Open source shows a strong prediliction for solving interesting problems well ahead of boring ones. For instance, we had useful, powerful distributed databases, cryptography, new languages and C compilers long before we had a functional word processor and spreadsheet combo. Quite simply, we have already solved mail distribution and address-book sharing on their own, and have relatively little interest in peeling apart a proprietary MS standard for same which is liable to change next week. This is also the reason why OpenOffice is great for everything except reading and writing Word documents.
This flows into my new theory about how Microsoft intends to go about attacking Linux: A deluge of boring, repetitious, pointless APIs and interfaces for problems that were long ago solved but now must be addressed using these new, uselessly variant interfaces simply because that's what everyone else has to do. (Think dotnet.) A hacker's familiarity with extant interfaces is his or her number-one resource, and is therefore that which he or she will part with least readily --- even at the expense of the compatibility or useability of the code they're writing.
Microsoft's strategy is reminiscent, in some ways, of an ancient Incan technique for pacifying politically difficult villages and towns. By forcibly migrating the entire settlement to some distant part of the empire, the usefulness of the skill-sets of these hunter-gatherers was greatly reduced, making them dependent on the (massively centralized) government for handouts, and therefore suddenly rather polite in their relations with the regime.
In the same way that a hunter-gatherer depends on his knowledge of the land, a geek depends on knowledge of the problem and solution spaces. Furthermore, most OSS projects are extremely long-term endeavours; think GCC, think Emacs, think the Linux kernel(*). OSS developers work by building things slowly and correctly with a minimal expenditure of precious manpower; Microsoft works by using more coders, more money, insane work hours and a blase attitude toward standards (even difficult, complicated, important standards) so that they may get to market early , recoup such expenditures, and get to work on the next total (and totally incompatible) revision of their product, which people will use simply because of the upgrade path that MS will kludge together with exactly the same bloodyminded application of superior capital.
Simply put, we need stability more than they do, because they have more time and money. We write things right the first time, whereas they have the luxury of making as many mistakes as they need to in order to grab market share. But more importantly, we need the projects of the past to have been written right the first time; we need a working libc, kernel, and so forth, otherwise OSS simply doesn't happen. Microsoft has no such prerequisites to its growth, as, in a pinch, *it can simply replace its foundations by fiat*. Their hunter-gatherers can, metaphorically speaking, simply create (with a certain expenditure of time and effort) the landscape best suited to their requirements. Thus they can march along beside us, setting the pace, forcing a speedup, replacing good APIs with new because every step into new territory costs them less than it costs us, dissociates us from our well-known and powerful (if somewhat lacking) APIs and encourages our work to depend on their own work, which will then be changed, etc, rendering ours much less useful.
Ultimately, the strategy is designed to encourage hackers to go take up billiards or chess or something with a potential of being useful to remember or think about or use five minutes hence. The ultimate goal of cycling APIs is to induce *indifference*, as we face a choice between working harder on minutia or walking away, hands in the air.
(*)Note that, of these projects, two are sufficiently low-level to be immune to all but the most radical shifts in design; this is again indicative of what OSS excels at.
Although not as popular as Apache and IIS, Other offers an incredibly scalable and diverse development platform; and although its share may wax and wane over time, it never drops to zero: In Other surveys of Other products and markets, not once has any Other competitor been successful at completely eliminating this tenacious brand. (Some Independent checks by Some Independent regulatory body ensured that the numbers remained accurate, although that Some-body could not be reached for comment.)
And, as for the 'second desktop' issue, these people *really* don't know how to work computers. Sorry; they simply don't. If I installed, say, XFree86, which lacks a native-window-widgets mode, then all day long I would hear a steady stream of complaints pertaining to disappearing desktop icons, the difficulties of using a non-Windows WM, etc....
AFAIK, the best/cheapest Win32 rootless X server solution is $90 a head. We don't want to pay that.
Oh, but I'm not a jerk.:) There are actually a number of extremely important reasons from the Access-to-LDAP migration; Quite simply, the version of Access that we actually have seats for is apparently incapable of displaying or listing in the appropriate volumes. (We might be a small company, but the.ldif file is 20000 lines long.;) The back-end was chosen because of its integration with sundry email clients, with an eye to a linux-ward upgrade for the salesfolks. (This latter actually makes sense for us, as we also do engineering and thus have a supply of people who know Linux; in many instances we therefore do not need the simplifications and retardations of Windows. Now, if only I could find an OSS office suite that didn't butcher Word docs...
(Although it remains to be seen if for the better.)
My first computer was a Macintosh LC, and it wasn't actually mine. It was, of course, my father's (purchased at a steep discount, as he is a teacher, and the post-Boxing-Day sales crush was on) and was the first modern computing device our family could afford. We even bought the deluxe version of the '_L_ow _C_ost' Macintosh, whose extra ram bay had been stuffed and whose second floppy drive was now, at 40 mb, a veritable ocean of space. With the extra RAM and hard drive, it was capable of running -- if only just -- the shiny-new System 7.0, which came with a 'HyperCard Player'.
I quickly mastered the ins and outs of every aspect of the UI. I knew how to set the colours of the window borders, the desktop background; I knew what to do when the sad Mac appeared; I was even friends with the mysterious and labyrinthine ResEdit, by whose agency one might transfigure the very type of a file.
But I did not know code.
Then, one autumn night, at around ten thirty --- I remember this clearly --- I was thumbing my way through an early edition of famously lighthearted tome called the 'Macintosh Bible', which casually (or in this case, perhaps 'causally') mentioned, somewhere in the back pages, that although System 7 ostensibly differed from earlier versions of the OS, which had come with 'complete' copies of HyperCard, Apple engineers had in fact been too lazy to write a 'read-only' Hypercard interpreter. The 'Hypercard Player' of System Seven was simply their most recent Hypercard development environment, saddled with an initialisation routine (a 'stack', in HC parlance) that perversely greyed out most of the interesting menu items. But even this paltry scaffolding of occlusion could be removed by clicking on the appropriate panel in the appropriate corner, and typing the following words in the resultant dialog box:
'go magic'.
System 7.1 came out a few months later, with a fully lobotomized 'Hypercard Player'. Had my parents held off just a few more weeks to buy that computer, I doubt that I would ever have taken up programming, and would neither know nor care about Slashdot or its comment forums.:)
Subject says it all. Why not simply lease to every product a unique IP number with a lifespan of, say, 50 years? That way, you can get all sorts of extra info about the product at http:///index.html whenever the thing is sitting near the radio tag scanner (which would be powering the server with the same energy needed to create the resonance in the first place?)
I went to university relatively determined to be an ubergeek. In high school I taught myself LISP, C, Perl, and pretty much all the usual ins/outs of UNIX (eg. intimate familiarity with vi, sed, bash, emacs, what the fuck/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward does on a Linux box, how to handle isakmpd on an OpenBSD box, , the usual shit.) Open-and-closed case, right? A born comp sci or comp engineering major.
Four years and two universities later, it turns out that I'd rather be doing something else! Although for the past year I've had a comfortable 'junior software engineer+net admin' job and a relatively high degree of success here in this anteroom to the 'real world', I now desperately want to go back for two extra years (!!$$) so I can get accreditation and raise my GPA for what I really want to do -- graduate studies in philosophy. You will *not* want to see my student debtload two years hence.
Pay attention not so much to what you're doing (although do that too!) but to what you *feel* about what you're doing. Take as diverse a course-spread as you can manage --- abstract algebra, physics, bio, chem, and certainly those lovable, wacky humanities. Read things not published by O'Reilly. Read Heidegger. Read Faulkner. Read your mood, but don't try to read the future --- unspoken feelings of 'destiny' and 'fate' are often simply disguised habit and fear of uncertainty. Do not cleave to your adopted 'tribe', geekiness, simply because it is yours; if you ultimately follow this path, do so because it is the best possible option! If the *only* thing about university that you enjoy is the bit with the beer and the friends, take it as a big, flashing warning over the course, and courses, you are taking.(Although you are allowed to enjoy said beer a little bit.)
Less melodramatically: Think of the following four+ years of your life as a 'random walk' optimisation algorithm in n dimensions: To find the best solution, you'll need to step off of the coordinates upon which you currently stand.
The European Space Agency has discovered that, when hit with a space ship at a high velocity, the asteroid can slow and be sucked into the gravity well of a nearby planet.
You have three minutes to call your parents one last time. Don't die lonely.
Actually, we're all *already* frozen. The reason that the world's OSes seem more bug-and-sploit-ridden,ungainly and defective with every major new release (witness, for instance, XP and the 2.4.[0-7] kernels) is a direct effect of Jory.
Yeah, but unless the beam is being directed outside of the room (or at some reasonable sort of 'sink') even if the lightsource is (an impossible) 100% efficient at converting 200W electricity->light, you will in short order see a near-100% efficient conversion of light->heat.
Wow. That explains why so much of the product I endure at poetry-slamming night is so godawful - I've been signed up as a member of the audience without my express permission!
Some big, suspicious corporation with many millions of dollars of PCB-filled waste containers slowly and secretly rusting in the Boston harbour could genetically engineer a microbe to take those PCBs and rip off the chlorine molecule so as to reduce the stuff to harmless saltwater.
Yes, boys and girls, let's gawk at the proliferation of geeks for whom 'C' is not only
a language but (yes!) also a measurement!:)
Since everyone else is suggesting meat/cheese/fat-filled recipes, here's a little number that I prepared just last night. Cooks in vast quantities, lasts forever, can be prepared in minutes, tastes great. Good for you to boot. (But doesn't help booting.) This one goes out to all those west-coast tech-savvy neohippies out there... Chris' Magic Granola Globals
-------
1.3 kg bag of oat flakes. Not 'quick' oatmeal, not 'minute' oatmeal. NO OATMEAL. Oat flakes. They look like oatmeal, but they're subtly different.
1/2 c cocoa powder
1/3 c cinnamon
1/2->1 c honey (may also use 50% brown sugar, 50% honey)
3/4 c cooking oil
raisins, dates, cranberries, walnuts, almonds, sesame seeds (esp these) and whatever else you have in your local grocery that might taste good when baked very dry. Note that this p
Instructions
------------
(1) empty oat flakes into roasting pan.
(2) Bake (alone, uncovered) for 45min at 400F, stirring every 15min.
(3) Add chopped walnuts, almonds, sesame seeds, and other dry ingredients until the oat-to-other ratio is something like the ratio of working to buggy subroutines in 'doze. Add cocoa and cinnamon. Stir well.
(4) Bake uncovered for another 15min.
(5) Stir in raisins, date chunks, cranberries, oil, honey, and sugar. The bits of fruit should have something like the frequency of pimples on the face or butt of the average MSCE.
(6). Bake (again, uncovered) for another 15-20min. Remove from heat, and stir a couple of times for good luck. Allow to cool. Put in big glass jugs (like the kind you can get in Chinatown). Eat for breakfast, lunch and evening snack for the rest of the term.
Slashdot Mirror
At this rate, I'm waiting for the following:
* When milk comes 'fortified' with caffeine, like it is with Vitamin D and salt is with iodine;
* When *not* drinking coffee increases your insurance rates.
* When companies ask you to take a urine test, in order to verify that you're drinking enough of the stuff.
Well, it has excellent rw support for Excel files, but IME it can really butcher a Word document (or create a butchered-looking .doc, for that matter.)
AFAIK, StarOffice 6.0 sells itself on (a) having better MSO compat, and (b) having Adabas. Is this correct?
...because the problem isn't interesting enough.
Open source shows a strong prediliction for solving interesting problems well ahead of boring ones. For instance, we had useful, powerful distributed databases, cryptography, new languages and C compilers long before we had a functional word processor and spreadsheet combo. Quite simply, we have already solved mail distribution and address-book sharing on their own, and have relatively little interest in peeling apart a proprietary MS standard for same which is liable to change next week. This is also the reason why OpenOffice is great for everything except reading and writing Word documents.
This flows into my new theory about how Microsoft intends to go about attacking Linux: A deluge of boring, repetitious, pointless APIs and interfaces for problems that were long ago solved but now must be addressed using these new, uselessly variant interfaces simply because that's what everyone else has to do. (Think dotnet.) A hacker's familiarity with extant interfaces is his or her number-one resource, and is therefore that which he or she will part with least readily --- even at the expense of the compatibility or useability of the code they're writing.
Microsoft's strategy is reminiscent, in some ways, of an ancient Incan technique for pacifying politically difficult villages and towns. By forcibly migrating the entire settlement to some distant part of the empire, the usefulness of the skill-sets of these hunter-gatherers was greatly reduced, making them dependent on the (massively centralized) government for handouts, and therefore suddenly rather polite in their relations with the regime.
In the same way that a hunter-gatherer depends on his knowledge of the land, a geek depends on knowledge of the problem and solution spaces. Furthermore, most OSS projects are extremely long-term endeavours; think GCC, think Emacs, think the Linux kernel(*). OSS developers work by building things slowly and correctly with a minimal expenditure of precious manpower; Microsoft works by using more coders, more money, insane work hours and a blase attitude toward standards (even difficult, complicated, important standards) so that they may get to market early , recoup such expenditures, and get to work on the next total (and totally incompatible) revision of their product, which people will use simply because of the upgrade path that MS will kludge together with exactly the same bloodyminded application of superior capital.
Simply put, we need stability more than they do, because they have more time and money. We write things right the first time, whereas they have the luxury of making as many mistakes as they need to in order to grab market share. But more importantly, we need the projects of the past to have been written right the first time; we need a working libc, kernel, and so forth, otherwise OSS simply doesn't happen. Microsoft has no such prerequisites to its growth, as, in a pinch, *it can simply replace its foundations by fiat*. Their hunter-gatherers can, metaphorically speaking, simply create (with a certain expenditure of time and effort) the landscape best suited to their requirements. Thus they can march along beside us, setting the pace, forcing a speedup, replacing good APIs with new because every step into new territory costs them less than it costs us, dissociates us from our well-known and powerful (if somewhat lacking) APIs and encourages our work to depend on their own work, which will then be changed, etc, rendering ours much less useful.
Ultimately, the strategy is designed to encourage hackers to go take up billiards or chess or something with a potential of being useful to remember or think about or use five minutes hence. The ultimate goal of cycling APIs is to induce *indifference*, as we face a choice between working harder on minutia or walking away, hands in the air.
(*)Note that, of these projects, two are sufficiently low-level to be immune to all but the most radical shifts in design; this is again indicative of what OSS excels at.
Other holds steady at 12%.
Although not as popular as Apache and IIS, Other offers an incredibly scalable and diverse development platform; and although its share may wax and wane over time, it never drops to zero: In Other surveys of Other products and markets, not once has any Other competitor been successful at completely eliminating this tenacious brand. (Some Independent checks by Some Independent regulatory body ensured that the numbers remained accurate, although that Some-body could not be reached for comment.)
Tell that to smallpox.
And, as for the 'second desktop' issue, these people *really* don't know how to work computers. Sorry; they simply don't. If I installed, say, XFree86, which lacks a native-window-widgets mode, then all
day long I would hear a steady stream of complaints pertaining to disappearing desktop icons, the difficulties of using a non-Windows WM, etc....
AFAIK, the best/cheapest Win32 rootless X server solution is $90 a head. We don't want to pay that.
Oh, but I'm not a jerk. :) There are actually a number of extremely important reasons from the Access-to-LDAP migration; Quite simply, the version of Access that we actually have seats for is apparently incapable of displaying or listing in the appropriate volumes. (We might be a small company, but the .ldif file is 20000 lines long. ;) The back-end was chosen because of its integration with sundry email clients, with an eye to a linux-ward upgrade for the salesfolks. (This latter actually makes sense for us, as we also do engineering and thus have a supply of people who know Linux; in many instances we therefore do not need the simplifications and retardations of Windows. Now, if only I could find an OSS office suite that didn't butcher Word docs...
;)
This sentence is random filler to get past slashdot's random filter.
(Although it remains to be seen if for the better.)
:)
My first computer was a Macintosh LC, and it wasn't actually mine. It was, of course, my father's (purchased at a steep discount, as he is a teacher, and the post-Boxing-Day sales crush was on) and was the first modern computing device our family could afford. We even bought the deluxe version of the '_L_ow _C_ost' Macintosh, whose extra ram bay had been stuffed and whose second floppy drive was now, at 40 mb, a veritable ocean of space. With the extra RAM and hard drive, it was capable of running -- if only just -- the shiny-new System 7.0, which came with a 'HyperCard Player'.
I quickly mastered the ins and outs of every aspect of the UI. I knew how to set the colours of the window borders, the desktop background; I knew what to do when the sad Mac appeared; I was even friends with the mysterious and labyrinthine ResEdit, by whose agency one might transfigure the very type of a file.
But I did not know code.
Then, one autumn night, at around ten thirty --- I remember this clearly --- I was thumbing my way through an early edition of famously lighthearted tome called the 'Macintosh Bible',
which casually (or in this case, perhaps 'causally') mentioned, somewhere in the back pages, that although System 7 ostensibly differed from earlier versions of the OS, which had come with 'complete' copies of HyperCard, Apple engineers had in fact been too lazy to write a 'read-only' Hypercard interpreter. The 'Hypercard Player' of System Seven was simply their most recent Hypercard development environment, saddled with an initialisation routine (a 'stack', in HC parlance) that perversely greyed out most of the interesting menu items. But even this paltry scaffolding of occlusion could be removed by clicking on the appropriate panel in the appropriate corner, and typing the following words in the resultant dialog box:
'go magic'.
System 7.1 came out a few months later, with a fully lobotomized 'Hypercard Player'. Had my parents held off just a few more weeks to buy that computer, I doubt that I would ever have taken up programming, and would neither know nor care about Slashdot or its comment forums.
Subject says it all. Why not simply lease to every product a unique IP number with a lifespan of, say, 50 years? That way, you can get all sorts of extra info about the product at http:///index.html whenever the thing is sitting near the radio tag scanner (which would be powering the server with the same energy needed to create the resonance in the first place?)
Or, more simply, 'Be open to change.'
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward does on a Linux box, how to handle isakmpd on an OpenBSD box, , the usual shit.) Open-and-closed case, right? A born comp sci or comp engineering major.
:)
I went to university relatively determined to be
an ubergeek. In high school I taught myself LISP, C, Perl, and pretty much all the usual ins/outs of UNIX (eg. intimate familiarity with vi, sed, bash, emacs, what the fuck
Four years and two universities later, it turns out that I'd rather be doing something else! Although for the past year I've had a comfortable 'junior software engineer+net admin' job and a relatively high degree of success here in this anteroom to the 'real world', I now desperately want to go back for two extra years (!!$$) so I can get accreditation and raise my GPA for what I really want to do -- graduate studies in philosophy. You will *not* want to see my student debtload two years hence.
Pay attention not so much to what you're doing (although do that too!) but to what you *feel* about what you're doing. Take as diverse a course-spread as you can manage --- abstract algebra, physics, bio, chem, and certainly those lovable, wacky humanities. Read things not published by O'Reilly. Read Heidegger. Read Faulkner. Read your mood, but don't try to read the future --- unspoken feelings of 'destiny' and 'fate' are often simply disguised habit and fear of uncertainty. Do not cleave to your adopted 'tribe', geekiness, simply because it is yours; if you ultimately follow this path, do so because it is the best possible option! If the *only* thing about university that you enjoy is the bit with the beer and the friends, take it as a big, flashing warning over the course, and courses, you are taking.(Although you are allowed to enjoy said beer a little bit.)
Less melodramatically: Think of the following four+ years of your life as a 'random walk' optimisation algorithm in n dimensions: To find the best solution, you'll need to step off of the coordinates upon which you currently stand.
But watch out for those downward asymptotes.
The European Space Agency has discovered that, when hit with a space ship at a high velocity, the asteroid can slow and be sucked into the gravity well of a nearby planet.
You have three minutes to call your parents one last time. Don't die lonely.
Oh baby baby, how was I supposed to know...
That something wasn't right?
Oh baby baby, I hacked on that blasted code...
Till the morning's early light!
Tell me, how to fix it, soothe me,
Tell me, baby, cuz I need to know now, oh because,
This bloody LISP, is killing me ---
Though I test-regress, it still goes bleep!
(Still goes bleep!)
If it's the closures, I'll lose my mind,
And rewrite the damned thing one more time!
(Repeat until 3 minutes and 50 seconds is achieved.)
Actually, we're all *already* frozen. The reason that the world's OSes seem more bug-and-sploit-ridden,ungainly and defective with every major new release (witness, for instance, XP and the 2.4.[0-7] kernels) is a direct effect of Jory.
Yeah, but unless the beam is being directed outside of the room (or at some reasonable sort of 'sink') even if the lightsource is (an impossible) 100% efficient at converting 200W electricity->light, you will in short order see a near-100% efficient conversion of light->heat.
Or am I wrong about this? IANAPOAE.
A quasi-dystopia (and very, very good reading):
_Infinite_Jest_, by David Foster Wallace.
_Do_Androids_Dream_Of_Electric_Sheep, philip K dick.
Almost anything by William Gibson (depending on your (pre)conception of dystopia).
Man, I used to be a math major...
You know, with all those, like, problems, and
equations and stuff...
Calc, linear algebra, advanced calc...
Group theory...
But then my GPA went down, so I switched to computer science!
Now, all I have to do is get into protracted fights about obscure and ill-thought-out Notepad clones
that have terminally silly keyboard shortcuts...
Yeah. Like Emacs, vi....
It's all so easy, and my profs are amazed that
they have a student who pays attention!
http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/switch
Now I have an A+, and I go drinking every night!
Once again our 'scientists' have managed to
misintepret perfectly clear statistical
data by imposing a faulty chain of causality.
Obviously, things are back-to-front. Ice ages
cause changes in the path of the solar system.
Duh.
Well, then the Axis of Evil would be able
to put a lot more information on their optical
storage devices, now wouldn't they?
I say *we* use the blue lasers, and they can use the red ones.
Wow. That explains why so much of
the product I endure at poetry-slamming
night is so godawful - I've been signed up as a member of the audience without my express permission!
Everything is clear now. Thanks, Slashdot!
Some big, suspicious corporation with many millions of dollars of PCB-filled waste containers slowly and secretly rusting in the Boston harbour could genetically engineer a microbe to take those PCBs and rip off the chlorine molecule so as to reduce the stuff to harmless saltwater.
But wait, this all sounds familiar...
Taurine. It contains taurine, not caffeine.
Sorry, but this has to be one for NTK's habitual BBC graphics mock-fest. The asteroid depicted is somewhat larger than Earth's moon.
Yes, boys and girls, let's gawk at the proliferation of geeks for whom 'C' is not only a language but (yes!) also a measurement! :)
Since everyone else is suggesting meat/cheese/fat-filled recipes, here's a little number that I prepared just last night. Cooks in vast quantities, lasts forever, can be prepared in minutes, tastes great. Good for you to boot. (But doesn't help booting.)
This one goes out to all those west-coast tech-savvy neohippies out there...
Chris' Magic Granola
Globals ------- 1.3 kg bag of oat flakes. Not 'quick' oatmeal, not 'minute' oatmeal. NO OATMEAL. Oat flakes. They look like oatmeal, but they're subtly different. 1/2 c cocoa powder 1/3 c cinnamon 1/2->1 c honey (may also use 50% brown sugar, 50% honey) 3/4 c cooking oil raisins, dates, cranberries, walnuts, almonds, sesame seeds (esp these) and whatever else you have in your local grocery that might taste good when baked very dry. Note that this p Instructions ------------ (1) empty oat flakes into roasting pan. (2) Bake (alone, uncovered) for 45min at 400F, stirring every 15min. (3) Add chopped walnuts, almonds, sesame seeds, and other dry ingredients until the oat-to-other ratio is something like the ratio of working to buggy subroutines in 'doze. Add cocoa and cinnamon. Stir well. (4) Bake uncovered for another 15min. (5) Stir in raisins, date chunks, cranberries, oil, honey, and sugar. The bits of fruit should have something like the frequency of pimples on the face or butt of the average MSCE. (6). Bake (again, uncovered) for another 15-20min. Remove from heat, and stir a couple of times for good luck. Allow to cool. Put in big glass jugs (like the kind you can get in Chinatown). Eat for breakfast, lunch and evening snack for the rest of the term.