You forgot the most important one: If you change horses in the middle of the stream without a paddle, you might find that the broth is spoilt before it's hatched out of the bag.
Look at it this way: power corrupts. (Or, as someone once said, power attracts the corruptible. Or maybe power exposes people's corruption. You get the point, anyway: power and corruption tend to go together.)
If an employer has a huge amount of power over its employees, then (eventually) it's likely to abuse that power in some way; possibly lots of ways. So to start with, a union is a good way to reduce the employer's power and the abuses that go with it.
Trouble is, when a union gets big, it starts to get lots of power itself. And that power tends to get abused, leading to the sort of excesses discussed here. (Also seen here in the UK in the '70s: the three-day week, etc. That was so bad the inevitable backlash led to Thatcherism and all that...)
So the best situation would seem to be a balance, where a union is powerful enough to curb an employer's worst excesses, without causing too many of its own.
(And there's probably a Nobel Price for Industrial Relations awaiting anyone who works out how to achieve that...)
Theoretically, yes; the trouble is, we don't know the potential for harm. We only know what exploits have actually been found -- in fact, we don't even know about all of those; we only know about those which have been exploited enough to have been recognised by security folks.
I'd say, based on previous performance, that both browsers probably have exploits allowing people to read files, delete files, get local root privileges, etc. The question should really be: how many such problems are there, how easy are they to find and exploit, and how quickly can they be fixed?
Personally, I'd say that we can make reasonable estimates of those answers by now, but we'll never know the actual values.
What's holding me back? Well, depends what you mean.
If you mean: what's stopping me from reading books on my handheld (a Psion 5mx), then the answer's absolutely nothing: I have a large library (about three bookcases' worth, in the open Palm Doc format), and read more on screen than on paper. I find it really convenient: my Psion's always with me, so I don't have to worry about leaving books around, and I don't have to bother with bookmarks. The backlight means I can read in bed with the lights out! And while the screen's not perfect, I still find it comfortable enough to read from -- after all, once you get engrossed in a story, you're not so aware of the screen anyway.
However, if you mean: what's stopping me from buying gadgets specifically designed as e-books, then I share the same concerns as anyone else: the hassle of carrying around another gadget, especially one that doesn't do much else; the inability to get the books I want on it; the inability to use open-format books; the difficulty of transferring stuff to/from it; and of course the expense.
And if you mean: what's stopping me from buying texts online, then that's a two-parter. Fictionwise sells lots of good stuff at fairly reasonable prices; the latest big-name stuff is only available in encrypted formats (MS Reader, Adobe Reader, etc.), but the other half is available in open formats (PDF, Palm Doc, etc.). Needless to say, I only buy the latter! (Partly because there is no MS Reader or Adobe Reader app for the 5mx, but also on principle. I like to edit my texts -- fix the formatting, use British English spelling, use curly quotes, etc, -- and I can only do that if the format's open.) Of course, I don't buy all my texts; many are from free sites, or various other sources.
So no, nothing's holding me back; though wider support for non-dedicated gadgets, and greater availability of texts in open formats would certainly help. Does that answer the question?:)
they can insert in the middle of genes without causing harm because they can undergo chemical reactions by which they remove themselves from the RNA messages the genes make.
Am I too much of a geek, or did this remind anyone else of a rather similar situation with source code, Ken Thompson's fascinating 'Reflections on Trusting Trust'?
I don't need to -- I get very very few unwanted calls.
But then, I'm not in the US. Here in the UK it's illegal to make unsolicited direct marketing calls to people who've registered with the Telephone Preference Service.
(There's a corresponding service for faxes, too.)
I'm registered, and it works! I get unwanted calls only every few months. (Where they're from the UK, the very mention of the TPS normally causes them to ring off. Though I did have a nice discussion with one local company who'd clearly never heard of it but were asking all about it, and gave the strong impression of being about to change their marketing practices accordingly. In fact, the really really annoying ones are, predictably enough, American companies who call here for some reason and are apparently not bound by the TPS...)
So no, I don't screen calls. I haven't even got around to getting a phone capable of displaying the caller ID...
Coz the solution to people using mobiles inconsiderately is definitely to completely block them. Yeah, absolutely. And while we're at it, how about we remove their tongues at the door, so they can't swear. Yeah, that's a far better solution than just asking them not to! Hey, why not block out all the light, too, so I don't have to see someone looking at me strangely! I love all this solving-problems-with-technology thing!
AIUI, these companies aren't proposing any absolute increase in speed -- they're simply going to give your bits better treatment than those who don't pay.
Play it out. The first person to pay for this will get a substantial speed increase, and no-one else will notice any different. Great so far. But what happens when a substantial number of others join in? It all has to come from the same pipes, so they'll see a smaller increase -- and it'll be at the expense of others. Not only from the remainder who aren't paying the premium, but also from the existing premium payers.
By that point, people will be paying the premium not so much for extra speed, but to avoid the rapidly-declining non-premium service. Ultimately, everyone will be forced to pay the premium, just to get exactly the same service they have now.
In other words, the only people to benefit from this are the ISPs. Ka-ching! Everyone else is paying more and getting nothing for it. Not quite a 'tragedy of the commons' scenario, but with the same sort of inevitability.
I don't like the idea of legislating around problems, but maybe this one deserves it. (Telecoms generally seems to benefit from the odd bit of red tape -- look at the state of the mobile phone markets in the unregulated US and the regulated UK, for example.) I think we need some way to nip this one in the bud, and unless anyone has any better ideas...?
I don't know if there's a 'right way' or a 'wrong way' to sync, but the way I do it seems to be a lot easier than yours.
I don't bother with selecting or deselecting files. Instead, I have a playlist called 'iPod'. It's a normal, non-smart playlist, and I put into it everything I want on the iPod. Then, in the iPod options, I tell it to automatically sync to that one playlist. That way, I can drag single tracks, blocks of tracks, albums, etc. to and from the playlist, and set it up very easily. Then, when I connect the iPod, it ensure that those tracks (and no others) end up on there. (One other advantage is that when my old 3G iPod died and was replaced, I didn't have to remember what was on the old one.)
As I said, I don't know if that's how you're supposed to use an iPod with it, but it seems to work very well for me, so maybe you could try it.
I can't compare timings directly, coz I have a Mac and not a PC. But even on my 5-year-old Mac, and a full 60GB iPod, syncing doesn't usually take more than a minute or two unless there's a lot of stuff to copy. Just tried it: after a minute for the iPod to boot (haven't used it for a few days), mounting and syncing took one minute 15 seconds.
It may matter how it's connected. Of course, a USB1 connection will take longer. Mine's Firewire, which is much quicker; I'd expect USB2 to be fairly comparable, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a little slower. (I'd also not be surprised if the Windows version of iTunes wasn't quite as solid as the Mac one.)
Would Perfect 10 have known about the copyright violation had not Google indexed it?
Google's indexing seems a double-edged sword: it doesn't just let prospective users find illegal material, it also lets those with an interest (copyright/patent/trademark holders, law enforcement) find it too. So you might consider it an impartial, disinterested* process. Maybe on those grounds alone, we should consider linking to illegal material qualitatively different from providing/hosting it.
It's just struck me that the Apple philosophy (do one thing and do it well) is rather like the Unix philosophy (where each command does just one thing and does it well). As contrasted with that of most other gadgets (try to do everything), which you might consider more similar to another OS entirely...
I'll try to explain. (I probably won't do a very good job of it, but hey, no-one else has tried yet:)
Where the iPod scores isn't in big features. It doesn't have a tick-list of big features to impress you, like other gadgets do (Sony's, especially). Where it does score is in lots and lots of really little things that individually sound stupid or not worth bothering about, but collectively add up to a really great experience. That's Apple's way of doing things, from their Mac hardware and software down, and that's why people love them; the "It Just Works" motto is a good description. Their stuff doesn't get in the way, it doesn't try to impress you, it just does what you want it to as easily as possible.
I'll try to address your individual points, but I suspect that the answers won't mean much unless you actually use an iPod, preferably for a week or two.
The scroll wheel: the big advantage here is that you're controlling how fast the selection moves, not just in which direction. Even though my albums list has a thousand or so entries, I can zip really quickly down to the approximate area, then slow down, and zero in on the right one. Sure, you can do that with arrows or buttons or whatever, but the scroll wheel is that much faster, more controllable, more intuitive.
It's similar for fast-forwarding. On the iPod, you can hold down the forward or backward buttons just like on any other device. But you can also (after pressing the centre button) use the scroll wheel, which again is great for zipping straight to one particular part of the song, especially if it's a long one or you want fine control.
As to the software, I know iTunes isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the integration is really good. I've told it to sync a couple of playlists, so every time I plug in my iPod, iTunes fires up and syncs. No user action needed at all; it transfers any new songs to the iPod, removes any no longer in the playlist, updates play counts and times for songs you've played on either machine, copies to the iPod any edits you've done to track names or other data -- as I said, It Just Works.
I don't have another current MP3 player, so I can't compare directly, but maybe a comparison with my MD player would help. The MD player has a 'play' button, a 'stop' button, a 'mode' button, an 'edit' button, a 'disp' button, a 'rec' button, and two paddles which move up/down/in marked 'vol+/-/bass' and '>>/<</entersync', and each of these has several different functions depending which mode it's in. Some of them must be pushed several times to cycle through the different options; some must be held down for several seconds; some must be used in combination. In short, it's a pain to use. I learned how do do all I wanted to, but it was never easy, and I'd still forget some of the more advanced stuff. And while it's manageable for a single MD, I dread to think how it'd scale up to a HD full of music.
The iPod, OTOH, has only five buttons and one slider, and they do one or at most two things. And the interface is completely different: instead of umpteen different pages and modes, with all of the buttons having completely different functions in each, there's a menu structure. One single menu structure. Wherever you are in the menu, the wheel and the buttons do exactly the same thing. You can always see where you are in relation to everything else, and there's practically nothing to learn. (I first used an iPod in a shop for about two minutes, and on my own completely figured it all out.) It's childishly simple.
As I said, this won't sound like a big advantage, but once you've used it, anything else seems like hard work. The beauty of it is that you don't need to think about it; you just do what you want to do, and can keep thinking about your music or whatever. 'Simplicity' will never be a feature people put on their ticklists for new gadgets, nor will it be an advertising point for anything in the technology world, b
This will be hacked within a few months of it coming out the same way CSS was
That's a fairly optimistic point of view. If memory serves, CSS was only hacked due to one stupid manufacturer leaving their keys visible.
Look at music. Although DVD Jon broke Apple's original FairPlay encryption, they updated it almost half a year ago, and it still hasn't been broken. Now, if an incremental update to a known DRM system protecting low-value files and designed to be easy to decrypt (to run on iPods) has people stumped, how do you think they'll fare with purpose-designed encryption that's learned from all these previous mistakes, and is protecting a much greater investment?
Yes, it's true that any encryption can be broken given sufficient motivation, time, and resouces; but I suspect 'sufficient' might be getting greater than people can bear...
They are displaying the entire copyrighted work not an excerpt. The owner has legal control of where and how the work is displayed.
So the entire copyrighted work is already available on the web, and because Google is cacheing it, they're crying foul? If they don't want people viewing their photos, how about not putting them on the web in the first place???
It just sounds one step on from the arguments about linking. They may have a legal point here, but their position seems harder to justify on moral grounds.
Indeed. In fact, I suspect the real outcome of all this controversy will be loss of trust and respect -- not for Wikipedia, but for 'authoritative' sources as a whole. So Wikipedia's relative rating will rise!
Pick a subject you have particular knowledge of -- maybe a local event or situation, or an area of learning or technology. Then take a look at how it's reported in the newspapers, in books and encyclopaedias, in movies and documentaries and news programmes. It's a fair bet that you'll come across inaccuracies, ranging from oversimplifications and typos to bias and misrepresentation to plain ignorance and blatant lies.
Now, stop and consider that that's how everything else gets covered, too. Frightening, isn't it?
Of course, some sources are much less likely to get things wrong than others. But very few sources are as authoritative as we tend to assume; all get things wrong from time to time. We should treat all printed and broadcast material with a little scepticism.
Now, look at Wikipedia in that light. Maybe it doesn't seem that much worse than the others after all?
Yes, it's true that there's vastly greater opportunity for errors to be introduced. But to balance that, there's vastly greater opportunity for them to be fixed, too. Wikipedia's far from perfect, but the huge majority of articles seem well worth reading, and its average doesn't seem noticeably lower than other reference works.
(In fact, rather than quality, I think its main problem is coverage; it's very patchy, and has too many gaps and stubs.)
Basically, as long as enough people want Wikipedia to be accurate, it will be!
You know, it's strange, but that looks oddly familiar. I can't place it, but there's a certain...
Hang on a minute! It looks like Windows! That can't be right -- all those free software folk hate Windows, don't they? Surely they wouldn't just be copying the Windows L&F?
it is a good thing, because it will give the users choice
To be specific, it'll give users of vanilla, x86, current, supported Linux distros a choice. Hard to see how it's giving users of other distros, or on other platforms, much of a choice...
The first computer I ever used was a Commodore PET 4000. This was on a course; for a couple of hours we played a 'tree of life' game, and I loved it. I was about 7.
The first computer we had at home was a Video Genie, which we borrowed for a couple of weekends. Enough to write my first program, anyway.
The first computer we owned was a ZX81, complete with dodgy rampak and even more dodgy cassette storage. No need to elaborate there, I hope. I got half-way through writing a space-invader game, but gave up.
But the first real computer we owned was a Beeb, a machine which seems little known in the US, but was amazingly well-designed in both software and hardware -- as evidenced by its amazing expandability and longevity. We got it when I was about 9; by the time I went off to uni almost a decade later, it was still in constant use, and had disk drives, printers, an external sound system, a synthesiser module, a full-size musical keyboard, a speech synth (bought just before a software-based one came out and made it obsolete), analogue and digital joysticks, a real-time clock, and massive expansion of RAM and ROM. It also had a new OS EPROM with a few tweaks of my own, and an additional EPROM I wrote adding stuff like extended cursor editing and a new screen mode. Amongst the hundreds of floppy disks were some education programs I had published, an album's worth of original music and another of covers, hundreds of pirated games, languages like FORTH, BCPL, and Pascal, fonts, WP and DTP software, and loads more I've forgotten.
(And if you think that's good, I helped turn a friend's one into a fully-working laser harp!)
<sigh> A wonderful machine. When it came out in 1981, I doubt anyone knew just how rich, how ingenious, and how long it would outlast its contemporaries. It was the last machine I knew absolutely inside-out; probably the last one you could know to that level of detail. I could list most of the OS calls, interrupts used, locations of indirection vectors... Ah well.
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Since then I've owned an Atari STE, an Atari Falcon, and then this 'ere Mac, plus severalPsions. But I'm pleased to say I've never owned a PC, nor even lived in a house with one!
the original OS X interface ran godawfully slow when it first came out.
True, but that was five years ago, when W2K was still new, and no-one else was doing the graphically intense stuff OS X was.
Apple made no effort to scale settings back automatically
Not at the time; but right now Quartz Extreme and Core Image are already doing the sort of scaling MS is talking about, only more transparently. (It works rather well, too -- I'm running Mac OS X 10.4 on a 5.5-year-old machine with an ATI Rage 128, and it's perfectly usable without missing much at all.)
I was honest about my skill level and let my people know that their expertice and creativity was always appreciated.
I think that's the important thing; the problem isn't with managers who have less technical knowledge than their people, but with managers who don't realise that. Or who don't think that matters.
Back on topic, 'interesting work' was one of my main criteria when doing my last round of interviewing. But you've no idea how hard it is to explain 'interesting work' to recruiters or agencies! The most common reaction was that if I wanted to learn stuff and work with smart people, I should become a professor, and that if I wanted to be creative and take pride in my work, I should become an artist...:(
you can only prove the existence of bugs, you cannot prove the non-existence of bugs
You sure that's what he said? Program proofs can indeed prove the correctness of programs (i.e. the non-existence of bugs). It's just that they're hard to do for any significant amount of code.
The way I heard the quote, it's about testing: "Program testing can at best show the presence of errors but never their absence." (Edsger W. Dijkstra)
Slashdot Mirror
Look at it this way: power corrupts. (Or, as someone once said, power attracts the corruptible. Or maybe power exposes people's corruption. You get the point, anyway: power and corruption tend to go together.)
If an employer has a huge amount of power over its employees, then (eventually) it's likely to abuse that power in some way; possibly lots of ways. So to start with, a union is a good way to reduce the employer's power and the abuses that go with it.
Trouble is, when a union gets big, it starts to get lots of power itself. And that power tends to get abused, leading to the sort of excesses discussed here. (Also seen here in the UK in the '70s: the three-day week, etc. That was so bad the inevitable backlash led to Thatcherism and all that...)
So the best situation would seem to be a balance, where a union is powerful enough to curb an employer's worst excesses, without causing too many of its own.
(And there's probably a Nobel Price for Industrial Relations awaiting anyone who works out how to achieve that...)
I'd say, based on previous performance, that both browsers probably have exploits allowing people to read files, delete files, get local root privileges, etc. The question should really be: how many such problems are there, how easy are they to find and exploit, and how quickly can they be fixed?
Personally, I'd say that we can make reasonable estimates of those answers by now, but we'll never know the actual values.
If you mean: what's stopping me from reading books on my handheld (a Psion 5mx), then the answer's absolutely nothing: I have a large library (about three bookcases' worth, in the open Palm Doc format), and read more on screen than on paper. I find it really convenient: my Psion's always with me, so I don't have to worry about leaving books around, and I don't have to bother with bookmarks. The backlight means I can read in bed with the lights out! And while the screen's not perfect, I still find it comfortable enough to read from -- after all, once you get engrossed in a story, you're not so aware of the screen anyway.
However, if you mean: what's stopping me from buying gadgets specifically designed as e-books, then I share the same concerns as anyone else: the hassle of carrying around another gadget, especially one that doesn't do much else; the inability to get the books I want on it; the inability to use open-format books; the difficulty of transferring stuff to/from it; and of course the expense.
And if you mean: what's stopping me from buying texts online, then that's a two-parter. Fictionwise sells lots of good stuff at fairly reasonable prices; the latest big-name stuff is only available in encrypted formats (MS Reader, Adobe Reader, etc.), but the other half is available in open formats (PDF, Palm Doc, etc.). Needless to say, I only buy the latter! (Partly because there is no MS Reader or Adobe Reader app for the 5mx, but also on principle. I like to edit my texts -- fix the formatting, use British English spelling, use curly quotes, etc, -- and I can only do that if the format's open.) Of course, I don't buy all my texts; many are from free sites, or various other sources.
So no, nothing's holding me back; though wider support for non-dedicated gadgets, and greater availability of texts in open formats would certainly help. Does that answer the question? :)
Remember, Eurasia is at war on terrorism.
Eurasia has always been at war on terrorism.
Am I too much of a geek, or did this remind anyone else of a rather similar situation with source code, Ken Thompson's fascinating 'Reflections on Trusting Trust'?
But then, I'm not in the US. Here in the UK it's illegal to make unsolicited direct marketing calls to people who've registered with the Telephone Preference Service. (There's a corresponding service for faxes, too.)
I'm registered, and it works! I get unwanted calls only every few months. (Where they're from the UK, the very mention of the TPS normally causes them to ring off. Though I did have a nice discussion with one local company who'd clearly never heard of it but were asking all about it, and gave the strong impression of being about to change their marketing practices accordingly. In fact, the really really annoying ones are, predictably enough, American companies who call here for some reason and are apparently not bound by the TPS...)
So no, I don't screen calls. I haven't even got around to getting a phone capable of displaying the caller ID...
Play it out. The first person to pay for this will get a substantial speed increase, and no-one else will notice any different. Great so far. But what happens when a substantial number of others join in? It all has to come from the same pipes, so they'll see a smaller increase -- and it'll be at the expense of others. Not only from the remainder who aren't paying the premium, but also from the existing premium payers.
By that point, people will be paying the premium not so much for extra speed, but to avoid the rapidly-declining non-premium service. Ultimately, everyone will be forced to pay the premium, just to get exactly the same service they have now.
In other words, the only people to benefit from this are the ISPs. Ka-ching! Everyone else is paying more and getting nothing for it. Not quite a 'tragedy of the commons' scenario, but with the same sort of inevitability.
I don't like the idea of legislating around problems, but maybe this one deserves it. (Telecoms generally seems to benefit from the odd bit of red tape -- look at the state of the mobile phone markets in the unregulated US and the regulated UK, for example.) I think we need some way to nip this one in the bud, and unless anyone has any better ideas...?
I don't bother with selecting or deselecting files. Instead, I have a playlist called 'iPod'. It's a normal, non-smart playlist, and I put into it everything I want on the iPod. Then, in the iPod options, I tell it to automatically sync to that one playlist. That way, I can drag single tracks, blocks of tracks, albums, etc. to and from the playlist, and set it up very easily. Then, when I connect the iPod, it ensure that those tracks (and no others) end up on there. (One other advantage is that when my old 3G iPod died and was replaced, I didn't have to remember what was on the old one.)
As I said, I don't know if that's how you're supposed to use an iPod with it, but it seems to work very well for me, so maybe you could try it.
I can't compare timings directly, coz I have a Mac and not a PC. But even on my 5-year-old Mac, and a full 60GB iPod, syncing doesn't usually take more than a minute or two unless there's a lot of stuff to copy. Just tried it: after a minute for the iPod to boot (haven't used it for a few days), mounting and syncing took one minute 15 seconds.
It may matter how it's connected. Of course, a USB1 connection will take longer. Mine's Firewire, which is much quicker; I'd expect USB2 to be fairly comparable, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a little slower. (I'd also not be surprised if the Windows version of iTunes wasn't quite as solid as the Mac one.)
Google's indexing seems a double-edged sword: it doesn't just let prospective users find illegal material, it also lets those with an interest (copyright/patent/trademark holders, law enforcement) find it too. So you might consider it an impartial, disinterested* process. Maybe on those grounds alone, we should consider linking to illegal material qualitatively different from providing/hosting it.
(* Though not necessarily uninterested!)
No no no. We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania.
It's just struck me that the Apple philosophy (do one thing and do it well) is rather like the Unix philosophy (where each command does just one thing and does it well). As contrasted with that of most other gadgets (try to do everything), which you might consider more similar to another OS entirely...
Where the iPod scores isn't in big features. It doesn't have a tick-list of big features to impress you, like other gadgets do (Sony's, especially). Where it does score is in lots and lots of really little things that individually sound stupid or not worth bothering about, but collectively add up to a really great experience. That's Apple's way of doing things, from their Mac hardware and software down, and that's why people love them; the "It Just Works" motto is a good description. Their stuff doesn't get in the way, it doesn't try to impress you, it just does what you want it to as easily as possible.
I'll try to address your individual points, but I suspect that the answers won't mean much unless you actually use an iPod, preferably for a week or two.
The scroll wheel: the big advantage here is that you're controlling how fast the selection moves, not just in which direction. Even though my albums list has a thousand or so entries, I can zip really quickly down to the approximate area, then slow down, and zero in on the right one. Sure, you can do that with arrows or buttons or whatever, but the scroll wheel is that much faster, more controllable, more intuitive.
It's similar for fast-forwarding. On the iPod, you can hold down the forward or backward buttons just like on any other device. But you can also (after pressing the centre button) use the scroll wheel, which again is great for zipping straight to one particular part of the song, especially if it's a long one or you want fine control.
As to the software, I know iTunes isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the integration is really good. I've told it to sync a couple of playlists, so every time I plug in my iPod, iTunes fires up and syncs. No user action needed at all; it transfers any new songs to the iPod, removes any no longer in the playlist, updates play counts and times for songs you've played on either machine, copies to the iPod any edits you've done to track names or other data -- as I said, It Just Works.
I don't have another current MP3 player, so I can't compare directly, but maybe a comparison with my MD player would help. The MD player has a 'play' button, a 'stop' button, a 'mode' button, an 'edit' button, a 'disp' button, a 'rec' button, and two paddles which move up/down/in marked 'vol+/-/bass' and '>>/<</entersync', and each of these has several different functions depending which mode it's in. Some of them must be pushed several times to cycle through the different options; some must be held down for several seconds; some must be used in combination. In short, it's a pain to use. I learned how do do all I wanted to, but it was never easy, and I'd still forget some of the more advanced stuff. And while it's manageable for a single MD, I dread to think how it'd scale up to a HD full of music.
The iPod, OTOH, has only five buttons and one slider, and they do one or at most two things. And the interface is completely different: instead of umpteen different pages and modes, with all of the buttons having completely different functions in each, there's a menu structure. One single menu structure. Wherever you are in the menu, the wheel and the buttons do exactly the same thing. You can always see where you are in relation to everything else, and there's practically nothing to learn. (I first used an iPod in a shop for about two minutes, and on my own completely figured it all out.) It's childishly simple.
As I said, this won't sound like a big advantage, but once you've used it, anything else seems like hard work. The beauty of it is that you don't need to think about it; you just do what you want to do, and can keep thinking about your music or whatever. 'Simplicity' will never be a feature people put on their ticklists for new gadgets, nor will it be an advertising point for anything in the technology world, b
That's a fairly optimistic point of view. If memory serves, CSS was only hacked due to one stupid manufacturer leaving their keys visible.
Look at music. Although DVD Jon broke Apple's original FairPlay encryption, they updated it almost half a year ago, and it still hasn't been broken. Now, if an incremental update to a known DRM system protecting low-value files and designed to be easy to decrypt (to run on iPods) has people stumped, how do you think they'll fare with purpose-designed encryption that's learned from all these previous mistakes, and is protecting a much greater investment?
Yes, it's true that any encryption can be broken given sufficient motivation, time, and resouces; but I suspect 'sufficient' might be getting greater than people can bear...
So the entire copyrighted work is already available on the web, and because Google is cacheing it, they're crying foul? If they don't want people viewing their photos, how about not putting them on the web in the first place???
It just sounds one step on from the arguments about linking. They may have a legal point here, but their position seems harder to justify on moral grounds.
Pick a subject you have particular knowledge of -- maybe a local event or situation, or an area of learning or technology. Then take a look at how it's reported in the newspapers, in books and encyclopaedias, in movies and documentaries and news programmes. It's a fair bet that you'll come across inaccuracies, ranging from oversimplifications and typos to bias and misrepresentation to plain ignorance and blatant lies.
Now, stop and consider that that's how everything else gets covered, too. Frightening, isn't it?
Of course, some sources are much less likely to get things wrong than others. But very few sources are as authoritative as we tend to assume; all get things wrong from time to time. We should treat all printed and broadcast material with a little scepticism.
Now, look at Wikipedia in that light. Maybe it doesn't seem that much worse than the others after all?
Yes, it's true that there's vastly greater opportunity for errors to be introduced. But to balance that, there's vastly greater opportunity for them to be fixed, too. Wikipedia's far from perfect, but the huge majority of articles seem well worth reading, and its average doesn't seem noticeably lower than other reference works.
(In fact, rather than quality, I think its main problem is coverage; it's very patchy, and has too many gaps and stubs.)
Basically, as long as enough people want Wikipedia to be accurate, it will be!
Hang on a minute! It looks like Windows! That can't be right -- all those free software folk hate Windows, don't they? Surely they wouldn't just be copying the Windows L&F?
To be specific, it'll give users of vanilla, x86, current, supported Linux distros a choice. Hard to see how it's giving users of other distros, or on other platforms, much of a choice...
The first computer we had at home was a Video Genie, which we borrowed for a couple of weekends. Enough to write my first program, anyway.
The first computer we owned was a ZX81, complete with dodgy rampak and even more dodgy cassette storage. No need to elaborate there, I hope. I got half-way through writing a space-invader game, but gave up.
But the first real computer we owned was a Beeb, a machine which seems little known in the US, but was amazingly well-designed in both software and hardware -- as evidenced by its amazing expandability and longevity. We got it when I was about 9; by the time I went off to uni almost a decade later, it was still in constant use, and had disk drives, printers, an external sound system, a synthesiser module, a full-size musical keyboard, a speech synth (bought just before a software-based one came out and made it obsolete), analogue and digital joysticks, a real-time clock, and massive expansion of RAM and ROM. It also had a new OS EPROM with a few tweaks of my own, and an additional EPROM I wrote adding stuff like extended cursor editing and a new screen mode. Amongst the hundreds of floppy disks were some education programs I had published, an album's worth of original music and another of covers, hundreds of pirated games, languages like FORTH, BCPL, and Pascal, fonts, WP and DTP software, and loads more I've forgotten.
(And if you think that's good, I helped turn a friend's one into a fully-working laser harp!)
<sigh> A wonderful machine. When it came out in 1981, I doubt anyone knew just how rich, how ingenious, and how long it would outlast its contemporaries. It was the last machine I knew absolutely inside-out; probably the last one you could know to that level of detail. I could list most of the OS calls, interrupts used, locations of indirection vectors... Ah well. .
Since then I've owned an Atari STE, an Atari Falcon, and then this 'ere Mac, plus several Psions. But I'm pleased to say I've never owned a PC, nor even lived in a house with one!
True, but that was five years ago, when W2K was still new, and no-one else was doing the graphically intense stuff OS X was.
Not at the time; but right now Quartz Extreme and Core Image are already doing the sort of scaling MS is talking about, only more transparently. (It works rather well, too -- I'm running Mac OS X 10.4 on a 5.5-year-old machine with an ATI Rage 128, and it's perfectly usable without missing much at all.)
I think that's the important thing; the problem isn't with managers who have less technical knowledge than their people, but with managers who don't realise that. Or who don't think that matters.
Back on topic, 'interesting work' was one of my main criteria when doing my last round of interviewing. But you've no idea how hard it is to explain 'interesting work' to recruiters or agencies! The most common reaction was that if I wanted to learn stuff and work with smart people, I should become a professor, and that if I wanted to be creative and take pride in my work, I should become an artist... :(
You sure that's what he said? Program proofs can indeed prove the correctness of programs (i.e. the non-existence of bugs). It's just that they're hard to do for any significant amount of code.
The way I heard the quote, it's about testing: "Program testing can at best show the presence of errors but never their absence." (Edsger W. Dijkstra)