Nah, not cron. Cron is for things that need running after time intervals, e.g. a program that checks you e-mail each hour.
If you want to run those commands every reboot, you instead need to add commands to your init shell scripts. Those are just a list of command-line programs that are run every time you boot.
The location of the init shell scripts varies depending on the unix you use, but it's always somewhere in the/etc directory tree. I'm not familiar with MacOS X, so I can't tell you exactly where; look around in/etc for files called "init(something)" or "rc.d". Find a file that seems to be starting up a bunch of initialization programs and just cut-and-paste the new commands at the end.
I disagree. What "real damage" are you talking about exactly? How could you possibly delete a database by mistake? Deleting anything, under any sane user interface, requires you to press or type "del" or some other obviously dangerous action, and usually pops up some kind of alert.
The only way you could lose important data is if you ran around purposely deleting things without knowing what they are, which is just stupid (if anyone actually does that, I would say the problem has more to do with basic intelligence than tech-savviness).
No, in my experience, it's virtually impossible to cause "real damage" through tinkering. I became proficient at Windows and Unix through tinkering, I have changed settings in my bios at random, I have deleted entries in my Windows registry, and I have never lost data as a result. Those actions are far more dangerous than anything the vast majority of computer users would do, and yet I still didn't lose data. The worst that can happen is that my computer refuses to boot, which happens all the time in any case with Win9x.
No, tinkering is 99% safe. Adults' fear of it is irrational. It's understandable, though, since they don't know that computers are not cars or dangerous chemicals. Unlike those things, computers were designed to be randomly tinkered with: it is not dangerous. We should teach adults that there is nothing that can go wrong, and that they shouldn't be afraid to try out new things.
What you said is a pretty good description of the education system up to the high school level, but universities (the better ones, anyway) have filtered out most of the unmotivated students and involve actual, real learning. It came as quite a shock to me:).
Everything changes at the university level: school is actually challenging, profs don't assume by default that you're an idiot, and you come out of a semester with your head crammed with new knowledge. If you're in high school, don't consider dropping out of the education system after you graduate, thinking it'll be more of the same, because it isn't.
Open-source programming doesn't appear to me to have any intrinsic advantage that would justify such a massive improvement. My guess would be that extremely talented and enthusiastic programmers tend to gravitate to open-source projects. Only people who really care about what they're coding will take on a huge project they aren't being paid for.
also one can observe that as we've acquired more and more knowledge, that hasn't necessarily led to an increase in wisdom.
It's certainly valid to point out that not all our new knowledge is in some sense valuable. But, literacy is at unprecedently high levels. Although there is no way to measure "wisdom" (not too sure what you mean by that, BTW), it would seem highly plausible to infer that it increased along with literacy, since there is an obvious link between capacity to read and capacity to get informed.
As for your second point, life in the third world actually has, in many ways, been getting progressively better in the past decades. The UN food aid organization says the number of starving people (defined as 55% calorie intake above subsistence) has decreased from 917 million in 1970 to 792 million in 1997, despite a population increase of over a billion. Of course, 792 million is still nothing to cheer about, but it is better than before, which was my point. Life expectancy in the developing world has also gone from 53 in 1970 to 65 now (despite AIDS which has brought it down). I don't have any facts on education, though, but I'd be very surprised if it had gone down.
This is a bit off-topic to the discussion, but since you brought it up, I don't see what's wrong with people working for "pitiful money." Nobody's forcing people in the third world to work in sweatshops. They want to work there, because having no work and starving is worse. We should encourage business in the third world, because stimulating their economy is the only way they'll ever get out of poverty.
I figure everyone will just call them "JP2" files anyway. Nobody ever says "MPEG1 layer 3", they say "MP3", and I figure the same thing will occur with this format.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: things aren't getting worse. I agree that there's a sheep mentality, but it's been with us since the beginning of time. It's a well-known aspect of human psychology that we always tend to think the world is going down the drain and it was better before.
An Assyrian tablet from ~2000BC was found with words to that effect (e.g. kids aren't worshipping our pagan gods as much as they used to, the air is getting rotten, etc). The same thing has been said and re-said millions of times since. But it's just not true.
People aren't really getting more ignorant: we're more educated than at anytime in the past. If you think it's bad now, imagine how it was last century. Do you think those textile workers were curious to know how the sewing machines really worked? No, we should try to fight our innate tendency to think everything is getting worse, because in fact by most measures the state of humanity is getting better and better.
If you just had a program that calculated the digits of pi and outputted them to the screen forever, no, that wouldn't be an algorithm. AFAIK, algorithms that don't terminate are called computational methods. But since computational methods can usually be trivially terminated at some arbitrary point (e.g. in the case of pi, stop after one million digits), their study intersects with the study of algorithms.
Yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way as well. When they ask a question that isn't relevant to your problem, don't tell the truth, tell the techs what they want to hear. In particular, never mention the word "Linux" to a tech.
On a more personal note, before you decide that you're too good to need God, and before you place yourself above those that have chosen Him, don't you think you'd better give Him a try? This is something that it would really suck to be wrong about...
I agree with the rest of your post. I'm agnostic, myself. But saying that you should believe in God just to be on the safe side, because you'll go to hell if He exists, is a logical fallacy. It's actually quite famous, and has a name, Pascal's Gambit. There are several problems with it, but the core problem is that you are reducing an infinite number of possibilities to an artificial either-or situation. It's not a simple choice between believing in a Christian God or believing in nothing at all: any number of deities could exist.
For example, if the Islamists are right, then Allah might be even angrier at me for believing in a Christian God than believing in nothing at all. Or, to be perverse, how about a deity with a sense of humor that sends atheists to heaven and religious people to hell? From the atheist's point of view, he has no evidence either way, and so, to him, this ironic deity has the same chance of existing as the Christian God. Therefore, it is not in his interest to change his beliefs: he has the same probability of going to hell either way. He may as well stick to what his reason tells him is true. Thus, Pascal's Gambit is a fundamentally unconvincing argument.
Of course it's useless right now. It's fundamental research. But to state the obvious, recent "useless" fundamental research on unexpected magnetic effects led to the development of current multi-Gb hard drives, and let's not even get into "useless" semiconductor research in the mid-20th century.
This stuff is interesting because it may represent the future of some fields of computing, even if it's only solving NP-complete problems for scientific applications. Now maybe you are only interested in the few developments that have an immediate, direct impact on you, fine. Personally, I'm not. Just because this technology currently limited to the lab is no reason to be so scathing.
Re:Yeah! But try getting it to look as nice as LaT
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Yeah, it does work conceptually like HTML, though the syntax is different. E.g. to typeset some text in bold, you would write \textbf{this is bold}.
From my point of view, there are two major advantages to using LaTeX:
Since TeX source files are plain ASCII text instead of some proprietary format, I can edit them with my favorite text editor instead of Word's pathetic GUI editor. This also allows me to edit my documents on a remote text terminal.
TeX has excellent support for mathematical notation (it was designed by a mathematician). OTOH, Word's support for equations is half-assed: the equation editor is difficult to use, doesn't support all types of mathematical notation, and produces very ugly output. In sum, in the math department, TeX rules but Word is total garbage.
Whether or not LaTeX's "structure" makes large documents easier to work with is kind of subjective. I think the two above points are really the "killer" features of LaTeX; if you have no need of them, you're probably okay just sticking with Word.
Seiken Densetsu 2 never really got the recognition it deserved. I still think (though this is probably partly my nostalgia speaking) it's one of the greatest RPGs ever made. For starters, whacking those rabites was so damn fun:).
They may get tax breaks, but on the whole, being a native Indian still sucks. Personally, I'm glad that 'complete chance' didn't decide to make me one of them. The rate of unemployment, alchoholism and suicide is way higher among them than the norm. This, in a sense, is a moral justification for the tax break, since all these problems can plausibly be traced back to our society's historical abuse of the Indians.
Anyway, even if you don't accept that argument, it's not worth being seriously upset about.
The fact that they don't have to pay taxes doesn't bother me too much, since it makes their miserable lives at least a bit brighter.
I can't believe I just learned a new word from a slashdot editor. My high school english teachers would hang their heads in shame.
Re:I was looking for a C book...
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C
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Avoiding open source software because people on newsgroups are rude almost never happens, IMHO. Most people never post on newsgroups: in my CS classes, I wouldn't be surprised if half the students there didn't even know what a newsgroup is. Let's not even talk about average joes. I've used linux for years and have never used a newsgroup to answer a question, and I think that's the case for most people.
I would go further than that: IMHO, HTML sucks. I find it strange that almost nobody admits this. Because it was never designed for its current uses, it's far more difficult than it should be to get a good-looking web page that displays properly over all browsers. HTML is a ghastly pain to work with, compared to a consistently designed language like TeX.
Millions of web-developer hours have been wasted trying to get HTML do things it was never designed to do. People are quick to blame the various implementations for not follow the standard properly, but to me, the incredible difficulty all the implementors seem to be having is a symptom of flaws in HTML itself. I'm not saying there's anything better right now (and certainly not Flash), but HTML is still crap and I'll be glad when it dies.
So you'd like a city full of technological gimmicks and isolated from the rest of the world. Nice setting for an SF story, but what's the point, exactly? You haven't said what it would be good for or why anyone would want to finance such a project. "test the future"? Can't we do that in an ordinary city? The only use I can see is that we would be able to observe the behavior of a society resembling the population on a colony starship, but that doesn't seem to be what you have in mind.
BTW, "chalkful"? Mmmm, full of tasty chalk powder. I think you meant "chock full" (or "chock-full", they both seem to be correct):).
I'm going out on a limb here, but has anyone considered that IPv6 may never get widespread acceptance?
From the point of view of any individual organization, there are no reasons to switch to IPv6 right now. First movers receive no benefits at all: in fact, it only makes communicating with the rest of the (currently IPv4) internet more difficult. Moreover, I imagine that many businesses large enough to have an impact already have a large IPv4 address block, and have a vested interest in discouraging others from making the switch:
There is no reason for them to pay for new routers
A crowded IPv4 internet might allow them to loan out some of their in-demand addresses for extra profit.
The various hacks available for IPv4 do the job. I can easily imagine a scenario where Cisco doesn't push IPv6 routers hard enough in the future, and people invest more and more in NATs and so forth, making a global switch harder and harder as time goes on.
The fundamental problem is that IPv6 doesn't provide any short-term killer benefits, and that's what's necessary for an evolution to take place. My prediction (though predicting acceptance of technologies is always risky, so I may well turn out to be wrong) is that we will still be using an IPv4 internet in a decade.
Another alternative to office that is good for starving college students is LaTeX. It takes a bit of tech savvy to learn how to use it, so I wouldn't advocate it for Joe User, but it really isn't any more complicated than HTML. Very nice for CS students, because its support for mathematical symbols is far superior to office's, and you can use your favorite text editor to edit LaTeX files instead of suffering office's weak and crashy WYSIWYG editor.
That was a bit of a disappointing article. I was expecting some major insights from a developer of such great games, but he mostly just reiterated banalities that any long-time gamer is aware of.
But I would add one more crucial point: gameplay should be fast-paced and aggressive. Sitting in your base and defending against unsuccessful attacks is just boring. In Warcraft 2, defending almost never worked and attacking was always to your benefit. The result was an edge-of-your-seat game where, among skilled players, every unit you pumped out was immediately sent to the battlefield and you were constantly trying to stop one of your bases from being trashed. I have yet to see an RTS which, all balance issues aside, is just plain more exciting than a good game of multiplayer War2. This is why I continue to consider it the greatest RTS ever made.
But Blizzard seems to have lost sight of this in later games. In Starcraft, sitting in your base and defending actually works, which makes for terribly boring games. Am I the only one who finds that games after Quake 1/Warcraft 2 have subtly become more and more slow-paced and boring?
Frankly, I would object to the "balance" business, which seems to be taken for granted by all game developers nowadays. Of course, games should be mostly balanced, but saying that ideally a game should be 100% balanced is going too far. A bit of imbalance serves to focalize the players' energies. E.g., in the original Quake, the most important thing was to control the rocket launcher and red armor, and this made for exciting games where players desperately vied for control of the key resources. In later Quakes, you can just pick up any weapon, since they're all just as good.
In sum, I don't think "balance" is the holy grail modern developers make it out to be. IMHO, the attitude of "balance above all" epitomizes all that's wrong with modern games. If a bit of imbalance is necessary to make a game that's more aggressive, fast-paced and fun, I say game developers shouldn't be afraid to sacrifice the principle.
Sure, but put yourself in the shoes of the bnetd developers. If you were developing a free game server as a hobby, would you risk prison or a lawsuit in the thousands of dollars just to keep developing it, when you aren't even getting any benefit from it? The risks just aren't worth it.
I disagree wholeheartedly with the insinuation that the Scientific American critique of this book was an "attack."
Ahem. The cover of SA claimed "Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist". Furthermore, several of the articles had a hostile and used ad hominem attacks. Now, those articles made some good points but "attack" is definitely the word we want here.
Hm, my understanding of black holes is that creating one would decidedly be a very bad idea, as it would have the consequence of utterly destroying the planet (and I don't mean just the surface). Fortunately, creating a black hole would take so much energy that we will never be able to create one in the lab, unless we find some way to harness all the power of the sun or something on that scale.
Finally, a voice of reason. These AI futurists' predictions are so completely absurd, it's baffling that so few people call them on it. This list is basically cut-and-pasted from similar lists from the fifties predicting the advances of AI up to the year 2000. It was ridiculous then, and it's even more ridiculous now.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to run those commands every reboot, you instead need to add commands to your init shell scripts. Those are just a list of command-line programs that are run every time you boot.
The location of the init shell scripts varies depending on the unix you use, but it's always somewhere in the /etc directory tree. I'm not familiar with MacOS X, so I can't tell you exactly where; look around in /etc for files called "init(something)" or "rc.d". Find a file that seems to be starting up a bunch of initialization programs and just cut-and-paste the new commands at the end.
No, in my experience, it's virtually impossible to cause "real damage" through tinkering. I became proficient at Windows and Unix through tinkering, I have changed settings in my bios at random, I have deleted entries in my Windows registry, and I have never lost data as a result. Those actions are far more dangerous than anything the vast majority of computer users would do, and yet I still didn't lose data. The worst that can happen is that my computer refuses to boot, which happens all the time in any case with Win9x.
No, tinkering is 99% safe. Adults' fear of it is irrational. It's understandable, though, since they don't know that computers are not cars or dangerous chemicals. Unlike those things, computers were designed to be randomly tinkered with: it is not dangerous. We should teach adults that there is nothing that can go wrong, and that they shouldn't be afraid to try out new things.
Everything changes at the university level: school is actually challenging, profs don't assume by default that you're an idiot, and you come out of a semester with your head crammed with new knowledge. If you're in high school, don't consider dropping out of the education system after you graduate, thinking it'll be more of the same, because it isn't.
Open-source programming doesn't appear to me to have any intrinsic advantage that would justify such a massive improvement. My guess would be that extremely talented and enthusiastic programmers tend to gravitate to open-source projects. Only people who really care about what they're coding will take on a huge project they aren't being paid for.
It's certainly valid to point out that not all our new knowledge is in some sense valuable. But, literacy is at unprecedently high levels. Although there is no way to measure "wisdom" (not too sure what you mean by that, BTW), it would seem highly plausible to infer that it increased along with literacy, since there is an obvious link between capacity to read and capacity to get informed.
As for your second point, life in the third world actually has, in many ways, been getting progressively better in the past decades. The UN food aid organization says the number of starving people (defined as 55% calorie intake above subsistence) has decreased from 917 million in 1970 to 792 million in 1997, despite a population increase of over a billion. Of course, 792 million is still nothing to cheer about, but it is better than before, which was my point. Life expectancy in the developing world has also gone from 53 in 1970 to 65 now (despite AIDS which has brought it down). I don't have any facts on education, though, but I'd be very surprised if it had gone down.
This is a bit off-topic to the discussion, but since you brought it up, I don't see what's wrong with people working for "pitiful money." Nobody's forcing people in the third world to work in sweatshops. They want to work there, because having no work and starving is worse. We should encourage business in the third world, because stimulating their economy is the only way they'll ever get out of poverty.
I figure everyone will just call them "JP2" files anyway. Nobody ever says "MPEG1 layer 3", they say "MP3", and I figure the same thing will occur with this format.
An Assyrian tablet from ~2000BC was found with words to that effect (e.g. kids aren't worshipping our pagan gods as much as they used to, the air is getting rotten, etc). The same thing has been said and re-said millions of times since. But it's just not true.
People aren't really getting more ignorant: we're more educated than at anytime in the past. If you think it's bad now, imagine how it was last century. Do you think those textile workers were curious to know how the sewing machines really worked? No, we should try to fight our innate tendency to think everything is getting worse, because in fact by most measures the state of humanity is getting better and better.
If you just had a program that calculated the digits of pi and outputted them to the screen forever, no, that wouldn't be an algorithm. AFAIK, algorithms that don't terminate are called computational methods. But since computational methods can usually be trivially terminated at some arbitrary point (e.g. in the case of pi, stop after one million digits), their study intersects with the study of algorithms.
Yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way as well. When they ask a question that isn't relevant to your problem, don't tell the truth, tell the techs what they want to hear. In particular, never mention the word "Linux" to a tech.
I agree with the rest of your post. I'm agnostic, myself. But saying that you should believe in God just to be on the safe side, because you'll go to hell if He exists, is a logical fallacy. It's actually quite famous, and has a name, Pascal's Gambit. There are several problems with it, but the core problem is that you are reducing an infinite number of possibilities to an artificial either-or situation. It's not a simple choice between believing in a Christian God or believing in nothing at all: any number of deities could exist.
For example, if the Islamists are right, then Allah might be even angrier at me for believing in a Christian God than believing in nothing at all. Or, to be perverse, how about a deity with a sense of humor that sends atheists to heaven and religious people to hell? From the atheist's point of view, he has no evidence either way, and so, to him, this ironic deity has the same chance of existing as the Christian God. Therefore, it is not in his interest to change his beliefs: he has the same probability of going to hell either way. He may as well stick to what his reason tells him is true. Thus, Pascal's Gambit is a fundamentally unconvincing argument.
This stuff is interesting because it may represent the future of some fields of computing, even if it's only solving NP-complete problems for scientific applications. Now maybe you are only interested in the few developments that have an immediate, direct impact on you, fine. Personally, I'm not. Just because this technology currently limited to the lab is no reason to be so scathing.
From my point of view, there are two major advantages to using LaTeX:
Whether or not LaTeX's "structure" makes large documents easier to work with is kind of subjective. I think the two above points are really the "killer" features of LaTeX; if you have no need of them, you're probably okay just sticking with Word.
Seiken Densetsu 2 never really got the recognition it deserved. I still think (though this is probably partly my nostalgia speaking) it's one of the greatest RPGs ever made. For starters, whacking those rabites was so damn fun :).
Anyway, even if you don't accept that argument, it's not worth being seriously upset about. The fact that they don't have to pay taxes doesn't bother me too much, since it makes their miserable lives at least a bit brighter.
I can't believe I just learned a new word from a slashdot editor. My high school english teachers would hang their heads in shame.
Avoiding open source software because people on newsgroups are rude almost never happens, IMHO. Most people never post on newsgroups: in my CS classes, I wouldn't be surprised if half the students there didn't even know what a newsgroup is. Let's not even talk about average joes. I've used linux for years and have never used a newsgroup to answer a question, and I think that's the case for most people.
Millions of web-developer hours have been wasted trying to get HTML do things it was never designed to do. People are quick to blame the various implementations for not follow the standard properly, but to me, the incredible difficulty all the implementors seem to be having is a symptom of flaws in HTML itself. I'm not saying there's anything better right now (and certainly not Flash), but HTML is still crap and I'll be glad when it dies.
BTW, "chalkful"? Mmmm, full of tasty chalk powder. I think you meant "chock full" (or "chock-full", they both seem to be correct) :).
From the point of view of any individual organization, there are no reasons to switch to IPv6 right now. First movers receive no benefits at all: in fact, it only makes communicating with the rest of the (currently IPv4) internet more difficult. Moreover, I imagine that many businesses large enough to have an impact already have a large IPv4 address block, and have a vested interest in discouraging others from making the switch:
The various hacks available for IPv4 do the job. I can easily imagine a scenario where Cisco doesn't push IPv6 routers hard enough in the future, and people invest more and more in NATs and so forth, making a global switch harder and harder as time goes on.
The fundamental problem is that IPv6 doesn't provide any short-term killer benefits, and that's what's necessary for an evolution to take place. My prediction (though predicting acceptance of technologies is always risky, so I may well turn out to be wrong) is that we will still be using an IPv4 internet in a decade.
Another alternative to office that is good for starving college students is LaTeX. It takes a bit of tech savvy to learn how to use it, so I wouldn't advocate it for Joe User, but it really isn't any more complicated than HTML. Very nice for CS students, because its support for mathematical symbols is far superior to office's, and you can use your favorite text editor to edit LaTeX files instead of suffering office's weak and crashy WYSIWYG editor.
But I would add one more crucial point: gameplay should be fast-paced and aggressive. Sitting in your base and defending against unsuccessful attacks is just boring. In Warcraft 2, defending almost never worked and attacking was always to your benefit. The result was an edge-of-your-seat game where, among skilled players, every unit you pumped out was immediately sent to the battlefield and you were constantly trying to stop one of your bases from being trashed. I have yet to see an RTS which, all balance issues aside, is just plain more exciting than a good game of multiplayer War2. This is why I continue to consider it the greatest RTS ever made.
But Blizzard seems to have lost sight of this in later games. In Starcraft, sitting in your base and defending actually works, which makes for terribly boring games. Am I the only one who finds that games after Quake 1/Warcraft 2 have subtly become more and more slow-paced and boring?
Frankly, I would object to the "balance" business, which seems to be taken for granted by all game developers nowadays. Of course, games should be mostly balanced, but saying that ideally a game should be 100% balanced is going too far. A bit of imbalance serves to focalize the players' energies. E.g., in the original Quake, the most important thing was to control the rocket launcher and red armor, and this made for exciting games where players desperately vied for control of the key resources. In later Quakes, you can just pick up any weapon, since they're all just as good.
In sum, I don't think "balance" is the holy grail modern developers make it out to be. IMHO, the attitude of "balance above all" epitomizes all that's wrong with modern games. If a bit of imbalance is necessary to make a game that's more aggressive, fast-paced and fun, I say game developers shouldn't be afraid to sacrifice the principle.
Sure, but put yourself in the shoes of the bnetd developers. If you were developing a free game server as a hobby, would you risk prison or a lawsuit in the thousands of dollars just to keep developing it, when you aren't even getting any benefit from it? The risks just aren't worth it.
Ahem. The cover of SA claimed "Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist". Furthermore, several of the articles had a hostile and used ad hominem attacks. Now, those articles made some good points but "attack" is definitely the word we want here.
Hm, my understanding of black holes is that creating one would decidedly be a very bad idea, as it would have the consequence of utterly destroying the planet (and I don't mean just the surface). Fortunately, creating a black hole would take so much energy that we will never be able to create one in the lab, unless we find some way to harness all the power of the sun or something on that scale.
Finally, a voice of reason. These AI futurists' predictions are so completely absurd, it's baffling that so few people call them on it. This list is basically cut-and-pasted from similar lists from the fifties predicting the advances of AI up to the year 2000. It was ridiculous then, and it's even more ridiculous now.