"Wow," my wife said. "How did you learn to do that?"
The strange answer is that my bumbling hours on the Linux box were launching the process by which I could take control of my information life. Or begin to.
Of course the answer, as Katz discovered, to "How do you learn to do that?" is that you don't learn how to do that. You learn how to read what is printed on the screen and make educated guesses as to how to do things in general.
This is an argument that I've always used in the Mac vs. Windows context: Windows, by being so fragile and counter-intuitive, encourages naive users to be afraid of their computers, as in "Much more than me, my wife dreads altering any function of a computer, utterly convinced she will destroy the machine, along with her life's work, in a keystroke." There are so many things you need to know not to do, and it is so easy to damage the system inadvertently if you don't know them all, that these fears are not unjustified.
On a Mac, by contrast, it really is safe to explore things. Internal weaknesses in memory protection and multitasking are irrelevant in this context: you really can tell a naive user, "As long as you stay out of the System Folder and don't put anything in the Trash that you don't want to lose, there is nothing you can do that will damage the machine or your stuff. Go play." I learned a lot of what I know that way. Sure, it hides the internals, but it introduces you to (mostly) logical, intuitive behavior. By exploring my Classic II this way, I gained an intuitive sense of a lot of the operating system, and general computing, concepts that I later learned more concretely in my CS courses at Berkeley.
I guess the same applies to Linux, with a few differences: it's a bit more intimidating for the beginner, but that's offset by its being more stable (hence safer) and by allowing you to explore deeper into the internals. How these tradeoffs balance out is an interesting question.
...I for one would not complain about the above being a grammar flame, etc., since the difference between "infer" and "imply" is really something that nerds, of all people, should get right; we should be making fun of the non-nerds who just lump "all those technical-sounding 'logic' words" together instead of using them properly. The original comment was really pretty backwards: when a statement implies something, that thing is what we can infer from it.
Actually, I would think the best word would have been "say" or "mean", as in "Both sentences say the same thing."
Still, what started this whole argument was the point that a lot of people are misunderstanding the patent. Maybe instead of comparing the article to Rob's summary (which, as pointed out above, was not so bad after all), he should have compared the article directly to the dumb comments that he was reacting to. The point is valid: the patent is on paying for downloads, not just downloads. The other point is that it is still obscenely wrong-headed of them to claim to own this idea.
I'll bet you're just saying that; you haven't really patented the binary digits. If you have, please give the relevant patent number that we can look up.
First, you have to know that I am absolutely not supporting these guys. I think that what they are doing -- claiming to own a general idea, as if it were a specific technology, etc. -- is absolutely disgusting. I can't decide whether to assume that they are so mind-bogglingly stupid as to really believe that their patent is valid, or such unscruplous greedy bastards as to try this sort of patent terrorism when they are fully aware of all the arguments we are yelling and screaming about. (This is a general problem I have with "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- maybe it really is malice. I would at least say "Do not necessarily..." instead of "Never...".)
However: my point here is that, whereas you are just babbling about getting silly patents, they actually did go through the process of applying for, and receiving these patents. Whenever one of these "ridiculous patents" stories comes up and people make comments like yours, I am struck by this difference.
...Qualcomm's decision to switch from Palm OS to Windows CE for its Internet-enabled phone...
I must have missed that one. When did this happen? Was it on/.? I'd assume this is referring to the PdQ (PalmPilot/cell phone combo) that we all got so excited about late last year. Guess it's gone. How could we have failed to hear about that? Or is it just me?
Just in case that was too subtle for anyone, he's talking about Reflections on Trusting Trust, which was posted here the other day.
Apparently, Ken Thompson added a piece of code to the C compiler that would detect when it was compiling the Unix login command and insert a special password. He then added a piece to detect when it was compiling the C compiler and add both of these routines. He then compiled the standard C compiler on this doctored version: the source is clean but the binary contains his hacks, with the effect that he can rootshell any Unix system that was compiled with any version of the C compiler that was compiled with his C compiler binary. He claims he never actually used this.
The point is that not only can you not trust binaries that you are given; you can't even trust binaries that you've compiled unless you trust your compiler, i.e., you wrote it yourself in assembly. I guess even then there could be hardware back doors, so you'd better make your own processors too.
But then, I'm not sure writing it yourself is such a good solution: I know there are no back doors in code I've written from scratch, but how far would I want to trust my own debugging skills? Dunno.
...controlling Intellectual Property and tying it to a particular machine.
Bit by bit, Richard Stallman's paper The Right to Read (from the 2/1997 Communications of the ACM) is coming true. Read this paper. It's scary, especially when you realize that he's talking about things that are already happening, or at least being proposed.
Accually more people might drink tea today if the biggest tea company in the country didn't make aweful tea.
What are you talking about? I don't know who's the biggest, but you surely don't mean Bigelow. Their Earl Grey is far superior to Twinings'. (Can this be the next caffeine poll? Who makes the best Earl Grey tea blend?)
Oh, wait! I see: "aweful", not "awful". Does "aweful" mean full of awe? Is it like "awesome"? Speaking of picking on typos, at least balance your parentheses.
Anybody want in on a pool as to when this will be deleted?
I'm in favor of the right to post anonymously, but it's kind of stupid to offer a wager when, in order to take you up on it, somebody would need a way to contact you! That's assuming it was an honest suggestion and not just weak sarcasm.
Why does Star Wars warrent all this attention and not say 'Pi' or something?
There was a story here about Pi, when it was new. The discussion was very favorable. I for one had not heard of it until then, but it got me interested enough to look up the theater listing and go see it. It was a great movie. Thanks for asking. Did you have a point?
Why do people assume that because I use a computer and have access this this site, I automatically want to hear about STAR WARS 3 times a week?
That would make sense if this were a "mainstream" media body targetting "nerds". No doubt the content would be dictated by stereotypes and we "real" nerds would probably be offended, etc.
However, this is a "real" nerd site: Rob doesn't post stories because he thinks people will find them interesting (well, yeah, but not based on stereotypes) -- he posts stories that he himself finds interesting, on the basis that people like him will also be interested. I suspect that a poll would show he's right.
WTF could Star Trek possibly have to do with this? The post was completely about Star Wars. Someone claimed that Star Wars has outlived itself (he's wrong), but he didn't say anything about Star Trek being any better.
Are you one of those idiots who thinks that fans of Star Trek and Star Wars are somehow opposed to each other, hence anyone with something bad to say about Star Wars must be Trekkie? Otherwise why change the subject unless trying to start a Star * flamewar?
Or was this just a lame attempt to insult people who know how to appreciate real science fiction? (Though of course neither Star * is on the level of Babylon 5.)
Sorry, but if you don't think you learned anything important in college, then either you weren't paying attention or you didn't go to a real school.
"Until an $85-a-copy textbook is written, they can't teach a course, and by the time the book is published, the technology is out of date," Waldo says. "I could go to HotWired and master Dynamic HTML in five days, or I could spend a year in college and would leave knowing Fortran, which is an out-of-date computer language."
Crap. You don't go to school to learn to hack; you go to school to learn Computer Science. As Brian Harvey said at the beginning of CS61a (the first CS class at UCB), CS knowledge is not tied to any particular language and technology. The knowledge you get from these classes is applicable to any language, platform, or technology, with only a quick skim of the reference manual to learn the particular syntax.
"For geeks, colleges have become like those cheesy technical schools offering courses on refrigerator and auto repair that advertise on Dukes of Hazzard reruns," Waldo says.
Sure, if you go to those schools, where the textbooks are probably from the "For Dummies" or "21 Days" series. At a real school, you don't learn the specifics of JavaScript, DHTML, or whatever the latest "hot" technology is supposed to be. Of course those skills have "the shelf-life of a banana", especially if you have to wait for them to percolate into a college curriculum. Instead, you learn theory: NP-completeness, formal language theory, graph theory, data structures and algorithms, operating system concepts, databases, etc., and, perhaps most importantly, problem-solving skills: you learn how to analyze a problem and come up with a good solution. For anything non-trivial, you just can't pick this stuff up on the street.
A lot of the people out there with MCSEs, etc., making big bucks are not even aware of the existence of this stuff. They think that writing efficient code means reusing variable names instead of DIMming a new variable in VB (I actually had this conversation once -- the same guy also once asked my friend "How do you sort an array?" I guess he couldn't find the function in the VB manual, so he was stuck). They also think it's necessary to go to expensive training seminars to learn each new technology. Maybe for them it is, since they don't have the theoretical background to look at a "new" technology and see it in terms of those basic concepts.
It's probably true that if you're reasonably smart you can make more money, at least in the short term, by skipping school, learning a few "hot" technologies, and going to work. In most jobs, all that theoretical knowledge is not used much anyway. However, there are times when you can make big mistakes if you don't have a proper background. Besides, "real nerds" find that stuff interesting and worthwhile in its own right. I don't know that one way is necessarily better for everyone, since not eveyone has the same values, but I for one thought school was extremely worthwhile. I went to work instead of graduate school in order to get some real-world perspective and because of the bucks I could make, but I fully intend to go back in ~5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
"Wow," my wife said. "How did you learn to do that?"
The strange answer is that my bumbling hours on the Linux box were launching the process by which I could take control of my information life. Or begin to.
Of course the answer, as Katz discovered, to "How do you learn to do that?" is that you don't learn how to do that. You learn how to read what is printed on the screen and make educated guesses as to how to do things in general.
This is an argument that I've always used in the Mac vs. Windows context: Windows, by being so fragile and counter-intuitive, encourages naive users to be afraid of their computers, as in "Much more than me, my wife dreads altering any function of a computer, utterly convinced she will destroy the machine, along with her life's work, in a keystroke." There are so many things you need to know not to do, and it is so easy to damage the system inadvertently if you don't know them all, that these fears are not unjustified.
On a Mac, by contrast, it really is safe to explore things. Internal weaknesses in memory protection and multitasking are irrelevant in this context: you really can tell a naive user, "As long as you stay out of the System Folder and don't put anything in the Trash that you don't want to lose, there is nothing you can do that will damage the machine or your stuff. Go play." I learned a lot of what I know that way. Sure, it hides the internals, but it introduces you to (mostly) logical, intuitive behavior. By exploring my Classic II this way, I gained an intuitive sense of a lot of the operating system, and general computing, concepts that I later learned more concretely in my CS courses at Berkeley.
I guess the same applies to Linux, with a few differences: it's a bit more intimidating for the beginner, but that's offset by its being more stable (hence safer) and by allowing you to explore deeper into the internals. How these tradeoffs balance out is an interesting question.
David Gould
...I for one would not complain about the above being a grammar flame, etc., since the difference between "infer" and "imply" is really something that nerds, of all people, should get right; we should be making fun of the non-nerds who just lump "all those technical-sounding 'logic' words" together instead of using them properly. The original comment was really pretty backwards: when a statement implies something, that thing is what we can infer from it.
Actually, I would think the best word would have been "say" or "mean", as in "Both sentences say the same thing."
Still, what started this whole argument was the point that a lot of people are misunderstanding the patent. Maybe instead of comparing the article to Rob's summary (which, as pointed out above, was not so bad after all), he should have compared the article directly to the dumb comments that he was reacting to. The point is valid: the patent is on paying for downloads, not just downloads. The other point is that it is still obscenely wrong-headed of them to claim to own this idea.
David Gould
I'll bet you're just saying that; you haven't really patented the binary digits. If you have, please give the relevant patent number that we can look up.
First, you have to know that I am absolutely not supporting these guys. I think that what they are doing -- claiming to own a general idea, as if it were a specific technology, etc. -- is absolutely disgusting. I can't decide whether to assume that they are so mind-bogglingly stupid as to really believe that their patent is valid, or such unscruplous greedy bastards as to try this sort of patent terrorism when they are fully aware of all the arguments we are yelling and screaming about. (This is a general problem I have with "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- maybe it really is malice. I would at least say "Do not necessarily..." instead of "Never...".)
However: my point here is that, whereas you are just babbling about getting silly patents, they actually did go through the process of applying for, and receiving these patents. Whenever one of these "ridiculous patents" stories comes up and people make comments like yours, I am struck by this difference.
David Gould
I must have missed that one. When did this happen? Was it on
David Gould
is at www.MacWeek.com.
David Gould
Just in case that was too subtle for anyone, he's talking about Reflections on Trusting Trust, which was posted here the other day.
Apparently, Ken Thompson added a piece of code to the C compiler that would detect when it was compiling the Unix login command and insert a special password. He then added a piece to detect when it was compiling the C compiler and add both of these routines. He then compiled the standard C compiler on this doctored version: the source is clean but the binary contains his hacks, with the effect that he can rootshell any Unix system that was compiled with any version of the C compiler that was compiled with his C compiler binary. He claims he never actually used this.
The point is that not only can you not trust binaries that you are given; you can't even trust binaries that you've compiled unless you trust your compiler, i.e., you wrote it yourself in assembly. I guess even then there could be hardware back doors, so you'd better make your own processors too.
But then, I'm not sure writing it yourself is such a good solution: I know there are no back doors in code I've written from scratch, but how far would I want to trust my own debugging skills? Dunno.
David Gould
Bit by bit, Richard Stallman's paper The Right to Read (from the 2/1997 Communications of the ACM) is coming true. Read this paper. It's scary, especially when you realize that he's talking about things that are already happening, or at least being proposed.
David Gould
Accually more people might drink tea today if the biggest tea company in the country didn't make aweful tea.
What are you talking about? I don't know who's the biggest, but you surely don't mean Bigelow. Their Earl Grey is far superior to Twinings'. (Can this be the next caffeine poll? Who makes the best Earl Grey tea blend?)
Oh, wait! I see: "aweful", not "awful". Does "aweful" mean full of awe? Is it like "awesome"? Speaking of picking on typos, at least balance your parentheses.
David Gould
Anybody want in on a pool as to when this will be deleted?
I'm in favor of the right to post anonymously, but it's kind of stupid to offer a wager when, in order to take you up on it, somebody would need a way to contact you! That's assuming it was an honest suggestion and not just weak sarcasm.
Why does Star Wars warrent all this attention and not say 'Pi' or something?
There was a story here about Pi, when it was new. The discussion was very favorable. I for one had not heard of it until then, but it got me interested enough to look up the theater listing and go see it. It was a great movie. Thanks for asking. Did you have a point?
Why do people assume that because I use a computer and have access this this site, I automatically want to hear about STAR WARS 3 times a week?
That would make sense if this were a "mainstream" media body targetting "nerds". No doubt the content would be dictated by stereotypes and we "real" nerds would probably be offended, etc.
However, this is a "real" nerd site: Rob doesn't post stories because he thinks people will find them interesting (well, yeah, but not based on stereotypes) -- he posts stories that he himself finds interesting, on the basis that people like him will also be interested. I suspect that a poll would show he's right.
David Gould
WTF could Star Trek possibly have to do with this? The post was completely about Star Wars. Someone claimed that Star Wars has outlived itself (he's wrong), but he didn't say anything about Star Trek being any better.
Are you one of those idiots who thinks that fans of Star Trek and Star Wars are somehow opposed to each other, hence anyone with something bad to say about Star Wars must be Trekkie? Otherwise why change the subject unless trying to start a Star * flamewar?
Or was this just a lame attempt to insult people who know how to appreciate real science fiction? (Though of course neither Star * is on the level of Babylon 5.)
David Gould
Sorry, but if you don't think you learned anything important in college, then either you weren't paying attention or you didn't go to a real school.
"Until an $85-a-copy textbook is written, they can't teach a course, and by the time the book is published, the technology is out of date," Waldo says. "I could go to HotWired and master Dynamic HTML in five days, or I could spend a year in college and would leave knowing Fortran, which is an out-of-date computer language."
Crap. You don't go to school to learn to hack; you go to school to learn Computer Science. As Brian Harvey said at the beginning of CS61a (the first CS class at UCB), CS knowledge is not tied to any particular language and technology. The knowledge you get from these classes is applicable to any language, platform, or technology, with only a quick skim of the reference manual to learn the particular syntax.
"For geeks, colleges have become like those cheesy technical schools offering courses on refrigerator and auto repair that advertise on Dukes of Hazzard reruns," Waldo says.
Sure, if you go to those schools, where the textbooks are probably from the "For Dummies" or "21 Days" series. At a real school, you don't learn the specifics of JavaScript, DHTML, or whatever the latest "hot" technology is supposed to be. Of course those skills have "the shelf-life of a banana", especially if you have to wait for them to percolate into a college curriculum. Instead, you learn theory: NP-completeness, formal language theory, graph theory, data structures and algorithms, operating system concepts, databases, etc., and, perhaps most importantly, problem-solving skills: you learn how to analyze a problem and come up with a good solution. For anything non-trivial, you just can't pick this stuff up on the street.
A lot of the people out there with MCSEs, etc., making big bucks are not even aware of the existence of this stuff. They think that writing efficient code means reusing variable names instead of DIMming a new variable in VB (I actually had this conversation once -- the same guy also once asked my friend "How do you sort an array?" I guess he couldn't find the function in the VB manual, so he was stuck). They also think it's necessary to go to expensive training seminars to learn each new technology. Maybe for them it is, since they don't have the theoretical background to look at a "new" technology and see it in terms of those basic concepts.
It's probably true that if you're reasonably smart you can make more money, at least in the short term, by skipping school, learning a few "hot" technologies, and going to work. In most jobs, all that theoretical knowledge is not used much anyway. However, there are times when you can make big mistakes if you don't have a proper background. Besides, "real nerds" find that stuff interesting and worthwhile in its own right. I don't know that one way is necessarily better for everyone, since not eveyone has the same values, but I for one thought school was extremely worthwhile. I went to work instead of graduate school in order to get some real-world perspective and because of the bucks I could make, but I fully intend to go back in ~5 years.
David Gould