What is human? What is God? Science looks at what traditionally God or human and forces us to push those definitions out.
Even my cat is capable of a wide range of emotion, limited planning and communication (cursing, begging and lying mostly.) If it weren't for monkeys that do teamwork, tool use, comedy and lying there would still be one unique trait that humans have. Can it be that human is a merely a quantitative and not a qualitative measure?
Heh, to quote another slashdot comment:
If it isn't capable of doing algebra, it's not yet human. That's my definition.
Set the bar high enough and you too can join the Nazis in persecuting large sections of the current populace.
I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want.
After age 21 it seems all that a large portion of the population wants to do is watch TV and get laid. Not everyone can be a Nielson viewer and the military/church seriously hates any contraception that might lower their recruitment pool.
Unskilled and semi-skilled day labor exits for a reason:
Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their brains are not significantly costlier than pigeon brains, and for many tasks they are actually superior. -- Richard Dawkins
I understand patching holes in Linux. There's no one out there who is going to hold you responsible if you release the patch for free and say install at your own risk.
At a seminar recently the speaker summed up proprietary software with a simple quote:
"Hardware comes with a warranty. Software comes with a disclaimer."
However, if you put out a patch for a closed source system, you run the risk of not only breaking some unexpected functionality, but also make your users susceptible to having their systems determined to be WGA-noncompliant. You run the risk of essentially breaking peoples' computers
API stability is why some developers test for compatibility on minor version numbers while warning you about changes that require bumping major version numbers. Since you backed up your system, testing the patch and rolling back should be not a problem. Right?
Sure it won't happen this time, and maybe you'll dodge the bullet a few more times, but when the day comes that you've crossed over the line too far, will having fixed Microsoft's problems really been all that great?
The PC is not a box of pixie dust and rainbow magic. The software works, or in Microsoft's case doesn't work, for a reason. Experience in PC video gaming says no-CD cracks for broken DRM and OS-version-detection fixes can be downloaded with ease. Sometimes developed long after the original developer went bankrupt on Version X.0. In some cases people are paid good overtime to make these 3rd party patches not work. Yet J. Random Hacker still manages to pull through, thwarting attempts to make your $75 purchase a nice coaster companion for the paper box it came in. In short, it's not roses and green grass on either side of the fence.
(I have a high UID because I always posted as AC, but I've been here for a long time)
Does anyone remember the story on Ask Slashdot about getting lurkers to come out and discuss?
I registered an account just to post on that article.
I recall submitting an ask Slashdot about online comics, getting throughly trashed by critics and then the Slashdot Funny Pages showing up a little bit later.
Also, those who have been lurking since the Chips'n'Dips site recall that these are not the first user accounts. In fact, the user account database was lost early on and people were asked to sign back up. This was, of course, long before the advent of subscription.
Ah, to return to that day and bend that lurker arm, forcing it to snag a low ID.
That's probably one reason why people are more productive with 2 monotirs - you can shove all the "personal stuff" to one side, and keep an ey on it without actually having to stop working on what you're doing.
Linux Journal September 2007: LG Index.
Male percentage of Internet porn users: 72
Percentage of porn traffic during the 9-5 eight-hour workday:70
These kids, however, seem to need assistance from the "long arm of the law" every few steps. When will we learn that it's not how rapidly kids are able to do something, but whether or not they succeed in the end on their own?
Because we never ever have some kind of older person teach, help or guide children? I mean, if some adults were actively paying attention to these kids and helping them to learn they might be stifling them. These hypothetical long arms could be protecting them from harm or providing hints that make them successes, rather than failures but at what cost? What would happen to all those budding artists and scientists in Africa if they had some parent figure forcing them to not find their own food or struggle to stay out of the elements? Where would third-world religious/military dictatorships be if each new generation didn't have to start all over again?
I for one don't care to much about what was being played with, laptop or Legos. It is the presence of those arms and that unheard direction that is most important. And the one presence far to frequently lacking in the war-torn, poverty-stricken famine-plagued and/or AIDS ravaged third-world.
Parents: not just a good idea, but in the first world, it's the law.
Anyway, spam is bad, yada yada. Get used to it, or download a mod like SpamSentry and put a stop to it.
As long as the game lets random people join and chat, there will be UCE, XCP, and fraud. If you let absolutely new accounts get full access to communication when you release, everyone expects it from then on. So, unless Spam becomes game-breaking, you can't escape that design choice for your chat features. I'd prefer a three tiered system of (1) default no chat, (2) listen only and (3) full duplex with Turing tests and basic communication skills tests in between. You could even integrate it into the game's content.
This is similar to how the online game Kingdom of Loathing's limits chat: you cannot use the chat features until you pass a basic grammar and spelling test. It has the downside of pissing off potential players. However, being able to chat indicates that you had to either know basic communication skills or were a bald-faced cheater. Somewhat harsher penalties can be justified because 'you should know better.'
Even then there are people who manage to spam. Automated bans and gags on poorly behaving accounts can lead to an arms race. No matter how cleaver the scripts are, some Gold Farmer is sitting in front of a computer upping the ante with more obtuse yet functional language to get out the message about their gold-for-dollars services.
Short of a live moderator standing around in each public area, it's not possible to keep up with the filters needed for bans and gags. With the money that Blizzard makes they might be able to do something about it though...
On the other hand, over urbanization means u Urbanization is an abstract concept, like the boundary between urban and rural. It doesn't make you do anything. All you complaints derive from poor implementation (shoddy construction by sub-standard builders) and bad planning.
For instance:
wake up from a horrible sleep because the couple in the house nextdoor(6 inches away) was fighting all night. Set building codes that include walls thicker than paper-thin. Learn to report your neighbors for noise violations. Such behavior can be tied to one or more people with problems that need jail-time or medication to solve. This is not caused by 'ubanization' but can be found out in the sticks whenever those dreaded 'other people' are.
taking an overcrowded train or crawl along the highway in your car at 6mph
Proper public transport is do-able. The U.S. highway system is more about siphoning your dollars into the hands of automakers and oil tycoons than providing quality service. See Europe, with better public transport and higher urban density than the U.S.
walk along dirty streets
If you dropped any trash on that street then you are responsible for that dirty. Yes, enough money can buy the sanitation crews to wipe your butt as you walk along the sidewalks. Or just jail fools that can't use a trash can. My solution is to let cops take out any frustrations on litterbugs. Beat the crap out of anyone in an Armani or tattered rags if they get caught on camera littering, spitting or not cleaning up after their dog. Oh, and it's not like rural roads are used as dumping grounds.
look up at all the grey buildings with no possibility of seeing 90% of the sky
Not all cities were build during the modernist 'must be a cube' fad in architecture. Just google pictures of La Palomas in Mexico City. Light pollution is just that. If you can penalized people for not properly reducing glare or give incentives for not wasting power lighting up the sky, that will go away.
ordering a pint of beer that costs 2x what it would in a less urban environment.
I assume you meant 'in a rural' environment. But you don't want to know that the high cost is largely due to either a sin tax from your religious neighbors (who just want to make you less-sinful in that neighborly way) or from a farmer that got a subsidy and tariff to protect his crops. You want cheep food? Don't tax imports. Just be prepared for all the local (expensive lifestyle) farmers to go out of business within the year.
see the bill for your mortgage you could buy a nice 4 bedroom house
Architects demonstrated cheap, high quality modular urban housing in the 50s. It's almost a conspiracy that people focus on home ownership to the point of penalizing renters. There is only so much land around, and most of it is worthless.
Don't confuse the methods of FOSS (GPL, CDDL, most Creative Commons permissive licenses) with the philosophy and realization of FOSS.
supporting Free Software and/or the GNU GPL does not automagically make you speak out against copyright per se at all
Copyright is used because it is the appropriate tool. While Click-wrap licenses and EULA live in a grey world, rejecting the GNU Public License makes you a copyright violator. With the power of Disney Co. behind you, your GPL'd code gets the same treatment as any moder Masterpiece[1].
Copyright exits at its best when enforcing correct attribution, but at its worst when crushing innovation. Because greedy and immoral people will claim anything as their own for a quick buck, copyright laws can, like any law-based concept, grown and consume more rights from the public as time goes on. Those opposing copyright oppose excessive copyrights resulting from this parasitic growth on the public commons. Successful or not restoring balance, this fight will pendulum for the foreseeable future as the invested fight reality to protect their business model.
FTA: the argument becomes not whether copyright should be abolished, but what form it should take. In short, we've established what kind of girl you are. Now we're just haggling over the price.
It was the proffer's mistake in walking into the red-light district in the first place. Only the insane may want to abolish copyright, but most[2] just want it limited.
We as a people reserve the right of copy from the public domain to improve creativity and innovation through protection of financial incentives to the creative to create and innovate. When that right is abused by the copy holders[3], you have the same situation that one young Richard Stallman found himself. Creativity and innovation are being stifled through restrictions on access. Free and Open Source Software is about removing restrictions on access by enforcing the surrender of copy rights while at the same time being based upon them.
The FSF's GPL gives you the rope. You can climb out of that pit or hang yourself. The FSF won't decide for you.
And no, there is no company with enough money to buy that girl[4]. Somethings are literally 'priceless.'
--- 1. Stolen by other companies and relentlessly copied in China.
2. To paraphrase the head of the MPAA: "Of course copyright as it is in the USA is Constitutional. The Constitution forbids eternal copyright. Our goal with copyright extension is 'one day short of forever.'"
3. Typically distributors who have no "real" value to the creative process except to make a buck off someone else's work.
4. Greg Bulmash bases his article on a quote typically attributed to Winston Churchill. Like I said, copyright when at it's best.
Pay someone enough to keep something running and it generally stays running.
we did that to address some stability issues we were having
I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that your stability is highly dependent on the skill and knowledge of you sysadmins. The last place I worked, most the Linux gurus were self trained. But the IBM AIX people got some seriously high quality training from IBM specialists. And some of the best technical manuals outside of an O'Reilly sales office.
You get clearly better MTB compared to a PC based server under Linux.
Greater costs shouldn't surprise anybody. I know from experience that AIX is significantly more stable than Linux, it costs to IBM money achieve that stability and it requires the customer to use higher quality hardware.
Big Blue make make some piecemeal on hardware and OS licenses, but there are big bucks in services like training, support. While you can get Linux on that very same 'higher quality' hardware, you might not find 'higher quality' sysadmins to handle it (supply, meet demand.) Then there is also the old adage of computer PHBs:
If it costs a lot, we need to pay the people that run it a lot. Which doesn't make sense in the real world until you consider that stability, features and cost are set in one of those engineering trade-off triangles. Far too many people get into Linux for the features and the (perceived lack of) cost without considering the high costs it takes to get stability. Pay someone enough to keep something running and it generally stays running.
His server was back up by the time I got to it. Most the comments posted there were 'Linux needs X to work on the desktop' and 'I like Windows.' Makes me feel sad to have spent the time to read the site.
Thank you for posting the article text. Now I can rip it apart bit by bit without waiting for his server to come back.
I agree with many of the counterpoints presented, but they do get somewhat off topic. Granted, the article itself, apart from some self-congratulatory meta-statements, is not about "5 things you can't talk about in Linux" so much as "I don't follow the Linux community at all."
1. Not being able to talk about Linux as a product. Linux is used as a generic for the trademarked Linux kernel used with some userland system be that busybox, BSD utilities, GNU applications, or whatever. At work we say 'Windows this' and 'Windows that.' Microsoft Windows includes every versions from a DOS menu system from the 1980s, Windows 95, 98, 98se, 2000, CE, XP, Vista and about a 1/2 dozen server systems based on NT. In fact, one of the first things a 'Linux newb' is told by any 'Linux guru' is that Linux, as used generically, is not a single application, kernel, distribution or package system. It is more a style and context for an operating system, similar in approach to UNIX. The only difference is that many companies and people package and sell and distribute Linux. Only Microsoft distributes Microsoft Windows.
2. Mostly harping on physical security and worms is a little off topic. Every security class, seminar and training session will harp on how security is not some Hollywood GUI with flashy pass codes. Making veiled attacks on Groklaw doesn't help. Tangential slander at community members for using handles (a long tradition in UNIX, not just Linux) is a hollow ad-homian attack. In corporate security, like F/OSS security, it takes a few dedicated and skilled individuals to do the hard work.
3. The community is supported by a few? No surprise. The community is full of the legends of super-coders. People talk about it a LOT. In a corporation you have a few people that do a lot of work and a few dead weights. When the dead weight gets to be too much, the company fails. The people working in F/OSS donated their time or (per the recent who paid for Linux articles) were paid just like everyone else. What about BSD which tried this before? Because the GPL encourages feedback enrichment and freeloaders have margial cost, F/OSS scales much better. It's like the difference between an FTP server and Bittorent.
4. One word: telecommuting. You ask 'is Linux pro-developer?' I ask you: what kind of development? I'm typing this on SuSE, the name in German originally meant 'System for Software Development.' I have over 30 complete development tool chains installed. Documentation for how to learn over a dozen programing languages. And, like OS 10, I have a UNIX CLI that has 30 years of refinement in supporting development. And thanks to the GPL, I can develop how I want and what I want. I may not have Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop, but you weren't talking about that kind of developer or were you?
The argument that I will get paid less because my tools are cheaper makes no sense. Any manager that would pay me more because my tools cost more is an idiot. Me and my skills have to rest on our own qualifications. If I do a better job in a perfect world, I should get paid more. In reality I compete with other people who only have to do the job 'adequately.'
Outsourcing isn't a fad, it's businesses realizing that high-priced Ferrari mechanic could wash their car as well as the kids down the street. Eventually the jobs go where they need to. The F/OSS community is already distributed widely and used to coordinating people from remote locations. Linux isn't made at one campus in Redmond, Washington but all over the world. I have an advantage if I know that I can do my job for 1/10 the price in India just as easily as in th
I have tried to call Dell to at least notify them of my problems, but each time I have called I get transferred into an endless loop of "Joe" or "Alan" all speaking a delectable version of English I presume emanates from Bangalore.
Ah, you must be a small business customer. That dialect would emanate from the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma call center, just north of the Apache.org-stole-my-website town of Tuttle, Oklahoma.
However, considering the large influx of Indian contractors on IT slave-VISAs they still might be originally from Bangalore. Part of that think global, buy local mentality. So it must be good, right?
Apparently for corralling many of the explosives-happy people in your community into a single, easily controlled group instead of letting them run wild and blow up cars, trash cans, beer cans and light brights.
Oh, wait. Those were all blown up by bomb squads. Never mind.
This message brought to you by Open Source Abuse Resistance Education. Just say no to Open Source
Slashdot quotes of old:
"Re: Hooked on Crack ($200 M$ Windows for $50 offered to users of Lindows Linux)
[It's] Like the friendly neighborhood drug dealer, Bill says, "Here, have this first taste on me..."
-- Anonymous, Tuesday June 10, 2003 @08:11AM
And the Reply:
"Why do people always insist on insulting drug dealers by comparing them to Microsoft?
Drug dealers offer real products with real choice."
-- eniu!uine (317250), Tuesday June 10, 2003 @09:19AM
On a more serious note, I nearly got into a flame war on a private email list about OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office. One of the 'old guys' (e.g. someone with a paying job) complained that the students on the list were sending attachments in.odt format. It was hard to convince him that some people might object to violating Microsoft's copyright on their products when a almost-equivalent free program exists. But at least he knew that Word != Windows.
We won't merely be discovered if aliens exist - we'll be colonized. That's the most likely scenario for running into aliens. If they never spread beyond their home planet, they'll just be one star out of trillions - but if they do start colonizing, we'd find them everywhere.
What I don't get is why people (especially Sagan's followers and B-movie 'writers') are so fixated on planets. Why, once you managed to get out of one steep gravity do you want to throw yourself down another? Is not a planet but a big lump of resources, inconveniently located?
Right now, once we get out of orbit we return to Earth because that's where all the good stuff is (hookers, paychecks, hookers to blow paychecks on.) Terraforming in the movies takes all of 5 minutes at the push of the big ol' Genesis button. In reality, you are looking at centuries of work with our (and our grandkids) level of technology. I can't find the study, but someone posted to USENET an article describing how, compared with sublight travel between the stars, building a self-sufficient colony using the pop-sci idea of glazing a dead world with a thin layer of Earth's ecosystem is ludicrously slow. Were talking a few throusand yeas of travel vs. 10 to 100's of thousands of years of terraforming, building infrastructure and human breeding rates that would make a nymphomaniac break out in sweat.
Iain Banks Culture Novels and the Orion's Arm take a much more sensible view of things. Once you build the luxury space colony ships, why live planetside? Just cruise from star system to star system and see the sights. And we are talking ships the size of Halo here, not some 160 crew member job with a pie-tin shell and day-glow tipped vibrators for engines. Like O'Neil colonies with engines where whole generations of people can grow up to only work the order counter at the McDonald's space-colony franchise locations.
Then there is the fundamental assumption behind the Drake equation and Fermi's Paradox: both only talk about life as we know it. For all we know, every star system has an exact copy of Earth, save that the people consider radio a religious Evil to be suppressed and lasers and robots to be tools of the Devil. It smacks of egocentric anthropomorphism to assume that if we encounter a phenomena that at least fits the definitions of life (increte, excrete, secrete, and reproduce) we'd be able to recognize it, and not accidentally kill it.
Of all of the possible uses of Nuclear power, using it to power a rocket out of the atmosphere is perhaps the last one I'd want to see actually implemented.
Let's see:
Throium Nuclear reactor to make the hot parts safer than your car's gasoline engine.
Hydrogen as the reaction mass (yes, you still need reaction mass) so no secondary active radionuclides get made.
????
Orbit?
Don't skimp on that hyrdogen, though. The difference between a clean single-to-orbit nuclear spacecraft and a planet-sterilizing cruise missile (non-nuclear link) is in the reaction mass, not the energy source.
I'm sure it'd be trivial compared to the spread of radioactive particles from coal power plants.
But people usually worry about that violent cause of death that happens really flashy and to 1% of the population. They tend to focus on labels (NMR anyone?) and ignore that they are dying slooooowly from their McDonald's lunch like most of the 1st world.
a warning he found on the cover of his local Yellow Pages book which cautions users: "Please do not use this directory while operationg [sic] a moving vehicle."
I'm sorry. When I'm driving a car, I am driving a car. Much like any technology that can kill people (e.g. chainsaws) you really should be multitasking only two things: do your job and don't kill people (unless it's a gun, which is meant to kill people anyway.)
When driving a car I am not:
Drinking Booze like I'm at a frat party
Taking a nap like I'm in bed at home
Having a four-course lunch as if I'm at a restaurant
Yacking on my cellphone like I'm at the salon getting my hair done
Reading the bleeding Yellow-pages to call someone on my cellphone
No. You are not good enough of a driver to do these either. If you are, why aren't you a professional race-car driver? (And many pro race-car drivers will tell you not to do these things either.) If you want to eat, drink, yack and read take the bus or a train that serves breakfast. Voice mail exists so you don't have to carry on a 5-way conference call while swerving down Interstate 40 on your way to hell.
(This rant has been brought to you by the letters G, E, T, A and the word 'clue.')
I suspect this is not people being clueless, though. It's people willing playing a deadly game to 'be productive' and make up for playing WoW / serfing pr0n at 4am.
They'll care about it when it's practical for some of them to take a trip into space or to the Moon.
Develop an immersive real-world based video game. Base it on the orion project. Let people compete as private enterprises to build, launch and settle:
Low earth orbit
The Moon
Lagrange points
NEOs like asteroids and doomsday comets.
Fill it to the brim with adventure. Put it online. You don't fish for trout with bricks. Hook the kids with bait they will take. If anything, the breadth of Medieval-themed online worlds and derth of space operas should imply a market waiting to happen. If Eve Online can take banking in space and make it sexy, something should be possible.
This would be a propaganda machine for the space industry. But, add plenty of educational material as links from in-game resources and the game practically educates by itself. And NASA generates enough raw space-related content each day to make a full game, so licensing photos, models, etc would already be handled.
However, nerds like slashdotters may get off on technical diagrams filled with hard-core numbers. The average Joe won't. You might have to gloss over aspects of the system (e.g. don't reinvent Space Empires V, a.k.a Spreadsheets in Space.) Lively competition should be entertaining (my colony vs. yours or my colony plus yours.) And if it's profitable tax payers don't have to ask 'why did my tax money pay for some goddamn game.'
But you just might convince a few future tax payers to put down their +10 Axe of Orge slaying and pick up a telescope or two.
Part of me sees the point you're making, but another part of me say "Yea, and... what?" Does Notepad, embarrassingly simple though it may be, not still have appropriate uses?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: None at all.
Oh, come on, like you never copied an Engineer's instruction out of a Word document and had to paste it into notepad to clean out all the autotext special characters and 'extra' special formatting information? I'm certainly happy that my option hyphens aren't converted to em-dashes and my quotes turned into something totally differen't. I know a guy that even resorted to using the Windows Run dialog to do this. Notepad is great for stripping junk out of a text cut'n'paste from or to Microsoft Office Apps. It's almost like a working clipboard.
<ObTopic> Now you probably wouldn't catch me passing my data through MySQL before sending it to a database. Oracle and Postgresql have good integrity checking but automated input validation can only do so much.
I kid! After all MySQL is way faster than PostgreSQL or Oracle Community for the 3 people that read my 'blog. In a month.
Really, does anyone have a good link for converting MySQL apps to use PostgreSQL or Oracle? Just automatic conversion of the SQL db creation scripts would be nice. </ObTopic>
Though, its very likely that these ideas originate from even earlier in computing history.
Attribution.
That is why most, if not all, software patents are bogus. Just because you reinvent something published by a PhD working in a committee that disbanded 10 years before you knew 'C' came after 'B' in the alphabet does not make you reinvention patent worthy. The history of invsqrt() crosses disciplines of hardware and software design, spec development, graphics and math theory. With such a fascinating function having a hard to track history it is no wonder that things like James W. Hunt's 1976 diff concept can be patented in 2006 by Microsoft. (As mentioned by QuantumG on slashdot.)
The trouble had in tracking the history of InvSqrt() is really sad. Computing is an industry that hypes how digital storage of information and perfect copies eliminates the isse of decay. While the ever expanding secondary storage (just now getting to really usefull) means oblivating the scaling issues with retaining the meta-information that denotes this very history. I guess the moral of the story is: sign your contributions. It won't take up that much space in the comments.
"Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them."
--Alan Perlis
And will the real Fast InvSqrt() author please stand up?
FTA: Incidentally, few Cathedral-style projects suffer from lack of vision: those that do simply die off and are never heard from again. Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time, where it is vastly expensive for a Cathedral-style project to do the same.
Reminds me of the Gegls project to re-invent the internals of the Gimp. Lots of hot air^H^H^H^H design initially, goes dead for X years, then just recently Kolas starts hacking on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Even my cat is capable of a wide range of emotion, limited planning and communication (cursing, begging and lying mostly.) If it weren't for monkeys that do teamwork, tool use, comedy and lying there would still be one unique trait that humans have. Can it be that human is a merely a quantitative and not a qualitative measure?
Heh, to quote another slashdot comment:
Set the bar high enough and you too can join the Nazis in persecuting large sections of the current populace.
$(sleep 3 && export my_karma=0)
So the race is on. Who will win?
The backyarders who try to grow their own Stage Trees and escape into orbit?
Or the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamist_terrorism"Terrorists with super-Sarin on their suddenly glowing, long-blonde minds?
Has Microsoft heard about this? It could be useful for Backing Up Your Brain. Maybe with something cellular...
After age 21 it seems all that a large portion of the population wants to do is watch TV and get laid. Not everyone can be a Nielson viewer and the military/church seriously hates any contraception that might lower their recruitment pool.
Unskilled and semi-skilled day labor exits for a reason: Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their brains are not significantly costlier than pigeon brains, and for many tasks they are actually superior. -- Richard Dawkins
Nah. I've sold computers before. Even user-car salesmen would spit on me.
At a seminar recently the speaker summed up proprietary software with a simple quote:
"Hardware comes with a warranty. Software comes with a disclaimer."
API stability is why some developers test for compatibility on minor version numbers while warning you about changes that require bumping major version numbers. Since you backed up your system, testing the patch and rolling back should be not a problem. Right?
The PC is not a box of pixie dust and rainbow magic. The software works, or in Microsoft's case doesn't work, for a reason. Experience in PC video gaming says no-CD cracks for broken DRM and OS-version-detection fixes can be downloaded with ease. Sometimes developed long after the original developer went bankrupt on Version X.0. In some cases people are paid good overtime to make these 3rd party patches not work. Yet J. Random Hacker still manages to pull through, thwarting attempts to make your $75 purchase a nice coaster companion for the paper box it came in. In short, it's not roses and green grass on either side of the fence.
How about one of the first websites to use slashcode before is was...well usable: segfault.org
(I have a high UID because I always posted as AC, but I've been here for a long time)
Does anyone remember the story on Ask Slashdot about getting lurkers to come out and discuss?
I registered an account just to post on that article.
I recall submitting an ask Slashdot about online comics, getting throughly trashed by critics and then the Slashdot Funny Pages showing up a little bit later.
Also, those who have been lurking since the Chips'n'Dips site recall that these are not the first user accounts. In fact, the user account database was lost early on and people were asked to sign back up. This was, of course, long before the advent of subscription.
Ah, to return to that day and bend that lurker arm, forcing it to snag a low ID.
Also, the +5, Trolls were pretty good.
Linux Journal September 2007: LG Index.
Information: just another reason to read.
Because we never ever have some kind of older person teach, help or guide children? I mean, if some adults were actively paying attention to these kids and helping them to learn they might be stifling them. These hypothetical long arms could be protecting them from harm or providing hints that make them successes, rather than failures but at what cost? What would happen to all those budding artists and scientists in Africa if they had some parent figure forcing them to not find their own food or struggle to stay out of the elements? Where would third-world religious/military dictatorships be if each new generation didn't have to start all over again?
I for one don't care to much about what was being played with, laptop or Legos. It is the presence of those arms and that unheard direction that is most important. And the one presence far to frequently lacking in the war-torn, poverty-stricken famine-plagued and/or AIDS ravaged third-world.
Parents: not just a good idea, but in the first world, it's the law.
Anyway, spam is bad, yada yada. Get used to it, or download a mod like SpamSentry and put a stop to it.
As long as the game lets random people join and chat, there will be UCE, XCP, and fraud. If you let absolutely new accounts get full access to communication when you release, everyone expects it from then on. So, unless Spam becomes game-breaking, you can't escape that design choice for your chat features. I'd prefer a three tiered system of (1) default no chat, (2) listen only and (3) full duplex with Turing tests and basic communication skills tests in between. You could even integrate it into the game's content.
This is similar to how the online game Kingdom of Loathing's limits chat: you cannot use the chat features until you pass a basic grammar and spelling test. It has the downside of pissing off potential players. However, being able to chat indicates that you had to either know basic communication skills or were a bald-faced cheater. Somewhat harsher penalties can be justified because 'you should know better.'
Even then there are people who manage to spam. Automated bans and gags on poorly behaving accounts can lead to an arms race. No matter how cleaver the scripts are, some Gold Farmer is sitting in front of a computer upping the ante with more obtuse yet functional language to get out the message about their gold-for-dollars services.
Short of a live moderator standing around in each public area, it's not possible to keep up with the filters needed for bans and gags. With the money that Blizzard makes they might be able to do something about it though...
Urbanization is an abstract concept, like the boundary between urban and rural. It doesn't make you do anything. All you complaints derive from poor implementation (shoddy construction by sub-standard builders) and bad planning.
For instance:
Set building codes that include walls thicker than paper-thin. Learn to report your neighbors for noise violations. Such behavior can be tied to one or more people with problems that need jail-time or medication to solve. This is not caused by 'ubanization' but can be found out in the sticks whenever those dreaded 'other people' are.
Proper public transport is do-able. The U.S. highway system is more about siphoning your dollars into the hands of automakers and oil tycoons than providing quality service. See Europe, with better public transport and higher urban density than the U.S.
If you dropped any trash on that street then you are responsible for that dirty. Yes, enough money can buy the sanitation crews to wipe your butt as you walk along the sidewalks. Or just jail fools that can't use a trash can. My solution is to let cops take out any frustrations on litterbugs. Beat the crap out of anyone in an Armani or tattered rags if they get caught on camera littering, spitting or not cleaning up after their dog. Oh, and it's not like rural roads are used as dumping grounds.
Not all cities were build during the modernist 'must be a cube' fad in architecture. Just google pictures of La Palomas in Mexico City. Light pollution is just that. If you can penalized people for not properly reducing glare or give incentives for not wasting power lighting up the sky, that will go away.
I assume you meant 'in a rural' environment. But you don't want to know that the high cost is largely due to either a sin tax from your religious neighbors (who just want to make you less-sinful in that neighborly way) or from a farmer that got a subsidy and tariff to protect his crops. You want cheep food? Don't tax imports. Just be prepared for all the local (expensive lifestyle) farmers to go out of business within the year.
Architects demonstrated cheap, high quality modular urban housing in the 50s. It's almost a conspiracy that people focus on home ownership to the point of penalizing renters. There is only so much land around, and most of it is worthless.
supporting Free Software and/or the GNU GPL does not automagically make you speak out against copyright per se at all
Copyright is used because it is the appropriate tool. While Click-wrap licenses and EULA live in a grey world, rejecting the GNU Public License makes you a copyright violator. With the power of Disney Co. behind you, your GPL'd code gets the same treatment as any moder Masterpiece[1].
Copyright exits at its best when enforcing correct attribution, but at its worst when crushing innovation. Because greedy and immoral people will claim anything as their own for a quick buck, copyright laws can, like any law-based concept, grown and consume more rights from the public as time goes on. Those opposing copyright oppose excessive copyrights resulting from this parasitic growth on the public commons. Successful or not restoring balance, this fight will pendulum for the foreseeable future as the invested fight reality to protect their business model.
It was the proffer's mistake in walking into the red-light district in the first place. Only the insane may want to abolish copyright, but most[2] just want it limited.
We as a people reserve the right of copy from the public domain to improve creativity and innovation through protection of financial incentives to the creative to create and innovate. When that right is abused by the copy holders[3], you have the same situation that one young Richard Stallman found himself. Creativity and innovation are being stifled through restrictions on access. Free and Open Source Software is about removing restrictions on access by enforcing the surrender of copy rights while at the same time being based upon them.
The FSF's GPL gives you the rope. You can climb out of that pit or hang yourself. The FSF won't decide for you.
And no, there is no company with enough money to buy that girl[4]. Somethings are literally 'priceless.'
---
1. Stolen by other companies and relentlessly copied in China.
2. To paraphrase the head of the MPAA: "Of course copyright as it is in the USA is Constitutional. The Constitution forbids eternal copyright. Our goal with copyright extension is 'one day short of forever.'"
3. Typically distributors who have no "real" value to the creative process except to make a buck off someone else's work.
4. Greg Bulmash bases his article on a quote typically attributed to Winston Churchill. Like I said, copyright when at it's best.
we did that to address some stability issues we were having
I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that your stability is highly dependent on the skill and knowledge of you sysadmins. The last place I worked, most the Linux gurus were self trained. But the IBM AIX people got some seriously high quality training from IBM specialists. And some of the best technical manuals outside of an O'Reilly sales office.
Big Blue make make some piecemeal on hardware and OS licenses, but there are big bucks in services like training, support. While you can get Linux on that very same 'higher quality' hardware, you might not find 'higher quality' sysadmins to handle it (supply, meet demand.) Then there is also the old adage of computer PHBs: If it costs a lot, we need to pay the people that run it a lot. Which doesn't make sense in the real world until you consider that stability, features and cost are set in one of those engineering trade-off triangles. Far too many people get into Linux for the features and the (perceived lack of) cost without considering the high costs it takes to get stability. Pay someone enough to keep something running and it generally stays running.
I agree with many of the counterpoints presented, but they do get somewhat off topic. Granted, the article itself, apart from some self-congratulatory meta-statements, is not about "5 things you can't talk about in Linux" so much as "I don't follow the Linux community at all."
1. Not being able to talk about Linux as a product. Linux is used as a generic for the trademarked Linux kernel used with some userland system be that busybox, BSD utilities, GNU applications, or whatever. At work we say 'Windows this' and 'Windows that.' Microsoft Windows includes every versions from a DOS menu system from the 1980s, Windows 95, 98, 98se, 2000, CE, XP, Vista and about a 1/2 dozen server systems based on NT. In fact, one of the first things a 'Linux newb' is told by any 'Linux guru' is that Linux, as used generically, is not a single application, kernel, distribution or package system. It is more a style and context for an operating system, similar in approach to UNIX. The only difference is that many companies and people package and sell and distribute Linux. Only Microsoft distributes Microsoft Windows.
2. Mostly harping on physical security and worms is a little off topic. Every security class, seminar and training session will harp on how security is not some Hollywood GUI with flashy pass codes. Making veiled attacks on Groklaw doesn't help. Tangential slander at community members for using handles (a long tradition in UNIX, not just Linux) is a hollow ad-homian attack. In corporate security, like F/OSS security, it takes a few dedicated and skilled individuals to do the hard work.
3. The community is supported by a few? No surprise. The community is full of the legends of super-coders. People talk about it a LOT. In a corporation you have a few people that do a lot of work and a few dead weights. When the dead weight gets to be too much, the company fails. The people working in F/OSS donated their time or (per the recent who paid for Linux articles) were paid just like everyone else. What about BSD which tried this before? Because the GPL encourages feedback enrichment and freeloaders have margial cost, F/OSS scales much better. It's like the difference between an FTP server and Bittorent.
4. One word: telecommuting. You ask 'is Linux pro-developer?' I ask you: what kind of development? I'm typing this on SuSE, the name in German originally meant 'System for Software Development.' I have over 30 complete development tool chains installed. Documentation for how to learn over a dozen programing languages. And, like OS 10, I have a UNIX CLI that has 30 years of refinement in supporting development. And thanks to the GPL, I can develop how I want and what I want. I may not have Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop, but you weren't talking about that kind of developer or were you?
The argument that I will get paid less because my tools are cheaper makes no sense. Any manager that would pay me more because my tools cost more is an idiot. Me and my skills have to rest on our own qualifications. If I do a better job in a perfect world, I should get paid more. In reality I compete with other people who only have to do the job 'adequately.'
Outsourcing isn't a fad, it's businesses realizing that high-priced Ferrari mechanic could wash their car as well as the kids down the street. Eventually the jobs go where they need to. The F/OSS community is already distributed widely and used to coordinating people from remote locations. Linux isn't made at one campus in Redmond, Washington but all over the world. I have an advantage if I know that I can do my job for 1/10 the price in India just as easily as in th
How about checking a Slashdot Dictionary?
Ah, you must be a small business customer. That dialect would emanate from the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma call center, just north of the Apache.org-stole-my-website town of Tuttle, Oklahoma.
However, considering the large influx of Indian contractors on IT slave-VISAs they still might be originally from Bangalore. Part of that think global, buy local mentality. So it must be good, right?
Apparently for corralling many of the explosives-happy people in your community into a single, easily controlled group instead of letting them run wild and blow up cars, trash cans, beer cans and light brights.
Oh, wait. Those were all blown up by bomb squads. Never mind.
"Re: Hooked on Crack ($200 M$ Windows for $50 offered to users of Lindows Linux)
[It's] Like the friendly neighborhood drug dealer, Bill says, "Here, have this first taste on me..."
-- Anonymous, Tuesday June 10, 2003 @08:11AM
And the Reply:
"Why do people always insist on insulting drug dealers by comparing them to Microsoft?
Drug dealers offer real products with real choice."
-- eniu!uine (317250), Tuesday June 10, 2003 @09:19AM
On a more serious note, I nearly got into a flame war on a private email list about OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office. One of the 'old guys' (e.g. someone with a paying job) complained that the students on the list were sending attachments in
We won't merely be discovered if aliens exist - we'll be colonized. That's the most likely scenario for running into aliens. If they never spread beyond their home planet, they'll just be one star out of trillions - but if they do start colonizing, we'd find them everywhere.
What I don't get is why people (especially Sagan's followers and B-movie 'writers') are so fixated on planets. Why, once you managed to get out of one steep gravity do you want to throw yourself down another? Is not a planet but a big lump of resources, inconveniently located?
Right now, once we get out of orbit we return to Earth because that's where all the good stuff is (hookers, paychecks, hookers to blow paychecks on.) Terraforming in the movies takes all of 5 minutes at the push of the big ol' Genesis button. In reality, you are looking at centuries of work with our (and our grandkids) level of technology. I can't find the study, but someone posted to USENET an article describing how, compared with sublight travel between the stars, building a self-sufficient colony using the pop-sci idea of glazing a dead world with a thin layer of Earth's ecosystem is ludicrously slow. Were talking a few throusand yeas of travel vs. 10 to 100's of thousands of years of terraforming, building infrastructure and human breeding rates that would make a nymphomaniac break out in sweat.
Iain Banks Culture Novels and the Orion's Arm take a much more sensible view of things. Once you build the luxury space colony ships, why live planetside? Just cruise from star system to star system and see the sights. And we are talking ships the size of Halo here, not some 160 crew member job with a pie-tin shell and day-glow tipped vibrators for engines. Like O'Neil colonies with engines where whole generations of people can grow up to only work the order counter at the McDonald's space-colony franchise locations.
Then there is the fundamental assumption behind the Drake equation and Fermi's Paradox: both only talk about life as we know it. For all we know, every star system has an exact copy of Earth, save that the people consider radio a religious Evil to be suppressed and lasers and robots to be tools of the Devil. It smacks of egocentric anthropomorphism to assume that if we encounter a phenomena that at least fits the definitions of life (increte, excrete, secrete, and reproduce) we'd be able to recognize it, and not accidentally kill it.
Let's see:
Don't skimp on that hyrdogen, though. The difference between a clean single-to-orbit nuclear spacecraft and a planet-sterilizing cruise missile (non-nuclear link) is in the reaction mass, not the energy source.
But people usually worry about that violent cause of death that happens really flashy and to 1% of the population. They tend to focus on labels (NMR anyone?) and ignore that they are dying slooooowly from their McDonald's lunch like most of the 1st world.
I'm sorry. When I'm driving a car, I am driving a car. Much like any technology that can kill people (e.g. chainsaws) you really should be multitasking only two things: do your job and don't kill people (unless it's a gun, which is meant to kill people anyway.)
When driving a car I am not:
No. You are not good enough of a driver to do these either. If you are, why aren't you a professional race-car driver? (And many pro race-car drivers will tell you not to do these things either.) If you want to eat, drink, yack and read take the bus or a train that serves breakfast. Voice mail exists so you don't have to carry on a 5-way conference call while swerving down Interstate 40 on your way to hell.
(This rant has been brought to you by the letters G, E, T, A and the word 'clue.')
I suspect this is not people being clueless, though. It's people willing playing a deadly game to 'be productive' and make up for playing WoW / serfing pr0n at 4am.
I'm serious.
They'll care about it when it's practical for some of them to take a trip into space or to the Moon.
Develop an immersive real-world based video game. Base it on the orion project. Let people compete as private enterprises to build, launch and settle:
Fill it to the brim with adventure. Put it online. You don't fish for trout with bricks. Hook the kids with bait they will take. If anything, the breadth of Medieval-themed online worlds and derth of space operas should imply a market waiting to happen. If Eve Online can take banking in space and make it sexy, something should be possible.
This would be a propaganda machine for the space industry. But, add plenty of educational material as links from in-game resources and the game practically educates by itself. And NASA generates enough raw space-related content each day to make a full game, so licensing photos, models, etc would already be handled.
However, nerds like slashdotters may get off on technical diagrams filled with hard-core numbers. The average Joe won't. You might have to gloss over aspects of the system (e.g. don't reinvent Space Empires V, a.k.a Spreadsheets in Space.) Lively competition should be entertaining (my colony vs. yours or my colony plus yours.) And if it's profitable tax payers don't have to ask 'why did my tax money pay for some goddamn game.'
But you just might convince a few future tax payers to put down their +10 Axe of Orge slaying and pick up a telescope or two.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: None at all.
Oh, come on, like you never copied an Engineer's instruction out of a Word document and had to paste it into notepad to clean out all the autotext special characters and 'extra' special formatting information? I'm certainly happy that my option hyphens aren't converted to em-dashes and my quotes turned into something totally differen't. I know a guy that even resorted to using the Windows Run dialog to do this. Notepad is great for stripping junk out of a text cut'n'paste from or to Microsoft Office Apps. It's almost like a working clipboard.
<ObTopic>
Now you probably wouldn't catch me passing my data through MySQL before sending it to a database. Oracle and Postgresql have good integrity checking but automated input validation can only do so much.
I kid! After all MySQL is way faster than PostgreSQL or Oracle Community for the 3 people that read my 'blog. In a month.
Really, does anyone have a good link for converting MySQL apps to use PostgreSQL or Oracle? Just automatic conversion of the SQL db creation scripts would be nice.
</ObTopic>
Attribution.
That is why most, if not all, software patents are bogus. Just because you reinvent something published by a PhD working in a committee that disbanded 10 years before you knew 'C' came after 'B' in the alphabet does not make you reinvention patent worthy. The history of invsqrt() crosses disciplines of hardware and software design, spec development, graphics and math theory. With such a fascinating function having a hard to track history it is no wonder that things like James W. Hunt's 1976 diff concept can be patented in 2006 by Microsoft. (As mentioned by QuantumG on slashdot.)
The trouble had in tracking the history of InvSqrt() is really sad. Computing is an industry that hypes how digital storage of information and perfect copies eliminates the isse of decay. While the ever expanding secondary storage (just now getting to really usefull) means oblivating the scaling issues with retaining the meta-information that denotes this very history. I guess the moral of the story is: sign your contributions. It won't take up that much space in the comments.
--Alan Perlis
And will the real Fast InvSqrt() author please stand up?
"I find your lack of vision disturbing."
FTA:
Incidentally, few Cathedral-style projects suffer from lack of vision: those that do simply die off and are never heard from again. Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time, where it is vastly expensive for a Cathedral-style project to do the same.
Reminds me of the Gegls project to re-invent the internals of the Gimp. Lots of hot air^H^H^H^H design initially, goes dead for X years, then just recently Kolas starts hacking on it.