Interesting that all the responses thus far seem to support the idea of conservatism setting in. With all due respect, 'Get a dregree' and 'Get into what the colleges are doing' are exactly the problem she is espousing. The young pre college crowd has not been trained (some might say brainwashed) to accept marketing and outside ideas as gospel truths.
Infamous young gentleman, Thomas Alva Edison, was inventing without a degree, or a marketing/college firm guidance. Many many open source programmers are doing similarly. The degree of creativity displayed by the mostly young no worries no inhibitions crowd is where I place my bet. They have historically been the ones with the greatest inventions, and the most spectacular failures.
Let's have a pre meeting to discuss the meeting to go over the format for the covers for the TPS report we will prepare to justify the expenses of planning the research necessary to prepare to study the effects... etc...
The corporate research world (in which I have had the dubious pleasure of working) spends 4 weeks planning and meeting for every one spent actually working... the 5:1 ratio of the team to the individual is quickly lost there... and then the passionate inventor will willingly work 18 hour days. Try getting a researcher to do that... or the company to allow it.
Use reversable compression. Encrypt the cleartext, package it in a container (subcontained if desired), stga that into the BMP or WAV, compress using GIF/PNG/FLAC as required. Ship product to receiver, they uncompress (since the compression is lossless, no bits lost there), de-steg, decrypt, decrypt, viola recipe for brownies.
Also tends to confuse the detectors, as they are not trying all (n) possible ways the file could have been compressed to look for steg data in the raw file, only looking at the compression errors in the current format.
For every scheme, a crack, for every crack, a new scheme. What fun the merry go round is!
Interesting experience I had this weekend. I was retiring a machine to other uses, but it was a media machine with gigs of files on it, so I wanted another machine to take over it's functions. So, I figured, simple enough. With Windows, I'd back up, sysprep, move the drive to the new machine, watch it crash, reinstall Win2k, run all the updates, etc. etc.
So I 'sysprep' by changing the system to boot to init 3, moved the drive to the new machine, booted, watched harddrake update everything, used linuxconf to change XFree's settings, init 5'ed and was up and running in 15 minutes.
I have never had a transfer to a system with different hardware go that smoothly. I was quite impressed.
But I still have a lingering disappointment every time I have to vi a config file.
Of course, the laser pointers in question are most likely red, thus making the wavelength of the beam in the visible spectrum, so have no bearing on the patent. If in doubt, apply a refractive/reflective substance (i.e. fog or smoke) and pass the beam through it. Definitely not invisible.
Aside from which, $DIETY has prior art, re. the Sun and a Tree.
Rinse, repeat, watch the animal pant in exhaustion. Loads of fun.
True, there is little (or no) remedy in the case of off the shelf software, but in the same vein, buy a premanufactured home and you are getting low press drywall, minimum vapor seal, and very likely will have bugs within a month (in Florida) in the house. None of which is remediable in court, caveat emptor. The building meets the customer specifications, passes the requisite permits and checks, but will likely not last five years.
Much like software where a cheap off the shelf solution is similarly shoddily constructed. On the other hand, hire your contractor personally, backed by full research and guarantees, and you get exactly what you pay for. Failures of the contractor are remediable in court, be it software or housing.
Of course, the housebuilding equivalent of OSS would be volunteer built homes, such as HUD or Habitat for Humanity. When the construction is guided by a knowledgable leader, some of those homes are quite well built and will outlast manufactured homes easily. Forget the leadership, or have too many leaders, and you get the platypus of homes.
Like all analogies, this one can be carried as far as the imaginative take it. But the general point I am trying to make is that standards do not guarantee better software, and being built by volunteers can be as reliable as built by professionals. The difference lies in the planning, leadership, and vision of the group, as much as in the assorted skills.
While Microsoft Software is, in my view, terrible work, there are some pieces of software out there, both OSS and Proprietary, that are sheer works of art. It is up to the end user to pick what works best and suits their needs best. And if the user feels it is worth blue screens and the other hassles of Windows to have a certain software, that is their value choice. Likewise, if the user does not mind text configurations and frequently skimpy documentation in trade for more complete control, then they have that option.
You were'nt very wrong at all, just more forward thinking than most. The thing is, carpentry (a centuries old profession) started out just like OSS, with each person having their own way of doing things. Later, as something worked better, more people started using it. Once it had caught on, it became a de facto standard. Much later, groups were started to catalogue existing standards and create new ones.
But at no point does having a standard prevent a carpented from using an angle grinder to modify a hammer to work exactly the way he wants, then share that mod with other carpenters. If it works well, it too becomes a standard. And the carpenters have more choice, from very specialized tools (like a jig, for one purpose) to very generalized tools (like the hammer.)
The key difference, and where the analogy fails, is that the carpenters did not start out with the idea of designing a 'standard' hammer, they started out with a nail that needed to be driven, and created a tool to do just that. Later, the best variations became the standard through a genetic algorythm. In software, we have the option of designing a standard, then refining it, then building the standard hammer based on that.
Then the genetic festival begins, mutations through forking, evolutionary generations, parental merging of projects. By the end, what we hope to have is a polished, finished product that can continue to evolve. The lacking function (or NP hard problem) is the selector function. Often in software's case, the selector results in a local optimum, software that works the way a particular group wants or needs.
Of course, considering the specifications requirement for a global audience, I think any such selector function would be on par with the computational complexity of Go. The best result to be expected is a varying set of local optimums. The beauty of OSS is that this is an acceptable answer in many cases, as each optimum can be further tuned for specific application.
The local optimum that will often be missed by this function, however, is the indiscriminate selector, i.e. Joe Sixpack. Because the evolution forces are selecting for and evolving/mutating primarily for function and efficiency, they are necessarily pruning against ease of use and simplicity. These forces value the customizability, flexibility, and pure raw computational power above the eye candy. This is primarily due to the Joe Sixpack taking no interest in the evolution of the software, leaving a set of criteria out of the selector pool.
The evolutionary forces (developers,) can draw this indiscriminate selector into the pool. The question that still is unanswered is will they, and how.
When you refer to hammer, which of the following do you mean?
Ball Peen Finish Hammer Ball Peen Sheet Metal Hammer Bal Peen Tack Hammer Claw Finish Hammer (10 oz, 12 oz, 16 oz, or custom weight?) Claw Roofing Hammer Sledge Hammer (Short or long grip, what weight, what material head) Shingle Hammer (with or without Shingle lifter) Tack Hammer Rubber Bodywork Hammer (Flat, round, ball, point heads)
And the screws yo refer to? What thread? Metric or SAE, or custom size reference? UK or US pitch formula? What length? Pan, Countersink, what head style? What meatrial?
Don't even get me started on nails or drills...
The point is there are so many 'standards' and they all started out just like OSS: Joe Contractor started using it, and Jane Contractor liked it, so they taught their apprentices, and eventually it became a 'standard.' Later standards bodies were created (ISO, ANSI, etc.) to correlate the standards.
(Oh, and ASP requires a very large impact hammer with a titanuim head to get the pieces to fit. We just hid it in a velvet pouceh)
Mandrake supported most of my hardware right out of the package, and the one thing it did not was my nVidia. No big deal there, neither did Windows. Donwload the driver, up in under an hour.
I prefer Mandrake for much of my 'business critical' work, but there are still places that I have to use win32 due to lack of specific software. The music editing software is not quite ready for prefessional use, but getting very close. I keep my eyes out and keep testing the OSS replacements, and as soon as they are the equal of what I use, the switch is on.
In the meantime, Mandrake is a well assembled, easy to use distro for daily needs. E-mail, documents (text, spreadsheet, etc) are well supported from the start. Games are lacking a bit, but that applies to all distros. The urpmi packaging is a major improvement over Mandrake 8.x, and there is community supported RPM's for just about everything.
So kudos are right Mandrake. Keep up the good work!
No matter how they try to cut people off, people will find a way to get their art out. Look at all the efforts that have been made to get around copy protection, All the ways around port blocking for p2p, all the used CD stores. The variety of ways that the customers have found to get what they want is simply astounding. No matter what they do, they are fighting a losing battle trying to control art.
Try laws, people will break them. Try copy protection, people will crack it. Try giving good value, with good extras, people will buy. (And yes, enough will buy to make up for the freeloaders)
Or you can bookmark all the Indie sites, the ones NOT listed on MP3.com
Google for 'free music mp3' or 'free music ogg' and there are lots of sites and people out there taking advantage of the internet to distribute original music. There are also sites giving out tracks with the option to purhcase CD's legally. And for under $10.
As many times as I have gone to an ATM and not gotten a receipt because the paper was curled inside the machine, or it was out, or whatever, and given the number of times I have had to contest an ATM transaction that I canceled and still went through, my hopes for the stability and accountability of the Diebold (and other) machines is rather low.
The primary thing to keep in mind is simple. The more complex the system, the more places it can break or be broken. Redundancy helps, but only to a limited degree, as the addition of the redundancy also complicates the system more. The best way I ever heard it put is 'The more they overhaul the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the pipes.' - Scotty, Star Trek.
What we need is not a more complex way to vote, that only benifits the politicians and voting machine companies. We need to apply the KISS principle. Keep It Simple Silly. Quit trying to get instant results, exit polls, and the like, and focus on getting complete, accurate votes and counts. Introduce a concept that, though unfashionable right now, is well proven to increase accuracy and efficiency. Have some patience.
To be honest, I think that in the face of a crisis we would still have enough people to pull something off. Of course, I always tend to look at the brighter side of things...
I would imagine that by enlisting enough hands, foundries, etc, and going f*ck it with regards to precision and using minimal safety and all the best ideas, we probably could whip up some means of evacuation in a week. Might not be pretty, but enough to survive...
Remember, something that big becomes a 6 billion person job.
Hey, us Guitarists don't need any more 13 year old 'Talent' hacking on a fine Gibson guitar! Let em hack the planet, if they're up to it. I suggest they start by digging a 7 foot by 3 foot by six foot deep hole.
Actually, that sounds similar to what the human eye does... minus the MPG of course. From what I understand, humans constantly move their eyes in 'micro movements' and the optic nerve does some mamboleo on the images to transmit a single pair of images (combined from the angles) with distance information, rather than sending each individual image. Makes for some really neat optical illusion capabilities hardwired in.
Please don't tell my cat this, she will get very depressed that she can no longer chase the lasers I bounce off all the mirrors in our home for her. As of course a laser contains no light, so operates outside the light spectrum. Never minding that infared can be both reflected and refracted as well, withness the door chime sensors using a mirrored reflector to return the beam from emitter to detector. Or the old trick of using your mirror to turn on the roommate's TV.
But of course, you are in mensa, so I am certain all this occured to you already.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that all the responses thus far seem to support the idea of conservatism setting in. With all due respect, 'Get a dregree' and 'Get into what the colleges are doing' are exactly the problem she is espousing. The young pre college crowd has not been trained (some might say brainwashed) to accept marketing and outside ideas as gospel truths.
Infamous young gentleman, Thomas Alva Edison, was inventing without a degree, or a marketing/college firm guidance. Many many open source programmers are doing similarly. The degree of creativity displayed by the mostly young no worries no inhibitions crowd is where I place my bet. They have historically been the ones with the greatest inventions, and the most spectacular failures.
Let's have a pre meeting to discuss the meeting to go over the format for the covers for the TPS report we will prepare to justify the expenses of planning the research necessary to prepare to study the effects... etc...
The corporate research world (in which I have had the dubious pleasure of working) spends 4 weeks planning and meeting for every one spent actually working... the 5:1 ratio of the team to the individual is quickly lost there... and then the passionate inventor will willingly work 18 hour days. Try getting a researcher to do that... or the company to allow it.
Use reversable compression. Encrypt the cleartext, package it in a container (subcontained if desired), stga that into the BMP or WAV, compress using GIF/PNG/FLAC as required. Ship product to receiver, they uncompress (since the compression is lossless, no bits lost there), de-steg, decrypt, decrypt, viola recipe for brownies.
Also tends to confuse the detectors, as they are not trying all (n) possible ways the file could have been compressed to look for steg data in the raw file, only looking at the compression errors in the current format.
For every scheme, a crack, for every crack, a new scheme. What fun the merry go round is!
No, newbies will say "Linux sucks! It can't even see my memory. I have 120gigs of memory and can't use it!"
Never overestimate the newbie...
In which case they are only adding eunichs to the list... as a Longhorn has typically been releived of the burden of testicles.
So I guess this version of Windows Server hasn't got the balls to be in my server room.
Interesting experience I had this weekend. I was retiring a machine to other uses, but it was a media machine with gigs of files on it, so I wanted another machine to take over it's functions. So, I figured, simple enough. With Windows, I'd back up, sysprep, move the drive to the new machine, watch it crash, reinstall Win2k, run all the updates, etc. etc.
So I 'sysprep' by changing the system to boot to init 3, moved the drive to the new machine, booted, watched harddrake update everything, used linuxconf to change XFree's settings, init 5'ed and was up and running in 15 minutes.
I have never had a transfer to a system with different hardware go that smoothly. I was quite impressed.
But I still have a lingering disappointment every time I have to vi a config file.
Of course, the laser pointers in question are most likely red, thus making the wavelength of the beam in the visible spectrum, so have no bearing on the patent. If in doubt, apply a refractive/reflective substance (i.e. fog or smoke) and pass the beam through it. Definitely not invisible.
Aside from which, $DIETY has prior art, re. the Sun and a Tree.
Rinse, repeat, watch the animal pant in exhaustion. Loads of fun.
Human: Robot, What is the difference between a Robot and a Human?
2 6F74732C20526F626F74732063616E20756E6465727374616E 64207468697320616E737765722E
Robot: 48756D616E732063616E20756E6465727374616E6420526F6
(Translated for the hex encoded ASCII impaired)
"Humans can understand Robots, Robots can understand this answer."
True, there is little (or no) remedy in the case of off the shelf software, but in the same vein, buy a premanufactured home and you are getting low press drywall, minimum vapor seal, and very likely will have bugs within a month (in Florida) in the house. None of which is remediable in court, caveat emptor. The building meets the customer specifications, passes the requisite permits and checks, but will likely not last five years.
Much like software where a cheap off the shelf solution is similarly shoddily constructed. On the other hand, hire your contractor personally, backed by full research and guarantees, and you get exactly what you pay for. Failures of the contractor are remediable in court, be it software or housing.
Of course, the housebuilding equivalent of OSS would be volunteer built homes, such as HUD or Habitat for Humanity. When the construction is guided by a knowledgable leader, some of those homes are quite well built and will outlast manufactured homes easily. Forget the leadership, or have too many leaders, and you get the platypus of homes.
Like all analogies, this one can be carried as far as the imaginative take it. But the general point I am trying to make is that standards do not guarantee better software, and being built by volunteers can be as reliable as built by professionals. The difference lies in the planning, leadership, and vision of the group, as much as in the assorted skills.
While Microsoft Software is, in my view, terrible work, there are some pieces of software out there, both OSS and Proprietary, that are sheer works of art. It is up to the end user to pick what works best and suits their needs best. And if the user feels it is worth blue screens and the other hassles of Windows to have a certain software, that is their value choice. Likewise, if the user does not mind text configurations and frequently skimpy documentation in trade for more complete control, then they have that option.
You were'nt very wrong at all, just more forward thinking than most. The thing is, carpentry (a centuries old profession) started out just like OSS, with each person having their own way of doing things. Later, as something worked better, more people started using it. Once it had caught on, it became a de facto standard. Much later, groups were started to catalogue existing standards and create new ones.
But at no point does having a standard prevent a carpented from using an angle grinder to modify a hammer to work exactly the way he wants, then share that mod with other carpenters. If it works well, it too becomes a standard. And the carpenters have more choice, from very specialized tools (like a jig, for one purpose) to very generalized tools (like the hammer.)
The key difference, and where the analogy fails, is that the carpenters did not start out with the idea of designing a 'standard' hammer, they started out with a nail that needed to be driven, and created a tool to do just that. Later, the best variations became the standard through a genetic algorythm. In software, we have the option of designing a standard, then refining it, then building the standard hammer based on that.
Then the genetic festival begins, mutations through forking, evolutionary generations, parental merging of projects. By the end, what we hope to have is a polished, finished product that can continue to evolve. The lacking function (or NP hard problem) is the selector function. Often in software's case, the selector results in a local optimum, software that works the way a particular group wants or needs.
Of course, considering the specifications requirement for a global audience, I think any such selector function would be on par with the computational complexity of Go. The best result to be expected is a varying set of local optimums. The beauty of OSS is that this is an acceptable answer in many cases, as each optimum can be further tuned for specific application.
The local optimum that will often be missed by this function, however, is the indiscriminate selector, i.e. Joe Sixpack. Because the evolution forces are selecting for and evolving/mutating primarily for function and efficiency, they are necessarily pruning against ease of use and simplicity. These forces value the customizability, flexibility, and pure raw computational power above the eye candy. This is primarily due to the Joe Sixpack taking no interest in the evolution of the software, leaving a set of criteria out of the selector pool.
The evolutionary forces (developers,) can draw this indiscriminate selector into the pool. The question that still is unanswered is will they, and how.
Haha.. that's a perfect example of a 'Standard hammer'... I may just get myself on of these for use on my boat (for Crew motivation!)
When you refer to hammer, which of the following do you mean?
Ball Peen Finish Hammer
Ball Peen Sheet Metal Hammer
Bal Peen Tack Hammer
Claw Finish Hammer (10 oz, 12 oz, 16 oz, or custom weight?)
Claw Roofing Hammer
Sledge Hammer (Short or long grip, what weight, what material head)
Shingle Hammer (with or without Shingle lifter)
Tack Hammer
Rubber Bodywork Hammer (Flat, round, ball, point heads)
And the screws yo refer to? What thread? Metric or SAE, or custom size reference? UK or US pitch formula? What length? Pan, Countersink, what head style? What meatrial?
Don't even get me started on nails or drills...
The point is there are so many 'standards' and they all started out just like OSS: Joe Contractor started using it, and Jane Contractor liked it, so they taught their apprentices, and eventually it became a 'standard.' Later standards bodies were created (ISO, ANSI, etc.) to correlate the standards.
(Oh, and ASP requires a very large impact hammer with a titanuim head to get the pieces to fit. We just hid it in a velvet pouceh)
Is this an attempt to scam a scammer? You must be new here too...
Mandrake supported most of my hardware right out of the package, and the one thing it did not was my nVidia. No big deal there, neither did Windows. Donwload the driver, up in under an hour.
I prefer Mandrake for much of my 'business critical' work, but there are still places that I have to use win32 due to lack of specific software. The music editing software is not quite ready for prefessional use, but getting very close. I keep my eyes out and keep testing the OSS replacements, and as soon as they are the equal of what I use, the switch is on.
In the meantime, Mandrake is a well assembled, easy to use distro for daily needs. E-mail, documents (text, spreadsheet, etc) are well supported from the start. Games are lacking a bit, but that applies to all distros. The urpmi packaging is a major improvement over Mandrake 8.x, and there is community supported RPM's for just about everything.
So kudos are right Mandrake. Keep up the good work!
No matter how they try to cut people off, people will find a way to get their art out. Look at all the efforts that have been made to get around copy protection, All the ways around port blocking for p2p, all the used CD stores. The variety of ways that the customers have found to get what they want is simply astounding. No matter what they do, they are fighting a losing battle trying to control art.
Try laws, people will break them.
Try copy protection, people will crack it.
Try giving good value, with good extras, people will buy. (And yes, enough will buy to make up for the freeloaders)
Or maybe I'm just an optimist.
Or you can bookmark all the Indie sites, the ones NOT listed on MP3.com
Google for 'free music mp3' or 'free music ogg' and there are lots of sites and people out there taking advantage of the internet to distribute original music. There are also sites giving out tracks with the option to purhcase CD's legally. And for under $10.
Hmmm... what is this msdns.dll that keeps wanting to talk to the internet? I don't know it, so I'll click no... ...later...
Hello, Tech support? My internet is broken!
Bellsouth had this back in ~95 for cell phones. When you were in range of a base station, the cell functioned as a cordless.
FreeBSD=FuBer/FuBar
OpenBSD=OB'er
NetBSD=NewBer
Fuser, Ouser (pronounced Owser), Nuser (Pronounced nooser)
120 characters certainly can't contain all the distros and variations >:)
As many times as I have gone to an ATM and not gotten a receipt because the paper was curled inside the machine, or it was out, or whatever, and given the number of times I have had to contest an ATM transaction that I canceled and still went through, my hopes for the stability and accountability of the Diebold (and other) machines is rather low.
The primary thing to keep in mind is simple. The more complex the system, the more places it can break or be broken. Redundancy helps, but only to a limited degree, as the addition of the redundancy also complicates the system more. The best way I ever heard it put is 'The more they overhaul the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the pipes.' - Scotty, Star Trek.
What we need is not a more complex way to vote, that only benifits the politicians and voting machine companies. We need to apply the KISS principle. Keep It Simple Silly. Quit trying to get instant results, exit polls, and the like, and focus on getting complete, accurate votes and counts. Introduce a concept that, though unfashionable right now, is well proven to increase accuracy and efficiency. Have some patience.
To be honest, I think that in the face of a crisis we would still have enough people to pull something off. Of course, I always tend to look at the brighter side of things...
I would imagine that by enlisting enough hands, foundries, etc, and going f*ck it with regards to precision and using minimal safety and all the best ideas, we probably could whip up some means of evacuation in a week. Might not be pretty, but enough to survive...
Remember, something that big becomes a 6 billion person job.
Hey, us Guitarists don't need any more 13 year old 'Talent' hacking on a fine Gibson guitar! Let em hack the planet, if they're up to it. I suggest they start by digging a 7 foot by 3 foot by six foot deep hole.
Actually, that sounds similar to what the human eye does... minus the MPG of course. From what I understand, humans constantly move their eyes in 'micro movements' and the optic nerve does some mamboleo on the images to transmit a single pair of images (combined from the angles) with distance information, rather than sending each individual image. Makes for some really neat optical illusion capabilities hardwired in.
Please don't tell my cat this, she will get very depressed that she can no longer chase the lasers I bounce off all the mirrors in our home for her. As of course a laser contains no light, so operates outside the light spectrum. Never minding that infared can be both reflected and refracted as well, withness the door chime sensors using a mirrored reflector to return the beam from emitter to detector. Or the old trick of using your mirror to turn on the roommate's TV.
But of course, you are in mensa, so I am certain all this occured to you already.