Google and eBay allow end users to run programs on Google and eBay servers that create HTML for the end user. If I go to Google and do a search, INPUT occurs on my computer, PROCESSING occurs on Google's computer, and OUTPUT occurs on my computer.
That's not the same as you distributing a document you created. In that case, INPUT occurs on your computer, PROCESSING occurs on your computer, and OUTPUT occurs on your computer.
The question is: What's important in determining if a program has been "distributed"? Clearly if I give you a CD with the program and you run it on your computer, I've distributed the program. Clearly if I take GPL software and modify it and I run it on my computer only, I have not distributed the program.
But if I take GPL'd software, modify it, and then let YOU run it on my computer...
Did I distribute it, or not?
Your immediate answer is probably "Who cares?" But now what if I charge you to run this modified program on my computer, for example, by charging a fee if you use my auction program? Now I'm using software provided by the open source community for my financial gain, but not returning the modifications I made to that software to the community.
The extreme of this problem is that eventually, the internet becomes so fast and clients become so dumb that software is never "distributed" at all. I take an open source office suite and then modify it. According to the GPL, if I then sell that software on CD, or by download, so that people can actually run it on their computers, I must provide the source to it as well. But what if I'd rather just make money off of the GPL'd software I've taken without giving anything back to the community?
Well, then I just put the software on my own server, and instead of selling CDs or downloads, I let people provide input and receive output over a remote connection to the program running on my server.
And wala! People can modify and essentially provide GPL'd software without having to provide source.
I have lots of programs that save me hours of "doing my fucking job". They're called scripts, and it's called efficiency.
If I can write a program to automate a menial task so I don't have to do it, then by all means, I should do it. If grading undergrad papers is a menial task that can be automated, then it should be automated.
I mean, just because a freshman writes a bad paper doesn't mean a professor has to actually read it.
My spelling has improved massively with the advent of the red squigle under the mispelled word - and not just because I fix the error, but I now just don't make the errors in the first place. (The green squiggle is not so useful - sometimes it's just quite wrong.)
You remember peer editing in 4th grade? Did that have any value? Not really - but if you got instant feedback on papers, that makes it easier to just write better in the first place.
Especially if this technology is combined with this technology.
I went into my insurance agent to change my insurance poicy a while back. This is obviosuly not a computationally expensive task, but his computer had to have been an original Pentium. Had his computer been fast, I would havebeen in and out of there in 3 minutes. But I literally had to wait 10 minutes for the thing to boot up and open up the requisie program.
Two people sitting in a room waching a computer boot costs $40/hr. Given the current prices of computers, not replacing the computer was a very poor business decision as any savings from not buying a new computer were eaten by lost productivity.
Mapquest (I'm 90% sure, could have been something else I suppose) used to offer satelite imagry as well - much the same way google does now, just click on the Satelite button and get an image instead of a map. This was years ago.
You've obviously never seen a girl in an engineering class trying desperately to appear very bad at math, have you?
One of *THE* dumbest girls I ever met in college (and this was a big state school with plenty of intellectually sub-par people mind you) was in my honors math class. I don't know how she got there, but she still passed.
She was, however, one of the HOTTEST girls I ever met in college as well. Which, again, given tens of thousands of women at a state school, is pretty hot.
To be fair, however, one of the other HOTTEST girls I met in college was the only other person in my freshmen chem lecture of 450 students who would regularly do better than me on exams.
Or maybe women, in general, are just bad at IT?
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
I can count on one hand the number of women I have met who are proficient at their jobs in a technical area. Everyone else is male.
This was even apparent at school, where even though only 5% of the students were female, only 30% of them had any business being there. (Then again, only 30% of the guys had any business being there, so it's even in that regard.)
Society still pushes genders into certain roles. that there are fewer women in the IT industry has nothing to do with the IT industry - that outcome is determined way back in elementary school in the way we program our kids.
Women having a lower percentage in IT positions is definitely a symptom, but bias against them in the employment setting is definitely not the problem. If anything, anywhere I've ever been in a technical setting women are by far given the advantage, from always having access to a free tutor in college to adequecy sufficing where excelence is presented by male counterparts in the workplace.
If we want to solve this problem, we need to be solving it young. We need to expect girls to be just as interested and good at math and science as boys, and we need to provide them with the opportunity to fullfill that expectation. More importantly, we need to stop programming girls that they will be successful when they are married to a successful man.
Many girls go to college to meet men. Societal programming.
Or maybe it's lots of parents expect their children to go to college, and women who meet men at college have an alternative to working.
See, now THAT's a comment you can all get worked up about.
You're modded as +3 funny but...
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Given any particular male in IT, and any particular female in IT, the male is much more likely to be proficient in what he is doing. The exodus of women from IT just coincides with the burst of the tech bubble. Now that there are a lot less IT positions, the people who are filling them are the more qualified candidates, which means men. The girls who went to school in IT to make money/meet men aren't employed anymore.
Now, I'm sure a buncha people are going to get up-in-arms screaming 'Men are not better than women!'. To which I wholeheartedly agree. However, people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement working on computers are better at computers than those who do not, and people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement are far more likely to be men. Ergo, a particular male, having been far more likely to have been hiding in his basement working on computers while other people were dating, is more likely to be qualified for an IT position that a particular female.
Your analogy is bad. Software with vulnerabilities is not like gas with sugar in it. Software with vulnerabilities is like a gas tank without a lockable cap. It's a lot easier for someone who is malicious to harm your car if your gas tank doesn't have a lockable cap, just like it's a lot easier for someone to mess with your computer if your software is vulnerable.
But, the consumer doesn't want software without vulnerabilities. Well, sure, they want it, but they want it LESS than they want software they can actually afford to buy.
There simply, aside from a few critical applications, is not a market for software that is guaranteed to not be vulnerable. It is far preferable to most consumers to just accept that their software may not be perfect in exchange for a reasonable price.
Holding companies responsible for software flaws seems like a good idea, until you notice that nobody writes software anymore because too many software providers get sued into bankruptcy and/or the price for "software insurance" for software providers becomes so high that when passed onto the consumer the product is no longer affordable.
The market has spoken. The government should be loathe to act in opposition to the market.
Let's say I produce a bunch of flyers for my restaurant that advertise the menu and prices.
Two years later, if someone comes in with one of the old flyers, am I liable because the menu and prices are no longer correct?
Merely having out-of-date information on an old website shouldn't be actionable any more than having out-of-date information on an old flyer should be actionable.
Now, if you have incorrect information on the website, *AND* you represent that information as current, that should be actionable. It does not look like the website advertised the menu as a CURRENT menu however.
Slashdot Mirror
Google and eBay allow end users to run programs on Google and eBay servers that create HTML for the end user. If I go to Google and do a search, INPUT occurs on my computer, PROCESSING occurs on Google's computer, and OUTPUT occurs on my computer.
That's not the same as you distributing a document you created. In that case, INPUT occurs on your computer, PROCESSING occurs on your computer, and OUTPUT occurs on your computer.
The question is: What's important in determining if a program has been "distributed"? Clearly if I give you a CD with the program and you run it on your computer, I've distributed the program. Clearly if I take GPL software and modify it and I run it on my computer only, I have not distributed the program.
But if I take GPL'd software, modify it, and then let YOU run it on my computer...
Did I distribute it, or not?
Your immediate answer is probably "Who cares?" But now what if I charge you to run this modified program on my computer, for example, by charging a fee if you use my auction program? Now I'm using software provided by the open source community for my financial gain, but not returning the modifications I made to that software to the community.
The extreme of this problem is that eventually, the internet becomes so fast and clients become so dumb that software is never "distributed" at all. I take an open source office suite and then modify it. According to the GPL, if I then sell that software on CD, or by download, so that people can actually run it on their computers, I must provide the source to it as well. But what if I'd rather just make money off of the GPL'd software I've taken without giving anything back to the community?
Well, then I just put the software on my own server, and instead of selling CDs or downloads, I let people provide input and receive output over a remote connection to the program running on my server.
And wala! People can modify and essentially provide GPL'd software without having to provide source.
I have lots of programs that save me hours of "doing my fucking job". They're called scripts, and it's called efficiency.
If I can write a program to automate a menial task so I don't have to do it, then by all means, I should do it. If grading undergrad papers is a menial task that can be automated, then it should be automated.
I mean, just because a freshman writes a bad paper doesn't mean a professor has to actually read it.
But then again, this is a socialogy course, so his students probably won't think of it on their own.
And if they did, they'd quickly realize that it would be easier/cheaper to write/buy a good paper than write/buy a good program.
Ours were always graded by computer. If you got the correct output for the given input, you got an A.
You remember peer editing in 4th grade? Did that have any value? Not really - but if you got instant feedback on papers, that makes it easier to just write better in the first place.
Especially if this technology is combined with this technology.
I went into my insurance agent to change my insurance poicy a while back. This is obviosuly not a computationally expensive task, but his computer had to have been an original Pentium. Had his computer been fast, I would havebeen in and out of there in 3 minutes. But I literally had to wait 10 minutes for the thing to boot up and open up the requisie program.
Two people sitting in a room waching a computer boot costs $40/hr. Given the current prices of computers, not replacing the computer was a very poor business decision as any savings from not buying a new computer were eaten by lost productivity.
They had to pay whoever provided that imagry for using it, and when the internet advertising bubble burst, that no longer made cents.
Cents, get it? I kill me.
Mapquest (I'm 90% sure, could have been something else I suppose) used to offer satelite imagry as well - much the same way google does now, just click on the Satelite button and get an image instead of a map. This was years ago.
So, no, not new.
Who would want a 3D drive anyway? My 2D drive is inifinitely thinner.
We don't want to share our grass with power plants!
If he was being stupid, he would have said "Star Star Star Star Star Star".
The student seeking a transfer to a more competently run University.
You'll have to use HTTP or FTP to transfer, since BitTorrent is prohibited.
Not if that sharpie mark is part of, say, a drawing in black marker that just HAPPENS to be done on the back of a CD....
How could you have known that your completely innocent piece of art would make your CD work?
If they can do it with cell towers, they can do it with VOIP and there's absolutely no excuse.
Uh, HELLO? The whole point is that VoIP customers can be ANYWHERE. Last I checked, people didn't pick up their cell towers and move them.
But wait - if you TELL Vonage where your modem is, then you have 911!
Cell Phone company knows where cell tower is, they route you to 911. Vonage knows where you are, they route you to 911.
So what's the issue here again?
Oh, right, THE END USER IS STUPID.
without unhealthily raising your expectations for real world women,
If a woman is lousy in bed, why is that the porn's fault? If women can't meet the expectations set by porn, they should TRY HARDER!
Or in the very least, stop expecting me to meet the "unhealthy" expectations set by romance movies.
"Given any particular", and "it's more likely". It's a statement of chance.
You've obviously never seen a girl in an engineering class trying desperately to appear very bad at math, have you?
One of *THE* dumbest girls I ever met in college (and this was a big state school with plenty of intellectually sub-par people mind you) was in my honors math class. I don't know how she got there, but she still passed.
She was, however, one of the HOTTEST girls I ever met in college as well. Which, again, given tens of thousands of women at a state school, is pretty hot.
To be fair, however, one of the other HOTTEST girls I met in college was the only other person in my freshmen chem lecture of 450 students who would regularly do better than me on exams.
I can count on one hand the number of women I have met who are proficient at their jobs in a technical area. Everyone else is male.
This was even apparent at school, where even though only 5% of the students were female, only 30% of them had any business being there. (Then again, only 30% of the guys had any business being there, so it's even in that regard.)
Society still pushes genders into certain roles. that there are fewer women in the IT industry has nothing to do with the IT industry - that outcome is determined way back in elementary school in the way we program our kids.
Women having a lower percentage in IT positions is definitely a symptom, but bias against them in the employment setting is definitely not the problem. If anything, anywhere I've ever been in a technical setting women are by far given the advantage, from always having access to a free tutor in college to adequecy sufficing where excelence is presented by male counterparts in the workplace.
If we want to solve this problem, we need to be solving it young. We need to expect girls to be just as interested and good at math and science as boys, and we need to provide them with the opportunity to fullfill that expectation. More importantly, we need to stop programming girls that they will be successful when they are married to a successful man.
Trying to solve it in the workplace is too late.
How am I supposed to deal with a woman that doesn't think compiling a just released kernel is exciting...
...and the best forplay one can have?
I would recommend screwing her.
Oops, didn't realize you were taking care of yourself.
Many girls go to college to meet men. Societal programming.
Or maybe it's lots of parents expect their children to go to college, and women who meet men at college have an alternative to working.
See, now THAT's a comment you can all get worked up about.
Given any particular male in IT, and any particular female in IT, the male is much more likely to be proficient in what he is doing. The exodus of women from IT just coincides with the burst of the tech bubble. Now that there are a lot less IT positions, the people who are filling them are the more qualified candidates, which means men. The girls who went to school in IT to make money/meet men aren't employed anymore.
Now, I'm sure a buncha people are going to get up-in-arms screaming 'Men are not better than women!'. To which I wholeheartedly agree. However, people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement working on computers are better at computers than those who do not, and people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement are far more likely to be men. Ergo, a particular male, having been far more likely to have been hiding in his basement working on computers while other people were dating, is more likely to be qualified for an IT position that a particular female.
Your analogy is bad. Software with vulnerabilities is not like gas with sugar in it. Software with vulnerabilities is like a gas tank without a lockable cap. It's a lot easier for someone who is malicious to harm your car if your gas tank doesn't have a lockable cap, just like it's a lot easier for someone to mess with your computer if your software is vulnerable.
But, the consumer doesn't want software without vulnerabilities. Well, sure, they want it, but they want it LESS than they want software they can actually afford to buy.
There simply, aside from a few critical applications, is not a market for software that is guaranteed to not be vulnerable. It is far preferable to most consumers to just accept that their software may not be perfect in exchange for a reasonable price.
Holding companies responsible for software flaws seems like a good idea, until you notice that nobody writes software anymore because too many software providers get sued into bankruptcy and/or the price for "software insurance" for software providers becomes so high that when passed onto the consumer the product is no longer affordable.
The market has spoken. The government should be loathe to act in opposition to the market.
Did Slashdot make the list?
Let's say I produce a bunch of flyers for my restaurant that advertise the menu and prices.
Two years later, if someone comes in with one of the old flyers, am I liable because the menu and prices are no longer correct?
Merely having out-of-date information on an old website shouldn't be actionable any more than having out-of-date information on an old flyer should be actionable.
Now, if you have incorrect information on the website, *AND* you represent that information as current, that should be actionable. It does not look like the website advertised the menu as a CURRENT menu however.
Take the money you're going to spend on getting another degree and start a business instead.