And here is where we get to the real crux of the matter. We are all talking about things that are fundamentally pre-rational. There are (simplifying greatly) three epistemologies at loggerheads here:
The worldview that includes these axioms: God, science. [theism]
The worldview that includes these axioms: science. [rationalism]
The worldview that includes these axioms: nothing. [postmodernism]
(To be more precise, the word "science" here should be replaced with "logic" or "reason.")
Nope.
Unfortunately it isn't as simple or as comfortable as that. While huge amounts of rubbish are written by half-arsed thinkers in the name of post modernism, 'logic' and 'reason' are not (or at least, not primarily) in the science camp. They are, unfortunately, in the post-modern (or, more strictly, relativist) camp.
Arguing from first principles is not, of course, new. Descartes famously tried to do it. But before you can start doing 'science' about the physical world, you have to assert first that there is a physical world, second that we have access to it, and third that we can communicate with one another about it. And, unfortunately, there is no way of proving any of those statements - they have to remain axiomatic.
And in fact they're highly problematic. When you start thinking about how you would go about proving that there was a physical world you discover that the concepts get very slippery. There's actually nothing in the least 'modern' let alone 'post-modern' about this - Gorgias had pointed it out ( in 'On Nonexistence') as early as the fourth century BC.
Of course, at some level this doesn't matter. Pragmatically, modern physics works and delivers us lots of benefits, even if its epistemological underpinnings are extremely shakey. The only philosophical doctrine which isn't full of shakey bits and internal contradictions is solipsism, and frankly even if solipsism is true it's too boring for me to take seriously.
But the social scientists on campuses across the world boring on about how modern science has no more solid foundation than the beliefs of witch doctors, may be intellectually lazy, but they're also strictly, technically, right. As far as we can rationally prove.
Oh, come now. This isn't morality; it's prejudice and spite masquerading as morality.
1. All else being equal, a kid is better off being raised by both biological parents.
No, definitely not. Not as a generalisation. A kid is better off being raised by happy, low stressed people in a stable relationship. Biological relationship simply does not come in here. It's always been 'a wise child who knows who his father is' - infidelity is a fact of life in all communities and at all periods of history. Kids grow up just fine raised by cuckolds, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, adoptive and foster parents. Biological relationship really isn't critical. Stability is critical. It may even be possible that it's important for children to have access to adult role models of both genders, which, if true, would be an argument against gay people adopting kids. But biological parents? No.
3. Using tax laws and so forth, we can encourage families to stay together.
That's pretty naive. If a relationship isn't working, it's not very likely that people are going to stay together for a few hundred dollars worth of tax allowance. And it's not in the interests of the children that they should. Few things are worse for children than growing up with their parents locked into an abusive or disfunctional relationship.
4. A gay couple, collectively, can never produce offspring of their own.
My wife, after she left me, lived in a homosexual relationship for eight years. Why should her son (who wasn't mine - see one above) suffer financial penalties because of his mothers choices? Wouldn't it have been better for him if that relationship had stayed together?
5. If you allow gays to be legally married, they enjoy the benefits which were put in place for the sake of keeping families together, which is fundamentally unfair to single people and common-law marriages, who also do not enjoy said benefits.
If the benefits are for raising children, give those benefits to all people raising children (and not to, e.g., married couples who are childless). If childless married couples get the benefits, don't pretend they've got anything to do with children.
When you grow up, you'll find that live is much more complex (and much more painful) than you possibly imagined it could be. And with luck you'll learn to be a bit more tolerant of people who aren't like you.
FWIW, the guy who runs the third-party service has an entirely different take on this matter.
Yup. I'm not saying podkey are doing the evilpirate bait-and-switch trick. But they've certainly put themselves into the position, intentionally or not, where they have the power to. And it would be very hard for them to guarantee that they won't at some stage in the future sell their business to someone who would. Their ability to do it, whether it's something they intended or not, is now a major asset of their business.
Frankly, if I was producing a 'podcast', I would be very wary of anyone who claimed, in order to add value to my service, that it was necessary to advertise it via an RSS feed they controlled.
Well explained. The guy genuinely does have something to complain about, but this is just the same sort of scuzzy borderline crooked exploit we've seen every time we've had a new technical development - the borderline criminals are quick to get in there and find an exploitable wheeze. Then they rake in some $$$$ and move on to the next scam before the legislators can catch up with them.
Re:Slashdot overrun by old fogies
on
The Podjacker Threat
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· Score: 4, Informative
I don't think many people understand what a podjacking is. Does it mean someone else distributes an identical podcast file as their own, or does it mean they make their own podcast and pretend is comes from another source?
What has happened here (if I understand it correctly, and someone will correct me if I don't) is that the guy puts up his mp3s at http://myrealserver.dm/podcast/content0001.mp3
and then he creates an RSS file which points to his mp3s at http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss. The RSS file is essentially a signpost: it isn't the content in itself, it just points to the content. Then, when he posts new mp3 content, he updates his RSS. What is supposed to happen is that people point their podcast client at http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss, and every time he posts new content and updates the RSS it's automatically downloaded.
But what he's complaining is that the 'podjacker', evilpirate, has done is created a new feed, http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss which also points to myrealsite's content. The file at http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss is automatically updated using something like wget so that whenever myrealsite adds more content, http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss gets updated too.
evilpirate now registers http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss with podcast search engines as the authoritative signpost for myrealsite. Users search for content on the search engine, and if they like myrealsite's content, they point their clients at http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss.
So now some - or even most - of myrealsite's users are finding new myrealsite content through evilpirate's signpost. This gives evilpirate the power to alter where the signpost points to, so that instead of getting myrealsite's content they now get rivalsite's content.
Wrong premise, wrong answer
on
The Future of HTML
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If you start by asserting a falsehood as an axiom, any conclusion you reach is going to be wrong. In this case:
HTML isn't a very good language for making Web pages.
Sorry, wrong.
HTML is a relatively compact, low overhead markup. An HTML page is much more compact than, for example, a PDF or a Word file containing exactly the same data. The consequence of this is it makes good use of low bandwidth links, without needing compression - a benefit I'll return to later.
HTML leverages SGML's experience in dealing with multiple character sets, scanning directions, etc; it's therefore effective as a universal markup, not limited to any particular natural language or culture.
HTML separates data from presentation, allowing the same content to be made available on a wide range of devices, and to people with a wide range of special needs.
HTML is extremely simple to parse; the parser can be extremely lightweight. This in conjunction with the fact that the data representation is compact and doesn't need decompression means that HTML can easily be rendered on extremely low powered devices.
HTML's forms extension is admittedly a hack. But it's a successful hack because it's a good hack - it allows system designers to make use of ubiquitous low cost clients. There is a tradeoff between simplicity and functionality and admittedly HTML forms err on the side of simplicity; some more input types would be beneficial. But the XForms proposal is woefully over complex and will fail to be widely deployed for that reason.
Finally, HTML is universal and ubiquitous. A huge range of devices out there can accept well formed HTML and render it usefully; there's no need to worry about whether this or that extension or plugin is available on the client.
In summary, HTML has been so successful largely because it's an extremely good language for writing Web pages. It's become universal and ubiquitous because it's simple, flexible and lightweight. Admittedly HTML is weak in the area of representing special technical formatting such as mathematical formulae; there is a place for such things as MathML et al.
Yes, there are a huge number of proposals to give us more prolix, more byzantine languages in which to write Web pages. They are going to have to co-exist in a darwinian environment with HTML, and outcompete it. They won't, in my opinion, succeed. In ten, or twenty, years time there will be devices out there which will render formats we haven't yet imagined, and there will be a fragmented web of pages which can only be read on this or that specialised device. But there will still be a web of plain old vanilla flavoured [X]HTML, because that will be the lingua franca that every device can use.
And secondly, most folks have a relatively short memory. Considering France's repeated losses to Germany which required U.S. military liberation, despite the fact that we had no [tt]imetable for withdrawal or troop reduction plan, or a plan to deal with the resistance that did not want to be liberated, we persisted twice.
Yup. And the French lost the war in Vietnam...
So, while it's great France may have had success during the age of the longbow, tactics of enemies have changed. Planes and bomb vests are the preferred method of the enemy.
...and it's so great to know that America has won the War on Terror!
It should be a species of a particular genus, no? Mammals are an entire class of organisms, where if the species is new we should at least be able to identify the genus (and order, and family).
Oh, please, someone, do RTFA. They've photographed this creature twice, both times with automatic cameras triggered by infra red. No-one has (as far as we know) ever seen one. There is no cine or video footage. It looks a bit like a lemur but is more likely a viverrid. But no-one knows yet. So no, no-one can identify the genus, or even the order. It's a mammal. So far, that's all anyone can say for certain.
That I am a malicious hacker and I want to take over the computers of some unknown civilisation which may come to exist on a planet hundreds of lightyears away long after I am dead.
The algorithm goes like this:
Compute all the viable possible encodings of all the valid possible instruction sets of all the possible processors;
For each processor, compute all the possible system architectures and operating systems;
For each encoding of each instruction set for each processor, for each architecture for that processor, for each operating system for that architecture, encode a piece of malicious code which would overcome all the possible security precautions of that operating environment;
For each piece of malicious code, embed it in a stream of data which will do the equivalent of overflowing buffers (assuming this is possible) on that operating system so as inject the code into the processors instruction stream...
And then pump all this data out with a powerful enough transmitter at a sufficiently low data rate to be successfully received across the width of an average sized galaxy.
Now, even supposing this were possible (and it seems to me that the size of the data set you'd generate would be up about the region of aleph four), and supposing (say) the Intel 86x processor family continues to be used for a thousand years, and that (say) Linux 2.4.21 continues to be used on those processors for the whole of that time, and that BOINC 5.2.8 continues to be used on that operating system kernel for the whole of that time, what are the chances of
The part of the data stream designed to infect BOINC 5.2.8 on Linux 2.4.21 on Intel x86 arriving at Planet Earth in that period, and
The whole of that part of the data stream being passed to a single client machine to process?
To express this as a business plan
Perform infeasibly complex calculation
Generate an infinite amount of data
Lock up enormously powerful transmitter for the lifetime of several universes
wait
wait
die
wait some more
at chances of several billion to one against, actually succeed in infecting an alien computer several hundred light years away
wait
wait
wait
never actually get a return signal
???
profit
Only a culture with precisely zero mathematical understanding could possibly imagine this being a risk.
Which doesn't take into account the complexity of unique parts, I might add - Lego can achieve some degree of economies of scale with their common parts (6x2 / 4x2 bricks, helmets, etc). Mindstorms has a large number of parts that are only relevant for the Mindstorms line (such as gears, IR sensors, pulleys, etc). Production costs are likely to be higher, and because they're not piggy-backing on a fad (like Harry Potter or Star Wars), sales are also probably going to be lower.
Sorry, no. The only parts in a Mindstorms box which are unique to Mindstorms are the RCX (ptogrammable brick) itself, the IR transciever, three touch sensors and one light sensor. All the other parts are standard Technic parts.
On the more specific topic of the Mindstorms kit, the author of that article seems to assume everyone who might be interested in Lego would be interested in Mindstorms, which just isn't true. Most people aren't interested in programming their own toys. I know it is difficult for geeks to believe this (and I say this as a professional C++ programmer for the past 10 years), but it is true.
That is true, of course, but there is a whole big market out there for accessible robotics prototyping which wouldn't otherwise be interested in LEGO, and that's a potential target market that LEGO hasn't successfully tapped - because they've targetted Mindstorms at kids, and consequently 'dumbed it down' from it's MIT programmable brick origins. More compute power would be nice, better interfacing is essential. But the point is that adult hobbyists have a lot more money to spend than kids, and selling more sophisticated stuff to adult hobbyists doesn't harm your sales of less sophisticated stuff to kids.
Mindstorm is a perfect example of the problem. They had a $200 set, and once you bought it, there wasn't any hook to make you buy more. So no one did. It didn't matter that they made huge profit on that $200 set that would have probably been more like $20 to create. If you aren't continuing to buy, then they failed.
Look, this is arrant nonsense. I was 45 when Mindstorms first came out, and I don't have any kids. I was one of the first purchasers, and from what I've read 50% or more of all Mindstorms sets sold have been sold for use by adults - people who simply would not have bought other LEGO products. Furthermore, since I bought my Mindstorms set, I've bought masses of other Technic LEGO, and other stuff like rotation sensors, additional light sensors, additional motors, and so on.
LEGO could develop a whole new audience with Mindstorms. They'd need to get rid of the awful firmware it comes with and bundle instead some of the many enthusiast-developed alternative firmwares (e.g. TinyVM, BrickOS, pbForth). It would be nice also to have a USB or serial port, to make interfacing things like GPS systems easier. A more powerful processor and more memory would be great. But there is a big adult audience out there for mindstorms - people who want to tinker with robotics - and that audience has far more money to spend than kids have.
LEGO are missing a trick here. They need to rebrand Mindstorms as an adult focussed product, add more compute power, and raise the price. They'd have a run away winner.
OK, OK, maybe it's a bit strange to post this comment on slashdot.org, but the point at which I got really cross about all this was the point at which the pajama party adopted the domain 'osm.org'. The .org top-level domain is, at least in theory, intended for non-commercial, non-governmental, non-academic use. By describing themselves as osm.org the pajamas are making an implied claim to be non-commercial, which is not true and is consequently false advertising. Yes, I know this applies to slashdot as well...
What? Are American schools are not only teaching creationism now, but also teaching flat earthism? More seriously, no, the Earth is not perfectly spherical. It's slightly oblate and very slightly rough. But I didn't say it was spherical, I said it was 'round like a ball'. If you go down to your local toyshop, you will very lucky to find any ball which is as near to a mathematical sphere as the earth is.
Suppose the temperate band moves 5 degrees towards the poles, what happens? Would there be the same amount of arable land, or more, or less?
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY has the slightest idea.
And even worse, nobody will ever have.
No-one who doesn't understand primary school maths, no.
I agree it's contentious how much the temperate belt will on average shift, but that isn't what I posited: I made a very simple point about geometry. Suppose the temperate belt shifts outward from the equator (irrespective of cause), then the area of the temperate belt shrinks. A child of five can understand that.
Further, it's pretty clear to everyone that
global temperatures are on average rising (it doesn't matter why), and
if average temperatures are higher, then the temperate belt must move further from the equator, and that consequently
to a first approximation, the amount of available arable land must reduce.
You see, climate is the poster child for dynamic complex systems,
That's certainly true...
and is inherently unpredictable beyond a few days.
There's a ton of arible land in the world that does not have the absolutely-perfect-ideal climate.
Many cold areas - siberia, canada - may become nice temerate regions.
Suppose the temperate band moves 5 degrees towards the poles, what happens? Would there be the same amount of arable land, or more, or less? Hint: the world is round like a ball. The further north you go from the equator, the less the diameter is, and consequently the less surface there is per degree. Furthermore, most of the current temperate zone was under broadleaved woodland for thousands of years before the coming of agriculture, and we're still using the depth of fertile soil laid down in thousands of years of leaf-fall. But the current tundras have been tundras for thousands of years, and don't have any great depth of soil fertility. So it does matter if the temperate belt shifts five degrees towards the poles.
The thing I have had to learn for myself most painfully in open source development is a new approach to version control. In a business environment version control is essentially an archive, and what the current ruling version of any component is is a matter of management diktat. With open source, you have to let people go away on their own with a bit of code - you can't stop them - and when they come back they may well have come up with something that's genuinely better.
So a project 'owner' has got to have the humility to assess someone else's work to appreciate when it is better, and also must be able to manage branching and merging of versions effectively and smoothly which is not always straightforward. You certainly don't want to be in a position where you don't merge a really good bit of work into the project simply because the version control overhead is too great.
So teach version control; not only what systems are out there but the theory of it and how to make it work effectively in an open source environment.
Well I have seen that particular form of representation hundreds of times. In 1996 a friend did a Java applet with the same representational view. I agree the underlying data structure is far more important. What I find annoying is the visual representation of the relationships. It adds nothing to my knowledge of the subject. This particular form of visual interface is just plain not very useful.
I think this is a matter of 'one size does not fit all'. I'm not claiming that graph browsers do work for you or even should work for you. I find them extremely useful, and I know they work for a lot of other people too. For me, they're one of the most powerful tools in the GUI toolkit. The fact that you don't find them useful is not a reason not to provide them for other people who do.
Disclaimer: I've had papers published on the graphical representation of data, but it's a long time ago now.
I distribute mysoftware for free, in the hope that it may be useful - to you, among other people. Consider it a gift. If it breaks it will even send me a bug report, and I'll look at it for you for free. Oh, you want to be able to sue me if it breaks? Then I shan't give it to you.
The Ajax apps all look extremely impressive, but I do believe inconsistent UI will eventually plateau the adoption. Developers love to play the artist when there's a clean slate, and everyone will have their own set of icons and widgets.
Frankly, that's a completely bogus argument. Early X Windows applications had wildly inconsistent interfaces. Then, gradually, over time, people learned this was a bad idea, and people started developing user interface standards. Furthermore, as GUIs got more complex and GUI toolkits got better, the overhead of rolling your own became too much for most projects, so they tended to use toolkits.
The new web-based applications - call it DHTML, call it AJAX, call it what you will - will go through the same evolutionary process. Initially the GUI will be all over the place, later standards will emerge. It's noticeable that the numsum apps already load their user interface from a separate JavaScript file than their application 'engines'.
Over time we'll find people generating JavaScript+XML GUI libraries with standardised user interfaces, just like KDE and Gnome in the X Windows space. And we'll find projects adopting these both to make their products look more professional and because adopting a toolkit is easier than rolling your own.
Can't view a spreadsheet created in Mozilla, in Opera.
Scrollbar obscures text entry box, all the time.
Can't see column headers.
Can't see grid.
Don't know if I'm creating any text, but if I am I can't see it.
Don't seem to be able to save a spreadsheet from Opera - if I click 'Save', and then, in Mozilla, reload my list of spreadsheets, the one created in Opera does not appear.
I'd like this if they sold $20 dumb terminals to use it, but I paid a lot of money for a computer that can run applications locally without constantly going to the network.
Most people - the overwhelming majority - are not competent to use a general purpose computer. They don't understand about basic things like security and backups. Consequently their machines are crawling with viruses and trojans, and when eventually they have a hardware problem they lose, in many cases, months or even years of work.
For these people, a thin client web appliance using applications hosted remotely on machines maintained by competent people makes a huge amount of sense. And, frankly, that's 90+% of the whole population, so this is potentially a very big market.
I never played Civ 1; I was a huge fan of Civ II, which was and is a brilliant game. I regularly still play Alpha Centauri, which is essentially Civ two and a half. I have Civ III and have scarcely ever played it - it had nothing new to add over Civ II. And I think that the reason for that is that, as the turn based strategy game goes, Civ II is and always will be the classic.
You've been there. You've done it (very well). Why revisit old territory? Similarly with Pirates. I am having enormous fun with the new Pirates, which I find hugely engaging. But it really doesn't add much over Pirates I.
You've got an extremely talented team. Sequels and franchises are rarely better - and often worse - than what went before.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope.
Unfortunately it isn't as simple or as comfortable as that. While huge amounts of rubbish are written by half-arsed thinkers in the name of post modernism, 'logic' and 'reason' are not (or at least, not primarily) in the science camp. They are, unfortunately, in the post-modern (or, more strictly, relativist) camp.
Arguing from first principles is not, of course, new. Descartes famously tried to do it. But before you can start doing 'science' about the physical world, you have to assert first that there is a physical world, second that we have access to it, and third that we can communicate with one another about it. And, unfortunately, there is no way of proving any of those statements - they have to remain axiomatic.
And in fact they're highly problematic. When you start thinking about how you would go about proving that there was a physical world you discover that the concepts get very slippery. There's actually nothing in the least 'modern' let alone 'post-modern' about this - Gorgias had pointed it out ( in 'On Nonexistence') as early as the fourth century BC.
Of course, at some level this doesn't matter. Pragmatically, modern physics works and delivers us lots of benefits, even if its epistemological underpinnings are extremely shakey. The only philosophical doctrine which isn't full of shakey bits and internal contradictions is solipsism, and frankly even if solipsism is true it's too boring for me to take seriously.
But the social scientists on campuses across the world boring on about how modern science has no more solid foundation than the beliefs of witch doctors, may be intellectually lazy, but they're also strictly, technically, right. As far as we can rationally prove.
Oh, come now. This isn't morality; it's prejudice and spite masquerading as morality.
No, definitely not. Not as a generalisation. A kid is better off being raised by happy, low stressed people in a stable relationship. Biological relationship simply does not come in here. It's always been 'a wise child who knows who his father is' - infidelity is a fact of life in all communities and at all periods of history. Kids grow up just fine raised by cuckolds, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, adoptive and foster parents. Biological relationship really isn't critical. Stability is critical. It may even be possible that it's important for children to have access to adult role models of both genders, which, if true, would be an argument against gay people adopting kids. But biological parents? No.
Little evidence of that. One fifth of US children are below the poverty line (1998 data); and, before you accuse me of being down on the US, the situation here in Scotland is also bad.
That's pretty naive. If a relationship isn't working, it's not very likely that people are going to stay together for a few hundred dollars worth of tax allowance. And it's not in the interests of the children that they should. Few things are worse for children than growing up with their parents locked into an abusive or disfunctional relationship.
My wife, after she left me, lived in a homosexual relationship for eight years. Why should her son (who wasn't mine - see one above) suffer financial penalties because of his mothers choices? Wouldn't it have been better for him if that relationship had stayed together?
If the benefits are for raising children, give those benefits to all people raising children (and not to, e.g., married couples who are childless). If childless married couples get the benefits, don't pretend they've got anything to do with children.
When you grow up, you'll find that live is much more complex (and much more painful) than you possibly imagined it could be. And with luck you'll learn to be a bit more tolerant of people who aren't like you.
Yup. I'm not saying podkey are doing the evilpirate bait-and-switch trick. But they've certainly put themselves into the position, intentionally or not, where they have the power to. And it would be very hard for them to guarantee that they won't at some stage in the future sell their business to someone who would. Their ability to do it, whether it's something they intended or not, is now a major asset of their business.
Frankly, if I was producing a 'podcast', I would be very wary of anyone who claimed, in order to add value to my service, that it was necessary to advertise it via an RSS feed they controlled.
Well explained. The guy genuinely does have something to complain about, but this is just the same sort of scuzzy borderline crooked exploit we've seen every time we've had a new technical development - the borderline criminals are quick to get in there and find an exploitable wheeze. Then they rake in some $$$$ and move on to the next scam before the legislators can catch up with them.
What has happened here (if I understand it correctly, and someone will correct me if I don't) is that the guy puts up his mp3s at http://myrealserver.dm/podcast/content0001.mp3 and then he creates an RSS file which points to his mp3s at http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss. The RSS file is essentially a signpost: it isn't the content in itself, it just points to the content. Then, when he posts new mp3 content, he updates his RSS. What is supposed to happen is that people point their podcast client at http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss, and every time he posts new content and updates the RSS it's automatically downloaded.
But what he's complaining is that the 'podjacker', evilpirate, has done is created a new feed, http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss which also points to myrealsite's content. The file at http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss is automatically updated using something like wget so that whenever myrealsite adds more content, http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss gets updated too.
evilpirate now registers http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss with podcast search engines as the authoritative signpost for myrealsite. Users search for content on the search engine, and if they like myrealsite's content, they point their clients at http://evil.pirate/devious/feed.rss.
So now some - or even most - of myrealsite's users are finding new myrealsite content through evilpirate's signpost. This gives evilpirate the power to alter where the signpost points to, so that instead of getting myrealsite's content they now get rivalsite's content.
If you start by asserting a falsehood as an axiom, any conclusion you reach is going to be wrong. In this case:
Sorry, wrong.
In summary, HTML has been so successful largely because it's an extremely good language for writing Web pages. It's become universal and ubiquitous because it's simple, flexible and lightweight. Admittedly HTML is weak in the area of representing special technical formatting such as mathematical formulae; there is a place for such things as MathML et al.
Yes, there are a huge number of proposals to give us more prolix, more byzantine languages in which to write Web pages. They are going to have to co-exist in a darwinian environment with HTML, and outcompete it. They won't, in my opinion, succeed. In ten, or twenty, years time there will be devices out there which will render formats we haven't yet imagined, and there will be a fragmented web of pages which can only be read on this or that specialised device. But there will still be a web of plain old vanilla flavoured [X]HTML, because that will be the lingua franca that every device can use.
Yup. And the French lost the war in Vietnam...
...and it's so great to know that America has won the War on Terror!
Can you smell hubris?
Oh, please, someone, do RTFA. They've photographed this creature twice, both times with automatic cameras triggered by infra red. No-one has (as far as we know) ever seen one. There is no cine or video footage. It looks a bit like a lemur but is more likely a viverrid. But no-one knows yet. So no, no-one can identify the genus, or even the order. It's a mammal. So far, that's all anyone can say for certain.
That I am a malicious hacker and I want to take over the computers of some unknown civilisation which may come to exist on a planet hundreds of lightyears away long after I am dead.
The algorithm goes like this:
Now, even supposing this were possible (and it seems to me that the size of the data set you'd generate would be up about the region of aleph four), and supposing (say) the Intel 86x processor family continues to be used for a thousand years, and that (say) Linux 2.4.21 continues to be used on those processors for the whole of that time, and that BOINC 5.2.8 continues to be used on that operating system kernel for the whole of that time, what are the chances of
To express this as a business plan
Only a culture with precisely zero mathematical understanding could possibly imagine this being a risk.
Sorry, no. The only parts in a Mindstorms box which are unique to Mindstorms are the RCX (ptogrammable brick) itself, the IR transciever, three touch sensors and one light sensor. All the other parts are standard Technic parts.
That is true, of course, but there is a whole big market out there for accessible robotics prototyping which wouldn't otherwise be interested in LEGO, and that's a potential target market that LEGO hasn't successfully tapped - because they've targetted Mindstorms at kids, and consequently 'dumbed it down' from it's MIT programmable brick origins. More compute power would be nice, better interfacing is essential. But the point is that adult hobbyists have a lot more money to spend than kids, and selling more sophisticated stuff to adult hobbyists doesn't harm your sales of less sophisticated stuff to kids.
LEGO are missing a trick, here.
Look, this is arrant nonsense. I was 45 when Mindstorms first came out, and I don't have any kids. I was one of the first purchasers, and from what I've read 50% or more of all Mindstorms sets sold have been sold for use by adults - people who simply would not have bought other LEGO products. Furthermore, since I bought my Mindstorms set, I've bought masses of other Technic LEGO, and other stuff like rotation sensors, additional light sensors, additional motors, and so on.
LEGO could develop a whole new audience with Mindstorms. They'd need to get rid of the awful firmware it comes with and bundle instead some of the many enthusiast-developed alternative firmwares (e.g. TinyVM, BrickOS, pbForth). It would be nice also to have a USB or serial port, to make interfacing things like GPS systems easier. A more powerful processor and more memory would be great. But there is a big adult audience out there for mindstorms - people who want to tinker with robotics - and that audience has far more money to spend than kids have.
LEGO are missing a trick here. They need to rebrand Mindstorms as an adult focussed product, add more compute power, and raise the price. They'd have a run away winner.
OK, OK, maybe it's a bit strange to post this comment on slashdot.org , but the point at which I got really cross about all this was the point at which the pajama party adopted the domain 'osm.org'. The .org top-level domain is, at least in theory, intended for non-commercial, non-governmental, non-academic use. By describing themselves as osm.org the pajamas are making an implied claim to be non-commercial, which is not true and is consequently false advertising. Yes, I know this applies to slashdot as well...
What? Are American schools are not only teaching creationism now, but also teaching flat earthism? More seriously, no, the Earth is not perfectly spherical. It's slightly oblate and very slightly rough. But I didn't say it was spherical, I said it was 'round like a ball'. If you go down to your local toyshop, you will very lucky to find any ball which is as near to a mathematical sphere as the earth is.
No-one who doesn't understand primary school maths, no.
I agree it's contentious how much the temperate belt will on average shift, but that isn't what I posited: I made a very simple point about geometry. Suppose the temperate belt shifts outward from the equator (irrespective of cause), then the area of the temperate belt shrinks. A child of five can understand that.
Further, it's pretty clear to everyone that
That's certainly true...
... and that's certainly false.
Suppose the temperate band moves 5 degrees towards the poles, what happens? Would there be the same amount of arable land, or more, or less? Hint: the world is round like a ball. The further north you go from the equator, the less the diameter is, and consequently the less surface there is per degree. Furthermore, most of the current temperate zone was under broadleaved woodland for thousands of years before the coming of agriculture, and we're still using the depth of fertile soil laid down in thousands of years of leaf-fall. But the current tundras have been tundras for thousands of years, and don't have any great depth of soil fertility. So it does matter if the temperate belt shifts five degrees towards the poles.
The thing I have had to learn for myself most painfully in open source development is a new approach to version control. In a business environment version control is essentially an archive, and what the current ruling version of any component is is a matter of management diktat. With open source, you have to let people go away on their own with a bit of code - you can't stop them - and when they come back they may well have come up with something that's genuinely better.
So a project 'owner' has got to have the humility to assess someone else's work to appreciate when it is better, and also must be able to manage branching and merging of versions effectively and smoothly which is not always straightforward. You certainly don't want to be in a position where you don't merge a really good bit of work into the project simply because the version control overhead is too great.
So teach version control; not only what systems are out there but the theory of it and how to make it work effectively in an open source environment.
Also, of course, documentation....
I think this is a matter of 'one size does not fit all'. I'm not claiming that graph browsers do work for you or even should work for you. I find them extremely useful, and I know they work for a lot of other people too. For me, they're one of the most powerful tools in the GUI toolkit. The fact that you don't find them useful is not a reason not to provide them for other people who do.
Disclaimer: I've had papers published on the graphical representation of data, but it's a long time ago now.
I distribute my software for free, in the hope that it may be useful - to you, among other people. Consider it a gift. If it breaks it will even send me a bug report, and I'll look at it for you for free. Oh, you want to be able to sue me if it breaks? Then I shan't give it to you.
Frankly, that's a completely bogus argument. Early X Windows applications had wildly inconsistent interfaces. Then, gradually, over time, people learned this was a bad idea, and people started developing user interface standards. Furthermore, as GUIs got more complex and GUI toolkits got better, the overhead of rolling your own became too much for most projects, so they tended to use toolkits.
The new web-based applications - call it DHTML, call it AJAX, call it what you will - will go through the same evolutionary process. Initially the GUI will be all over the place, later standards will emerge. It's noticeable that the numsum apps already load their user interface from a separate JavaScript file than their application 'engines'.
Over time we'll find people generating JavaScript+XML GUI libraries with standardised user interfaces, just like KDE and Gnome in the X Windows space. And we'll find projects adopting these both to make their products look more professional and because adopting a toolkit is easier than rolling your own.
Opera 8.50, on Debian:
Further to that, Konqi can't load a spreadsheet created in Mozilla. Still playing...
Most people - the overwhelming majority - are not competent to use a general purpose computer. They don't understand about basic things like security and backups. Consequently their machines are crawling with viruses and trojans, and when eventually they have a hardware problem they lose, in many cases, months or even years of work.
For these people, a thin client web appliance using applications hosted remotely on machines maintained by competent people makes a huge amount of sense. And, frankly, that's 90+% of the whole population, so this is potentially a very big market.
Sadly, the spreadsheet doesn't work with Konqi at all. None of the text you enter either shows up or gets saved. In Mozilla
I'm carrying on playing, because this is potentially very, very cool technology indeed.
I never played Civ 1; I was a huge fan of Civ II, which was and is a brilliant game. I regularly still play Alpha Centauri, which is essentially Civ two and a half. I have Civ III and have scarcely ever played it - it had nothing new to add over Civ II. And I think that the reason for that is that, as the turn based strategy game goes, Civ II is and always will be the classic.
You've been there. You've done it (very well). Why revisit old territory? Similarly with Pirates. I am having enormous fun with the new Pirates, which I find hugely engaging. But it really doesn't add much over Pirates I.
You've got an extremely talented team. Sequels and franchises are rarely better - and often worse - than what went before.
Isn't it time to move on?