Now The Internet is going to melt down today as tens of thousands of slashgeeks stock up on microwave burritos and net-pr0n and wait out the upcoming apocolypse.
My friend Zaulo was here this weekend helping me re-arrange my office, and we were discussing this exact story (thankfully this is a dupe, so I've had a chance to get some Local Color betweent the first and second postings!)
File this under "the Spanish-speaking world is big. Really Big.". In Locale esMX macho and hembra are commonly used for animals, meaning male and female respectively.
When applied to humans, they take on the connotation of "super manly" (a usage that is common in US English) and "extremely feminine and beautiful"... (a usage that seems not to have found its way to the US).
In some Latin American coutnries, the usage ranges from decidedly negative to merely curious.
There was a similar story that made the headlines for a while, that some beer company had a series of commercials where all of the characters were referring to each other as "güey" (pronounced "way", like "do you know the way to san jose?") , which in esMX is the closest translation possible to "dude." In some other locales it is much more rude.
The word is, in fact, a variant on the word buey (Ox) which is a very crude insult, likely leading to physical assault.
Until next year when programmer #2 who does know how to spell works on your project (or, in your case, you yourself learn to spell), and types make and hits return harder and harder and curses you out loud, because he has to remember to misspell caffeine precisely the same way you did in every place.
Then, one day, he will get tired of it, and S&R the misspelled version with the non-misspelled version, and blood pressure will be relieved.
One metric of a programmer is "how much time transpires between beginning modification and fixing some stupid little cosmetic problem that is driving him nuts." Feel free now, to include by reference the entire "color" vs. "colour" flamefest from lkml.
One habit I have had to force myself to break, is to re-idiom code to match my personal habits. Or, more accurately, refining the change it or leave it? decision process.
A little snippet of a conversation I had with one of the other guys I work with:
me:...I kind of regret that inteface - I was not sure it was the right thing when I wrote it, but now it is too entrenched to rip out, but it defintiely is not the right thing
him:Don't sweat it too much. Great programmers are always wracked with regret. It is the crappy ones who never look back.
Hell, that is not contrived at all -- that is exactly the way we are working on a large project at my current prime client.
And, for the most part it works pretty well -- I happen to be one of the Object/DB abstraction layer guys.
The biggest problem we have had on this project is that the interface was not adequately defined before a lot of the CGI-layer stuff was written, so there is a lot of kludging and rewriting.
It is at moments like this that I am glad to live outside my homeland.
As to your little quiz...
I have no clue what 1,2,3 or 6 are (But six is very intriguing!)
I recognize the slogan for #4, but couldn't tell you who it is for... Fridays maybe. The only one I can speculate a sponsor for is #5, and I think they're McDonalds.
I have always heard rumors of Marijuana Tax Stamps and the like, so I did a little googling. Here's a random sample from Kansas:
Drug dealers, as defined above, are required by law to purchase tax stamps from the Department of Revenue's Business Tax Bureau (K.S.A. 79-5204). In order to protect against any possible violation of the self-incrimination constitutional protection, a dealer is not required to give his/her name or address when purchasing stamps and the Business Tax Bureau is prohibited from sharing any information relating to the purchase of drug tax stamps with law enforcement or anyone else
Software Patents can be the end of OSS/FS whether we win the game or not, but nobody has ever won by staying home and whining that the rules suck.
They (meaning the OSS, FS community) provide tens of thousands of dollars of "value" - that is, avoided cost by doing their craft (writing code) for free. Some are masters in their field whose time, if purchased on the open market would be in the hundreds of dollars per hour - comparable with a top-flight attorney.
Who is to say that masters of patent law cannot apply the same level of dedication to the advancement of Free Information that people like Randy Schwartz or (insert some luminary from your pet project here)?
An organization I was once afilliated with, had a suit filed against us that would have bankrupted us, if it were not for the fact that one of our members, besides being a member of our non-technical SIG, was an attorney, admitted to appear before the Supreme Court of California. The cost of fighting the suit, and getting it dismissed was on the order of hundreds of dollars, instead of tens of thousands.
As to the second point, how many FOSS developers want to debate ideas worth patenting. Perhaps you know a different subset of the community than I have met, but I would say, All of them. It is precisely the kind of intillectual challenge that really turns a Great Hacker's crank!
How to protect the portfolio -- well, there is the achilles heel. I do not have the answer to that one. [1]
As to the third point: Who would want to cross-licesnse patents? Well -- I need to think about this some more, and I think it will require a substantial reformation in FOSS dogma. Let me cogitate and come up with some ideas.
Footnote 1:
It really burns my toast when people put untold amounts of energy into firehosing. (Not to pick at you Flower -- this is a rant against The World) - I once worked in a place where I said, "DAMMIT! The next engineer in this meeting who comes up with an argument why such-and-such won't work is FIRED! If you find a problem, I want to hear three possible paths to SOLUTION at the same time!"
You do bring up an excellent point that a patent without the backing to fight for it is worthless, and I am sorry to say I have no answer for that. Perhaps finding some white knight (IBM) to help underwrite that would be worthwhile.
As to the second point -- I think there is a continuum - some algorithms are clearly mathematical in nature, others are much more procedural.
I am reminded of an era when to patent an algorithm, it was necessary to show that it could be implemented in hardware, patent that hardware, and then make an additional claim of "any process that simulates the physical artifact."
This article brings up a point I have been thinking about for a long
time: The OSS/FS community is losing sight of the trees for the forest
with regard to software patentability.
We need to fight the patent war on two fronts - the first front:
Lobby to make software patents more difficult to obtain.
And the second front, equally important: Until the rules change in
our favor, we need to build up a portfolio of patents, to share and
trade with our friends (which anyone in business will tell you is the
true purpose of a patent).
Instead of screeching to the heavans, Software Patents Are
EEEEEEEEEVIL, the movement would be better served by gaming the
system. If a portfolio of patents is what is needed to keep Free
Software Free, then so be it - put our minds to making the application
and examination system as easy as possible, and assign patents to some
organization (a role that would be well served by FSF if they could
stop their jihad.
For the record,
I do not think that software patents are intrinsically
evil. I believe in my heart-of-hearts that algorithms are
just as
much an invention as a better mousetrap, and I disagree
with the article author's assertion that the copyright protection
granted to an implementation is sufficient protection for this
inventive process.
Plus, you forget that one of the Principles of Free Software,
transparency, is fundament in the patent process. The wisdom of the
patent system is, In exchange for exclusive right-to-use on your
invention, for a limited time, you must fully disclose that
same invention.
I am seriously concerned that the patent process may suffer
the same slow creep in the meaning of limited time that has
happened surrounding copyright, but that is a separate problem for
another posting.
Boy -- talk about your pointless questions...
on
Can GNU Ever Be Unix?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I think it is almost certain that some distro of Linux could easily pass OG's test suite. It is also almost a certainty that FSF/GNU would never opt for it on religious grounds.
The rest of the thread is now available for stupid/. jokes.
In Soviet Russia, The Open Group petitions GNU for certification.
I found most interesting that the only vaguely technical discussion of biodiesel in the puff-piece was a bit of bashing:
Biodiesel is more expensive than gas and eats natural rubber hoses and gaskets on older diesel engines.
What the article neglects to mention is that the dino-diesel sold in California also wreaked havoc with older diesel engines, and all left-coasters have already done the trivial job of modernizing their fuel systems.
I realize this violates the slashdot group think, but consider for the moment: Maybe this is precisely the balance between the rights of would be PS2 homebrewers and pirates.
If you have the ability to modify your own PS2 to bypass the copy protection, you 'win' and get to use your hardware in the way you wish. If you just want to play pirated games, you're SOL.
For the record, I think this is patently bad jurisprudence - but I can see their frustration at their impotence to solve the root problem.
An interesting side story:
Some years ago, when I was developing for the Sega Genesis, I built the hardware to slurp the contents of cartridges (while not strictly necessary for job function, it made a lot of ancilliary tasks much easier).
The following conversation must have happened a zillion times:
Gamer: Wow! You can copy carts! Can you make me a copy of PopularTitle 93?
Me: Sure. You have to pay cost for the blank ROM board and some EPROMs though.
Gamer: Oh, sure! How much is it?
Me: Blank rom boards are twelve bucks. The EPROMs are about fifteen bucks a pop, and it depends on the title how many it will take. Most are two, a few are one, and a few are four.
Gamer visibly let down: Oh.... that costs more than buying the cart retail!
Me: Well, DUH -- a mass produced product is ALWAYS cheaper than one hand-built. Or you could buy one of the development systems, that's a mere $8,500 and you can store your ROM images on disk....
This always had the desired effect of them wandering away depressed and never asking again.
I would say that proves the rocks efficacy! Tigers just a few km away from my house (yes, the 'accidental zoo' is still there, although I haven't seen the tigers with my own eyes - my friend Zaulo worked there last summer, I will ask if they still have tigers) and I have yet to be mauled.
To ping the satellite, yes. However, that is of limited interest - since most people want to actually communicate with other internet hosts - not just their edge router. Plus, as far as I know the actual SV is just operating in bent-pipe mode -- there is no packet-level processing on board, so there is no actual router inside the satellite to ping. (Disclaimer: My IP-over-satellite experience is based soley on setting up VSAT systems -- these consumer products might be engineered differently.)
There are two round trips for a packet going via satellite. From your computer to the satellite, back to an earth station (240 mS) , across the internet, then the reply packet goes from the earth station to the satellite and back down to your house (240 mS again).
Barring sudden improvements on the speed of light, any geosync satellite is going to suck mud through a straw from a latency perspective. There is just no way around that 75,000 km round trip.
So, put it in a box. Wrap it in giftwrap. Leave it on the T.
Of course, NOW, the bomb-squad will be called out. Sorry I was late for work, boss -- the bomb squad had Kenmore Square station closed because someone left a VGA monitor on the platform.
The system at one of my previous place of employ
on
Redundant Internet Access?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We had four T1s -- two from MFS and two from Bell. Of the four T1s, two (one MFS and one Bell) went to one NSP in Santa Clara, and the other two went to a different vendor in Oakland.
We even had physical plant diversity -- the Bell loops came from cable that ran along Stevens Creek Blvd, and the MFS fiber came up from the street that ran behind us. Outside of the building burning down, we were bulletproof.
Ran three years without a single minute of downtime.
My crowning glory in network design. Never again did I work for an employer who was willing to put their money where there mouth was for reliability.
Seems likely that most here would declare themselves to be
anti-censorship..... until their own particular threshold is
crossed. And if one indeed has such a threshold (and most do,
somewhere), then moral indignation at someone else's more restrictive
threshold seems hard to come by.
There is a line that is pretty easy to cross that I will say "I shall
choose to ignore your speech because it is repugnant to me." I am
even willing to delegate the positioning of that line to
entities I trust (e.g. listening to my friend Chuy's opinion on a
movie that I may or may not like, or reading slashdot at +2)
Apart from demonstrably harmful speech (e.g. "shouting fire
in a crowded movie house", libel, slander) I honestly believe there is
no line you can cross that I would say "you need to be censored to
protect me or others."
Of course, the argument that we need to restrict "obscene" and
"indecent" speech, is predicated on the belief that, to some, it
is harmful. It is with this determination that I take issue
- which is why I said demonstrably harmful.
It always amazes me when someone gets up on a soapbox
and screams some silly thing, then claims that there's no such thing
as free speech. Like Michael Moore.
I never claimed there is no such thing as free speech. I
claim that if things continue the way they are, speech will be
seriously curtailed, perhaps to extinction. You will be far
more amazed when it happens that you did nothing while you could.
Slashdot Mirror
Now The Internet is going to melt down today as tens of thousands of slashgeeks stock up on microwave burritos and net-pr0n and wait out the upcoming apocolypse.
My friend Zaulo was here this weekend helping me re-arrange my office, and we were discussing this exact story (thankfully this is a dupe, so I've had a chance to get some Local Color betweent the first and second postings!)
File this under "the Spanish-speaking world is big. Really Big.". In Locale esMX macho and hembra are commonly used for animals, meaning male and female respectively.
When applied to humans, they take on the connotation of "super manly" (a usage that is common in US English) and "extremely feminine and beautiful" ... (a usage that seems not to have found its way to the US).
In some Latin American coutnries, the usage ranges from decidedly negative to merely curious.
There was a similar story that made the headlines for a while, that some beer company had a series of commercials where all of the characters were referring to each other as "güey" (pronounced "way", like "do you know the way to san jose?") , which in esMX is the closest translation possible to "dude." In some other locales it is much more rude.
The word is, in fact, a variant on the word buey (Ox) which is a very crude insult, likely leading to physical assault.
Until next year when programmer #2 who does know how to spell works on your project (or, in your case, you yourself learn to spell), and types make and hits return harder and harder and curses you out loud, because he has to remember to misspell caffeine precisely the same way you did in every place.
Then, one day, he will get tired of it, and S&R the misspelled version with the non-misspelled version, and blood pressure will be relieved.
One metric of a programmer is "how much time transpires between beginning modification and fixing some stupid little cosmetic problem that is driving him nuts." Feel free now, to include by reference the entire "color" vs. "colour" flamefest from lkml.
One habit I have had to force myself to break, is to re-idiom code to match my personal habits. Or, more accurately, refining the change it or leave it? decision process.
A little snippet of a conversation I had with one of the other guys I work with:
Hell, that is not contrived at all -- that is exactly the way we are working on a large project at my current prime client.
And, for the most part it works pretty well -- I happen to be one of the Object/DB abstraction layer guys.
The biggest problem we have had on this project is that the interface was not adequately defined before a lot of the CGI-layer stuff was written, so there is a lot of kludging and rewriting.
It is at moments like this that I am glad to live outside my homeland.
As to your little quiz ...
I have no clue what 1,2,3 or 6 are (But six is very intriguing!)
I recognize the slogan for #4, but couldn't tell you who it is for ... Fridays maybe. The only one I can speculate a sponsor for is #5, and I think they're McDonalds.
Electronic Voting is a solution in search of a problem.
Why this fetish for applying complicating technology to simple problems?
I have always heard rumors of Marijuana Tax Stamps and the like, so I did a little googling. Here's a random sample from Kansas:
There is other text http://www.ksrevenue.org/faqs-abcdrugtax.htm for your amusement.Software Patents can be the end of OSS/FS whether we win the game or not, but nobody has ever won by staying home and whining that the rules suck.
They (meaning the OSS, FS community) provide tens of thousands of dollars of "value" - that is, avoided cost by doing their craft (writing code) for free. Some are masters in their field whose time, if purchased on the open market would be in the hundreds of dollars per hour - comparable with a top-flight attorney.
Who is to say that masters of patent law cannot apply the same level of dedication to the advancement of Free Information that people like Randy Schwartz or (insert some luminary from your pet project here)?
An organization I was once afilliated with, had a suit filed against us that would have bankrupted us, if it were not for the fact that one of our members, besides being a member of our non-technical SIG, was an attorney, admitted to appear before the Supreme Court of California. The cost of fighting the suit, and getting it dismissed was on the order of hundreds of dollars, instead of tens of thousands.
As to the second point, how many FOSS developers want to debate ideas worth patenting. Perhaps you know a different subset of the community than I have met, but I would say, All of them. It is precisely the kind of intillectual challenge that really turns a Great Hacker's crank!
How to protect the portfolio -- well, there is the achilles heel. I do not have the answer to that one. [1]
As to the third point: Who would want to cross-licesnse patents? Well -- I need to think about this some more, and I think it will require a substantial reformation in FOSS dogma. Let me cogitate and come up with some ideas.
Footnote 1: It really burns my toast when people put untold amounts of energy into firehosing. (Not to pick at you Flower -- this is a rant against The World) - I once worked in a place where I said, "DAMMIT! The next engineer in this meeting who comes up with an argument why such-and-such won't work is FIRED! If you find a problem, I want to hear three possible paths to SOLUTION at the same time!"
You do bring up an excellent point that a patent without the backing to fight for it is worthless, and I am sorry to say I have no answer for that. Perhaps finding some white knight (IBM) to help underwrite that would be worthwhile.
As to the second point -- I think there is a continuum - some algorithms are clearly mathematical in nature, others are much more procedural.
I am reminded of an era when to patent an algorithm, it was necessary to show that it could be implemented in hardware, patent that hardware, and then make an additional claim of "any process that simulates the physical artifact."
This article brings up a point I have been thinking about for a long time: The OSS/FS community is losing sight of the trees for the forest with regard to software patentability.
We need to fight the patent war on two fronts - the first front: Lobby to make software patents more difficult to obtain.
And the second front, equally important: Until the rules change in our favor, we need to build up a portfolio of patents, to share and trade with our friends (which anyone in business will tell you is the true purpose of a patent).
Instead of screeching to the heavans, Software Patents Are EEEEEEEEEVIL, the movement would be better served by gaming the system. If a portfolio of patents is what is needed to keep Free Software Free, then so be it - put our minds to making the application and examination system as easy as possible, and assign patents to some organization (a role that would be well served by FSF if they could stop their jihad.
For the record, I do not think that software patents are intrinsically evil. I believe in my heart-of-hearts that algorithms are just as much an invention as a better mousetrap, and I disagree with the article author's assertion that the copyright protection granted to an implementation is sufficient protection for this inventive process.
Plus, you forget that one of the Principles of Free Software, transparency, is fundament in the patent process. The wisdom of the patent system is, In exchange for exclusive right-to-use on your invention, for a limited time, you must fully disclose that same invention.
I am seriously concerned that the patent process may suffer the same slow creep in the meaning of limited time that has happened surrounding copyright, but that is a separate problem for another posting.
I think it is almost certain that some distro of Linux could easily pass OG's test suite. It is also almost a certainty that FSF/GNU would never opt for it on religious grounds.
The rest of the thread is now available for stupid /. jokes.
In Soviet Russia, The Open Group petitions GNU for certification.
I found most interesting that the only vaguely technical discussion of biodiesel in the puff-piece was a bit of bashing:
What the article neglects to mention is that the dino-diesel sold in California also wreaked havoc with older diesel engines, and all left-coasters have already done the trivial job of modernizing their fuel systems.Damn you :)
I got this as a metamoderation (yes, it WAS funny) and felt instantly compelled to grab Erect Monkey and google it.
Fortunately there is no monkeyse.cx (yet)
I realize this violates the slashdot group think, but consider for the moment: Maybe this is precisely the balance between the rights of would be PS2 homebrewers and pirates.
If you have the ability to modify your own PS2 to bypass the copy protection, you 'win' and get to use your hardware in the way you wish. If you just want to play pirated games, you're SOL.
For the record, I think this is patently bad jurisprudence - but I can see their frustration at their impotence to solve the root problem.
An interesting side story:
Some years ago, when I was developing for the Sega Genesis, I built the hardware to slurp the contents of cartridges (while not strictly necessary for job function, it made a lot of ancilliary tasks much easier).
The following conversation must have happened a zillion times:
This always had the desired effect of them wandering away depressed and never asking again.
I called Zaulo yesterday, and got this from him:
Mission accomplished. From my apartment to the park is about seven kilometers, so I'd say the tiger repellent rock is doing pretty well!I would say that proves the rocks efficacy! Tigers just a few km away from my house (yes, the 'accidental zoo' is still there, although I haven't seen the tigers with my own eyes - my friend Zaulo worked there last summer, I will ask if they still have tigers) and I have yet to be mauled.
I need to double the anti-tiger rock rental!
To ping the satellite, yes. However, that is of limited interest - since most people want to actually communicate with other internet hosts - not just their edge router. Plus, as far as I know the actual SV is just operating in bent-pipe mode -- there is no packet-level processing on board, so there is no actual router inside the satellite to ping. (Disclaimer: My IP-over-satellite experience is based soley on setting up VSAT systems -- these consumer products might be engineered differently.)
There are two round trips for a packet going via satellite. From your computer to the satellite, back to an earth station (240 mS) , across the internet, then the reply packet goes from the earth station to the satellite and back down to your house (240 mS again).Barring sudden improvements on the speed of light, any geosync satellite is going to suck mud through a straw from a latency perspective. There is just no way around that 75,000 km round trip.
So, put it in a box. Wrap it in giftwrap. Leave it on the T.
Of course, NOW, the bomb-squad will be called out. Sorry I was late for work, boss -- the bomb squad had Kenmore Square station closed because someone left a VGA monitor on the platform.
We had four T1s -- two from MFS and two from Bell. Of the four T1s, two (one MFS and one Bell) went to one NSP in Santa Clara, and the other two went to a different vendor in Oakland.
We even had physical plant diversity -- the Bell loops came from cable that ran along Stevens Creek Blvd, and the MFS fiber came up from the street that ran behind us. Outside of the building burning down, we were bulletproof.
Ran three years without a single minute of downtime.
My crowning glory in network design. Never again did I work for an employer who was willing to put their money where there mouth was for reliability.
There is a line that is pretty easy to cross that I will say "I shall choose to ignore your speech because it is repugnant to me." I am even willing to delegate the positioning of that line to entities I trust (e.g. listening to my friend Chuy's opinion on a movie that I may or may not like, or reading slashdot at +2)
Apart from demonstrably harmful speech (e.g. "shouting fire in a crowded movie house", libel, slander) I honestly believe there is no line you can cross that I would say "you need to be censored to protect me or others."
Of course, the argument that we need to restrict "obscene" and "indecent" speech, is predicated on the belief that, to some, it is harmful. It is with this determination that I take issue - which is why I said demonstrably harmful.