Who said there was no good quality American SF? Asimov, Dick, Gibson...the list can go on and on. The point is not Europe vs. America but good sci-fi vs. the crap that goes by the name of sci-fi. There are great sci-fi writers all over the world but it's important to recognize the subject and style differences. You also have to realize that most great sci-fi from Europe is prolly from the 50s-70s when it as much about communism criticism as it was about technology. Nowadays, it's the same type of stuff as any American sci-fluff novel about princesses in space. Good American sci-fi had a different mode of inquiry, it was about technology changing our lives on a more personal level with a lot less of "grand soul searching"m and moralizing. Each one is as important as other, if, at least, to contrast the societies and times it was written in.
Lem was the bastion of old-school eastern european sci-fi. His sci-fi wasn't about huge robots carrying large breasted women, or random-monster-of-the-week attacking the hapless but plucky space pioneers or even George Clooney's naked ass. Sci-fi for Lem was a way to take a clear look at everything that people took for granted in technology and progress. In both Solaris and His Master's Voice he he tackled space exploration not as an soap opera but as an examination of what it means to be human and what humans see in technological progress. He took our limitations seriously and showed how incredibly alien it will be for humans to seriously venture out into space and even make first contact. And even in talking about all the limitations on scientific and technological progress he never stopped believing in the possibility of human progress through these tools. He was not only a great author but also a great man. RIP Stan.
A great book on this subject is Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate : The Modern Denial of Human Nature. He spends a good while explaining the biological evidence for certain traits such as increased intelligence being just as much genetically determined as someone's eye color. He also takes the time to explain why so many people instinctively demonize this stance and why facing the truth about our genetic heritage will actually allow people to live in greater harmony with each other. The explanations are surprisingly clear and he mostly stays away from rhetorical and psychological bubble that so many philosophers often resort to.
For those who don't want to watch the video, the new format will supposedly offer a %75 improvement in file size. The old, binary format did not use any compression at all. Some of the other features include having the formatting information at the end of the file so that a half transmitted file still contains all the content.
instead of an all or nothing approach. Doesn't it make more sense that Open Source software will thrive where a commodity product or platform is used and the development costs can be shared among the entire community?
Closed source software, in this situation, would then be built on top of OS platforms or frameworks. Money can be made either on customization of the OS frameworks/applications or by building innovative and specifically targetted products on top of those frameworks.
The innovation would continually trickle down to the underlying OS level forcing the closed source companies to constantly innovate to stay competitive. Open Source would, in fact, allow more innovation by more companies, by amortizing the development costs for large complex frameworks among large numbers of developers. This seems to be what the IBM's of the world are looking at right now.
Irony - when something happens that is the opposite of what is expected. Gnome is easy to use and so the expectation is that it is also easy to build. The irony here is that it is not actually easy to build. That seems like a correct use of the word ironic.
How ironic, seeing that Gnome tries to be the simplest and easiest to use full-featured desktop on Linux. I guess easy to use doesn't mean easy to package.
Enoch Root
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: 5, Informative
One of the, if not major, then most enigmatic characters in both the books of the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon is Enoch Root. A person(?) with an unnaturally(?) long lifetime. The tiny bits of information that Stephenson dishes out throughout Cryptonomicon and now in both Quicksilver and The Confusion are enough to drive anyone mad:). The Confusion has at least one, uncharacteristically lucid explanation that is worth reading. There has grown up a sizeable following, online, of other readers who are trying to piece together the puzzle of Enoch Root. Here are some links for those who are interested.
LINKS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Mod parent up, great techical explanation. I should've been more clear in mentioning that the factoring is used in the brute force _breaking_ of the encryption (in RSA for ex.) by factoring the mod portion of the pub key. It looks like I meant that it's used in the actual encryption. My mistake:)
Basically it's a cryptographic method that allows the same or nearly the same level of security as a regular public-key encryption scheme(based on factoring large numbers) but makes it computationally cheaper to encrypt the data. So while the bad guys still, theoretically, need nearly the same amounts of processing power and time as regular asymmetric crypto to decrypt the message, the good guys save significantly in encryption. This is of course extremely important for, let's say mobile devices with limited processing power.
It's a matter of understanding the user. Instead of having studies on which percentage of users approaches buttons from the left or right, how about an error message that actually indicates what the user did wrong. Most programs I encounter love generic messages. This is of course understandable, it's hard to code a message for every stupid thing a user might do but that is exactly what is needed. A user has more questions then expectations. They _WANT_ to know what's going on. Where did I save? How do I open that file again? Why did this click not work? What happens if I crash, how much work is saved? Instead of assuming that you can make an interface so easy that they will never go wrong, you need to understand what concerns the user has. The error messages should explain what the user did wrong in detail. Date was too far in the future, too far in the past, you didn't select a user, you selected too many users.
I remember working on a tiny Java appointment book application. There was more error checking and messaging code then the actual logic code. Granted, someone might say it was a very limited application, but every single user who used it loved it! Simply because I put them in control, and they knew exactly what they did wrong when they pressed a button. There was no feeling of being lost and not being sure of what the magical black box in front of you is doing. No need for technical explanations just say, "You did not select a date within the corrent range (RANGE)" or "Please choose at least one item from the list." Informative messages that understand the user's questions and answer them.
Seriously. I'm sure that some slashdotters will start saying stuff like, "hang out with like minded individuals", "the other kids are just jealous", etc. However, none of this will really help the kid as much as just combing his hair. In fact if he's smart enough he'll see fitting in as another intellectual challenge. If he's as gifted as you say, then I'm sure he has a lot of interests and ambitions that he can share with his peers. Make him understand that being intelligent in this world is great, but being intelligent, sociable and athletic would put the world at his feet. Your looks, dress and behavior get you in the door but people respect you for your character and intellect. Get him to pay more attention to his clothes, looks and current events. Make sure he knows the latest fads, make him do sports like martial arts, swimming or team sports. Those will build his self confidence as well as health and looks. Just let the kid know that being a well rounded individual will make him appreciate his knowledge of the world so much more then being a closed off hermit. For a kid like that fitting in would be an exercise in self control and intellectual improvement. Nothing would excercise his brain more then understanding those extrememly complex mases of social interaction in a school:). In the end it should be a breeze as long as he is aware of what he's doing. Make it a simple socialogical fact, people want to hang around with winners, those who are good at doing stuff whether it's sports, conversation, or knowldedge. Make him year to excell at those and people will flock to him. Just make sure that he understands that to be successfull and achieve his ambitions he needs to be both intellectually and sociably knowledgable.
The pictures are just sooo eerie. The housing in the pictures is a perfect visual example of the kind of large apartment complexes built in the Soviet Union at that time. Large sprawling 16-24 story houses with balconies and nearby schools, playgrounds, stores and hospitals. She mentions how they were brand new, just waiting for families to move into them.(In the Soviet Union your housing was assigned to you btw). Just seeing pictures of those apartment complexes was the most horrifying part of this entire photo journal. Interestingly enough it also reminded me of a Russian book, "Picnic by the Roadside" by Strugatski Brothers and the it's movie adaptation by Tarkovski(same guy who made the original Solaris) called "Stalker." Same idea of traveling through a modern ghostown after a catastrophe. Incredibly eerie.
Yeah the American schools somehow forget to mention or deemphasize the first man in space, first woman in space, first open spacewalk. Now I'm not trying to disavow the great feats achieved by the American space program but I especially like this list of "firsts in space", with tiny paragraphs devoted to the first HUMANS(Russian) to do things in space and the large, detailed paragraphs devoted to the first AMERICANS to do anything in space, since we all know that the first American in space is of course a much more monumental achievement for the entire human race then just the first person in space.
For someone who sees these feats of human courage as universal it's a little shocking and sad to see so many educated Americans who have absolutely no idea about any of these events. These should be viewed not as Russian/Soviet achievements but as human achievements. Forgeting these pioneers is just an insult to their courage and sacrifices.
That is exactly what I and few close friends from high school and college are doing right now. openorbit.net
And let me tell you the difficulties you encounter brought my opinion of people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or even Miguel de Icaza to a much higher level. Though I'm sure few people think running a software company is easy, I don't really know how many programmers or hackers appreciate the business side of things. I would have to say that legal, financial and management issues are 60-80% of a good business. The coding itself is often a safe retreat from navigating the perilous fields of US business and legal practices. And not every firm can afford a lawyer for every little detail from incorporation/LLC formation to contract negotiations, trademark protection, NDAs, patent searches. Not even to mention regular business practices such as accounting, tax law and employment rules. The amount of work/finances required to cover all of these bases is one of the major hurdles that discourages most wannabe startups. Like they say "It takes money to make money", and starting your own business, software or otherwise is something that often cannot be done on the cheap.
Looking at the huge amounts of half finished products and low quality scripts that abound on sites like freshmeat.net it's very easy to get your own project lost. What few hackers want to admit is that waiting for the world to recognize the inherent greatness of your product, no matter how well coded is not always a solution for a software firm. Marketing, networking and media contacts and plain people skills often make or brake companies no matter what the quality of their product. And this is without taking into account market forces and the demand for said programs. Say what you will about the business practices of Bill Gates and others like him, but when you see in person the difficulties they had to surmount, they at least deserve respect for having the will and the ability to get to where they are right now and stay there.
I really love this part from one of those sites [ http://www.apfn.org/apfn/moon.htm ]:)
The questions don't stop there. Outer space is awash with deadly radiation that emanates from solar flares firing out from the sun. Standard astronauts orbiting earth in near space, like those who recently fixed the Hubble telescope, are protected by the earth's Van Allen belt. But the Moon is to 240,000 miles distant, way outside this safe band. And, during the Apollo flights, astronomical data shows there were no less than 1,485 such flares.
John Mauldin, a physicist who works for NASA, once said shielding at least two meters thick would be needed. Yet the walls of the Lunar Landers which took astronauts from the spaceship to the moons surface were, said NASA, about the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil.
How could that stop this deadly radiation? And if the astronauts were protected by their space suits, why didn't rescue workers use such protective gear at the Chernobyl meltdown, which released only a fraction of the dose astronauts would encounter? Not one Apollo astronaut ever contracted cancer - not even the Apollo 16 crew who were on their way to the Moon when a big flare started. "They should have been fried", says Rene.
I'm sorry that part is probably the most hilarious thing I have ever read, really shows the author's knowledge of Soviet safety protocols.
...Of course, India will not be the only country to have BrahMos. As the missile was designed and developed and is going to be produced and marketed (yes, it will be on sale) with the Russians, the latter would also have the missile...
The missile and consequently the plane weren't exactly designed from the ground up by India alone. In fact this seems to fit very well with the everpresent notion of Russian faster-then-sound armaments such as the Shkval torpedo.
Interestingly enough D.C. seems to be the area where almost every single developer I know is getting a job. There are even a start up or two (or more) I've heard about in that area. I would guess the defense contractors and government involved agencies still have lots of projects even in the face of the recession.
This article isn't for a startup, it's for an established company. Saying that a $28k project was serious underbidding would be a dream come true for some startups out there. A real bootstrap startup doesn't exactly worry about whether they should buy their own building or not since they're too busy worrying about actually getting customers. And speaking from experience, trying to start a company in a high-tech company dense area like NYC or San Francisco is even harder. SourceGear being based in Illinois is in a very different position to bargain then a company which has to compete with hundreds of other bids on every single project.
The most important thing that startups should realize is not that you shouldn't trust VCs or that you should mind your lease but that competition is tough and when you are surrounded by lots of technically savvy companies those marketing and networking(people not LANs:)) skills some so quickly dismiss basically make or break your firm.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said there was no good quality American SF? Asimov, Dick, Gibson...the list can go on and on. The point is not Europe vs. America but good sci-fi vs. the crap that goes by the name of sci-fi. There are great sci-fi writers all over the world but it's important to recognize the subject and style differences. You also have to realize that most great sci-fi from Europe is prolly from the 50s-70s when it as much about communism criticism as it was about technology. Nowadays, it's the same type of stuff as any American sci-fluff novel about princesses in space. Good American sci-fi had a different mode of inquiry, it was about technology changing our lives on a more personal level with a lot less of "grand soul searching"m and moralizing. Each one is as important as other, if, at least, to contrast the societies and times it was written in.
Lem was the bastion of old-school eastern european sci-fi. His sci-fi wasn't about huge robots carrying large breasted women, or random-monster-of-the-week attacking the hapless but plucky space pioneers or even George Clooney's naked ass. Sci-fi for Lem was a way to take a clear look at everything that people took for granted in technology and progress. In both Solaris and His Master's Voice he he tackled space exploration not as an soap opera but as an examination of what it means to be human and what humans see in technological progress. He took our limitations seriously and showed how incredibly alien it will be for humans to seriously venture out into space and even make first contact. And even in talking about all the limitations on scientific and technological progress he never stopped believing in the possibility of human progress through these tools. He was not only a great author but also a great man. RIP Stan.
A great book on this subject is Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate : The Modern Denial of Human Nature. He spends a good while explaining the biological evidence for certain traits such as increased intelligence being just as much genetically determined as someone's eye color. He also takes the time to explain why so many people instinctively demonize this stance and why facing the truth about our genetic heritage will actually allow people to live in greater harmony with each other. The explanations are surprisingly clear and he mostly stays away from rhetorical and psychological bubble that so many philosophers often resort to.
If you gave yourself nearly perfect haircuts with that method it would be made illegal to protect the barber's profits.
For those who don't want to watch the video, the new format will supposedly offer a %75 improvement in file size. The old, binary format did not use any compression at all. Some of the other features include having the formatting information at the end of the file so that a half transmitted file still contains all the content.
instead of an all or nothing approach. Doesn't it make more sense that Open Source software will thrive where a commodity product or platform is used and the development costs can be shared among the entire community?
Closed source software, in this situation, would then be built on top of OS platforms or frameworks. Money can be made either on customization of the OS frameworks/applications or by building innovative and specifically targetted products on top of those frameworks.
The innovation would continually trickle down to the underlying OS level forcing the closed source companies to constantly innovate to stay competitive. Open Source would, in fact, allow more innovation by more companies, by amortizing the development costs for large complex frameworks among large numbers of developers. This seems to be what the IBM's of the world are looking at right now.
Coming from a guy who works at a patent-focused company.
Irony - when something happens that is the opposite of what is expected. Gnome is easy to use and so the expectation is that it is also easy to build. The irony here is that it is not actually easy to build. That seems like a correct use of the word ironic.
How ironic, seeing that Gnome tries to be the simplest and easiest to use full-featured desktop on Linux. I guess easy to use doesn't mean easy to package.
One of the, if not major, then most enigmatic characters in both the books of the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon is Enoch Root. A person(?) with an unnaturally(?) long lifetime. The tiny bits of information that Stephenson dishes out throughout Cryptonomicon and now in both Quicksilver and The Confusion are enough to drive anyone mad :). The Confusion has at least one, uncharacteristically lucid explanation that is worth reading. There has grown up a sizeable following, online, of other readers who are trying to piece together the puzzle of Enoch Root. Here are some links for those who are interested.
LINKS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
What's up with Enoch Root
Neal Stephenson Wiki
Mod parent up, great techical explanation. I should've been more clear in mentioning that the factoring is used in the brute force _breaking_ of the encryption (in RSA for ex.) by factoring the mod portion of the pub key. It looks like I meant that it's used in the actual encryption. My mistake :)
Basically it's a cryptographic method that allows the same or nearly the same level of security as a regular public-key encryption scheme(based on factoring large numbers) but makes it computationally cheaper to encrypt the data. So while the bad guys still, theoretically, need nearly the same amounts of processing power and time as regular asymmetric crypto to decrypt the message, the good guys save significantly in encryption. This is of course extremely important for, let's say mobile devices with limited processing power.
whether this affects the old 2.x series?
It's a matter of understanding the user. Instead of having studies on which percentage of users approaches buttons from the left or right, how about an error message that actually indicates what the user did wrong. Most programs I encounter love generic messages. This is of course understandable, it's hard to code a message for every stupid thing a user might do but that is exactly what is needed. A user has more questions then expectations. They _WANT_ to know what's going on. Where did I save? How do I open that file again? Why did this click not work? What happens if I crash, how much work is saved? Instead of assuming that you can make an interface so easy that they will never go wrong, you need to understand what concerns the user has. The error messages should explain what the user did wrong in detail. Date was too far in the future, too far in the past, you didn't select a user, you selected too many users. I remember working on a tiny Java appointment book application. There was more error checking and messaging code then the actual logic code. Granted, someone might say it was a very limited application, but every single user who used it loved it! Simply because I put them in control, and they knew exactly what they did wrong when they pressed a button. There was no feeling of being lost and not being sure of what the magical black box in front of you is doing. No need for technical explanations just say, "You did not select a date within the corrent range (RANGE)" or "Please choose at least one item from the list." Informative messages that understand the user's questions and answer them.
The upper left month has an empty space circled. Since I doubt anyone would circle an empty space that's where the faded numbers used to be :)
Seriously. I'm sure that some slashdotters will start saying stuff like, "hang out with like minded individuals", "the other kids are just jealous", etc. However, none of this will really help the kid as much as just combing his hair. In fact if he's smart enough he'll see fitting in as another intellectual challenge. If he's as gifted as you say, then I'm sure he has a lot of interests and ambitions that he can share with his peers. Make him understand that being intelligent in this world is great, but being intelligent, sociable and athletic would put the world at his feet. Your looks, dress and behavior get you in the door but people respect you for your character and intellect. Get him to pay more attention to his clothes, looks and current events. Make sure he knows the latest fads, make him do sports like martial arts, swimming or team sports. Those will build his self confidence as well as health and looks. Just let the kid know that being a well rounded individual will make him appreciate his knowledge of the world so much more then being a closed off hermit. For a kid like that fitting in would be an exercise in self control and intellectual improvement. Nothing would excercise his brain more then understanding those extrememly complex mases of social interaction in a school :). In the end it should be a breeze as long as he is aware of what he's doing. Make it a simple socialogical fact, people want to hang around with winners, those who are good at doing stuff whether it's sports, conversation, or knowldedge. Make him year to excell at those and people will flock to him. Just make sure that he understands that to be successfull and achieve his ambitions he needs to be both intellectually and sociably knowledgable.
So how many years before they become intelligent and take over the world? :)
The pictures are just sooo eerie. The housing in the pictures is a perfect visual example of the kind of large apartment complexes built in the Soviet Union at that time. Large sprawling 16-24 story houses with balconies and nearby schools, playgrounds, stores and hospitals. She mentions how they were brand new, just waiting for families to move into them.(In the Soviet Union your housing was assigned to you btw). Just seeing pictures of those apartment complexes was the most horrifying part of this entire photo journal. Interestingly enough it also reminded me of a Russian book, "Picnic by the Roadside" by Strugatski Brothers and the it's movie adaptation by Tarkovski(same guy who made the original Solaris) called "Stalker." Same idea of traveling through a modern ghostown after a catastrophe. Incredibly eerie.
Yeah the American schools somehow forget to mention or deemphasize the first man in space, first woman in space, first open spacewalk. Now I'm not trying to disavow the great feats achieved by the American space program but I especially like this list of "firsts in space", with tiny paragraphs devoted to the first HUMANS(Russian) to do things in space and the large, detailed paragraphs devoted to the first AMERICANS to do anything in space, since we all know that the first American in space is of course a much more monumental achievement for the entire human race then just the first person in space.
For someone who sees these feats of human courage as universal it's a little shocking and sad to see so many educated Americans who have absolutely no idea about any of these events. These should be viewed not as Russian/Soviet achievements but as human achievements. Forgeting these pioneers is just an insult to their courage and sacrifices.
That is exactly what I and few close friends from high school and college are doing right now. openorbit.net
And let me tell you the difficulties you encounter brought my opinion of people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or even Miguel de Icaza to a much higher level. Though I'm sure few people think running a software company is easy, I don't really know how many programmers or hackers appreciate the business side of things. I would have to say that legal, financial and management issues are 60-80% of a good business. The coding itself is often a safe retreat from navigating the perilous fields of US business and legal practices. And not every firm can afford a lawyer for every little detail from incorporation/LLC formation to contract negotiations, trademark protection, NDAs, patent searches. Not even to mention regular business practices such as accounting, tax law and employment rules. The amount of work/finances required to cover all of these bases is one of the major hurdles that discourages most wannabe startups. Like they say "It takes money to make money", and starting your own business, software or otherwise is something that often cannot be done on the cheap.
Looking at the huge amounts of half finished products and low quality scripts that abound on sites like freshmeat.net it's very easy to get your own project lost. What few hackers want to admit is that waiting for the world to recognize the inherent greatness of your product, no matter how well coded is not always a solution for a software firm. Marketing, networking and media contacts and plain people skills often make or brake companies no matter what the quality of their product. And this is without taking into account market forces and the demand for said programs. Say what you will about the business practices of Bill Gates and others like him, but when you see in person the difficulties they had to surmount, they at least deserve respect for having the will and the ability to get to where they are right now and stay there.
FYI, Chris Toshok (toshok), the person who wrote up this experience is also one of the head programmers on Ximian's Evolution mail client.
I really love this part from one of those sites [ http://www.apfn.org/apfn/moon.htm ]:)
The questions don't stop there. Outer space is awash with deadly radiation that emanates from solar flares firing out from the sun. Standard astronauts orbiting earth in near space, like those who recently fixed the Hubble telescope, are protected by the earth's Van Allen belt. But the Moon is to 240,000 miles distant, way outside this safe band. And, during the Apollo flights, astronomical data shows there were no less than 1,485 such flares. John Mauldin, a physicist who works for NASA, once said shielding at least two meters thick would be needed. Yet the walls of the Lunar Landers which took astronauts from the spaceship to the moons surface were, said NASA, about the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil. How could that stop this deadly radiation? And if the astronauts were protected by their space suits, why didn't rescue workers use such protective gear at the Chernobyl meltdown, which released only a fraction of the dose astronauts would encounter? Not one Apollo astronaut ever contracted cancer - not even the Apollo 16 crew who were on their way to the Moon when a big flare started. "They should have been fried", says Rene.
I'm sorry that part is probably the most hilarious thing I have ever read, really shows the author's knowledge of Soviet safety protocols.
Let's give more credit where credit is due.
...Of course, India will not be the only country to have BrahMos. As the missile was designed and developed and is going to be produced and marketed (yes, it will be on sale) with the Russians, the latter would also have the missile...
The missile and consequently the plane weren't exactly designed from the ground up by India alone. In fact this seems to fit very well with the everpresent notion of Russian faster-then-sound armaments such as the Shkval torpedo.
Interestingly enough D.C. seems to be the area where almost every single developer I know is getting a job. There are even a start up or two (or more) I've heard about in that area. I would guess the defense contractors and government involved agencies still have lots of projects even in the face of the recession.
This article isn't for a startup, it's for an established company. Saying that a $28k project was serious underbidding would be a dream come true for some startups out there. A real bootstrap startup doesn't exactly worry about whether they should buy their own building or not since they're too busy worrying about actually getting customers. And speaking from experience, trying to start a company in a high-tech company dense area like NYC or San Francisco is even harder. SourceGear being based in Illinois is in a very different position to bargain then a company which has to compete with hundreds of other bids on every single project. The most important thing that startups should realize is not that you shouldn't trust VCs or that you should mind your lease but that competition is tough and when you are surrounded by lots of technically savvy companies those marketing and networking(people not LANs :)) skills some so quickly dismiss basically make or break your firm.