This is about the most boring topic I've read on slashdot in a long while.
Why you ask? Because its one of the areas that Linux/Gnu sucks at providing any applications or features for and its an area in which an opensource community should be able to accel at. But we don't do anything about it. So why post a topic about something we ignore?
We ignore the need for a decent GPS navigation application for PDAs, car projects, autonomous vehicles, research and disabled needs.
Maybe I'm missing something here though. Is there some reason that we can't be successful at such a project? Like is all of the road map and route data proprietary?
But many people use the "unstable" version of
Debian as that version has all the latest
stuff. I find it almost always more "up to
date" than the latest RedHat with patches.
However, Debian could learn volumes of
information from RedHat's installation,
eye candy and ease of configuring things
such as email services.
Presonally I think Debian *forces* the
user to be an administrator and *forces*
them to be knowledgable about all of the
underlying applications before you can
get anything configured correctly.
Now you may be saying "good, finally people
will know what they're doing." Well you
can keep on saying that as Linux continues
to lose market share and $$$ to
operating systems that are actually *usable*
because they are easy to learn and easy to
use. Steep learning curves are simply the
symptom of a poor design.
I've been an administrator for Linux and
Solaris for the past ten years but now
I'm a teacher. regardless
of how much I dislike Micro$oft's business
practices I find that I am *wasting* tons
of time handling system setup trying to
stay married to a O/S the I fell in love
with as an administrator when I could
actually be making progress as a teacher
by abandoning my old ways and just conforming
to Micro$oft's order.
The summary is: I want the ease of use that
RedHat provides with the up-to-date nature of
Debian. Neither seems likely to be included in
the other.
Aside from the ACLU, child welfare service and PETA issues that would arise I guess if a chimp baby can perform the same tasks that a human baby can then we would have to consider...
I'll always be wary of Statistically filtered
spam mail. Especially if your simply filtering
on the probabilities of words. Plus I think
this is something that spammers can figure
a way around by altering their choice of
words and phrases
The only "trait" that all spam mail has is that
the same message is sent to hundreds or
thousands of recipients. A trait which can not
be altered.
The Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (DCC)
filters on exactly this aspect. You can find
it here
The mail server runs DCC on every incoming
message and computes a fuzzy checksum for
the message. This checksum is then reported
to a central set of servers which record the
presence of this checksum and then reports
back to the mail server the number of times
others have reported a similar message.
If you get a high number back its spam and
the mail server rejects the message.
Similar messages generate identical checksums.
So personalizations and random tokens do nothing
to circumvent the filtering.
I think that if every existing sendmail/qmail
server ran DCC then spam would simply cease
to function instantly. Currently though I
don't preceive there to be a sufficient number
of mail servers computing and reporting
checksums to make it 100% effective but my
server is currently filtering out about 95%
of spam mail.
This is not as good as the 99.95% reported
by this article but DCC will be more
resistant to spammers getting clever and
attempting to using statistically rare words or phrases to defeat the anti-spam filter.
Re:Breaking interoperability... again???
on
GCC 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps you are misreading it.
Code compiled with 3.2 will not be
interoperable with code compiled with
3.1.1.
I would intrepet this as saying: If you
have say a shared library that was compiled
with 3.1.1 and you attempt to use that library
with a program compiled with 3.2 then it
won't work because the compiled results are
not interoperable.
But you can simply recompile both parts using
3.2 and they will work fine. you don't need
to change the source code.
In a related story later today, God issued a
statement that he intends to bring heavy
litigation against Toho for their obvious
transgession of copyright and trademark
material.
In additional to any monetary damages awarded
by the court He has also stated that He will
be seeking more long-term, Eternal punishments;
citing precendences pertaining to "Thou shall not
take the Lord's name in vain".
There is some controversy surrounding this precedence as it is not commonly viewed as valid by secular courts. Those closer to The Lord however hold little
doubt that He will be able to act upon this measure with "swift and furious vengeance".
Public opinon has it that if Toho loses it will be highly unlikely that any appeals will be heard or effective.
I do quite a bit of consulting for small
business in the construction industry in Los Angeles (though not enough to make a living). This post summarizes some of the experience and thoughts I have gained from my efforts concerning Linux market penetration.
I'm sure the sales of workstations to small business dwarf the sales of large business and Internet servers. Small business systems do not need to have the same level of sophistication or integration that large business requires.
Linux already competes well in the Internet Server market because of its cost effectiveness and flexibility coupled with the fact that you still need to hire the same level of human resources to support either a Linux based system or a Windows based system due to the equal required sophistication of both solutions. But this market segment is very small and does very little to boost public awareness.
Until public awareness is increased Microsoft can continue to require such anti-competitive clauses in its distributor licensing agreements and nobody will care; at least not enough people to provide sufficient pressure to have the clauses reversed or struck illegal.
If you want to increase Linux market share your
best bet is to compete in the small business sector.
Competing in the small business market segment has the disadvantage that small business is hesitant to implement a system they are not familiar with from a marketing perspective. But the advantage of competing in the small business market is that you only have to provide a few ubiquitous tools to satisfy their needs. If you can provide
Perfect MS Word replacement,
Perfect MS Excel replacement,
Perfect MS Outlook replacement,
Perfect PeachTree and Quickbooks replacement
File sharing
Schedule/Calendar/Contact management.
then you can satisfy the computing needs of most small business (1-10 employees.)
This does not have to be done for free. Small business would easily be willing to pay $200.00 per seat to license the above features. But they are NOT willing to license, install or use imperfect products from this list. It is simply not economical to waste their time troubleshooting and bug hunting these products. A good marketing strategy for these products to this segment would be to offer lifetime upgrade and updates. Small business is tired of hearing "You have to buy the new version" They are aware of the continuous cost this imposes upon them and the difficulty it presents in keeping their computing systems up to date. Instead Small business tends to continue their usage of applications well past the point of obsolesence or even support for those products. The result are systems that are nearly impossible to bring up to date without entirely replacing all applications.
There isn't any decent accounting package for Linux yet and the Office tools are far, far from perfect replacements for the MS office suite.
It is also necessary to provide these products in a 100% fully integrated fashion. The small business user buys the disk and clicks setup and everything is taken care of and installed ready to use. Having to deal with configurations or multi-step setups will never be accepted by them.
The payoff for providing small business with acceptable solutions is that you gain a large awareness that economical, flexible and acceptable alternatives to Microsoft exist. Then license agreements such as the one we are now dealing with simply cease to exist because their only effect will be to push more businesses to accept linux solutions.
Wah, Wah, Wah. Cry all you want. This is what Microsoft has done its whole life. Did you expect anything different after learning that Microsoft could effectively manipulate the DOJ trials so well?
Until court judges actually gain a technical IQ higher than 60 Microsoft will continue to be able to do this and more because they can continue to defraud the court into believing their actions, tactics and products are necessary and legal and don't constitue a monopoly.
I agree that BeOS should step up to the plate and use this latest contractual addendum as an example of the anti-competitive tactics that are used by Microsoft.
Why do Fortran creators expend so much effort
and time duplicating efforts that other languages have already taken care of?
I keeping reading in this thread over and over
about how "large" the reusable code base is for
Fortran and how reusing Fortran code is such an
advantage. Then in these same posts the authors
talk about how the newer versions such as Fortran
90 and 95 even have some implementation of
advanced features found in newer languages.
Well, as I see it. The Fortran people are just
wasting time duplicating a different, larger set of efforts. If they spent the same effort helping to optimize C/C++ compilers as they do
trying to reinvent their own language then C/C++ would give them the ONE advantage they are all looking for... Numerical speed. But instead they cling to "We use it cause its faster." When that doesn't have to be the case.
First I apologize for all those that may have taken my background material to indicate that I was arguing that either I was superior to those with less or that such a background was necessary to understand the problem. My intention was to show that even in the extremes of education, dedication and experience the implementation and operation of a linux system is a complicated issue. This is the
fundamental problem and is the answer to why most mothers don't use Linux.
I still do like it and have used it exclusively since 1995
I didn't imply that I don't like linux. My background is hugely academic research, networking, web farms and corporate infrastructures. For these things a professional that knows what they are doing can implement superior solutions using linux that saves thousands of dollars and provide a more stable and flexible environment. I do like linux but I'm moving away from the networking field now and I find that I need something simple so that I can spend my time applying my management abilities instead of trying to keep up with the
hardware caveats and technical tidbits necessary to know to keep a complicated operating system
functional. I understood the original question to be "Why isn't your mother using Linux?" I'm
not arguing "Why isn't Linux technically superior than Windows?" I Believe Linux is
superior both in terms of technical implementation and also in terms of philosophy. Ask the crusading knights how well strong philosophies worked out. Though I'll grant you that religious philosophies have some strong fundamental differences compared to technical philosophies (Unless maybe you are RMS;-)
I build my computer *for* Linux I make sure the stuff I buy works well with Linux before I buy it.
So do I. Notice that I mentioned a Dell Inspiron. My research indicated that if you wanted to run Linux wiht the least problems select The IBM A (or T) series, the Dell Inspiron series or something from a dedicated supplier like Emperor penguin. IBMs were too darn expensive and the dedicated suppliers lacked features as well as being a bit pricey.
In any case knowing that it is necessary to select compatible hardware is a useless argument. Do you really think that any reasonable number of our mothers has the technical knowledge to accurately select linux compatible systems or even the desire to have to do that much research. Your mother uses linux because she has *you* to abstract the complicated work out of the problem for her.
The last time (last week) I installed XP I spent 1/2 hr. on the net trying to find the right video driver because XP couldn't find the proper driver on the CD
Aside from your inaccurate comment about using linux exclusively this comment and the rest of the paragraph is a worthless counter argument to my statement that implied that Linux doesn't work out of the box well. All you have done is prove that in some small cases Windows doesn't either. So your mother shouldn't be using either (which many, if not most, don't.)
But more to the point if we were to get into the details of which operating system correctly and fully supports the largest number of hardware components I am positive you will lose that argument rather soundly. Especially if we extend the requirements to include that the support of these devices requires few, if any, technical knowledge about chipsets, options or configuration caveats.
And as far as those modems that don't work, their called Winmodems for a reason
My point almost exactly. Windows *does* support more hardware, especially ubiquitous, commodity hardware. Our mothers, and almost everybody else on this planet, falls into that category. The readers of Slashdot are certainly a very small percentage of the market that repesents the atypical, technically savvy market segment.
Almost nobody's mother is going to call up Gateway and start asking "Is that a controllerless modem or a winmodem? What chipset is it based on? Will it work with the linux HSF modem drivers..."
Tell that to my biker friend, He came a while back and had me install Linux for him....
You're killing yourself. Do you not notice that all the people you've put up as examples of common people who use linux are only doing so because *you* are taking care of the complicated pieces for them!
...They just want people to have to bring their computers in every week or two for "fixin'"
I was going to write a long retort to this by I decided to just sum it up with... That's just plain insulting to those of us that provide linux and systems administration services. We provide a quality service and pride ourselves and reliable work. And every administrator that I've ever known would rather entirely avoid having to deal with people's technical problems let alone try to create an endless stream of problems to deal with. Why do you think people like us developed computer applications like Nethack, NetTrek or Moria we *need* as much free time as possible.;-) So we're dedicated to providing one-time, permanent solutions. Unfortunately, even without creating additional problems there still seems to be an endless supply to keep us busy 120% of our time.
The point still boils down to 'Your mother doesn't use linux because it IS too complicated for her'. Nothing you've said makes me believe otherwise.
Though I do now believe that it can be shown that Windows also has some troubles with some hardware devices and that you mother and biker friend are damn lucky to know somebody like you.
I've been using Linux since 1991. I've written
device drivers under linux and I've adminstered
mission critical and e-commerce system based on
linux machines. I also have a doctoral degree in
computer science...
and even *I* don't feel like using linux anymore.
Your answer boils down to a single, simple
answer... Linux is far too complicated.
Oh don't believe me? here's my list of top
pet peeves...
APM support never became fully function or free
of administration issues so lets not even
talk about ACPI functionality. So all of
you with laptops probably have at least
as many suspend/power management problems
as I have.
I find the configuration and implementation
of linux's network interface a complicated and
bug ridden process. For instance why after
coming out of suspend does my wireless MiniPCI
interface not come back up until I restart the
PCMCIA subsystem?
hardware support... HAHAHAHAHA! try
building in kernel support for just about
anything. Look at the "help" and all you will
find is tons, and tons, and tons of options
or caveats all different depending on your
hardware. You'll find lots of links to "if you
want this you will also need to get tools
from yada.yada.yada...". And this is even
assuming you *know* what hardware you actually
have. "Some laptops have buggy BIOS. enable
this if you laptop crashes instead of
suspending". That's great advice. Which laptops
have this problem; exactly? And, even if you
know, the thought of "crashing" isn't going
to induce any positive perspectives of linux
anytime soon.
If you give me enough time I can certainly come
up with an almost endless list and I haven't
even begun to touch upon topics such as lack
of marketing presence or issues concerning
the horrible integration of highly disjointed
projects. (How many sound "architectures"
do we have, at least two. How many printing
systems? how many pcmcia projects? How many
web browsers?) I'll agree to arguments that
each project has its benefits but your mother
won't care. Even I'm past caring. I'm more
interested in something that works with out
consuming hours of my week adminstering the
machine's operating system.
It boils down to this... I buy a machine and
I can put Windows XP on it and it takes me
a *total* of two hours after which *everything*
on the machine functions and I didn't have
to know or choose any options at all. I can choose
from a selection of thousands of fully
functional software application and all the
latest games and entertainment.
If I put linux on
the machine it takes me three months
to get the MiniPCI wireless network card working
at all and after half a year I still don't
have support for the modem in the machine
[Dell Inspiron 4100].
I figure this post will generate all sorts of
"ACPI does work if you do..." or "your PCMCIA
doesn't come up because this script on your
machine is broken..." or "It works on my
machine." But this will only prove
my point...
Answer: Your mother doesn't use linux because its too
complicated.
The short of it is: no matter what you call "it"
somebody is going to lose credit.
I understand Stallman's point. His organization put an uncountable number of man hours into producing reliable
widely used and useful tools, utilities,
applications and more. They deserve credit where
credit is due.
Linus and the kernel developers contributed similar amounts of efforts and did a far, far
better job at marketing. A talent which is
very deserving of credit on its own.
So GNU/Linux would be appropriate. So would
Linux/GNU with equal validity.
However, check out the software packages on
a LiGNUx distributed and just discover how
many packages and applications were created
by people other than the GNU Foundation or
Linux Kernel developers. They deserve the
same credit as well.
Oh wait? Did you get all these applications and
build them yourself? no, (probably not) The
people at Suse, RedHat, Slackware, YellowDog
and many, many others made equally important
contributions to the system you are running.
Do they get much mention? Not really. Only
when asking questions about troubleshooting
when you say: Oh its a Suse 7.3 distribution.
So shouldn't it be:
Linux/GNU/John-Doe/RedHat/Suse/YellowDog?
Oops, left out all the commercial vendors that
have supported this effort. HP for instance
seems to be contributing quite a bit in the
printing area.
Stallman is on an Ego trip. He deserves to be.
So does Linus. The difference is Stallman
expects his ego to be paid and is completely
uncompromising in not only his beliefs but also
in his attempt at converting others.
As he said "I don't mind if [you] call it linux
because you know what its all about.". Well
This is the way everyone should be treated in
our community. If somebody knows what their
talking about then it doesn't matter what they
call it. If they don't know then its their
personal failing, Not Stallman's or Linus' or
anybody else. They don't deserve to be punished,
reprimanded or flogged for getting it wrong.
The fact that they chose your product/system over
others should be enough to welcome them.
If you're in this for credit you're in the
wrong place. If you're in this to make a
positive difference you are going to have
to be diplomatic and self sacraficing
most of the time.
People don't compromise with uncompromising
people.
Richard has the right idea: Free Software.
But if he's going to charge an Ego fee for the
use of his products its not really "Free"
is it? Not in terms of beer at least. If he
wants everything named GNU then the GPL should
enforce this. Otherwise, let it go.
Over the past few weeks I've seen several different publications hint at the concept that "when viewers watch a channel they have agreed to watch the advertisement spots." Even going so far as to indicate that this is a contract between the viewer and the advertisers/networks.
THIS IS REDICULOUS!! Is there any "viewer" out there that actually considers themselves as having agreed to watch ad spots in order to receive the programming?? Certainly I don't and never will.
My "Contract" with the advertisers/Networks is at most this: "I pay the cable company to bring me programming. I expect to receive 100 or so channels of programming that may or may not be interesting to me or consist of quality content. Except for premium channels, I expect to be annoyed during the airing of a program by interruptions from advertisers attempting to gain my attention."
But I never "agreed" to actually watch these annoying interruptions. In fact if I am ever forced into such a contract in order to receive a television program I'll just refuse to watch the program and the included advertisements entirely.
If the advertisers actually want to compete for attention in the new age of PVRs then I think they should take a history lesson. In the early days of television Advertisers sponsored a particular show and their product placement and other advertisements where made during the airing of the show. Famous examples would be shows like Howdy Doody or the Milton Berle Show, etc... It was in the best interest of both the viewer and the advertiser to produce high quality shows. It was almost impossible to be aware of the program without being aware of the sponsor and vice verse.
These days we have hundreds of times more content produced yearly but as we all know, 99% of it is pure crap. And the advertisements are, by far, the worst of the crap. Consisting of inane or irrelevant premises and pandering to the overall stupidity of the masses. 99% of all advertisements are no better than e-mail spam. Relying on contacing millions of recipients who don't need the product, can't afford the product or would be harmed by the product in an attempt to reach the overwhelming minority of recipients who do need the product or are stupid enough to waste their money on the product.
If PVRs result in the decrease attendance of advertisements then advertisers will be lessing willing to pay for advertisement time. Decrease revenues from advertsiements would result in the decreased ability for channels to remain operative resulting in fewer available channels. Fewer channels means less air time and thus an increase in competition for air time. Increase competition means a greater likelyhood of quality shows on the fewer available channels.
So PVRs result in fewer channels with an increased signal to noise ratio? I'm all for that. I don't need to watch crap like VIP or Greg the Bunny and I especially do not need to see another vacuous automobile commercial.
Wonder? That's an easy one... Most/.'ers are
actualy (gasp) intelligent. We read a lot of
books. We learn from past mistakes. TPM was
truly a piece of garbage and we're going to
be smart and figure out if AOTC is just as bad
before deciding to stupily spend nine dollars
to see it in the theater or spend ninety-nine
hours trying to download a divx version.
I've used the MAPS tools in the past to check that
my mail servers are properly configured to reject relays. But for actually stopping the 20-30
spam articles I get per day nothing has worked. (We all know what those dreaded
"unsubscribe" "features" really do. don't we?)
That is nothing worked until a few days ago. I recommend
anybody that has spam problems, can run procmail
or is in charge of a mail server running sendmail check out the
"Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse" (DCC) at
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/
It took me some time to get the dcc sendmail
milter dccm working correctly but, since I did,
this has become my new best friend. Its catching
100% of spam targeted at me and rejecting it.
From what I know about MAPS I think its a needed
service to keep ISPs in check. But it seems
targeted at attacking the delivers of spam and
doesn't seem to provide much to directly
protect the recipients of spam mail. DCC is the
only solution I've found that accurately prevents
spam mail from even being delivered to myself or users. I think this is necessary because if
nobody actually receives spam the spammers will
starve.
So If you're like me and think spam is a rashy
plague that you can't get rid of their is a cream
available and it is named DCC. Check it out.
When Starband says "requires Windows98/blahblahblah" they really mean it.
We all know that with normal networks the phrase
"requires windows98..." in conjunction with a
standard ethernet connection usually means
"To run our idiot software that sets up your TCP/IP settings correctly". So all of us Unix users can just throw that disc in the trash and
configure the TCP/IP settings manually because
a) we actually know what we're doing and b) we prefer to do it ourselves anyways.
Well, THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH STARBAND!!
The actual satellite transmission rate (at least
for downstream bandwidth) is actually 50K. Starband requires Windows98 in order to run some
sort of compression software that is able to
get the 350K downstream rates.
So what I discovered (thankfully not too late) is
that yes you can use linux with Starband but:
you'll have hideous latency problems with games
you will be limited to 50K downstream rates
(you might even have limitations on upstream
rates too I don't know)
You'll have to hassle with dynamic IPs since you are not assigned a static IP. (But the Starband person will say "Your IP won't change". which is to really say "Its not static" in the same way "Do you have tuna fish?" "We have meatloaf." means "No. we do not have tuna fish.")
I wound up cancelling my order and going with
PacBell DSL instead which has horrible rates and took three months to correct an arial wiring problem.
What the people in this thread need to figure out is a definition for "addiction". Are there are psychiatrists on this forum?
Yes: Schizophrenics do not have control over their decisions or their affliction. (well, actually they do control their descions but those descions are usually based on inaccurate perceptions of their reality; inaccurate reality yields faulty descions.) All in all, schizophrenia or any other psychosis was probably not a good analogy to bring to the discussion. Schizophrenia does not have much in common with addictions.
So lets take obsessive-compulsive disorders as an exmaple instead of phsycosis. People afflicted with this family of disorders are very much not in control of their descisions and their actions are performed in order to satisfy some overwhelming influence. I would consider this similar to addictions and I would extend the same amount of support and effort to these individuals as I would to chemically dependent people.
Mr. Cooper is still correct though... People do need to stop claiming victim status for actions that are under their control and are not the result of some overwhelming stimulus. This most definitely includes computer game play.
People playing video games do not, in any way, qualify as "addicted". It is your choice to play until the sun comes up. And yes, you can put it down at any moment without suffering any ill effects as the result of some sort of withdrawl. Furthermore these activities may produce measurable changes in brain chemicals but this fails miserably at qualifying for addictive status. You can get similar chemical changes by running, holding your breath, having sex or masturbating all day long. But we don't. Why? They simply just aren't addictive behaviors and neither is game playing.
Addiction to chemical substances is a different story. These people do not have the option of quiting "Cold Turkey" (except for a few, rare cases) and these people do suffer dibilitating symptoms as a direct result of choosing to stop. Although at some point it may have been within their power to prevent the addiction by not subjecting themselves to the chemical intitally they are still addicted and it is no longer within their power to choose to discontinue the behavior.
Basically the argument is apples and oranges. You cannot, and should not, compare the psychological qualities and behaviors of non-addicted persons such as those playing video games to addicted people such as heroine addicts. They just aren't similar and any attempt at comparison is a fallacious attempt to gain support for game players and their poor judgement.
Damn!! Preview! preview! preview!! argh. Philosophy only looks wise when its formatted properly! Now I just look like another nobody with a dead-end life.
(but then again maybe not-previewing resulted in higher accuracy for a change)
Most of the replies I read here all have quite a bit of truth to them.
You should immediately find something else that you enjoy doing better. But good luck. It is very rare that anybody can say "I want to do this now; and I'm going to enjoy it for the rest of my life". This is rare because You can never know all the caveats of your decision until its too late. And when you are first looking for something you encounter mostly the good and desirable aspects of that environment. The tedium and abrasive qualities either become known later or they slowly become unbearable with time.
Its clear that you have come to a point in your life where you realize that most of what you thought you knew was either false or miniscule compared to what is to be known. Well, I've got another jolt for you. You still don't know anything. (Neither do I; though probably more than you;-) I would agree with those that suggested graduate school. It makes a huge difference in both knowledge and abilities. Unlike the original posters of this topic I'm living proof that you can get a doctorate from a near-ivy league school for free. If you want to then check into reasearch assitantships and teaching assistant ships. At most high level schools these positions will pay a pitiful stipend but will also a) pay for your tuition, and b) provide you with the necessary exposure to find your thesis topic and introduce you to the real players in the field. Picking your research department and advisor well is a key element.
But even that will only get you so far. Myself... Doctorate in Computer Science. Unfortunately what I've come to realize lately that, like you, it is a thankless career where people use you as a tool and there is very little satisfaction to be had from enployment in this field. So what do a lot of us do? We apply our abilities, training and talent outside of our employment and work on projects that others find useful and appreciative of. I believe this is at the heart of why OpenSource is so successful with minimum funding and minimum corporate planning or management. [Though we do tons of planning and management ourselves to accomplish the task.] The bottom line is we don't get paid in monetary compensation; we get paid in terms of accomplishment and appreciation. Linus didn't make zillions of dollars on what started out as a small project. But he will never have to go hungry and he will never have to eat alone. Anywhere in the world I'm sure a line would form to spend lunch with him; I certainly would! Most of us aren't that noticable but the point is that I think many of us take what we have and apply it to interests outside of our jobs and we harvest satisfaction in our lives from that instead of trying to extract it from our employment.
One of my difficulties is that what was often incorrect for ourselves earlier in life become correct or desirable later (and vice-versa).
I had no interest in biology when I was in high school. I loathed the thought of having to dissect animals in biology class and I avoided it all entirely. Almost twenty years later I find that I'm totally fascinated by it now. In fact one of the most interesting things to me now is surgery. So I'm going through life as a CS nerd. I make some money and I pay the bills. But I'm always on the look out for opportunities to pursue my other interests. So if UCLA medical school ever needs to hire a network engineer I'll be in line.;-)
Boil this all down and I think it comes out to: You won't entirely like anything that you do. Accept the positive aspects of what you already have. Bear and ignore the negative aspects when possible. Take advantage of new opportunities in order to fill any needs not already met. But most importantly I think you need to keep a clear perspective on what you like, don't like, want, need and don't need. Otherwise it is very, very difficult to spot the new opportunities. I've been very disconnected from this and it has trapped me into enduring the same situations for the past two decades. Hopefully, this might help you out early enough to make a real difference.
Encryption, or lack of, in no way implies any level of physical security. All it does is make certain information undecipherable to some people. Physical security *requires* more than encryption. It requires, at least, authorization, authentication, physical barriers and a logical or physical environment that makes circumventing any of these *impossible* (or much, much too costly.)
The attacks that happened last week would have happened whether or not the information used to perpetrate the act was encrypted.
Authentication was non-existent. This enabled individuals to obtain and use fake identifications.
Authorization was poor; allowing these individuals access to areas they were not supposed to have access to (authorization is generally only as good as authentication; this added to the problems.)
The physical environment and barriers were also inadequate. This allowed individuals to ignore either authentications or authorization and force access to physical environments, such as the cockpits, that they should not have been able to get to.
You can put all the back doors into encryption that you want. The reality is that any nine year old with a decent grasp of basic math can devise and encryption system that is better than average. Prime numbers are easy to generate. Prime numbers multiply quickly to generate extremely large numbers. Extremely large numbers are considered impossible to factorize. Un-factorable numbers are the basis for a lot of encryption algorithms. Thus nearly anybody can create a decent one.
Really you don't even need this much knowledge. Just start writing down digits until you write out say 1000 of them. Use that as the basis for your key. It'll probably be pretty unfactorable.
Almost everything I've heard proposed to "insure" security in the future is crap! Almost all of it is based on the false deduction...
Assert: [A] is equivalent to encryption
Assert: [B] is equivalnet to 9/11/01 catastrophe
Terrorists used [A] (true.)
Terrorists caused [B] (true.)
Therefore [A] caused [B] (FALSE!!!)
If not [A] then not [B] (FALSE!!!)
I believe both of the false conclusions are actual examples of formal fallacies but I do not remember the names of all of the fallacies. In any case, They are false and they are misleading.
After some research:
The step from "Therefore [A] caused [B]" to "if not [A] then not [B]" is a fallacy termed "Denying the Antecedent". I'm uncertain as to the exact phallacy of the first false conclusion.
but certainly: any two fact A and B do not necessarily yield A->B. I think it is one of the Inductive or causal phallacies. Maybe some other logic scholar can fill this in.
The end of the story is I am tired of listening to people propose solutions based on patently false assumptions and ignorance of both the problem itself and of their own solution. This fatigue is further exagerated by the constant presence of typical "marketing" hype and phallacies in an attempt to trick me into buying their rediculous idea/product and giving up my liberties and freedoms.
I have a plane trip to make in a couple of weeks. I will have the same security then as I had three weeks ago. I will have the same [lack of] security a year from now based on all the false solutions I've heard thrown about with possibly the exception of armed air marshalls. I do believe I will have significantly less civil and humanitarian freedoms. In any event I am not irrationally afraid of the recent history repeating itself and will not allow such fear to overtake me and cause me to give up any liberties that I now posses.
I don't fully believe this. A more accurate statement would be: "Convenience and Security are always trade-offs."
RMS is correct in stating that baggage searches and face recognition security measures do not limit our freedoms so long as the information gathered from such procedures is not stored and/or used for any other purpose. I have no problem with my authority to do any activity constantly being verified so long as information gathered from such verifications are not gathered, collected or collated to be used for any other purpose. And there should be strict laws forbidding such use of information.
Security can be enforced without limiting freedom in most cases. (Assuming you are supposed to be "free" to do the activity for which you are attempting authorization. Obviously Security will limit your "freedom" to bring a weapon or bomb on-board an aircraft. But it will not inhibit you from flying.)
On the other hand I will agree that you *will* see actual revocation and limitation of true freedom because of this disaster. Not for the false assumption that security and freedom are mutually exclusive but rather because people will be duped into falsing believing that it is necessary to give up those freedoms in order for some security measure to function. This will also be tragic because many of those "security" items will be patently false and mis-guided attempts to market products or ideas that do not provide the needed securities. These ideas will find acceptance more readily now using the current disaster as an inaccurate vehicle for proving their necessity.
For instance: "You need to have back-doors on all encryption otherwise more Trade Centers will collapse." implies the need for encryption back-doors, a congressional idea that has long failed to gain approval. Now more people will, falsely, believe it is necessary and accept it. The truth is that back-doors for encryption will do next to nothing to prevent such a terrorist activity. Though it will provide for eavesdropping on all other aspects of your life. Terrorist will just avoid using encryption systems (at least "authorized" encryption systems). And the government will be able to watch every aspect of your life.
This disaster should be used primarily as evidence to prevent further plane hijackings. In order to do this the only security measures in my opinion that have to be enacted or enforced are:
1) prohibit all weapons on board all flights. No
pocket knives, no nail-files and all other items generally accepted as usable weapons against ordinary people.
2) All carry on and checked baggage thuroughly X-rayed. I know in the US carry-on is X-rayed. I don't know if all checked baggage is X-rayed, I don't think so.
3) provide a trained, armed flight marshall on every flight. This provides an adequately over-powering force compared to any passenger or group of passengers that may try to hijack a flight without the use of weapons.
4) increase the physical security of the cockpit door. In case you don't know... They're light, they're aluminum and they're weak.
5) strictly enforce all FAA regulations currently enacted.
These three procedures alone would have minimal cost and minimal impact to travelers while providing most of the security necessary to prevent what happened last week.
I'm highly skeptical of any other "necessary" security policies since I doubt they provide any real level of security for any situation similar to this recent disaster. If you can get on-board an aircraft you can still get to the cockpit, disable the crew and hijack it. Not being able to check your bag at the curb doesn't change this. Not being able to drop passengers off at the terminal doesn't change this. Having face-recognition (which I don't believe is reliable enough yet to prevent false positive matches) won't change this. And having encryption back-doors doesn't change this.
Stallman is correct this time about freedom and security. He's incorrect about his political and diplomatic views. That does not surprise me though.
Slashdot Mirror
Why you ask? Because its one of the areas that Linux/Gnu sucks at providing any applications or features for and its an area in which an opensource community should be able to accel at. But we don't do anything about it. So why post a topic about something we ignore?
We ignore the need for a decent GPS navigation application for PDAs, car projects, autonomous vehicles, research and disabled needs.
Maybe I'm missing something here though. Is there some reason that we can't be successful at such a project? Like is all of the road map and route data proprietary?
However, Debian could learn volumes of information from RedHat's installation, eye candy and ease of configuring things such as email services.
Presonally I think Debian *forces* the user to be an administrator and *forces* them to be knowledgable about all of the underlying applications before you can get anything configured correctly.
Now you may be saying "good, finally people will know what they're doing." Well you can keep on saying that as Linux continues to lose market share and $$$ to operating systems that are actually *usable* because they are easy to learn and easy to use. Steep learning curves are simply the symptom of a poor design.
I've been an administrator for Linux and Solaris for the past ten years but now I'm a teacher. regardless of how much I dislike Micro$oft's business practices I find that I am *wasting* tons of time handling system setup trying to stay married to a O/S the I fell in love with as an administrator when I could actually be making progress as a teacher by abandoning my old ways and just conforming to Micro$oft's order.
The summary is: I want the ease of use that RedHat provides with the up-to-date nature of Debian. Neither seems likely to be included in the other.
Aside from the ACLU, child welfare service and PETA issues that would arise I guess if a chimp baby can perform the same tasks that a human baby can then we would have to consider...
Oh... "make" babies.
Well. that's different.
The rest would eventually fall back to Earth.
Except for both movies being presented as animation, comparing SA to BATB is like comparing gold to crap.
Its a comparison between true visual art and typical, run-of-the-mill disney fare. Want to see BATB again? go rent The Little Mermaid.
And let's not even begin to compare the story lines. SA is far, far more creative, deep and moving.
The Republican to Democratic shift will be a bit unpleasant but less than putting up with all of the idiots in "Earth" as you termed it.
The only "trait" that all spam mail has is that the same message is sent to hundreds or thousands of recipients. A trait which can not be altered.
The Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (DCC) filters on exactly this aspect. You can find it here
The mail server runs DCC on every incoming message and computes a fuzzy checksum for the message. This checksum is then reported to a central set of servers which record the presence of this checksum and then reports back to the mail server the number of times others have reported a similar message. If you get a high number back its spam and the mail server rejects the message.
Similar messages generate identical checksums. So personalizations and random tokens do nothing to circumvent the filtering.
I think that if every existing sendmail/qmail server ran DCC then spam would simply cease to function instantly. Currently though I don't preceive there to be a sufficient number of mail servers computing and reporting checksums to make it 100% effective but my server is currently filtering out about 95% of spam mail.
This is not as good as the 99.95% reported by this article but DCC will be more resistant to spammers getting clever and attempting to using statistically rare words or phrases to defeat the anti-spam filter.
I would intrepet this as saying: If you have say a shared library that was compiled with 3.1.1 and you attempt to use that library with a program compiled with 3.2 then it won't work because the compiled results are not interoperable.
But you can simply recompile both parts using 3.2 and they will work fine. you don't need to change the source code.
In additional to any monetary damages awarded by the court He has also stated that He will be seeking more long-term, Eternal punishments; citing precendences pertaining to "Thou shall not take the Lord's name in vain".
There is some controversy surrounding this precedence as it is not commonly viewed as valid by secular courts. Those closer to The Lord however hold little doubt that He will be able to act upon this measure with "swift and furious vengeance".
Public opinon has it that if Toho loses it will be highly unlikely that any appeals will be heard or effective.
I'm sure the sales of workstations to small business dwarf the sales of large business and Internet servers. Small business systems do not need to have the same level of sophistication or integration that large business requires.
Linux already competes well in the Internet Server market because of its cost effectiveness and flexibility coupled with the fact that you still need to hire the same level of human resources to support either a Linux based system or a Windows based system due to the equal required sophistication of both solutions. But this market segment is very small and does very little to boost public awareness.
Until public awareness is increased Microsoft can continue to require such anti-competitive clauses in its distributor licensing agreements and nobody will care; at least not enough people to provide sufficient pressure to have the clauses reversed or struck illegal.
If you want to increase Linux market share your best bet is to compete in the small business sector.
Competing in the small business market segment has the disadvantage that small business is hesitant to implement a system they are not familiar with from a marketing perspective. But the advantage of competing in the small business market is that you only have to provide a few ubiquitous tools to satisfy their needs. If you can provide
- Perfect MS Word replacement,
- Perfect MS Excel replacement,
- Perfect MS Outlook replacement,
- Perfect PeachTree and Quickbooks replacement
- File sharing
- Schedule/Calendar/Contact management.
then you can satisfy the computing needs of most small business (1-10 employees.)This does not have to be done for free. Small business would easily be willing to pay $200.00 per seat to license the above features. But they are NOT willing to license, install or use imperfect products from this list. It is simply not economical to waste their time troubleshooting and bug hunting these products. A good marketing strategy for these products to this segment would be to offer lifetime upgrade and updates. Small business is tired of hearing "You have to buy the new version" They are aware of the continuous cost this imposes upon them and the difficulty it presents in keeping their computing systems up to date. Instead Small business tends to continue their usage of applications well past the point of obsolesence or even support for those products. The result are systems that are nearly impossible to bring up to date without entirely replacing all applications.
There isn't any decent accounting package for Linux yet and the Office tools are far, far from perfect replacements for the MS office suite.
It is also necessary to provide these products in a 100% fully integrated fashion. The small business user buys the disk and clicks setup and everything is taken care of and installed ready to use. Having to deal with configurations or multi-step setups will never be accepted by them.
The payoff for providing small business with acceptable solutions is that you gain a large awareness that economical, flexible and acceptable alternatives to Microsoft exist. Then license agreements such as the one we are now dealing with simply cease to exist because their only effect will be to push more businesses to accept linux solutions.
Until court judges actually gain a technical IQ higher than 60 Microsoft will continue to be able to do this and more because they can continue to defraud the court into believing their actions, tactics and products are necessary and legal and don't constitue a monopoly.
I agree that BeOS should step up to the plate and use this latest contractual addendum as an example of the anti-competitive tactics that are used by Microsoft.
I keeping reading in this thread over and over about how "large" the reusable code base is for Fortran and how reusing Fortran code is such an advantage. Then in these same posts the authors talk about how the newer versions such as Fortran 90 and 95 even have some implementation of advanced features found in newer languages.
Well, as I see it. The Fortran people are just wasting time duplicating a different, larger set of efforts. If they spent the same effort helping to optimize C/C++ compilers as they do trying to reinvent their own language then C/C++ would give them the ONE advantage they are all looking for... Numerical speed. But instead they cling to "We use it cause its faster." When that doesn't have to be the case.
I still do like it and have used it exclusively since 1995
I didn't imply that I don't like linux. My background is hugely academic research, networking, web farms and corporate infrastructures. For these things a professional that knows what they are doing can implement superior solutions using linux that saves thousands of dollars and provide a more stable and flexible environment. I do like linux but I'm moving away from the networking field now and I find that I need something simple so that I can spend my time applying my management abilities instead of trying to keep up with the hardware caveats and technical tidbits necessary to know to keep a complicated operating system functional. I understood the original question to be "Why isn't your mother using Linux?" I'm not arguing "Why isn't Linux technically superior than Windows?" I Believe Linux is superior both in terms of technical implementation and also in terms of philosophy. Ask the crusading knights how well strong philosophies worked out. Though I'll grant you that religious philosophies have some strong fundamental differences compared to technical philosophies (Unless maybe you are RMS ;-)
I build my computer *for* Linux I make sure the stuff I buy works well with Linux before I buy it.
So do I. Notice that I mentioned a Dell Inspiron. My research indicated that if you wanted to run Linux wiht the least problems select The IBM A (or T) series, the Dell Inspiron series or something from a dedicated supplier like Emperor penguin. IBMs were too darn expensive and the dedicated suppliers lacked features as well as being a bit pricey.
In any case knowing that it is necessary to select compatible hardware is a useless argument. Do you really think that any reasonable number of our mothers has the technical knowledge to accurately select linux compatible systems or even the desire to have to do that much research. Your mother uses linux because she has *you* to abstract the complicated work out of the problem for her.
The last time (last week) I installed XP I spent 1/2 hr. on the net trying to find the right video driver because XP couldn't find the proper driver on the CD
Aside from your inaccurate comment about using linux exclusively this comment and the rest of the paragraph is a worthless counter argument to my statement that implied that Linux doesn't work out of the box well. All you have done is prove that in some small cases Windows doesn't either. So your mother shouldn't be using either (which many, if not most, don't.)
But more to the point if we were to get into the details of which operating system correctly and fully supports the largest number of hardware components I am positive you will lose that argument rather soundly. Especially if we extend the requirements to include that the support of these devices requires few, if any, technical knowledge about chipsets, options or configuration caveats.
And as far as those modems that don't work, their called Winmodems for a reason
My point almost exactly. Windows *does* support more hardware, especially ubiquitous, commodity hardware. Our mothers, and almost everybody else on this planet, falls into that category. The readers of Slashdot are certainly a very small percentage of the market that repesents the atypical, technically savvy market segment.
Almost nobody's mother is going to call up Gateway and start asking "Is that a controllerless modem or a winmodem? What chipset is it based on? Will it work with the linux HSF modem drivers..."
Tell that to my biker friend, He came a while back and had me install Linux for him. ...
You're killing yourself. Do you not notice that all the people you've put up as examples of common people who use linux are only doing so because *you* are taking care of the complicated pieces for them!
I was going to write a long retort to this by I decided to just sum it up with... That's just plain insulting to those of us that provide linux and systems administration services. We provide a quality service and pride ourselves and reliable work. And every administrator that I've ever known would rather entirely avoid having to deal with people's technical problems let alone try to create an endless stream of problems to deal with. Why do you think people like us developed computer applications like Nethack, NetTrek or Moria we *need* as much free time as possible. ;-) So we're dedicated to providing one-time, permanent solutions. Unfortunately, even without creating additional problems there still seems to be an endless supply to keep us busy 120% of our time.
The point still boils down to 'Your mother doesn't use linux because it IS too complicated for her'. Nothing you've said makes me believe otherwise.
Though I do now believe that it can be shown that Windows also has some troubles with some hardware devices and that you mother and biker friend are damn lucky to know somebody like you.
and even *I* don't feel like using linux anymore.
Your answer boils down to a single, simple answer... Linux is far too complicated.
Oh don't believe me? here's my list of top pet peeves...
- APM support never became fully function or free
of administration issues so lets not even
talk about ACPI functionality. So all of
you with laptops probably have at least
as many suspend/power management problems
as I have.
- I find the configuration and implementation
of linux's network interface a complicated and
bug ridden process. For instance why after
coming out of suspend does my wireless MiniPCI
interface not come back up until I restart the
PCMCIA subsystem?
- hardware support... HAHAHAHAHA! try
building in kernel support for just about
anything. Look at the "help" and all you will
find is tons, and tons, and tons of options
or caveats all different depending on your
hardware. You'll find lots of links to "if you
want this you will also need to get tools
from yada.yada.yada...". And this is even
assuming you *know* what hardware you actually
have. "Some laptops have buggy BIOS. enable
this if you laptop crashes instead of
suspending". That's great advice. Which laptops
have this problem; exactly? And, even if you
know, the thought of "crashing" isn't going
to induce any positive perspectives of linux
anytime soon.
If you give me enough time I can certainly come up with an almost endless list and I haven't even begun to touch upon topics such as lack of marketing presence or issues concerning the horrible integration of highly disjointed projects. (How many sound "architectures" do we have, at least two. How many printing systems? how many pcmcia projects? How many web browsers?) I'll agree to arguments that each project has its benefits but your mother won't care. Even I'm past caring. I'm more interested in something that works with out consuming hours of my week adminstering the machine's operating system.It boils down to this... I buy a machine and I can put Windows XP on it and it takes me a *total* of two hours after which *everything* on the machine functions and I didn't have to know or choose any options at all. I can choose from a selection of thousands of fully functional software application and all the latest games and entertainment.
If I put linux on the machine it takes me three months to get the MiniPCI wireless network card working at all and after half a year I still don't have support for the modem in the machine [Dell Inspiron 4100].
I figure this post will generate all sorts of "ACPI does work if you do..." or "your PCMCIA doesn't come up because this script on your machine is broken..." or "It works on my machine." But this will only prove my point...
Answer: Your mother doesn't use linux because its too complicated.
I understand Stallman's point. His organization put an uncountable number of man hours into producing reliable widely used and useful tools, utilities, applications and more. They deserve credit where credit is due.
Linus and the kernel developers contributed similar amounts of efforts and did a far, far better job at marketing. A talent which is very deserving of credit on its own.
So GNU/Linux would be appropriate. So would Linux/GNU with equal validity. However, check out the software packages on a LiGNUx distributed and just discover how many packages and applications were created by people other than the GNU Foundation or Linux Kernel developers. They deserve the same credit as well.
Oh wait? Did you get all these applications and build them yourself? no, (probably not) The people at Suse, RedHat, Slackware, YellowDog and many, many others made equally important contributions to the system you are running. Do they get much mention? Not really. Only when asking questions about troubleshooting when you say: Oh its a Suse 7.3 distribution.
So shouldn't it be: Linux/GNU/John-Doe/RedHat/Suse/YellowDog?
Oops, left out all the commercial vendors that have supported this effort. HP for instance seems to be contributing quite a bit in the printing area.
Linux/GNU/John-Doe/Redhat/Suse/YellowDog/HP/COMPAQ . .
You know... Its just plain silly to do this.
Stallman is on an Ego trip. He deserves to be. So does Linus. The difference is Stallman expects his ego to be paid and is completely uncompromising in not only his beliefs but also in his attempt at converting others.
As he said "I don't mind if [you] call it linux because you know what its all about.". Well This is the way everyone should be treated in our community. If somebody knows what their talking about then it doesn't matter what they call it. If they don't know then its their personal failing, Not Stallman's or Linus' or anybody else. They don't deserve to be punished, reprimanded or flogged for getting it wrong. The fact that they chose your product/system over others should be enough to welcome them.
If you're in this for credit you're in the wrong place. If you're in this to make a positive difference you are going to have to be diplomatic and self sacraficing most of the time.
People don't compromise with uncompromising people.
Richard has the right idea: Free Software. But if he's going to charge an Ego fee for the use of his products its not really "Free" is it? Not in terms of beer at least. If he wants everything named GNU then the GPL should enforce this. Otherwise, let it go.
THIS IS REDICULOUS!! Is there any "viewer" out there that actually considers themselves as having agreed to watch ad spots in order to receive the programming?? Certainly I don't and never will.
My "Contract" with the advertisers/Networks is at most this: "I pay the cable company to bring me programming. I expect to receive 100 or so channels of programming that may or may not be interesting to me or consist of quality content. Except for premium channels, I expect to be annoyed during the airing of a program by interruptions from advertisers attempting to gain my attention."
But I never "agreed" to actually watch these annoying interruptions. In fact if I am ever forced into such a contract in order to receive a television program I'll just refuse to watch the program and the included advertisements entirely.
If the advertisers actually want to compete for attention in the new age of PVRs then I think they should take a history lesson. In the early days of television Advertisers sponsored a particular show and their product placement and other advertisements where made during the airing of the show. Famous examples would be shows like Howdy Doody or the Milton Berle Show, etc... It was in the best interest of both the viewer and the advertiser to produce high quality shows. It was almost impossible to be aware of the program without being aware of the sponsor and vice verse.
These days we have hundreds of times more content produced yearly but as we all know, 99% of it is pure crap. And the advertisements are, by far, the worst of the crap. Consisting of inane or irrelevant premises and pandering to the overall stupidity of the masses. 99% of all advertisements are no better than e-mail spam. Relying on contacing millions of recipients who don't need the product, can't afford the product or would be harmed by the product in an attempt to reach the overwhelming minority of recipients who do need the product or are stupid enough to waste their money on the product.
If PVRs result in the decrease attendance of advertisements then advertisers will be lessing willing to pay for advertisement time. Decrease revenues from advertsiements would result in the decreased ability for channels to remain operative resulting in fewer available channels. Fewer channels means less air time and thus an increase in competition for air time. Increase competition means a greater likelyhood of quality shows on the fewer available channels.
So PVRs result in fewer channels with an increased signal to noise ratio? I'm all for that. I don't need to watch crap like VIP or Greg the Bunny and I especially do not need to see another vacuous automobile commercial.
Wonder? That's an easy one... Most /.'ers are
actualy (gasp) intelligent. We read a lot of
books. We learn from past mistakes. TPM was
truly a piece of garbage and we're going to
be smart and figure out if AOTC is just as bad
before deciding to stupily spend nine dollars
to see it in the theater or spend ninety-nine
hours trying to download a divx version.
That is nothing worked until a few days ago. I recommend anybody that has spam problems, can run procmail or is in charge of a mail server running sendmail check out the "Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse" (DCC) at http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/
It took me some time to get the dcc sendmail milter dccm working correctly but, since I did, this has become my new best friend. Its catching 100% of spam targeted at me and rejecting it.
From what I know about MAPS I think its a needed service to keep ISPs in check. But it seems targeted at attacking the delivers of spam and doesn't seem to provide much to directly protect the recipients of spam mail. DCC is the only solution I've found that accurately prevents spam mail from even being delivered to myself or users. I think this is necessary because if nobody actually receives spam the spammers will starve.
So If you're like me and think spam is a rashy plague that you can't get rid of their is a cream available and it is named DCC. Check it out.
We all know that with normal networks the phrase "requires windows98..." in conjunction with a standard ethernet connection usually means "To run our idiot software that sets up your TCP/IP settings correctly". So all of us Unix users can just throw that disc in the trash and configure the TCP/IP settings manually because a) we actually know what we're doing and b) we prefer to do it ourselves anyways.
Well, THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH STARBAND!! The actual satellite transmission rate (at least for downstream bandwidth) is actually 50K. Starband requires Windows98 in order to run some sort of compression software that is able to get the 350K downstream rates.
So what I discovered (thankfully not too late) is that yes you can use linux with Starband but:
I wound up cancelling my order and going with PacBell DSL instead which has horrible rates and took three months to correct an arial wiring problem.
Yes: Schizophrenics do not have control over their decisions or their affliction. (well, actually they do control their descions but those descions are usually based on inaccurate perceptions of their reality; inaccurate reality yields faulty descions.) All in all, schizophrenia or any other psychosis was probably not a good analogy to bring to the discussion. Schizophrenia does not have much in common with addictions.
So lets take obsessive-compulsive disorders as an exmaple instead of phsycosis. People afflicted with this family of disorders are very much not in control of their descisions and their actions are performed in order to satisfy some overwhelming influence. I would consider this similar to addictions and I would extend the same amount of support and effort to these individuals as I would to chemically dependent people.
Mr. Cooper is still correct though... People do need to stop claiming victim status for actions that are under their control and are not the result of some overwhelming stimulus. This most definitely includes computer game play.
People playing video games do not, in any way, qualify as "addicted". It is your choice to play until the sun comes up. And yes, you can put it down at any moment without suffering any ill effects as the result of some sort of withdrawl. Furthermore these activities may produce measurable changes in brain chemicals but this fails miserably at qualifying for addictive status. You can get similar chemical changes by running, holding your breath, having sex or masturbating all day long. But we don't. Why? They simply just aren't addictive behaviors and neither is game playing.
Addiction to chemical substances is a different story. These people do not have the option of quiting "Cold Turkey" (except for a few, rare cases) and these people do suffer dibilitating symptoms as a direct result of choosing to stop. Although at some point it may have been within their power to prevent the addiction by not subjecting themselves to the chemical intitally they are still addicted and it is no longer within their power to choose to discontinue the behavior.
Basically the argument is apples and oranges. You cannot, and should not, compare the psychological qualities and behaviors of non-addicted persons such as those playing video games to addicted people such as heroine addicts. They just aren't similar and any attempt at comparison is a fallacious attempt to gain support for game players and their poor judgement.
Damn!! Preview! preview! preview!! argh. Philosophy only looks wise when its formatted properly! Now I just look like another nobody with a dead-end life.
(but then again maybe not-previewing resulted in higher accuracy for a change)
Most of the replies I read here all have quite a bit of truth to them. You should immediately find something else that you enjoy doing better. But good luck. It is very rare that anybody can say "I want to do this now; and I'm going to enjoy it for the rest of my life". This is rare because You can never know all the caveats of your decision until its too late. And when you are first looking for something you encounter mostly the good and desirable aspects of that environment. The tedium and abrasive qualities either become known later or they slowly become unbearable with time. Its clear that you have come to a point in your life where you realize that most of what you thought you knew was either false or miniscule compared to what is to be known. Well, I've got another jolt for you. You still don't know anything. (Neither do I; though probably more than you ;-) I would agree with those that suggested graduate school. It makes a huge difference in both knowledge and abilities. Unlike the original posters of this topic I'm living proof that you can get a doctorate from a near-ivy league school for free. If you want to then check into reasearch assitantships and teaching assistant ships. At most high level schools these positions will pay a pitiful stipend but will also a) pay for your tuition, and b) provide you with the necessary exposure to find your thesis topic and introduce you to the real players in the field. Picking your research department and advisor well is a key element.
But even that will only get you so far. Myself... Doctorate in Computer Science. Unfortunately what I've come to realize lately that, like you, it is a thankless career where people use you as a tool and there is very little satisfaction to be had from enployment in this field. So what do a lot of us do? We apply our abilities, training and talent outside of our employment and work on projects that others find useful and appreciative of. I believe this is at the heart of why OpenSource is so successful with minimum funding and minimum corporate planning or management. [Though we do tons of planning and management ourselves to accomplish the task.] The bottom line is we don't get paid in monetary compensation; we get paid in terms of accomplishment and appreciation. Linus didn't make zillions of dollars on what started out as a small project. But he will never have to go hungry and he will never have to eat alone. Anywhere in the world I'm sure a line would form to spend lunch with him; I certainly would! Most of us aren't that noticable but the point is that I think many of us take what we have and apply it to interests outside of our jobs and we harvest satisfaction in our lives from that instead of trying to extract it from our employment.
One of my difficulties is that what was often incorrect for ourselves earlier in life become correct or desirable later (and vice-versa).
I had no interest in biology when I was in high school. I loathed the thought of having to dissect animals in biology class and I avoided it all entirely. Almost twenty years later I find that I'm totally fascinated by it now. In fact one of the most interesting things to me now is surgery. So I'm going through life as a CS nerd. I make some money and I pay the bills. But I'm always on the look out for opportunities to pursue my other interests. So if UCLA medical school ever needs to hire a network engineer I'll be in line. ;-)
Boil this all down and I think it comes out to: You won't entirely like anything that you do. Accept the positive aspects of what you already have. Bear and ignore the negative aspects when possible. Take advantage of new opportunities in order to fill any needs not already met. But most importantly I think you need to keep a clear perspective on what you like, don't like, want, need and don't need. Otherwise it is very, very difficult to spot the new opportunities. I've been very disconnected from this and it has trapped me into enduring the same situations for the past two decades. Hopefully, this might help you out early enough to make a real difference.
Look it boils down to this...
Encryption, or lack of, in no way implies any level of physical security. All it does is make certain information undecipherable to some people. Physical security *requires* more than encryption. It requires, at least, authorization, authentication, physical barriers and a logical or physical environment that makes circumventing any of these *impossible* (or much, much too costly.)
The attacks that happened last week would have happened whether or not the information used to perpetrate the act was encrypted.
Authentication was non-existent. This enabled individuals to obtain and use fake identifications.
Authorization was poor; allowing these individuals access to areas they were not supposed to have access to (authorization is generally only as good as authentication; this added to the problems.)
The physical environment and barriers were also inadequate. This allowed individuals to ignore either authentications or authorization and force access to physical environments, such as the cockpits, that they should not have been able to get to.
You can put all the back doors into encryption that you want. The reality is that any nine year old with a decent grasp of basic math can devise and encryption system that is better than average. Prime numbers are easy to generate. Prime numbers multiply quickly to generate extremely large numbers. Extremely large numbers are considered impossible to factorize. Un-factorable numbers are the basis for a lot of encryption algorithms. Thus nearly anybody can create a decent one.
Really you don't even need this much knowledge. Just start writing down digits until you write out say 1000 of them. Use that as the basis for your key. It'll probably be pretty unfactorable.
Almost everything I've heard proposed to "insure" security in the future is crap! Almost all of it is based on the false deduction...
Assert: [A] is equivalent to encryption
Assert: [B] is equivalnet to 9/11/01 catastrophe
Terrorists used [A] (true.)
Terrorists caused [B] (true.)
Therefore [A] caused [B] (FALSE!!!)
If not [A] then not [B] (FALSE!!!)
I believe both of the false conclusions are actual examples of formal fallacies but I do not remember the names of all of the fallacies. In any case, They are false and they are misleading.
After some research:
The step from "Therefore [A] caused [B]" to "if not [A] then not [B]" is a fallacy termed "Denying the Antecedent". I'm uncertain as to the exact phallacy of the first false conclusion.
but certainly: any two fact A and B do not necessarily yield A->B. I think it is one of the Inductive or causal phallacies. Maybe some other logic scholar can fill this in.
The end of the story is I am tired of listening to people propose solutions based on patently false assumptions and ignorance of both the problem itself and of their own solution. This fatigue is further exagerated by the constant presence of typical "marketing" hype and phallacies in an attempt to trick me into buying their rediculous idea/product and giving up my liberties and freedoms.
I have a plane trip to make in a couple of weeks. I will have the same security then as I had three weeks ago. I will have the same [lack of] security a year from now based on all the false solutions I've heard thrown about with possibly the exception of armed air marshalls. I do believe I will have significantly less civil and humanitarian freedoms. In any event I am not irrationally afraid of the recent history repeating itself and will not allow such fear to overtake me and cause me to give up any liberties that I now posses.
I don't fully believe this. A more accurate statement would be: "Convenience and Security are always trade-offs."
RMS is correct in stating that baggage searches and face recognition security measures do not limit our freedoms so long as the information gathered from such procedures is not stored and/or used for any other purpose. I have no problem with my authority to do any activity constantly being verified so long as information gathered from such verifications are not gathered, collected or collated to be used for any other purpose. And there should be strict laws forbidding such use of information.
Security can be enforced without limiting freedom in most cases. (Assuming you are supposed to be "free" to do the activity for which you are attempting authorization. Obviously Security will limit your "freedom" to bring a weapon or bomb on-board an aircraft. But it will not inhibit you from flying.)
On the other hand I will agree that you *will* see actual revocation and limitation of true freedom because of this disaster. Not for the false assumption that security and freedom are mutually exclusive but rather because people will be duped into falsing believing that it is necessary to give up those freedoms in order for some security measure to function. This will also be tragic because many of those "security" items will be patently false and mis-guided attempts to market products or ideas that do not provide the needed securities. These ideas will find acceptance more readily now using the current disaster as an inaccurate vehicle for proving their necessity.
For instance: "You need to have back-doors on all encryption otherwise more Trade Centers will collapse." implies the need for encryption back-doors, a congressional idea that has long failed to gain approval. Now more people will, falsely, believe it is necessary and accept it. The truth is that back-doors for encryption will do next to nothing to prevent such a terrorist activity. Though it will provide for eavesdropping on all other aspects of your life. Terrorist will just avoid using encryption systems (at least "authorized" encryption systems). And the government will be able to watch every aspect of your life.
This disaster should be used primarily as evidence to prevent further plane hijackings. In order to do this the only security measures in my opinion that have to be enacted or enforced are:
1) prohibit all weapons on board all flights. No
pocket knives, no nail-files and all other items generally accepted as usable weapons against ordinary people.
2) All carry on and checked baggage thuroughly X-rayed. I know in the US carry-on is X-rayed. I don't know if all checked baggage is X-rayed, I don't think so.
3) provide a trained, armed flight marshall on every flight. This provides an adequately over-powering force compared to any passenger or group of passengers that may try to hijack a flight without the use of weapons.
4) increase the physical security of the cockpit door. In case you don't know... They're light, they're aluminum and they're weak.
5) strictly enforce all FAA regulations currently enacted.
These three procedures alone would have minimal cost and minimal impact to travelers while providing most of the security necessary to prevent what happened last week.
I'm highly skeptical of any other "necessary" security policies since I doubt they provide any real level of security for any situation similar to this recent disaster. If you can get on-board an aircraft you can still get to the cockpit, disable the crew and hijack it. Not being able to check your bag at the curb doesn't change this. Not being able to drop passengers off at the terminal doesn't change this. Having face-recognition (which I don't believe is reliable enough yet to prevent false positive matches) won't change this. And having encryption back-doors doesn't change this.
Stallman is correct this time about freedom and security. He's incorrect about his political and diplomatic views. That does not surprise me though.