On this particular issue, it is my personal opinion, that our internet rights are not being curtailed by these Internet Danger Signs.
Do danger signs, required by government, stop people using:
* electricity plugs
* medicines
* rat-poisons
* or other stuff?
No. But they probably saved a few toddlers from electrocuting or poisoning themselves.
---
In Australia there is a big problem with some Indigenous Australians sniffing petrol. So the government places restrictions on how petrol can be obtained in those parts. Surely that is penalising car owners who do not sniff petrol?? Where do you stand on that issue?
I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but slashdot is very skilled in technology and the implications compared to the wider populace.
The government deals with all peoples of all capabilities. Some are young, some unable and some just uninformed. But they still need some help sometimes.
There are people who need protection, occasionally from themselves. They deserve every opportunity to be informed. Those who need protection:
* Don't read blogs
* Don't shred their bank statements
* Don't read lifehacker, digg, reddit, slashdot
* Don't read mainstream press or Wired
* May believe they are protected by "Guardian Angels", karma, astral-projections and generally need help with everything
* Native communities who don't have a mainstream existence.
* The list goes on.
But the internet can be a place for bad people to take advantage of others. Why pretend people should not be informed that it can be perverted that way??
Read The Economist for broader coverage of this issue. What concerns them and other news media is the frosting of relations between Russia and American.
However, and I had never heard this put before, Russia defines so much about itself by its opposition to the USA. So an increased sense of Russian worth is correlated with sabre rattling of this sort.
More points raised:
* The deterents posed by the Shield could never, ever stop the amount of weapons Russia has.
* The argument for the shields "They are only for defense", echoes the Iranian defence of their Nuclear Weapons program. We don't believe the Iranians, why should the Russians believe the USA/Europe??
* This is all about influence, rather than actual defense
* Putin won't be around forever
A snippet of coverage:: A few interceptors, a big gap
They also had a whole special on it a few weeks back, if you're interested, it's in there.
I worked on an internet startup with a guy who turned out to be a conman. The startup tanked when the conman ran away with the investors' cash.
One of his other favourite cons was the Deep Sea Gold..... While running the startup-con, he was also trying to start this con on the same investors.
He would claim to have intimate knowledge of an ancient wreck somewhere. There was the lure of lots of gold. All that the investors needed to do was stump up some cash to hire dive-boats and a little sundry, and they would get all the gold retrieved.
This guy had fake Lordships [where you buy a tiny plot of land in Britain and get the title] and fake ids. But in essence the fact that the wreck was out to sea and the investors didn't have an independent source of verification made the con a good one. The investors put in lots of cash, some deep sea divers were hired, but the fictitious wreck remained undiscovered long enough for the conman to drain all the cash from the investors. Then the conman disappeared back to whatever country he had never fled to before. No cash, now wreck, no gold, no money.
So now I'm always wary of deep sea discoveries... Special software to spot wrecks from the comfort of Google Maps and your couch??? The conmen will have a field-day if people start to believe this. Not saying this guy is wrong, but how soon until other people leech his achievements?
[1995] When I was at university on Java 1.0, we were taught operating systems on emulated Minix. It was fine then, no reason x86 won't be fine now.
Just give this project time. Everybody is queuing up to knock it down, but it should be fine. They're not planning to put Vista on it, just emulate some DOS data entry applications.
Can some helpful person explain how the NASA budget is drawn up? The wikipedia article covers the facts and outcomes, and not the political angles.
I guess I'm asking:
* where the money is going instead? To different NASA projects or to other state projects outside [stable economy]
* is there less money overall? [shrinking economy]
* is the budget determined by the President or the Senate?
* how frequently are these budgets determined? - how soon could all this budget shrinking really be turned around?
* is there consensus on the role of NASA, or is there variation between Democrats and Republicans?
* if there had been less spent on Defense [say Iraq war], would that have been allocatable to NASA? Sometimes budgets are drawn from several pools... e.g. Road Tax in Australia is only spent on roads.
But Illustrator doesn't work with embedded fonts, so you have to load a PDF, print it with all fonts converted to outlines, and then import THAT. Why won't the PDF import in illustrator just use Acrobat to do the import if it's installed, so you can have full PDF display/import capability? Oh yeah, because Adobe is lame.
I think this is a font licensing issue.
It's pretty silly I know, as there are plenty of font extraction programs out there. People get around this and just tend to [illegally] send the fonts with the file:: "Collect for Output".
But I do not think that Adobe are allowed to edit a file with embedded fonts, as it breaks most font licenses. Especially if they were not subset!
Also, a lot of the time I find that Acrobat has turned a line of text into several disjointed lines of text which happen to have the same vertical level on the page. Sometimes this happens in the middle of a word, sometimes between words, but it happens an awful lot. I think it will do it any time you change a font, but it happens randomly as well. This text is simply not reasonably editable in acrobat.
FYI: Illustrator does this because some text has kerning and tracking information. Often this is added without the designer requesting it. Most programs which generate PDF render that kern/track information as discreet blocks. This is sad, because the PDF text object follows the postscript roots and has provision for per-glyph adjustment. If you look in the Pdf Content stream for that page you'll see discreet Text blocks, often with pairs of characters even for a very long string.
Seeing as some kind soul modded my original post as Flamebait, I'll take another post to say I probably wrongly singled out the EFF, whereas I probably meant the FSF.
In this thread you can see an employee[1] of FSF (novalis atsign fsf.org) asking for submissions about the Linksys software. This is not out of simple interest in what is running. It so that they can build a case to ask Linksys to prove they have complied with the various licensing terms of the open source software incorporated in their device.
For the other people out there who might mod this down, here is a more comprehensive list:
* And the whole SveaSoft debacle - Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? - Please note this entailed multi-party activism with external people deciding to leak SveaSofts code
I could not agree more. More specifically, there is only so much trained attention to go around. In the case of Many Eyes, interpreting the visualization takes a uni graduates equivalent of training. Not a degree, but similar capacity. Other slashdotters may argue to set the bar lower, but how much lower than HighSchool Grad can it be in educational terms? People boggle at the concept of Compound Interest, these mutli-layered datasets would be hard for them. E.g. Some of the data needs to be on a logarithmic scale, which is complicated to grok.
2. The Big Picture often misses The Little Picture
Often with these overviews, important details can be overlooked.
a)Metrics not chosen well: For instance if the visualization has been weighted to represent one metric you can entriely miss the metric you should be looking for.
b) Too many entries: A classic case in point is Wikipedia. If you stumble upon a complex Disambiguation you are lost by the number of entries. This is the problem that Google set out to minimize. It has improved on a couple of years ago but all the Link Farms still hamper the same problem of finding what you are looking for.
JVM targeted languages reviewed comprehensively
on
Groovy in Action
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So if that slap-dash story can actually happen, how can any plan counter one of the many *serious* long term Fictional problems??
* Alien, Crimson Tide - Superuser has too much power
* Stark - Everyone hates it and commits suicide
* Celebrity Big Brother - One group starts picking on another
* Robocop 2 - First prototype mission works, but subsequent missions/models cannot *recreate the magic* ?
If things go wrong, will they stop the daily messages back from the deranged crew??
Writing software is hard. Very hard. So hard that it can take many years to appreciate all the interactions between all components. These components are both concrete and abstract.
Multi core is yet another layer on top of everything else.
One of the first problems which Developers will need to master is Cache-Consistency. We are not being helped very much here. At the moment this is all very level/library specific. All the tricks for, say, elegantly sharing a session in a Hibernate based J2EE webapp are different for synching L3 cache structures between different cores. They are the same Cache-Consistency problem in principle.
Hibernate accomplishes a lot by giving in-code Hints [called AOP for some stupid reason]. These are instructions which are reasonably close in to where the code which deals with that data is located.
What is needed is a lot more consistent frameworks for describing what data should be shared between cores&servers. Some will be a priority and the rest can be fetched later. Similar to marking
register
to hint the compiler should use a cpu register to store the variable.
Describing this data stuff cuts across many levels. Data design, language choice, IDE integration, build tools and then target deployment environments.
From the question 'Where's the Software to Catch Up to Multicore Computing?'. We need better consistency to describe to the computer what we'd like it to be doing, and we need a consistent system so we can learn it more easily when we're novices.
* Paris Hilton Video
* George Bush dropping the First Dog
* Wikipedia: The Greatest Edits
* Donald Trump's Hairpiece
* Star Wars where Han shoots first
Can you model a roadside bomb?? Nope. Not in a every possible scenario
So concentrate on getting the basics correct. Some of those basics would be rote learned in idealised computer environment where replaying "Mistakes" is cheaper.
Why should the computer be 100%? If it was held to be the model of perfection, troops would learn to fight the computer and not the enemy.
You are right in terms society only _really_ needs enough work to keep everyone going.
Why people worry about productivity is because the World Economy is related to it.
Inflation is closely linked to productivity. If workers are more efficient, there is lower cost of paying them. Which mean that costs of services are lower, and inflation is stopped. Currently, it is looking as though producitivity can no longer be relied on to keep inflation low... i.e. a recession/depression is coming.
Also people like to think that miracles will come of increased productivity. Shareholders and investment bankers and Corporate Boards extoll increases in productivity to lower costs and increase value... Yadda yadda. If procuctivity hits a ceiling [likely] then their Blue Sky projections will fail, along with their stock valuations.
THAT is why they keep going on about productivity all the time.
Joel Spolsky makes some good arguments about the best programmers being siginificantly more productive than the rest.
In France, the government found that some surgeons were able to acheive 12x as many procedures as others at the same quality level[1]. This is the basis of the NHS reforms in the UK. i.e. Provide a system to encourage the 12x surgeons/other-staff to succeed.
So one way to increase productivity is to identify those 12x people, and find less demanding work for the <12ers. This is done by hocus-pocus Management Consultant type processes at the moment. Correcting this would lead to improved efficiency overall.
How much improvement? Dunno, I'm not a 12x person either!
----
[1] I read this in The Economist. Sorry, they require registration+£££ to read the article.
Lord of the Rings was great. But Return of the King was a little too long. If they'd cut out some of the ending, they could have put more content in elsewhere [Tom Bomadil at the start, Sacking of Hobbiton by Saruman at end].
And King Kong was unwatchably, laughably bad.
Is a Director judged on their latter movies? Because if they are, I wouldn't want Jackson to do The Hobbit.
Slashdot Mirror
Competent Artists who've heard of Dynamic Range:
Sigur Ros
Rufus Wainwright
Belle & Sebastian
Radiohead
Gorillaz
DJ Shadow
Goldfrapp [Felt Mountain]
Competent Artists who've heard of Dynamic Range, but choose to use a lot of compression anyway:
M83
Outkast
Daft Punk
++
Compression is not the death of an album, and there are still artists who do not use it every song.
penalized for the actions of the stupid
It is personal opinion in which way anyone views this issue; and attitudes vary over time and subject matter.
The scale varies from the cold-hearted Matlusian & Randian view ; to the overpowering cotton wool Nanny State.
On this particular issue, it is my personal opinion, that our internet rights are not being curtailed by these Internet Danger Signs.
Do danger signs, required by government, stop people using:
* electricity plugs
* medicines
* rat-poisons
* or other stuff?
No. But they probably saved a few toddlers from electrocuting or poisoning themselves.
---
In Australia there is a big problem with some Indigenous Australians sniffing petrol.
So the government places restrictions on how petrol can be obtained in those parts.
Surely that is penalising car owners who do not sniff petrol?? Where do you stand on that issue?
I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but slashdot is very skilled in technology and the implications compared to the wider populace. The government deals with all peoples of all capabilities. Some are young, some unable and some just uninformed. But they still need some help sometimes.
There are people who need protection, occasionally from themselves. They deserve every opportunity to be informed. Those who need protection:
* Don't read blogs
* Don't shred their bank statements
* Don't read lifehacker, digg, reddit, slashdot
* Don't read mainstream press or Wired
* May believe they are protected by "Guardian Angels", karma, astral-projections and generally need help with everything
* Native communities who don't have a mainstream existence.
* The list goes on.
But the internet can be a place for bad people to take advantage of others. Why pretend people should not be informed that it can be perverted that way??
After you do this, you will always remember it the next years.
You won't forget, and neither will she.
Read The Economist for broader coverage of this issue. What concerns them and other news media is the frosting of relations between Russia and American.
However, and I had never heard this put before, Russia defines so much about itself by its opposition to the USA. So an increased sense of Russian worth is correlated with sabre rattling of this sort.
More points raised:
* The deterents posed by the Shield could never, ever stop the amount of weapons Russia has.
* The argument for the shields "They are only for defense", echoes the Iranian defence of their Nuclear Weapons program. We don't believe the Iranians, why should the Russians believe the USA/Europe??
* This is all about influence, rather than actual defense
* Putin won't be around forever
A snippet of coverage:: A few interceptors, a big gap
They also had a whole special on it a few weeks back, if you're interested, it's in there.
One of his other favourite cons was the Deep Sea Gold..... While running the startup-con, he was also trying to start this con on the same investors.
He would claim to have intimate knowledge of an ancient wreck somewhere. There was the lure of lots of gold. All that the investors needed to do was stump up some cash to hire dive-boats and a little sundry, and they would get all the gold retrieved.
This guy had fake Lordships [where you buy a tiny plot of land in Britain and get the title] and fake ids. But in essence the fact that the wreck was out to sea and the investors didn't have an independent source of verification made the con a good one. The investors put in lots of cash, some deep sea divers were hired, but the fictitious wreck remained undiscovered long enough for the conman to drain all the cash from the investors. Then the conman disappeared back to whatever country he had never fled to before. No cash, now wreck, no gold, no money.
So now I'm always wary of deep sea discoveries... Special software to spot wrecks from the comfort of Google Maps and your couch??? The conmen will have a field-day if people start to believe this. Not saying this guy is wrong, but how soon until other people leech his achievements?
[1995] When I was at university on Java 1.0, we were taught operating systems on emulated Minix. It was fine then, no reason x86 won't be fine now.
Just give this project time. Everybody is queuing up to knock it down, but it should be fine. They're not planning to put Vista on it, just emulate some DOS data entry applications.
Can some helpful person explain how the NASA budget is drawn up? The wikipedia article covers the facts and outcomes, and not the political angles.
I guess I'm asking:
* where the money is going instead? To different NASA projects or to other state projects outside [stable economy]
* is there less money overall? [shrinking economy]
* is the budget determined by the President or the Senate?
* how frequently are these budgets determined? - how soon could all this budget shrinking really be turned around?
* is there consensus on the role of NASA, or is there variation between Democrats and Republicans?
* if there had been less spent on Defense [say Iraq war], would that have been allocatable to NASA? Sometimes budgets are drawn from several pools... e.g. Road Tax in Australia is only spent on roads.
Spare a thought for all those poor hackers out there with an addiction to packet sniffing.
What will they find to feed their addiction?
But Illustrator doesn't work with embedded fonts, so you have to load a PDF, print it with all fonts converted to outlines, and then import THAT. Why won't the PDF import in illustrator just use Acrobat to do the import if it's installed, so you can have full PDF display/import capability? Oh yeah, because Adobe is lame.
:: "Collect for Output".
I think this is a font licensing issue.
It's pretty silly I know, as there are plenty of font extraction programs out there.
People get around this and just tend to [illegally] send the fonts with the file
But I do not think that Adobe are allowed to edit a file with embedded fonts, as it breaks most font licenses. Especially if they were not subset!
Also, a lot of the time I find that Acrobat has turned a line of text into several disjointed lines of text which happen to have the same vertical level on the page. Sometimes this happens in the middle of a word, sometimes between words, but it happens an awful lot. I think it will do it any time you change a font, but it happens randomly as well. This text is simply not reasonably editable in acrobat.
FYI: Illustrator does this because some text has kerning and tracking information. Often this is added without the designer requesting it. Most programs which generate PDF render that kern/track information as discreet blocks. This is sad, because the PDF text object follows the postscript roots and has provision for per-glyph adjustment. If you look in the Pdf Content stream for that page you'll see discreet Text blocks, often with pairs of characters even for a very long string.
In this thread you can see an employee[1] of FSF (novalis atsign fsf.org) asking for submissions about the Linksys software. This is not out of simple interest in what is running. It so that they can build a case to ask Linksys to prove they have complied with the various licensing terms of the open source software incorporated in their device.
For the other people out there who might mod this down, here is a more comprehensive list:
* Theo de Raadt On Firmware Activism - requiring firms to open linked code
* And the whole SveaSoft debacle - Is Sveasoft Violating the GPL? - Please note this entailed multi-party activism with external people deciding to leak SveaSofts code
-----------
1 - someone claiming to be at least
'Never again will you fear the BSA (Business Software Alliance) knocking on your door wanting to perform a software audit.'
You may however have the EFF or activists wanting to inspect your code.
I could not agree more. More specifically, there is only so much trained attention to go around. In the case of Many Eyes, interpreting the visualization takes a uni graduates equivalent of training. Not a degree, but similar capacity. Other slashdotters may argue to set the bar lower, but how much lower than HighSchool Grad can it be in educational terms? People boggle at the concept of Compound Interest, these mutli-layered datasets would be hard for them. E.g. Some of the data needs to be on a logarithmic scale, which is complicated to grok.
2. The Big Picture often misses The Little Picture
Often with these overviews, important details can be overlooked.
a)Metrics not chosen well: For instance if the visualization has been weighted to represent one metric you can entriely miss the metric you should be looking for.
b) Too many entries: A classic case in point is Wikipedia. If you stumble upon a complex Disambiguation you are lost by the number of entries. This is the problem that Google set out to minimize. It has improved on a couple of years ago but all the Link Farms still hamper the same problem of finding what you are looking for.
He liked the NICE language the best.
... "in ways you could never imagine", you thought she meant sex.
Now all your Base belong to her and she encrypted your CD collection.
* a NASA lady
* dressing in disguise and
* trying to revenge upon a NASA love rival
is pure B-Rate Drama worthy of Dan Brown
So if that slap-dash story can actually happen, how can any plan counter one of the many *serious* long term Fictional problems??
* Alien, Crimson Tide - Superuser has too much power
* Stark - Everyone hates it and commits suicide
* Celebrity Big Brother - One group starts picking on another
* Robocop 2 - First prototype mission works, but subsequent missions/models cannot *recreate the magic* ?
If things go wrong, will they stop the daily messages back from the deranged crew??
One of the first problems which Developers will need to master is Cache-Consistency. We are not being helped very much here. At the moment this is all very level/library specific. All the tricks for, say, elegantly sharing a session in a Hibernate based J2EE webapp are different for synching L3 cache structures between different cores. They are the same Cache-Consistency problem in principle.
Hibernate accomplishes a lot by giving in-code Hints [called AOP for some stupid reason]. These are instructions which are reasonably close in to where the code which deals with that data is located.
What is needed is a lot more consistent frameworks for describing what data should be shared between cores&servers. Some will be a priority and the rest can be fetched later. Similar to marking
to hint the compiler should use a cpu register to store the variable.
From the question 'Where's the Software to Catch Up to Multicore Computing?'. We need better consistency to describe to the computer what we'd like it to be doing, and we need a consistent system so we can learn it more easily when we're novices.Describing this data stuff cuts across many levels. Data design, language choice, IDE integration, build tools and then target deployment environments.
* Paris Hilton Video
* George Bush dropping the First Dog
* Wikipedia: The Greatest Edits
* Donald Trump's Hairpiece
* Star Wars where Han shoots first
I mean, wasting cycles on Web 2.x stuff could divert resources from global warming solutions or how to protect children without infringing liberties.
Then blind people can carry around a conveniently sized RFID reader.
Just swipe past the reader and it'll tell you how much money is in your wallet. Or is that the amount in the next person's wallet? Ok, forget it.
So concentrate on getting the basics correct. Some of those basics would be rote learned in idealised computer environment where replaying "Mistakes" is cheaper.
Why should the computer be 100%? If it was held to be the model of perfection, troops would learn to fight the computer and not the enemy.
Why people worry about productivity is because the World Economy is related to it.
Inflation is closely linked to productivity. If workers are more efficient, there is lower cost of paying them. Which mean that costs of services are lower, and inflation is stopped. Currently, it is looking as though producitivity can no longer be relied on to keep inflation low... i.e. a recession/depression is coming.
Also people like to think that miracles will come of increased productivity. Shareholders and investment bankers and Corporate Boards extoll increases in productivity to lower costs and increase value... Yadda yadda. If procuctivity hits a ceiling [likely] then their Blue Sky projections will fail, along with their stock valuations.
THAT is why they keep going on about productivity all the time.
In France, the government found that some surgeons were able to acheive 12x as many procedures as others at the same quality level[1]. This is the basis of the NHS reforms in the UK. i.e. Provide a system to encourage the 12x surgeons/other-staff to succeed.
So one way to increase productivity is to identify those 12x people, and find less demanding work for the <12ers. This is done by hocus-pocus Management Consultant type processes at the moment. Correcting this would lead to improved efficiency overall.
How much improvement? Dunno, I'm not a 12x person either!
----
[1] I read this in The Economist. Sorry, they require registration+£££ to read the article.
And King Kong was unwatchably, laughably bad.
Is a Director judged on their latter movies? Because if they are, I wouldn't want Jackson to do The Hobbit.