Google did things in the Android system that make a lot more sense for the mobile phone market than on the server or desktop. Much of it they did by forking the kernel in ways that were not accepted upstream. It's Linux, but in many ways it's a fork of Linux that so far hasn't been merged with the official tree.
Your logic led to this point, but didn't come out and make it: the "look at these apps" marketing is what desktop Linux is missing. Android didn't have a market before the phones were released.
Positioning desktop-class (including laptops, netbooks, and anything else with a desktop OS and desktop metaphor) computers as CE devices with different groups of applications available failed in the early to mid 1980's largely due to Microsoft's identification with IBM and their dirty tricks. They didn't always have a stranglehold on the market.
For phones Apple, Nokia, and RIM were strongly established as providers of leading devices. Microsoft had a decent share of the market, too, based largely on their name form the desktop despite decent but underwhelming phone OSes. Then along comes Android, which was not compatible with any of the other phones (except a very limited source code compatibility with some Nokia devices that run other versions of Linux).
The only desktop-class line of computers sold as a system of quality applications rather than as an open box of possibilities is the Mac. Apple, during years they've done well with the Mac, has touted it largely as just that: an application system.
The iPod and iPhone are targeted at markets the same way, despite the "Apple factor" of coolness and sleek design. They are not sold as replacements for other products, even though there were plenty of MP3 players and cell phones when they came out. They were sold based on what they did and how well they did it, with the design thrown in.
The Mac, likewise, is not sold as a Windows replacement, despite the "I'm a Mac" commercials. They are sold as systems which have great apps and on which the apps run without many problems. The real irony here is that Windows 7 is now being marketed based on features rather than on ubiquity.
Broad popularity of Linux on the desktop is not even a goal of many people who develop Linux and Linux applications. It's likewise not a goal of everyone who uses it on servers. It's not even a goal for everyone who loves Linux on their own desktops, although it might make things easier on them.
If someone wants broad popularity of Linux on the desktop, though, it needs this sort of mindset that has formed around Android. It needs it not just in marketing, but in at least part of the development and documentation community. People need to see Linux not as a check-list alternative that might be able to replace Windows for some of their needs.
They need to see a big pool of great applications that fill their needs first. Only secondly do they need to see some benefits of that pool of applications over the one they have with Windows. Thirdly, they need to have an easy migration path from one to the other no matter which way they are going. They need to be confident in both moving to Linux and in being able to move back to Windows.
It's a limited course with probably one hour of credit involved. You can't teach everything in it. That's what the other courses at the university are for, to fill in the gaps in this freshman seminar.
Seriously, it seems too many scientists don't even understand enough of the history and nature of science to know that science is empiricism and empiricism is philosophy. If you accept science and reject every other branch of philosophy without knowing what science is, you've already failed at your quest to understand the human experience.
So many people engaged in hard sciences or even in technological fields point out the empirical progress made in science and technology as proof that science is real and good, not to mention really good. Yet they discount any good any other branch of philosophy may have contributed to human culture, such as ethical considerations about what to do with all that knowledge.
Is it right to create something that can kill a hundred thousand people with one action? It's been done, and it's been used. Is it right? Science is a study of what empirically is. There is no right or wrong in science. There are no ethics, there are no morals, and there are no goals other than knowledge and possibly application of that knowledge. However, it is unwise to practice science without also applying ethics and morals, which responsible scientists understand.
Yes, sciences and the applied sciences have made life more fulfilling for many and easier for a great many people. Has it made life better, though? Is easier objectively or subjectively better for everyone? Isn't much of science and technology even the tools some groups use to exploit others, making part of the world more secure and easier in which to live than the others?
If you push for understanding of science without understanding of other things, then you're blind. Just ask Einstein. Science has its place in the world, but it's not what defines the human experience.
You've already made several philosophical decisions by the time you decide the empirical objective world holds any importance at all. Once you hold that it is important, there are a great many more philosophical questions before you get to the decision that science is any more important than some other discipline. It would do people some good to understand that as part of the human experience, too.
The one freshman seminar course can't teach everything, though. Perhaps they need a sophomore interdisciplinary required course that teaches an appreciation of science to the liberal arts crowd and an appreciation of the humanities to the science majors.
You're free to print a book on an open hardware platform. It's just that not so many of those exist that work on the scale of commercial publication of books. Feel free to contribute.;)
Lucky you. The 200 Mhz Pentium was a very pricy processor when some of us went to college, and didn't even exist yet for a couple of full generations of CS students.
Although most of the game is tongue-in-cheek, there are plenty of philosophical subjects in Portal. I imagine that's much more important than the students winning the game. Playing the first couple of training missions and watching a recorded demo of the rest would be enough to discuss the game.
The topics of how much control to give AI (from the main computer and GladOS to the AI sentry guns), how people react to the apparently inanimate companion cube after being told there's something alive in it, the symbolism of the cake in different contexts (as an actual cake, as any generic abstract reward for finishing a task, as a symbol for eternal rewards in religions, etc), the idea of lying about a reward to motivate someone you're never going to provide with the reward, and probably at least half a dozen ideas I'm not bringing to the fore right now.
Several of the above topics would be ripe fruit for ethical discussions as well.
There are also the logic puzzles involved, which for quite a while after the game's initial release led to cartoon panels all over the Web in which people had created their own Portal mini-levels, often involving actual cake rather than just an escape route. Puzzles such as these are sometimes used to solicit creative solutions and promote other kinds of creative thinking.
This isn't Doom or Unreal Tournament. When a game really makes you think, it's probably as culturally important as a play, movie, or book that makes you think. If it makes you think about issues that are actually important, then it's probably as relevant as any other art form that makes you think about important issues.
You're violating Occam's Razor by insisting you needed to be mentally retarded to carelessly take part of a paragraph out of context.
You're also violating Occam's Razor (and Hanlon's Razor too for that matter) by insisting that rather than making a mistake, a misquoting must happen for malicious reasons.
You are admittedly letting one word ("anyway") overshadow the context of the paragraph together. Even after including the sentence you conveniently forgot to include the first time, you emphasize everything but that.
You wanted clarification, you got it, and you're still saying I don't communicate effectively. You would appear to believe that intertactive communication requires hours of editing and proofreading in order to be as clear as humanly possible like authoritative journals, even after you admit that you took my summary to imply something that wasn't explicitly stated.
Pot, meet kettle. This isn't the JAMA, and you're not a flawless communicator in informal media yourself. I doubt very much after this exchange that you'd be qualified to write in formal media.
I missed the part about reusing pads, even after rereading. "You encrypt them with the last/reserved OTP the other end has." is mistaken in the idea that you can use a bitstring longer than the pad itself. It's not really a suggestion to reuse a pad that's already been used, though. It's a suggestion that the new pad be encrypted with the last pad bits not used from the old pad source.
One could chain-block a partial pad out to cover a larger cleartext, but then you're not really utilizing a full one-time pad.
In the end, almost any bug is security related anyway. A denial of service by crashing my system is security related. A denial of service by tying up my ports is security related. Gaining unauthorized access is security related. Gaining more than authorized access is security related. Any bug more serious than a color or a pixel alignment being off in a UI is pretty much security-related, because security means the system is available to authorized, authenticated users and not to anyone else.
Anything that can overrun a buffer or smash the stack can execute arbitrary code if you play around with your delivery package enough. Lots of code out there has stack or buffer issues. Some web browsers used to be exploitable just by overrunning the address bar's buffer, no executable code at all until the buffer overruns and you overwrite a JMP instruction to jump into part of what you wrote to the unchecked buffer.
Security is hard. It's even harder when you're not using a language or libraries that check for proper array and buffer bounds.
I fail to see how a commodity bought with real money could cost CCP anything just because it is traded in-game. I don't even want people so stupid as to think buying it from CCP and then trading it further will mean that CCP didn't sell it in the first place reading Slashdot.
in the mid '90s I was running stereo 5.1 encoded out of my sound card and into a receiver. The receiver ran 5.1 with 125 watts for each front, 110 center, and 110 each rear. The fronts were five-ways with 12" subs, 9" woofers, mids, mid-tweets, and tweeters. Then there was the 110-watt 10" self-powered sub with its own adjustable bandpass and volume in aircraft aluminum box with woodgrain black vinyl cover. Yeah, it's not quite as geeky as your setup, but I could throw a party with Modplug or DMP, and Heretic was just freaking spooky with those wizards breathing behind me.
The motherboard in this PC doesn't support any floppy drives unless I get a USB one.
The box sitting next to me has a 5.25", a 3.5", a DDS3 tape drive, a CD-ROM (I have enough DVD burners in other PCs it really doesn't need a burner, and I didn't have a SCSI burner lying around -- all the PATA are taken up by hard drives), a system PATA drive and a three PATA in software RAID 5. That's the system with my ZIp-250 hooked up to it, too. It' was my main Linux desktop at my office before I started working out of my house, and I used it for a lot of data recovery and emulation for older stuff.
Somewhere in this house I have a working 250-megabyte tape drive, but it's not installed in anything right now.
I have a SunServer 600 you can pick up or I'll charge shipping plus 5%. Just remember, people without a raised dock generally pay $50-$75 for a lift-gate fee.;)
If you're getting it at the airport without calling ahead, it's because one of the bases for that black car service is at the airport and you're visiting their base in person. You cannot hail it at the curb. The trip must be prearranged. In English, as a matter of fact, "to call" or "to call on" someone meant to visit in person before the telephone was ever invented.
In the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission Rules and Local Laws book, Chapter 6 on For-Hire Vehicles, Section 16 "Conditions of Operation for For-Hire Vehicle Drivers", rule "f" states:
A driver shall not solicit or pick up passengers by means other than prearrangement through a licensed base, except that the driver of a wheelchair accessible livery may be dispatched as provided in chapter 16 of this title.
rule "g" states:
A driver shall not pick up a passenger at an authorized taxi stand.
So yes, you do have to prearrange the trip, per the law. Just because they have a base at the airport for your convenience doesn't mean you can just hail them on the street. still have to arrange the trip at their base either in person or by some electronic means.
I did keep that in mind. Hence the sentence just before what you selectively almost blockquoted, which you conveniently left out of your almost blockquote. That whole part about "Some players buy PLEXes with IRL currency and sell it for isk or trade it for other stuff in-game" along with what you almost blockquoted pretty much says that. Why be so selective in your almost-blockquoting just to repeat a point?
Okay, so Best Buy (who should be sued for using that name since they almost never are even close to being the best buy, but that's a whole different issue) has changed their policy to be more customer-friendly in the last few years. That original receipt they tell you to show to get the balance replaced, though, they also tell you to have with the card when you redeem it in case the card malfunctions. Convenient that you keep them together but you need the one to replace the other. I guess make sure you get a duplicate receipt at the register whenever you buy a gift card and keep it separate.
Also, it says they can, and only under that one circumstance that you can produce the original receipt. It does not say they are bound by anything other than their published policy to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Google did things in the Android system that make a lot more sense for the mobile phone market than on the server or desktop. Much of it they did by forking the kernel in ways that were not accepted upstream. It's Linux, but in many ways it's a fork of Linux that so far hasn't been merged with the official tree.
Your logic led to this point, but didn't come out and make it: the "look at these apps" marketing is what desktop Linux is missing. Android didn't have a market before the phones were released.
Positioning desktop-class (including laptops, netbooks, and anything else with a desktop OS and desktop metaphor) computers as CE devices with different groups of applications available failed in the early to mid 1980's largely due to Microsoft's identification with IBM and their dirty tricks. They didn't always have a stranglehold on the market.
For phones Apple, Nokia, and RIM were strongly established as providers of leading devices. Microsoft had a decent share of the market, too, based largely on their name form the desktop despite decent but underwhelming phone OSes. Then along comes Android, which was not compatible with any of the other phones (except a very limited source code compatibility with some Nokia devices that run other versions of Linux).
The only desktop-class line of computers sold as a system of quality applications rather than as an open box of possibilities is the Mac. Apple, during years they've done well with the Mac, has touted it largely as just that: an application system.
The iPod and iPhone are targeted at markets the same way, despite the "Apple factor" of coolness and sleek design. They are not sold as replacements for other products, even though there were plenty of MP3 players and cell phones when they came out. They were sold based on what they did and how well they did it, with the design thrown in.
The Mac, likewise, is not sold as a Windows replacement, despite the "I'm a Mac" commercials. They are sold as systems which have great apps and on which the apps run without many problems. The real irony here is that Windows 7 is now being marketed based on features rather than on ubiquity.
Broad popularity of Linux on the desktop is not even a goal of many people who develop Linux and Linux applications. It's likewise not a goal of everyone who uses it on servers. It's not even a goal for everyone who loves Linux on their own desktops, although it might make things easier on them.
If someone wants broad popularity of Linux on the desktop, though, it needs this sort of mindset that has formed around Android. It needs it not just in marketing, but in at least part of the development and documentation community. People need to see Linux not as a check-list alternative that might be able to replace Windows for some of their needs.
They need to see a big pool of great applications that fill their needs first. Only secondly do they need to see some benefits of that pool of applications over the one they have with Windows. Thirdly, they need to have an easy migration path from one to the other no matter which way they are going. They need to be confident in both moving to Linux and in being able to move back to Windows.
It's a limited course with probably one hour of credit involved. You can't teach everything in it. That's what the other courses at the university are for, to fill in the gaps in this freshman seminar.
Seriously, it seems too many scientists don't even understand enough of the history and nature of science to know that science is empiricism and empiricism is philosophy. If you accept science and reject every other branch of philosophy without knowing what science is, you've already failed at your quest to understand the human experience.
So many people engaged in hard sciences or even in technological fields point out the empirical progress made in science and technology as proof that science is real and good, not to mention really good. Yet they discount any good any other branch of philosophy may have contributed to human culture, such as ethical considerations about what to do with all that knowledge.
Is it right to create something that can kill a hundred thousand people with one action? It's been done, and it's been used. Is it right? Science is a study of what empirically is. There is no right or wrong in science. There are no ethics, there are no morals, and there are no goals other than knowledge and possibly application of that knowledge. However, it is unwise to practice science without also applying ethics and morals, which responsible scientists understand.
Yes, sciences and the applied sciences have made life more fulfilling for many and easier for a great many people. Has it made life better, though? Is easier objectively or subjectively better for everyone? Isn't much of science and technology even the tools some groups use to exploit others, making part of the world more secure and easier in which to live than the others?
If you push for understanding of science without understanding of other things, then you're blind. Just ask Einstein. Science has its place in the world, but it's not what defines the human experience.
You've already made several philosophical decisions by the time you decide the empirical objective world holds any importance at all. Once you hold that it is important, there are a great many more philosophical questions before you get to the decision that science is any more important than some other discipline. It would do people some good to understand that as part of the human experience, too.
The one freshman seminar course can't teach everything, though. Perhaps they need a sophomore interdisciplinary required course that teaches an appreciation of science to the liberal arts crowd and an appreciation of the humanities to the science majors.
Well, we can have gluten-free cake sweetened with applesauce rather than sugar, but we don't want it.
Some of his works have been said to belong properly to Ben Jonson as well.
You're free to print a book on an open hardware platform. It's just that not so many of those exist that work on the scale of commercial publication of books. Feel free to contribute. ;)
Lucky you. The 200 Mhz Pentium was a very pricy processor when some of us went to college, and didn't even exist yet for a couple of full generations of CS students.
Although most of the game is tongue-in-cheek, there are plenty of philosophical subjects in Portal. I imagine that's much more important than the students winning the game. Playing the first couple of training missions and watching a recorded demo of the rest would be enough to discuss the game.
The topics of how much control to give AI (from the main computer and GladOS to the AI sentry guns), how people react to the apparently inanimate companion cube after being told there's something alive in it, the symbolism of the cake in different contexts (as an actual cake, as any generic abstract reward for finishing a task, as a symbol for eternal rewards in religions, etc), the idea of lying about a reward to motivate someone you're never going to provide with the reward, and probably at least half a dozen ideas I'm not bringing to the fore right now.
Several of the above topics would be ripe fruit for ethical discussions as well.
There are also the logic puzzles involved, which for quite a while after the game's initial release led to cartoon panels all over the Web in which people had created their own Portal mini-levels, often involving actual cake rather than just an escape route. Puzzles such as these are sometimes used to solicit creative solutions and promote other kinds of creative thinking.
This isn't Doom or Unreal Tournament. When a game really makes you think, it's probably as culturally important as a play, movie, or book that makes you think. If it makes you think about issues that are actually important, then it's probably as relevant as any other art form that makes you think about important issues.
You're violating Occam's Razor by insisting you needed to be mentally retarded to carelessly take part of a paragraph out of context.
You're also violating Occam's Razor (and Hanlon's Razor too for that matter) by insisting that rather than making a mistake, a misquoting must happen for malicious reasons.
You are admittedly letting one word ("anyway") overshadow the context of the paragraph together. Even after including the sentence you conveniently forgot to include the first time, you emphasize everything but that.
You wanted clarification, you got it, and you're still saying I don't communicate effectively. You would appear to believe that intertactive communication requires hours of editing and proofreading in order to be as clear as humanly possible like authoritative journals, even after you admit that you took my summary to imply something that wasn't explicitly stated.
Pot, meet kettle. This isn't the JAMA, and you're not a flawless communicator in informal media yourself. I doubt very much after this exchange that you'd be qualified to write in formal media.
Yes, please have jam and marmalade.
I missed the part about reusing pads, even after rereading. "You encrypt them with the last/reserved OTP the other end has." is mistaken in the idea that you can use a bitstring longer than the pad itself. It's not really a suggestion to reuse a pad that's already been used, though. It's a suggestion that the new pad be encrypted with the last pad bits not used from the old pad source.
One could chain-block a partial pad out to cover a larger cleartext, but then you're not really utilizing a full one-time pad.
Now THAT's what I call self-healing software!
FROSTY PISS!
In the end, almost any bug is security related anyway. A denial of service by crashing my system is security related. A denial of service by tying up my ports is security related. Gaining unauthorized access is security related. Gaining more than authorized access is security related. Any bug more serious than a color or a pixel alignment being off in a UI is pretty much security-related, because security means the system is available to authorized, authenticated users and not to anyone else.
Anything that can overrun a buffer or smash the stack can execute arbitrary code if you play around with your delivery package enough. Lots of code out there has stack or buffer issues. Some web browsers used to be exploitable just by overrunning the address bar's buffer, no executable code at all until the buffer overruns and you overwrite a JMP instruction to jump into part of what you wrote to the unchecked buffer.
Security is hard. It's even harder when you're not using a language or libraries that check for proper array and buffer bounds.
I fail to see how a commodity bought with real money could cost CCP anything just because it is traded in-game. I don't even want people so stupid as to think buying it from CCP and then trading it further will mean that CCP didn't sell it in the first place reading Slashdot.
Nah. Ticked off clients are a dime a dozen. Turning them back into happy clients is the expensive part. ;-)
in the mid '90s I was running stereo 5.1 encoded out of my sound card and into a receiver. The receiver ran 5.1 with 125 watts for each front, 110 center, and 110 each rear. The fronts were five-ways with 12" subs, 9" woofers, mids, mid-tweets, and tweeters. Then there was the 110-watt 10" self-powered sub with its own adjustable bandpass and volume in aircraft aluminum box with woodgrain black vinyl cover. Yeah, it's not quite as geeky as your setup, but I could throw a party with Modplug or DMP, and Heretic was just freaking spooky with those wizards breathing behind me.
The motherboard in this PC doesn't support any floppy drives unless I get a USB one.
The box sitting next to me has a 5.25", a 3.5", a DDS3 tape drive, a CD-ROM (I have enough DVD burners in other PCs it really doesn't need a burner, and I didn't have a SCSI burner lying around -- all the PATA are taken up by hard drives), a system PATA drive and a three PATA in software RAID 5. That's the system with my ZIp-250 hooked up to it, too. It' was my main Linux desktop at my office before I started working out of my house, and I used it for a lot of data recovery and emulation for older stuff.
Somewhere in this house I have a working 250-megabyte tape drive, but it's not installed in anything right now.
I have a SunServer 600 you can pick up or I'll charge shipping plus 5%. Just remember, people without a raised dock generally pay $50-$75 for a lift-gate fee. ;)
Waaaaaaaaaaay pre-Intel. As in pre-G3. Yeah, they existed. You could get a 386 or 486 in your Powermac 7300 or so.
list of NYC TLC rules just in case anyone's too lazy to search
If you're getting it at the airport without calling ahead, it's because one of the bases for that black car service is at the airport and you're visiting their base in person. You cannot hail it at the curb. The trip must be prearranged. In English, as a matter of fact, "to call" or "to call on" someone meant to visit in person before the telephone was ever invented.
In the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission Rules and Local Laws book, Chapter 6 on For-Hire Vehicles, Section 16 "Conditions of Operation for For-Hire Vehicle Drivers", rule "f" states:
rule "g" states:
So yes, you do have to prearrange the trip, per the law. Just because they have a base at the airport for your convenience doesn't mean you can just hail them on the street. still have to arrange the trip at their base either in person or by some electronic means.
I did keep that in mind. Hence the sentence just before what you selectively almost blockquoted, which you conveniently left out of your almost blockquote. That whole part about "Some players buy PLEXes with IRL currency and sell it for isk or trade it for other stuff in-game" along with what you almost blockquoted pretty much says that. Why be so selective in your almost-blockquoting just to repeat a point?
First, what do you mean "again"?
Okay, so Best Buy (who should be sued for using that name since they almost never are even close to being the best buy, but that's a whole different issue) has changed their policy to be more customer-friendly in the last few years. That original receipt they tell you to show to get the balance replaced, though, they also tell you to have with the card when you redeem it in case the card malfunctions. Convenient that you keep them together but you need the one to replace the other. I guess make sure you get a duplicate receipt at the register whenever you buy a gift card and keep it separate.
Also, it says they can, and only under that one circumstance that you can produce the original receipt. It does not say they are bound by anything other than their published policy to do so.