I haven't read this particular work, but I came to a very similar conclusion many years back. Some books reward not just rereading, but also reading with a different mindset (analytic, historical, psychological, stylistic...). If this is truly the case, they'll also reward a variety of readers (with a variety of approaches). Thus, these are
the "good" books. And, oddly enough, these are exactly the books that stand the test of time (and for the same reason - over time a variety of readers with a variety of interests
have found something in them worthwhile).
The first thing I thought of when I read the story about Microsoft claiming all these patents was that it was probably a move to
extort Dell into paying protection on every Linux system they shipped. They could, thereby, effectively raise the price on an
installed Linux system high enough to price it substantially higher than Windows. And, with Dell, unlike with IBM or Redhat,
they could enforce it by threatening to raise the price they pay for every Windows install. This may be an interesting battle
to watch.
The 30 April New Yorker has (paper copy, p32) a one page aritcle on layoffs and profits and notes that on average neither stock prices nor profits rise after significant layoffs. Worth a read, and for those in decision making positions, rather a bit of thought.
Having Improv back would be wonderful. The best spreadsheet I've ever used - using Improv made using Excel or other grid based spreadsheets painful.
But then too, there was also this oddball thing called (I think, its been some years) "Advance", I only had a couple weeks to play with a test copy. Very powerful, rather strange. I'd like to have
that back to play with too.
It doesn't matter which party is out to screw us over. The professional politicians, who stay in office by selling their votes
(not directly, perhaps, but effectively), need to keep their paying masters happy. The republicans are beholden to one set
of bosses, the democrats to another. Both parties are equally corrupt and they just find different ways to sell their
corruption to the people.
The continual sniping "the republicans do this", "no the democrats are worse" just ignores the deeper problem and sidetracks
people into pointless spats - spats that the politicians love, down deep, as it just increases their hold on the spatters.
Funny. Just yesterday I got a phishing email (purporting to be ebay) with the interesting, active link pointing to some random site. I stripped out the tailing part of the url and looked at the place. Coming in at the top level, I got a directory listing - one directory was "/ws2" which led to the phishing and the other ("/a") led to a directory listing of twenty files [1,2...20].exe. So I grabbed 1.exe to see if it was something interesting (a virus, botnet executable...).
Turns out it was a rar encoded windows (duh - ".exe") executable that decoded to three files "a.txt-001 - each of which contained 10000 email addresses. So that 6,000,000 addresses were probably in the 20 text files. I could (but won't - after all my name is attached to this post) sell the addresses to all and sundry. Reported this to cert and to google (there were gmail addresses in the list) and tried to report it to ebay, but they bounced back the report because it was in the wrong format or something.
I've run into botnets before, but this is the first time I've found listings email addresses like this.
The question then arises : Will the DA be interested in doing this?
Yes, it may well be perjury. It may be against the law and deserving of jail time.
But.... Does the DA have a real interest in challenging a judge on something like this. DA's present cases before judges, need judges to sign warrants, and generally rely on a judge's good impression of a DA to do their jobs. Irritating (even in a small way) a judge by challenging their rulings is not at all likely to make the judge feel all warm and fuzzy toward the DA. Do this a couple of times and I suspect that the chances of a DA keeping their job start to diminish.
Better still would be to wait till the/. article is reasonably full, print the whole thing out (along with URL) and mail it (physically) to the Governor and any groups (ACLU?) that might be in a position to actually do something, and who are not beholden to the judges to keep their jobs.
The fact is that on any platform that supports Flash it's a guarantee that in almost every single case the application is going to be identical. It's going to look the same and it's going to run exactly the same way.
That, and the fact that someone who learns the Flash toolset once doesn't need to learn anything else will probably mean the end of HTML and the browser as we now know it. Sad really, as it is also going to mean that every designer will build their own interface and many will be horrible. It will also mean that every marketer will insist that every viewer of pages sits through their marketing crap before getting to content. (This already happens enough, but if everything is flash, FlashBlock will be essentially useless.)
Of course, it might very well also mean that Microsoft will see the arena as being valuable enough that they want in. Any bets that they build a compatible Flash player (probably reverse engineering it to avoid having to agree to the license) and do the "embrace and extend" that helped make HTML the pain it currently is?
And TFA does not even include a link to one of the most important process viewing programs around - lavaps - which shows processes running on your system in a lava-lamp-esque display.
While the article is a bit elementary for most unix users, there are those who are not unix users who might need someday to know this.
The phrase "department of redundancy department" (if I remember correctly) comes from the Firesign Theater's
"Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers". A quick lookup later and it seems to be part of Principal
Poop's speech:
Your food, housing, insecurity will be guaranteed by your Department of Redundancy Department and the Natural Guard.
You did have to go and remind us of the hideous (and hilarious) eyesore that some (I think it was the "Gnus for Geeks") website became last year around this time.
We should do well to remember that McCain is a powerful senator and is (at least) in the running for president.
Given the delight with which the media loves to change a small problem into a "crisis", and given the ability of attention-seeking politicians to take such crises and make them into world-shaking problems that Must Be Solved, we might be looking forward to legislation in the matter - or some kind of presidentially ordered "regulation". Given the way the Congress works, I can easily see some nice Democrat who owes McCain a favor sponsoring the legislation - just so it doesn't look like McCain is doing it himself - given enough support he could even vote against it. After all, it would probably benefit all politicians.
It is probably best that Davidson did not use goatse (or anything similar) as that would have just intensified the pressure.
Other console development kits are nowhere near so pricey. Still, given the fact that the PS3 hasn't done very well since its introduction, it would seem to be in Sony's interest to put development kits into the hands of everyone interested - unless they want to make money on the development kit instead of on the consoles/games.
Also, this makes it tough for schools interested in teaching game development to introduce students to the PS3 - which is one of the ways to keep the game developer pipeline busy.
I recently heard that the price of a development system was on the order of $25,000. Is this correct? Why would you price the development system so high unless you're actively trying to discourage game developers?
I particularly like the place where the site says "Why can't I print this." I clicked through to see what the reason was (they seem to want a pile of money - $5000 - for every page printed since the site is "so valuable"). The claim was that they'd disabled the print and copy functionality on the page, but firefox had no trouble at all producing a print preview page (though their style sheets are broken so it doesn't render correctly). Nor did firefox have any trouble saving a copy. And I had no problems viewing the source. I didn't try wget, but suspect it works nicely (really, it must, since they're complaining about spidering).
That they also have a recommendation (on their "problems" page) that you disable virus protection "for this site only" is just further evidence of something odd somewhere.
Given the nature of politicians, and the idea that "community standards" should apply. I imagine that this is just the first step in being able to tell an ISP to turn off various ports for a whole community (for values of "community" ranging from village to state). And of course since porn is a relatively (for the most part) private indulgence and one that is viewed as somewhat shameful (even by many who enjoy it), the non-porn users and those who enjoy porn but feel that they should be stopped from using it (for their own good of course) - community standards will probably be set legislatively, compelled to be enforced by ISPs and very, very strict.
a text-based service that answers any question you can throw at it
Is P = NP?
Does this (description of a Turing Machine) TM halt?
What is BusyBeaver(100) ?
Give a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. (Not in the form of a question? How about "Is the Riemann hypothesis true?")
Of course, it doesn't say the answers will be correct (or verifiable).
Now that we can actually read the text, it is pretty clear that this is just someone talking because he likes to hear himself, and wants to see his name in lights (or the web equivalent thereof).
Perhaps he's never actually read anything on/. as I've certainly seen many of these things discussed (and a few more besides). If he did have to quit his job for being critical of Linux, perhaps it was because he was writing in the same way he did in this article - innuendo, invalid comparisons, and lots and lots of just plain weird statements. There are a few reasonable things said - but nothing I've not seen here (and elsewhere) before.
I built (many years ago) a couple of small boolean circuits using this kind of water gate (specifically the things described in the Scientific American article way back when). Had some time on my hands, a big sink in a chemistry lab that was otherwise more or less unused, and lots of glass and rubber tubing and some stands and clamps. It was cranky and wet and messy and very tough to get working. At that time I had only seen minimal computer science stuff, so I didn't really appreciate what was going on and promptly forgot it (mostly). I didn't actually have the article I based it on, so had to figure out how to build gates - I managed a NOT and (A AND (NOT B)) (which, if you first invert B gives you AND).
Later on, while teaching computer architecture, I remember suddenly remembering the beast and realizing how many lessons I could learn from it. The importance of the power supply (which had been one of the problems I never solved completely), limited fan out, signals loosing strength, and most importantly speed. One of the problems I had had in trying to build the thing was that different parts of the mechanism (often as much as a foot apart because of the way I had to construct it) got out of synch easily and quickly. I had tried to build a two bit adder, but it only worked sporadically (ok, thats generous - maybe it worked once, and that probably just by chance) - and one of the realizations that hit me was the ever so vital importance of the clock. I don't know that a clock would have fixed my adder - it would have taken serious work to get the clock pulse to everything in the contraption at the right times, but it would probably have helped quite a bit. So many lessons in retrospect.
For what it is worth, Jonathan Lethem is an excellent writer and well worth reading. His works range from weird science fiction ("Girl in Landscape") to the just plain weird ("Gun, with Occasional Music") to more or less straight fiction ("Fortress of Solitude").
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't read this particular work, but I came to a very similar conclusion many years back. Some books reward not just rereading, but also reading with a different mindset (analytic, historical, psychological, stylistic...). If this is truly the case, they'll also reward a variety of readers (with a variety of approaches). Thus, these are the "good" books. And, oddly enough, these are exactly the books that stand the test of time (and for the same reason - over time a variety of readers with a variety of interests have found something in them worthwhile).
The first thing I thought of when I read the story about Microsoft claiming all these patents was that it was probably a move to extort Dell into paying protection on every Linux system they shipped. They could, thereby, effectively raise the price on an installed Linux system high enough to price it substantially higher than Windows. And, with Dell, unlike with IBM or Redhat, they could enforce it by threatening to raise the price they pay for every Windows install. This may be an interesting battle to watch.
Timecube?
The 30 April New Yorker has (paper copy, p32) a one page aritcle on layoffs and profits and notes that on average neither stock prices nor profits rise after significant layoffs. Worth a read, and for those in decision making positions, rather a bit of thought.
Having Improv back would be wonderful. The best spreadsheet I've ever used - using Improv made using Excel or other grid based spreadsheets painful.
But then too, there was also this oddball thing called (I think, its been some years) "Advance", I only had a couple weeks to play with a test copy. Very powerful, rather strange. I'd like to have that back to play with too.
It doesn't matter which party is out to screw us over. The professional politicians, who stay in office by selling their votes (not directly, perhaps, but effectively), need to keep their paying masters happy. The republicans are beholden to one set of bosses, the democrats to another. Both parties are equally corrupt and they just find different ways to sell their corruption to the people.
The continual sniping "the republicans do this", "no the democrats are worse" just ignores the deeper problem and sidetracks people into pointless spats - spats that the politicians love, down deep, as it just increases their hold on the spatters.
Funny. Just yesterday I got a phishing email (purporting to be ebay) with the interesting, active link pointing to some random site. I stripped out the tailing part of the url and looked at the place. Coming in at the top level, I got a directory listing - one directory was "/ws2" which led to the phishing and the other ("/a") led to a directory listing of twenty files [1,2...20].exe. So I grabbed 1.exe to see if it was something interesting (a virus, botnet executable...). Turns out it was a rar encoded windows (duh - ".exe") executable that decoded to three files "a.txt-001 - each of which contained 10000 email addresses. So that 6,000,000 addresses were probably in the 20 text files. I could (but won't - after all my name is attached to this post) sell the addresses to all and sundry. Reported this to cert and to google (there were gmail addresses in the list) and tried to report it to ebay, but they bounced back the report because it was in the wrong format or something.
I've run into botnets before, but this is the first time I've found listings email addresses like this.
The question then arises : Will the DA be interested in doing this?
Yes, it may well be perjury. It may be against the law and deserving of jail time.
But.... Does the DA have a real interest in challenging a judge on something like this. DA's present cases before judges, need judges to sign warrants, and generally rely on a judge's good impression of a DA to do their jobs. Irritating (even in a small way) a judge by challenging their rulings is not at all likely to make the judge feel all warm and fuzzy toward the DA. Do this a couple of times and I suspect that the chances of a DA keeping their job start to diminish.
Better still would be to wait till the /. article is reasonably full, print the whole thing out (along with URL) and mail it (physically) to the Governor and any groups (ACLU?) that might be in a position to actually do something, and who are not beholden to the judges to keep their jobs.
See also todays article in which it is stated repeatedly that customers are always liars.
That, and the fact that someone who learns the Flash toolset once doesn't need to learn anything else will probably mean the end of HTML and the browser as we now know it. Sad really, as it is also going to mean that every designer will build their own interface and many will be horrible. It will also mean that every marketer will insist that every viewer of pages sits through their marketing crap before getting to content. (This already happens enough, but if everything is flash, FlashBlock will be essentially useless.)
Of course, it might very well also mean that Microsoft will see the arena as being valuable enough that they want in. Any bets that they build a compatible Flash player (probably reverse engineering it to avoid having to agree to the license) and do the "embrace and extend" that helped make HTML the pain it currently is?
I thought it was "Don't be evil" and evidently not "Don't buy evil".
And TFA does not even include a link to one of the most important process viewing programs around - lavaps - which shows processes running on your system in a lava-lamp-esque display.
While the article is a bit elementary for most unix users, there are those who are not unix users who might need someday to know this.
Google was small once too.
Check out these guys who seem to be interested in patenting plots for novels.
You did have to go and remind us of the hideous (and hilarious) eyesore that some (I think it was the "Gnus for Geeks") website became last year around this time.
We should do well to remember that McCain is a powerful senator and is (at least) in the running for president. Given the delight with which the media loves to change a small problem into a "crisis", and given the ability of attention-seeking politicians to take such crises and make them into world-shaking problems that Must Be Solved, we might be looking forward to legislation in the matter - or some kind of presidentially ordered "regulation". Given the way the Congress works, I can easily see some nice Democrat who owes McCain a favor sponsoring the legislation - just so it doesn't look like McCain is doing it himself - given enough support he could even vote against it. After all, it would probably benefit all politicians.
It is probably best that Davidson did not use goatse (or anything similar) as that would have just intensified the pressure.
Also, this makes it tough for schools interested in teaching game development to introduce students to the PS3 - which is one of the ways to keep the game developer pipeline busy.
I recently heard that the price of a development system was on the order of $25,000. Is this correct? Why would you price the development system so high unless you're actively trying to discourage game developers?
I particularly like the place where the site says "Why can't I print this." I clicked through to see what the reason was (they seem to want a pile of money - $5000 - for every page printed since the site is "so valuable"). The claim was that they'd disabled the print and copy functionality on the page, but firefox had no trouble at all producing a print preview page (though their style sheets are broken so it doesn't render correctly). Nor did firefox have any trouble saving a copy. And I had no problems viewing the source. I didn't try wget, but suspect it works nicely (really, it must, since they're complaining about spidering).
That they also have a recommendation (on their "problems" page) that you disable virus protection "for this site only" is just further evidence of something odd somewhere.
Given the nature of politicians, and the idea that "community standards" should apply. I imagine that this is just the first step in being able to tell an ISP to turn off various ports for a whole community (for values of "community" ranging from village to state). And of course since porn is a relatively (for the most part) private indulgence and one that is viewed as somewhat shameful (even by many who enjoy it), the non-porn users and those who enjoy porn but feel that they should be stopped from using it (for their own good of course) - community standards will probably be set legislatively, compelled to be enforced by ISPs and very, very strict.
Is P = NP?
Does this (description of a Turing Machine) TM halt?
What is BusyBeaver(100) ?
Give a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. (Not in the form of a question? How about "Is the Riemann hypothesis true?")
Of course, it doesn't say the answers will be correct (or verifiable).
Now that we can actually read the text, it is pretty clear that this is just someone talking because he likes to hear himself, and wants to see his name in lights (or the web equivalent thereof).
Perhaps he's never actually read anything on /. as I've certainly seen many of these things discussed (and a few more besides). If he did have to quit his job for being critical of Linux, perhaps it was because he was writing in the same way he did in this article - innuendo, invalid comparisons, and lots and lots of just plain weird statements. There are a few reasonable things said - but nothing I've not seen here (and elsewhere) before.
I built (many years ago) a couple of small boolean circuits using this kind of water gate (specifically the things described in the Scientific American article way back when). Had some time on my hands, a big sink in a chemistry lab that was otherwise more or less unused, and lots of glass and rubber tubing and some stands and clamps. It was cranky and wet and messy and very tough to get working. At that time I had only seen minimal computer science stuff, so I didn't really appreciate what was going on and promptly forgot it (mostly). I didn't actually have the article I based it on, so had to figure out how to build gates - I managed a NOT and (A AND (NOT B)) (which, if you first invert B gives you AND).
Later on, while teaching computer architecture, I remember suddenly remembering the beast and realizing how many lessons I could learn from it. The importance of the power supply (which had been one of the problems I never solved completely), limited fan out, signals loosing strength, and most importantly speed. One of the problems I had had in trying to build the thing was that different parts of the mechanism (often as much as a foot apart because of the way I had to construct it) got out of synch easily and quickly. I had tried to build a two bit adder, but it only worked sporadically (ok, thats generous - maybe it worked once, and that probably just by chance) - and one of the realizations that hit me was the ever so vital importance of the clock. I don't know that a clock would have fixed my adder - it would have taken serious work to get the clock pulse to everything in the contraption at the right times, but it would probably have helped quite a bit. So many lessons in retrospect.
For what it is worth, Jonathan Lethem is an excellent writer and well worth reading. His works range from weird science fiction ("Girl in Landscape") to the just plain weird ("Gun, with Occasional Music") to more or less straight fiction ("Fortress of Solitude").