The last 2 days all I hear is people mourning Job's death. And clips of him make it through to prime time TV. They make me shiver. Man, this dude was severely twisted. It also makes me put everything into perspective of a geek. Most stuff he brought to the main stream was clearly innovative and all the money he earned he truly deserved.
But he or Apple didn't invent anything truly ground breaking.
Improving the Xerox idea of mouse and graphical UI is nice. Coming up with a top notch portable digital media player is nice too. And the Apple trackpad which marginalises the mouse is very nice again. Hell I even own a Mac Powerbook and I wouldn't trade it for anything else. Surely not for a tablet.
So, here's a proverbial business man being worshipped like a god. And I just don't get it. Not a single bit of it.
What's next? The world celebrating Gates' or Balmer's death? Perhaps.
But will true visionaries that did amazing work, when nobody really cared, be paid the respect they have earned and deserve? Sitting in system rooms alone, loading code in primitive ways, watching disk arms move,...
Will Ken end Denis be paid the homage that should come to them?
As an Italian I'm absolutely disgusted by the power of anti-defamation laws. These laws result not only in a severe limitation of free speech but also harm all progress. It's very easy to find that your political opponent or your business competitor is defaming you. Threatening with the law is first and then comes suing.
A likely root to this issue with defamation is "la bella figura". Italians value good appearance and decorum.
But we Italians basically reduce ourselves to 3rd rate individuals by imposing idiotic limitations on ourselves. It's in our nature and I don't expect non-Italians to understand this.
And no, an improvement of the situation is not to be expected. The Italian mentality is to emphasise disagreement on details and to avoid compromises -let alone cooperation- with the so called enemy. Left wing governments die in righteous beauty and right wing governments are next to totalitarian.
However, we never miss lunch and forget our differences over an exquisitely prepared dish. And then we can't be arsed to structurally solve issues.
But there are a few good things about this model. Junk food is very limited in Italy. And to maintain "la bella figura" we care for art and industrial design.
Who's heart's bleeding? The Faunhofer Institute, isn't that the bunch of goons that burn government money and then want money for the stuff they come up with?
Applied research demands money and talent that does not come free.
You need a budget of about 1.65 billion euros each year to function at this level.
The Fraunhofer Society earns ca. 70% of its income through contracts with industry or specific government projects. The other 30% of the budget is sourced in the proportion 9:1 from federal and state (Land) government grants and is used to support preparatory research.
Thus the size of the society's budget depends largely on its success in maximizing revenue from commissions.
I can read Wikipedia, thank you. My take is that the institute should cooperate more with the free software initiatives. Most likely they use free software to their advantage. It would have been just fair if they wouldn't have insisted on monetising their patents over the free community. I'm fine with paying for MP3 license through a Linux distro or device that makes money from me -i.E. Android, sat receiver, paid distro, distro charging me for support, etc... But the way Faunhofer behaved hurt the free software adaptation.
If they are such hot shots in financing 1.7 GEUR then they should avoid confusion and waive state funding altogether. Also, it is an educated guess that they didn't get any money from private Linux users and the sadness of their behaviour.
Who's heart's bleeding? The Faunhofer Institute, isn't that the bunch of goons that burn government money and then want money for the stuff they come up with? A sense of warmth is not what comes up immediately whenever the name is mentioned.
I love building my own stuff, more than most/.ers. Anything electronic in the house is done my yours truly. As is most cooking. Bicycles I build myself. I even build by own car and I even persuade the dealer to allow me do so.
Building your own stuff is great when your labour results in having stuff finished as it's supposed to be. And here's where IKEA just isn't worth the effort. After huge amounts of labour you almost always wind up with particle board stuff. Ugly, without any personality whatsoever to it and heavy as lead. Ever tried rearranging average IKEA furniture? Ever moved house with IKEA furniture?
A couple of years ago I wanted a sideboard and went through all the alternatives. I decided for Italian design furniture that was double the price of similar IKEA stuff. But altogether I got a much better deal. The sideboard looks stunning, it is made of real wood, it was delivered to my home and was installed by competent people.
An acquaintance of mine with a very comfortable job -he earns shit loads of money- thinks he's a bit of a geek because he buys his furniture at IKEA's. His wife absolutely loathes the protestant furniture, which one way or another is never finished perfectly -unaligned panels and doors, the works. How are you going to die happily when your bank account is full to the brim and you own IKEA furniture?
To me IKEA furniture does not make any sense and certainly does not make you a geek. It shows you generally have no taste and that you are quickly beguiled into buying apparently cheep stuff without considering the bigger picture.
So when someone invents a cunning method to combine existing applications, that he may patent. But when someone else does exactly that and it is against the interest of the lawmakers, then the law gets quickly patched, but of course only to favour lawmakers.
I sense a teeny weeny bit of opportunism at work here.
You know, I remember as a kid learning about the great inventions and inventors and thinking how cool it would be to come up with the next great idea. Now when I think about coming up with the next great idea, all I can picture is how I would even *begin* to deal with all the patent lawsuits that would inevitably follow.
It's even worse. You come to think that the thing you might pour your soul into, will eventually be taken hostage by some sleazy scum bag waiting for "idiots like us" to come up with the next great thing. Most of us would loose the waiting game. In several occasions I for one have refrained from doing exactly what I described in order not to become entangled in some legal loosing game. It would be save to assume that I'm not the only one to have done so. For that reason I think the patent system hinders software development.
Maybe there is someone out there who has the grain of insight in his mind that could lead to a radical advance in propulsion that could make a manned mission to Mars practical. But if the first thing that some venture capitalist tells him is "We'd love to fund this, but there is no way we can afford to defend you in the onslaught of patent lawsuits" how is it ever going to materialize? Patent trolls and patent collectors make it harder and harder for anything that isn't mainstream and almost immediately marketable from ever making it past the concept phase.
You'd be lucky to get to the defence bit. In reality you will NOT get any capital unless you have applied for a patent which most likely will be awarded to you.
Asperger logic at work here. Highly logical but completely unrealistic. Simply set how many people would benefit of a UTC only scheme against the people for which it would be really annoying and you'll understand. Essentially life is mainly is about being off-line. About having lunch at noon. Waking up some time between 6 and 9 am. Dining between 8 and 10 pm. Etc... You really want to sacrifice that in order to meet the whims of a hand full of geeks and business men?
As for Asperger, I've come up with enough crappy ideas where I realised that some of my perceived logic simply doesn't fit humanity.
Punching down the logic was the easy and fun part. Exception handling is the main challenge. Then come middleware issues.
It's easy to disassociate yourself and to become a patronising git and to claim to have done the hard work. Making software maintainable, supportable and well performing is never a matter of course.
Generally speaking it is hard for a non-programmer to imagine a programmer's job. The tedious thing is that scientists will always have significant influence and may not appreciate the hard programming work. This is even more so with clueless manager.
I went to see HP7b. I could choose to either view 3D or not at all. So there I sat with silly glasses and seeing it as I always do. No perception of depth and no negative effects on my brain... I think... I assume... I hope, OK?
Come to think of it, the term 3D does not take time into account. 4D would be better. And we can add a couple of Ds for the sound. I tried explaining this to my son. Don't know if he really got it.
Anyway, my strabismus finaly pays off
There's no Nobel prize for maths either. As CS mainly derives from maths, the Fields Medal should perhaps be awarded to CS scientists who produce extraordinary work. As much as I admire a handful of exponents in CS, I don't think they merit a Fields Medal as their research isn't truly ground breaking. Also, CS is mostly applied -not fundamental- science.
Back in the 70ies my brother in law fabricated a special door bell that opened the door when pushed with a specific pattern. Although it had its flaws it worked well enough. It even had a useful bug in that if pushed for a long time the door would open anyway. Terribly helpful when re-entering the apartment after a night out with loads of booze. I'm not sure the neighbours really appreciated this. We never bothered to care really.
Try running X over a slow connection whereby the idiot owning the slow connection really digs VLANs but you still need an SSH tunnel. WiFi would be the 3rd encryption in the chain and would make everything even more unlikely. Kick out WiFi and you're better off. Persuade the VLAN idiot -although the fscking bastard will go to great lengths in order NOT to understand you- and you're almost fine.
More often than not my mind wanders as soon as an issue gets boring. I can't stand people banging on about impossibilities when the solution to a problem is so bleeding obvious to me. I'm used to getting dismissed and I'm fed up of proving my point with actions whilst others sit back and reap benefits.
I'm not a genius but my intelligence is well above average. I'm not particularly successful in my professional life but I do OK. I'd sign up to become more compatible to the masses but that's an impossibility.
The up side of being distracted with a decent sense of irony is that you almost always see the funny side of even the most dreadful situations.
Still I don't blame society for not fully accepting me. When a hammer suits for almost any job you do -even handling screws- you just can't be arsed to appreciate some fancy tool that can become anything you want.
However, this does require the password be transmitted over the wire in one way or another on every connection.
Security isn't your forte I see. Encrypted sessions are common nowadays and the man in the middle attack is technically ruled out long ago. But clearly not everyone knows.
Anyway, passwords have their flaws. Systems -like SSH and PGP- where private keys are stored on the file system are not an alternative for passwords. Electronic keys with an inaccessible private key are but these aren't commonly used yet.
I have studied high availability systems and I have developed some. It's not too difficult to come up with a decent design that should guarantee extremely high availability. However, there always will remain assumptions and external factors which influence your system. The most tedious bits are systems and components that "never" fail (like simple NICs) for which you will not get any attention whatsoever.
100% availability is a myth. I know of a case where IBM's zero downtime operating system (z/OS) went down a whole day, causing huge losses. The shut down was allegedly caused by a cleaner accidentally disabling one power supply. Which essentially shouldn't have mattered... But it did. The fail over switch was prevented by a relatively small amount of disk writes which were not fully committed to the fail over site and hence the over site could not commence.
You should know that IBM charges huge amounts of money, it claim zero downtime and eventually doesn't deliver on that. Quite absurd.
But, IMHO, bashing IBM for not delivering zero downtime isn't fair. IBM's customer at hand should have conducted an own HA analysis but instead probably opted for a few words on "IBM" and "zero downtime". The customer really should have known.
Working from home saves on office space at the employer. Office space at prime locations costs an arm and a leg. Considering that, payment should remain the same or rise actually.
The question is "but?" But, will I be able to still respect the icons I venerate for ever more? With their beards, horn-rimmed glasses and shaped bellies?
It is save to assume the answer is most likely an ubiquitous "Yes!" My wild guess is that the main reason for this would be that such a ridiculous proposition would never ever cross their minds. Brain-cycles will most likely be saved for real problems and issues.
My recollection of the show is that the Tesla is OK-ish but not earth shattering or ground breaking. The lap time wasn't bad but certainly not impressive which is most likely affected by the weight of the batteries. In the same episode the Honda FCX Clarity is featured which has a fuel cell and behaves exactly like you'd expect from a Honda sedan. This impression is probably what most viewer remember.
Tesla were probably thinking that being featured on Top Gear would have resulted in a free commercial. Very naive. And suing after more than two years after the first broadcast won't do them any favours. The Streisand effect will be limited by their sort-of reasonable demands but they show themselves as a bunch of sorry sulking kids.
As said many times before, Top Gear is a show and not a car review programme.
You my dear have committed a so called rooky mistake as you most likely have employed security through obscurity. It must be so because nobody can even find some sort of system, the FBI is pissed like hell and you wind up dead on/.
Slashdot Mirror
The last 2 days all I hear is people mourning Job's death. And clips of him make it through to prime time TV. They make me shiver. Man, this dude was severely twisted. It also makes me put everything into perspective of a geek. Most stuff he brought to the main stream was clearly innovative and all the money he earned he truly deserved.
...
But he or Apple didn't invent anything truly ground breaking.
Improving the Xerox idea of mouse and graphical UI is nice. Coming up with a top notch portable digital media player is nice too. And the Apple trackpad which marginalises the mouse is very nice again. Hell I even own a Mac Powerbook and I wouldn't trade it for anything else. Surely not for a tablet.
So, here's a proverbial business man being worshipped like a god. And I just don't get it. Not a single bit of it.
What's next? The world celebrating Gates' or Balmer's death? Perhaps.
But will true visionaries that did amazing work, when nobody really cared, be paid the respect they have earned and deserve? Sitting in system rooms alone, loading code in primitive ways, watching disk arms move,
Will Ken end Denis be paid the homage that should come to them?
As an Italian I'm absolutely disgusted by the power of anti-defamation laws. These laws result not only in a severe limitation of free speech but also harm all progress. It's very easy to find that your political opponent or your business competitor is defaming you. Threatening with the law is first and then comes suing.
A likely root to this issue with defamation is "la bella figura". Italians value good appearance and decorum.
But we Italians basically reduce ourselves to 3rd rate individuals by imposing idiotic limitations on ourselves. It's in our nature and I don't expect non-Italians to understand this.
And no, an improvement of the situation is not to be expected. The Italian mentality is to emphasise disagreement on details and to avoid compromises -let alone cooperation- with the so called enemy. Left wing governments die in righteous beauty and right wing governments are next to totalitarian.
However, we never miss lunch and forget our differences over an exquisitely prepared dish. And then we can't be arsed to structurally solve issues.
But there are a few good things about this model. Junk food is very limited in Italy. And to maintain "la bella figura" we care for art and industrial design.
Who's heart's bleeding? The Faunhofer Institute, isn't that the bunch of goons that burn government money and then want money for the stuff they come up with?
Applied research demands money and talent that does not come free.
You need a budget of about 1.65 billion euros each year to function at this level.
The Fraunhofer Society earns ca. 70% of its income through contracts with industry or specific government projects. The other 30% of the budget is sourced in the proportion 9:1 from federal and state (Land) government grants and is used to support preparatory research.
Thus the size of the society's budget depends largely on its success in maximizing revenue from commissions.
I can read Wikipedia, thank you. My take is that the institute should cooperate more with the free software initiatives. Most likely they use free software to their advantage. It would have been just fair if they wouldn't have insisted on monetising their patents over the free community. I'm fine with paying for MP3 license through a Linux distro or device that makes money from me -i.E. Android, sat receiver, paid distro, distro charging me for support, etc... But the way Faunhofer behaved hurt the free software adaptation.
If they are such hot shots in financing 1.7 GEUR then they should avoid confusion and waive state funding altogether. Also, it is an educated guess that they didn't get any money from private Linux users and the sadness of their behaviour.
Who's heart's bleeding? The Faunhofer Institute, isn't that the bunch of goons that burn government money and then want money for the stuff they come up with? A sense of warmth is not what comes up immediately whenever the name is mentioned.
The world's most popular open-source software program isn't "the Linux operating system" but most likely "cat".
Calling an OS a mere program and attributing it to one person shows you really don't know a lot about the stuff you're writing about.
I love building my own stuff, more than most /.ers. Anything electronic in the house is done my yours truly. As is most cooking. Bicycles I build myself. I even build by own car and I even persuade the dealer to allow me do so.
Building your own stuff is great when your labour results in having stuff finished as it's supposed to be. And here's where IKEA just isn't worth the effort. After huge amounts of labour you almost always wind up with particle board stuff. Ugly, without any personality whatsoever to it and heavy as lead. Ever tried rearranging average IKEA furniture? Ever moved house with IKEA furniture?
A couple of years ago I wanted a sideboard and went through all the alternatives. I decided for Italian design furniture that was double the price of similar IKEA stuff. But altogether I got a much better deal. The sideboard looks stunning, it is made of real wood, it was delivered to my home and was installed by competent people.
An acquaintance of mine with a very comfortable job -he earns shit loads of money- thinks he's a bit of a geek because he buys his furniture at IKEA's. His wife absolutely loathes the protestant furniture, which one way or another is never finished perfectly -unaligned panels and doors, the works. How are you going to die happily when your bank account is full to the brim and you own IKEA furniture?
To me IKEA furniture does not make any sense and certainly does not make you a geek. It shows you generally have no taste and that you are quickly beguiled into buying apparently cheep stuff without considering the bigger picture.
So when someone invents a cunning method to combine existing applications, that he may patent. But when someone else does exactly that and it is against the interest of the lawmakers, then the law gets quickly patched, but of course only to favour lawmakers.
I sense a teeny weeny bit of opportunism at work here.
You know, I remember as a kid learning about the great inventions and inventors and thinking how cool it would be to come up with the next great idea. Now when I think about coming up with the next great idea, all I can picture is how I would even *begin* to deal with all the patent lawsuits that would inevitably follow.
It's even worse. You come to think that the thing you might pour your soul into, will eventually be taken hostage by some sleazy scum bag waiting for "idiots like us" to come up with the next great thing. Most of us would loose the waiting game. In several occasions I for one have refrained from doing exactly what I described in order not to become entangled in some legal loosing game. It would be save to assume that I'm not the only one to have done so. For that reason I think the patent system hinders software development.
Maybe there is someone out there who has the grain of insight in his mind that could lead to a radical advance in propulsion that could make a manned mission to Mars practical. But if the first thing that some venture capitalist tells him is "We'd love to fund this, but there is no way we can afford to defend you in the onslaught of patent lawsuits" how is it ever going to materialize? Patent trolls and patent collectors make it harder and harder for anything that isn't mainstream and almost immediately marketable from ever making it past the concept phase.
You'd be lucky to get to the defence bit. In reality you will NOT get any capital unless you have applied for a patent which most likely will be awarded to you.
This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be.
Sure, like other enemies would refrain from jamming signals on the base that it just isn't the way a gentleman should behave.
Asperger logic at work here. Highly logical but completely unrealistic. Simply set how many people would benefit of a UTC only scheme against the people for which it would be really annoying and you'll understand. Essentially life is mainly is about being off-line. About having lunch at noon. Waking up some time between 6 and 9 am. Dining between 8 and 10 pm. Etc... You really want to sacrifice that in order to meet the whims of a hand full of geeks and business men?
As for Asperger, I've come up with enough crappy ideas where I realised that some of my perceived logic simply doesn't fit humanity.
Punching down the logic was the easy and fun part. Exception handling is the main challenge. Then come middleware issues.
It's easy to disassociate yourself and to become a patronising git and to claim to have done the hard work. Making software maintainable, supportable and well performing is never a matter of course.
Generally speaking it is hard for a non-programmer to imagine a programmer's job. The tedious thing is that scientists will always have significant influence and may not appreciate the hard programming work. This is even more so with clueless manager.
I went to see HP7b. I could choose to either view 3D or not at all. So there I sat with silly glasses and seeing it as I always do. No perception of depth and no negative effects on my brain... I think... I assume... I hope, OK?
Come to think of it, the term 3D does not take time into account. 4D would be better. And we can add a couple of Ds for the sound. I tried explaining this to my son. Don't know if he really got it. Anyway, my strabismus finaly pays off
There's no Nobel prize for maths either. As CS mainly derives from maths, the Fields Medal should perhaps be awarded to CS scientists who produce extraordinary work. As much as I admire a handful of exponents in CS, I don't think they merit a Fields Medal as their research isn't truly ground breaking. Also, CS is mostly applied -not fundamental- science.
Back in the 70ies my brother in law fabricated a special door bell that opened the door when pushed with a specific pattern. Although it had its flaws it worked well enough. It even had a useful bug in that if pushed for a long time the door would open anyway. Terribly helpful when re-entering the apartment after a night out with loads of booze. I'm not sure the neighbours really appreciated this. We never bothered to care really.
Last time I checked Brussels was in Belgium.
Try running X over a slow connection whereby the idiot owning the slow connection really digs VLANs but you still need an SSH tunnel. WiFi would be the 3rd encryption in the chain and would make everything even more unlikely. Kick out WiFi and you're better off. Persuade the VLAN idiot -although the fscking bastard will go to great lengths in order NOT to understand you- and you're almost fine.
I'd sign up to be a cog. I really would.
More often than not my mind wanders as soon as an issue gets boring. I can't stand people banging on about impossibilities when the solution to a problem is so bleeding obvious to me. I'm used to getting dismissed and I'm fed up of proving my point with actions whilst others sit back and reap benefits.
I'm not a genius but my intelligence is well above average. I'm not particularly successful in my professional life but I do OK. I'd sign up to become more compatible to the masses but that's an impossibility.
The up side of being distracted with a decent sense of irony is that you almost always see the funny side of even the most dreadful situations.
Still I don't blame society for not fully accepting me. When a hammer suits for almost any job you do -even handling screws- you just can't be arsed to appreciate some fancy tool that can become anything you want.
It has to be said that the right amount of revenue induces naivety.
However, this does require the password be transmitted over the wire in one way or another on every connection.
Security isn't your forte I see. Encrypted sessions are common nowadays and the man in the middle attack is technically ruled out long ago. But clearly not everyone knows.
Anyway, passwords have their flaws. Systems -like SSH and PGP- where private keys are stored on the file system are not an alternative for passwords. Electronic keys with an inaccessible private key are but these aren't commonly used yet.
Pumps 6M$?! Google may perhaps accidentally spill 6 M$.
I have studied high availability systems and I have developed some. It's not too difficult to come up with a decent design that should guarantee extremely high availability. However, there always will remain assumptions and external factors which influence your system. The most tedious bits are systems and components that "never" fail (like simple NICs) for which you will not get any attention whatsoever.
100% availability is a myth. I know of a case where IBM's zero downtime operating system (z/OS) went down a whole day, causing huge losses. The shut down was allegedly caused by a cleaner accidentally disabling one power supply. Which essentially shouldn't have mattered... But it did. The fail over switch was prevented by a relatively small amount of disk writes which were not fully committed to the fail over site and hence the over site could not commence.
You should know that IBM charges huge amounts of money, it claim zero downtime and eventually doesn't deliver on that. Quite absurd.
But, IMHO, bashing IBM for not delivering zero downtime isn't fair. IBM's customer at hand should have conducted an own HA analysis but instead probably opted for a few words on "IBM" and "zero downtime". The customer really should have known.
Working from home saves on office space at the employer. Office space at prime locations costs an arm and a leg. Considering that, payment should remain the same or rise actually.
The question is "but?" But, will I be able to still respect the icons I venerate for ever more? With their beards, horn-rimmed glasses and shaped bellies?
It is save to assume the answer is most likely an ubiquitous "Yes!" My wild guess is that the main reason for this would be that such a ridiculous proposition would never ever cross their minds. Brain-cycles will most likely be saved for real problems and issues.
My recollection of the show is that the Tesla is OK-ish but not earth shattering or ground breaking. The lap time wasn't bad but certainly not impressive which is most likely affected by the weight of the batteries. In the same episode the Honda FCX Clarity is featured which has a fuel cell and behaves exactly like you'd expect from a Honda sedan. This impression is probably what most viewer remember.
Tesla were probably thinking that being featured on Top Gear would have resulted in a free commercial. Very naive. And suing after more than two years after the first broadcast won't do them any favours. The Streisand effect will be limited by their sort-of reasonable demands but they show themselves as a bunch of sorry sulking kids.
As said many times before, Top Gear is a show and not a car review programme.
You my dear have committed a so called rooky mistake as you most likely have employed security through obscurity. It must be so because nobody can even find some sort of system, the FBI is pissed like hell and you wind up dead on /.
/.
OTOH, only the truly great wind up dead dead on