Grill Spam slices on the GLLMFRGM (or fry in a pan) and then serve as a sandwich on toasted bread with mayo and a slice of american or velveeta cheese melted on it.
Ahhhh, college... the last time I could eat *that* with a straight face!
What a coincidence -- I actually had to take my work KB (a new IBM mush-model similar to the one in the article) apart to fix it Monday because the 'p' key was getting less and less reliable, and my typing was steadily getting worse.
When I popped the 'p' key off and looked underneath, the rubber contact mat was off center, like it had been stretched underneath so the contact didn't line up under the key. I pulled a few screws, blew out the dust and the rubber spring mat that lies on the contacts was misaligned by, like, 1/4 inch in areas. I pulled it off and tried to re-align it properly when I realized that the plastic/mylar/whatever contact sheet on the bottom wasn't flat either - like a rug that wasn't quite cut the correct shape for a room, there was a hump in it. I loosened the screws around the contacts to the PCB and I was able to then flatten the contact sheet and retighten, then realign the rubber springmat and reassemble.
Voila! Perfect. I want to point out three things.
1) It's still not a model M. If you find an old one GET IT, even if it's missing a few keys. Your neighbors' neighbors will hate all the clicking, but your fingers will be very, very happy. I personally have one of these as well as an original Northgate Omnikey Ultra purchased by me from Northgate Inc. in 1990 which was in use until March of this year. I replaced it because I bought a new PC and wanted a wireless KB. Every collector's shelf should have a Northgate on it, too.
2) This new IBM has way more contacts inside than keys. I realize this is so they can produce one electronic assembly to support 15 languages, but I wonder what the other contacts would do if I hit them. Maybe I'll get bored later today.
3) IBM's subassembly quality control has really hit the can. I realize this is a $5 keyboard, which by its design expects a certain number of defects, but if you could see how badly aligned the springmat was in this thing... SHEESH!
....our keyboards had chassis's which allowed 'em to be thrown off a 3-story building and still work - barely dented.
Back in my day, keyboards *actually* *did* *dent*, unlike the no-heft plastic chassis crud we have to deal with today. Don't get me wrong - I love my new Logitech cordless, but heft is underrated - it scoots across the table when the fan isn't turned *just* *right*.
If my email address is that damn valuable, it seems to me that I should be the one making money from it.
Why couldn't I create a licensing program for my personal info to sell licenses to marketers for, say, $10 million US per contact attempt.
It's my f***'n email address, after all, so I should be able to set the price. They should be at least as responsible with my information as other businesses are with their inventory.
Computer Science is a weird mixture of science and engineering. A lot of the theoretical and some of the applied work is very scientific, while most systems work is very much engineering. Scientific discoveries are not generally patentable, inventions are.
I'm curious - what's your definition of "science"?
I agree, and the words "security" and "trust" should be deprecated from the language because their meanings have been diluted and degenerated to the point of uselessness.
Ten different experts will give you ten different definitions for each, all missing the critical issue: security isn't a switch you can turn on and off - it's a result, a scoreboard, for all those hundreds of tiny little decisions that go into the process of making, following and re-making your security policy.
You can never say you are "secure" in the general sense, just like you can never say your network is (**shudder**) "rock solid". (That's another word that, for me, usually red flags as "ignorable" everything the speaker is saying.)
I think Cringely made the best point about this possibility when he pointed out that IBM HAS THE BEST IP/LEGAL DEPARTMENT IN THE BIDNESS. Nobody is in a better position to vet the code than IBM, so if there were anything there to be concerned about, I would have expected to hear from them by now.
As stupid as it sounds, SCO is bluffing -- if you're going to be stupid, be stupid big.
Not to mention that this is like settling lawsuits with discount coupons for Windows/Office. Punishing MS by increasing their market share? Dumb strategy. Microsoft has, what, $40 BILLION cash in the bank? I'm pretty sure they could afford to gift every household in America with a free XBox if they wanted to. The whole "they lose money on every sale" argument doesn't fly because right now they aren't interested in making money on half the stuff they produce.
/Rant
(Heh, heh.... "fancy moon language".... I gotta write that one down...)
Now, I can understand why a lot of you might think that he's nuts for continuing to rant on and on about the same 15 things over and over, but step back and read this page for a minute.
He has a point.
There is far too much slop and inprecision in the common language, and that breeds sloppy imprecise reasoning. It's one of the really big reasons why we have lawyers and marketroids in the first place, let alone explaining why they have been so successful.
You can think he's nuts if you want to, but words mean things; they carry momentum and inflection, and they guide your perception and expectations. As expert participants in a medium (the Internet, for those of you who are metaphorically challenged) that has really little to do with anything beyond raw, unadulterated communicative horsepower, that you should be able to at least apreciate that about him!
P.S. Plus, I'd rather be considered a user than a consumer anyday.
who-da ever thought that RMS's paranoid-bordering-on-schitzophrenic obsessive ranting about words, language and semantics would have actually come in handy?
You know, we had GW at my last sysadmin job. I hated the crap out of it and even planned to replace it until email became the primary transport vehicle for virii. I even used to send out weekly 'virus alerts' to my coworkers that went something like "Another virus is out but you can ignore it as long as you DON'T OPEN ATTACHMENTS because GW doesn't open them automatically. Click here for details....blah, blah." Mostly, it was just to explain why they were getting all these identical emails from their friends and acquaintances.
Nowadays, we run sendmail with renattach - and that's even better because they have to MANUALLY RENAME THE FILE BACK TO AN EXE for the virus to do anything.
Neat-o, but the entities (Microsoft, SCO, etc.) that are attacking the GPL as liberal/socialist/communist are in the US, and **THEY**, not me, **THEY** are doing so in that context. I didn't make up the words, so if you have a gripe about semantics, talk to somebody else. I was trying to head off this argument because
It -
appears
-
to
-
be
-
an
-
issue,
and it shouldn't be.
It's almost as if the GPL is too "far out" and too liberal for anyone in corporate America to really believe it's real...
Perhaps you meant something else, but I have seen a few people on both sides of the GPL try to use modern political partisanship to describe the purpose and intent of GPL, and I want to torpedo that stinking-freighter-full-of-trash right here, right now. The GPL is no more liberal or conservative than anything other legal contract or license.
To wit:
If Bob writes a piece of software and decides to GPL it, he is making his own free-will decision about how he wants to exercise control over his creation. That's conservative compared to the liberal/socialist/communist (take your pick) approach would demand that government would take ownership of the code and collect taxes for using it.
If AmazinglySuperSoft, Inc. sees his source and wants to use it, they have to consider that Bob's price tag as creator is that they have to GPL their derivative code, too. Don't like it? Fine, do the conservative thing and write your own code and don't use Bob's. Nobody can force you to do anything, and nobody's going to gripe about using alternatives, that would be liberalism.
Just like with everything else in that cozy little place I like to call 'reality', everyone gets to make their own decisions here -- ultimately, that's the essence of idealistic conservatism in a nutshell.
I do, however, agree with you entirely that these people are acting like ignorant bozos, but I think it has more to do with NOT READING THE FREAKING LICENSE[*] than the whole "liberal-conservative" thing. They're calling the GPL "communist" because it carries a stigma, not because it does anything even **remotely** communist. I think their real fear is that they've been commoditized by an entity thay can't buy out and with which they can't negotiate.
obDisclaimer: Yep, I consider myself a conservative. No, I didn't write this to pick on liberals. I wanted to show that political partisanship has no place here by arguing the exact opposite of the prediliction that the GPL is a liberal document. I am sorry if you missed the point.
[*] I mean, really, it isn't even that frickin' long, and the PREAMBLE tells you almost everything you really need to know in case the you have some sort of complex about having to look up the really big words like "verbatim".
Yeah! Agents, I read about them a long time ago. I thought it was a pretty good idea. Most of all I wanted to try one to see how well it worked. What happened to them anyway?
The theoretical work is a critical component, but if we stop when the theory is finished and do not go into the lab to see if the model we have been working on is correct, we haven't done any science, just math.
Well, I was actually making an ironic joke, but since you ask, I can certainly give it another shove closer to the edge of the cliff, so to speak.
First, let me say that I was actually serious when I said that programming (just like mathematics and logic) is not science.
This opinion was not formed without a fair amount of consideration (BS in math, MA in physics). We could argue semantics for many moons, but my definition of a "science" goes something like "A course of inquiry which employs the proper scientific method: only ask questions you can actually answer, employ direct empirical observation with proper control groups, verify the results independently (one trial does not a conclusion make), and reserve nature as the authority - you must maintain a complete willingness to be proven wrong."
Mathematics, Programming and Logic work this way because they conform to a different kind of rigor for validation -- namely, constructive or analytical "proof", which is not, by its nature, empirical. I'm not trying to refute, denounce or demean non-scientific studies, I just want to point out that "scientific" means something specific, and it does not apply to those other areas I mentioned.
BTW, one pet peeve of mine is when in sci-fi movies, the dude says "There has to be some kind of scientific explanation for this." Well, no: METHODS are scientific, not explanations.
Also, please note that many areas of study: Psychology, Sociology and Political Science (as well as certain areas of Biology and Chemistry -- needle, needle, jab, jab, ha-ha!) *could* be scientific in some cases, but typically aren't because they are populated by dumb researchers employing horribly poor experminental and analytical techniques.
So, having said that, I will conclude with the "on-topic" tongue-in-cheek gags:
Reproducibility: (In WRITING programs, not running them)
Since all developers on a project typically work from the same source tree, no programming results have ever been independently verified except the programming assignments in textbooks.
Control Groups:
Well, maybe you have a point on this one. I suppose a NOP loop would qualify as an effective control, but how do you halt the experiment?
Or better yet, users will just end up running their desktop OS inside of an emulator. That way, they can torpedo the thing as much as they want and you can reload from a RAM snapshot in minutes.
Please note that this even circumvents hardware obliteration techniques (and possibly even stuff like Palladium) because everything the OS knows about its universe - both hardware and software - can be faked by the emulator platform.
I think his title the ART of COmputer Programming was always incredible ironic because he has done more than anyone else to turn into a real science, which it is now, and by which I mean that it has hypothesis that can now be tested.
I disagree.
Real science has proper control groups and reproducible results. Programming has neither.
Slashdot Mirror
Only slightly better for you:
Grill Spam slices on the GLLMFRGM (or fry in a pan) and then serve as a sandwich on toasted bread with mayo and a slice of american or velveeta cheese melted on it.
Ahhhh, college... the last time I could eat *that* with a straight face!
What a coincidence -- I actually had to take my work KB (a new IBM mush-model similar to the one in the article) apart to fix it Monday because the 'p' key was getting less and less reliable, and my typing was steadily getting worse.
When I popped the 'p' key off and looked underneath, the rubber contact mat was off center, like it had been stretched underneath so the contact didn't line up under the key. I pulled a few screws, blew out the dust and the rubber spring mat that lies on the contacts was misaligned by, like, 1/4 inch in areas. I pulled it off and tried to re-align it properly when I realized that the plastic/mylar/whatever contact sheet on the bottom wasn't flat either - like a rug that wasn't quite cut the correct shape for a room, there was a hump in it. I loosened the screws around the contacts to the PCB and I was able to then flatten the contact sheet and retighten, then realign the rubber springmat and reassemble.
Voila! Perfect. I want to point out three things.
1) It's still not a model M. If you find an old one GET IT, even if it's missing a few keys. Your neighbors' neighbors will hate all the clicking, but your fingers will be very, very happy. I personally have one of these as well as an original Northgate Omnikey Ultra purchased by me from Northgate Inc. in 1990 which was in use until March of this year. I replaced it because I bought a new PC and wanted a wireless KB. Every collector's shelf should have a Northgate on it, too.
2) This new IBM has way more contacts inside than keys. I realize this is so they can produce one electronic assembly to support 15 languages, but I wonder what the other contacts would do if I hit them. Maybe I'll get bored later today.
3) IBM's subassembly quality control has really hit the can. I realize this is a $5 keyboard, which by its design expects a certain number of defects, but if you could see how badly aligned the springmat was in this thing... SHEESH!
Back in my day, keyboards *actually* *did* *dent*, unlike the no-heft plastic chassis crud we have to deal with today. Don't get me wrong - I love my new Logitech cordless, but heft is underrated - it scoots across the table when the fan isn't turned *just* *right*.
If my email address is that damn valuable, it seems to me that I should be the one making money from it.
Why couldn't I create a licensing program for my personal info to sell licenses to marketers for, say, $10 million US per contact attempt.
It's my f***'n email address, after all, so I should be able to set the price. They should be at least as responsible with my information as other businesses are with their inventory.
Computer Science is a weird mixture of science and engineering. A lot of the theoretical and some of the applied work is very scientific, while most systems work is very much engineering. Scientific discoveries are not generally patentable, inventions are.
I'm curious - what's your definition of "science"?
**That's** gonna make browsing pr0n a little more difficult...
How? It's a short-range technology.
I agree, and the words "security" and "trust" should be deprecated from the language because their meanings have been diluted and degenerated to the point of uselessness.
Ten different experts will give you ten different definitions for each, all missing the critical issue: security isn't a switch you can turn on and off - it's a result, a scoreboard, for all those hundreds of tiny little decisions that go into the process of making, following and re-making your security policy.
You can never say you are "secure" in the general sense, just like you can never say your network is (**shudder**) "rock solid". (That's another word that, for me, usually red flags as "ignorable" everything the speaker is saying.)
You know, you could probably fit a whole Beowulf cluster of these inside my now-seemingly-cavernous Shuttle SN41G2 XPC case!
I think Cringely made the best point about this possibility when he pointed out that IBM HAS THE BEST IP/LEGAL DEPARTMENT IN THE BIDNESS. Nobody is in a better position to vet the code than IBM, so if there were anything there to be concerned about, I would have expected to hear from them by now.
As stupid as it sounds, SCO is bluffing -- if you're going to be stupid, be stupid big.
Not to mention that this is like settling lawsuits with discount coupons for Windows/Office. Punishing MS by increasing their market share? Dumb strategy. Microsoft has, what, $40 BILLION cash in the bank? I'm pretty sure they could afford to gift every household in America with a free XBox if they wanted to. The whole "they lose money on every sale" argument doesn't fly because right now they aren't interested in making money on half the stuff they produce.
(Heh, heh.... "fancy moon language".... I gotta write that one down...)
By the way, here's what I was talking about. The guy is obsessed with words.
Now, I can understand why a lot of you might think that he's nuts for continuing to rant on and on about the same 15 things over and over, but step back and read this page for a minute.
He has a point.
There is far too much slop and inprecision in the common language, and that breeds sloppy imprecise reasoning. It's one of the really big reasons why we have lawyers and marketroids in the first place, let alone explaining why they have been so successful.
You can think he's nuts if you want to, but words mean things; they carry momentum and inflection, and they guide your perception and expectations. As expert participants in a medium (the Internet, for those of you who are metaphorically challenged) that has really little to do with anything beyond raw, unadulterated communicative horsepower, that you should be able to at least apreciate that about him!
P.S. Plus, I'd rather be considered a user than a consumer anyday.
Wow....
who-da ever thought that RMS's paranoid-bordering-on-schitzophrenic obsessive ranting about words, language and semantics would have actually come in handy?
You know, we had GW at my last sysadmin job. I hated the crap out of it and even planned to replace it until email became the primary transport vehicle for virii. I even used to send out weekly 'virus alerts' to my coworkers that went something like "Another virus is out but you can ignore it as long as you DON'T OPEN ATTACHMENTS because GW doesn't open them automatically. Click here for details....blah, blah." Mostly, it was just to explain why they were getting all these identical emails from their friends and acquaintances.
Nowadays, we run sendmail with renattach - and that's even better because they have to MANUALLY RENAME THE FILE BACK TO AN EXE for the virus to do anything.
Neat-o, but the entities (Microsoft, SCO, etc.) that are attacking the GPL as liberal/socialist/communist are in the US, and **THEY**, not me, **THEY** are doing so in that context. I didn't make up the words, so if you have a gripe about semantics, talk to somebody else. I was trying to head off this argument because It - appears - to - be - an - issue, and it shouldn't be.
I am sorry I failed.
It's almost as if the GPL is too "far out" and too liberal for anyone in corporate America to really believe it's real...
Perhaps you meant something else, but I have seen a few people on both sides of the GPL try to use modern political partisanship to describe the purpose and intent of GPL, and I want to torpedo that stinking-freighter-full-of-trash right here, right now. The GPL is no more liberal or conservative than anything other legal contract or license.
To wit:
If Bob writes a piece of software and decides to GPL it, he is making his own free-will decision about how he wants to exercise control over his creation. That's conservative compared to the liberal/socialist/communist (take your pick) approach would demand that government would take ownership of the code and collect taxes for using it.
If AmazinglySuperSoft, Inc. sees his source and wants to use it, they have to consider that Bob's price tag as creator is that they have to GPL their derivative code, too. Don't like it? Fine, do the conservative thing and write your own code and don't use Bob's. Nobody can force you to do anything, and nobody's going to gripe about using alternatives, that would be liberalism.
Just like with everything else in that cozy little place I like to call 'reality', everyone gets to make their own decisions here -- ultimately, that's the essence of idealistic conservatism in a nutshell.
I do, however, agree with you entirely that these people are acting like ignorant bozos, but I think it has more to do with NOT READING THE FREAKING LICENSE[*] than the whole "liberal-conservative" thing. They're calling the GPL "communist" because it carries a stigma, not because it does anything even **remotely** communist. I think their real fear is that they've been commoditized by an entity thay can't buy out and with which they can't negotiate.
obDisclaimer: Yep, I consider myself a conservative. No, I didn't write this to pick on liberals. I wanted to show that political partisanship has no place here by arguing the exact opposite of the prediliction that the GPL is a liberal document. I am sorry if you missed the point.
[*] I mean, really, it isn't even that frickin' long, and the PREAMBLE tells you almost everything you really need to know in case the you have some sort of complex about having to look up the really big words like "verbatim".
Yeah! Agents, I read about them a long time ago. I thought it was a pretty good idea. Most of all I wanted to try one to see how well it worked. What happened to them anyway?
Two words:
Bonzi Buddy.
Ultimately, yes, it does.
The theoretical work is a critical component, but if we stop when the theory is finished and do not go into the lab to see if the model we have been working on is correct, we haven't done any science, just math.
PC&A all have control groups.
Well, I was actually making an ironic joke, but since you ask, I can certainly give it another shove closer to the edge of the cliff, so to speak.
First, let me say that I was actually serious when I said that programming (just like mathematics and logic) is not science.
This opinion was not formed without a fair amount of consideration (BS in math, MA in physics). We could argue semantics for many moons, but my definition of a "science" goes something like "A course of inquiry which employs the proper scientific method: only ask questions you can actually answer, employ direct empirical observation with proper control groups, verify the results independently (one trial does not a conclusion make), and reserve nature as the authority - you must maintain a complete willingness to be proven wrong."
Mathematics, Programming and Logic work this way because they conform to a different kind of rigor for validation -- namely, constructive or analytical "proof", which is not, by its nature, empirical. I'm not trying to refute, denounce or demean non-scientific studies, I just want to point out that "scientific" means something specific, and it does not apply to those other areas I mentioned.
BTW, one pet peeve of mine is when in sci-fi movies, the dude says "There has to be some kind of scientific explanation for this." Well, no: METHODS are scientific, not explanations.
Also, please note that many areas of study: Psychology, Sociology and Political Science (as well as certain areas of Biology and Chemistry -- needle, needle, jab, jab, ha-ha!) *could* be scientific in some cases, but typically aren't because they are populated by dumb researchers employing horribly poor experminental and analytical techniques.
So, having said that, I will conclude with the "on-topic" tongue-in-cheek gags:
Reproducibility: (In WRITING programs, not running them)
Since all developers on a project typically work from the same source tree, no programming results have ever been independently verified except the programming assignments in textbooks.
Control Groups:
Well, maybe you have a point on this one. I suppose a NOP loop would qualify as an effective control, but how do you halt the experiment?
Or better yet, users will just end up running their desktop OS inside of an emulator. That way, they can torpedo the thing as much as they want and you can reload from a RAM snapshot in minutes.
Please note that this even circumvents hardware obliteration techniques (and possibly even stuff like Palladium) because everything the OS knows about its universe - both hardware and software - can be faked by the emulator platform.
I think his title the ART of COmputer Programming was always incredible ironic because he has done more than anyone else to turn into a real science, which it is now, and by which I mean that it has hypothesis that can now be tested.
I disagree.
Real science has proper control groups and reproducible results. Programming has neither.
[/me grins, ducks and runs]
YEAH!
What a bunch of slackers.
Sure you can -- you just need that robot arm thingy.