Linux is essentially all modular. It's so modular that Linux is the wrong word.
"Linux," properly speaking, is just the kernel, which is a very small part of what you think you're getting when you buy or download a distribution. The philosophy of all UN*X systems is essentially the opposite of the Windows philosophy. Make the real OS, the kernel, as small as possible, and build up the system by adding parts. The kernel is a crucial part, but most of what makes up what you think of as Linux has nothing to do with Linus Torvalds. For this reason, RMS is encouraging people to call it GNU/Linux. He can be strident about it, but he has a point.
I don't see any sense at all to describe it as "pulp sci-fi" rather than mythology, because pulp sci-fi is also based on mythology. So are comic books, which I think are the best source for new myths. So are westerns. So is fantasy. Pretty much everything where the protagonist has a quest to defeat evil is based on mythology.
Not everything is mythological. Detective stories, where the protagonists' goal is to restore the status quo, are not mythological. Nor are comedies or romances that are purely personal. However, drama where an external conflict mirrors an internal, personal confict is all myth, almost by definition.
The only question is what Lucas had in mind. This has become obfuscated with time. I have the advantage to be 40 years old, and so I remember what the interviews said. Basically, Lucas' money from THX-1138 was running out, and he didn't want to get a job. So he made Star Wars. He based it on westerns and war movies, particularly the 1930 WWI movie "Hell's Angels."
Then it became popular beyond his wildest dreams. The idea that it would be part of a trilogy of trilogies came later. The "Episode IV" wasn't on until it was re-released. Joseph Campbell picked up on Star Wars as a way of teaching mythology. He could have used any of hundreds of pop culture references, but Star Wars was succesful on an unprecedented level. I'm sure that Lucas had heard of Campbell, but the mythology really is in Star Wars because that's what people do when they make certain kinds of arts.
You're absolutely right about this. I'm another semi-old-timer. In the early 1980's, I was on the team (six people, all with developer background) to write a bisynchronous communications package (HASP station emulator). We had a standing offer--anybody who could find a bug would get a free dinner at any restaurant. We only had to pay off once.
Nobody seems to care about doing this anymore, or maybe they never did in the first place, and we were all just naive.
Does anybody know how to get 60 Minutes or Consumers' Reports to do a story like this? Here's how I imagine it. You find a typical or even sophisticated user who is trying to do an ordinary thing. Preferably it should be someone who is adamant about how bad pirates are. Then you get a lawyer to go over the EULA, find out how much he had to do that was illegal, and explain it to him.
I have to shake my head at this kind of reasoning. It's something like this: We have to revile RMS at every possible opportunity, or else he will instantly force us all to live in some hippy commune. Boo, RMS!
I don't have a problem with RMS living his life the way he wants to live it. I have a big problem with his shoving his
version of "freedom" down my throat.
The chance of this ever happening is miniscule compared to, say, Elvis taking over your brain by shooting zoobie rays from the flying saucer he got from the elves. Come on! It isn't going to happen.
If I want to use closed source, proprietary software, then dammit RMS stay the
hell out of my machine.
What, did he come to your house, break down the door, and force you at gunpoint to erase all your proprietary sofware licenses? Or are you being just a teensy bit paranoid?
The best we can hope for is a world in which some free software continues to exist and is not made totally illegal under pressure by the MPAA, RIAA, international media companies, etc. It's like a tug-of-war, and if you're outnumbered, you have to pull the rope really hard. I'm not like RMS, but I'm very glad he's out there and getting interviewed.
It is good that RMS exists, and it is also good that he has extreme opinions, because they define the arena within which consensus is built. He'll never get his way, but because of him and others, the mega-corporations may not get their way, which would be no freedom for anybody, ever, under any circumstances.
That's the choice here. It isn't RMS's vision versus a more moderate one. Closed source, proprietary software isn't going away. Ever.
It has long been said that nobody would have listened to Martin Luther King if the Black Panthers hadn't been there as an alternative. I think this is accurate. Nobody would listen to Linus or ESR if RMS weren't there, either. Consensus-building just doesn't work that way.
OK, I don't know how to do it myself, and it probably won't have an effect, but heyyyy...
Your theory that Americans don't know or care what's going on in the world is simply untrue.
I agree. In fact, I would say that with respect to 9/11, the situation is just the reverse. People in the rest of the world don't know or care what happens in America. The Germans didn't know or care what happens in America when they blew up the Lusitania. The Japanese didn't know or care when they bombed Pearl Harbor. Al Quaeda didn't know or care when they attacked the WTC (notice that the Pentagon is seldom mentioned?). People in the rest of the world have had a century to figure out what America is, and they still haven't learned.
Some people can never be made happy, no matter what choices America makes.
Minor quibble--I think they're very happy. Hatred of an all-evil foe is very happy-making, which is why there have been so many articles about LOTR. Add in the nobility of supreme sacrifice, and you have a lot of happy people. They may be happy by being proud of their (ex-) daughter the suicide bomber, but they like it.
There's an old parable that goes a little bit like this:
Supplicant: O Lord, help us! We suffer from war and crime and hatred and bigotry.
God: So what, if that's what you like?
Supplicant: But that's just it. We don't like it.
God: Well then stop, dum-dum!
Whether most Americans speak more than one language or not may deprive them of some cultural breadth, but that is more
than made up for in the rich tapestry of immigrant culture that has helped build America over the generations.
That's true, but language is a red herring for other reasons. I speak Spanish and German and have lived in Mexico and England and have at least visited most of Europe. This is perhaps not ultimately spectacular, but it isn't too shabby either. Plus I've studied anthropology, and I'm good enough at it to have figured out the algorithm to get Hispanics to show up for dates, which stumps most anthropologists. I may not be representative of all Americans, but I agree with you, and I probably have more cultural breadth than most of the people who don't.
"I can do everything on my PC that I can do on a Mac. Of course, there were some driver and integration issues, but what do you expect? Computers are like that. Also, the video software took a while to get used to, but all software is like that. What do you think, I'm some stupid grandmother who can't figure out a few problems? Deal with it. And I don't have a SuperDrive, but who wants that? And the video software couldn't do some things I wanted, but hey, software has limitations. Besides, I can do everything on a PC that I can do on a Mac. I don't need no fancy cases. Computers are tools; you're not supposed to enjoy using them. And it's cheaper, if you don't buy an external SuperDrive, but as I said, who wants that?"
That's approximately what I hear most of the time.
I've used PC's and own one. I've also used Amigas, Ataris, NeXT, DEC Vaxen, IBM SYSTEM/360, SGI, every imaginable UN*X, Alpha, DG Nova, Cyber 205, ETA-10, TRS-80, 68HC00 and 1802-based systems I built from chips, and other stuff I can't remember right now. Not to mention overclocking the direct video board on a Thinking Machines CM-2 with 65536 processors.
I like the Mac. A G4 is my current development/word processing/video editing machine. I have no fear of hacking hardware, but when I feel like doing that, I whip out the breadboards and do it. The Mac gives me something that nothing except the Amiga gives me--an environment where issues were thought out, not always with perfect solutions, but always with a craftsmanship that is a cut above the rest. I spent most of my life and still spend it at work putting together large pieces of software. I like being able to whip out a tool with just a few lines of code in Cocoa; I like being able to have undo/redo from day 1; I like dealing with the products of designers, developers, and engineers who are not my intellectual inferiors, and I don't mind the fact that they make more money than the average code monkey, nor that this money comes out of my pocket. I like having a cooperative rather than an adversarial relationship with those who write the API's I use.
Some people don't like that sort of thing. That's cool. But you can't compare apples with mock apple pie.
I know that it's heretical to point this out, but the fact that 16-year-olds are worse drivers than 18-year-olds is at least in part because they don't have two years' experience.
The guy was wrong, though. If it were just restrictions (which already exist), it wouldn't be that big a deal. Many states are considering raising the driving age to 18, period. This seems to be based on two assumptions:
On your 18th birthday, the magic Good Driving Gene all of a sudden gets expressed.
It's much safer to make someone's first experience behind the wheel of a car happen without any parental supervision at all, especially if they're in a fraternity at college.
Clocks below you tick more slowly, and clocks above you tick more quickly. This would be true even in a uniform gravitational field. Of course, the gravitational field around the Earth isn't uniform, so clocks below you tick more and more slowly the more down they are. So, there's a linear change and a nonlinear change. Fortunately, the linear part can be compensated with a constant factor, so it doesn't require much math. Also, the nonlinear part isn't so great as long as you are on the surface, and you can't get the signals in deep mine shafts anyway.
As an officer in the Air Force, perhaps you have some insight.
Back in the 1980's, I was at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, a DOE-funded site. Although ours was the designated unclassified site, we dealt with a lot of groups (Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore, etc.) who weren't exactly unconcerned with security. The operating systems they used in house very very tight and had to pass fairly stringent security requirements just to be considered. This was one of the reasons that VMS was so popular; DEC had worked very hard on the security.
If you had asked me then whether this would have happened, I would have laughed.
I can see why the business and consumer cultures played the lemming. But the military has a reputation for getting thing that work, even if they cost, and dammit, Mil Spec used to mean something.
So, what happened?
Frontiers, myths, and humanity
on
Hack in Space
·
· Score: 2
We need to go because the alternative is suicide. We need to go because we are human and wish to continue to be human.
The most valuable result of the moon landing was not the scientific research, the spin-offs, or the political gain. It was the photograph of Earth as seen from the moon, just after Earthrise, taken by a human being, holding the camera.
To continue to have frontiers is more important than anything else. We could cure cancer and AIDS, fix the environment, and become immortal, and we would be nothing more than healthy, immortal apes. But the way of the explorers is a way that apes do not know, and we must keep it. At this juncture, that means deep sea exploration and space exploration, in person, not by robots.
Didn't the scientists actually get the satellite up and running as fast as possible? What would you have had them do, get a really long stick and push it?
The problem is not that you need to push the big button in the sky sometimes. The problem is developing a mentality that says that rebooting the server "fixes" the problem. Rebooting the server is palliative. It keeps people from taking preventative and prophylactic measures. This attitude and its destructiveness are lamentably common in business.
No one knows who the first European visitors to the New World were. The credit generally goes to the Vikings, who reached the New World in about AD 1000, but there are grounds to suppose that others may have been there even earlier. An ancient Latin text, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot), recounts with persuasive detail a seven-year trip to the New World made by this Irish saint and a band of acolytes some four centuries before the Viking--and this on the advice of another Irishman who claimed to have been there earlier still.
Even the Vikings didn't think themselves the first. Their sagas record that when they first arrived in the New World they were chased from the beach by a group of wild white people. They subsequently heard stories from natives of a settlement of Caucasians who "wore white garments and...carried poles before them to which rags were attached"--precisely how an Irish religious procession would have looked to the uninitiated. (Intriguingly, five centuries later Columbus's men would hear a similar story in the Caribbean.) Whether by Irish or Vikings--or Italians or Welsh or Bretons or any of the other many groups for whom credit has been sought--crossing the Atlantic in the Middle Ages was not quite as daring a feat as it would at first appear, even allowing for the fact that it was done in small, open boats. The North Atlantic is conveniently scattered with islands that could serve as stepping-stones--the Shetland Islands, Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin. It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.
One problem is that recording companies already receive monies from a government-collected tax on blank media, which is supposed to compensate them for the fact that people will used blank media to copy songs, etc. This was bulldozed through Congres with some rather nasty politics--the wives of several senators involved in the tax got together and formed the PMRC, who had a campaign on "porn rock." The implicit deal (never directly linked, you know--it's politics) was, you give us "voluntary" record ratings and labels which a little thing called the Constitution prevents us from imposing, and you can have your precious tax. The record companies wanted it enough.
I don't think that one can simultaneously declare that it is their right to do whatever they want and also recieve these monies.
The people in power want to ban abortion outright, but they can't because of a Supreme Court decision. So, they ban everything having to do with embryos on the grounds that, if they allow people to do it, women will get abortions to provide the material. Thus, if they can't ban abortions, they can at least give the impression of wanting to ban abortions in principle.
I didn't say it made sense. It's just how these people think. It isn't hypocrisy; it's opportunism.
Look, it isn't possible to explain this. Many metaphors have been tried, but here's another:
Windows is like Budweiser
Linux is like homebrew
Mac is like hand-pumped Abbott ale
The Budweiser people who don't understand why some people like to drink Abbott ale never will, because in their minds,
You can get a lot of Budweiser really cheap.
It gets the fucking job done.
Everybody buys it. Look at that market share! Woohoo!
The homebrew people are a bit more flexible. They might like Abbott Ale, or they might not, but if they don't like it, it's either because they don't like it on its merits or they would rather change the recipe.
(I should also point out that Be OS is like Old Peculier poured from an elevated oak cask.)
One can use C++ for the Palm, but unless one knows the language rather intimately, it's easy to produce a big chunk o' code. That's because, depending what you do, C++ can link big libraries without your acquiescence.
The Palm requires the Old Virtues, grasshopper. Use simple C. Avoid non-Palm library calls.
You could do a lot worse than just taking some of the sample Palm code and studying it. The O'Reilly Palm Programming book is pretty good.
I was at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute at FSU during the P & F cold fusion period. This institute was heavy on physicist. We had nuclear physicists, high-energy physicists, string theorists, physicists working on QCD, spin systems up the wazoo, and incestuous connections with CERN and Fermilab.
Of all of those people, at first, every single one wanted cold fusion to be true.
Let me repeat that for jelly-brained Kuhn addicts: Every.Single.Physicist.
It was one of the most exciting times at the Institute. Every week we had "brown bag lunches" where some researcher from somewhere gave an informal lecture on some possibility for the mechanism.
It was only after various groups withdrew their early claims of replication, when the details didn't come, and after the fateful exposition of the calorimetry problems that physicists, in some cases almost reluctantly, concluded that it was a tempest in a teapot.
The so-called snubbing of "upstart chemists" by a physics priesthood never happened. At all. Even remotely. In spite of the fact that chemists and physicists hate each others' guts, it never happened and was entirely made up after the fact by people with sociological leanings who were not in the thick of things.
Go get a copy of Joe's Garage by Frank Zappa. It's on an independent label, so you can have a clean conscience. It is a good fable to what is going on.
The goal of any government is to make everything illegal. That way, the government can do anything they want, without that annoying due process stuff.
Of course, they usually get their way, because everyone rationalizes it like this: They couldn't possibly punish every transgression, so only the Bad People have anything to fear. The trouble is that once this is established, who exactly are the Bad People are a matter of caprice and fashion.
What's more, for about ten years, there have been secure (bulletproof glass) software and insecure (ordinary) software products on the market. Less so recently, because the market has consistently preferred the ordinary products, either because
They're cheeep, dude. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Like, total cost of ownership, dude.
Hey, I don' wanna deal with setting up no security.
Bulletproof products used to be the norm. How often do you think Open VMS got broken into? But businesses and consumers didn't want that. They wanted what they could get now and cheap.
And now it's all "Waah! Waah! Waah! It's insecure! I wanna SUE! Developers BAD, me GOOD! Me want butt wiped, for free!" Of course, they never consider how many good, careful companies they put out of business because they thought buying insecure crap was Good Business Sense.
The problem for the MPAA is that they cannot understand that as far as the economy goes they are not all that important.
The computer industry is an order of magnitude larger.
No, the problem is that they do understand that, and they want it. They see the computer as nothing more than a means of entertainment. They don't know what a computer is, but they see it playing videos. Then they look at the amount of money people are spending on computers and software, and their jaws drop. They think that money should all be theirs. If it isn't theirs, that means to their little pea brains that it must have been stolen from them. It's up to their lawyers and hired guns to figure out a way to prize the money away from the computer industry.
Oh, yeah, they may have some sort of awareness that computers are used for other things, like what the script girls would have used typewriters for back in the old days, but they don't have to dirty their hands with that.
Remember back during the Bush (Sr.) campaign when everybody was surprised he did not know what a supermarket check-out scanner was? It's like that. People at this level of politics or plutocracy simply do not have any clue. At all. About anything. They don't deal with reality; they hire people for that.
In other words, they're not stupid; they're delusional.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't tell me that's expensive.
To view an ad? Yes, it is. It's about the cost of a rental edition of a movie, not even a home edition.
Linux is essentially all modular. It's so modular that Linux is the wrong word.
"Linux," properly speaking, is just the kernel, which is a very small part of what you think you're getting when you buy or download a distribution. The philosophy of all UN*X systems is essentially the opposite of the Windows philosophy. Make the real OS, the kernel, as small as possible, and build up the system by adding parts. The kernel is a crucial part, but most of what makes up what you think of as Linux has nothing to do with Linus Torvalds. For this reason, RMS is encouraging people to call it GNU/Linux. He can be strident about it, but he has a point.
I don't see any sense at all to describe it as "pulp sci-fi" rather than mythology, because pulp sci-fi is also based on mythology. So are comic books, which I think are the best source for new myths. So are westerns. So is fantasy. Pretty much everything where the protagonist has a quest to defeat evil is based on mythology.
Not everything is mythological. Detective stories, where the protagonists' goal is to restore the status quo, are not mythological. Nor are comedies or romances that are purely personal. However, drama where an external conflict mirrors an internal, personal confict is all myth, almost by definition.
The only question is what Lucas had in mind. This has become obfuscated with time. I have the advantage to be 40 years old, and so I remember what the interviews said. Basically, Lucas' money from THX-1138 was running out, and he didn't want to get a job. So he made Star Wars. He based it on westerns and war movies, particularly the 1930 WWI movie "Hell's Angels."
Then it became popular beyond his wildest dreams. The idea that it would be part of a trilogy of trilogies came later. The "Episode IV" wasn't on until it was re-released. Joseph Campbell picked up on Star Wars as a way of teaching mythology. He could have used any of hundreds of pop culture references, but Star Wars was succesful on an unprecedented level. I'm sure that Lucas had heard of Campbell, but the mythology really is in Star Wars because that's what people do when they make certain kinds of arts.
You're absolutely right about this. I'm another semi-old-timer. In the early 1980's, I was on the team (six people, all with developer background) to write a bisynchronous communications package (HASP station emulator). We had a standing offer--anybody who could find a bug would get a free dinner at any restaurant. We only had to pay off once.
Nobody seems to care about doing this anymore, or maybe they never did in the first place, and we were all just naive.
Disruptive technologies are not cheaper. They may be cheaper per unit, but they always produce less bang for the buck than sustaining technologies.
Does anybody know how to get 60 Minutes or Consumers' Reports to do a story like this? Here's how I imagine it. You find a typical or even sophisticated user who is trying to do an ordinary thing. Preferably it should be someone who is adamant about how bad pirates are. Then you get a lawyer to go over the EULA, find out how much he had to do that was illegal, and explain it to him.
I have to shake my head at this kind of reasoning. It's something like this: We have to revile RMS at every possible opportunity, or else he will instantly force us all to live in some hippy commune. Boo, RMS!
I don't have a problem with RMS living his life the way he wants to live it. I have a big problem with his shoving his version of "freedom" down my throat.
The chance of this ever happening is miniscule compared to, say, Elvis taking over your brain by shooting zoobie rays from the flying saucer he got from the elves. Come on! It isn't going to happen.
If I want to use closed source, proprietary software, then dammit RMS stay the hell out of my machine.
What, did he come to your house, break down the door, and force you at gunpoint to erase all your proprietary sofware licenses? Or are you being just a teensy bit paranoid?
The best we can hope for is a world in which some free software continues to exist and is not made totally illegal under pressure by the MPAA, RIAA, international media companies, etc. It's like a tug-of-war, and if you're outnumbered, you have to pull the rope really hard. I'm not like RMS, but I'm very glad he's out there and getting interviewed.
It is good that RMS exists, and it is also good that he has extreme opinions, because they define the arena within which consensus is built. He'll never get his way, but because of him and others, the mega-corporations may not get their way, which would be no freedom for anybody, ever, under any circumstances.
That's the choice here. It isn't RMS's vision versus a more moderate one. Closed source, proprietary software isn't going away. Ever.
It has long been said that nobody would have listened to Martin Luther King if the Black Panthers hadn't been there as an alternative. I think this is accurate. Nobody would listen to Linus or ESR if RMS weren't there, either. Consensus-building just doesn't work that way.
OK, I don't know how to do it myself, and it probably won't have an effect, but heyyyy...
Your theory that Americans don't know or care what's going on in the world is simply untrue.
I agree. In fact, I would say that with respect to 9/11, the situation is just the reverse. People in the rest of the world don't know or care what happens in America. The Germans didn't know or care what happens in America when they blew up the Lusitania. The Japanese didn't know or care when they bombed Pearl Harbor. Al Quaeda didn't know or care when they attacked the WTC (notice that the Pentagon is seldom mentioned?). People in the rest of the world have had a century to figure out what America is, and they still haven't learned.
Some people can never be made happy, no matter what choices America makes.
Minor quibble--I think they're very happy. Hatred of an all-evil foe is very happy-making, which is why there have been so many articles about LOTR. Add in the nobility of supreme sacrifice, and you have a lot of happy people. They may be happy by being proud of their (ex-) daughter the suicide bomber, but they like it.
There's an old parable that goes a little bit like this:
Supplicant: O Lord, help us! We suffer from war and crime and hatred and bigotry.
God: So what, if that's what you like?
Supplicant: But that's just it. We don't like it.
God: Well then stop, dum-dum!
Whether most Americans speak more than one language or not may deprive them of some cultural breadth, but that is more than made up for in the rich tapestry of immigrant culture that has helped build America over the generations.
That's true, but language is a red herring for other reasons. I speak Spanish and German and have lived in Mexico and England and have at least visited most of Europe. This is perhaps not ultimately spectacular, but it isn't too shabby either. Plus I've studied anthropology, and I'm good enough at it to have figured out the algorithm to get Hispanics to show up for dates, which stumps most anthropologists. I may not be representative of all Americans, but I agree with you, and I probably have more cultural breadth than most of the people who don't.
"I can do everything on my PC that I can do on a Mac. Of course, there were some driver and integration issues, but what do you expect? Computers are like that. Also, the video software took a while to get used to, but all software is like that. What do you think, I'm some stupid grandmother who can't figure out a few problems? Deal with it. And I don't have a SuperDrive, but who wants that? And the video software couldn't do some things I wanted, but hey, software has limitations. Besides, I can do everything on a PC that I can do on a Mac. I don't need no fancy cases. Computers are tools; you're not supposed to enjoy using them. And it's cheaper, if you don't buy an external SuperDrive, but as I said, who wants that?"
That's approximately what I hear most of the time.
I've used PC's and own one. I've also used Amigas, Ataris, NeXT, DEC Vaxen, IBM SYSTEM/360, SGI, every imaginable UN*X, Alpha, DG Nova, Cyber 205, ETA-10, TRS-80, 68HC00 and 1802-based systems I built from chips, and other stuff I can't remember right now. Not to mention overclocking the direct video board on a Thinking Machines CM-2 with 65536 processors.
I like the Mac. A G4 is my current development/word processing/video editing machine. I have no fear of hacking hardware, but when I feel like doing that, I whip out the breadboards and do it. The Mac gives me something that nothing except the Amiga gives me--an environment where issues were thought out, not always with perfect solutions, but always with a craftsmanship that is a cut above the rest. I spent most of my life and still spend it at work putting together large pieces of software. I like being able to whip out a tool with just a few lines of code in Cocoa; I like being able to have undo/redo from day 1; I like dealing with the products of designers, developers, and engineers who are not my intellectual inferiors, and I don't mind the fact that they make more money than the average code monkey, nor that this money comes out of my pocket. I like having a cooperative rather than an adversarial relationship with those who write the API's I use.
Some people don't like that sort of thing. That's cool. But you can't compare apples with mock apple pie.
I know that it's heretical to point this out, but the fact that 16-year-olds are worse drivers than 18-year-olds is at least in part because they don't have two years' experience.
The guy was wrong, though. If it were just restrictions (which already exist), it wouldn't be that big a deal. Many states are considering raising the driving age to 18, period. This seems to be based on two assumptions:
When MS does it, it's Business.
When anybody else does it, it's zealotry and they should just GROW UP.
Typical MS apologia.
Clocks below you tick more slowly, and clocks above you tick more quickly. This would be true even in a uniform gravitational field. Of course, the gravitational field around the Earth isn't uniform, so clocks below you tick more and more slowly the more down they are. So, there's a linear change and a nonlinear change. Fortunately, the linear part can be compensated with a constant factor, so it doesn't require much math. Also, the nonlinear part isn't so great as long as you are on the surface, and you can't get the signals in deep mine shafts anyway.
As an officer in the Air Force, perhaps you have some insight.
Back in the 1980's, I was at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, a DOE-funded site. Although ours was the designated unclassified site, we dealt with a lot of groups (Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore, etc.) who weren't exactly unconcerned with security. The operating systems they used in house very very tight and had to pass fairly stringent security requirements just to be considered. This was one of the reasons that VMS was so popular; DEC had worked very hard on the security.
If you had asked me then whether this would have happened, I would have laughed.
I can see why the business and consumer cultures played the lemming. But the military has a reputation for getting thing that work, even if they cost, and dammit, Mil Spec used to mean something.
So, what happened?
We need to go because the alternative is suicide. We need to go because we are human and wish to continue to be human.
The most valuable result of the moon landing was not the scientific research, the spin-offs, or the political gain. It was the photograph of Earth as seen from the moon, just after Earthrise, taken by a human being, holding the camera.
To continue to have frontiers is more important than anything else. We could cure cancer and AIDS, fix the environment, and become immortal, and we would be nothing more than healthy, immortal apes. But the way of the explorers is a way that apes do not know, and we must keep it. At this juncture, that means deep sea exploration and space exploration, in person, not by robots.
Didn't the scientists actually get the satellite up and running as fast as possible? What would you have had them do, get a really long stick and push it?
The problem is not that you need to push the big button in the sky sometimes. The problem is developing a mentality that says that rebooting the server "fixes" the problem. Rebooting the server is palliative. It keeps people from taking preventative and prophylactic measures. This attitude and its destructiveness are lamentably common in business.
From Made in America by Bill Bryson (great book):
No one knows who the first European visitors to the New World were. The credit generally goes to the Vikings, who reached the New World in about AD 1000, but there are grounds to suppose that others may have been there even earlier. An ancient Latin text, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot), recounts with persuasive detail a seven-year trip to the New World made by this Irish saint and a band of acolytes some four centuries before the Viking--and this on the advice of another Irishman who claimed to have been there earlier still.
Even the Vikings didn't think themselves the first. Their sagas record that when they first arrived in the New World they were chased from the beach by a group of wild white people. They subsequently heard stories from natives of a settlement of Caucasians who "wore white garments and...carried poles before them to which rags were attached"--precisely how an Irish religious procession would have looked to the uninitiated. (Intriguingly, five centuries later Columbus's men would hear a similar story in the Caribbean.) Whether by Irish or Vikings--or Italians or Welsh or Bretons or any of the other many groups for whom credit has been sought--crossing the Atlantic in the Middle Ages was not quite as daring a feat as it would at first appear, even allowing for the fact that it was done in small, open boats. The North Atlantic is conveniently scattered with islands that could serve as stepping-stones--the Shetland Islands, Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin. It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.
One problem is that recording companies already receive monies from a government-collected tax on blank media, which is supposed to compensate them for the fact that people will used blank media to copy songs, etc. This was bulldozed through Congres with some rather nasty politics--the wives of several senators involved in the tax got together and formed the PMRC, who had a campaign on "porn rock." The implicit deal (never directly linked, you know--it's politics) was, you give us "voluntary" record ratings and labels which a little thing called the Constitution prevents us from imposing, and you can have your precious tax. The record companies wanted it enough.
I don't think that one can simultaneously declare that it is their right to do whatever they want and also recieve these monies.
The people in power want to ban abortion outright, but they can't because of a Supreme Court decision. So, they ban everything having to do with embryos on the grounds that, if they allow people to do it, women will get abortions to provide the material. Thus, if they can't ban abortions, they can at least give the impression of wanting to ban abortions in principle.
I didn't say it made sense. It's just how these people think. It isn't hypocrisy; it's opportunism.
Look, it isn't possible to explain this. Many metaphors have been tried, but here's another:
The Budweiser people who don't understand why some people like to drink Abbott ale never will, because in their minds,
The homebrew people are a bit more flexible. They might like Abbott Ale, or they might not, but if they don't like it, it's either because they don't like it on its merits or they would rather change the recipe.
(I should also point out that Be OS is like Old Peculier poured from an elevated oak cask.)
One can use C++ for the Palm, but unless one knows the language rather intimately, it's easy to produce a big chunk o' code. That's because, depending what you do, C++ can link big libraries without your acquiescence.
The Palm requires the Old Virtues, grasshopper. Use simple C. Avoid non-Palm library calls.
You could do a lot worse than just taking some of the sample Palm code and studying it. The O'Reilly Palm Programming book is pretty good.
I was at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute at FSU during the P & F cold fusion period. This institute was heavy on physicist. We had nuclear physicists, high-energy physicists, string theorists, physicists working on QCD, spin systems up the wazoo, and incestuous connections with CERN and Fermilab.
Of all of those people, at first, every single one wanted cold fusion to be true.
Let me repeat that for jelly-brained Kuhn addicts: Every. Single. Physicist.
It was one of the most exciting times at the Institute. Every week we had "brown bag lunches" where some researcher from somewhere gave an informal lecture on some possibility for the mechanism.
It was only after various groups withdrew their early claims of replication, when the details didn't come, and after the fateful exposition of the calorimetry problems that physicists, in some cases almost reluctantly, concluded that it was a tempest in a teapot.
The so-called snubbing of "upstart chemists" by a physics priesthood never happened. At all. Even remotely. In spite of the fact that chemists and physicists hate each others' guts, it never happened and was entirely made up after the fact by people with sociological leanings who were not in the thick of things.
Go get a copy of Joe's Garage by Frank Zappa. It's on an independent label, so you can have a clean conscience. It is a good fable to what is going on.
The goal of any government is to make everything illegal. That way, the government can do anything they want, without that annoying due process stuff.
Of course, they usually get their way, because everyone rationalizes it like this: They couldn't possibly punish every transgression, so only the Bad People have anything to fear. The trouble is that once this is established, who exactly are the Bad People are a matter of caprice and fashion.
What's more, for about ten years, there have been secure (bulletproof glass) software and insecure (ordinary) software products on the market. Less so recently, because the market has consistently preferred the ordinary products, either because
Bulletproof products used to be the norm. How often do you think Open VMS got broken into? But businesses and consumers didn't want that. They wanted what they could get now and cheap.
And now it's all "Waah! Waah! Waah! It's insecure! I wanna SUE! Developers BAD, me GOOD! Me want butt wiped, for free!" Of course, they never consider how many good, careful companies they put out of business because they thought buying insecure crap was Good Business Sense.
Inexperienced programmers care, because they have ego space associated with a language.
Experienced programmers care, because they know diversity brings health.
The problem for the MPAA is that they cannot understand that as far as the economy goes they are not all that important. The computer industry is an order of magnitude larger.
No, the problem is that they do understand that, and they want it. They see the computer as nothing more than a means of entertainment. They don't know what a computer is, but they see it playing videos. Then they look at the amount of money people are spending on computers and software, and their jaws drop. They think that money should all be theirs. If it isn't theirs, that means to their little pea brains that it must have been stolen from them. It's up to their lawyers and hired guns to figure out a way to prize the money away from the computer industry.
Oh, yeah, they may have some sort of awareness that computers are used for other things, like what the script girls would have used typewriters for back in the old days, but they don't have to dirty their hands with that.
Remember back during the Bush (Sr.) campaign when everybody was surprised he did not know what a supermarket check-out scanner was? It's like that. People at this level of politics or plutocracy simply do not have any clue. At all. About anything. They don't deal with reality; they hire people for that.
In other words, they're not stupid; they're delusional.