> Why don't they just get it over with, and just take your money?
That's what they're doing. That's what casinos have always done.
But they can get *more* of your money if they can get more of you playing and/or keep you playing longer. (By "you" I of course mean people who are bad at math; people who are good at math, as a rule, don't buy lottery tickets or play casino games.)
So in order to get more of you playing and keep you there longer, they take your money gradually, a little at a time, while maintaining an illusion that "you could win". They work very hard at maintaining the pretense that you can win, because it takes your guard down and allows them to rob you blind.
Like I said, people who understand math don't play casino games much.
> I often see these discussions end up boiling down > to "you have to give back" instead of freedom as > the purpose of the GPL was originally supposed to be.
The GPL was never about freedom in any conventional sense. If you really wanted to give people the maximum freedom to use your software any way they want, you'd release your software into the public domain, and that would be that. Total freedom. Of course, many authors are uncomfortable with this. Most authors want *something* back, even if it's only credit for doing the work (in which case they might use a BSD-style license). Levying requirements like that is the author's right under copyright law, but the more requirements you have, the less free the user is. Giving the user perfect freedom would mean no requirements at all.
The GPL is about something Stallman calls "freedom", but which does not fit any conventional definition of the word. Perhaps the easiest way to express it in plain English is "everyone has to give back".
> Meanwhile the stuff actually intended for web services > probably will never use AGPL because it would limit adoption.
As a rule, the stuff intended for web services (e.g., Apache) doesn't use any version of the GPL, because that would restrict usage of the software in undesirable ways.
> If we're mobilizing the torch and pitchfork mob, > I'd rather send them after the person who decided > in MS-DOS to substitute backward slashes where > convention for a long time had been forward > slashes as the separator in pathnames
Forward slash was not available, because a lot of existing DOS-based software already used it as a command-line switch character (the equivalent of what the hyphen is to most Gnu software). Making it a path separator would have broken all that existing software, which was something Microsoft -- net yet very firmly entrenched at that point -- could not afford to do.
(What, you thought the first version of DOS supported subdirectories? Haha. I don't think at that early stage that anyone really suspected a microcomputer would ever have so many files on it that it would need subdirectories. Most of the IT industry still thought of microcomputers as a niche product at that point, something you'd use to manage maybe one spreadsheet or something; everything else would be done on a "real" computer. By the time the need for subdirectories became evident, there was an existing base of business-critical software that had to be supported.)
You can argue that backslash was still a terrible choice, because that prevents it from being used for *its* conventional purpose, namely, escaping special characters. But they couldn't choose the forward slash either.
> If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings.
It's not practical for man to fly. I mean, with the right technology it's *possible*, but it's so much easier and more efficient to just ride on something else that flies, like, say, a jet plane.
> If restraining orders include Internet contact, then it means you > can send someone to jail if you can forge a packet from their machine
Umm, we're not talking about unauthenticated UDP traffic here. Even if facebook uses plain old http (no encryption; that seems unlikely but I don't happen to know), you'd still, in order to impersonate a user by forging packets, also have to be directly upstream from them and thus able to intercept traffic that was supposed to go to their computer; otherwise you'd never get past the TCP handshake. It's not impossible, but it's a good deal less likely than you make out. Basically, your ISP would have to be out to get you.
Aside from that, I imagine the court presumably made some effort to verify that the perpetrator actually did violate the restraining order. One would hope so, at any rate.
In the context of music, LP means a black vinyl record designed to be played on a turntable (usually at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, sometimes at 45). They were popular in the sixties, but by the mid eighties they'd been pretty well totally phased out in favor of audio cassette tapes.
But, you know, everything old is new again. Audiophiles claim that LPs have a better sound (or a "warmer" sound, or they use various other audiophile jargon to describe it), which, although the improvement is not measurable in any rational or scientific sense (quite the contrary; there is a measurable *reduction* in technical quality), nonetheless makes them happier.
Apple wants to make music fans happy, so they record the music onto an actual LP (which is a fairly expensive process if you're only making one), then play it on a turntable and record the result to create LP recordings, which are then lossily-compressed to make tracks for the iTunes store, so that iPod users can enjoy the "warm", "red", "cylindrical", audiophile-pleasing sound of real LPs.
> But, if someone with a name like Cindy or Susan tries > to contribute to a program and they're met with responses > that treat them differently because of their gender
So pull a George Elliot: use a pseudonym that doesn't make your gender so obvious right off the bat. Let people get familiar with your work and see its quality. They can deal with your gender a few years later when you're asked to speak at a conference or something. This strategy works: is there anyone left at this point who still thinks women can't write literature?
> Besides this isn't the only field with gender inequity.
It's not even the field with the strongest gender inequity, though it's admittedly pretty unbalanced. I used to think almost all computer geeks were male, and then I took a job at a public library...
As the tech guy, I've on several occasions been sent to various library-related conferences. Now, you may think the gender unbalance in the IT industry is strong, but if you go to a library conference, you find out what gender imbalance really is. At library-related conferences that aren't inherently technical (e.g., OLC trade shows), you don't really think anything about it because, you know, everyone's a librarian, so what? But if you ever go to a library-related *technology* conference (like, a user group for an integrated library automation system), you discover that at least two-thirds of the IT people (system administrators and so on from libraries) are female. I kid you not. The gender imbalance in libraries is so extreme, it overcomes the IT gender balance and pushes the demographic in the other direction.
> what I want to do is simply mv */*xml . Very basic stuff.
On the other hand, try to translate this much more common simple DOS command into anything that will work in a Unix shell:
ren *.htm *.html
(For those who don't know any DOS because you never used computers back in the pre-386 days before Linux became popular, what this does is rename every.htm file in the current directory to have the longer.html suffix. Obviously, this requires LFN support in your OS, but we used to do the same thing all the time with other extensions that fell within the three-character limit.)
I only know of two ways to do this sort of renaming on a Unix-like system. The hard way involves awk and at least three different pipes, and the (relatively) easy way is a Perl one-liner, which generally includes a Schwartzian transform and calls system() for each individual rename. Okay, I suppose you could substitute Python or some other interpreted VHLL for Perl, but that makes my point for me: the shell can't handle it without a lot of help, and the solution is much more complicated than the DOS command.
Note that I'm not saying the Windows shell is as good in general as a Unix shell (such as bash). For the most part it's not, in a variety of ways. I'm merely pointing out that harping on one particular command that's much easier in one shell than the other is a very inconclusive argument.
> The clock on the oven kinda reminds me of the estimated- > time-remaining clock on a windows file copy dialog.
That's because time actually works that way at Microsoft. Physicists aren't sure why, but in Redmond time actually skips, jumps, and sometimes even moves backwards. There's a Nobel prize in physics waiting for whoever figures out what causes this phenomenon and how to harness or control it.
Incidentally, this temporal shifting also explains why Windows 95 first became available in 1996, why Blackcomb (not yet released) was originally going to be the release after Whistler (XP) but later we discovered that Blackcomb was the release after Longhorn, why Longhorn (Vista) slipped from 2003 to 2007 (long after the early projections for Blackcomb's release date), and why features originally scheduled for Blackcomb (e.g., WinFS) were later announced for Longhorn but have not yet appeared in Vista or Seven. Once you understand the temporal mechanics, it all makes sense.
> So where does Microsoft think they > will find a market for this stuff?
Same place they found a market for WordPad and Paint and Times New Roman. If you read the summary, they're planning to have it included in OEM installations of Windows.
> Yeah, well I'm working on an OS that'll be 129 bits!
Mine's going to be 8192 bits -- a whole kilobyte. After all, why do things by halves? 8192-bit hardware will probably be a little expensive at first, but once it catches on the economies of scale will bring the price down.
The more I look at that image, the less convinced I am that it's based on a photo of a model at all. As best I can figure, the artist probably just painted it up from scratch, probably while hyped up on caffeine after not getting enough sleep.
> > I'd like to see a comparison between the > > number of patches to Linux vs. Windows.:) > For just the kernel, or for a whole average distro?
Neither is at all fair.
Comparing security track records for all of Windows against just the Linux kernel is grossly unfair to Windows, because it's got a good deal more in it than just a kernel, and many of its bugs are in those other components.
But going the other way (an entire distro -- say, Debian) is even more unfair, in the opposite direction, because Windows includes only a *tiny* fraction of all the software in a typical Linux distro.
I suppose it would be possible to pick out a set of open-source packages that approximately corresponds, in functionality, to what comes with Windows out of the box, but it would exclude so much really *basic* stuff (from the perspective of a Linux user) that it would be extremely atypical and not terribly useful or meaningful. I mean, unless you're trying to fit on a floppy disk or something, what would be the point of a Linux distribution that doesn't even include a perl interpreter?
So all in all I'm not sure there's any really meaningful way to compare the number of bugs noted or patches issued.
You *could* compare the average amount of *time* it takes for a fix to be made available once any given (security-relevant) bug is discovered. I think we all have a fair idea which way *that* would turn out.
> Candy is often used by such people as a replacement for > parental authority in controlling their kids' behavior.
Actually, it can be even worse than that.
There are parents out there who make absolutely no attempt whatsoever to control their kids' behavior or teach them *anything*, at all, ever. They let them eat quite literally whatever they want, which generally does not result in anything you could describe as a healthy diet. And they let them *do* whatever they want, which doesn't necessarily result in the most upright law-abiding citizens possible.
> But if I were to asked what his absolute favorite > food was? It would have to be any kind of meat and > bacon in particular. I know THAT can't be too healthy.
Actually, for young children, it's not as much of a problem as you might think -- provided they outgrow it at some point, preferably before reaching junior high age.
But yeah, you want to particularly encourage the vegetables, because those will *always* be healthy, no matter how old he gets.
> People are allowing > their work and social > life to blur but it's a > real problem. I think > it's very important to > keep them separate
Indeed.
A couple of years ago I had a boss who was really into the whole social networking thing ("Library 2.0"; believe me, you don't want to know; it's MUCH more inane than it sounds), and at some point he got this idea that it'd be cool if we were to link to employees' personal blogs from the library website. He thought it would be a cool way to add a personal touch and let patrons get to feeling like they "know" the staff. Which sounds good, I suppose, if you have no sense.
So, since I'm the computer guy, he asked me, "Hey, Nathan, do you have a blog?"
Fortunately at this point he'd already mentioned a couple of times his idea to link to personal blogs from the website, so I had the good sense to be vague, and then after a moment I waived a metaphorical arm around for a minute and redirected his attention to the discussion forum I'd set up on the library website, intended for people to discuss books and library issues and stuff.
Yeah, I have a personal blog, but it really wasn't any of his business and wouldn't be appropriate to link to from the library website. I express views on there that I would *not* be allowed to express while representing the library. (A public library can be a very ideologically oppressive work environment for a conservative.) Under no circumstances would I allow the library to dictate what I can say when I'm NOT at work. If it ever comes around to that, they can jolly well go find another IT guy.
> I'd resign if anyone > tried to tell me what > to wear in the real > world, never mind > the virtual.
I assume you mean when you're off the clock, right?
Because, if you're talking about what you wear *at* work, I don't think I've ever *heard* of an employer that has no dress-code rules at all. The details vary, but pretty much every employer has *some* rules. Where do you work, at a lemonade stand on a French beach?
> Under CP/M... will not delete a file with lower case characters in its name.
> I think MS-DOS is smart enough to fix this at the OS level.
DOS just made all filename operations case-insensitive. That solved the lowercase-characters problem...
But it *was* possible, in some DOS-based applications (e.g., certain well-known word processors; this was in the days before WYSIWYG) to create files with unfortunate characters in their filenames, which it was not possible to delete from the command prompt. (Space was the most common "unfortunate character" for this, because people who didn't understand the difference between an identifier and a description kept wanting to put spaces in their filenames, but there were other possibilities as well.)
At least one major word processing company actually ended up adding a primitive file management interface, complete with the ability to delete, into their product.
Slashdot Mirror
> Why don't they just get it over with, and just take your money?
That's what they're doing. That's what casinos have always done.
But they can get *more* of your money if they can get more of you playing and/or keep you playing longer. (By "you" I of course mean people who are bad at math; people who are good at math, as a rule, don't buy lottery tickets or play casino games.)
So in order to get more of you playing and keep you there longer, they take your money gradually, a little at a time, while maintaining an illusion that "you could win". They work very hard at maintaining the pretense that you can win, because it takes your guard down and allows them to rob you blind.
Like I said, people who understand math don't play casino games much.
> I often see these discussions end up boiling down
> to "you have to give back" instead of freedom as
> the purpose of the GPL was originally supposed to be.
The GPL was never about freedom in any conventional sense. If you really wanted to give people the maximum freedom to use your software any way they want, you'd release your software into the public domain, and that would be that. Total freedom. Of course, many authors are uncomfortable with this. Most authors want *something* back, even if it's only credit for doing the work (in which case they might use a BSD-style license). Levying requirements like that is the author's right under copyright law, but the more requirements you have, the less free the user is. Giving the user perfect freedom would mean no requirements at all.
The GPL is about something Stallman calls "freedom", but which does not fit any conventional definition of the word. Perhaps the easiest way to express it in plain English is "everyone has to give back".
> Meanwhile the stuff actually intended for web services
> probably will never use AGPL because it would limit adoption.
As a rule, the stuff intended for web services (e.g., Apache) doesn't use any version of the GPL, because that would restrict usage of the software in undesirable ways.
> If we're mobilizing the torch and pitchfork mob,
> I'd rather send them after the person who decided
> in MS-DOS to substitute backward slashes where
> convention for a long time had been forward
> slashes as the separator in pathnames
Forward slash was not available, because a lot of existing DOS-based software already used it as a command-line switch character (the equivalent of what the hyphen is to most Gnu software). Making it a path separator would have broken all that existing software, which was something Microsoft -- net yet very firmly entrenched at that point -- could not afford to do.
(What, you thought the first version of DOS supported subdirectories? Haha. I don't think at that early stage that anyone really suspected a microcomputer would ever have so many files on it that it would need subdirectories. Most of the IT industry still thought of microcomputers as a niche product at that point, something you'd use to manage maybe one spreadsheet or something; everything else would be done on a "real" computer. By the time the need for subdirectories became evident, there was an existing base of business-critical software that had to be supported.)
You can argue that backslash was still a terrible choice, because that prevents it from being used for *its* conventional purpose, namely, escaping special characters. But they couldn't choose the forward slash either.
> If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings.
It's not practical for man to fly. I mean, with the right technology it's *possible*, but it's so much easier and more efficient to just ride on something else that flies, like, say, a jet plane.
> If restraining orders include Internet contact, then it means you
> can send someone to jail if you can forge a packet from their machine
Umm, we're not talking about unauthenticated UDP traffic here. Even if facebook uses plain old http (no encryption; that seems unlikely but I don't happen to know), you'd still, in order to impersonate a user by forging packets, also have to be directly upstream from them and thus able to intercept traffic that was supposed to go to their computer; otherwise you'd never get past the TCP handshake. It's not impossible, but it's a good deal less likely than you make out. Basically, your ISP would have to be out to get you.
Aside from that, I imagine the court presumably made some effort to verify that the perpetrator actually did violate the restraining order. One would hope so, at any rate.
In the context of music, LP means a black vinyl record designed to be played on a turntable (usually at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, sometimes at 45). They were popular in the sixties, but by the mid eighties they'd been pretty well totally phased out in favor of audio cassette tapes.
But, you know, everything old is new again. Audiophiles claim that LPs have a better sound (or a "warmer" sound, or they use various other audiophile jargon to describe it), which, although the improvement is not measurable in any rational or scientific sense (quite the contrary; there is a measurable *reduction* in technical quality), nonetheless makes them happier.
Apple wants to make music fans happy, so they record the music onto an actual LP (which is a fairly expensive process if you're only making one), then play it on a turntable and record the result to create LP recordings, which are then lossily-compressed to make tracks for the iTunes store, so that iPod users can enjoy the "warm", "red", "cylindrical", audiophile-pleasing sound of real LPs.
HTH.HAND.
> But, if someone with a name like Cindy or Susan tries
> to contribute to a program and they're met with responses
> that treat them differently because of their gender
So pull a George Elliot: use a pseudonym that doesn't make your gender so obvious right off the bat. Let people get familiar with your work and see its quality. They can deal with your gender a few years later when you're asked to speak at a conference or something. This strategy works: is there anyone left at this point who still thinks women can't write literature?
> Besides this isn't the only field with gender inequity.
It's not even the field with the strongest gender inequity, though it's admittedly pretty unbalanced. I used to think almost all computer geeks were male, and then I took a job at a public library...
As the tech guy, I've on several occasions been sent to various library-related conferences. Now, you may think the gender unbalance in the IT industry is strong, but if you go to a library conference, you find out what gender imbalance really is. At library-related conferences that aren't inherently technical (e.g., OLC trade shows), you don't really think anything about it because, you know, everyone's a librarian, so what? But if you ever go to a library-related *technology* conference (like, a user group for an integrated library automation system), you discover that at least two-thirds of the IT people (system administrators and so on from libraries) are female. I kid you not. The gender imbalance in libraries is so extreme, it overcomes the IT gender balance and pushes the demographic in the other direction.
Okay, but do you know how to do it on an older version of DOS (say, 3.3) that doesn't have the move command?
> what I want to do is simply mv */*xml . Very basic stuff.
.htm file in the current directory to have the longer .html suffix. Obviously, this requires LFN support in your OS, but we used to do the same thing all the time with other extensions that fell within the three-character limit.)
On the other hand, try to translate this much more common simple DOS command into anything that will work in a Unix shell:
ren *.htm *.html
(For those who don't know any DOS because you never used computers back in the pre-386 days before Linux became popular, what this does is rename every
I only know of two ways to do this sort of renaming on a Unix-like system. The hard way involves awk and at least three different pipes, and the (relatively) easy way is a Perl one-liner, which generally includes a Schwartzian transform and calls system() for each individual rename. Okay, I suppose you could substitute Python or some other interpreted VHLL for Perl, but that makes my point for me: the shell can't handle it without a lot of help, and the solution is much more complicated than the DOS command.
Note that I'm not saying the Windows shell is as good in general as a Unix shell (such as bash). For the most part it's not, in a variety of ways. I'm merely pointing out that harping on one particular command that's much easier in one shell than the other is a very inconclusive argument.
> The clock on the oven kinda reminds me of the estimated-
> time-remaining clock on a windows file copy dialog.
That's because time actually works that way at Microsoft. Physicists aren't sure why, but in Redmond time actually skips, jumps, and sometimes even moves backwards. There's a Nobel prize in physics waiting for whoever figures out what causes this phenomenon and how to harness or control it.
Incidentally, this temporal shifting also explains why Windows 95 first became available in 1996, why Blackcomb (not yet released) was originally going to be the release after Whistler (XP) but later we discovered that Blackcomb was the release after Longhorn, why Longhorn (Vista) slipped from 2003 to 2007 (long after the early projections for Blackcomb's release date), and why features originally scheduled for Blackcomb (e.g., WinFS) were later announced for Longhorn but have not yet appeared in Vista or Seven. Once you understand the temporal mechanics, it all makes sense.
HTH.HAND.
> So where does Microsoft think they
> will find a market for this stuff?
Same place they found a market for WordPad and Paint and Times New Roman. If you read the summary, they're planning to have it included in OEM installations of Windows.
> In Soviet Russia 11 goes to our spinal
> tap overlords whom I for one welcome!
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these spinal tap overlords? Do they run Linux? Are they covered in hot grits? Are all our base belong to them?
> Yeah, well I'm working on an OS that'll be 129 bits!
Mine's going to be 8192 bits -- a whole kilobyte. After all, why do things by halves? 8192-bit hardware will probably be a little expensive at first, but once it catches on the economies of scale will bring the price down.
The more I look at that image, the less convinced I am that it's based on a photo of a model at all. As best I can figure, the artist probably just painted it up from scratch, probably while hyped up on caffeine after not getting enough sleep.
> > I'd like to see a comparison between the :)
> > number of patches to Linux vs. Windows.
> For just the kernel, or for a whole average distro?
Neither is at all fair.
Comparing security track records for all of Windows against just the Linux kernel is grossly unfair to Windows, because it's got a good deal more in it than just a kernel, and many of its bugs are in those other components.
But going the other way (an entire distro -- say, Debian) is even more unfair, in the opposite direction, because Windows includes only a *tiny* fraction of all the software in a typical Linux distro.
I suppose it would be possible to pick out a set of open-source packages that approximately corresponds, in functionality, to what comes with Windows out of the box, but it would exclude so much really *basic* stuff (from the perspective of a Linux user) that it would be extremely atypical and not terribly useful or meaningful. I mean, unless you're trying to fit on a floppy disk or something, what would be the point of a Linux distribution that doesn't even include a perl interpreter?
So all in all I'm not sure there's any really meaningful way to compare the number of bugs noted or patches issued.
You *could* compare the average amount of *time* it takes for a fix to be made available once any given (security-relevant) bug is discovered. I think we all have a fair idea which way *that* would turn out.
> Candy is often used by such people as a replacement for
> parental authority in controlling their kids' behavior.
Actually, it can be even worse than that.
There are parents out there who make absolutely no attempt whatsoever to control their kids' behavior or teach them *anything*, at all, ever. They let them eat quite literally whatever they want, which generally does not result in anything you could describe as a healthy diet. And they let them *do* whatever they want, which doesn't necessarily result in the most upright law-abiding citizens possible.
> A British study would be looking at the
> effect of *sweets* rather than *candy*.
What's the difference? I always thought they were the same thing.
> But if I were to asked what his absolute favorite
> food was? It would have to be any kind of meat and
> bacon in particular. I know THAT can't be too healthy.
Actually, for young children, it's not as much of a problem as you might think -- provided they outgrow it at some point, preferably before reaching junior high age.
But yeah, you want to particularly encourage the vegetables, because those will *always* be healthy, no matter how old he gets.
> People are allowing
> their work and social
> life to blur but it's a
> real problem. I think
> it's very important to
> keep them separate
Indeed.
A couple of years ago I had a boss who was really into the whole social networking thing ("Library 2.0"; believe me, you don't want to know; it's MUCH more inane than it sounds), and at some point he got this idea that it'd be cool if we were to link to employees' personal blogs from the library website. He thought it would be a cool way to add a personal touch and let patrons get to feeling like they "know" the staff. Which sounds good, I suppose, if you have no sense.
So, since I'm the computer guy, he asked me, "Hey, Nathan, do you have a blog?"
Fortunately at this point he'd already mentioned a couple of times his idea to link to personal blogs from the website, so I had the good sense to be vague, and then after a moment I waived a metaphorical arm around for a minute and redirected his attention to the discussion forum I'd set up on the library website, intended for people to discuss books and library issues and stuff.
Yeah, I have a personal blog, but it really wasn't any of his business and wouldn't be appropriate to link to from the library website. I express views on there that I would *not* be allowed to express while representing the library. (A public library can be a very ideologically oppressive work environment for a conservative.) Under no circumstances would I allow the library to dictate what I can say when I'm NOT at work. If it ever comes around to that, they can jolly well go find another IT guy.
> I'd resign if anyone
> tried to tell me what
> to wear in the real
> world, never mind
> the virtual.
I assume you mean when you're off the clock, right?
Because, if you're talking about what you wear *at* work, I don't think I've ever *heard* of an employer that has no dress-code rules at all. The details vary, but pretty much every employer has *some* rules. Where do you work, at a lemonade stand on a French beach?
> You son of a bitch. I use vi, KDE, Gentoo, and K&R.
Yeah, well I use Emacs, Sawfish, Debian, and the Camel book. So there.
> Once a developer is capable of realizing that much, they can
> form a picture of how hard writing an XML parser will be. (Easy)
That's the main point of well-formedness. XML is *designed* to be easy to parse.
> I could probably make a simple, fully-compliant, slow parser in a
> day or two, with a functional programming language like Haskell...
A *day* or two?
I could write an XML parser in Perl in an hour, if I didn't mind re-inventing something that already exists on the CPAN.
> Under CP/M ... will not delete a file with lower case characters in its name.
> I think MS-DOS is smart enough to fix this at the OS level.
DOS just made all filename operations case-insensitive. That solved the lowercase-characters problem...
But it *was* possible, in some DOS-based applications (e.g., certain well-known word processors; this was in the days before WYSIWYG) to create files with unfortunate characters in their filenames, which it was not possible to delete from the command prompt. (Space was the most common "unfortunate character" for this, because people who didn't understand the difference between an identifier and a description kept wanting to put spaces in their filenames, but there were other possibilities as well.)
At least one major word processing company actually ended up adding a primitive file management interface, complete with the ability to delete, into their product.