Somebody once calculated that you could fit the Earth's entire human population into Texas, on suburban-sized lots. The idea was that this was supposed to "prove" that overpopulation was a myth. Well, y'know, even if the math is correct, it's gibberish: Half of Texas is uninhabitable, and all of it is full of Texans. Besides, it seems far-fetched to imagine that there's enough land there to feed everybody. But there are people who take it seriously, which ought to give one pause.
People take all kinds of crazy shit seriously. And True Believers have always had a wonderful facility for making the math come out just the way they want it to.
Don't get the WSJ's right-wing maniac editorial pages mixed up with the rest of the paper, though. If one of their editorials really riles you up, the first place to look for facts that disprove it is the rest of the WSJ. It's not unheard-of. There often seems to be real disconnect between the left and the right hand there (so to speak).
The Economist often shows weird signs of independent thought, too, but mainly, it's entertaining. I never believe anything I read anyway.
Let's leave out "others of their ilk", though. You can't prove that I (for example) believe something just by saying that "others of my ilk" believe it -- not when said "ilk" is defined by commonality of belief. That's, like, circular, dude. And just because you can demonstrate that a view is a knee-jerk conservative view and then list three or four other knee-jerk conservative views that happen to be horrifically off-base (slavery, de-seg, etc.), that doesn't prove that all knee-jerk conservative views are wrong (any more than all knee-jerk liberal views are wrong, even though some of those have proven to be stone-cold loony, too).
Maybe faking your figures is dishonest, and wrong in principle, and maybe even such sacred figures as professional environmentalists should (god forbid) be held to the same standards of integrity as the rest of us.
Maybe every time these people issue a terrifying pronouncement which turns out to be dead wrong, it further diminishes the credibility of environmentalism in general.
These people think of themselves as priests, and they take a similarly dim view of "heretics" who dare disagree with them, but they're more like witch doctors: However often their prophetic dreams and visions fail to pan out, the True Believers still believe.
Meanwhile, we've got damned few credible, responsible organizations actually keeping an honest eye on things and informing the public accurately. Since the oil, as you observe, really will run out one of these years, it would be nice to have access to some reliable information about the matter. Instead, we get circus acts from professional fund raisers.
Using similar methods, the Club of Rome predicted in the early 1970s that the world would run out of oil by 1992. They and others also predicted that the West would be hopelessly overpopulated by... right around now. Both predictions have proven to be wildly inaccurate, but they got a lot of press at the time, and they were taken seriously by what passes for "intellectuals" (whose only measure of "truth" is how well a given story dovetails with their ideology).
In other words, this kind of nonsense is a great method for people like the WWF to solicit donations and get their names in the paper, but you shouldn't mistake it for meaningful information.
This was covered in The Economist already, by the way. Old news. They've got some amusing observations about how slipshod the "study"'s methods are, and how many hidden assumptions it relies on.
It was new in 1966.
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Funny this should come up; I was just reading RFC 1 this morning (read it; it's cool), and they mentioned the Lincoln Wand. "What's that?!", I asks myself; so I looked it up. 1966, guys.
I think this may set a new record for Slashdot missing the boat.
Oh, goody! A list of features! Can that list remind me about my wife's birthday? Well, no. It can't do anything. It's not software. It's just hot air.
Do I smell JOS here? (I know that site vanished two or three years ago; that's the point).
Where's the product? I see an announcement, and I see a public discussion about what people might like to do, if by some quirk of fate they were to shut up and start writing code. I see an elaborate "Mission Statement" located on a slick-looking web site. But I don't see any code. I don't see any output at all.
A lot of people are going to jump into this and start arguing endlessly about features, programming patterns, methodology, licenses, and all manner of irrelevant crapola. No functional product will ever emerge, because they're doing it backwards. This is a truism, but people never seem to remember it: If you start with code, you may end up with something. If you start with a flashy web site, a vague 400-word mission statement (any "mission statement" longer than ten words is a death sentence), and a public call for sidewalk superintendents to gum things up, you'll never end up with anything. The latter approach is best described as Announcement Engineering. It's been tried, and it has failed, and it has been tried again, and it has failed again.
Why does it fail? Because if you start a discussion, you'll get people who specialize in discussing things. If you start a slick web site, you'll get people who like slick web sites. Both of those groups are self-selected for parasitism and uselessness. If, on the other hand, you start writing code, you'll get people who like to write code. If writing code is your goal, people who write code are the people you want. Not sidewalk superintendents. Not methodology-obsessed BS artists. Not visionaries, not self-appointed "philosophers", not "online community" addicts, not Open Source rock stars, spokesmodels, public figures, beloved elder statesmen, or opinionated teenagers -- all of which are going to descend on Kapor like a horde of locusts. For programming, you want programmers. But all the programmers are somewhere else, working on projects that actually exist.
Devil's Advocate Dept.: What about the GNU Manifesto? It does superficially resemble Announcement Engineering, but one crucial ingredient of AE is missing: Stallman never asked for anybody's goddamn opinion, and to this day he still hasn't. He doesn't want to discuss anything with anybody. When Stallman wants to know what you think, Stallman will tell you what you think. He never asked anybody for an opinion in that announcement; he just asked for code.
Typically, nobody here on Slashdot has the slightest trace of awareness of the ethical implications of the technology they so blithely drool over.
Imagine being pent up in a microscopic prison cell for your life, bombarded incessantly with radiation until you glow in the dark. Imagine thirty thousand chest X-rays every day of your life. That's what these innocent, mindless little creatures are being exposed to. That's the gruesome reality of the brutal and ruthless experimental regime at the Kodak R&D facility.
Live animals are being tortured for their entire lives just to bring you those pretty pictures, and you don't even care. Their microscopic howls of anguish leave you utterly unmoved.
Cars will be drawn to the top of the elevator by a team of trained mules, hitched to a rope of a length roughly 1.8 times the circumference of the Earth. We anticipate only minor difficulties obtaining a right-of-way through most nations (with the possible exception of Sweden, because they're lame).
The mules will be fed and cared for by dedicated and highly trained staffpersons. At the end of their useful lifespan, most retired mules will be adopted by loving families everywhere. Unclaimed mules will be shot, as will be unclaimed members of loving families. Irresponsible and gratuitously hostile critics, who clearly do not have the best interests of humanity in mind, will be shot also.
On special occasions and international holidays, children of all races, creeds, colors, and nationalities, clothed in their quaint and colorful native garb, will be invited to throw superballs and apples from the top of the elevator. They will be charged only a nominal fee for this unique privilege. Highly sophisticated surveillance technology will enable all the world to enjoy the festivities!
We are now accepting investments in this historic, one-of-a-kind investment opportunity, not to be missed by the progressive and forward-thinking investors of our great nation. We anticipate incalculable earnings; we also anticipate neglecting to calculate them. Please give us all of your money right now and I promise you'll not regret having been so easily gulled.
All the 3G in the world won't change the fact that 99.9% of cell-phone conversations are moronic anyway:
A: Where are you?
B: I'm on th' terlet, huh huh! Where're you?
A: HOLY CRAP I'M ON THE TERLET TOO! What'cha doin', "number one"?
B: Nope, "number two"! Plop, plop!
A: HUH HUH HUH!
B: I'm wipin' my ass now! I'm wipin', I'm wipin'! What'cha doin' now, huh? Huh?
A: I'M WIPIN' TOO!
Brief pause...
A: You still wipin'?
B: Nope, ain't wipin.
A: So, uh, what'cha doin'? Where are ya'?
Later, rinse, repeat...
What we need, for example, is technology that will summarily strangle anybody who actually uses a cell phone. That, I think we'll all agree, will improve quality of life for everybody, just like Jesus meant for technology to do.
Until then, I'll just go on tripping morons who walk down the street yapping into their fists and bumping into each other.
Let's consider the source here. The "open source" bidders all spec'd out machines that would use GPL'd GNU code. A vote cast on such a machine is, of course, a Free Vote: You sign over the rights to your vote to Richard Stallman, who reserves the right to modify it as he sees fit. Sure, you can fork your vote, but ask the XEmacs people how much fun that is: You'll have Stallman bitching and moaning about your perfidy and bad judgement in weekly interviews on LinuxYammer.com until Hell freezes over.
The only possible outcome of Stallman's Free Vote philosophy is that all votes will end up being cast for Richard Stallman, after he's done "debugging" them. Maybe those "closed source" machines drop a vote here and there and hand over a solid 5% to Pat Buchanan just for the hell of it, but Stallman's Free Voting Machines would, within six years, leave us with Richard Stallman holding every single elected office in the United States of America.
So what's wrong with that?
A government of, by, and for Richard Stallman would have certain advantages. First and foremost, our many thousands of elected officials have many thousands of times the bandwidth that Mr. Stallman will have all on his lonesome. That means that a government consisting entirely of Richard Stallman will get into much less trouble than our current "distributed" system of taxation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment.
The downside, of course, will be seeing Stallman on the television every single night, singing the "GNU Hacker Mazurka" in that shaky, pitch-blind voice of his and then ranting about how the XEmacs traitors will be punished for their crimes.
Do you mean Multices was [blah blah web web blah McNealy marketing blah blah]...?
No, I mean it was a grotesquely overengineered fiasco which never had any practical use, just like Java. In both cases, the design was finalized before it was implemented. In both cases, hubris took over. Compare to successful operating systems like UNIX (or even Windows: Windows may be a dog, but people do at least find it usable), or to successful programming languages like C or that ugly little monstrosity Perl.
The verdict of history seems to be that good software designs start out relatively modest, and then they grow and change as people use them in the real world. Neither Multics nor Java was designed that way, and it shows.
Some people have found Java useful for some applications. So? That's also true of Smalltalk. It's true of batch files, for God's sake. Sun's multimillion-dollar advertising push has produced a resounding indifference among damn near everybody who actually writes code.
Java had two reasons for existing. One: Cross-platform binaries. That was a total failure. So they want us to use it on servers now -- where cross-platform binaries are irrelevant and the order-of-magnitude speed penalty of the JVM over native code is therefore totally unnecessary (yes, and Sun's marketing always did, and still does, conflate the AWT, the JVM, and the language itself, which is just plain annoying). Two: An OOP language with garbage collection and with a crude pretense of having no pointers. Well, okay, Point Two may have some value, if you've got a real low forehead and you can't cope with pointers or the delete operator, but it's not worth all that much in the end. Let's face it, pointers aren't hard to deal with. If you can't cope with pointers, you've got no business calling yourself a programmer anyhow. The "no-pointers" gibberish suggests that Java was aimed at the idiot market, but the idiots are saturated with Visual Basic already.
Java was a product of the reality-proof Internet hype of the late '90's. It was on life-support from day one. Let it die in peace.
Isn't Multics the legendary debacle that never turned into a usable product? Wasn't it a Grand Unified Solve-Everything Architecture? Wasn't it some kind of apotheosis of top-down design and other Best Practices?
Right! So, lesson number one from Multics is this: Don't do it that way. That, in fact, is the only lesson to be learned from Multics. You want more detail? Shoot the academics if they dare set foot off campus. Tucked away in their offices honing their algorithms, they do useful work -- but you can't ever, ever, ever let 'em influence the design of anything bigger than an algorithm.
Sigh... So many people just can't seem to think at all.
The real problem with optical fibers is that they transmit light.. Light is what you see with. Now, let's use our heads for a moment: You've got an optical fiber running from your bedroom to your ISP. What travels along that optical fiber? Light. That's right, folks, light. That means that people at the ISP can SEE you when you're NAKED.
Is that what you really want? Are you willing to pay for the privilege of exposing your bare bottom to the prying eyes of the sort of acne-scarred, socially dysfunctional, unbathed loners who work at ISPs? These people are, if you'll forgive the slur, sysadmins. It's not a nice thing to say, but it's a fact.
This has the potential to transform human society in ways we cannot even anticipate!
Imagine millions of commuters all watching Pam and Tommy Lee do their thing on the way to work in the morning! EVERY morning! My friends, we stand at the gateway to a new and better way of life for all human organisms on this ever-shrinking little old globe of ours.
The malevolent forces of evil, tyranny, poverty, stupidity, Scientology, lambda calculus, feminism, fascism, organized religion, the ASPCA, and Wizard of Oz/Pink Floyd theories will wither away like ice in a spring thaw!. THE CORPSES OF THE INIQUITOUS WILL LITTER THE STREETS! Wild dogs will gnaw the dry bones of the unrighteous! Everybody will have an above-average income and nobody will have to stay home on prom night!
I saw the same infomercial on Russian TV one late night, and they said the very same device has been shown to cancel gravity in certainly irreproachably irreproducible experiments conducted at the Skvorny Prkgkvrkngov Institute for Mysterious Russian Research in Moscow.
You get a cool knife set, too, and five winning lottery numbers (based on your unique horoscope and biorhythms), if you order your device immediately and pay cash.
Who exactly oversees ICANN? To whom are they responsible? Anybody?
This is nothing compared to, for example, the UN's casual complicity in the massacres in Srebrenica a decade ago[1], but ICANN and the UN are the same kind of organization and inevitably you get the same result: A mess. This is authority without culpability.
God knows you can't trust the private sector any farther than you can throw them, but sooner or later swine like Enron at least go bankrupt. Of course, that's a bad thing when it happens, too: The immediate burden falls on innocents while Ken Lay walks away rich -- but at least Enron is gone. ICANN and the UN are here forever.
[1] Oh, but some poor jerk in the Dutch government resigned, so it's okay! They found somebody to blame! That means it's all fixed, right? At least from a public-relations standpoint, and that's what really matters. I'm sure the next-of-kin of the 10,000 dead feel much better now.
Well, I think the atomization of our culture has gone just about far enough now, has it not?
Now they're selling technology pre-segregated along racial and economic lines. The left-leaning media seem to have expanded their ideological stranglehold out into the technology industry. What next? "White People Cell Phones"? The new 2003 Chrysler "Asians-Only"?
The destructive madness of exclusionary identity politics has gone far enough. It's time for us to focus on our common heritage as children of God, not on the divisive nonsense that strives to turn our great nation into a Balkanized chaos of competing and mutually genocidal tribal "identities".
I skimmed through this wild-eyed gibberish and I have to say I'm bitterly disappointed that Taco is still relying on moderation alone. It's clear to any rational being that meaningless, infantile, ankle-biting posts like yours should simply be deleted. When censorship serves to weed defectives out of the gene pool (poetically speaking), it can only be a Good Thing.
The problem with ReBirth, and with any clone thereof, is that the user gains nothing from a flashy raster imitation of a 303's physical interface (or that of any real gear), while losing a great deal of usability.
A physical knob isn't so bad out here in the physical world, but you're manipulating it with your fingers. A mouse pointer is not a pair of fingers. I've played with ReBirth, and while there's some great functionality in there, it's just hell trying to get at it through all those tiny, poorly-labeled knobs. That interface makes sense on a plastic box. It's got real drawbacks, but it is what it is because of simple necessity. It's the best you can do with a thing made out of plastic. Okay, that's fine when plastic is the medium you're stuck with, but you can do considerably better if you're making your interface out of zeroes and ones instead.
By all means, let us duplicate the functionality of analog gear in software. That's a noble undertaking. But let's not fuck up the GUI with gratuitously flashy nonsense at the expense of clarity and usability. It's a gimmick. The Microsoft Paper Clip is a gimmick.
If your software is actually meant to be used, gimmicks are bad.
The structure of our critical discourse is clearly fractured beyond repair.
The notorious "suicide doctor" (and suspected Canadian) Dr. Jack Horkheimer is all over the news telling us to drop acid and stare at the skies, and not a word is uttered in protest in this allegedly libertarian forum.
Meanwhile, Commander Taco instructs us to vegetate in front of a TV screen, because it will "help us to relax" -- indeed, indeed! Relax you shall, my little ones! Just as the Vichy government relaxed! Just as Mr. Quisling's expedient regime relaxed!
Yes, children, it's time to "relax". Just as the Western Left "relaxed" in the face of clear, irrefutable evidence of Stalin's barbarous atrocities.
But maybe, just maybe, one small voice might make itself heard: Is this wise? As the West descends into apathy and irrelevance, refusing to defend its ancient and hard-won freedoms, I ask you: Is it wise?
Western "great powers" shown to be fools yet again
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· Score: -1, Troll
Is there no end to the Western faith in "big science" and mammoth, wasteful works of useless technology? In September, we saw how easily all their flashy trash can be destroyed by good men with a moral purpose. Here, we see the poor Russians throwing billions of dollars into space for no reason at all.
The West is sick. They've destroyed themselves with materialism and injustice. Russia crumbled due to its excesses and brutalities, and the United States and Europe will soon follow. Their economic systems are fragile fictions based on international banking and their people are soft, aimless cowards. There's no hope for them.
All we can do is laugh, and pity them as they vanish from the international scene.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody once calculated that you could fit the Earth's entire human population into Texas, on suburban-sized lots. The idea was that this was supposed to "prove" that overpopulation was a myth. Well, y'know, even if the math is correct, it's gibberish: Half of Texas is uninhabitable, and all of it is full of Texans. Besides, it seems far-fetched to imagine that there's enough land there to feed everybody. But there are people who take it seriously, which ought to give one pause.
People take all kinds of crazy shit seriously. And True Believers have always had a wonderful facility for making the math come out just the way they want it to.
Don't get the WSJ's right-wing maniac editorial pages mixed up with the rest of the paper, though. If one of their editorials really riles you up, the first place to look for facts that disprove it is the rest of the WSJ. It's not unheard-of. There often seems to be real disconnect between the left and the right hand there (so to speak).
The Economist often shows weird signs of independent thought, too, but mainly, it's entertaining. I never believe anything I read anyway.
Let's leave out "others of their ilk", though. You can't prove that I (for example) believe something just by saying that "others of my ilk" believe it -- not when said "ilk" is defined by commonality of belief. That's, like, circular, dude. And just because you can demonstrate that a view is a knee-jerk conservative view and then list three or four other knee-jerk conservative views that happen to be horrifically off-base (slavery, de-seg, etc.), that doesn't prove that all knee-jerk conservative views are wrong (any more than all knee-jerk liberal views are wrong, even though some of those have proven to be stone-cold loony, too).
Maybe faking your figures is dishonest, and wrong in principle, and maybe even such sacred figures as professional environmentalists should (god forbid) be held to the same standards of integrity as the rest of us.
Maybe every time these people issue a terrifying pronouncement which turns out to be dead wrong, it further diminishes the credibility of environmentalism in general.
These people think of themselves as priests, and they take a similarly dim view of "heretics" who dare disagree with them, but they're more like witch doctors: However often their prophetic dreams and visions fail to pan out, the True Believers still believe.
Meanwhile, we've got damned few credible, responsible organizations actually keeping an honest eye on things and informing the public accurately. Since the oil, as you observe, really will run out one of these years, it would be nice to have access to some reliable information about the matter. Instead, we get circus acts from professional fund raisers.
Using similar methods, the Club of Rome predicted in the early 1970s that the world would run out of oil by 1992. They and others also predicted that the West would be hopelessly overpopulated by... right around now. Both predictions have proven to be wildly inaccurate, but they got a lot of press at the time, and they were taken seriously by what passes for "intellectuals" (whose only measure of "truth" is how well a given story dovetails with their ideology).
In other words, this kind of nonsense is a great method for people like the WWF to solicit donations and get their names in the paper, but you shouldn't mistake it for meaningful information.
This was covered in The Economist already, by the way. Old news. They've got some amusing observations about how slipshod the "study"'s methods are, and how many hidden assumptions it relies on.
Funny this should come up; I was just reading RFC 1 this morning (read it; it's cool), and they mentioned the Lincoln Wand. "What's that?!", I asks myself; so I looked it up. 1966, guys.
I think this may set a new record for Slashdot missing the boat.
Oh, goody! A list of features! Can that list remind me about my wife's birthday? Well, no. It can't do anything. It's not software. It's just hot air.
Do I smell JOS here? (I know that site vanished two or three years ago; that's the point).
Where's the product? I see an announcement, and I see a public discussion about what people might like to do, if by some quirk of fate they were to shut up and start writing code. I see an elaborate "Mission Statement" located on a slick-looking web site. But I don't see any code. I don't see any output at all.
A lot of people are going to jump into this and start arguing endlessly about features, programming patterns, methodology, licenses, and all manner of irrelevant crapola. No functional product will ever emerge, because they're doing it backwards. This is a truism, but people never seem to remember it: If you start with code, you may end up with something. If you start with a flashy web site, a vague 400-word mission statement (any "mission statement" longer than ten words is a death sentence), and a public call for sidewalk superintendents to gum things up, you'll never end up with anything. The latter approach is best described as Announcement Engineering. It's been tried, and it has failed, and it has been tried again, and it has failed again.
Why does it fail? Because if you start a discussion, you'll get people who specialize in discussing things. If you start a slick web site, you'll get people who like slick web sites. Both of those groups are self-selected for parasitism and uselessness. If, on the other hand, you start writing code, you'll get people who like to write code. If writing code is your goal, people who write code are the people you want. Not sidewalk superintendents. Not methodology-obsessed BS artists. Not visionaries, not self-appointed "philosophers", not "online community" addicts, not Open Source rock stars, spokesmodels, public figures, beloved elder statesmen, or opinionated teenagers -- all of which are going to descend on Kapor like a horde of locusts. For programming, you want programmers. But all the programmers are somewhere else, working on projects that actually exist.
Devil's Advocate Dept.: What about the GNU Manifesto? It does superficially resemble Announcement Engineering, but one crucial ingredient of AE is missing: Stallman never asked for anybody's goddamn opinion, and to this day he still hasn't. He doesn't want to discuss anything with anybody. When Stallman wants to know what you think, Stallman will tell you what you think. He never asked anybody for an opinion in that announcement; he just asked for code.
You seem to have rammed into a fucking bus at high speed. Would you like to...
You seem to be driving at fifty mph in the passing lane while you gaze droolingly at farmsex.com. Would you like to...
Typically, nobody here on Slashdot has the slightest trace of awareness of the ethical implications of the technology they so blithely drool over.
Imagine being pent up in a microscopic prison cell for your life, bombarded incessantly with radiation until you glow in the dark. Imagine thirty thousand chest X-rays every day of your life. That's what these innocent, mindless little creatures are being exposed to. That's the gruesome reality of the brutal and ruthless experimental regime at the Kodak R&D facility.
Live animals are being tortured for their entire lives just to bring you those pretty pictures, and you don't even care. Their microscopic howls of anguish leave you utterly unmoved.
If you ask me, that's just plain sad.
Cars will be drawn to the top of the elevator by a team of trained mules, hitched to a rope of a length roughly 1.8 times the circumference of the Earth. We anticipate only minor difficulties obtaining a right-of-way through most nations (with the possible exception of Sweden, because they're lame).
The mules will be fed and cared for by dedicated and highly trained staffpersons. At the end of their useful lifespan, most retired mules will be adopted by loving families everywhere. Unclaimed mules will be shot, as will be unclaimed members of loving families. Irresponsible and gratuitously hostile critics, who clearly do not have the best interests of humanity in mind, will be shot also.
On special occasions and international holidays, children of all races, creeds, colors, and nationalities, clothed in their quaint and colorful native garb, will be invited to throw superballs and apples from the top of the elevator. They will be charged only a nominal fee for this unique privilege. Highly sophisticated surveillance technology will enable all the world to enjoy the festivities!
We are now accepting investments in this historic, one-of-a-kind investment opportunity, not to be missed by the progressive and forward-thinking investors of our great nation. We anticipate incalculable earnings; we also anticipate neglecting to calculate them. Please give us all of your money right now and I promise you'll not regret having been so easily gulled.
All the 3G in the world won't change the fact that 99.9% of cell-phone conversations are moronic anyway:
What we need, for example, is technology that will summarily strangle anybody who actually uses a cell phone. That, I think we'll all agree, will improve quality of life for everybody, just like Jesus meant for technology to do.
Until then, I'll just go on tripping morons who walk down the street yapping into their fists and bumping into each other.
Let's consider the source here. The "open source" bidders all spec'd out machines that would use GPL'd GNU code. A vote cast on such a machine is, of course, a Free Vote: You sign over the rights to your vote to Richard Stallman, who reserves the right to modify it as he sees fit. Sure, you can fork your vote, but ask the XEmacs people how much fun that is: You'll have Stallman bitching and moaning about your perfidy and bad judgement in weekly interviews on LinuxYammer.com until Hell freezes over.
The only possible outcome of Stallman's Free Vote philosophy is that all votes will end up being cast for Richard Stallman, after he's done "debugging" them. Maybe those "closed source" machines drop a vote here and there and hand over a solid 5% to Pat Buchanan just for the hell of it, but Stallman's Free Voting Machines would, within six years, leave us with Richard Stallman holding every single elected office in the United States of America.
So what's wrong with that?
A government of, by, and for Richard Stallman would have certain advantages. First and foremost, our many thousands of elected officials have many thousands of times the bandwidth that Mr. Stallman will have all on his lonesome. That means that a government consisting entirely of Richard Stallman will get into much less trouble than our current "distributed" system of taxation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment.
The downside, of course, will be seeing Stallman on the television every single night, singing the "GNU Hacker Mazurka" in that shaky, pitch-blind voice of his and then ranting about how the XEmacs traitors will be punished for their crimes.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Ken Thompson stole some cool ideas from Multics, like for example command-line plumbing and a hierarchical filesystem.
Nevertheless, Unix was an entirely new and much less ambitious system. See Thompson's thoughts on the subject here.
Do you mean Multices was [blah blah web web blah McNealy marketing blah blah]...?
No, I mean it was a grotesquely overengineered fiasco which never had any practical use, just like Java. In both cases, the design was finalized before it was implemented. In both cases, hubris took over. Compare to successful operating systems like UNIX (or even Windows: Windows may be a dog, but people do at least find it usable), or to successful programming languages like C or that ugly little monstrosity Perl.
The verdict of history seems to be that good software designs start out relatively modest, and then they grow and change as people use them in the real world. Neither Multics nor Java was designed that way, and it shows.
Some people have found Java useful for some applications. So? That's also true of Smalltalk. It's true of batch files, for God's sake. Sun's multimillion-dollar advertising push has produced a resounding indifference among damn near everybody who actually writes code.
Java had two reasons for existing. One: Cross-platform binaries. That was a total failure. So they want us to use it on servers now -- where cross-platform binaries are irrelevant and the order-of-magnitude speed penalty of the JVM over native code is therefore totally unnecessary (yes, and Sun's marketing always did, and still does, conflate the AWT, the JVM, and the language itself, which is just plain annoying). Two: An OOP language with garbage collection and with a crude pretense of having no pointers. Well, okay, Point Two may have some value, if you've got a real low forehead and you can't cope with pointers or the delete operator, but it's not worth all that much in the end. Let's face it, pointers aren't hard to deal with. If you can't cope with pointers, you've got no business calling yourself a programmer anyhow. The "no-pointers" gibberish suggests that Java was aimed at the idiot market, but the idiots are saturated with Visual Basic already.
Java was a product of the reality-proof Internet hype of the late '90's. It was on life-support from day one. Let it die in peace.
Isn't Multics the legendary debacle that never turned into a usable product? Wasn't it a Grand Unified Solve-Everything Architecture? Wasn't it some kind of apotheosis of top-down design and other Best Practices?
Right! So, lesson number one from Multics is this: Don't do it that way. That, in fact, is the only lesson to be learned from Multics. You want more detail? Shoot the academics if they dare set foot off campus. Tucked away in their offices honing their algorithms, they do useful work -- but you can't ever, ever, ever let 'em influence the design of anything bigger than an algorithm.
Multics was the Java of operating systems.
Sigh... So many people just can't seem to think at all.
The real problem with optical fibers is that they transmit light.. Light is what you see with. Now, let's use our heads for a moment: You've got an optical fiber running from your bedroom to your ISP. What travels along that optical fiber? Light. That's right, folks, light. That means that people at the ISP can SEE you when you're NAKED.
Is that what you really want? Are you willing to pay for the privilege of exposing your bare bottom to the prying eyes of the sort of acne-scarred, socially dysfunctional, unbathed loners who work at ISPs? These people are, if you'll forgive the slur, sysadmins. It's not a nice thing to say, but it's a fact.
And they're watching you.
This has the potential to transform human society in ways we cannot even anticipate!
Imagine millions of commuters all watching Pam and Tommy Lee do their thing on the way to work in the morning! EVERY morning! My friends, we stand at the gateway to a new and better way of life for all human organisms on this ever-shrinking little old globe of ours.
The malevolent forces of evil, tyranny, poverty, stupidity, Scientology, lambda calculus, feminism, fascism, organized religion, the ASPCA, and Wizard of Oz/Pink Floyd theories will wither away like ice in a spring thaw!. THE CORPSES OF THE INIQUITOUS WILL LITTER THE STREETS! Wild dogs will gnaw the dry bones of the unrighteous! Everybody will have an above-average income and nobody will have to stay home on prom night!
Fuck a duck, man, this is heavy shit.
.45 ACP.
Sadly, the King's groundbreaking research in this field hasn't been followed up on a large scale.
I saw the same infomercial on Russian TV one late night, and they said the very same device has been shown to cancel gravity in certainly irreproachably irreproducible experiments conducted at the Skvorny Prkgkvrkngov Institute for Mysterious Russian Research in Moscow.
You get a cool knife set, too, and five winning lottery numbers (based on your unique horoscope and biorhythms), if you order your device immediately and pay cash.
Dionne Warwick bought three.
Who exactly oversees ICANN? To whom are they responsible? Anybody?
This is nothing compared to, for example, the UN's casual complicity in the massacres in Srebrenica a decade ago[1], but ICANN and the UN are the same kind of organization and inevitably you get the same result: A mess. This is authority without culpability.
God knows you can't trust the private sector any farther than you can throw them, but sooner or later swine like Enron at least go bankrupt. Of course, that's a bad thing when it happens, too: The immediate burden falls on innocents while Ken Lay walks away rich -- but at least Enron is gone. ICANN and the UN are here forever.
[1] Oh, but some poor jerk in the Dutch government resigned, so it's okay! They found somebody to blame! That means it's all fixed, right? At least from a public-relations standpoint, and that's what really matters. I'm sure the next-of-kin of the 10,000 dead feel much better now.
Well, I think the atomization of our culture has gone just about far enough now, has it not?
Now they're selling technology pre-segregated along racial and economic lines. The left-leaning media seem to have expanded their ideological stranglehold out into the technology industry. What next? "White People Cell Phones"? The new 2003 Chrysler "Asians-Only"?
The destructive madness of exclusionary identity politics has gone far enough. It's time for us to focus on our common heritage as children of God, not on the divisive nonsense that strives to turn our great nation into a Balkanized chaos of competing and mutually genocidal tribal "identities".
I skimmed through this wild-eyed gibberish and I have to say I'm bitterly disappointed that Taco is still relying on moderation alone. It's clear to any rational being that meaningless, infantile, ankle-biting posts like yours should simply be deleted. When censorship serves to weed defectives out of the gene pool (poetically speaking), it can only be a Good Thing.
The problem with ReBirth, and with any clone thereof, is that the user gains nothing from a flashy raster imitation of a 303's physical interface (or that of any real gear), while losing a great deal of usability.
A physical knob isn't so bad out here in the physical world, but you're manipulating it with your fingers. A mouse pointer is not a pair of fingers. I've played with ReBirth, and while there's some great functionality in there, it's just hell trying to get at it through all those tiny, poorly-labeled knobs. That interface makes sense on a plastic box. It's got real drawbacks, but it is what it is because of simple necessity. It's the best you can do with a thing made out of plastic. Okay, that's fine when plastic is the medium you're stuck with, but you can do considerably better if you're making your interface out of zeroes and ones instead.
By all means, let us duplicate the functionality of analog gear in software. That's a noble undertaking. But let's not fuck up the GUI with gratuitously flashy nonsense at the expense of clarity and usability. It's a gimmick. The Microsoft Paper Clip is a gimmick.
If your software is actually meant to be used, gimmicks are bad.
The structure of our critical discourse is clearly fractured beyond repair.
The notorious "suicide doctor" (and suspected Canadian) Dr. Jack Horkheimer is all over the news telling us to drop acid and stare at the skies, and not a word is uttered in protest in this allegedly libertarian forum.
Meanwhile, Commander Taco instructs us to vegetate in front of a TV screen, because it will "help us to relax" -- indeed, indeed! Relax you shall, my little ones! Just as the Vichy government relaxed! Just as Mr. Quisling's expedient regime relaxed!
Yes, children, it's time to "relax". Just as the Western Left "relaxed" in the face of clear, irrefutable evidence of Stalin's barbarous atrocities.
But maybe, just maybe, one small voice might make itself heard: Is this wise? As the West descends into apathy and irrelevance, refusing to defend its ancient and hard-won freedoms, I ask you: Is it wise?
Is there no end to the Western faith in "big science" and mammoth, wasteful works of useless technology? In September, we saw how easily all their flashy trash can be destroyed by good men with a moral purpose. Here, we see the poor Russians throwing billions of dollars into space for no reason at all.
The West is sick. They've destroyed themselves with materialism and injustice. Russia crumbled due to its excesses and brutalities, and the United States and Europe will soon follow. Their economic systems are fragile fictions based on international banking and their people are soft, aimless cowards. There's no hope for them.
All we can do is laugh, and pity them as they vanish from the international scene.
...by now -- since the article they linked is dated Monday, June 18, 2001. Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick! June of last year!
See here. It's already been on Slashdot, even.
Yeah, the hot news is always on Slashdot, kids.