I've read a lot of Gaiman's stuff -- Good Omens, Neverwhere, etc. His short stories are usually really good (the one about the cat fighting the devil each night was converted into the best campfire story in my mental collection).
But nothing touches Sandman and his other work with graphic novels. Rich storytelling, terrific dialog, great characters, etc. "A Dolls House" and "48 Hours" rank among the most-rereadable works in my library, followed up closely by Books of Magic (the first series -- the ones Neil wrote, not the later issues which just got a bit odd).
So: What was your favorite Sandman issue?
"An Epilogue: Sunday Morning", the one which takes place just after the Wake in which Hob Gadling, who was always one of my favorite characters, deals with the death of Morpheus. Of all the loose ends, I was glad he was the one that got some special attention.
(note: Ramadan was a close second due to the amazing story and art, but you can only have one favorite)
'Jam Echelon Day' did have some effect, but it wasn't the effect of choking off the NSA that some around here (rather naively) desired. I mean, let's face it: the NSA isn't running a couple of Perl scripts on an old pimped-out P100 running FreeBSD, and the people they've got doing the coding probably aren't first-year CS majors.
We're dealing with the best in the world here. The money ensures that.
No, what Jam Echelon Day did was accomplish the only thing we outside the system could have hoped to: raise awareness. The only way that this sort of crap goes on is because people don't know about it. Jam Echelon Day got press coverage, and that's ultimately what spooks like the NSA fear.
This is the part where we see a feature on '60 Minutes' about how the Big Bad Government is reading all of your 'private emails' (no matter how oxymoronic that term is). You'll see Mike Wallace walking past a row of Origins and talking incredulously about how our rights are being violated using our own tax dollars. He's good at that. Then, a couple of the higher-brow talk shows will include Echelon in their next 'CyberScare' episodes.
Then the congressional hearings start. That's what we can hope for. Hopefully, the violations of the rights of American citizens will be so bad that they'll dissolve the NSA or at least put it under some sort of realistic oversight.
It's good that they're getting a color version out the door; it'll be worth it to stop hearing by smug coworkers talking about how their CE devices all have color.
Really, though, other than as a status thing, how does having color really benefit you from a personal organizer standpoint? I like my Palm V because it's very very direct about getting places and doing things, really easy to use and because it fits neatly into my pocket (wallet-sized!). I can generally have an appointment set up with an alarm to remind me before the CE boys have managed to get their date book applications to launch.
I can think of one good use for a color screen, however: A faces database. It would be *really* nice to be able to enter a few basic facts (eye color, hair color, skin, etc) which would pull up a bunch of photos to choose from the next time I can't remember the name of one of my clients. Of course, it would be a memory hog, but I'll bet that the average palmtop will have hundreds of megs of memory within the next few years...
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Best Part of Snow Crash
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Snow Crash
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· Score: 3
The reviewer overlooked the very best part of Snow Crash: the first chapter. I've never wanted to be a pizza delivery guy so badly in my entire life.
No, we should be using our superior OS to make them all look bad on the same hardware. I know that's what we've all been doing now, but I suspect the faster the clock the more noticible the differences will become again.
I really worry about the amount our (meaning the world's, not just the US's) tech sector relies on the production provided by Taiwan. It's not the bad quake potential that scares me -- it's China. I have a bad feeling that it's only a matter of time before China decides to bring their "renegade province" back into line.
Here's my nightmare scenario: China develops and successfully tests a long-range ICBM with the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead. China steps up their rhetoric to the US -- a Chinese official comments that the US won't defend Taiwan because it's not worth losing Washington or New York (they've already threatened Los Angeles in exactly this way). The US, instead of promising to completely vaporize any country that initiates a nuclear conflict, backs down (not that I disagree with this -- it's not good to play macho with nukes).
Another quake or other major natural disaster hits Taiwan. The Taiwanese armed forces mobalize in another massive rescue effort. Meanwhile, the Chinese army starts to move. The Taiwanese navy reacts to try and hold the line, but is overwhelmed by an overwhelming wave of Chinese MiGs combined with an all-out assault by Chinese warships. Taiwan's US-built gear has the technical edge, but can't balance out the enormous numerical advantages of the Chinese fleet combined with the disorganization caused by the latest natural disaster. Taiwan makes a desperate plea to the US, but the President reluctantly ignores it and orders US navel assets in the area out of the war zone.
With the Taiwanese navy rusting at the bottom of the ocean and the US naval forces taken out of the conflict, the Chinese land a few thousand troops who secure a beachhead and hurredly lay down an airstrip. Within a month, the remaining Taiwanese loyalists are fighting a heroic but doomed door-to-door battle against a half million Chinese troops who made the short hop from the mainland in commercial 747s, commendeered at the Bejing airport the day the conflict begins.
The US lodges a protest and pushes a condemnation through the UN, but doesn't dare cut off trade with its Most Valued Nation trading partner. Soon, the Chinese are dug into Taiwan. Now, maybe they have the tech resources to rebuild and man the fabs -- maybe we'd even provide them with such. However, after the battle the infrastructure bears out the extent of the damage. Like Yugoslavia, it'll take years (not weeks or months) to rebuild, in some cases from scratch.
So, I'd suggest that (a) companies start looking for a more stable place to begin gradually moving to, or (b) the US get behind Taiwan big-time. Otherwise, the tech industry will be looking at a crisis that makes this look like a stroll in the park.
Hollywood overall hasn't been kind to computers and the people who use them in general, but I'll bet we can come up with a couple of computer-realistic or friendly moves. Lemme see.
Sneakers was fairly good, with the main stress point being the plot device (a math function that can be used to break military-strength encryption, which isn't really all that unbelievable). The geeks use more social engineering tactics, and the computers aren't all that special or (in some cases) useful. Good emphesis on how the government is interested in reading our information while keeping their mail private.
Office Space showed the real underside of the computer industry: the intolerable management beaurocracy, the crappy peon work, dealing with moronic coworkers, and the brainlessness of downsizing tactics. Again, nothing unbelievable is done with the computers -- in fact, one of the programmers even writes (gasp) buggy code.
The Pirates of Silicon Valley. Again, the Industry (and in this case the industry leaders) gets a well-deserved working over. While this is a "TNT Original Production" and not actually an honest-to-god theatre movie, we'll count it in 'cause I liked it.
Contact had believable computers used for astronomy, and little subliminal niceties like a button that said "Unix Party" scattered around. The idea of HR Hadden breaking into the research computers seemed a bit far-fetched until I considered that he had actually provided those computers in the first place (and thus had ample opportunity to install Back Orifice). Again, not a really computer-heavy movie, but then again I don't think the more emphesis there is on computers the more liberties are likely to be taken with their abilities.
Clear and Present Danger used a lot of computer and spy tech that pushed the envelope without being unbelievable or unlikely, but I'd sort of expect that in a Tom Clancy movie. After all, if there's one thing that guy does well, it's research. The part where the computer dweeb guessed the guy's ATM PIN was funny, since I know how stupid users are with their passwords (while thinking they're being clever).
Anyhow, that's my "top of the head" list. The list for "bad use of computers" is easier and much longer, but I'm sure I've missed more than a few easy computer-friendly flicks. Anybody else have a good one?
Don't blame Microsoft's PR department; this sort of thing really did used to work, and it used to be used by companies all the time. So it won't work against Linux; they just haven't realized it yet. It's like in the Civil War: None of the generals knew that their tactics were out of date compared to the weapons they were using, and some hadn't learned that by the end of the war (with disasterous consequences for their commands).
Mindcraft, Gartner and any other company that bases its business on its rep with the business community need to learn right now that you can't fool 100,000 pairs of eyeballs, no matter how hard you try to distract them, nor can you outshout 100,000 angry mouths yelling against you. They simply can't afford to pull this "We do a report for you that says exactly what you want it to say and you pays us" crap (which is exactly what they both did, its just that Mindcraft got paid before and Gartner got paid after).
The 100,000 brains out there are ripping this report to shreads, and 100,000 coworkers are talking about how the Gartner Group sold out to Microsoft. Gartner is, in a word, fucked; any second-year advertising major can tell you that word-of-mouth is the most incredibly powerful force for or against a company that exists.
Gartner made the mistake of letting MS use them to use a tactic that's out of date in the information age. The only question is how many more generals out there have yet to realize that their tactics are out of date, and how many more companies will have their reputation destroyed before this is over.
Okay, go find a mirror and look yourself in the eye. Now,say, "A computer is a tool, not a way of life or a religion" one hundred times. Repeat as needed.
What would be unethical in a case like this one would be for Carmack to not tell about his positive experiences using and developing with Windows NT. It would be unethical to sell your business on using Linux (or any OS) if you knew that there was a better option available that you can't stomach for purely philosophical reasons.
I notice a lot of people on/. recently who seem to think that Linux and OSS got to where it is today via either refusing to admit its faults or mindless advocacy. Sitting on your butt and yelling, "MS might be better, but they cheated and used buyouts and corporate sabotage to become so!" is a useless response. Refusing to admit your own weaknesses is a sure path to defeat. Victory, be it in war, software development or table tennis, comes from knowing your own strengths and weaknesses and being able to embrace them, to work on them.
Anyone being paid by a company to choose a platform for a specific task has a moral obligation to provide the best platform for that task. You need to accept that blind advocacy is not a Good Thing(tm).
As much as it galls the little open-source fanatic in me, it was really good to see someone at last come out with a very well-reasoned decision to use NT as a development platform.
It's usually easy for people in the OSS community to bash Windows because the people who make the decision to use it generally do so because they're uninformed sheep, following whatever PC Week told them. Overall, I think this ease of attacking leads us past some of the actual advantages of using NT. We sit here and back Gartner or ZD, moan about how much Bill pulls down, and all the time we are blind to those certain places where MS still "ownz" Linux.
But you can't really argue with what Carmack said, and even if you do you've got to have the creds to stand up to frickin' John Carmack (I can think of a half dozen names at best who'd even get that sort of time of day, and they better have a damn good arguement).
Overall, I give Linus and Carmack the most points for being the most grounded hackers out there; whenever they take a stand on an issue, you generally realize (either then or later on when all the pieces have fallen into place) that they were right -- I remember Carmack talking about lack of an easy-to-use email program under Linux a few months back, and he is (or was, this new KDE email program looks pretty hip) 100% right.
One last thing that's a little off-subject: Why do we have to put up with people posting comments like "Right on!" just so they can be in the top few comments? I'm not sure what can be done about it, but it's really starting to cheese me off. Maybe just saying out loud that they're morons in enough, but I'd really rather that people started posting more intelligent, though-out and well reasoned comments that at least demonstrate that they've read the article. Rant mode off, sorry.
Griping from people like myself... You really have to look outside of the Industry sometime -- you're obviously so used to having software makers walk all over you that you can't even concieve of not having boot tracks on your back anyhow.
While I agree that it's near-impossible to track down and squash every bug in a piece of modern software, there are a lot (and by this I mean a majority) of software makers who don't even really try. If this isn't obvious to you, you've never been involved in a software release. Why: The software makers know that, quite simply, they can get away with it. Since there is no prescident of software makers being held liable for their defective products, they feel safe in rushing a product to market at the expense of beta testing or any level of ethical programming.
I guarantee, however, that this will change. There is no other industry that can get away with this sort of carelessness and not be held liable, despite what you might be willing to forgive or put up with.
Here's how I see it unfolding: A major release of an important piece of software will be installed by a fairly major business. After a few months, a known software bug will corrupt some sort of very expensive data and cause some very expensive downtime. Clients will be lost and important data gathered since the last backup will be destroyed forever. The firm will do some poking around, and find out that this bug was known about before the release. A few private investigators will interview a few ex-employees of the software company in question and discover that a deliberate decision was made to ship without fixing the bug in order to meet deadlines.
The firm will hire an expensive law firm and will take the software company to court. The case will be tried in the media a dozen times over before the opening statements even begin. The firm will present documentation of both their losses and the negligance of the software company in causing those losses. The software company will present an argument like yours, claiming that their EULA protects them.
The software company might win, if the appeals court upholds the status of their EULA and if they aren't found to be grossly negligent (which no EULA can protect them against). It won't matter, however, since the public outcry created by this high-profile case will lead to new legislation. The public will be so incredibly sick of their own computers constantly crashing that they'll support a shocking amount of regulatory effort. EULAs will probably be outlawed, and software makers will likely be held to a "reasonable effort" bug test.
In any event, the field day will be over, and it will be a Good Thing(tm). Despite what you seem to think, holding companies legally responsible is the only safeguard against corporate bullying -- your "invisible hand" idea was discredited in the 1920's. If you have any question about this, ask yourself: the next time you're wheeled into the hospital, are you glad that the docs have the added incentive of avoiding malpractice, or would you rather trust that they won't skip a test because they have a "gut feeling" that you probably don't need it? Me, I'd rather be sure they cover their ass by protecting me.
Okay, so maybe in my distant youth I might have broken into a system or two, but I never really hurt anything and never "crashed a system so it [wouldn't] work".
IMHO, if the Justice Department wants to start looking into computer crime, how about looking into how a *lot* of computer companies (and by no means do I just mean MS, although they are one of the major perps) put out buggy software and then sell the security or software patches?
So, you either have to buy the "upgrade" or face having your data deleted or corrupted by a hacker or by a bad bit of code. In the tone of the article, "Can we say 'Blackmail'? I knew we could." Wasting time and resources on crackers is such BS -- maybe one in ten thousand ever get caught or in trouble, and meanwhile these crooked computer software companies are costing the economy billions in wasted money.
Put a few CEOs in prison and let 'em rot for a few years without a trial. I'm sure that meets with the DOJ's blind-justice-for-all philosophy.
You'd think there would be a considerable market for "tough" personal computing equipment. Given that, I'm really sort of shocked that we haven't seen this sort of thing previously (unless you count the NeXT cubes, which I'm told could be dropped from several stories without the case being damaged).
Think of the buyers: Military ('natch), campers (not the Quake kind), off-road bikers, heavy-duty business travellers -- just about anyone who gets tossed around enough that their gear has to take a beatin' and keep on tickin'.
I dunno. I'm not a religious person -- I don't even really believe in God -- but the idea of playing Him just sort of seems wrong for some reason.
Maybe it just from reading one too many Sci Fi books, but somehow the idea of bringing back an animal that had its chance and went extinct anyhow just seems plain wrong. I can't really intellectualize why it seems wrong, but it does.
Of course, it might just be that my racial memory is urging me to charge the beast and stick a spear into its side....
... but I can assure you that there is still such a thing as a deer rifle up here in the frozen wastes that is Wisconsin (where the primary modes of entertainment are the Gren Bay Packers, drinking beer and shooting the occassional allusive 4-legged animal).
I use a nice rifle I inherited from my granddad when he died. So far, I can brag that I've never missed, which means I'm nail a whole two deer. It kind of scares me to go out again; I don't want to lose that kind of bragging rights...
The idea of putting an ad or a logo where everybody can see it isn't a new one. There's a company (I forget who) which offers a satellite-based banner. After launch, the satellite would unfold a thin banner which would end up being the size of several football fields. In LEO, this could be easily seen at night and even during the day. It would orbit for a few weeks or months, then fall out of orbit and burn up.
It would give global coverage and it's actually relatively affordable (compared with the huge amounts companies spend on ads for events like the superbowl). No companies have elected to go for it, however, because they're afraid of public backlash.
Picture this: You're just finishing up a week-long canoe trip in Minnesota's boundry waters with your SO. You've been unplugged from everything related to your job or your worries or the real world in general for days now. You and your honey cuddle up in a sleeping bag that night next to the smoldering embers of your fire, look up at the stars at see...
A Nike swoosh.
Would you respond positively to the ad? Go out and buy Nike for your next "roughing it" trip? More likely, you'd make it your life goal to see the Nike Corporation destroyed and Phil Knight's children out on the street selling pencils. This is why I'm a bit shocked that Pizza Hut actually considered engaging in a form of enviromental advertising.
But I agree -- this crosses the line. Being able to get the heck away from the world every so often is something I value more than I can easily express. While regulating this sort of thing would be about as easy as regulating the internet (because there is a growing number of money-hungry countries with launch capabilities), I think a bit of self-regulation could be accomplished if, say, the first few companies to do this had their CEO picked off by a sniper (not a suggestion, just an idea I'm throwing out to anyone who is good with a deer rifle).
First, it's important to realize that the North really fought the war with one hand behind it's back (I'm borrowing from historian Shelby Foote here). If you look at the other stuff going on in this period -- some minor indian wars, the homestead act, etc. The North was never really short on men in its army, but for a long time it was seriously short on the will to use them. If they'd ever were really needing men or supplies, they would have just taken that other hand out from behind their back.
From the numbers and stats I've seen, the black troops in the war had a fairly nominal effect (mostly because they were forbidden from actually fighting until fairly late in the conflict). If you can show me some data that suggests otherwise, I'll entertain it, but there's been quite a number of papers written in and around this area.
No, the biggest effect that emancipation had on the war was to prevent foreign powers from trying to mediate or meddle on behalf of the South -- Britain and France really missed the South's cotten, but because they were free countries they couldn't (politically) justify intervention once the war had formally become about slavery.
Besides, while there were some really old ideas held by the generals (notably the bayonette charge, which was obsolete the second the foundries started producting rifled barrels), it was a learning curve thing. The generals in the South, Lee and Jackson in particular, were bright enough to adapt their tactics fairly quickly (although Lee apparently forgot all these lessons at Gettysburg). The Northern high commanders not only didn't learn fast enough (Fredricksburg), but they also either froze up (Hooker and Pope) or wussed out (McClellan). Both of these are Very Bad Things(tm) from a tactical point of view.
Actually, to be completely honest I think the thing that really kept the Civil War going as long as it did was really inept generaling on the part of the North.
The North always had far superior manpower and a larger industrial base. McClellan could have marched to Richmond and destroyed the confederate capitol during the Peninsula Campaign if he hadn't been so completely psyched out by the southern commanders (who he outnumbered heavily, but was convinced that the opposite was true).
After that, the North cycled through one inept commander after another. Lee knew how to beat each one until Grant came along. Grant had a fairly simple approach to the whole affair; he set his "acceptible loss" numbers very very high and just pushed.
So, Grant actually managed to keep Lee busy. At about the same time, Sherman's army cut loose from their supply lines and gutted the South's infrastructure (Atlanta was the big railroad hub -- burning it like you saw in Gone With the Wind would have the same effect as nuking O'Hare, LAX and JFK all on the same day).
Not that the war didn't become about emancipation, I just didn't want you to think that was the deciding factor.
What'll happen here is that any "nice" parts of Solaris (and I'm so angry with Solaris lately that I can't think of a one) will be assimilated into Linux and the other open source OS projects.
Reasoning: If you thought getting started with Mozilla was tough from a learning-curve point of view, just imagine how tough it would have been on a much larger scale (like this is). Besides, anyone out there interested in doing operating systems development is already likely working on Linux, and I can't see any compelling reason to switch over to working on Solaris. After all, linux's success was a right-place-at-right-time occurance as much as anything else.
Besides, Sun's instituting Yet Another License, which is always discouraging to those of us who think that the GPL is still the only really honest way to go in terms of open source licensing.
Look, it may be a "well known bug", but it's still a gaping security hole that got installed with the default RedHat distro. I can foresee a *lot* of situations where this sort of thing would bite a company on the ass. Maybe I'm a new admin. Maybe I'm busy and don't keep up on the latest bug reports. Maybe I just forgot or didn't know how to work around it. The point is, this isn't something I should have to deal with.
I am so sick of the whining wannabes who seem to be pervading the Linux community lately. It used to be that when someone pointed out a flaw, it was put on a TODO list someplace and fixed; now we just post it up to Slashdot and have everyone yell "This is FUD! PCWeek Sux! I'm 3L337".
The facts stand as they are: PCWeek installed a default RedHat system and it got cracked. No matter how many times you yell "FUD", this is still a Very Bad Thing(tm). Much like the Mindcraft tests (the second round, anyhow), this shows weaknesses in Linux (or in this case, the most popular distro). These things should be addressed, not spun. Spinning probems or denying their existance is not what makes OSS great.
I see a lot of posts which point out that the world can't beat Kasparov 'cause they're, taken together, the most average chess player possible.
While this may be true, they have one very major advantage: They must be very difficult to predict, which is what these chess types count on to decide their next moves.
That plus they have a couple of grand masters helping them out.
Hey, you gotta be fair. Usually, a reputation is all you have to go on as a member of the media.
Really, you've got to take what people tell you and try to disseminate it into an article about a field you're usually not an expert in. It's not as easy as it looks, but when the editor says "hop" you'd better already know how high.
Contrary to popular/.'er belief, the media (even Jesse Berst) isn't out to distort facts or intentionally get things wrong. It's just a matter of not getting good enough quality information from sources.
If someone can talk to the media and make themselves understood (and seem to know of whence they speak), they're a good source until proven otherwise.
That said, I'm glad that egomaniac JP is getting his at long last -- that Packet Storm thing POed me something royal.
Would we? If we ended up with a truly conscious, thinking being, could we simply turn it off? Assuming that we can create such a thing, flipping the power off would be awfully close to killing a human.
Your point? We kill other humans all the time, oftentimes for some pretty silly reasons (aka, nationalism). I don't think that assuring our place as top of earth's evolutionary ladder is at all as trivial as you seem to assume it is.
Trust me -- if humanity in general ever had reason to think that its place at the top of the evolutionary food chain was in contest, we'd do what we had to do to ensure that is wasn't -- even if it means killing a potentially intelligent and sentiant being and (if necessesary, or maybe even if not) its creators. It's kind of a sad commentary, but we can't help it. It's hardcoded into our DNA by the experience of a thousand generations.
Slashdot Mirror
But nothing touches Sandman and his other work with graphic novels. Rich storytelling, terrific dialog, great characters, etc. "A Dolls House" and "48 Hours" rank among the most-rereadable works in my library, followed up closely by Books of Magic (the first series -- the ones Neil wrote, not the later issues which just got a bit odd).
So: What was your favorite Sandman issue?
"An Epilogue: Sunday Morning", the one which takes place just after the Wake in which Hob Gadling, who was always one of my favorite characters, deals with the death of Morpheus. Of all the loose ends, I was glad he was the one that got some special attention.
(note: Ramadan was a close second due to the amazing story and art, but you can only have one favorite)
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We're dealing with the best in the world here. The money ensures that.
No, what Jam Echelon Day did was accomplish the only thing we outside the system could have hoped to: raise awareness. The only way that this sort of crap goes on is because people don't know about it. Jam Echelon Day got press coverage, and that's ultimately what spooks like the NSA fear.
This is the part where we see a feature on '60 Minutes' about how the Big Bad Government is reading all of your 'private emails' (no matter how oxymoronic that term is). You'll see Mike Wallace walking past a row of Origins and talking incredulously about how our rights are being violated using our own tax dollars. He's good at that. Then, a couple of the higher-brow talk shows will include Echelon in their next 'CyberScare' episodes.
Then the congressional hearings start. That's what we can hope for. Hopefully, the violations of the rights of American citizens will be so bad that they'll dissolve the NSA or at least put it under some sort of realistic oversight.
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Really, though, other than as a status thing, how does having color really benefit you from a personal organizer standpoint? I like my Palm V because it's very very direct about getting places and doing things, really easy to use and because it fits neatly into my pocket (wallet-sized!). I can generally have an appointment set up with an alarm to remind me before the CE boys have managed to get their date book applications to launch.
I can think of one good use for a color screen, however: A faces database. It would be *really* nice to be able to enter a few basic facts (eye color, hair color, skin, etc) which would pull up a bunch of photos to choose from the next time I can't remember the name of one of my clients. Of course, it would be a memory hog, but I'll bet that the average palmtop will have hundreds of megs of memory within the next few years...
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Here's my nightmare scenario: China develops and successfully tests a long-range ICBM with the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead. China steps up their rhetoric to the US -- a Chinese official comments that the US won't defend Taiwan because it's not worth losing Washington or New York (they've already threatened Los Angeles in exactly this way). The US, instead of promising to completely vaporize any country that initiates a nuclear conflict, backs down (not that I disagree with this -- it's not good to play macho with nukes).
Another quake or other major natural disaster hits Taiwan. The Taiwanese armed forces mobalize in another massive rescue effort. Meanwhile, the Chinese army starts to move. The Taiwanese navy reacts to try and hold the line, but is overwhelmed by an overwhelming wave of Chinese MiGs combined with an all-out assault by Chinese warships. Taiwan's US-built gear has the technical edge, but can't balance out the enormous numerical advantages of the Chinese fleet combined with the disorganization caused by the latest natural disaster. Taiwan makes a desperate plea to the US, but the President reluctantly ignores it and orders US navel assets in the area out of the war zone.
With the Taiwanese navy rusting at the bottom of the ocean and the US naval forces taken out of the conflict, the Chinese land a few thousand troops who secure a beachhead and hurredly lay down an airstrip. Within a month, the remaining Taiwanese loyalists are fighting a heroic but doomed door-to-door battle against a half million Chinese troops who made the short hop from the mainland in commercial 747s, commendeered at the Bejing airport the day the conflict begins.
The US lodges a protest and pushes a condemnation through the UN, but doesn't dare cut off trade with its Most Valued Nation trading partner. Soon, the Chinese are dug into Taiwan. Now, maybe they have the tech resources to rebuild and man the fabs -- maybe we'd even provide them with such. However, after the battle the infrastructure bears out the extent of the damage. Like Yugoslavia, it'll take years (not weeks or months) to rebuild, in some cases from scratch.
So, I'd suggest that (a) companies start looking for a more stable place to begin gradually moving to, or (b) the US get behind Taiwan big-time. Otherwise, the tech industry will be looking at a crisis that makes this look like a stroll in the park.
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Sneakers was fairly good, with the main stress point being the plot device (a math function that can be used to break military-strength encryption, which isn't really all that unbelievable). The geeks use more social engineering tactics, and the computers aren't all that special or (in some cases) useful. Good emphesis on how the government is interested in reading our information while keeping their mail private.
Office Space showed the real underside of the computer industry: the intolerable management beaurocracy, the crappy peon work, dealing with moronic coworkers, and the brainlessness of downsizing tactics. Again, nothing unbelievable is done with the computers -- in fact, one of the programmers even writes (gasp) buggy code.
The Pirates of Silicon Valley. Again, the Industry (and in this case the industry leaders) gets a well-deserved working over. While this is a "TNT Original Production" and not actually an honest-to-god theatre movie, we'll count it in 'cause I liked it.
Contact had believable computers used for astronomy, and little subliminal niceties like a button that said "Unix Party" scattered around. The idea of HR Hadden breaking into the research computers seemed a bit far-fetched until I considered that he had actually provided those computers in the first place (and thus had ample opportunity to install Back Orifice). Again, not a really computer-heavy movie, but then again I don't think the more emphesis there is on computers the more liberties are likely to be taken with their abilities.
Clear and Present Danger used a lot of computer and spy tech that pushed the envelope without being unbelievable or unlikely, but I'd sort of expect that in a Tom Clancy movie. After all, if there's one thing that guy does well, it's research. The part where the computer dweeb guessed the guy's ATM PIN was funny, since I know how stupid users are with their passwords (while thinking they're being clever).
Anyhow, that's my "top of the head" list. The list for "bad use of computers" is easier and much longer, but I'm sure I've missed more than a few easy computer-friendly flicks. Anybody else have a good one?
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Mindcraft, Gartner and any other company that bases its business on its rep with the business community need to learn right now that you can't fool 100,000 pairs of eyeballs, no matter how hard you try to distract them, nor can you outshout 100,000 angry mouths yelling against you. They simply can't afford to pull this "We do a report for you that says exactly what you want it to say and you pays us" crap (which is exactly what they both did, its just that Mindcraft got paid before and Gartner got paid after).
The 100,000 brains out there are ripping this report to shreads, and 100,000 coworkers are talking about how the Gartner Group sold out to Microsoft. Gartner is, in a word, fucked; any second-year advertising major can tell you that word-of-mouth is the most incredibly powerful force for or against a company that exists.
Gartner made the mistake of letting MS use them to use a tactic that's out of date in the information age. The only question is how many more generals out there have yet to realize that their tactics are out of date, and how many more companies will have their reputation destroyed before this is over.
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Okay, go find a mirror and look yourself in the eye. Now,say, "A computer is a tool, not a way of life or a religion" one hundred times. Repeat as needed.
What would be unethical in a case like this one would be for Carmack to not tell about his positive experiences using and developing with Windows NT. It would be unethical to sell your business on using Linux (or any OS) if you knew that there was a better option available that you can't stomach for purely philosophical reasons.
I notice a lot of people on /. recently who seem to think that Linux and OSS got to where it is today via either refusing to admit its faults or mindless advocacy. Sitting on your butt and yelling, "MS might be better, but they cheated and used buyouts and corporate sabotage to become so!" is a useless response. Refusing to admit your own weaknesses is a sure path to defeat. Victory, be it in war, software development or table tennis, comes from knowing your own strengths and weaknesses and being able to embrace them, to work on them.
Anyone being paid by a company to choose a platform for a specific task has a moral obligation to provide the best platform for that task. You need to accept that blind advocacy is not a Good Thing(tm).
Read my .sig for starters.
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It's usually easy for people in the OSS community to bash Windows because the people who make the decision to use it generally do so because they're uninformed sheep, following whatever PC Week told them. Overall, I think this ease of attacking leads us past some of the actual advantages of using NT. We sit here and back Gartner or ZD, moan about how much Bill pulls down, and all the time we are blind to those certain places where MS still "ownz" Linux.
But you can't really argue with what Carmack said, and even if you do you've got to have the creds to stand up to frickin' John Carmack (I can think of a half dozen names at best who'd even get that sort of time of day, and they better have a damn good arguement).
Overall, I give Linus and Carmack the most points for being the most grounded hackers out there; whenever they take a stand on an issue, you generally realize (either then or later on when all the pieces have fallen into place) that they were right -- I remember Carmack talking about lack of an easy-to-use email program under Linux a few months back, and he is (or was, this new KDE email program looks pretty hip) 100% right.
One last thing that's a little off-subject: Why do we have to put up with people posting comments like "Right on!" just so they can be in the top few comments? I'm not sure what can be done about it, but it's really starting to cheese me off. Maybe just saying out loud that they're morons in enough, but I'd really rather that people started posting more intelligent, though-out and well reasoned comments that at least demonstrate that they've read the article. Rant mode off, sorry.
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While I agree that it's near-impossible to track down and squash every bug in a piece of modern software, there are a lot (and by this I mean a majority) of software makers who don't even really try. If this isn't obvious to you, you've never been involved in a software release. Why: The software makers know that, quite simply, they can get away with it. Since there is no prescident of software makers being held liable for their defective products, they feel safe in rushing a product to market at the expense of beta testing or any level of ethical programming.
I guarantee, however, that this will change. There is no other industry that can get away with this sort of carelessness and not be held liable, despite what you might be willing to forgive or put up with.
Here's how I see it unfolding: A major release of an important piece of software will be installed by a fairly major business. After a few months, a known software bug will corrupt some sort of very expensive data and cause some very expensive downtime. Clients will be lost and important data gathered since the last backup will be destroyed forever. The firm will do some poking around, and find out that this bug was known about before the release. A few private investigators will interview a few ex-employees of the software company in question and discover that a deliberate decision was made to ship without fixing the bug in order to meet deadlines.
The firm will hire an expensive law firm and will take the software company to court. The case will be tried in the media a dozen times over before the opening statements even begin. The firm will present documentation of both their losses and the negligance of the software company in causing those losses. The software company will present an argument like yours, claiming that their EULA protects them.
The software company might win, if the appeals court upholds the status of their EULA and if they aren't found to be grossly negligent (which no EULA can protect them against). It won't matter, however, since the public outcry created by this high-profile case will lead to new legislation. The public will be so incredibly sick of their own computers constantly crashing that they'll support a shocking amount of regulatory effort. EULAs will probably be outlawed, and software makers will likely be held to a "reasonable effort" bug test.
In any event, the field day will be over, and it will be a Good Thing(tm). Despite what you seem to think, holding companies legally responsible is the only safeguard against corporate bullying -- your "invisible hand" idea was discredited in the 1920's. If you have any question about this, ask yourself: the next time you're wheeled into the hospital, are you glad that the docs have the added incentive of avoiding malpractice, or would you rather trust that they won't skip a test because they have a "gut feeling" that you probably don't need it? Me, I'd rather be sure they cover their ass by protecting me.
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IMHO, if the Justice Department wants to start looking into computer crime, how about looking into how a *lot* of computer companies (and by no means do I just mean MS, although they are one of the major perps) put out buggy software and then sell the security or software patches?
So, you either have to buy the "upgrade" or face having your data deleted or corrupted by a hacker or by a bad bit of code. In the tone of the article, "Can we say 'Blackmail'? I knew we could." Wasting time and resources on crackers is such BS -- maybe one in ten thousand ever get caught or in trouble, and meanwhile these crooked computer software companies are costing the economy billions in wasted money.
Put a few CEOs in prison and let 'em rot for a few years without a trial. I'm sure that meets with the DOJ's blind-justice-for-all philosophy.
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Think of the buyers: Military ('natch), campers (not the Quake kind), off-road bikers, heavy-duty business travellers -- just about anyone who gets tossed around enough that their gear has to take a beatin' and keep on tickin'.
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Maybe it just from reading one too many Sci Fi books, but somehow the idea of bringing back an animal that had its chance and went extinct anyhow just seems plain wrong. I can't really intellectualize why it seems wrong, but it does.
Of course, it might just be that my racial memory is urging me to charge the beast and stick a spear into its side....
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I use a nice rifle I inherited from my granddad when he died. So far, I can brag that I've never missed, which means I'm nail a whole two deer. It kind of scares me to go out again; I don't want to lose that kind of bragging rights...
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It would give global coverage and it's actually relatively affordable (compared with the huge amounts companies spend on ads for events like the superbowl). No companies have elected to go for it, however, because they're afraid of public backlash.
Picture this: You're just finishing up a week-long canoe trip in Minnesota's boundry waters with your SO. You've been unplugged from everything related to your job or your worries or the real world in general for days now. You and your honey cuddle up in a sleeping bag that night next to the smoldering embers of your fire, look up at the stars at see...
A Nike swoosh.
Would you respond positively to the ad? Go out and buy Nike for your next "roughing it" trip? More likely, you'd make it your life goal to see the Nike Corporation destroyed and Phil Knight's children out on the street selling pencils. This is why I'm a bit shocked that Pizza Hut actually considered engaging in a form of enviromental advertising.
But I agree -- this crosses the line. Being able to get the heck away from the world every so often is something I value more than I can easily express. While regulating this sort of thing would be about as easy as regulating the internet (because there is a growing number of money-hungry countries with launch capabilities), I think a bit of self-regulation could be accomplished if, say, the first few companies to do this had their CEO picked off by a sniper (not a suggestion, just an idea I'm throwing out to anyone who is good with a deer rifle).
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First, it's important to realize that the North really fought the war with one hand behind it's back (I'm borrowing from historian Shelby Foote here). If you look at the other stuff going on in this period -- some minor indian wars, the homestead act, etc. The North was never really short on men in its army, but for a long time it was seriously short on the will to use them. If they'd ever were really needing men or supplies, they would have just taken that other hand out from behind their back.
From the numbers and stats I've seen, the black troops in the war had a fairly nominal effect (mostly because they were forbidden from actually fighting until fairly late in the conflict). If you can show me some data that suggests otherwise, I'll entertain it, but there's been quite a number of papers written in and around this area.
No, the biggest effect that emancipation had on the war was to prevent foreign powers from trying to mediate or meddle on behalf of the South -- Britain and France really missed the South's cotten, but because they were free countries they couldn't (politically) justify intervention once the war had formally become about slavery.
Besides, while there were some really old ideas held by the generals (notably the bayonette charge, which was obsolete the second the foundries started producting rifled barrels), it was a learning curve thing. The generals in the South, Lee and Jackson in particular, were bright enough to adapt their tactics fairly quickly (although Lee apparently forgot all these lessons at Gettysburg). The Northern high commanders not only didn't learn fast enough (Fredricksburg), but they also either froze up (Hooker and Pope) or wussed out (McClellan). Both of these are Very Bad Things(tm) from a tactical point of view.
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The North always had far superior manpower and a larger industrial base. McClellan could have marched to Richmond and destroyed the confederate capitol during the Peninsula Campaign if he hadn't been so completely psyched out by the southern commanders (who he outnumbered heavily, but was convinced that the opposite was true).
After that, the North cycled through one inept commander after another. Lee knew how to beat each one until Grant came along. Grant had a fairly simple approach to the whole affair; he set his "acceptible loss" numbers very very high and just pushed.
So, Grant actually managed to keep Lee busy. At about the same time, Sherman's army cut loose from their supply lines and gutted the South's infrastructure (Atlanta was the big railroad hub -- burning it like you saw in Gone With the Wind would have the same effect as nuking O'Hare, LAX and JFK all on the same day).
Not that the war didn't become about emancipation, I just didn't want you to think that was the deciding factor.
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What'll happen here is that any "nice" parts of Solaris (and I'm so angry with Solaris lately that I can't think of a one) will be assimilated into Linux and the other open source OS projects.
Reasoning: If you thought getting started with Mozilla was tough from a learning-curve point of view, just imagine how tough it would have been on a much larger scale (like this is). Besides, anyone out there interested in doing operating systems development is already likely working on Linux, and I can't see any compelling reason to switch over to working on Solaris. After all, linux's success was a right-place-at-right-time occurance as much as anything else.
Besides, Sun's instituting Yet Another License, which is always discouraging to those of us who think that the GPL is still the only really honest way to go in terms of open source licensing.
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Look, it may be a "well known bug", but it's still a gaping security hole that got installed with the default RedHat distro. I can foresee a *lot* of situations where this sort of thing would bite a company on the ass. Maybe I'm a new admin. Maybe I'm busy and don't keep up on the latest bug reports. Maybe I just forgot or didn't know how to work around it. The point is, this isn't something I should have to deal with.
I am so sick of the whining wannabes who seem to be pervading the Linux community lately. It used to be that when someone pointed out a flaw, it was put on a TODO list someplace and fixed; now we just post it up to Slashdot and have everyone yell "This is FUD! PCWeek Sux! I'm 3L337".
The facts stand as they are: PCWeek installed a default RedHat system and it got cracked. No matter how many times you yell "FUD", this is still a Very Bad Thing(tm). Much like the Mindcraft tests (the second round, anyhow), this shows weaknesses in Linux (or in this case, the most popular distro). These things should be addressed, not spun. Spinning probems or denying their existance is not what makes OSS great.
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While this may be true, they have one very major advantage: They must be very difficult to predict, which is what these chess types count on to decide their next moves.
That plus they have a couple of grand masters helping them out.
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Really, you've got to take what people tell you and try to disseminate it into an article about a field you're usually not an expert in. It's not as easy as it looks, but when the editor says "hop" you'd better already know how high.
Contrary to popular /.'er belief, the media (even Jesse Berst) isn't out to distort facts or intentionally get things wrong. It's just a matter of not getting good enough quality information from sources.
If someone can talk to the media and make themselves understood (and seem to know of whence they speak), they're a good source until proven otherwise.
That said, I'm glad that egomaniac JP is getting his at long last -- that Packet Storm thing POed me something royal.
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Your point? We kill other humans all the time, oftentimes for some pretty silly reasons (aka, nationalism). I don't think that assuring our place as top of earth's evolutionary ladder is at all as trivial as you seem to assume it is.
Trust me -- if humanity in general ever had reason to think that its place at the top of the evolutionary food chain was in contest, we'd do what we had to do to ensure that is wasn't -- even if it means killing a potentially intelligent and sentiant being and (if necessesary, or maybe even if not) its creators. It's kind of a sad commentary, but we can't help it. It's hardcoded into our DNA by the experience of a thousand generations.
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