I'll avoid the temptation of saying we should all add lines like the following to our code :
#define DARL "idiotic litigious bastard"
(oops - I guess I goofed on that).
But I did notice the thing about the ABI's. Does this now mean that if we were to change all the #define's in linux to be different values everything would be ok? So perhaps:
#define O_RDONLY 00
(which I find on my system) is violating SCO's right to Profit!, but
#define O_RDONLY 0x100
would not be?
I"m still not sure what these DARL s (see above) are claiming and now I'm more confused than ever.
Since it appears that these documents were published in conservative magazines/journals/papers/rags after being, um, "borrowed", isn't this at least a copyright violation, er, um "intellectual property theft" (aka piracy)? And didn't Orrin Hatch want to make "pirates" "walk the plank" (at least metaphorically)? Does this mean we can make Orrin Hatch walk the plank? Or can we keelhaul the folks who did this? Aaarrrggghhh!!!!!
Or is a P2P network an essential part of piracy these days?
I suspect that with the current administration the Open Source movement would do well to find biblical injunctions that support the notion of open source and (most especially) the GPL.
Then the claim could be made that it is faith based and since that is the thing that the administration likes best (after wars, oil and Profit!) it might serve as some level of protection.
Sadly, a full text search of the King James Bible fails to turn up either the term "copyleft" or "gnu". Though there is the "Gnu Testament", but I don't think that will convince anyone. (Though there may be a connection. Amazon.com tells me that : "Customers interested in The Linux Bible: The Gnu Testament may also be interested in:
Free for Christians "
Everything is for Christians. Everything is free. . Though that web page seems lacking in much in the way of "Free" software. )
About six years ago I got a response card thingy from one of the publishing companies. They were telling me that I could sign up then to buy Vol. 4 of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. So I guess that can't count as last years vaporware. Their optimism should have counted for something though.
A quick scan of google gives me the impression that colleges and universities for the most part do not claim copyright of student work.
They do frequently claim ownership of the physical medium (the paper or exam itself), and a right to use the work in an academic context, but the copyright most frequently continues to reside with the author (as is proper).
At my university (ewu.edu) every student is required to take a computer "literacy" (more like computer penmanship, I think) test to prove that they are computer literate.
Not only is this test MS product specific (PeePee, MS Worse, Eksell...) it is specific to the point where questions ask the student to do tasks using specific mouse clicks (or so I'm told - I'm doing my best to avoid the whole area myself) and the exam software won't let you do it in any other way.
And CS students can't graduate till they pass it. They can be expert coders in C, know low level OS internals, whatever - but if they can't get the right sequence of mouse clicks in MS worse to change a font (or whatever) they won't get that piece of paper.
I'm not sure that "The Office" is something that you'll manage to completely appreciate on one viewing. It is very much driven by the characters involved and once you know them better it gets funnier. It is very funny indeed, but sometimes I it a bit painful to watch.
Any faithful reader of Heinlein knows about throwing rocks from the moon. I'm not all that sure about the technology but I suspect that with relatively little work (at least compared to the work involved in actually getting to the moon and
setting up a self-sustaining colony there) a lunar base could be set up to toss rocks at Earth. This would put any country in control of such technology in a position to dictate to the rest of the world.
Its not hard to see that no country is going to look with favor on any other country gaining that kind of power without trying to get there too.
Of course, even better for the current administration is the notion that the existence of a rock is de facto proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
It seems that despite those gorgeous panaromic pictures they have got, the boffins haven't decided on where to go.
I think it may be "because" of those images. I've seen a bit or two of the press conferences and it always looks like the scientists are frothing at the mouth with eagerness to explore one feature or another. Or perhaps one feature and another and another and another.....
In the root directory on a unix machine many eons ago. I wanted to do "rm -rf something*" to get rid of some files that were created in / by some systems stuff I'd been doing. I managed to type "rm -rf something *" and hit return before I looked at it (it was an old clunky text-based console thing, in my own defense). Ooops.
It was not a fast machine though and I managed to catch it before too long - before it killed any user or important data anyway. It had killed some fun things like/dev and/etc and/bin though, but with the still running shell and some serious hackery and the network I managed to get the system back running well enough to restore things from backups (thankfully I did have recent backups).
Perhaps you'd prefer what people do in my university - everything is a MS Word format file and to send email you just attach the doc file to the email. Getting people to send email that is not in doc format is essentially impossible. Even suggesting it runs you into a maze of incomprehension (what other way is there?) and eventually anger (sometimes verging on fury).
A list of names, office numbers, email, phone numbers and so on was mailed out a couple months ago. It should have been a tiny text file (especially in csv format), but ended up being about a megabyte. Even in Excel format it would have been more usable.
What? No euoropean swallow wire? And do you need laden swallow vs unladen swallow wire? Enquiring minds want to know this before they reach the wind turbine of death.
Granted that such a computational problem will actually do what is claimed (and I have no reason to believe it will not), is it not possible that over a bit of time someone would find a way to reorganize the computation to maximize cache hits and minimize memory latency?
Not that I'm interested in helping spammers, but it sounds like an interesting challenge to me.
Antic Sorts
on
Systemantics
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Its all about systems. Therefore there is no better or efficient sort than bubblesort. I'd have thought that was self-evident.
Someday I'll learn to type.
Antic Systems
on
Systemantics
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While Systemantics isn't perfect, as the review says, in places it is dated and the author goes a bit overboard, it should be considered required reading for anyone in, building, or interacting with human organizations.
In sort, everyone.
Even more, it should be required regular reading for managers and other bureaucrats - say every six months or so.
I've been doing Search and Rescue for a few years now and cell phones are good things for people to carry but don't solve all the problems.
The obvious problem is that people go to areas where there is no service - in some wilderness areas there are mountains and canyons and these can make cell service impossible. In other places you can still find service in some locations but not in others - and people do seem to like to go get hurt/lost in the areas without service.
Even where cell service is available, people's phones tend to run out of power. I've been on at least one multi-day search for someone who reached 911 (though in the next county over) via cell and whose phone then just quit.
That was a major change and I (and a few other people in the showing I was at) spotted it and remarked on it. Personally I think the change was pretty reasonable - it gave the defenders of Minas Tirith a way to defeat that horde(!!!) of attackers and the timeline fit the film better than would have the "beat off the invaders of the coastal area, collect a bunch of folks to get in the ships, sail upstream and attack" that was in the book.
If you look through Tufte's website you can find the page on his sculpture where evidently you can buy an instance of one of his pieces online for only $200K.
Yup, you can "add it to shopping cart" and then type in your credit card number and buy the thing. I somehow doubt my credit card company would appreciate my attempting it though.
one equals two for small values of two....
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'd assume, given what else was said in the article that the other ton is mostly water (with traces of other volatile compounds).
But somehow the powdered brocoli just doesn't seem right. "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it."
If it works as claimed though, I can think of lots and lots of uses for it. Like maybe you could build something like a rototiller out of it (though you probably would have to mix in some larger bits to keep the powder from turning into cement when it gets wet).
While electronic voting seems superficially a kind of cool thing, the more you look into it the less it stands up.
While the push toward electronic voting seems driven by the notion that cutting costs is a good thing, it seems to me that elections are pretty damn fundamental to any democratic process and that we can certainly find other places to save a buck here and there.
Any election process is subject to potential fraud - whole cemeteries have been known to vote on paper ballots. But smallish precincts with paper ballots, a way for interested parties to observe the process, and some kind of challenge system just looks best, easiest, and least difficult.
I suspect it would be possible to persuade the electorate that a windows based voting system is safe and fair and so on - after all they mostly use windows in all kinds of contexts where they must trust it. But I don't believe that any closed source system should be trusted - there are simply too many ways to subvert it.
Open source systems based on complex algorithms such as we have seen discussed here previously are
difficult to understand. It took me a couple of reads to figure out the whole process in the most recent one. These are not likely to convince most of the voters and rightly so.
The problem then is that paper ballots are simple, but probably expensive and slow. Closed source electronic voting makes fraud for those providing the hardware/software far too easy. Open source electronic voting may be secure, but how would you convince anyone of it?
Lets stick to boxes printed on paper where people can put their X.
If Ansel Adams were around now it is entirely possible that he'd be pushing the envelope of digital imaging and thus enabling new kinds of technology. Market share drives some level of technology, but sometimes the important technology is driven more by the oddballs on the fringe that are asking for that extra little bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Snow falling on Perl
White noise buries the Line Noise
Why not APL ?
#define DARL "idiotic litigious bastard"
(oops - I guess I goofed on that).
But I did notice the thing about the ABI's. Does this now mean that if we were to change all the #define's in linux to be different values everything would be ok? So perhaps :
#define O_RDONLY 00
(which I find on my system) is violating SCO's right to Profit!, but
#define O_RDONLY 0x100
would not be?
I"m still not sure what these DARL s (see above) are claiming and now I'm more confused than ever.
Or is a P2P network an essential part of piracy these days?
Then the claim could be made that it is faith based and since that is the thing that the administration likes best (after wars, oil and Profit!) it might serve as some level of protection.
Sadly, a full text search of the King James Bible fails to turn up either the term "copyleft" or "gnu". Though there is the "Gnu Testament", but I don't think that will convince anyone. (Though there may be a connection. Amazon.com tells me that : "Customers interested in The Linux Bible: The Gnu Testament may also be interested in: Free for Christians " Everything is for Christians. Everything is free. . Though that web page seems lacking in much in the way of "Free" software. )
About six years ago I got a response card thingy from one of the publishing companies. They were telling me that I could sign up then to buy Vol. 4 of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. So I guess that can't count as last years vaporware. Their optimism should have counted for something though.
They do frequently claim ownership of the physical medium (the paper or exam itself), and a right to use the work in an academic context, but the copyright most frequently continues to reside with the author (as is proper).
At my university (ewu.edu) every student is required to take a computer "literacy" (more like computer penmanship, I think) test to prove that they are computer literate.
Not only is this test MS product specific (PeePee, MS Worse, Eksell...) it is specific to the point where questions ask the student to do tasks using specific mouse clicks (or so I'm told - I'm doing my best to avoid the whole area myself) and the exam software won't let you do it in any other way.
And CS students can't graduate till they pass it. They can be expert coders in C, know low level OS internals, whatever - but if they can't get the right sequence of mouse clicks in MS worse to change a font (or whatever) they won't get that piece of paper.
I'm not sure that "The Office" is something that you'll manage to completely appreciate on one viewing. It is very much driven by the characters involved and once you know them better it gets funnier. It is very funny indeed, but sometimes I it a bit painful to watch.
"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to respond to a slashdot post."
Its not hard to see that no country is going to look with favor on any other country gaining that kind of power without trying to get there too.
Of course, even better for the current administration is the notion that the existence of a rock is de facto proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
To misquote Dick Solomon, Alien Physics Teacher :
Trains don't kill people, physics kills people.
I think it may be "because" of those images. I've seen a bit or two of the press conferences and it always looks like the scientists are frothing at the mouth with eagerness to explore one feature or another. Or perhaps one feature and another and another and another .....
Deciding where to go first can't be easy.
In the root directory on a unix machine many eons ago. I wanted to do "rm -rf something*" to get rid of some files that were created in / by some systems stuff I'd been doing. I managed to type "rm -rf something *" and hit return before I looked at it (it was an old clunky text-based console thing, in my own defense). Ooops.
It was not a fast machine though and I managed to catch it before too long - before it killed any user or important data anyway. It had killed some fun things like /dev and /etc and /bin though, but with the still running shell and some serious hackery and the network I managed to get the system back running well enough to restore things from backups (thankfully I did have recent backups).
A list of names, office numbers, email, phone numbers and so on was mailed out a couple months ago. It should have been a tiny text file (especially in csv format), but ended up being about a megabyte. Even in Excel format it would have been more usable.
What? No euoropean swallow wire? And do you need laden swallow vs unladen swallow wire? Enquiring minds want to know this before they reach the wind turbine of death.
Not that I'm interested in helping spammers, but it sounds like an interesting challenge to me.
Someday I'll learn to type.
In sort, everyone.
Even more, it should be required regular reading for managers and other bureaucrats - say every six months or so.
The obvious problem is that people go to areas where there is no service - in some wilderness areas there are mountains and canyons and these can make cell service impossible. In other places you can still find service in some locations but not in others - and people do seem to like to go get hurt/lost in the areas without service.
Even where cell service is available, people's phones tend to run out of power. I've been on at least one multi-day search for someone who reached 911 (though in the next county over) via cell and whose phone then just quit.
That was a major change and I (and a few other people in the showing I was at) spotted it and remarked on it. Personally I think the change was pretty reasonable - it gave the defenders of Minas Tirith a way to defeat that horde(!!!) of attackers and the timeline fit the film better than would have the "beat off the invaders of the coastal area, collect a bunch of folks to get in the ships, sail upstream and attack" that was in the book.
If you look through Tufte's website you can find the page on his sculpture where evidently you can buy an instance of one of his pieces online for only $200K. Yup, you can "add it to shopping cart" and then type in your credit card number and buy the thing. I somehow doubt my credit card company would appreciate my attempting it though.
But somehow the powdered brocoli just doesn't seem right. "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it."
If it works as claimed though, I can think of lots and lots of uses for it. Like maybe you could build something like a rototiller out of it (though you probably would have to mix in some larger bits to keep the powder from turning into cement when it gets wet).
But a webcam? Now there's an idea.
Find out if there's a soda or a beer without opening the door! Find out if the Fridge Light really goes off when you close the door.
And, of course, you could do time lapse images of your lettuce turning brown. Or that cheese growing green stuff.
While the push toward electronic voting seems driven by the notion that cutting costs is a good thing, it seems to me that elections are pretty damn fundamental to any democratic process and that we can certainly find other places to save a buck here and there.
Any election process is subject to potential fraud - whole cemeteries have been known to vote on paper ballots. But smallish precincts with paper ballots, a way for interested parties to observe the process, and some kind of challenge system just looks best, easiest, and least difficult.
I suspect it would be possible to persuade the electorate that a windows based voting system is safe and fair and so on - after all they mostly use windows in all kinds of contexts where they must trust it. But I don't believe that any closed source system should be trusted - there are simply too many ways to subvert it.
Open source systems based on complex algorithms such as we have seen discussed here previously are difficult to understand. It took me a couple of reads to figure out the whole process in the most recent one. These are not likely to convince most of the voters and rightly so.
The problem then is that paper ballots are simple, but probably expensive and slow. Closed source electronic voting makes fraud for those providing the hardware/software far too easy. Open source electronic voting may be secure, but how would you convince anyone of it?
Lets stick to boxes printed on paper where people can put their X.
If Ansel Adams were around now it is entirely possible that he'd be pushing the envelope of digital imaging and thus enabling new kinds of technology. Market share drives some level of technology, but sometimes the important technology is driven more by the oddballs on the fringe that are asking for that extra little bit.