Steven Levy wrote a book that gets it right- "Hackers". It has comparatively little about phreaking and intrusion (for that read Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown")- instead, it's very old school and illustrates the knowledge seeking obsessions of classic hackers, for which intrusions or 'lock' breaking was no more than a tool to get to other tools to learn things. If you want anybody to really understand what a hacker(1) is, have 'em read the Steven Levy book. If you want them to understand what a hacker(2) is, have them read the Bruce Sterling book. If you want them to understand the situation have them read both...
Re:Tho it's fair to disagree with what it DOES say
on
Gartner Slams Linux
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· Score: 2
But, but... the rate of increase of the rate of increase of the rate of increase is slowing!! o_O
It's all very well to go for a 'good GUI/WM' (and it's a crying shame that this is routinely a blind slavish copy of Windows- you'd think that at least somebody would be trying a blind slavish copy of MacOS), but there is a real problem with 'default with all Linux distros'. One of Linux's biggest promises for the people who have ALREADY BEEN USING IT, is that you basically get to invent whatever GUI you want, in a very personal sense. Replacing this with a blind slavish copy of Windows would take away a key Linux advantage for current users while offering nothing at all in the way of applications and 'business productivity' programs. There's also a very real concern- shouldn't we be trying to do better than Windows, since it is doing so badly in terms of living up to its promise? If we're supposed to be making business productivity stuff, shouldn't we try to figure out ways of operating software that look wizzier and cooler than Windows, but are actually easier to use through being simpler and more direct? In many cases I think a modified 'kiosk' would be just the ticket.
I'll add http://www.golgotha.org/, which isn't as dead as it looks, and will toot my own horn in a subdued manner *toot* Return Of The Son Of Spacewar (ROTSOS) is my codename for a collection of GPLed sample programs that do terrain generation, with some very impressive possibilities. There is a lot of information on what the algorithms/hacks are and why, and more to come, and GPLed code (think of it as pseudocode, it's 'REALbasic' Mac code) for everything, and there are pictures and movies there too. I made a special effort to make MPEG video despite not being able to afford the real tools (ASTARTE Mpack) to do it- anyone who was able to view the Phantom Menace trailers will be able to see longer movies in Sorenson Quicktime format. There are pictures illustrating the concept behind the terrain generation, and plots of the distribution of the universe generation algorithms. Who else is working on stuff that can be used for GPLed games? Come on, go public, the time is now! The more we can use good bits of each other's ideas, the better the whole field will be, without too much effort on any one developer's part. For instance, it's dead trivial to take the object placement variation on my terrain-gen code and use it to produce a consistent, godawfulhuge 2D map- and you could easily scale down the large dataset I use to produce a fairly large map from a very small datafile. You'd be basing it on tiles and getting specific index numbers for the tiles from the big virtual map- and would set up the distribution so that the result emerged with a style you liked. In some circumstances this could produce a map too large for any person to explore, so you might have a Warcraft-like thing in which network players would explore the world and discover neat clearings or forests or juxtapositions of natural resources and features like rivers or lakes- potential map situations that you the designer did not specifically put there, but which were emergent from the algorithms. Put stuff out there! Mix and match:)
Interestingly, _depictions_ of child pornography are also illegal. In other words, paintings, drawings, sketches, computer renderings- Etch-A-Sketches depicting kiddie porn are illegal and actionable. This is not implying drawing from live models, but just artists' renderings of the subject at all. Perhaps Katz would like to fight for the right to make artists' renderings of kiddie porn?
"By the way, if you want real freedom, come with me to the Autobahn- freedom is going 165mph while I pass you a phat one. .:)" Heh. Glad I'm not there;) Maybe I'd feel safer if you were getting stoned while going 165 kph (uh, wouldn't that be metric, then?)... in 'Grand Theft Auto' while sitting on the couch at home;) But you know my final say on the matter? It's "Whatever, as long as I get to know what I need to know to stay out of your way". Does that sound reasonable? Would you consent to affix a flashing green 'stoner' light atop your car, so you could go 165 kph stoned out of your gourd, and I could see you coming and get out of the way, knowing you were pretty wasted? I'd be quite happy to settle for that and would never wish to restrict your personal freedoms unless your personal freedoms were sodomizing me with an automobile at 165 kph;) Okay, end of digression;)
I don't see Jon Katz lifting a damn finger to see to it that people listen to _me_. I could be the cleverest guy around, I could be incredibly karmically gifted (eh- '45' is semi karmically gifted for Slashdot) but Katz doesn't care. He isn't the least bit interested in fighting for my 'right' to publicity and free Slashdot stories. And this is okay, because I don't _have_ such a right. If I work hard enough (like with my work-in-progress GPLed game terrain engine concepts, eventually I would get that attention. It might take years, but I don't need Katz's help. The problem is, he feels very differently about any of _his_ thoughts. To him, there is a _right_ to publicity, Slashdot story posting access (just for him! Not for the common people), and even to criticise that makes a person a CENSOR. My wanting him to lose story posting access makes me a CENSOR. Well, tough. He does not have a right to publicity. It is a privilege he abuses, it's granted to him through Rob Malda and not by some global sense of the fitness of things, and it should be taken away. Katz needs to put the same effort into his thoughts and work as the rest of us have to. It's extremely annoying to see him justify clinging to his unreasonably nepotistic position by accusing critics of censorship. We are not born with write privileges to the world, nor with a stage conveniently growing out of our feet. If we want such exciting abilities to communicate on a broad basis, we have to go out and earn them, and convince someone with the means that our voice deserves amplification. Having done that, we become privileged, and that can be very transient.
Sorry, no: you're badly misinterpreting the situation. Katz gets a free ride- he has the ability to post stories unedited and without direction. He abuses this privilege. Look- I tried to contribute something to Slashdot, too. I erred in thinking self-promotion would work, I erred in underestimating the need for specifically Linux stuff- what I suggested was this page of mine: http://www.airwindows.com/rotsos/index. html. This is the first appearance of a GPLed game terrain engine, more accurately of a method for deriving insanely detailed data from a particular sort of datafile of limited size (16M). I have movies up, I have pictures, I have the (REALbasic, but think of it as 'pseudo-code') GPLed source code up. I've put months, _years_ into this work, there's lots more still to do, and I wanted to get serious publicity for it specifically so that any ideas worth keeping from it couldn't ever be patented. To me that was worth giving up any notion of profit or control from the ideas themselves (on the other hand, it'd be fun to make a game from such ideas and try to sell the art and concept around the game, with the engine being completely open but the story and art copyrighted works being sold). Well, I miscalculated, and I accept that. Silly of me to even try self-promoting and submitting my own story in hopes of it being run on Slashdot (not to mention not having Linux binaries, but that's more than I can do currently). Rejection sucks, but it happens when you and your audience mismatch. (I'm not going to try and go to Freshmeat until I can come up with proper Linux code, which might be a while yet, as I'm getting no help from anyone on any of this). And meanwhile, blithely, Jon Katz takes up the space I was denied- not working hard and trying to bring innovative ideas to Slashdotters like I was, oh no! Instead, he's a rabblerouser! He's descended to where he is only restating other Slashdot articles, in the most inflammatory manner possible, couching it in tired rhetoric. I have no problem whatsoever with Slashdot using editorial judgement and witholding publicity from me personally, or any ideas I might have. Decisions have to be made and there are worse things than not being given a story on slashdot (if you're a server, the 'worse thing' might _be_ getting a story on slashdot;) ). However, I and most Slashdot readers have a problem with Katz not being subject to editorial judgement, not being subject to the standards any normal person would be held to when trying to get stories on Slashdot. I agree with you on one point only. Let Katz write- on the privacy of his own Mac. There is no reason for him to be 'published', and if you are for one second suggesting that his empty restatement of the Singer story is 'ideas more valuable' than the months of GPLed game engine algorithm work I tried to bring to Slashdotters' attention as a story, you're out of your mind. It's not even that what I had to offer was so great- I think it's pretty cool, and you could adapt the ideas to many things, and those ideas can be kept safe from patents with glaring publicity, but what the hey, it's just some fun code. But compared to this? Let Katz write- don't let him POST. He can put his ideas in the queue like anybody else. He doesn't deserve special treatment, he doesn't deserve editorial status. Let him post comments like your average MEEPT!.
If this dendrite growth is more random, making the connections it forms irrelevant to efficient pattern retrieval, it sounds very much like it would enhance associativity at the expense of logical thinking. You could almost call that enhancing creativity at the expense of intelligence. You could also call it schizophrenia (tendency to associate _incorrectly_). However, there's one thing that's quite clear- 'thinking outside the box' or making conceptual jumps requires more than simple logical and efficient pattern retrieval. What sane, logical person would have speculated on how to make a consumer computer and decided, "I know! I'll make it a bright, transparent gumdrop!"? The idea is totally insane- but it worked and is still working. That's just one example of many- but the point is that if caffeine increases connections in this manner, it could be said to enhance innovation. This also suggests that innovation is on the borderline between logic and schizophrenia- the 'sweet spot' is ideas wacky enough to be innovative, but not so foolish as to be useless. That, as well, changes as the environment changes- many computer things would have been foolish five or ten years ago. 3D video games? Yeah right;) dynamic light sources in 'em? Impossible, there's too much calculation;) now, what is foolishly unrealistic today?
IANAL (honest, I'm not), but I think one would back me on this. Fortunately or unfortunately, it comes down to the most anal wording considerations of the contract. It is an actual written contract and supersedes what an employer thinks it ought to mean, and particularly it supersedes what RMS _wanted_ it to mean. As such, the contract makes absolutely no distinction regarding employees whatsoever. You yourself gave me one of the final keys to the probable outcome of this in court, when you apparently talked to a lawyer and learned that distribution was from 'one legal entity to another legal entity'. Now, corporations might want to write their OWN contracts (and have) to lay claim to the IP of their employees, but they don't have the power to stop a person being a legal entity just because that person is an employee. Therefore, it looks like 'distribution' within a company remains totally subject to the GPL's provisions regarding distribution, because the GPL says _nothing_ about 'unless it's a beta' or 'unless it's within a company that wants to preserve its intellectual property'. I don't think this is an accident. I think RMS wanted it this way. So would I. His license is a subtle and direct way of preserving lines of communications over source code, and to make special cases where you don't have to share defeats the purpose. It's written so there are no loopholes regarding that, but it is also written to not be too unmanageable for the source writer. The basic rule remains "binaries == source == complete rights under the contract", and is quite clear, concerning itself with no other issues at all. That's a strength and gives the contract focus.
What happened with that, did they make fun of him or not give him cards to test or something? Like anybody, I have pet vaporware that I'd like to see succeed and become real, and for me that's the next generation 3dfx stuff with the antialiasing and motion blurs (in which the former would work with old games too). It's OK with me if it doesn't fly, I'll still wait and see what happens with it, but it's pretty boggling to see this guy kicking at 3dfx so bad. He was coming up with these big benchmarks for a GeForce card that people can't even get yet, and making nasty remarks about how poorly the Voodoo3 measured up (when actually Glide ran competitively when available), and how old is the V3 by now? Compared with a GeForce that people can't even get ATM?
What is your favorite secret hack (or optimisation)? By this I don't mean 'getting root on w2k boxes' or anything like that: 2 1/2D (Wolfenstein) is a great hack, adding the ability to look up or down with a raycasting engine is a great hack etc. A hack would be some detail related to doing a seemingly impossible task in a very clever and insightful way, and odds are you have some pet hacks in q3test (for instance, one known example is running almost everything through one key OpenGL call which can then be optimised). So what is your favorite pet hack that you haven't yet revealed to the world?:)
Actually, if they give someone _inside_ of the company a beta or alpha or random coyrighted hack, as a binary, then that is distribution, and they'd have to give the person source under the GPL, or at least make it available. The trick is, in this situation it's probably being given to another programmer anyway- so it's _assumed_ that they're getting the source (to work on). But the point is an important one- there's no distinction between alpha, beta and final, and no distinction between inside the company and outside it, as far as GPL applying. When you give a person a binary you let them have source, that's the bottom line. It most certainly applies within a company as well. To control this, only give binaries and source to people who need it to work on, and who agree with you not to distribute it more widely yet. That has to be voluntary because the GPL specifically authorizes anyone to redistribute further on their whim, and doing so is also in the spirit of the license. You can explain to your programmer that you want the program to be more finished and whole before the world sees it. Suggesting that the bugs should be fixed first is not a good idea, because that brings thoughts of 'many eyes/easy bugs' and is an argument for going widely public instantly. Instead, a better argument for voluntarily keeping a distribution limited at first is that in early stages, the 'essence' of the program is very blurry and weak. You want to have the program stand on its own and seem original and worthwhile, bugs or no bugs, by the time you're really putting it out there. Otherwise people might not understand what it wants to be, and the open source interaction might pull it in many unhelpful directions. One might even say that a GPLed program doesn't need a buglist so much as a manifesto (ducks;) )...a clear statement of what the program wants to grow to become. Given that, there can be direction and clarity. Without it, you might have a perfectly bugless program that was just a pile of unrelated functionality.
*seizes ranking Mac geek cred, points to stack 'o Inside Macintosh, but doesn't need it for this* The reason people are getting upset is because you didn't phrase it correctly. The only time 'OK' isn't the default button is when the action is seriously destructive. You know, "This action will format the hard drive your system is currently installed on/will edit the swapfile you're currently paging out of/will close the program and throw away the work you've been doing for the last eight hours. Are you sure? (CANCEL/ok)" THAT is when you make cancel the default- when the action is _stupid_ but one that somebody might possibly want to do, maybe. As to when you get a dialog box at all (I understand some versions of Word hit you with an OK dialog when you DELETE TEXT, which is insane), one of the major purposes is when the program is going to need more info before doing what it's going to do. Those dialog boxes have other controls in them and might be modeless, or modal like an old print dialog- the rule is to add an ellipsis "..." to the menu item. This tells the person working the program that if they hit that menu item, it won't take effect immediately- either more information is needed, or there will be an opportunity to back out if the action is horribly wrong. This is not arbitrary, folks. There are some pretty major assumptions going on in these rules, and they are very much the reasons that you can give complete lusers Macs and have them not hurt themselves. There is no reason not to give Linux comparably sensible UI, and have it, too, be more approachable than Windows for your average noncomputer person. The point is, this is not done by putting a 'confirm' dialog on absolutely everything, it's done by figuring out "What's really destructive?" and having that default to cancel, by figuring out "What's most likely to make people go whoa-Whoa-WHOA-STOP-THAT?" or just get locked into a course of ACTION that they didn't expect or intend, and put "..." on the menuitems and "Are you sure? (cancel/OK)" in a dialog for that particular thing. And leave it off all the normal boring stuff! Geez. Never learn Mac human interface guidelines from Windows OK?;P:) Seriously, Linux can have this and it'll be fine. Just do it right...
Looks to me like a guitar-shaped carving. I don't see working tuning machines, implying that the strings are not under tension but are simply carved there, and would not vibrate. Still, pretty cool looking though. If only the people who did these things knew to produce 1024x768 jpegs of them for desktop pictures!:)
Ever read Federalist #10, Katz? There is a reason we don't do things purely by majority vote. The reason is this: using majority vote, the bigger factions always stomp all over the littler ones. If you want the political equivalent of a world in which everything but Windows is not only uncommon but illegal, go right ahead. In fact, on that note, I suggest that there is every reason to believe that such a system would quickly elect MS Word the U.S. File Format ('everyone' has Word, right?), IE the U.S. Browser ('everyone' has IE, right?) and of course Windows the only state-mandated operating system, with countless new electronic government features that work only for Windows- because people voted them in, and most people clicked the button next to what they see when they boot up, without a thought as to the effects of this decision. I'm afraid your vision is extremely unreasonable and unfeasible. Come back when you have a method for sustaining the input and contributions of smaller factions. Speaking as an American, the USA is _all_ of us Americans- not just the biggest gangs.
Why is the ability to take care of oneself equated with the ability to make a contribution to society? I don't see a connection at all. The obvious counterexample is Stephen Hawking- clearly he cannot take care of himself due to gross and costly physical disability. Now, would you care to make his contribution to society for him so we can put 'im down? Go on, knock yourself out- you can do it!:P My own take on the difference between infanticide/culling and abortion is this- abortion is a woman saying "Whoa! I DID NOT WISH to do this. At all. I never made a decision to bring a life into the world and I'm not prepared/equipped to cope with that, no matter what the baby would be like. Stop!" I also feel, if you're going to do that, best do it as early as possible. I don't think 'intelligent' culling of the human herd is a reasonable plan. It is a severely stupid and shortsighted plan, because few people advocating it believe in any sort of higher authority that can pass judgement on what's worthwhile and what's not. The inevitable result of this lack of judgement would be babies destroyed because they would have missing fingers, babies destroyed because they were female (but a better story would be made up), babies destroyed once someone figures out how to predict that the baby would probably be a computer geek, etc etc. These decisions would not be _made_ by educated, wise people. They'd be made by just random people, some of whom will be unreasonable. The result would be a great deal of abuse of the system.
If you use a mouse with a paint program, you're wacky;) get a Wacom tablet- hell, my old ADB Wacom tablet works in Linux:) Particularly if you're already using Photoshop you're already using _something_ that can use a tablet, so go for it. I've only known one guy who did _great_ art with a tablet- and believe me, it wasn't having a two button mouse that made him so good.:)
I don't know what else you're using (I personally was trying to get an entirely-GNOME setup to work with gnome-ppp) but for me, it turned out that I had to have/etc/ppp/options contain a particular command. The cammand was 'xonxoff'. This is because the Mac serial ports evidently don't have the same sort of flow control as pppd expects, and without that command (which gnome-ppp has no option for) it silently does a sort of hardware spew and fails to connect to the modem properly. I am posting this from LinuxPPC1999, btw... WOOHOO! First workaround for this screwup!;) Now I have to work out how to post news so I can be first dejanews article to return the actual fix to the problem;)
I run Linux on a PowerMac and there are some caveats about it. I'll grant you that if you're doing CLI stuff there's no drawback whatsoever- but when you start getting involved with X, expect problems with the one button mouse. _I_ happen to think a one button mouse is an ideal pointing device, and that keyboard modifiers should be used to add to that, but almost everyone writing apps or window managers for X expect at least a two button mouse- and typically build absolutely indispensable controls into the 'extra' button. Like a root menu that lets you shut down... though if you can break into a virtual console and kill X using top, then you can get out of just about anything. I always return to Window Maker on PPC Linux, because it's pretty easy to set up onebuttonedly. Go to the control panel and assign key equivalents for the root menu (I like using F1 and F2 for root and window menus). As a final note, the most recent LinuxPPC suffers from RedHatItis, in that it is screwy on some machines. I had to boot singleuser and run Xautoconfig just to be able to _run_ it, and I still have not got pppd working like it worked on the older LinuxPPC- and I know to hunt DejaNews and am fearless of really arcane twisted geekery. To top it off Linux is _not_ faster to interact with than MacOS is- especially if you're talking Enlightenment with textured GTK- compare that with 'Kaleidoscope' for MacOS that's at least six times faster at doing the exact same interface tweaks. I suspect that E+GTK is so optimized for x86 that it runs that fast itself- on a PC. On a Mac, if you want that level of eyecandy in usable form, you have to stay with MacOS so far, because even on a 300Mhz G3 E _crawls_ when using GTK textures, and I know quite well it's not that slow on a PC. Something's unoptimized in the state of PPC Linux, and it is certainly not the PPC (again, Kaleidoscope does all that at least six times faster than textured E, arguably more than ten times faster). Anybody have an idea what's going on with this? Is it gcc, egcs, or simply window manager/GTK code that makes heavy use of x86 optimizations and falls back to really crap code when they are not present?
in the article below this, NSA spooks are applauding and thanking L0pht for their hacking activities. L0pht have been celebrated by the government and senators have thanked them personally- and again, the ranking spook-house the NSA are grateful to them for what they do.
Why is industry and the DoJ trying to go against the desires of government, the Senate, and the National Security Agency? And what has industry been feeding the DoJ to provoke this seriously misguided adventure?
Slashdot Mirror
"TRUE LIFE: I'm a luser!"
Steven Levy wrote a book that gets it right- "Hackers". It has comparatively little about phreaking and intrusion (for that read Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown")- instead, it's very old school and illustrates the knowledge seeking obsessions of classic hackers, for which intrusions or 'lock' breaking was no more than a tool to get to other tools to learn things.
If you want anybody to really understand what a hacker(1) is, have 'em read the Steven Levy book. If you want them to understand what a hacker(2) is, have them read the Bruce Sterling book. If you want them to understand the situation have them read both...
But, but... the rate of increase of the rate of increase of the rate of increase is slowing!! o_O
*hehehe*
It's all very well to go for a 'good GUI/WM' (and it's a crying shame that this is routinely a blind slavish copy of Windows- you'd think that at least somebody would be trying a blind slavish copy of MacOS), but there is a real problem with 'default with all Linux distros'. One of Linux's biggest promises for the people who have ALREADY BEEN USING IT, is that you basically get to invent whatever GUI you want, in a very personal sense.
Replacing this with a blind slavish copy of Windows would take away a key Linux advantage for current users while offering nothing at all in the way of applications and 'business productivity' programs.
There's also a very real concern- shouldn't we be trying to do better than Windows, since it is doing so badly in terms of living up to its promise? If we're supposed to be making business productivity stuff, shouldn't we try to figure out ways of operating software that look wizzier and cooler than Windows, but are actually easier to use through being simpler and more direct? In many cases I think a modified 'kiosk' would be just the ticket.
I'll add http://www.golgotha.org/, which isn't as dead as it looks, and will toot my own horn in a subdued manner *toot* :)
Return Of The Son Of Spacewar (ROTSOS) is my codename for a collection of GPLed sample programs that do terrain generation, with some very impressive possibilities. There is a lot of information on what the algorithms/hacks are and why, and more to come, and GPLed code (think of it as pseudocode, it's 'REALbasic' Mac code) for everything, and there are pictures and movies there too. I made a special effort to make MPEG video despite not being able to afford the real tools (ASTARTE Mpack) to do it- anyone who was able to view the Phantom Menace trailers will be able to see longer movies in Sorenson Quicktime format. There are pictures illustrating the concept behind the terrain generation, and plots of the distribution of the universe generation algorithms.
Who else is working on stuff that can be used for GPLed games? Come on, go public, the time is now! The more we can use good bits of each other's ideas, the better the whole field will be, without too much effort on any one developer's part. For instance, it's dead trivial to take the object placement variation on my terrain-gen code and use it to produce a consistent, godawfulhuge 2D map- and you could easily scale down the large dataset I use to produce a fairly large map from a very small datafile. You'd be basing it on tiles and getting specific index numbers for the tiles from the big virtual map- and would set up the distribution so that the result emerged with a style you liked. In some circumstances this could produce a map too large for any person to explore, so you might have a Warcraft-like thing in which network players would explore the world and discover neat clearings or forests or juxtapositions of natural resources and features like rivers or lakes- potential map situations that you the designer did not specifically put there, but which were emergent from the algorithms.
Put stuff out there! Mix and match
Interestingly, _depictions_ of child pornography are also illegal. In other words, paintings, drawings, sketches, computer renderings- Etch-A-Sketches depicting kiddie porn are illegal and actionable.
This is not implying drawing from live models, but just artists' renderings of the subject at all.
Perhaps Katz would like to fight for the right to make artists' renderings of kiddie porn?
"By the way, if you want real freedom, come with me to the Autobahn- freedom is going 165mph while I pass you a phat one. . :)" ;) ;) ;) ;)
Heh. Glad I'm not there
Maybe I'd feel safer if you were getting stoned while going 165 kph (uh, wouldn't that be metric, then?)... in 'Grand Theft Auto' while sitting on the couch at home
But you know my final say on the matter? It's "Whatever, as long as I get to know what I need to know to stay out of your way". Does that sound reasonable? Would you consent to affix a flashing green 'stoner' light atop your car, so you could go 165 kph stoned out of your gourd, and I could see you coming and get out of the way, knowing you were pretty wasted? I'd be quite happy to settle for that and would never wish to restrict your personal freedoms unless your personal freedoms were sodomizing me with an automobile at 165 kph
Okay, end of digression
I don't see Jon Katz lifting a damn finger to see to it that people listen to _me_. I could be the cleverest guy around, I could be incredibly karmically gifted (eh- '45' is semi karmically gifted for Slashdot) but Katz doesn't care. He isn't the least bit interested in fighting for my 'right' to publicity and free Slashdot stories.
And this is okay, because I don't _have_ such a right. If I work hard enough (like with my work-in-progress GPLed game terrain engine concepts, eventually I would get that attention. It might take years, but I don't need Katz's help.
The problem is, he feels very differently about any of _his_ thoughts. To him, there is a _right_ to publicity, Slashdot story posting access (just for him! Not for the common people), and even to criticise that makes a person a CENSOR. My wanting him to lose story posting access makes me a CENSOR.
Well, tough. He does not have a right to publicity. It is a privilege he abuses, it's granted to him through Rob Malda and not by some global sense of the fitness of things, and it should be taken away. Katz needs to put the same effort into his thoughts and work as the rest of us have to. It's extremely annoying to see him justify clinging to his unreasonably nepotistic position by accusing critics of censorship. We are not born with write privileges to the world, nor with a stage conveniently growing out of our feet. If we want such exciting abilities to communicate on a broad basis, we have to go out and earn them, and convince someone with the means that our voice deserves amplification. Having done that, we become privileged, and that can be very transient.
Sorry, no: you're badly misinterpreting the situation. Katz gets a free ride- he has the ability to post stories unedited and without direction. He abuses this privilege. ;) ). However, I and most Slashdot readers have a problem with Katz not being subject to editorial judgement, not being subject to the standards any normal person would be held to when trying to get stories on Slashdot.
Look- I tried to contribute something to Slashdot, too. I erred in thinking self-promotion would work, I erred in underestimating the need for specifically Linux stuff- what I suggested was this page of mine: http://www.airwindows.com/rotsos/index. html. This is the first appearance of a GPLed game terrain engine, more accurately of a method for deriving insanely detailed data from a particular sort of datafile of limited size (16M).
I have movies up, I have pictures, I have the (REALbasic, but think of it as 'pseudo-code') GPLed source code up. I've put months, _years_ into this work, there's lots more still to do, and I wanted to get serious publicity for it specifically so that any ideas worth keeping from it couldn't ever be patented. To me that was worth giving up any notion of profit or control from the ideas themselves (on the other hand, it'd be fun to make a game from such ideas and try to sell the art and concept around the game, with the engine being completely open but the story and art copyrighted works being sold).
Well, I miscalculated, and I accept that. Silly of me to even try self-promoting and submitting my own story in hopes of it being run on Slashdot (not to mention not having Linux binaries, but that's more than I can do currently). Rejection sucks, but it happens when you and your audience mismatch. (I'm not going to try and go to Freshmeat until I can come up with proper Linux code, which might be a while yet, as I'm getting no help from anyone on any of this).
And meanwhile, blithely, Jon Katz takes up the space I was denied- not working hard and trying to bring innovative ideas to Slashdotters like I was, oh no! Instead, he's a rabblerouser! He's descended to where he is only restating other Slashdot articles, in the most inflammatory manner possible, couching it in tired rhetoric.
I have no problem whatsoever with Slashdot using editorial judgement and witholding publicity from me personally, or any ideas I might have. Decisions have to be made and there are worse things than not being given a story on slashdot (if you're a server, the 'worse thing' might _be_ getting a story on slashdot
I agree with you on one point only. Let Katz write- on the privacy of his own Mac. There is no reason for him to be 'published', and if you are for one second suggesting that his empty restatement of the Singer story is 'ideas more valuable' than the months of GPLed game engine algorithm work I tried to bring to Slashdotters' attention as a story, you're out of your mind.
It's not even that what I had to offer was so great- I think it's pretty cool, and you could adapt the ideas to many things, and those ideas can be kept safe from patents with glaring publicity, but what the hey, it's just some fun code. But compared to this?
Let Katz write- don't let him POST. He can put his ideas in the queue like anybody else. He doesn't deserve special treatment, he doesn't deserve editorial status. Let him post comments like your average MEEPT!.
If this dendrite growth is more random, making the connections it forms irrelevant to efficient pattern retrieval, it sounds very much like it would enhance associativity at the expense of logical thinking. ;) dynamic light sources in 'em? Impossible, there's too much calculation ;) now, what is foolishly unrealistic today?
You could almost call that enhancing creativity at the expense of intelligence. You could also call it schizophrenia (tendency to associate _incorrectly_). However, there's one thing that's quite clear- 'thinking outside the box' or making conceptual jumps requires more than simple logical and efficient pattern retrieval. What sane, logical person would have speculated on how to make a consumer computer and decided, "I know! I'll make it a bright, transparent gumdrop!"? The idea is totally insane- but it worked and is still working.
That's just one example of many- but the point is that if caffeine increases connections in this manner, it could be said to enhance innovation. This also suggests that innovation is on the borderline between logic and schizophrenia- the 'sweet spot' is ideas wacky enough to be innovative, but not so foolish as to be useless. That, as well, changes as the environment changes- many computer things would have been foolish five or ten years ago. 3D video games? Yeah right
"If you had to choose money or power, which would you choose?" (followup) "How are you making that happen?"
IANAL (honest, I'm not), but I think one would back me on this. Fortunately or unfortunately, it comes down to the most anal wording considerations of the contract. It is an actual written contract and supersedes what an employer thinks it ought to mean, and particularly it supersedes what RMS _wanted_ it to mean.
As such, the contract makes absolutely no distinction regarding employees whatsoever. You yourself gave me one of the final keys to the probable outcome of this in court, when you apparently talked to a lawyer and learned that distribution was from 'one legal entity to another legal entity'. Now, corporations might want to write their OWN contracts (and have) to lay claim to the IP of their employees, but they don't have the power to stop a person being a legal entity just because that person is an employee. Therefore, it looks like 'distribution' within a company remains totally subject to the GPL's provisions regarding distribution, because the GPL says _nothing_ about 'unless it's a beta' or 'unless it's within a company that wants to preserve its intellectual property'.
I don't think this is an accident. I think RMS wanted it this way. So would I. His license is a subtle and direct way of preserving lines of communications over source code, and to make special cases where you don't have to share defeats the purpose. It's written so there are no loopholes regarding that, but it is also written to not be too unmanageable for the source writer. The basic rule remains "binaries == source == complete rights under the contract", and is quite clear, concerning itself with no other issues at all. That's a strength and gives the contract focus.
What happened with that, did they make fun of him or not give him cards to test or something? Like anybody, I have pet vaporware that I'd like to see succeed and become real, and for me that's the next generation 3dfx stuff with the antialiasing and motion blurs (in which the former would work with old games too). It's OK with me if it doesn't fly, I'll still wait and see what happens with it, but it's pretty boggling to see this guy kicking at 3dfx so bad. He was coming up with these big benchmarks for a GeForce card that people can't even get yet, and making nasty remarks about how poorly the Voodoo3 measured up (when actually Glide ran competitively when available), and how old is the V3 by now? Compared with a GeForce that people can't even get ATM?
What is your favorite secret hack (or optimisation)? By this I don't mean 'getting root on w2k boxes' or anything like that: 2 1/2D (Wolfenstein) is a great hack, adding the ability to look up or down with a raycasting engine is a great hack etc. A hack would be some detail related to doing a seemingly impossible task in a very clever and insightful way, and odds are you have some pet hacks in q3test (for instance, one known example is running almost everything through one key OpenGL call which can then be optimised). :)
So what is your favorite pet hack that you haven't yet revealed to the world?
Actually, if they give someone _inside_ of the company a beta or alpha or random coyrighted hack, as a binary, then that is distribution, and they'd have to give the person source under the GPL, or at least make it available. ;) ) ...a clear statement of what the program wants to grow to become. Given that, there can be direction and clarity. Without it, you might have a perfectly bugless program that was just a pile of unrelated functionality.
The trick is, in this situation it's probably being given to another programmer anyway- so it's _assumed_ that they're getting the source (to work on). But the point is an important one- there's no distinction between alpha, beta and final, and no distinction between inside the company and outside it, as far as GPL applying. When you give a person a binary you let them have source, that's the bottom line. It most certainly applies within a company as well. To control this, only give binaries and source to people who need it to work on, and who agree with you not to distribute it more widely yet. That has to be voluntary because the GPL specifically authorizes anyone to redistribute further on their whim, and doing so is also in the spirit of the license.
You can explain to your programmer that you want the program to be more finished and whole before the world sees it. Suggesting that the bugs should be fixed first is not a good idea, because that brings thoughts of 'many eyes/easy bugs' and is an argument for going widely public instantly. Instead, a better argument for voluntarily keeping a distribution limited at first is that in early stages, the 'essence' of the program is very blurry and weak. You want to have the program stand on its own and seem original and worthwhile, bugs or no bugs, by the time you're really putting it out there. Otherwise people might not understand what it wants to be, and the open source interaction might pull it in many unhelpful directions.
One might even say that a GPLed program doesn't need a buglist so much as a manifesto (ducks
*seizes ranking Mac geek cred, points to stack 'o Inside Macintosh, but doesn't need it for this* ;P :)
The reason people are getting upset is because you didn't phrase it correctly. The only time 'OK' isn't the default button is when the action is seriously destructive. You know, "This action will format the hard drive your system is currently installed on/will edit the swapfile you're currently paging out of/will close the program and throw away the work you've been doing for the last eight hours. Are you sure? (CANCEL/ok)"
THAT is when you make cancel the default- when the action is _stupid_ but one that somebody might possibly want to do, maybe.
As to when you get a dialog box at all (I understand some versions of Word hit you with an OK dialog when you DELETE TEXT, which is insane), one of the major purposes is when the program is going to need more info before doing what it's going to do. Those dialog boxes have other controls in them and might be modeless, or modal like an old print dialog- the rule is to add an ellipsis "..." to the menu item. This tells the person working the program that if they hit that menu item, it won't take effect immediately- either more information is needed, or there will be an opportunity to back out if the action is horribly wrong.
This is not arbitrary, folks. There are some pretty major assumptions going on in these rules, and they are very much the reasons that you can give complete lusers Macs and have them not hurt themselves. There is no reason not to give Linux comparably sensible UI, and have it, too, be more approachable than Windows for your average noncomputer person. The point is, this is not done by putting a 'confirm' dialog on absolutely everything, it's done by figuring out "What's really destructive?" and having that default to cancel, by figuring out "What's most likely to make people go whoa-Whoa-WHOA-STOP-THAT?" or just get locked into a course of ACTION that they didn't expect or intend, and put "..." on the menuitems and "Are you sure? (cancel/OK)" in a dialog for that particular thing. And leave it off all the normal boring stuff! Geez. Never learn Mac human interface guidelines from Windows OK?
Seriously, Linux can have this and it'll be fine. Just do it right...
Looks to me like a guitar-shaped carving. I don't see working tuning machines, implying that the strings are not under tension but are simply carved there, and would not vibrate. Still, pretty cool looking though. If only the people who did these things knew to produce 1024x768 jpegs of them for desktop pictures! :)
http://www.seattle times.com/news/local/html98/hunt_19990621.html
They're already playing soldier, is this such a stretch?
Ever read Federalist #10, Katz? There is a reason we don't do things purely by majority vote. The reason is this: using majority vote, the bigger factions always stomp all over the littler ones. If you want the political equivalent of a world in which everything but Windows is not only uncommon but illegal, go right ahead. In fact, on that note, I suggest that there is every reason to believe that such a system would quickly elect MS Word the U.S. File Format ('everyone' has Word, right?), IE the U.S. Browser ('everyone' has IE, right?) and of course Windows the only state-mandated operating system, with countless new electronic government features that work only for Windows- because people voted them in, and most people clicked the button next to what they see when they boot up, without a thought as to the effects of this decision.
I'm afraid your vision is extremely unreasonable and unfeasible. Come back when you have a method for sustaining the input and contributions of smaller factions. Speaking as an American, the USA is _all_ of us Americans- not just the biggest gangs.
Why is the ability to take care of oneself equated with the ability to make a contribution to society? I don't see a connection at all. The obvious counterexample is Stephen Hawking- clearly he cannot take care of himself due to gross and costly physical disability. Now, would you care to make his contribution to society for him so we can put 'im down? Go on, knock yourself out- you can do it! :P
My own take on the difference between infanticide/culling and abortion is this- abortion is a woman saying "Whoa! I DID NOT WISH to do this. At all. I never made a decision to bring a life into the world and I'm not prepared/equipped to cope with that, no matter what the baby would be like. Stop!" I also feel, if you're going to do that, best do it as early as possible.
I don't think 'intelligent' culling of the human herd is a reasonable plan. It is a severely stupid and shortsighted plan, because few people advocating it believe in any sort of higher authority that can pass judgement on what's worthwhile and what's not. The inevitable result of this lack of judgement would be babies destroyed because they would have missing fingers, babies destroyed because they were female (but a better story would be made up), babies destroyed once someone figures out how to predict that the baby would probably be a computer geek, etc etc. These decisions would not be _made_ by educated, wise people. They'd be made by just random people, some of whom will be unreasonable. The result would be a great deal of abuse of the system.
If you use a mouse with a paint program, you're wacky ;) get a Wacom tablet- hell, my old ADB Wacom tablet works in Linux :) :)
Particularly if you're already using Photoshop you're already using _something_ that can use a tablet, so go for it. I've only known one guy who did _great_ art with a tablet- and believe me, it wasn't having a two button mouse that made him so good.
I don't know what else you're using (I personally was trying to get an entirely-GNOME setup to work with gnome-ppp) but for me, it turned out that I had to have /etc/ppp/options contain a particular command. The cammand was 'xonxoff'. This is because the Mac serial ports evidently don't have the same sort of flow control as pppd expects, and without that command (which gnome-ppp has no option for) it silently does a sort of hardware spew and fails to connect to the modem properly. I am posting this from LinuxPPC1999, btw... ;) Now I have to work out how to post news so I can be first dejanews article to return the actual fix to the problem ;)
WOOHOO! First workaround for this screwup!
"throatwobbler mangrove"
(You're a very silly corporation and I'm not going to interview you!" "Oh please?")
I run Linux on a PowerMac and there are some caveats about it. I'll grant you that if you're doing CLI stuff there's no drawback whatsoever- but when you start getting involved with X, expect problems with the one button mouse. _I_ happen to think a one button mouse is an ideal pointing device, and that keyboard modifiers should be used to add to that, but almost everyone writing apps or window managers for X expect at least a two button mouse- and typically build absolutely indispensable controls into the 'extra' button. Like a root menu that lets you shut down... though if you can break into a virtual console and kill X using top, then you can get out of just about anything.
I always return to Window Maker on PPC Linux, because it's pretty easy to set up onebuttonedly. Go to the control panel and assign key equivalents for the root menu (I like using F1 and F2 for root and window menus).
As a final note, the most recent LinuxPPC suffers from RedHatItis, in that it is screwy on some machines. I had to boot singleuser and run Xautoconfig just to be able to _run_ it, and I still have not got pppd working like it worked on the older LinuxPPC- and I know to hunt DejaNews and am fearless of really arcane twisted geekery. To top it off Linux is _not_ faster to interact with than MacOS is- especially if you're talking Enlightenment with textured GTK- compare that with 'Kaleidoscope' for MacOS that's at least six times faster at doing the exact same interface tweaks. I suspect that E+GTK is so optimized for x86 that it runs that fast itself- on a PC. On a Mac, if you want that level of eyecandy in usable form, you have to stay with MacOS so far, because even on a 300Mhz G3 E _crawls_ when using GTK textures, and I know quite well it's not that slow on a PC.
Something's unoptimized in the state of PPC Linux, and it is certainly not the PPC (again, Kaleidoscope does all that at least six times faster than textured E, arguably more than ten times faster). Anybody have an idea what's going on with this? Is it gcc, egcs, or simply window manager/GTK code that makes heavy use of x86 optimizations and falls back to really crap code when they are not present?
in the article below this, NSA spooks are applauding and thanking L0pht for their hacking activities. L0pht have been celebrated by the government and senators have thanked them personally- and again, the ranking spook-house the NSA are grateful to them for what they do.
Why is industry and the DoJ trying to go against the desires of government, the Senate, and the National Security Agency? And what has industry been feeding the DoJ to provoke this seriously misguided adventure?