So this guy is seeing 6,000 attempts to break in via SSH over 4 days. That averages about 1 per minute. His earlier attacks were on a similar scale. And apparently he has long windows where there aren't attacks. While being attacked is never good, this rate of attack doesn't seem newsworthy. Welcome to the internet, it's dangerous out there! I had no doubt that botnets were being used for attacking a variety of services, so I would expect to see them attacking SSH. Going slowly is slightly clever, as it does reduce the likelihood of tripping some detection measures, but good fundamental security should be as effective against this attack as any other. Am I missing something about why this is actually interesting? Or is it just a really slow news day.
Come to think of it, isn't that the mindset that has made Macs a second-class citizen for so very long? Can I call my ISP a smashing success if all of my Windows users are happy, but my Mac users are miserable?
Your facts are skewed/outdated/outright false.
Thanks for the handy debating technique! Here I've been trying to provide pesky facts supported with citations, however low quality. It's way easier to just dismissively declare that the oppositions claims are "skewed/outdates/outright false."
What you'll find is the other phones are frustrating to the extreme compared to the iPhone, but hey, they are mildly freer than the iPhone.
I happily use Linux on my personal laptop, so I'm clearly willing to suffer a bit. (Oddly, my wife spends a more time being angry at her Mac laptop than I do at my Linux box. At least we're united in hating Windows.:-) )
As for the frustration, I'm not going to jump blind. I have friends with Palm Pres and Android G1s. I ask then regularly what they like, what they dislike. I regularly fiddle with them.
Once you find an app that interests you, it just takes one click to acquire it and have it installed on your iPhone.
One click. Oh, and then enter your password. Which better be secure, since it's linked to your credit card number. And a good secure password includes upper case, lower case, numbers, and symbols randomly interspersed, making it a pain in the ass to enter into the iPhone. The app is free? Apple doesn't care, they damn well want your password.
As far as the customers are concerned, the iTunes App Store is a smashing success.
My first generation iPhone is perfectly capable of recording low frame-rate video. Apps have been developed to do exactly that. Where exactly do I download them? Oops. I don't get to, Apple refused to let them ship.
iTunes for Windows is festering crap, and the ITMS on the iPhone itself sucks for following a podcast. I need a dedicated podcast tracking and downloading system. Hey, there's an app for that! Oops, denied. But Apple kindly changed their mind, and simply required the developer to remove all of the useful functionality and turning it into a crippled streaming solution..
I'd dig an e-book reader that gave be easy access to everything in Project Gutenberg. Apple's okay with that, so long as "everything" means minus historically important books about sex.
I sure would love an app to give me a better interface to Google Voice! Rejected. Remote control of a bittorrent client (not bittorrent on the phone itself, mind you). Rejected. I'm an adult, maybe I'd like some immature but "adult" apps. Rejected.
I'm a customer, and as far as I'm concerned the iTunes App Store a bland mush, not a smashing success. I'm coming up on the end of my contract with AT&T, and I'll be getting something different, something that serves me, not Apple and AT&T. I'm looking at the Android options and the Pre. I was hearing good things about the Pre, but this makes me very wary.
"Before ASCIIpOrtal came along, it would have been easy to argue that the game play mechanics of portal would have been impossible or at least diminished without 3D graphics..."
Nothing says Commitment to Quality like deciding that 40 minutes is the right length of time for an important lesson, then assigning someone else to creating the lesson content.
As others have noted, people are already going to be surly about a mandatory meeting. For those people who actually use social networks, they're going to be surly about whatever restrictions your company has decided on. You can buy a bit of forgiveness by letting them out early. It might seem like you're passing on a golden opportunity, but trying to cram in additional content is doomed. They start surly. You'll be 30 minutes in and they'll be zoning out. It's a hostile audience, and little, if anything, you say will stick with them. If it's obvious you've jumped to seemingly optional topics, (which is what "While I have you" says), you'll lose the rest.
You've been ordered to push a boulder half-way up a hill. It's doomed to roll back down the moment you're done. Don't make extra work for yourself by uselessly pushing it all the way to the top.
No it's not warped and obfuscated. ReCaptcha gives you the word as-is.
Go here. Bounce on the reload button a few times to see some example reCAPTCHA. Tell me with a straight face that they're not warped. Perhaps they're scanning books printed on silly putty? As for obfuscated see the example here. They used to slap a line across each word. They don't appear to be doing so any more, but they used to.
Imagine a hack where you send some exploit to somebody over IM. If it doesn't work, the IM client *will* crash as it tried to execute some random portion of memory. How are you going to try your exploit at a different address now?
Spam bunches of people over IM, possibly using a botnet to evade spam throttles in the IM system. And I get multiple chances per user, since most people will go, "Stupid IM client" and restart it without another thought. Many will restart it repeatedly, erroneously attributing the crashes to bad luck and not hostile intent.
Depends on the program I'm attacking, I might be lucky and be attacking a subsystem that forks when I connect, so I can attack over and over again. The program may have a watchdog system in place to automatically restart and recover after a crash to make the software appear more stable than it actually is.
Mind you, this isn't an argument against ASLR. I'm in favor of it! Maybe it doesn't stop everyone, but it will stop some attacks.
I've never bothered with a light meter and stopwatch, but my assessment is similar. For the lights I use most often, my living room lights, the lights are bright enough to comfortably read by instantly. It does take a minute or two to reach full brightness, but I don't notice. I switched these lamps from incandescent to CFL just a few years ago. The delay in brightness dig bug me a bit for a few days, then I got over it. I think it was just that it was different, not that it was a real problem.
You had 38 CFL bulbs that all died in less than a year. Meanwhile other people (myself included) are seeing multiple years of life out of ours. As you note, it's can't possibly be something unusual in your case; you have electricl voodoo, and have a line conditioner. That's interesting.
For no particular reason, I'm reminded of the guy I know who complains that every single romantic relationship he's in ends messily. He's wisely concluded that it's impossible for any man to have a healthy, long-term relationship with with women. I'm sure there is some valuable lesson there.
You missed the big disadvantage:
You can't own a copy of a game. If GaiKai goes out of business, or the license from the publisher to GaiKai is withdrawn, or GaiKai decides to stop supporting a game (say, because it's really hard to get running on Windows 2015), you lose access. If a publisher targets only systems like GaiKai and OnLive, you have no way to secure a copy for long term purposes.
When people see my library of books, most understand why I enjoy it. I can enjoy a book over and over again, sometimes decades later. I can loan it out to a friend to enjoy. I can pass it along to my children. I can show someone else a passage that I feel is important to understanding the time period, the author, or the progress of the art form. CDs and DRM-free audio files give me the same freedom with music. VHS gave me the same freedom with movies and television shows. (DVD does as well, if you don't mind violating the DMCA.) But a system like this takes the right away from me. A system like GaiKai or OnLive in addition to sales of games would be a good thing; I think NetFlix movie streaming is a great option for movies I don't wish to own for the long term.
I don't mind the hours of my life spent watching television; I'm just picky to only watch good stuff. However, I would very much like to recover the hours of my life spent listening to people proudly tell me about how wonderful their life is since they gave up television. Can I somehow give them up?
Most mooches living in their parents basement manage to satisfy themselves with porn and World of Warcraft. While sad, they somehow manage to avoid actively reaching out to destroy things. This man is a psychopath, and it will take more than a bit of tough love to fix him, assuming he can be fixed.
Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
You do realize that's simultaneously a joke and a warning, right? While it does implicitly reference the Perl motto, it warns of the dark side: if there is more than one way to do it, there are almost certainly many very bad ways of doing it. It's hardly mindless cheerleading for the language.
One of the things I appreciate about Perl and Python are their forthrightness. Perl's motto is "There is more than one way to do it." Python's design philosophy included, "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." Just based on that, a reasonably reflective and experienced programmer should be able to determine which language matches his mindset better.
The grandparent poster was talking about what should be legal, not what actually is. And modding other people's hardware for money should be legal. If it would be legal to do for myself (admittedly, it isn't, but it should be), it should be legal to pay someone else to do for me.
The GPL is not an especially complex license, and it's quite clear that you can charge for copies of the software. People have been selling copies of GPLed software, either directly or more commonly attached to hardware, for a long, long time. The Free Software Foundation itself has sold copies of their software. You've met the letter of the GPL, and I believe the spirit. You've gone above and beyond the call of duty by making the software easily downloadable from your site. And you face the exact same challenge any other GPL publisher does: one of your users can download the source build it, and ship a no cost competitor. The original developer has lost nothing to you, indeed, he is free to take your changes for whatever purposes he wants. It's all good. You owe the original developers nothing other than appropriate credit and some thanks. Feel no guilt.
At least some of us want to retain the right to resell and more importantly transfer ownership of copies of games because we care about the games themselves, not as a way to make a bit more money. If I buy a book, assuming I'm careful I can pass it on to my children, or even grandchildren. With music, I can do the same things, although I might need to pass along a tape deck or record player, or at least format shift the music. With movies I can pass them along, although format shifting is impeded by immoral laws. With digitally distributed games that are inevitably locked to online activation, I'm screwed. Braid is a brilliant game, and I want to ensure that future generations of game developers can play it to study it. But it's locked to my Xbox live account. I can't legally transfer it, and technically it's very difficult. Braid may not be for sale when Microsoft is shipping the Xbox7. Digital distribution of movies and books are heading down the same route. Music escaped and DRM free formats appear to have won, but by no means is this guaranteed for other media types. We're entering a world where copying media is easier and cheaper than ever, where nothing should need to be lost because of technology, and now we're bolting crap on top, crap that makes our media more expensive (since it takes time and money to bolt crap on), less useful (Why can't I move my book from my Kindle2010 to my Sony eReader2013?), and more fragile (Oops, the activation server is down). If we keep heading down this road, our culture will suffer as a result.
My apologies, I apparently have Nineteen Eighty-Four on the brain. Just in case it wasn't obvious, replace Nineteen Eighty-Four with Animal Farm in the above post and I sound less insane.:-)
My core claim stands: I have seen no evidence that the preface was suppressed out of some love of the Soviets. It might have been removed for much more boring reasons, like being hamfisted, even relative to the decidedly non-subtle metaphor of the main book. I've seen no evidence that the preface was even removed over Orwell's complaints. (Although that's entirely plausible; more than one author complains that his brilliant work was destroyed by editors. Some are right, most are wrong.)
So one of four publishers chose to consult with the Ministry of Information. Based on that consultation, they refused the book. Assuming that Orwell is reporting the facts accurately, what do we know?
Three out of four publishers rejected his book for reasons Orwell apparently thinks have nothing to do with the Soviets. It's hard to feel sympathy for poor Orwell's oppression when 75% of the time his work was rejected for reasons beyond his core ideas. (This is not to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't a worthy book. It's a great book. But lots of great literature gets rejected while crap gets published because publishers are cautious and frequently stupid.)
One publisher did choose to consult with the Ministry of Information. I'm not entirely sure why they did, but I note that the Ministry was dedicated to publicity and propoganda. I'm also not up to speed on the details of England's Ministry of Information, but I don't generally find government centers for propoganda to be "left-wing and liberal", and thus part of some media conspiracy to suppress ideas. I find it more plausible that the Ministry of Information decided it was in England's best interest to not antagonize a major world power, possibly making diplomatic negotiations more difficult. In much the same way that if the publisher of The Satanic Verses would have asked the US State Department, "Hey, is this okay?" the State Department might say, "Ummm, we're busy negotiating with Iran right now, could you not get them all pissy at us at the moment?" While I find such kowtowing to the government sad, it's not a compelling sign of a left wing media conspiracy.
So my question stands: Can you provide citations supporting the claim that Orwell's proposed preface was not present in early printings of Nineteen Eighty-Four because the publisher wanted support the Soviet side of things? And while we're at it, why would they want to protect the Soviets by hiding the preface, but go on to publish such a thinly veiled metaphor attacking the Soviet communist system?
When it was originally written (1949) copyright law granted 56 years of copyright, so the book should have entered the public domain in 2005. In 1998 it was realized Orwell hadn't produced a new work in years. Careful research showed that 56 years wasn't enough incentive to convince Orwell to write a new book. Worse, a case could be made that were Orwell to publish something new in 1998, it would only receive 2 years of copyright! This was a grave matter. Congress wisely passed a law extending the copyright on Nineteen Eighty-Four to 2020. This should be plenty of incentive! I, for one, look forward to Orwell's next new book. Someone should dig him up for an interview; see if they can get him to give us a ghost of a clue when it's due out.
Would you happen to have any supporting evidence that it was actively censored because the publisher either loved the Soviets, or feared the government? (And simultaneously is brave enough to publish a thinly veiled attack on the Soviet form of government but cowardly enough to refuse to publish a screed about publishers and "intelligentsia" loving that same government?)
I think we can agree: Orwell wrote that text as a proposed preface to Animal Farm. It did not appear in early, or indeed most, printings of Animal Farm. But was it censorship because of a love of Soviet Russia? I don't think you can support that claim.
Given the book was originally refused by four publishers, including "Two [that] had been publishing anti-Russian books for years, and [another that] had no noticeable political colour," it seems entirely plausible that the preface was rejected for other reasons. Perhaps the publisher felt it was a hamfisted introduction to an otherwise (relatively) subtle book. It's possible they refused it because they generally felt the book was better without it. They might have felt the book might be more widely read and the anti communist message spread without it. It's entirely possible Orwell agreed with these decisions. The page you linked to has no supporting claims, only mentioning the idea that it was "censored" in passing. Some quick checking around fails to turn up any evidence for the theory of active suppression by a publisher.
Cursive as taught in US schools is slower and more tiring than printing, which is why I'm in favor of scrapping it. In its original form, as a hybrid shorthand I expect it's faster. But such a system is highly individual. Teaching students to craft their own individual cursive that compromises between readability and speed is hard. Of course I expect that Holt has some thoughts on what the school system does when given a choice between easy but useless standardization and difficult but productive individuality.:-)
The advantage of cursive over printing is that it is faster and less fatiguing to the hand.
While that's the original goal, for far too many teachers it's not about that. It's about learning the "adult" way to write. Students are pressured to slavishly reproduce the samples, as a result actually ending up moving more slowly and with more work. And of course the idealized samples themselves have long since moved beyond efficiency and into what is expected. I doubt I'm the only person who wrote exclusively in cursive for years, then discovered as an adult that the silted form we learned is slower and more work than print. So I gave it up.
Good riddance to cursive as it is currently inflicted on students. Perhaps there is a place for a mainstream but fast writing form, but at this point it may be better to start from scratch. And as others have noted, for long form writing almost everyone is typing, not writing, thus eliminating the most compelling use. The most common use of writing is to fill out forms, for which print is usually required anyway.
The grandparent ultimately asserted that "for the rest of us,
SQL is cumbersome," calling out that an "SQL-free" database is
"easier", "more secure," and "cheaper."
If we're talking about essentially key-value stores, SQL can
do it well.
It's harder, but we're talking about an hour or so of work, an
hour's worth of value you can reuse for future projects. For all
of the complaints about needing to worry about tables with lots
of fields and serialization, it's moot if you just want a key
store. All that worrying about getting your data into tabular
form is irrelevant. (I'm not sure what your point about trees is;
I'm not aware of an especially more elegant way to store trees in
a simple key-value store that I couldn't implement with similar
ease in a relational database.)
Writing secure SQL is not hard; every modern language supports
placeholders that will handle your escaping.
Now a simple key-value store is "cheaper," there is less going
on under the hood, less built-in functionality ("power")
available and thus less complexity. But, are you really writing
the next Google? Sure, you want to believe your application will
have millions of users, but... really? "The rest of us" are
writing much, much smaller scale applications. Little things
like the phone company's billing system, Wikipedia, and EVE
Online. And we're not feeling terribly encumbered by our
databases.
I find your comparison to LISP/Java and C relevant, but for
the opposite reason. Key-value stores and C are the simple,
obvious solution. They're really fast because they don't do
much, and you can accurately predict what's going on under the
hood. LISP, Java, and a relational database are powerful,
resultingly complex, and it's hard to predict exact run-time
performance. But many real world programs frequently don't need to
be all that fast, the benefits of all that extra functionality
speed development, if you add the functionality yourself you end up
paying the cost or more anyway, and years of research have shown that you can
make them quite fast. C programmers for years wailed that all
those extra layers of indirection was way overkill, that Java "is
often more complex than necessary and has too much overhead" and
"that much of the overhead is hidden from the average developer,
which for today's lazy programmers makes for some very
inefficient code." At least today, C programmer standing by this
argument are wrong for most real-world problems.
And, of course, part of the price of a key-store system is
that many seemingly simple tasks become hard. Sure, you can map
from product ID to a product's information, but how do you query
on price, name, or manufacturer? As best I can tell the answers
are to throw more computers at the problem, or start maintaining
your own indexes and hoping you don't screw them up. Related but
separate pieces of information (products, customers, orders)
don't have an elegant representation; you end up maintaining the
relationships in your code; the key-store system can't catch
errors. You can add layers to help you with all of these things,
but as you go, you'll find you're reimplementing a relational
database. On the up side, you only pay for the features you
need. But the down sides are many: an existing relational
database has dedicated many years of work into optimizations and
research, time you can't afford; your system is non-standard,
increasing the time it takes a new team member to get up to
speed; if your needs are relatively modest, the cost of
development will exceed the cost of using off-the-shelf software.
Systems like Hadoop or Google's MapReduce have a lot of
advantages, as you note. They do scale, especially across
multiple machines, in a way that relational databases suck hard
at. They can provide high reliability in the face of unreliable
machines. (And on a large enough system, the mean time to
failure is now.) Maybe you're doing something where those or
other advantages are important. Great! But "the rest of us"
aren't especial
I believe the great-grandparent poster was talking about simple key-value stores, similar to the Tokyo Cabinet system he mentioned. When people talk about Anti-SQL or SQL-Free, that seems to be what they're always talking about, although usually on the larger end with things like BigTable and HBase. My criticism was directed in that direction. Compared a key-value store to a subset of SQL, or even a key-value store implemented in SQL, the complexity difference is negligible for any but the most simplistic of projects. As such, the great-grandparent poster's objection to SQL and relational databases compared to key-value stores was wrong. But I must yield that object storage is an area where object oriented DB have a clear advantage over relational DBs.
Slashdot Mirror
So this guy is seeing 6,000 attempts to break in via SSH over 4 days. That averages about 1 per minute. His earlier attacks were on a similar scale. And apparently he has long windows where there aren't attacks. While being attacked is never good, this rate of attack doesn't seem newsworthy. Welcome to the internet, it's dangerous out there! I had no doubt that botnets were being used for attacking a variety of services, so I would expect to see them attacking SSH. Going slowly is slightly clever, as it does reduce the likelihood of tripping some detection measures, but good fundamental security should be as effective against this attack as any other. Am I missing something about why this is actually interesting? Or is it just a really slow news day.
And therefore I don't count?
Come to think of it, isn't that the mindset that has made Macs a second-class citizen for so very long? Can I call my ISP a smashing success if all of my Windows users are happy, but my Mac users are miserable?
Thanks for the handy debating technique! Here I've been trying to provide pesky facts supported with citations, however low quality. It's way easier to just dismissively declare that the oppositions claims are "skewed/outdates/outright false."
I happily use Linux on my personal laptop, so I'm clearly willing to suffer a bit. (Oddly, my wife spends a more time being angry at her Mac laptop than I do at my Linux box. At least we're united in hating Windows. :-) )
As for the frustration, I'm not going to jump blind. I have friends with Palm Pres and Android G1s. I ask then regularly what they like, what they dislike. I regularly fiddle with them.
One click. Oh, and then enter your password. Which better be secure, since it's linked to your credit card number. And a good secure password includes upper case, lower case, numbers, and symbols randomly interspersed, making it a pain in the ass to enter into the iPhone. The app is free? Apple doesn't care, they damn well want your password.
My first generation iPhone is perfectly capable of recording low frame-rate video. Apps have been developed to do exactly that. Where exactly do I download them? Oops. I don't get to, Apple refused to let them ship.
iTunes for Windows is festering crap, and the ITMS on the iPhone itself sucks for following a podcast. I need a dedicated podcast tracking and downloading system. Hey, there's an app for that! Oops, denied. But Apple kindly changed their mind, and simply required the developer to remove all of the useful functionality and turning it into a crippled streaming solution..
I'm a big fan of text adventure games, and I loved that iPhone Frotz could download games from the IFArchive. Oops, Apple disagreed and the functionality had to be removed..
I'd dig an e-book reader that gave be easy access to everything in Project Gutenberg. Apple's okay with that, so long as "everything" means minus historically important books about sex.
I sure would love an app to give me a better interface to Google Voice! Rejected. Remote control of a bittorrent client (not bittorrent on the phone itself, mind you). Rejected. I'm an adult, maybe I'd like some immature but "adult" apps. Rejected.
I'm a customer, and as far as I'm concerned the iTunes App Store a bland mush, not a smashing success. I'm coming up on the end of my contract with AT&T, and I'll be getting something different, something that serves me, not Apple and AT&T. I'm looking at the Android options and the Pre. I was hearing good things about the Pre, but this makes me very wary.
Assuming one was unfamiliar with Portal: the Flash Version which came out some time ago.
Nothing says Commitment to Quality like deciding that 40 minutes is the right length of time for an important lesson, then assigning someone else to creating the lesson content.
As others have noted, people are already going to be surly about a mandatory meeting. For those people who actually use social networks, they're going to be surly about whatever restrictions your company has decided on. You can buy a bit of forgiveness by letting them out early. It might seem like you're passing on a golden opportunity, but trying to cram in additional content is doomed. They start surly. You'll be 30 minutes in and they'll be zoning out. It's a hostile audience, and little, if anything, you say will stick with them. If it's obvious you've jumped to seemingly optional topics, (which is what "While I have you" says), you'll lose the rest.
You've been ordered to push a boulder half-way up a hill. It's doomed to roll back down the moment you're done. Don't make extra work for yourself by uselessly pushing it all the way to the top.
Go here. Bounce on the reload button a few times to see some example reCAPTCHA. Tell me with a straight face that they're not warped. Perhaps they're scanning books printed on silly putty? As for obfuscated see the example here. They used to slap a line across each word. They don't appear to be doing so any more, but they used to.
Spam bunches of people over IM, possibly using a botnet to evade spam throttles in the IM system. And I get multiple chances per user, since most people will go, "Stupid IM client" and restart it without another thought. Many will restart it repeatedly, erroneously attributing the crashes to bad luck and not hostile intent.
Depends on the program I'm attacking, I might be lucky and be attacking a subsystem that forks when I connect, so I can attack over and over again. The program may have a watchdog system in place to automatically restart and recover after a crash to make the software appear more stable than it actually is.
Mind you, this isn't an argument against ASLR. I'm in favor of it! Maybe it doesn't stop everyone, but it will stop some attacks.
I've never bothered with a light meter and stopwatch, but my assessment is similar. For the lights I use most often, my living room lights, the lights are bright enough to comfortably read by instantly. It does take a minute or two to reach full brightness, but I don't notice. I switched these lamps from incandescent to CFL just a few years ago. The delay in brightness dig bug me a bit for a few days, then I got over it. I think it was just that it was different, not that it was a real problem.
You had 38 CFL bulbs that all died in less than a year. Meanwhile other people (myself included) are seeing multiple years of life out of ours. As you note, it's can't possibly be something unusual in your case; you have electricl voodoo, and have a line conditioner. That's interesting.
For no particular reason, I'm reminded of the guy I know who complains that every single romantic relationship he's in ends messily. He's wisely concluded that it's impossible for any man to have a healthy, long-term relationship with with women. I'm sure there is some valuable lesson there.
You missed the big disadvantage: You can't own a copy of a game. If GaiKai goes out of business, or the license from the publisher to GaiKai is withdrawn, or GaiKai decides to stop supporting a game (say, because it's really hard to get running on Windows 2015), you lose access. If a publisher targets only systems like GaiKai and OnLive, you have no way to secure a copy for long term purposes. When people see my library of books, most understand why I enjoy it. I can enjoy a book over and over again, sometimes decades later. I can loan it out to a friend to enjoy. I can pass it along to my children. I can show someone else a passage that I feel is important to understanding the time period, the author, or the progress of the art form. CDs and DRM-free audio files give me the same freedom with music. VHS gave me the same freedom with movies and television shows. (DVD does as well, if you don't mind violating the DMCA.) But a system like this takes the right away from me. A system like GaiKai or OnLive in addition to sales of games would be a good thing; I think NetFlix movie streaming is a great option for movies I don't wish to own for the long term.
The general public doesn't use the full power of their CPUs, so I'm not holding my breath that some killer app will harness the GPU for them.
I don't mind the hours of my life spent watching television; I'm just picky to only watch good stuff. However, I would very much like to recover the hours of my life spent listening to people proudly tell me about how wonderful their life is since they gave up television. Can I somehow give them up?
Most mooches living in their parents basement manage to satisfy themselves with porn and World of Warcraft. While sad, they somehow manage to avoid actively reaching out to destroy things. This man is a psychopath, and it will take more than a bit of tough love to fix him, assuming he can be fixed.
You do realize that's simultaneously a joke and a warning, right? While it does implicitly reference the Perl motto, it warns of the dark side: if there is more than one way to do it, there are almost certainly many very bad ways of doing it. It's hardly mindless cheerleading for the language.
One of the things I appreciate about Perl and Python are their forthrightness. Perl's motto is "There is more than one way to do it." Python's design philosophy included, "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." Just based on that, a reasonably reflective and experienced programmer should be able to determine which language matches his mindset better.
The grandparent poster was talking about what should be legal, not what actually is. And modding other people's hardware for money should be legal. If it would be legal to do for myself (admittedly, it isn't, but it should be), it should be legal to pay someone else to do for me.
The GPL is not an especially complex license, and it's quite clear that you can charge for copies of the software. People have been selling copies of GPLed software, either directly or more commonly attached to hardware, for a long, long time. The Free Software Foundation itself has sold copies of their software. You've met the letter of the GPL, and I believe the spirit. You've gone above and beyond the call of duty by making the software easily downloadable from your site. And you face the exact same challenge any other GPL publisher does: one of your users can download the source build it, and ship a no cost competitor. The original developer has lost nothing to you, indeed, he is free to take your changes for whatever purposes he wants. It's all good. You owe the original developers nothing other than appropriate credit and some thanks. Feel no guilt.
At least some of us want to retain the right to resell and more importantly transfer ownership of copies of games because we care about the games themselves, not as a way to make a bit more money. If I buy a book, assuming I'm careful I can pass it on to my children, or even grandchildren. With music, I can do the same things, although I might need to pass along a tape deck or record player, or at least format shift the music. With movies I can pass them along, although format shifting is impeded by immoral laws. With digitally distributed games that are inevitably locked to online activation, I'm screwed. Braid is a brilliant game, and I want to ensure that future generations of game developers can play it to study it. But it's locked to my Xbox live account. I can't legally transfer it, and technically it's very difficult. Braid may not be for sale when Microsoft is shipping the Xbox7. Digital distribution of movies and books are heading down the same route. Music escaped and DRM free formats appear to have won, but by no means is this guaranteed for other media types. We're entering a world where copying media is easier and cheaper than ever, where nothing should need to be lost because of technology, and now we're bolting crap on top, crap that makes our media more expensive (since it takes time and money to bolt crap on), less useful (Why can't I move my book from my Kindle2010 to my Sony eReader2013?), and more fragile (Oops, the activation server is down). If we keep heading down this road, our culture will suffer as a result.
My apologies, I apparently have Nineteen Eighty-Four on the brain. Just in case it wasn't obvious, replace Nineteen Eighty-Four with Animal Farm in the above post and I sound less insane. :-)
My core claim stands: I have seen no evidence that the preface was suppressed out of some love of the Soviets. It might have been removed for much more boring reasons, like being hamfisted, even relative to the decidedly non-subtle metaphor of the main book. I've seen no evidence that the preface was even removed over Orwell's complaints. (Although that's entirely plausible; more than one author complains that his brilliant work was destroyed by editors. Some are right, most are wrong.)
So one of four publishers chose to consult with the Ministry of Information. Based on that consultation, they refused the book. Assuming that Orwell is reporting the facts accurately, what do we know?
Three out of four publishers rejected his book for reasons Orwell apparently thinks have nothing to do with the Soviets. It's hard to feel sympathy for poor Orwell's oppression when 75% of the time his work was rejected for reasons beyond his core ideas. (This is not to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't a worthy book. It's a great book. But lots of great literature gets rejected while crap gets published because publishers are cautious and frequently stupid.)
One publisher did choose to consult with the Ministry of Information. I'm not entirely sure why they did, but I note that the Ministry was dedicated to publicity and propoganda. I'm also not up to speed on the details of England's Ministry of Information, but I don't generally find government centers for propoganda to be "left-wing and liberal", and thus part of some media conspiracy to suppress ideas. I find it more plausible that the Ministry of Information decided it was in England's best interest to not antagonize a major world power, possibly making diplomatic negotiations more difficult. In much the same way that if the publisher of The Satanic Verses would have asked the US State Department, "Hey, is this okay?" the State Department might say, "Ummm, we're busy negotiating with Iran right now, could you not get them all pissy at us at the moment?" While I find such kowtowing to the government sad, it's not a compelling sign of a left wing media conspiracy.
So my question stands: Can you provide citations supporting the claim that Orwell's proposed preface was not present in early printings of Nineteen Eighty-Four because the publisher wanted support the Soviet side of things? And while we're at it, why would they want to protect the Soviets by hiding the preface, but go on to publish such a thinly veiled metaphor attacking the Soviet communist system?
When it was originally written (1949) copyright law granted 56 years of copyright, so the book should have entered the public domain in 2005. In 1998 it was realized Orwell hadn't produced a new work in years. Careful research showed that 56 years wasn't enough incentive to convince Orwell to write a new book. Worse, a case could be made that were Orwell to publish something new in 1998, it would only receive 2 years of copyright! This was a grave matter. Congress wisely passed a law extending the copyright on Nineteen Eighty-Four to 2020. This should be plenty of incentive! I, for one, look forward to Orwell's next new book. Someone should dig him up for an interview; see if they can get him to give us a ghost of a clue when it's due out.
Would you happen to have any supporting evidence that it was actively censored because the publisher either loved the Soviets, or feared the government? (And simultaneously is brave enough to publish a thinly veiled attack on the Soviet form of government but cowardly enough to refuse to publish a screed about publishers and "intelligentsia" loving that same government?)
I think we can agree: Orwell wrote that text as a proposed preface to Animal Farm. It did not appear in early, or indeed most, printings of Animal Farm. But was it censorship because of a love of Soviet Russia? I don't think you can support that claim.
Given the book was originally refused by four publishers, including "Two [that] had been publishing anti-Russian books for years, and [another that] had no noticeable political colour," it seems entirely plausible that the preface was rejected for other reasons. Perhaps the publisher felt it was a hamfisted introduction to an otherwise (relatively) subtle book. It's possible they refused it because they generally felt the book was better without it. They might have felt the book might be more widely read and the anti communist message spread without it. It's entirely possible Orwell agreed with these decisions. The page you linked to has no supporting claims, only mentioning the idea that it was "censored" in passing. Some quick checking around fails to turn up any evidence for the theory of active suppression by a publisher.
Cursive as taught in US schools is slower and more tiring than printing, which is why I'm in favor of scrapping it. In its original form, as a hybrid shorthand I expect it's faster. But such a system is highly individual. Teaching students to craft their own individual cursive that compromises between readability and speed is hard. Of course I expect that Holt has some thoughts on what the school system does when given a choice between easy but useless standardization and difficult but productive individuality. :-)
While that's the original goal, for far too many teachers it's not about that. It's about learning the "adult" way to write. Students are pressured to slavishly reproduce the samples, as a result actually ending up moving more slowly and with more work. And of course the idealized samples themselves have long since moved beyond efficiency and into what is expected. I doubt I'm the only person who wrote exclusively in cursive for years, then discovered as an adult that the silted form we learned is slower and more work than print. So I gave it up.
Good riddance to cursive as it is currently inflicted on students. Perhaps there is a place for a mainstream but fast writing form, but at this point it may be better to start from scratch. And as others have noted, for long form writing almost everyone is typing, not writing, thus eliminating the most compelling use. The most common use of writing is to fill out forms, for which print is usually required anyway.
The grandparent ultimately asserted that "for the rest of us, SQL is cumbersome," calling out that an "SQL-free" database is "easier", "more secure," and "cheaper."
If we're talking about essentially key-value stores, SQL can do it well.
It's harder, but we're talking about an hour or so of work, an hour's worth of value you can reuse for future projects. For all of the complaints about needing to worry about tables with lots of fields and serialization, it's moot if you just want a key store. All that worrying about getting your data into tabular form is irrelevant. (I'm not sure what your point about trees is; I'm not aware of an especially more elegant way to store trees in a simple key-value store that I couldn't implement with similar ease in a relational database.)
Writing secure SQL is not hard; every modern language supports placeholders that will handle your escaping.
Now a simple key-value store is "cheaper," there is less going on under the hood, less built-in functionality ("power") available and thus less complexity. But, are you really writing the next Google? Sure, you want to believe your application will have millions of users, but... really? "The rest of us" are writing much, much smaller scale applications. Little things like the phone company's billing system, Wikipedia, and EVE Online. And we're not feeling terribly encumbered by our databases.
I find your comparison to LISP/Java and C relevant, but for the opposite reason. Key-value stores and C are the simple, obvious solution. They're really fast because they don't do much, and you can accurately predict what's going on under the hood. LISP, Java, and a relational database are powerful, resultingly complex, and it's hard to predict exact run-time performance. But many real world programs frequently don't need to be all that fast, the benefits of all that extra functionality speed development, if you add the functionality yourself you end up paying the cost or more anyway, and years of research have shown that you can make them quite fast. C programmers for years wailed that all those extra layers of indirection was way overkill, that Java "is often more complex than necessary and has too much overhead" and "that much of the overhead is hidden from the average developer, which for today's lazy programmers makes for some very inefficient code." At least today, C programmer standing by this argument are wrong for most real-world problems.
And, of course, part of the price of a key-store system is that many seemingly simple tasks become hard. Sure, you can map from product ID to a product's information, but how do you query on price, name, or manufacturer? As best I can tell the answers are to throw more computers at the problem, or start maintaining your own indexes and hoping you don't screw them up. Related but separate pieces of information (products, customers, orders) don't have an elegant representation; you end up maintaining the relationships in your code; the key-store system can't catch errors. You can add layers to help you with all of these things, but as you go, you'll find you're reimplementing a relational database. On the up side, you only pay for the features you need. But the down sides are many: an existing relational database has dedicated many years of work into optimizations and research, time you can't afford; your system is non-standard, increasing the time it takes a new team member to get up to speed; if your needs are relatively modest, the cost of development will exceed the cost of using off-the-shelf software.
Systems like Hadoop or Google's MapReduce have a lot of advantages, as you note. They do scale, especially across multiple machines, in a way that relational databases suck hard at. They can provide high reliability in the face of unreliable machines. (And on a large enough system, the mean time to failure is now.) Maybe you're doing something where those or other advantages are important. Great! But "the rest of us" aren't especial
I believe the great-grandparent poster was talking about simple key-value stores, similar to the Tokyo Cabinet system he mentioned. When people talk about Anti-SQL or SQL-Free, that seems to be what they're always talking about, although usually on the larger end with things like BigTable and HBase. My criticism was directed in that direction. Compared a key-value store to a subset of SQL, or even a key-value store implemented in SQL, the complexity difference is negligible for any but the most simplistic of projects. As such, the great-grandparent poster's objection to SQL and relational databases compared to key-value stores was wrong. But I must yield that object storage is an area where object oriented DB have a clear advantage over relational DBs.