The first cyclotron (and early form of particle accelerator) had a patent applied for and rejected. The patent examiner said that because particles couldn't be seen they couldn't be verified to have been accelerated. This had two major effects. First, the inventor died penniless and heartbroken. Second, because there was no patent, the scientific community was easily able to pirate the design and do research with it leading to a profusion of nuclear weapons and the brink of war we find ourselves on today.
IP law isn't as bad as you think, just imagine the safe and secure world we'd be living in today if this evil technology had remained a secret.
A lot of people don't even know about the existence of Rule Number One, though good designers always follow it at least unconsciously.
Don't forget the intelligence level of your audience.
Look at science software. It generally is chock-full of weird acronyms and has unexplained buttons. Or consider Linux, which is well-known for being ugly and unusable. These kinds of "blunders" are fine when you are creating software for genius-level IQ people who don't mind taking a few minutes out of every day to learn how to use their most vital tools.
On the opposite end of the spectrum we have Windows and Mac. Both of them are "easy to use" (read: for idiots). The colors are attractive, indicating an overemphasis of form over function. The respective companies have spent uncounted millions on figuring out the exact pixel alignment for the "OK" button--millions that could have gone to putting a web server in the kernel, like Linux has. But they have idiots using their software, so they have to spend that money.
The "O" in "OLED" stands for organic. Basically they have a bunch of bacterii inside these monitors and they zap them to make them light up like fireflies (it's more complicated than that, obviously). But what about when the bacterii inevitably escape? What kind of environmental and human health impact could that have? Have the EPA and FDA taken a look at OLEDs yet?
3D modelers are nice to play with but any serious artist will tell you that the only way to get a photo-realistic rendering is to get a human artist to draw it by hand. Simple graph theory shows that handling all the data involved, edges, vertii, colors, etc is an O(2^n) task. Whereas a human can intuitively grasp the essential elements and pare the decision tree such that a scene can be drawn with minimal data.
I love the Internet. All that information and discussion right at/from my fingertips has been a life-changing experience. That's why stories like this sadden me. In their zeal to "free" intellectual property, hackers are destroying the Internet.
First, there's the issue of bandwidth. Downloading (or worse, streaming realtime) huge binary files is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons. A few people have this insatiable need to play music directly from the Internet instead of just buying the CD and the rest of us get enormous ping times.
Second, and more important in the long run, there's legislation. If it hadn't been for the greedy hackers "sharing" their music, the RIAA wouldn't have noticed the Internet at all. Now they are getting custom-tailored laws that will through out the Internet baby with the hacker bathwater.
I would even argue that the UK gov't is well within it's rights to track UK citizens like this. After all, the gov't pays for their health care for free, right? So they should be keeping tabs on everyone to make sure they don't get hit by a bus or anything that will cause a big expense for taxpayers. The one that pays for the maintenance fees/doctor appointments should be the one in charge of what kind of dangerous activities engaged in, eh wot wot?
So the reason were supposed to be afraid of cellphones is that the government might be trying to use them to catch criminals. Guess what, genii, they use fingerprints the same way--are you planning on cutting off your hands any time soon?
A much more valid reason to avoid cellphones is radiation. If you remember your physics, H=qrP/3pi which indicates that the dosage recieved is proportional to the distance. Since you put your cellphone by your head (and since they contain substantial amounts of power, to reach the faraway cell towers) your brain is going to get quite a zap. Use with care, or with tongs.
First of all, it takes a lot of brains to code for Linux. Your typical American high school graduate, for instance, would never be able to handle the doubly-linked, struct-ified lists that are common throughout the kernel code. It takes a full 4-year college education to be able to work with that kind of high-level paradigm, which is why most of the successful hackers are PhDs.
Second, those hackers smart enough to code for Linux have generally been smart enough to move to America and get an American citizenship. They are smart enough to understand that what keeps Americans safe is the 2nd Amendment. They are no longer crouching in their stinking hovels with nothing but a Dell laptop to their names.
You may call Linux a hobby, but think of a guy with a woodshop in his basement. Would you rather use a bookshelf that he himself lovingly made from only the finest parts or would you rather buy a $15 piece of laminated crap from WalMart?
I use it at home and I've never discovered a breakin. But when I tried to use it at work, I got shut down real fast. I have a high-sensitivity position at a Big National Laboratory (if you follow me) and our security needs to pass federal muster every 3 months. When I told the inspector that I was planning to install Linux to replace Windows 2000, he about had a heart attack.
The inspector related that the government's tests had indicated Linux was pretty weak on security. Apparently they feel that the open (he called it "promiscuous") development model meant that there were no controls, verification or even logged history of who checked what in, meaning that terrorists or spies could have planted trojans in there. (He also had problems with the stability, but that's not really a security issue so he couldn't make me deinstall for that).
Anyway, I obviously lodged a protest but it came right back with a stamp on it: "Linux is not being considered until the development model is safe." I guess they get a lot of requests like mine.
Energy = work = force times distance. And, in the case of moving through a fluid, force is proportional to the square of the area times the viscosity. Let's say that the square of the area of the glider is 1 unit. And let's say the viscosity of air is 1 and that of water is 2. Then the energy to push the glider through water is twice as high as it would be in air.
This is exactly why water transport is a dead end that has rarely worked in the past.
It's obvious that ESP is right when he says that many eyes make bugs shallow, but I think his idea is implemented badly. The eyes that inspect the code have to be experienced and knowledgeable--having your neighbor's teenager type cat source.c isn't really enough.
That's why I recommend a three-pronged approach:
1) A large internal testing infrastructure, such as you might find at Oracle or Microsoft.
2) A set of coding guidelines intended to reduce well-known problems like buffer-overruns and the use of error-prone C++ in general. These would be analogous to engineering "best practices" as found in other fields and, like in those other fields, would be overseen by government inspection and periodic code review at the federal level.
3) Most important of all, I think we need to make sure that inexperienced-but-well-meaning child hackers don't destroy what we already have by accident. Larry Torvalds should probably stop accepting patches for his web server project, for instance, because each one is a potential timebomb. It is time for the adults to run the software industry, is my belief.
Also, when it is found that a lot of these scaling problems could have been fixed by switching to proven Enterprise software instead of stuff they found on the Internet, it will lead to a revolution in the software industry. Engineering licenses and governmental oversight (code inspectors), while a little onerous at first, improve the level of coding worldwide, saving millions of lives and dollars.
If we are allowed to include the science industry as well, here are my predictions:
Cold fusion will continue to gain acceptance among more and more "mainstream" physicists (it's at about 30% acceptance now)
12 months puts us in late 2003, right before the next election. Hopefully Bush, in need of popular support, will finally stand up to the big pharm companies and tell the FAA to approve so-called "alternative medicines" which have been languishing. Most of those herbal remedies are clinically proven but are being suppressed.
As the economy continues to worsen, companies will begin to realize that they don't need to put up with arrogant, socially-inept programmers who live at the bottom of the food chain. Especially those that don't have any actual experience. On the downside, this means more of them will be posting here.
I expect ther to be several improvements in the Linux arena. For instance, I understand Linus Wall is intending to release a version of Perl that doesn't require that confusing CPAN stuff and uses regular DLLs like every other language in the universe.
Another Linux improvement is likely to be the inclusion of optically-differentiated subbuses on the front end buffer array to increase volatility throughput.
Different formats go through different channels (== different employees) and the proceeds are earmarked differently. When you buy the CD but download the MP3, you are effectively stealing from the Digital Music Department at Big Recording Company, even though you paid for a different product from a different group.
If you think about it, you know it's true. You are getting for free something that honest people pay for. That's stealing in my book.
I've already told my rep what I think of DRM, though I don't suppose it would hurt to tell him again. I believe DRM is 21st century solution to a 21st century problem. We need to have some way of protecting innovation from those, like the inhabitants of Slashdot, that choose to steal rather than create. If this means that I lose a little convience in the pursuit of a larger good, well then so be it.
On the one hand, this is great traditional news for Linux. As everyone knows by now, the superior development model of the GNU Source system precludes infection by virices. So as these computers' users get fed up with crashes and unexplained data theft, they are sure to migrate to the harder-to-use but eminently-secure Linux platform in droves.
On the other hand, this could be the start of something big. There is reason to believe that "junk DNA", which comprises about 90% of the human genome, is leftover virus DNA. How much of human evolution was driven by viral infection either indirectly or directly? Might the same happen to computers? I think it might be smart to leave China's computii infected and see if an AI evolves. Put up a firewall, of course, in case of a Predator scenario.
The quality of radio today is pathetic (and I'm talking about the data itself, the content is a whole nother story). Static, pops, poor channeling, etc. Everybody knows this. And thus everybody thinks that it would be a good thing if we got the radio equivalent of HDTV, which is what this Digital thing is.
But it's not, it's pure opiate.
Both HDTV and Digital Radio employ an incredible amount of bandwidth. And we aren't talking about bandwidth in a wire where if you add more wires (or upgrade to fiber) you can magically fix the problem. There is simply a finite amount of broadcast bandwidth available, period. Widening the channels as these schemes require crowds out highly necessary bandwidth uses such as radio astronomy (including SETI), marine rescue channels, military radios, CBs (don't laugh, a lot of rural people depend on them) and of course cellphones.
The real solution to our problem is to decrease the amount of useless bandwidth wastage out there, like the badly-named "SciFi" channel (aka the Pseudo-Science channel. XFiles, I'm looking at you). But no lawmaker is interested in reducing the opiate that The People are getting, so you can say goodbye to anything meaningful being done via broadcast in the US.
In my field, it is absolute essential that one squeeze every last bit of math power out of the CPU. So this books occupies a place of honor on my shelf and I refer to it almost daily when I write my Perl scripts.
I'm surprised to see it posted on/., though, because he's pretty harsh towards the gaming community. In fact, he says near the beginning that game-related technology in CPUs (MMX and so forth) is taking away much-needed brainpower from research that should be reaching towards making chips do more math per unit time (not to mention driving up production costs for toy-obsessed, joyless loners). He calls for an immediate end to the pandering that Intel et al do to get into the pocketbooks of the socially-inept, technology pseudo-elite and wants real reform in the area of empowering science.
When we see articles about automatic shutoff switches for stolen cars set out as bait for the criminal element, everybody here thinks it's a great idea. When we see the exact same idea applied to people who do illegal and unethical things with computers, suddenly it's all about "freedom".
Well, I for one am glad that we are going to see a crackdown on today's tech-obsessed miscreant.
1 W = 1 J/s. 1 kcal = 1 Cal = 4000 J. Therefore, if I want 3 kW of power continuously (which is about how much an average US home uses), I would need to feed my HomeStomach(TM) Generator less than 3/4 Calorie/second. My suggestion is to stock up on Tic-Tacs.
I think you are right, "parents and children" are unlikely to need to play "Wormz" at the mall--and if they do, they can use their cellphones. There's nothing on this $100 Zira that a normal (and free) cellphone can't provide.
However, I think the idea of a cheap PDA is a good one in another field. Many's the time I've been at a collegues desk and we'll get into a "debate" about the molar mass of yttrbium or what the fifth-order solution to Schrodinger's equation is. At times like these, when your geeky rep is on the line, it is absolutely essential that your have some firepower to back yourself up. A handy periodic table app, or some high-powered number crunching will save your pimply, fishbelly-white ass someday. $100 is not to much to pay for this piece of mind--and the sleek silver case doesn't hurt either!
I love to have the latest, most expensive hardware as much as the next cloistered geek, but I have to wonder if this is such great news for Linux?
Consider that every time new hardware comes out, Linux (and the GNU Source process in general) has to go through a period of reverse engineering, documentation "freeing", alpha testing, beta testing, etc. Add to that the fact that Linux kernels come out less often than wars in the Persian Gulf and we could be looking at several years before True Geeks can take full advantage of the power of these Intel G4's.
Slashdot Mirror
IP law isn't as bad as you think, just imagine the safe and secure world we'd be living in today if this evil technology had remained a secret.
Don't forget the intelligence level of your audience.
Look at science software. It generally is chock-full of weird acronyms and has unexplained buttons. Or consider Linux, which is well-known for being ugly and unusable. These kinds of "blunders" are fine when you are creating software for genius-level IQ people who don't mind taking a few minutes out of every day to learn how to use their most vital tools.
On the opposite end of the spectrum we have Windows and Mac. Both of them are "easy to use" (read: for idiots). The colors are attractive, indicating an overemphasis of form over function. The respective companies have spent uncounted millions on figuring out the exact pixel alignment for the "OK" button--millions that could have gone to putting a web server in the kernel, like Linux has. But they have idiots using their software, so they have to spend that money.
The "O" in "OLED" stands for organic. Basically they have a bunch of bacterii inside these monitors and they zap them to make them light up like fireflies (it's more complicated than that, obviously). But what about when the bacterii inevitably escape? What kind of environmental and human health impact could that have? Have the EPA and FDA taken a look at OLEDs yet?
3D modelers are nice to play with but any serious artist will tell you that the only way to get a photo-realistic rendering is to get a human artist to draw it by hand. Simple graph theory shows that handling all the data involved, edges, vertii, colors, etc is an O(2^n) task. Whereas a human can intuitively grasp the essential elements and pare the decision tree such that a scene can be drawn with minimal data.
First, there's the issue of bandwidth. Downloading (or worse, streaming realtime) huge binary files is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons. A few people have this insatiable need to play music directly from the Internet instead of just buying the CD and the rest of us get enormous ping times.
Second, and more important in the long run, there's legislation. If it hadn't been for the greedy hackers "sharing" their music, the RIAA wouldn't have noticed the Internet at all. Now they are getting custom-tailored laws that will through out the Internet baby with the hacker bathwater.
You people should be ashamed of yourselves.
MacOS hasn't even had real multitasking or (shipped with) two-button mice "for years" so I think MS has a point here.
I would even argue that the UK gov't is well within it's rights to track UK citizens like this. After all, the gov't pays for their health care for free, right? So they should be keeping tabs on everyone to make sure they don't get hit by a bus or anything that will cause a big expense for taxpayers. The one that pays for the maintenance fees/doctor appointments should be the one in charge of what kind of dangerous activities engaged in, eh wot wot?
A much more valid reason to avoid cellphones is radiation. If you remember your physics, H=qrP/3pi which indicates that the dosage recieved is proportional to the distance. Since you put your cellphone by your head (and since they contain substantial amounts of power, to reach the faraway cell towers) your brain is going to get quite a zap. Use with care, or with tongs.
Second, those hackers smart enough to code for Linux have generally been smart enough to move to America and get an American citizenship. They are smart enough to understand that what keeps Americans safe is the 2nd Amendment. They are no longer crouching in their stinking hovels with nothing but a Dell laptop to their names.
You may call Linux a hobby, but think of a guy with a woodshop in his basement. Would you rather use a bookshelf that he himself lovingly made from only the finest parts or would you rather buy a $15 piece of laminated crap from WalMart?
The inspector related that the government's tests had indicated Linux was pretty weak on security. Apparently they feel that the open (he called it "promiscuous") development model meant that there were no controls, verification or even logged history of who checked what in, meaning that terrorists or spies could have planted trojans in there. (He also had problems with the stability, but that's not really a security issue so he couldn't make me deinstall for that).
Anyway, I obviously lodged a protest but it came right back with a stamp on it: "Linux is not being considered until the development model is safe." I guess they get a lot of requests like mine.
This is exactly why water transport is a dead end that has rarely worked in the past.
That's why I recommend a three-pronged approach:
1) A large internal testing infrastructure, such as you might find at Oracle or Microsoft.
2) A set of coding guidelines intended to reduce well-known problems like buffer-overruns and the use of error-prone C++ in general. These would be analogous to engineering "best practices" as found in other fields and, like in those other fields, would be overseen by government inspection and periodic code review at the federal level.
3) Most important of all, I think we need to make sure that inexperienced-but-well-meaning child hackers don't destroy what we already have by accident. Larry Torvalds should probably stop accepting patches for his web server project, for instance, because each one is a potential timebomb. It is time for the adults to run the software industry, is my belief.
Also, when it is found that a lot of these scaling problems could have been fixed by switching to proven Enterprise software instead of stuff they found on the Internet, it will lead to a revolution in the software industry. Engineering licenses and governmental oversight (code inspectors), while a little onerous at first, improve the level of coding worldwide, saving millions of lives and dollars.
If you think about it, you know it's true. You are getting for free something that honest people pay for. That's stealing in my book.
Please note the first word. Making copies that bite into the profits of the RIAA isn't fair, it's stealing.
I've already told my rep what I think of DRM, though I don't suppose it would hurt to tell him again. I believe DRM is 21st century solution to a 21st century problem. We need to have some way of protecting innovation from those, like the inhabitants of Slashdot, that choose to steal rather than create. If this means that I lose a little convience in the pursuit of a larger good, well then so be it.
On the other hand, this could be the start of something big. There is reason to believe that "junk DNA", which comprises about 90% of the human genome, is leftover virus DNA. How much of human evolution was driven by viral infection either indirectly or directly? Might the same happen to computers? I think it might be smart to leave China's computii infected and see if an AI evolves. Put up a firewall, of course, in case of a Predator scenario.
But it's not, it's pure opiate.
Both HDTV and Digital Radio employ an incredible amount of bandwidth. And we aren't talking about bandwidth in a wire where if you add more wires (or upgrade to fiber) you can magically fix the problem. There is simply a finite amount of broadcast bandwidth available, period. Widening the channels as these schemes require crowds out highly necessary bandwidth uses such as radio astronomy (including SETI), marine rescue channels, military radios, CBs (don't laugh, a lot of rural people depend on them) and of course cellphones.
The real solution to our problem is to decrease the amount of useless bandwidth wastage out there, like the badly-named "SciFi" channel (aka the Pseudo-Science channel. XFiles, I'm looking at you). But no lawmaker is interested in reducing the opiate that The People are getting, so you can say goodbye to anything meaningful being done via broadcast in the US.
I'm surprised to see it posted on /., though, because he's pretty harsh towards the gaming community. In fact, he says near the beginning that game-related technology in CPUs (MMX and so forth) is taking away much-needed brainpower from research that should be reaching towards making chips do more math per unit time (not to mention driving up production costs for toy-obsessed, joyless loners). He calls for an immediate end to the pandering that Intel et al do to get into the pocketbooks of the socially-inept, technology pseudo-elite and wants real reform in the area of empowering science.
Powerful stuff.
I think sugar has about 5 Cal/g so that's 250 Cal = 1,000,000 J. Keeping in mind that "4000 J/C" is an approximation, their numbers are right.
Well, I for one am glad that we are going to see a crackdown on today's tech-obsessed miscreant.
1 W = 1 J/s. 1 kcal = 1 Cal = 4000 J. Therefore, if I want 3 kW of power continuously (which is about how much an average US home uses), I would need to feed my HomeStomach(TM) Generator less than 3/4 Calorie/second. My suggestion is to stock up on Tic-Tacs.
However, I think the idea of a cheap PDA is a good one in another field. Many's the time I've been at a collegues desk and we'll get into a "debate" about the molar mass of yttrbium or what the fifth-order solution to Schrodinger's equation is. At times like these, when your geeky rep is on the line, it is absolutely essential that your have some firepower to back yourself up. A handy periodic table app, or some high-powered number crunching will save your pimply, fishbelly-white ass someday. $100 is not to much to pay for this piece of mind--and the sleek silver case doesn't hurt either!
Consider that every time new hardware comes out, Linux (and the GNU Source process in general) has to go through a period of reverse engineering, documentation "freeing", alpha testing, beta testing, etc. Add to that the fact that Linux kernels come out less often than wars in the Persian Gulf and we could be looking at several years before True Geeks can take full advantage of the power of these Intel G4's.