Only languages compiled into assembly are worthy of being considered "real" programming.:)
REAL programmers:
know that only weak-minded wimps need high-level languages like Mummy Java and Daddy C++ to write their assembler for them, or lets them shirk the responsibility of knowing what's happening in the processor.
Are suspicious of assembler anyway, and prefer to write machine code by hand
All this is just a hangover from the 'programmers in white coats' syndrome from the 1950s and 60s. Keep the machine room door locked. Keep out the infidels. Talk as esoterically as possible.
IMO, what this discrimination is based on is the fact that with scripting languages, especially Python/Ruby/Perl etc, you can achieve the same task in minutes that in C/C++ or Java can take hours/days/weeks. Same as the recording industry trying to block digital distribution. And same as the ferry operators who would try to stop the bridge from getting built.
At the start of each gig, the guitar amp would 'activate' with a central Gibson server via GPRS, WLAN etc.
Once cleared by the server, the guitar would then be able to play wirelessly.
During each gig, the guitarist's playing would be written to disk as a compressed MIDI file.
During the next 'activation' with the Gibson server, the midi file of the last gig gets uploaded.
The Gibson server analyses the musical components of the MIDI file, and determine which of the licks, riffs, rhythms, fingerings, chops, changes, scales, arpeggios and general melodic sequences are already on the 'copyrighted guitar techniques' database, as well as general songs databases.
For all playing elements that encroach on copyright, the Gibson server would calculate a royalty bill, which would be totalled up and emailed out to the musician. For example, the chord sequence Am/D7/Edom9 would cost 0.1 cent each time it's played.
Failure to pay the royalty bill at the end of each month would result in the guitar refusing to 'activate' at the start of the next gig. Either that, or physically incapable of all chords except those for 'Achy Breaky Heart'
Well, tax the shareware downloads, as well as other stuff sold, as in, money actually paid. Kinda defensible - why should the internet be used as a sales tax shelter, particularly when people pay sales tax for fax, snail-mail and phone orders.
But don't let them get any ideas about taxing downloads in cases where there is no money paid. Fucked if I want to go to bed after typing 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and wake up to find $25 added to my tax bill.
...is often reported by people undergoing the process of Rebirthing.
This process, through a deep connected breathwork discipline, appears to simultaneously engage the sympathetic and autonomous nervous systems via the breath, and open a deep portal into the subconscious.
Allegations of 'false memory syndrome' can't be thrown lightly, because in many cases people have had memories of their earliest infancy, even birth and inside the womb, that have been later substantiated with hospital records, accounts from relatives etc.
Rebirthing is in desperate need of formal scientific study, but the memory retrieval phenomenon suggests that individual cells of the body may be capable of storing memory, albeit in a much different way to the neural-net cerebral-based memory we're familiar with.
Personally, I've seen more than enough to forever debunk any notions that retrievable memory can only be written after the first couple of years of infancy.
I've been self-employed for 7 years now, and wouldn't dream of going back to the paycheck.
Hurts a bit at lean times, but it's better than sucking coc^H^H^Hup to idiots and trashing your self-esteem.
With your device-level skills, you could team up with other IT-ers with complementary skills, have a few bourbons or cafe lattes or acid trips, whatever works for you, and brainstorm up some ideas.
Put the 20 best ideas into a list, and sleep on them. Get together into a renovated garage and create something that'll blow everyone away. End up in a position where you don't ever have to touch a keyboard again (except where it gives you pleasure).
...because if some sufficiently skilled h4x0rz put your ideas into practice, and launch global worm warfare, some accusing fingers could end up pointing in your direction.
But if the worms do their job sufficiently well, the police/justice systems will be so adversely affected that your arrest papers won't even see the light of day:)
Well done, dude! You've covered a lot of angles in your paper. You may have even launched the bootloader for Project Mayhem!
On one hand, I can understand that the up-front capital expenditure for all the cable infrastructure has yet to pay for itself, and that while bandwidth is currently a somewhat scarce resource, it does need to be divvied up more fairly.
But a real menace lurks within all this: the prospect of cable companies charging different fees according to types and providers of content.
What this could mean is that there could be a list of news sites, music stations etc which can be accessed freely, even gigs per month. But accessing any site which isn't in the cable companies' "good books" (read: payola), runs up the traffic charges.
The real agenda of the copyright enforcement lobby is to create a closed shop which bars the entry of new players - musicians, software developers, movie makers.
The only downside is it will take a while to build X, or any other large package(Gnome, KDE, etc).
You can say that again. On average, a package takes about twice as long to download in source form than in binary form. Also, source takes about as much time again to build. So all up, you're looking at about 4 times as long to install a given Gentoo package as the same package on Debian.
While Gentoo takes you close to the bleeding edge, and while its build system is well put together, it is a far more complicated process to set up a system to your tastes than it is with Debian. You need to know a lot of esoteric internals with some key packages, and are left in a position of often having to beg for help on the #gentoo irc channel.
After going back to Debian sid, I was surprised to find that Debian goes from power-up to usable desktop in 2/3 of the time Gentoo takes (which is 1/2 the time Mandrake takes).
In conclusion, there is no bliss which compares to an installed and working Debian desktop. The installer might not be pretty, but once you're up, you can trust apt-get to add anything you want, to a state which actually works.
I heard of someone who's intent on raising several million dollars to finance the hardware, software, connectivity and legal expenses of a new generation international spam-fighting network.
Seems he'll meet his funding targets, after being promised a substantial sum from a former government dignitary from Nigeria...
I wonder if it might be possible to install some of one's software on such drives?
If so, I could just imagine hordes of stressed-out execs on the Tokyo subway, turning their drives on in the train, then sitting down with some hot sake' and enjoying all the pr0n and mp3s the drive collected during the trip home./me envisions a disturbing scenario where people in crowded public places are randomly searched for bombs, chemical weapons AND illicit wireless stor age devices
About the only reason the Net is quasi-democratic today, and why it isn't *only* a marketing force-feed to disempowered consumers, is timing and surprise.
The traditional media playing field is a sheer vertical cliff, but the Internet turned out to be merely a steep hill.
Why?
Because decades before the net attracted real interest from Big Media, the universities with their more open philosophies built the underlying TCP/IP layers on a peer2peer premise.
Yes, folks - yes, RIAA/MPAA/BSA - the core infrastructure of the Net is Peer2Peer!
It would have taken only one media magnate, back in the 1970s, to envision the possibilities, and start taking interest in, investing in, and ultimately controlling the evolution of the technology, and the internet today (and the world) would have been a totally different place.
Instead of TCP/IP, we could have instead seen a network architecture based on strictly one-way client-server, with absolutely no possibility of peer connections.
Like, imagine if the Internet was instead completely modelled on SNA (or a variant thereof), where all protocols and protocol implementations were tightly patented and copyrighted, where you can't even log in without Big Media knowing about it and adding to your bill, where Big Media owns all the international backbones, routers, switches.
As an example - in such a regime, you would need to sign a strict and expensive licensing agreement , and purchase and install expensive equipment, just to run a web server - and Big Media's editors would have total veto power all your content. They would charge whatever they like for each hit to your site - even $1/click. Any content clashing with their editorial policy would get pulled, and your site possibly terminated.
Phew!
History has been so kind to us! It feels to me that the Net is the offer of redemption for centuries of people's mass folly in giving away their rights.
Let's not get complacent and lose what little freedom we have left in this new frontier.
By the time all the hardware technology becomes available, the whole space of software - languages, algorithms, protocols, data structures etc - will be completely patented and owned by warring corporate interests.
The royalties on all the software patents will exceed, by orders of magnitude, the costs of hardware, training, admin etc. NASA will never be able to afford it.
Worse, if NASA just goes ahead and codes like they did in the '50s and '60s. Imagine sitting in the spacecraft, just entering the red planet's atmosphere, and hearing on the radio:
"Aries, this is Houston... we have a problem... we've been prosecuted under the DMCA for using patented navigation algorithms... we've got no choice but to shut down your guidance and propulsion systems... DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CIRCUMVENT THE SOFTWARE - EVEN IF YOUR SAFETY DEPENDS ON IT - OR YOU WILL BE ARRESTED UPON RETURN TO EARTH!
Worst Nightmare is on its way
on
Spy Fly
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Once they perfect the fly, next it's ants, cockroaches etc.
Ants completely immune to insecticide, crawling into people's houses, looking and listening to everything happening in every room.
Ants crawling into keyboards and sensing keystrokes; into monitors and recording displays;
Insects in cars, flying around the sky, networking and collecting data.
Once the prototypes are worked out, and production is tooled up, it'll be viable to implement 100% surveillance of a entire resident populations.
Or, with extreme micromechanical advances, it'll be devices smaller than a human cell, resistant to human antibodies, that can enter via the nasal passages, travel through the bloodstream, sneak past the blood-brain barrier, and embed into various centres around the brain, including the speech centre. Thus such devices will have the ability to read a portion of human thought (the verbal compenent at least), encode verbal thoughts into a data stream, and use the brain's electricity to power a transmitter, sending the encoded thoughts out to external surveillance insects for collection into government databases.
George Orwell's coined word 'thoughtcrime' will take on a much more literal meaning.
This is one of the most frightening developments I've ever seen. The only thing that might hold it in check is an underground movement of people developing technological counter-measures.
I worked for the Australian subsidiary of Wang Labs, at the time when Wang was the #2 computer company in Australia.
Their R&D department was surging from strength to strength, until the Director made the decision to recruit staff from the sales support team to work as project managers.
Never in my whole computing career was I immersed into such a political cesspit. These posturing pretenders sold out us R&D engineers to the most ridiculously stupid deadlines and functional requirements, skipping testing, fudging demos, and crafting a clever spin which transferred the perceived blame to the engineers for failure to deliver.
After months of being unable to focus on a project, due to constantly moving goalposts and political bitching, I resigned. One week later, most R&D staff were laid off, and a couple of years later, Wang Labs went Chapter 11.
In my 2 jobs following, the project managers were veteran engineers, who played an active and respected part in all aspects of the projects, from design through to maintenance. Any non-technical project managers were routinely beaten into submission by technical management. Took me ages to get over the shock. But these companies were notorious in the industry for being able to deliver more, faster, better and cheaper than their bloated, suit-driven rivals.
For any developer going through interviews, I advise you to ask for some time with one or more project managers, get into technical conversation and see what they know. If they start bullshitting and bluffing - decline the job politely and look forward to the interview with the next company.
Otherwise, your career may suffer unrecoverable damage. Every month you spend in the industry - you are accountable for that time, and hsve to justify it when seeking your next job. Don't be seduced by slightly higher pay packets with the suit-driven outfits - it'll cost you in the long run.
The 1.2.5 release of Galeon is awesome - lots of teething pains gone, just smooth, fast, accurate ergonomic browsing.
Micro$oft would have reason to fear if Galeon's devs were to cut some layers making Galeon capable of piggybacking Mozilla in a Windows environment.
Would take a ton of effort, but with Galeon's vastly superior UI, coupled with its strengths inherited from Mozilla, it'd be worth it a zillion times over.
The large scale recording industry as we now know it started in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
In times when per-capits musical skills were far higher than now, published sheet music was all the rage. The publishers would hire a singer and pianist to appear at every music store to promote the latest offerings. At that time, the product being sold was just the composition - lyrics, melody, arrangement, chords etc.
Later, as mass-production of recordings became viable, this industry changed accordingly, recruiting the best exploitable artists. At that time, many sheet music printers and performing singers/musicians found themselves out of work, as new technology replaced old.
As for mass-communicating the offerings, remember that Buggles song - 'Video Killed the Radio Star' - need I say more? The technology of filmclip production and the rise of colour TV saw a decline in radio's popularity. Ditto for cinemas, as video distribution has partly taken over the movie market.
But society has proved itself capable of making meaningful adaptations to new advances in technology. I suggest that the whole system of private intellectual property ownership was great at the time, but has been made redundant by the explosion of this new technology for cheap efficient distribution.
I now suggest that the recording/publishing industry, as we've known it for a century, is now obsolete - and look forward to seeing the wonderful cultural adaptations that will come in its wake.
The struggle by the recording industry to keep its obsolete business model in place makes about as much sense as ferry operators trying to charge a royalty for everyone skipping the ferry and using the new bridge.
My suggestion to the recording industry would be to start winding up operations, and investing heavily in internet infrastructure, especially broadband. You'll get your goddam money, guys, but you're going to have to adapt!
Slashdot Mirror
REAL programmers:
- know that only weak-minded wimps need high-level languages like Mummy Java and Daddy C++ to write their assembler for them, or lets them shirk the responsibility of knowing what's happening in the processor.
- Are suspicious of assembler anyway, and prefer to write machine code by hand
All this is just a hangover from the 'programmers in white coats' syndrome from the 1950s and 60s. Keep the machine room door locked. Keep out the infidels. Talk as esoterically as possible.IMO, what this discrimination is based on is the fact that with scripting languages, especially Python/Ruby/Perl etc, you can achieve the same task in minutes that in C/C++ or Java can take hours/days/weeks. Same as the recording industry trying to block digital distribution. And same as the ferry operators who would try to stop the bridge from getting built.
It's just "Job Protection". Period.
That's what we, as consumers, are being asked to do.
But here's how it *could* work:
Well, tax the shareware downloads, as well as other stuff sold, as in, money actually paid.
Kinda defensible - why should the internet be used as a sales tax shelter, particularly when people pay sales tax for fax, snail-mail and phone orders.
But don't let them get any ideas about taxing downloads in cases where there is no money paid. Fucked if I want to go to bed after typing 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and wake up to find $25 added to my tax bill.
...is often reported by people undergoing the process of Rebirthing.
This process, through a deep connected breathwork discipline, appears to simultaneously engage the sympathetic and autonomous nervous systems via the breath, and open a deep portal into the subconscious.
Allegations of 'false memory syndrome' can't be thrown lightly, because in many cases people have had memories of their earliest infancy, even birth and inside the womb, that have been later substantiated with hospital records, accounts from relatives etc.
Rebirthing is in desperate need of formal scientific study, but the memory retrieval phenomenon suggests that individual cells of the body may be capable of storing memory, albeit in a much different way to the neural-net cerebral-based memory we're familiar with.
Personally, I've seen more than enough to forever debunk any notions that retrievable memory can only be written after the first couple of years of infancy.
I've been self-employed for 7 years now, and wouldn't dream of going back to the paycheck.
Hurts a bit at lean times, but it's better than sucking coc^H^H^Hup to idiots and trashing your self-esteem.
With your device-level skills, you could team up with other IT-ers with complementary skills, have a few bourbons or cafe lattes or acid trips, whatever works for you, and brainstorm up some ideas.
Put the 20 best ideas into a list, and sleep on them. Get together into a renovated garage and create something that'll blow everyone away. End up in a position where you don't ever have to touch a keyboard again (except where it gives you pleasure).
...because if some sufficiently skilled h4x0rz put your ideas into practice, and launch global worm warfare, some accusing fingers could end up pointing in your direction.
:)
But if the worms do their job sufficiently well, the police/justice systems will be so adversely affected that your arrest papers won't even see the light of day
Well done, dude! You've covered a lot of angles in your paper. You may have even launched the bootloader for Project Mayhem!
On one hand, I can understand that the up-front capital expenditure for all the cable infrastructure has yet to pay for itself, and that while bandwidth is currently a somewhat scarce resource, it does need to be divvied up more fairly.
But a real menace lurks within all this: the prospect of cable companies charging different fees according to types and providers of content.
What this could mean is that there could be a list of news sites, music stations etc which can be accessed freely, even gigs per month. But accessing any site which isn't in the cable companies' "good books" (read: payola), runs up the traffic charges.
This to me is the bigger threat.
To state the obvious for the nth time...
The real agenda of the copyright enforcement lobby is to create a closed shop which bars the entry of new players - musicians, software developers, movie makers.
Check out Gentoo Linux [gentoo.org].
I tried it, went back to Debian
The only downside is it will take a while to build X, or any other large package(Gnome, KDE, etc).
You can say that again. On average, a package takes about twice as long to download in source form than in binary form. Also, source takes about as much time again to build. So all up, you're looking at about 4 times as long to install a given Gentoo package as the same package on Debian.
While Gentoo takes you close to the bleeding edge, and while its build system is well put together, it is a far more complicated process to set up a system to your tastes than it is with Debian. You need to know a lot of esoteric internals with some key packages, and are left in a position of often having to beg for help on the #gentoo irc channel.
After going back to Debian sid, I was surprised to find that Debian goes from power-up to usable desktop in 2/3 of the time Gentoo takes (which is 1/2 the time Mandrake takes).
In conclusion, there is no bliss which compares to an installed and working Debian desktop. The installer might not be pretty, but once you're up, you can trust apt-get to add anything you want, to a state which actually works.
I heard of someone who's intent on raising several million dollars to finance the hardware, software, connectivity and legal expenses of a new generation international spam-fighting network.
Seems he'll meet his funding targets, after being promised a substantial sum from a former government dignitary from Nigeria...
Based on an idea that's been /.'ed before...
/me envisions a disturbing scenario where people in crowded public places are randomly searched for bombs, chemical weapons AND illicit wireless stor age devices
I wonder if it might be possible to install some of one's software on such drives?
If so, I could just imagine hordes of stressed-out execs on the Tokyo subway, turning their drives on in the train, then sitting down with some hot sake' and enjoying all the pr0n and mp3s the drive collected during the trip home.
About the only reason the Net is quasi-democratic today, and why it isn't *only* a marketing force-feed to disempowered consumers, is timing and surprise.
The traditional media playing field is a sheer vertical cliff, but the Internet turned out to be merely a steep hill.
Why?
Because decades before the net attracted real interest from Big Media, the universities with their more open philosophies built the underlying TCP/IP layers on a peer2peer premise.
Yes, folks - yes, RIAA/MPAA/BSA - the core infrastructure of the Net is Peer2Peer!
It would have taken only one media magnate, back in the 1970s, to envision the possibilities, and start taking interest in, investing in, and ultimately controlling the evolution of the technology, and the internet today (and the world) would have been a totally different place.
Instead of TCP/IP, we could have instead seen a network architecture based on strictly one-way client-server, with absolutely no possibility of peer connections.
Like, imagine if the Internet was instead completely modelled on SNA (or a variant thereof), where all protocols and protocol implementations were tightly patented and copyrighted, where you can't even log in without Big Media knowing about it and adding to your bill, where Big Media owns all the international backbones, routers, switches.
As an example - in such a regime, you would need to sign a strict and expensive licensing agreement , and purchase and install expensive equipment, just to run a web server - and Big Media's editors would have total veto power all your content. They would charge whatever they like for each hit to your site - even $1/click. Any content clashing with their editorial policy would get pulled, and your site possibly terminated.
Phew!
History has been so kind to us! It feels to me that the Net is the offer of redemption for centuries of people's mass folly in giving away their rights.
Let's not get complacent and lose what little freedom we have left in this new frontier.
Editing movies to dub in *more* obsenities, nudity, violence etc.
Nothing better than a cute woman in an evening dress showing up nude instead!
By the time all the hardware technology becomes available, the whole space of software - languages, algorithms, protocols, data structures etc - will be completely patented and owned by warring corporate interests.
The royalties on all the software patents will exceed, by orders of magnitude, the costs of hardware, training, admin etc. NASA will never be able to afford it.
Worse, if NASA just goes ahead and codes like they did in the '50s and '60s. Imagine sitting in the spacecraft, just entering the red planet's atmosphere, and hearing on the radio:
Once they perfect the fly, next it's ants, cockroaches etc.
Ants completely immune to insecticide, crawling into people's houses, looking and listening to everything happening in every room.
Ants crawling into keyboards and sensing keystrokes; into monitors and recording displays;
Insects in cars, flying around the sky, networking and collecting data.
Once the prototypes are worked out, and production is tooled up, it'll be viable to implement 100% surveillance of a entire resident populations.
Or, with extreme micromechanical advances, it'll be devices smaller than a human cell, resistant to human antibodies, that can enter via the nasal passages, travel through the bloodstream, sneak past the blood-brain barrier, and embed into various centres around the brain, including the speech centre. Thus such devices will have the ability to read a portion of human thought (the verbal compenent at least), encode verbal thoughts into a data stream, and use the brain's electricity to power a transmitter, sending the encoded thoughts out to external surveillance insects for collection into government databases.
George Orwell's coined word 'thoughtcrime' will take on a much more literal meaning.
This is one of the most frightening developments I've ever seen. The only thing that might hold it in check is an underground movement of people developing technological counter-measures.
I worked for the Australian subsidiary of Wang Labs, at the time when Wang was the #2 computer company in Australia.
Their R&D department was surging from strength to strength, until the Director made the decision to recruit staff from the sales support team to work as project managers.
Never in my whole computing career was I immersed into such a political cesspit. These posturing pretenders sold out us R&D engineers to the most ridiculously stupid deadlines and functional requirements, skipping testing, fudging demos, and crafting a clever spin which transferred the perceived blame to the engineers for failure to deliver.
After months of being unable to focus on a project, due to constantly moving goalposts and political bitching, I resigned. One week later, most R&D staff were laid off, and a couple of years later, Wang Labs went Chapter 11.
In my 2 jobs following, the project managers were veteran engineers, who played an active and respected part in all aspects of the projects, from design through to maintenance. Any non-technical project managers were routinely beaten into submission by technical management. Took me ages to get over the shock. But these companies were notorious in the industry for being able to deliver more, faster, better and cheaper than their bloated, suit-driven rivals.
For any developer going through interviews, I advise you to ask for some time with one or more project managers, get into technical conversation and see what they know. If they start bullshitting and bluffing - decline the job politely and look forward to the interview with the next company.
Otherwise, your career may suffer unrecoverable damage. Every month you spend in the industry - you are accountable for that time, and hsve to justify it when seeking your next job. Don't be seduced by slightly higher pay packets with the suit-driven outfits - it'll cost you in the long run.
Exemption for Open Source!
Exemption for Open Source!!
Exemption for Open Source!!!
Liability makes sense for closed-source software, since the user has no power to procure fixes.
But leave open source software out of any liability provisions - the availability of source surely strengthens the caveat emptor line.
Just mix in a few 1000 digit primes.
Chop fish into 128 pieces, add and blow.
Simmer and stir, and allow 1-3 secs for CPU to cool.
Talk when done.
Guess what kind of new high-tech sunglasses will become all the rage?
The 1.2.5 release of Galeon is awesome - lots of teething pains gone, just smooth, fast, accurate ergonomic browsing.
Micro$oft would have reason to fear if Galeon's devs were to cut some layers making Galeon capable of piggybacking Mozilla in a Windows environment.
Would take a ton of effort, but with Galeon's vastly superior UI, coupled with its strengths inherited from Mozilla, it'd be worth it a zillion times over.
The large scale recording industry as we now know it started in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
In times when per-capits musical skills were far higher than now, published sheet music was all the rage. The publishers would hire a singer and pianist to appear at every music store to promote the latest offerings. At that time, the product being sold was just the composition - lyrics, melody, arrangement, chords etc.
Later, as mass-production of recordings became viable, this industry changed accordingly, recruiting the best exploitable artists. At that time, many sheet music printers and performing singers/musicians found themselves out of work, as new technology replaced old.
As for mass-communicating the offerings, remember that Buggles song - 'Video Killed the Radio Star' - need I say more? The technology of filmclip production and the rise of colour TV saw a decline in radio's popularity. Ditto for cinemas, as video distribution has partly taken over the movie market.
But society has proved itself capable of making meaningful adaptations to new advances in technology. I suggest that the whole system of private intellectual property ownership was great at the time, but has been made redundant by the explosion of this new technology for cheap efficient distribution.
I now suggest that the recording/publishing industry, as we've known it for a century, is now obsolete - and look forward to seeing the wonderful cultural adaptations that will come in its wake.
The struggle by the recording industry to keep its obsolete business model in place makes about as much sense as ferry operators trying to charge a royalty for everyone skipping the ferry and using the new bridge.
My suggestion to the recording industry would be to start winding up operations, and investing heavily in internet infrastructure, especially broadband. You'll get your goddam money, guys, but you're going to have to adapt!
rm -i `find / -name \*truth\*`
vi `find / -name \*truth\*
Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.
> Spoken like someone who's never done LSD
My friend, I was joking. I actually did acid for 14 years, and took probably 250-400 trips in all.
But there comes a point where acid feels like 'window-shopping' and one starts to seek those transcendental states in real life.