before (e.g., nuclear power), and we'll have to go through it again (e.g., nanotechnology, cloning, etc.). Progress is scary, inevitable, and ultimately desirable.
http://segusoland.sourceforge.net/screenshots.htm
Bookmarked. It's really neat to see open source enabling the exploration of alternative UI's.
The user is suppose to know that if he wants to do an unusual operation on any object, he can right click on it and get a full list of choices. I'll agree that this is not obvious the first time you use a computer, but "having a good UI" does not mean that "every user is able to use the software perfectly the first time he or she encounters it".
Once the user has learned the technique, the context menu is a *much* better location for the renaming operation than the system-wide menu bar you propose. The problem w/the system-wide (or application-wide) menu bar is that it does not narrow down the number of choices based on context... to rename under this arrangement, I have to "select" the file (thus enabling "invisible" functionality elsewhere), than I have to search the menus for a rename operation, and that's very costly. With the context menu, I know that my options just apply to the file I clicked on.
Consider this... maximum visibilty would be a bunch of buttons popping up around the file whenever you hover over it. But this would be annoying. Making the user explicitly ask for the buttons to come up removes the annoyance while adding a small learning cost.
But don't take my word for it... go conduct a usability test or look through the research to see what actually works for real users.
Clearly, the U.S. has fallen into an overly-legalistic mindset that produces a tremendous drag on our economy. The nutcase TOS would make a good museum exhibit because it tipifies the excesses of our society. A good history museum captures the zeitgeist, the spirit of an age. A museum devoted to the 70's would dig up pictures of some hippy smoking pot, playing a guitar, surrounded by woman in loose billowy, fabric. Is this what the typical citizen in the 70's was spending their time doing? No, but it does help tell the story of that time period in America.
So yes, one nutcase does speak clearly for the "American Empire" because his behavior correlates with the excesses of society. There's a bit of spuriousness here, but individual examples tell a (historical, social) story better than plain statitics.
And I agree with you... "slide" is more likely than "fall".
What sort of needs does a big business have? Well, they all need to manage human resources. Most need to track items in their warehouses and perhaps training for their employees. The industrial sector will have many additional needs to track equipment, schedule resources, control work authorizations, and safely take equipment in and out of service. Running an enterprise call system also takes more than a PHP app.
There are dozens of other highly generic needs that I haven't mentioned, but all take extensive effort to set up, customize, and integrate into a business environment. And these things are *mission critical*: millions of dollars can ride on the availability of the software. Open source can eventually get here, but it will have to (first) be written, (second) creep up through small business, and (third) be vetted and pushed by consultants who can make money from long-standing service contracts.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic about open source, but there are many unmet needs here. Don't expect to run a serious business without proprietary software. In fact, be as objective as possible when evaluating software needs for your business... pretend that you have to defend every decision in front of someone who doesn't care about the distiction b/t free and non-free software. Someone who only thinks in terms of money, growth potiential, implementation schedules, and risk. If OSS can't stand its ground here (even with the price advantage), drop it. Don't jeporadize your business, and (if you're working for someone else) don't give your boss a bad taste of what OSS is all about.
Stallman--as much as I support the guy--completely misses the real world when he says that "any business based on proprietary software deserves to fail". Deserving or not, any medium or large business that is not based on proprietary software will fail.
I hope open source can one day address these needs, especially for small businesses and start-ups, but I'm not too worried even if it can't. If Linux becomes good enough in other aspects, these proprietary apps will be made to run on Linux too (and some of them already do). "Mostly" free is good enough for me.
Good analogy, but keep in mind that humans have a large amount of circuitry dedicated to forming intuitions about mechanical systems. (Well, most of us at least.) These intuitions are somewhat crude, but they apply very directly to the single-minded task of driving.
By contrast, computers are full-fledged knowledge manipulators. This is a completely alien environment for most people, and even those of us who have mastered the crude basics have a tremendously hard time of finding ways to effectively communicate a package of knowledge-manpiulation tasks to a broad audience.
If you had to master a new vehicle (car, truck, kayak, train, hangglider, unicycle, ostrich...) everytime you wanted to go somewhere new, and if some of the vehicles obstructed your site of the ground or messed with your sense of gravity, and if you had to observe a different set of traffic signals and social behavior for each vehicle, then you too would get pretty frustrated at the stablehand who berates you for overtightening a cinch strap when you're running late to that promising job interview.
Of course, to be fair, our theoretical stablehand has new people coming in all day making the same basic mistakes over and over again. He's the one who has to take care of the sore horses, and it's a big pain to constantly deal with ignorant users.
The problem here is the sheer versatitily of computers: since they make things so efficent, we have, in a period of ~20 years, put one in front of damn near everybody with minimal preparation. The human rate is just not capable of adopting such tools without frustrating end-users (who become hostile) and tech support (who become condescending).
Humans are complex social beings with many ingrained trust instincts. Introduce them to the trust implications of running a program and make an analogy b/t trusting code and trusting people. Equate "running a program" to leaving a stranger alone in their house. This will be easier and more effective than training them to assess whether it's reasonable for foo32.exe to want to access a shared memory segment set up by app woojah32.exe. Introduce advanced users to tools/techniques that can help them detect and isolate dangerous apps (including anti-virus software, sandboxing software, privelege seperation among different user ID's, etc.).
Finally, establish institutions to help users assess trust. This has already been done, really: you have anti-virus software makers (a reliable source of news about virii), code-signing mechanisms (which help establish identity), sanctioned repositories of applications (e.g., I trust official Debian packages over download.com stuff, and I trust download.com stuff over squirrly gag apps that my sister emails me), and software vendors (e.g., I trust GNU over Microsoft, and Microsoft over those pr0n sites that offer me free "history killer" software).
Thanks for your well-written post. It's important that we as a community see our own flaws, but medicine goes down easier with sugar.
Trust is pretty much the basis from which you *have* to work here. There are three problems with your proposal: (1) it would be difficult/impossible to implement in a satisfactory manner; (2) users would be very prone just to OK their way through the warning messages [much like they do when they launch the attachment in the first place]; and (3) this would pose extra difficulties in production environments where code must run unattended or users must be handed quick-fixes in the form of batch files, etc.
#2 is trickier than it seems: the Java VM lets applets run in a sandboxed space. Applets can request elevated permissions, and the user must OK it manually. (This appears to be the level of granularity you are thinking about.) But users still just click their way through it w/o understanding the implications.
Microsoft maybe onto the right thing with signed binaries (as much as I'm suspicious of the concept). You do have a point... more native sandboxing capability might be a worthwhile thing to have.
Thanks for the well-written response. At the end of the day, my boss and coworkers want to understand software proposals in terms of cost, benefits, and risk. Although I like Stallman's philosophy on software, I also know that my employeer is paying me for results, not principle.
As a side note, it's amazing how much open-source software IS NOT out there. Common stuff for warehousing, procurement, financials, work controls, human resources... It will be a long time before open source has something serious to offer here, I'm afraid.
You forgot a step. Before doing this, you should take a look at your own website. If the content is crap that nobody wants to read, you should block google's spider instead fo MSN's. That way, MSN search results turn out to be useless and frustrating. :-)
Ahh... truly the human spirit: always find a place to point the mighty finger of blame.
Dude... parent poster is just pointing out that jokes taken out of context are a political liability. There's been more than one occassion where comments from slashdot have been placed in front of a judge to support "the opposition".
Once other people start using SPF to filter their mail, all you'll have to do is modify your DNS records so that your email will get through to them. That should be simple for you.
You won't have to patch postfix/exim/whatever unless you decide that you want to filter based on SPF right now. If you don't want to patch your mail server software, wait for a newer version that comes with it standard.
Really... this is the best solution I've ever heard of for the spam problem. It sounds neat and clean. No messy government legislation, no centralized handling of certificates [screw you, Verisign], no cumbersome approaches with crypto, no unweildy modifications to SMTP, no client-app changes, no silly "hard computational task" to waste CPU cycles, no lame micropayment systems. If SPF catches on, it will reduce spam to a manageable problem. The only real worry is that it will encourage spammers to try their hand at IP-spoofing and intrusive hacking.
Stallman's "right" in the sense that FSF deserves credit for the philosophical, legal, and technical leadership it has contributed to the community.
But "GNU/Linux" is difficult to pronounce and market. The reason that people just say "Linux" is not to screw Stallman out of credit, but because it's linguistically preferable to most speakers.
Stallman's browbeating people to try and shape their language, but language doesn't really work that way unless you force it (like the poltical correctness movement). It's intresting that a lot of his initiatives seems to suffer from this sort of linguistically naivete... e.g,. why call it "Free Software Foundation" intead of "Software Freedom Foundation"? He's also fighting the term "Intellectual Property"... a good fight in my opinion, but he's still working again the grain of the language: there's a reason people find it convenient to lump Trademark, Patents, and Copyrights into the same bucket.