Are you surprised at the ignorance of the average slashdotter who doesn't realize that OSX is running on the Mach microkernel... All of this microkernal bashing and things like "If there was a decent microkernel out there I would use it" and there has been a modern OS that has been built on one. Amazing...
From Wikipedia:
For example, the Mac OS X kernel XNU, while based on the Mach 3.0 microkernel, includes code from the BSD kernel in the same address space in order to cut down on the latency incurred by the traditional microkernel design. Several modern operating systems today fall into this category, Microsoft Windows NT and successors being the most popular examples.
Am I the only initial detractor who's actually getting used to the name? At first I thought it was awful, but it's sort of growing on me.
As someone's sig recently remarked, asking us programmers to name a console/flagship app is about as intelligent as asking the marketing guys to program it.
It sounded ridiculous to me, too. But I think they might know what they're doing.
Generally, people get used to absolutely ridiculous names. I'm reminded of a Boondocks strip, where Huey calls up Puff Daddy's studio and asks to talk to him, and the receptionist refuses to let Huey talk to him because Huey refuses to say "P. Diddy". The receptionist points out, "Well, when you think about it, it's no less stupid than 'Puff Daddy'." Touch&#eaccent, receptionist.
Similarly, I recently made a friend who is honestly named 'Muffin'. It was really weird at first, but I quickly got used to it. Ditto for my friends Lyric and Kestrel. Ditto for "The Empire Strikes Back". Names are labels, and they soon lose previous association and just become associated with the thing itself.
I am increasingly of the opinion that Linux SHOULDN'T be a desktop OS. To overcome the inherent problem that the people who decide what to fix aren't standard users, you pretty much need to pay a large staff to act in a consistent way. I run Ubuntu, and my friend wanted to give it a try. We installed it (a dapper beta, admittedly) on a free partition, and the first thing he saw of the desktop were two icons representing his windows drives. Getting to his documents was the first step in switching, so he double-clicked them. He got a message saying he didn't have permission to access them.
Fixing it involves -- of course -- hacking at config files.
He's back to Windows now. He said "I like the philosophy, but if this kind of thing is a frequent occurance, I'm not really interested."
I'm starting to think that "that will be fixed in the next release" isn't enough, and we should have people who need robust servers writing our robust servers, and people who need really easy-to-use programs buying them from designers trained and paid to build them.
I like that she mentions "The things that seem absolutely unsolvable but that we have to solve is the user interface stuff."
Consistently the most overlooked element of design.
I think the problem is inherent in that the problem is that the people who know how to build things are the ones who are used to figuring things out and making things straightforward. But they're mistaken in assuming that making things "straightforward" -- making it clear how the system operates, really -- is the right way to make things easy to use. Generally, it takes a lot of cleverness to make an interface that a person who has an idea of what they want to do can sit down and use with no manual. And no one is being paid to solve that problem.
People aren't spending time looking for better metaphors, and they're being stumbled on here and there by accident, often misapplied for years. It seems like Apple is the only group out there pouring money into UI design, and, from iPod to OS X, we're all reaping the benefits -- directly or indirectly.
As another poster's sig mentioned, letting programmers name flagship applications makes as much sense as letting marketers write them. Part of the solution is hiring marketers (or UI experts), and part of it is teaching the engineers at all levels a little bit of marketing.
Oh, but we know that Microsoft will be on top of the game. For sure. Absolutely. Windows 2050 will be THE safest, THE most secure version of Windows yet.
I was really surprised to see someone arguing that Windows does kernel security really well, and that the problem is that people don't want a detailed permissions control system so at all levels they enable everything. But they've provided a good security architecture as far as thread control goes -- it's just that coders down the line are ignoring it.
Of course, how many of those 'down-the-line coders' are at Microsoft itself?
a new service that lets users listen to any song among its catalog of 2 million songs absolutely free -- so long as they don't want to listen to any one song more than five times." I don't expect them to have much success finding a larger userbase under those terms.
That actually sounds pretty good to me.
However, the music is probably pretty DRM-ed, so I'm not interested.
What's the count these days? Are there any non-evil services out there?
Rule of thumb: Anything that allows you to "level up" is out to fuck you, take your money, or both. Examples: School, military, corporate hierarchy, catholic church, world of warcraft, scientology, etc.
Although, to be fair, you could apply that same idea to "anyone who offers you anything" and it would sound just as accurate.
My boss spent two months getting a set of robotics cameras to work with Mandrake 10, recompiling a bunch of custom kernels, getting various gurus in, working every day from january through march, just to get the camera data read properly by the libraries and the libraries working properly with the system.
We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu.
An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.
That having been said, I'm running Dapper as of yesterday, and I had to do crazy tricks to get it to actually print to my standard, detected printer.
I think this is a great approach. Its effectiveness is questionable, but that is the story with everything else. Seems as though it should at least help shed some light on different approaches to some of the problems and maybe help those that are truly the 'professionals' that have been cranking on these problems to see some insight and fresh ideas. Kinda just rolls with the oss philosophy of having as many eyes and brains as possible looking at code to find the bugs
This is an absolutely ridiculous approach.
As Keith Devlin discusses in his book on the problems, doing this kind of mathematics is like climbing a previously unclimbed mountain. First it takes you tremendous amounts of study -- years -- before you can even get through the foothills and have a decent idea of where the peak is. Then, probably after completing a doctorate in mathematics and being good enough to get a tenured position at a major university, you can really start attacking the slopes. There are tremendous cognitive leaps, sheer walls of the mind to scale, smooth cliffs requiring careful ascent, and of and of the thousands of climbers who have tried, none have yet found a path to the peaks.
This approach is like trying to climb by getting a bunch of people together and shuffling vaguely in the direction of the mountain. Yes, it's a good way to make it through a thick woods (albeit with a few tramplings and falling down hills). As a behavioral roboticist, I appreciate the skill with which a few stupid components can navigate around small confusions. But it is a terrible way to try to free-climb the highest peaks ever discovered.
By all means, give it a try, but I predict a ridiculous signal to noise ratio in a field where you require, as a basic component of your work, an S/N of near zero.
Are you guys serious? Yes, we use "cheques" all the time in the U.S. I get my wages in a check, I pay the rent with a check, etc. I do use a debit card for most purchases, though.
Yes, they are most probably serious. I am equally surpised every time I hear americans talk about checks. For me it is a novelty from a past age
I'm a young american who's had a checking account for four years now, and the only thing that's required me to write a physical check was paying the rent on an apartment I had. I remember first getting a starter checkbook with my account and trying to buy something with a check from it, but it was sort of . . . novelty-ish, with pictures on the checks, and the wal-mart clerk just looked at me strangely, called over a supervisor, and then said "uhh, we can't take this" as if it was the strangest request they'd ever had. For the next four years, I didn't even bother trying to use checks, and it wasn't a problem until I had to pay for my rent. However, I haven't done much bill-paying; I think you can do a lot of that with checks,
Pretending for a moment that the story is what the headline said it was, because that makes it much more interesting:
Can you drop the word "simulation"? If it's simulated from the ground up, it's (in its environment) indistinguishable from the real-life version (here assuming the simulation is proper). So let's be provocative and just say it's a digital life-form.
What always struck me about the "wikipedia reaches N articles" stories is that they provide a measure of the number of concepts in the world, concepts of a certain class.
Sometimes I look around my room or campus, look at objects and people and things happening, and think about how many of the 'things' I can name have Wikipedia articles (a high percentage). This tells me that there are fewer than a million different kinds of 'things' that I'm likely to see. A million references, movies, famous people, household objects, interesting sights.
I always see it as an almost depressing box placed around the number of constructs that I'm likely to encounter. But then again, one could also look at it as a testament to how large a million really is.
Whoa. I said something unclearly, you took issue with my words, I tried to clarify my point, and . . . you apologized? I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to say to that!
Here's another solution, create a porn section. Video stores have them. Why not public libraries? Libraries are supposed to be shared collections of material that people want. So, I'll ask the tough question: why not porn? I think there are good reasons why not - but let's have them out on the table rather than assume libraries just shouldn't have it. That's another form of hypocrisy hidden in this little tale.
You've no right to assume that a person is looking at "porn" for the same reasons that someone might look at porn. There are many reasons to do so -- investigators do it all the time. Artists do it all the time. Anthropologists do it all the time. Perhaps the person's child had just announced that they wanted to be a porn star, and the responsible adult was investigating the industry before deciding to forbid it.
This is one of the reasons you're allowed to, and I'm trying to say that I defend your right to do so while politely asking that, if you have an alternative that's not too difficult for you, you don't watch porn for fun in front of my children. It's politeness, not law, and I'm trying to express the idea that we can be against legislating morality while still thinking polite behavior is a good thing.
100%, flat-out, spectacularly wrong. You obviously did not read the article. The idea is completely incompatible!
'People shouldn't' is a dangerous way to start out a sentence. Who decides?
I wasn't speaking on behalf of the law. I was saying that as a private citizen, I don't want people to do this. It is certainly within their rights, as it should be, but I can still ask them not to. It's like asking people to please stop treating my wife rudely. They're rightly allowed to, but if people keep doing it, I will speak out asking them not to (which is hardly effective, but such is life).
The fact is, your constitution rules in this scenario (public library), and the librarians cannot make the call on what is or isn't obscene.
Exactly! That's what I'm saying. Just because I think this isn't something you should do doesn't mean I think the people in charge should make the call. I'm condemning these policies while at the same time, as a private citizen, making a request regarding polite behavior. You're free to ignore it; these are all behaviors perfectly within our constitutional rights, and I will fight to keep them there. But I think it's a reasonable request.
Have you read the article? The library provides "privacy screens" if anyone objects to what you are looking at.
Yeah; it's just that at places by my library there are sometimes people looking at porn on the middle-of-the-lobby computers. I'm not sure if we offer privacy screens.
"Stop making this an issue" - what does that mean? Stop exercising your civil liberties because it is inconvenient?
There's this attitude here that if something is technically a civil liberty, we can't criticize or discourage people from it. It is your right as a free American to, for example, treat my wife rudely. That doesn't mean I should approve of or tolerate it.
This attitude that any behavior that is legally permitted is behavior that should be encouraged is the same attitude that, flipped around, causes legislation that tries to tell people how to live their lives. I'm saying "I would appreciate it if you don't look at porn on easily-visible computers because it's extremely rude." It is your legal right to do so, and it's my legal right to ask you not to.
Something doesn't have to be legal to be good, and it doesn't have to be illegal to be bad. If people would just understand that good behavior can be encouraged without federal law, we could make a lot of progress on this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
From Wikipedia:
For example, the Mac OS X kernel XNU, while based on the Mach 3.0 microkernel, includes code from the BSD kernel in the same address space in order to cut down on the latency incurred by the traditional microkernel design. Several modern operating systems today fall into this category, Microsoft Windows NT and successors being the most popular examples.
As someone's sig recently remarked, asking us programmers to name a console/flagship app is about as intelligent as asking the marketing guys to program it.
It sounded ridiculous to me, too. But I think they might know what they're doing.
Generally, people get used to absolutely ridiculous names. I'm reminded of a Boondocks strip, where Huey calls up Puff Daddy's studio and asks to talk to him, and the receptionist refuses to let Huey talk to him because Huey refuses to say "P. Diddy". The receptionist points out, "Well, when you think about it, it's no less stupid than 'Puff Daddy'." Touch&#eaccent, receptionist.
Similarly, I recently made a friend who is honestly named 'Muffin'. It was really weird at first, but I quickly got used to it. Ditto for my friends Lyric and Kestrel. Ditto for "The Empire Strikes Back". Names are labels, and they soon lose previous association and just become associated with the thing itself.
"The project has been using the code-name 'Death Star', but we felt that 'Laser 2 Station' would better strike fear into the Rebellion."
this is a really cool story about how a company handled a DDoS attack by organized crime.
I don't know; let's check their company for signs of health.
I am increasingly of the opinion that Linux SHOULDN'T be a desktop OS. To overcome the inherent problem that the people who decide what to fix aren't standard users, you pretty much need to pay a large staff to act in a consistent way. I run Ubuntu, and my friend wanted to give it a try. We installed it (a dapper beta, admittedly) on a free partition, and the first thing he saw of the desktop were two icons representing his windows drives. Getting to his documents was the first step in switching, so he double-clicked them. He got a message saying he didn't have permission to access them.
Fixing it involves -- of course -- hacking at config files.
He's back to Windows now. He said "I like the philosophy, but if this kind of thing is a frequent occurance, I'm not really interested."
I'm starting to think that "that will be fixed in the next release" isn't enough, and we should have people who need robust servers writing our robust servers, and people who need really easy-to-use programs buying them from designers trained and paid to build them.
I like that she mentions "The things that seem absolutely unsolvable but that we have to solve is the user interface stuff."
Consistently the most overlooked element of design.
I think the problem is inherent in that the problem is that the people who know how to build things are the ones who are used to figuring things out and making things straightforward. But they're mistaken in assuming that making things "straightforward" -- making it clear how the system operates, really -- is the right way to make things easy to use. Generally, it takes a lot of cleverness to make an interface that a person who has an idea of what they want to do can sit down and use with no manual. And no one is being paid to solve that problem.
People aren't spending time looking for better metaphors, and they're being stumbled on here and there by accident, often misapplied for years. It seems like Apple is the only group out there pouring money into UI design, and, from iPod to OS X, we're all reaping the benefits -- directly or indirectly.
As another poster's sig mentioned, letting programmers name flagship applications makes as much sense as letting marketers write them. Part of the solution is hiring marketers (or UI experts), and part of it is teaching the engineers at all levels a little bit of marketing.
I was really surprised to see someone arguing that Windows does kernel security really well, and that the problem is that people don't want a detailed permissions control system so at all levels they enable everything. But they've provided a good security architecture as far as thread control goes -- it's just that coders down the line are ignoring it.
Of course, how many of those 'down-the-line coders' are at Microsoft itself?
And that, children, was when Slashdot's ratio of non-Bender-related comments to Bender-related comments began its inexorable slide toward zero.
Am I the only one who sort of wants them to say, "Hey! Anyone who goes and builds a moon colony gets all our money."
Enough with this baby-step stuff.
However, the music is probably pretty DRM-ed, so I'm not interested.
What's the count these days? Are there any non-evil services out there?
. . . I'm not saying that would be wrong, though.
I keep starting on a reasoned critique of his arguments, but it just feels so pointless, so empty.
I'm just gonna have to go with:
"That's nice, John."
My boss spent two months getting a set of robotics cameras to work with Mandrake 10, recompiling a bunch of custom kernels, getting various gurus in, working every day from january through march, just to get the camera data read properly by the libraries and the libraries working properly with the system.
We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu.
An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.
That having been said, I'm running Dapper as of yesterday, and I had to do crazy tricks to get it to actually print to my standard, detected printer.
I think this is a great approach. Its effectiveness is questionable, but that is the story with everything else. Seems as though it should at least help shed some light on different approaches to some of the problems and maybe help those that are truly the 'professionals' that have been cranking on these problems to see some insight and fresh ideas. Kinda just rolls with the oss philosophy of having as many eyes and brains as possible looking at code to find the bugs
This is an absolutely ridiculous approach.
As Keith Devlin discusses in his book on the problems, doing this kind of mathematics is like climbing a previously unclimbed mountain. First it takes you tremendous amounts of study -- years -- before you can even get through the foothills and have a decent idea of where the peak is. Then, probably after completing a doctorate in mathematics and being good enough to get a tenured position at a major university, you can really start attacking the slopes. There are tremendous cognitive leaps, sheer walls of the mind to scale, smooth cliffs requiring careful ascent, and of and of the thousands of climbers who have tried, none have yet found a path to the peaks.
This approach is like trying to climb by getting a bunch of people together and shuffling vaguely in the direction of the mountain. Yes, it's a good way to make it through a thick woods (albeit with a few tramplings and falling down hills). As a behavioral roboticist, I appreciate the skill with which a few stupid components can navigate around small confusions. But it is a terrible way to try to free-climb the highest peaks ever discovered.
By all means, give it a try, but I predict a ridiculous signal to noise ratio in a field where you require, as a basic component of your work, an S/N of near zero.
Yes, they are most probably serious. I am equally surpised every time I hear americans talk about checks. For me it is a novelty from a past age
I'm a young american who's had a checking account for four years now, and the only thing that's required me to write a physical check was paying the rent on an apartment I had. I remember first getting a starter checkbook with my account and trying to buy something with a check from it, but it was sort of . . . novelty-ish, with pictures on the checks, and the wal-mart clerk just looked at me strangely, called over a supervisor, and then said "uhh, we can't take this" as if it was the strangest request they'd ever had. For the next four years, I didn't even bother trying to use checks, and it wasn't a problem until I had to pay for my rent. However, I haven't done much bill-paying; I think you can do a lot of that with checks,
Pretending for a moment that the story is what the headline said it was, because that makes it much more interesting:
Can you drop the word "simulation"? If it's simulated from the ground up, it's (in its environment) indistinguishable from the real-life version (here assuming the simulation is proper). So let's be provocative and just say it's a digital life-form.
Fucking Jersey.
Which is like New Jersey, only a little farther west and markedly more liberal.
What always struck me about the "wikipedia reaches N articles" stories is that they provide a measure of the number of concepts in the world, concepts of a certain class.
Sometimes I look around my room or campus, look at objects and people and things happening, and think about how many of the 'things' I can name have Wikipedia articles (a high percentage). This tells me that there are fewer than a million different kinds of 'things' that I'm likely to see. A million references, movies, famous people, household objects, interesting sights.
I always see it as an almost depressing box placed around the number of constructs that I'm likely to encounter. But then again, one could also look at it as a testament to how large a million really is.
Whoa. I said something unclearly, you took issue with my words, I tried to clarify my point, and . . . you apologized? I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to say to that!
Who are you, and how did you get here?
Here's another solution, create a porn section. Video stores have them. Why not public libraries? Libraries are supposed to be shared collections of material that people want. So, I'll ask the tough question: why not porn? I think there are good reasons why not - but let's have them out on the table rather than assume libraries just shouldn't have it. That's another form of hypocrisy hidden in this little tale.
Sounds good to me.
You've no right to assume that a person is looking at "porn" for the same reasons that someone might look at porn. There are many reasons to do so -- investigators do it all the time. Artists do it all the time. Anthropologists do it all the time. Perhaps the person's child had just announced that they wanted to be a porn star, and the responsible adult was investigating the industry before deciding to forbid it.
This is one of the reasons you're allowed to, and I'm trying to say that I defend your right to do so while politely asking that, if you have an alternative that's not too difficult for you, you don't watch porn for fun in front of my children. It's politeness, not law, and I'm trying to express the idea that we can be against legislating morality while still thinking polite behavior is a good thing.
100%, flat-out, spectacularly wrong. You obviously did not read the article. The idea is completely incompatible!
'People shouldn't' is a dangerous way to start out a sentence. Who decides?
I wasn't speaking on behalf of the law. I was saying that as a private citizen, I don't want people to do this. It is certainly within their rights, as it should be, but I can still ask them not to. It's like asking people to please stop treating my wife rudely. They're rightly allowed to, but if people keep doing it, I will speak out asking them not to (which is hardly effective, but such is life).
The fact is, your constitution rules in this scenario (public library), and the librarians cannot make the call on what is or isn't obscene.
Exactly! That's what I'm saying. Just because I think this isn't something you should do doesn't mean I think the people in charge should make the call. I'm condemning these policies while at the same time, as a private citizen, making a request regarding polite behavior. You're free to ignore it; these are all behaviors perfectly within our constitutional rights, and I will fight to keep them there. But I think it's a reasonable request.
If you've got your dick in your hand while you look at it it's porn.
Great. Well, as of last night, Better Homes and Gardens and the American Machinist's Handbook are both porn.
And stop looking at me like that.
Have you read the article? The library provides "privacy screens" if anyone objects to what you are looking at.
Yeah; it's just that at places by my library there are sometimes people looking at porn on the middle-of-the-lobby computers. I'm not sure if we offer privacy screens.
"Stop making this an issue" - what does that mean? Stop exercising your civil liberties because it is inconvenient?
There's this attitude here that if something is technically a civil liberty, we can't criticize or discourage people from it. It is your right as a free American to, for example, treat my wife rudely. That doesn't mean I should approve of or tolerate it.
This attitude that any behavior that is legally permitted is behavior that should be encouraged is the same attitude that, flipped around, causes legislation that tries to tell people how to live their lives. I'm saying "I would appreciate it if you don't look at porn on easily-visible computers because it's extremely rude." It is your legal right to do so, and it's my legal right to ask you not to.
Something doesn't have to be legal to be good, and it doesn't have to be illegal to be bad. If people would just understand that good behavior can be encouraged without federal law, we could make a lot of progress on this issue.