On a slight tangent, it would be nice to see Apple embrace this, maybe even help the project out with specs/docs.
I don't see it happening. I'm surprised they haven't gotten around to legally harassing the MOL people yet. I suppose that bit of look-n-feel fun will have to wait for affordable third-party PowerPC mobos to make the scene.
Calling someone who uses or advocates a technology you don't like a "zealot" is just the latest intelligent conversation ender. Mr. Godwin already has our favorite group of 40's goose steppers taken care of. And you can just forget it once the commies are trotted out in any discussion about volunteerism or FOSS software.
Most of the people who toss "zealot" around shouldn't look too closely in the mirror. Really, check out the posting history of most anyone who resorts to the ephitet.
As a teenager, a friend and I bought an assortment of electrolytic caps and a spool of wire from The Shack. We took my benchtop 12V supply around the side of house and had great fun hooking caps up backwards to one end of a 40 foot long piece of wire. The best explosion was had from a funky looking cap that was made in Mexico. Pieces of that sucker flew everywhere. We even got a nice little fireball at the moment of detonation. We even experimented with supergluing the rubber "safety corks...specially crimped stoppers" and "safety tops...prescored metal plates" in electrolytics. Fuh-hun shit. My supply didn't have enough amperage to do the larger caps justice; they just bloated, smoked and stunk a little.
Check out the Gadgeteer's Goldmine. It's a sort of Anarchist's Cookbook for the electronics hobbyist. My favorite is the "Lethal Burning Device". It is basically a reverse stun gun. Normal stunguns feel like getting hit with a sparkplug. It's high voltage and the current measured in microamps. The "burning device" featured lower voltages (low thousands or the hundreds) and milliamp scale currents. It spoke of testing the device on a raw steak. Let's see....there was also the tabletop homebuilt CO2 laser that can "cut through thin gauge steel plate". There was also the homebuilt YAG laser that could punch holes through the same.
When I used to work as a bench tech, we made our own "lethal burning device". We rented sound level meters, geiger counters, and other instruments that ran on 9-volt batteries. Any battery with less than 8.5 volts of charge unloaded was deemed too used up for another rental. We didn't throw them out. When I had about 32 of them in my drawer, we snapped them together end to end like Legos. That was good for about 250 volts. We also added a 45 volt dry cell of unknown origin that laying in a parts box. When all was said and done, there was a 300v powerpack that was capable of sourcing a fair amount of amperage....in the hands of irresposible young twentysomethings. 80v neon lamps would glow like the sun. A worn out twelve volt sampling fan became a monstrous ElectroTurbine engine that could drag small loads across the bench. You could get a one inch long spark if you brought a wire from one terminal close to the other and slowly drew it back. The stranded end of the wire would fly apart into a broom shape because the individual strands were mutally repulsed. A capacitor or two might have even died horribly.
Strangelove was largely a parody of Teller. In life, the mere mention of Strangelove was an interview ender to Teller.
RMS goes to great pains to point out ESR's views are different from his. The mere mention of ESR or Open Source provokes correction from RMS in interviews.
It also wedges Firefox 0.8. I tried it in Konqueror but I didn't have "ask" configured in the pop-up window policy. It did to Konqueror what I think it is intended to do in IE. With "ask" configured, the initial shocking picture comes up and then it wedges. I did find out that Javascript can be enabled on a site by site basis. Since, I rarely use Konqueror that seems best.
One of the reasons I rarely us Konqueror is because things like adblock seem to be more readily availiable for the Gecko based browsers. I also find it cluttered after using Firefox.
It's only the beginning though. Remember when Be Inc sold their assets to Palm? They retained the right to sue MS and existed as a one or two man operation solely to carry that suit out. The consolation is that such a rump corporation isn't going to be either effective or credible at pumping the FUD. I suppose Didiot and Pretenderle will still hype up how SCO is going to 0wnz3r L1n00ks; oh well.
I heard some analyst on NPR today talking about "unprecendented" growth in the manufacturing sector. I guess he hasn't heard that the Dept. of Labor is counting fast food jobs as "manufacturing" jobs. If a minimum wage job magically counts as a relatively well paying manufacturing job, I have to wonder what other games are being played with those numbers.
True enough but I have a book from the Sixties that is full of tube based TV circuits. Of course, we wouldn't build it out of tubes now but that little genie is out of the bottle too.
We're talking very basic electronics here. Yes the components and circuit designs have to be quality but it isn't insurmountable. Granted Joe Sixpack isn't going to be any good with a soldering iron. Those of us that are won't put up with this. If all you can buy is a fubared D/A converter then build some out of ladders of resistors and op-amps. I'm sure several of us can chip in with even better ideas.
From what I understand, they might as well smoke oregano. Hemp grade cannabis contains very little THC and one would have to smoke a LOT of it to feel any effect.
Don't forget all of the eye candy, abstraction layers, and the replacement of assembly and C with high level languages...which are probably running on a virtual machine. And we can't blame it all on MS either. Everybody is operating that way.
For all that developers have a bit too much ease of use vs efficiency, today's PC has apps that just weren't possible with that old gear. Non-linear video editing and audio compression just isn't going to happen on a 12 Mhz 286.
In another 10 or 15 years, I believe that computing will cease to be sexy in any way shape or form. Don't get me wrong; advances will still be occuring but they won't be hot topics. Most major applications will have well understood methodologies for accomplishing them. APIs and architectures will be settled down more. That is the point where there will be value in making things a bit more efficient and maintainable. Hell, I even think the IP tulip mania will be mostly over with by then. But things will stay chaotic as long as Moore's Law still has steam in it.
To be quite honest, I doubt that this is terribly different from the situation in traditional software companies, who obviously want to protect their code. The main motivation in the academic environment, however, is that you don't want your techniques used by another research group when grants are so hard to come by these days. Again, I'm glad all I deal with is a blackboard.
That's all well and good. So it seems academia is to be just another part of the corporate world. I'm just wondering about one small detail.
How is this piffling little thing called science going to get done? It doesn't work too well when scientists can't disseminate their ideas.
The rules are different for public key cryptography. You are correct in that every bit added to a symmetric crypto key doubles the keyspace. In public key crypto which RSA is one type of, it is necessary to add 10 bits to double the difficulty. That 10 bit number is somewhat fuzzy. It can be a little more or a little less depending on whether we are talking about elliptic curves or Diffie-Hellman and others.
If I could end my compatibility issues without giving a single vendor the power to control whether or not I can open my own data, then I would be happy to. And that is only one of the power and control issues that come up.
Oh well, I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself without the help of either MS or Turbolinux. So are many of us here. So why use Windows when you find it personally repugnant?
Sun is lot like a friend of mine's old girlfriend. She was hot as hell, a party animal; and I'm told the sex was great. She was also a raving psycho who would start a knock-down drag-out argument as soon as the orgasms were over. I'm talking ripped shirts, stitches, screaming, and all around physical abuse. Of course, real men don't hit women and the sex is great........
Yes, they've done some nice things for FOSS but they're freaking nuts. Sun would have you know that while Linux has a place on the desktop it is useless as a server. Huh? They contribute patronage fees to the FSF but they also pay SCO. WTH? They sell a Linux desktop distro but they call it Java and charge $100/year/seat for it. WTF? They contributed Openoffice and continue to contribute to Gnome but think MS will be a reliable partner. I've heard of identity crises but these guys are ridiculous.
Umm, Supras and 300ZXs are what riceboys lust after . Since they can't have it, they settle for chrome rims and a big spoiler on Mom's old Prelude. Being a riceboy is all about trying to give wimpy econoboxes the appearance of performance. A Supra owner doesn't need to dork with his car to let everyone know it's bad. A performance enthusiast who pimps his Supra is still a performance enthusiast. A riceboy is something else altogether.
You might find one or two nutters that do. I think there were a few people who got the US military to recognize "Jedi" as a religion. I don't know if any of them post to Slashdot though. To a few more of us, Star Wars is good science fiction. I think we can lump them in with the nutters too.
Others of us at least think some of the movies were good entertainment and a source of references and in-jokes. For them and the rest of us, claiming "jedi" as a religion of choice is a good joke; well its a joke anyway.
That isn't so remarkable. Ancient peoples didn't have the mobility we take for granted today. With the exception of nomads who will still migrate to and from places where their way of life makes sense, most people just didn't move around that much. Peasant and serf classes were especially limited in their experiences. A river valley flood of the same magitude as the Mississippi River floods a few years back would seem like the whole world to a settled people. After isn't every place you ever heard of underwater?
I know that young-earth creationists like to do things like apply carbon-14 dating to things that are older than 6000 years or so. Or they might apply it to things like ancient sealife which are known not to participate in quite the same carbon cycle as land based life. Basically, let's use the test in a way no trained biologist would and then claim that proves the test doesn't work. Other forms of radioisotope dating can also be selectively misapplied. I suspect young-earthers don't like uranium-lead dating much either since it covers even larger timescales. Pick the wrong type of rock anyone?
Old-earth creationism might...just MIGHT...have a leg to stand on. Young-earth Bibilical literalism just isn't worth taking seriously. For the young-earth point of view to prevail, extreme violence must be done to more than just the life sciences. Chemistry, physics, geology, cosmology and others must all be severely twisted if literalism is to be viable. ALL of those disciplines show that the earth and the universe in general is much older than young-earthers can tolerate. What's funny is that even though literalists would destroy science in their triumph, they love to sound scientific.
In reality, young-earthers admit their literalist beliefs must be paramount in any discussion. Their take on the Bible is said to be "inerrant". If any scientific finding counterdicts that interpretation of the Bible then something must be wrong with it. It also follows that biological evolution is what offends them the most but it isn't the only thing that offends them. A political triumph by young-earthers would result in Lysenko style scientific absurdities.
Sounds to me like the lock system seriously sucks then. Law breakers by definition do not care about the laws they are breaking.
Also, that "terms of the contract" crap doesn't impress me at all. The way things are going every single item on grocery and department store shelf is going to have a fucking contract shrinkwrapped on it. What good is it to have rights and liberties when you have to sign every single damn one of them away to live?
Slashdot Mirror
On a slight tangent, it would be nice to see Apple embrace this, maybe even help the project out with specs/docs.
I don't see it happening. I'm surprised they haven't gotten around to legally harassing the MOL people yet. I suppose that bit of look-n-feel fun will have to wait for affordable third-party PowerPC mobos to make the scene.
Calling someone who uses or advocates a technology you don't like a "zealot" is just the latest intelligent conversation ender. Mr. Godwin already has our favorite group of 40's goose steppers taken care of. And you can just forget it once the commies are trotted out in any discussion about volunteerism or FOSS software.
Most of the people who toss "zealot" around shouldn't look too closely in the mirror. Really, check out the posting history of most anyone who resorts to the ephitet.
As a teenager, a friend and I bought an assortment of electrolytic caps and a spool of wire from The Shack. We took my benchtop 12V supply around the side of house and had great fun hooking caps up backwards to one end of a 40 foot long piece of wire. The best explosion was had from a funky looking cap that was made in Mexico. Pieces of that sucker flew everywhere. We even got a nice little fireball at the moment of detonation. We even experimented with supergluing the rubber "safety corks...specially crimped stoppers" and "safety tops...prescored metal plates" in electrolytics. Fuh-hun shit. My supply didn't have enough amperage to do the larger caps justice; they just bloated, smoked and stunk a little.
Check out the Gadgeteer's Goldmine. It's a sort of Anarchist's Cookbook for the electronics hobbyist. My favorite is the "Lethal Burning Device". It is basically a reverse stun gun. Normal stunguns feel like getting hit with a sparkplug. It's high voltage and the current measured in microamps. The "burning device" featured lower voltages (low thousands or the hundreds) and milliamp scale currents. It spoke of testing the device on a raw steak. Let's see....there was also the tabletop homebuilt CO2 laser that can "cut through thin gauge steel plate". There was also the homebuilt YAG laser that could punch holes through the same.
When I used to work as a bench tech, we made our own "lethal burning device". We rented sound level meters, geiger counters, and other instruments that ran on 9-volt batteries. Any battery with less than 8.5 volts of charge unloaded was deemed too used up for another rental. We didn't throw them out. When I had about 32 of them in my drawer, we snapped them together end to end like Legos. That was good for about 250 volts. We also added a 45 volt dry cell of unknown origin that laying in a parts box. When all was said and done, there was a 300v powerpack that was capable of sourcing a fair amount of amperage....in the hands of irresposible young twentysomethings. 80v neon lamps would glow like the sun. A worn out twelve volt sampling fan became a monstrous ElectroTurbine engine that could drag small loads across the bench. You could get a one inch long spark if you brought a wire from one terminal close to the other and slowly drew it back. The stranded end of the wire would fly apart into a broom shape because the individual strands were mutally repulsed. A capacitor or two might have even died horribly.
Fun times......
RMS can be Teller.
ESR can be Dr. Strangelove.
Strangelove was largely a parody of Teller. In life, the mere mention of Strangelove was an interview ender to Teller.
RMS goes to great pains to point out ESR's views are different from his. The mere mention of ESR or Open Source provokes correction from RMS in interviews.
It also wedges Firefox 0.8. I tried it in Konqueror but I didn't have "ask" configured in the pop-up window policy. It did to Konqueror what I think it is intended to do in IE. With
"ask" configured, the initial shocking picture comes up and then it wedges. I did find out that Javascript can be enabled on a site by site basis. Since, I rarely use Konqueror that seems best.
One of the reasons I rarely us Konqueror is because things like adblock seem to be more readily availiable for the Gecko based browsers. I also find it cluttered after using Firefox.
It's only the beginning though. Remember when Be Inc sold their assets to Palm? They retained the right to sue MS and existed as a one or two man operation solely to carry that suit out. The consolation is that such a rump corporation isn't going to be either effective or credible at pumping the FUD. I suppose Didiot and Pretenderle will still hype up how SCO is going to 0wnz3r L1n00ks; oh well.
I heard some analyst on NPR today talking about "unprecendented" growth in the manufacturing sector. I guess he hasn't heard that the Dept. of Labor is counting fast food jobs as "manufacturing" jobs. If a minimum wage job magically counts as a relatively well paying manufacturing job, I have to wonder what other games are being played with those numbers.
Do not compare the devil to SCO.
You're right. It is rather insulting to the devil isn't it?
Do you think Joe Artist is going to be able to open up his HDTV and install it without screwing it up?
No.
If it's out of the reach of the common layman, it's not good enough.
Defiant technologists are a start. A draconian regime like this would tend to strengthen our ranks as well.
True enough but I have a book from the Sixties that is full of tube based TV circuits. Of course, we wouldn't build it out of tubes now but that little genie is out of the bottle too.
We're talking very basic electronics here. Yes the components and circuit designs have to be quality but it isn't insurmountable. Granted Joe Sixpack isn't going to be any good with a soldering iron. Those of us that are won't put up with this. If all you can buy is a fubared D/A converter then build some out of ladders of resistors and op-amps. I'm sure several of us can chip in with even better ideas.
I apt-get dist-upgrade myself but if I was faced with the parent posters admin task on a regular basis, it would only be a one liner shell script.
It looks ugly but it isn't that big a deal. It certainly wouldn't be hard to wrap it in a GUI if the one liner shell script is too scary.
From what I understand, they might as well smoke oregano. Hemp grade cannabis contains very little THC and one would have to smoke a LOT of it to feel any effect.
Don't forget all of the eye candy, abstraction layers, and the replacement of assembly and C with high level languages...which are probably running on a virtual machine. And we can't blame it all on MS either. Everybody is operating that way.
For all that developers have a bit too much ease of use vs efficiency, today's PC has apps that just weren't possible with that old gear. Non-linear video editing and audio compression just isn't going to happen on a 12 Mhz 286.
In another 10 or 15 years, I believe that computing will cease to be sexy in any way shape or form. Don't get me wrong; advances will still be occuring but they won't be hot topics. Most major applications will have well understood methodologies for accomplishing them. APIs and architectures will be settled down more. That is the point where there will be value in making things a bit more efficient and maintainable. Hell, I even think the IP tulip mania will be mostly over with by then. But things will stay chaotic as long as Moore's Law still has steam in it.
To be quite honest, I doubt that this is terribly different from the situation in traditional software companies, who obviously want to protect their code. The main motivation in the academic environment, however, is that you don't want your techniques used by another research group when grants are so hard to come by these days. Again, I'm glad all I deal with is a blackboard.
That's all well and good. So it seems academia is to be just another part of the corporate world. I'm just wondering about one small detail.
How is this piffling little thing called science going to get done? It doesn't work too well when scientists can't disseminate their ideas.
The rules are different for public key cryptography. You are correct in that every bit added to a symmetric crypto key doubles the keyspace. In public key crypto which RSA is one type of, it is necessary to add 10 bits to double the difficulty. That 10 bit number is somewhat fuzzy. It can be a little more or a little less depending on whether we are talking about elliptic curves or Diffie-Hellman and others.
If I could end my compatibility issues without giving a single vendor the power to control whether or not I can open my own data, then I would be happy to. And that is only one of the power and control issues that come up.
Oh well, I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself without the help of either MS or Turbolinux. So are many of us here. So why use Windows when you find it personally repugnant?
Sun is lot like a friend of mine's old girlfriend. She was hot as hell, a party animal; and I'm told the sex was great. She was also a raving psycho who would start a knock-down drag-out argument as soon as the orgasms were over. I'm talking ripped shirts, stitches, screaming, and all around physical abuse. Of course, real men don't hit women and the sex is great........
Yes, they've done some nice things for FOSS but they're freaking nuts. Sun would have you know that while Linux has a place on the desktop it is useless as a server. Huh? They contribute patronage fees to the FSF but they also pay SCO. WTH? They sell a Linux desktop distro but they call it Java and charge $100/year/seat for it. WTF? They contributed Openoffice and continue to contribute to Gnome but think MS will be a reliable partner. I've heard of identity crises but these guys are ridiculous.
Umm, Supras and 300ZXs are what riceboys lust after . Since they can't have it, they settle for chrome rims and a big spoiler on Mom's old Prelude. Being a riceboy is all about trying to give wimpy econoboxes the appearance of performance. A Supra owner doesn't need to dork with his car to let everyone know it's bad. A performance enthusiast who pimps his Supra is still a performance enthusiast. A riceboy is something else altogether.
You might find one or two nutters that do. I think there were a few people who got the US military to recognize "Jedi" as a religion. I don't know if any of them post to Slashdot though. To a few more of us, Star Wars is good science fiction. I think we can lump them in with the nutters too.
Others of us at least think some of the movies were good entertainment and a source of references and in-jokes. For them and the rest of us, claiming "jedi" as a religion of choice is a good joke; well its a joke anyway.
That isn't so remarkable. Ancient peoples didn't have the mobility we take for granted today. With the exception of nomads who will still migrate to and from places where their way of life makes sense, most people just didn't move around that much. Peasant and serf classes were especially limited in their experiences. A river valley flood of the same magitude as the Mississippi River floods a few years back would seem like the whole world to a settled people. After isn't every place you ever heard of underwater?
I know that young-earth creationists like to do things like apply carbon-14 dating to things that are older than 6000 years or so. Or they might apply it to things like ancient sealife which are known not to participate in quite the same carbon cycle as land based life. Basically, let's use the test in a way no trained biologist would and then claim that proves the test doesn't work. Other forms of radioisotope dating can also be selectively misapplied. I suspect young-earthers don't like uranium-lead dating much either since it covers even larger timescales. Pick the wrong type of rock anyone?
Old-earth creationism might...just MIGHT...have a leg to stand on. Young-earth Bibilical literalism just isn't worth taking seriously. For the young-earth point of view to prevail, extreme violence must be done to more than just the life sciences. Chemistry, physics, geology, cosmology and others must all be severely twisted if literalism is to be viable. ALL of those disciplines show that the earth and the universe in general is much older than young-earthers can tolerate. What's funny is that even though literalists would destroy science in their triumph, they love to sound scientific.
In reality, young-earthers admit their literalist beliefs must be paramount in any discussion. Their take on the Bible is said to be "inerrant". If any scientific finding counterdicts that interpretation of the Bible then something must be wrong with it. It also follows that biological evolution is what offends them the most but it isn't the only thing that offends them. A political triumph by young-earthers would result in Lysenko style scientific absurdities.
Sounds to me like the lock system seriously sucks then. Law breakers by definition do not care about the laws they are breaking.
Also, that "terms of the contract" crap doesn't impress me at all. The way things are going every single item on grocery and department store shelf is going to have a fucking contract shrinkwrapped on it. What good is it to have rights and liberties when you have to sign every single damn one of them away to live?
That naughty ole telescope done burned my eyes out Flash! A-geh! A-geh! Oooh that smarts. -geh! -geh!