If you look at water molecules flowing thru a pipe, you'll see that they speed up when the pipe narrows. This is exactly contrary to what happens when people driving encounter a narrow place in the road. They have to merge, so someone will brake, you can count on it.
If cars were under central control, a computer could merge them and speed them up simultaneously on encountering a narrow place. I don't think there is any way to teach individuals to safely speed up and merge.
I think people have to stop thinking of 100% reliability as a feasible goal. After all, malfunctioning cars kill people every year, its a price of using cars in our society, and though there are lawsuits no one really expects cars to be 100% reliable.
IANAL, but a friend of mine who's had some law school told me the operative phrase was "honest best effort". You can be sued for negligence in an accident if there is something you should have done to prevent the accident, but didn't. This has to be the test of liability, not the undeniable fact that people were damaged.
Large software is just too complex to test all cases, no matter how many years of test cases you generate. There are often assumptions during such testing anyway, such as the hardware CPU being without faults. If the chip glitches and the software doesn't handle it, who is at fault now?
I see medical software being a big problem for BOTH proprietary and open source models. I think open source definitely provides some advantages. The number of trivial suits is likely somewhat decreased because there's no real money to go after, OSS is not rich. From the customer's point of view, at least the entire codebase is available for inspection. This should avoid letting rushed-out-the-door spaghetti code loose on a patient! It also means better accountability because if the software vendor did something really stupid that they should have caught, you can prove it. Finally, it would make it far more difficult to settle software liability suits with a monetary reward and non-disclosure agreement - the fault is there for anyone who wants to look, and will be fixed. This last point, that bugs WILL be fixed when found, is what really matters, IMO.
Just one last point though. Medical software bazaars can't be anything like Linux. The emphasis has to be purely on bug avoidance and fixing, not on feature rollouts. No itch scratching here, sorry. It would also require far more management and review in terms of which patches are allowed, so could possibly be rather frustrating to work on. Once released, even if a feature is broken it might be better to disable it than attempt to fix it, unless it is truly critical. This isn't how Microsoft does software either though, that's for sure.:)
Absolutely. I don't especially fault ISPs for this behavior of canning sites (nor admire it!), and you're right it has little to do with how many there are. With zillions of ISPs though, a site can easily find another ISP that is willing to take them on (until the next threat at least.) If the choice narrows it will get much harder to "route around" censorship, that's all.
I hear what you're saying. I think a more analogous situation would be the broadcast TV networks with their virtual lock on content before cable appeared. Its much easier for an interest group like the xtian right, e.g., to pressure an oligarchy than a distributed network of providers. ISPs have been rather ready and willing to take down sites at the slightest hint of a lawsuit. If there are only a few ISPs that means some sites will be effectively banned from the internet. As you say oligarchies are not necessarily bad, but I don't want one to control any aspect of the internet, if it can be avoided.
Good point. I can also see the xtian right and censorware manufacturers being excited about having a comprehensive list of sites that need shutting down/blocking. If people want to remain unpublicized on search engines, they should be able to. Respecting ROBOTS.TXT is a simple solution already available, and I hope FAST will come around on this.
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/blammo.pl?displ ay=19990802&topic=everything#Gates to Charities: Not So Fast!_Monday
suggests that the "unrelated story" may not be entirely factual. It seems to be true in intent perhaps, but then Windows is intended to be bug free too...
Thanks Eric, I was starting to wonder if maybe there was something wrong with me after all.:) I'm glad someone else believes in this.
I think that 35 is too young, for me it started when I was about 42 (47 now). We aren't in a recession right now either, I shudder to think what that's going to be like.
I've also learned what I needed to know from manuals as I needed it. I do embedded assembly code for DSP processors as a contractor and the typical situation is that the part is brand new with a new instruction set, and sometimes, new architecture.
I think a large part of the problem is the job shops that have taken over the market. The people running these places don't understand the computer field and are forced to use really unrealistic tools like buzzword resume searches and age to determine suitability. I've never experienced age discrimination interviewing in an engineering department, its just difficult to get that far these days. It's usually someone I've worked for before that calls me.
DSP chips are optimized mainly for speed in operations like multiply and accumulate. They are incredibly more programmable than the analog circuits they replace, but far from suitable for any general computing application such as an OS, e.g.
WinModems use the x86 processor to do DSP operations, something they're not very good at. Other modems have a DSP chip that is optimized for just those sorts of operations, but less reprogrammable than most microprocesors.
Don't know links, but how about the first paper on public key encryption?
I'd be more interested in a broad set of interesting links about the internet, open source, and hacker culture rather than something too historical or self important. It would be a good place to point someone who was trying to find a clue or a good read.
I agree there's not much point to rooting for either side here.
This is corporate war and expecting either side to respect moral or ethical considerations is somewhat naive. Holding them to legality may prove tough enough. I'm sure the fact that AOL is using IE has crossed Microsoft's mind.
AOL, Sun, Netscape, IBM etc may be the allies of Linux and open source, but they can't be counted its friends. When the chips are down and survival is at stake, their responsibilities to their stockholders don't legally allow it. Not saying they don't make good allies, but only when their purposes happen to align with ours.
Sit back and watch folks, MS and AOL aren't listening anyway.:)
>If you don't like driver's licenses, then don't drive (ok, that's a tough one).
Yeah, but not too bad. I'm 47, live in the Bay Area Valley and have never had a driver's license. I wouldn't want to try it with a family however! I do need a California ID, or I can't cash my paychecks. They just aren't impressed when you show up with a birth cerificate.
>Don't like credit cards, pay cash.
Also never had one of these. For a period of a few years it was very difficult to cash checks (at my home branch) or use them due to lack of a second ID, usually requiring special permission from some manager. This has pretty much gone away today, most all places take just a California ID. (But don't try to rent something like a U-Haul or a movie!)
My point is that if life-critical functions require something, the "freedom not to use it" is pretty hollow.
I wish more places would use COD, phone billing, be willing to start cash accounts for customers, or at least accept ATM cards.
Funny thing is, I might even tolerate a national ID card, just so I definitely DIDN'T have to have any OTHER form of identification. As it is credit cards are the default national ID, and I don't trust those companies any more than the government. Its pretty well known, anyone "connected" can access the damn database.
I'd want to be able to take a look at the card with my computer though and see exactly what information was on it, and what was accessed(and by whom) recently. If a store got too nosy, they wouldn't see me again. If the government or an employer got too nosy then legal recourse should be possible.
Do you really want to see a situation where lots of competing companies are all laying their own broadband infrastructure? This doesn't strike me as being very reliable or efficient for the end user. Cable companies can't even manage their existing cable system, I can't see it getting simpler with multiple networks. Not to mention the chaos from having roads torn up all over the country to lay new cable runs.
Keep in mind that Microsoft would love to own the cable systems and has plenty of money to buy them. Its only those nasty government regulators stopping them.
If the roads had been built by a private company would you say that someone who wanted access to them for commerce should build their own redundant road system?
Inarguably the investment in building the infrastructure should be rewarded. I think it probably has been already by years of effective monopoly, but never mind. No one is objecting to a reasonable fee for access.
Excuse me, but "free market"? What free market?After corporations have spent so much time and money lobbying governments for laws giving them advantages I think its a little late to talk about a free market.
The US subsidizes corporations regularly. Overseas ads for tobacco companies, artificially low gas prices, farm surplus controls, etc. Its a shame our founding fathers didn't think to separate business and the state. If these are allowed though, I'm inclined to think careful, well planned, minimalist, interference for social purposes is also fair play.
Personally, I'm not any kind of ist, socialist, capitalist, whateverist. I avoid istism because it leads to considering ideas in terms of faith and dogma rather than objective, pragmatic, and challengeable criteria. The problem with the "socialist" experiments in this country isn't their interference with a "free" market, they're implementation issues. Political baggage, inefficiency, and the inability to scrap them and try again when they don't work is closer.
So does subsidizing internet access for kids who don't have it make sense? How do you handle parents who think the internet is evil? Would built-in filtering be required (or constitutional)? What kind of computers would they be, Windows? Linux? Internet Appliances? How much more money would be required for training and administration? There are lots of reasons why this might not work well. Isn't it more useful to discuss those than to simply FUD it by calling it socialism? Getting our kids, all our kids, up to speed on the Internet and computer usage has wide implications for our global competitiveness. No matter whether you're a socialist or capitalist it might make sense to at least consider it.
Thats a good point. However three years ago it was $650, which comes out to over 13% per year lately (since the last sale of the building). If this is a blip, well and fine, but if the curve is exponential, might as well move now .
BTW, I was born here, I didn't choose to move to this area. I just don't like the thought of losing friends I've had all my life, otherwise I would have moved long ago.
I moved into a small one bedroom apartment in Sunnyvale in 1982, and I still live there. In that time my rent has increased from $360/mo to $950/mo. There has been no significant work done to the apartment in that time other than regular maintenance. The building has changed owners twice, and both times a large rent increase followed. As the article mentions, if I wanted to move I'd have to pay at least $150/mo more.
I do independent contract work, so sometimes have to survive some months between jobs. This has been getting harder and harder as the rent has increased and its beginning to be a real problem. I can relate to the possibility of not being able to stay housed and will probably relocate to a studio while I can still afford one. Its obvious that I can forget about retiring around here.
San Francisco isn't much better, but they have rent control. So once you've moved in, you can get a relatively cheap price by just remaining there for some years. Or if you're really lucky, find a lease to assume.
I'm not sure that integration is an unmixed blessing with respect to configuration issues.
I was recently forced to buy a cheap HP Pavillion 6330 when my old system died, and of course it had video and sound built into the motherboard, both Crystal chip sets. Well the sound chip died after three days of use, and the video chip won't support 3d graphics for games, so I've got little choice but to replace them with expansion adapters. (The store won't swap the computer because I failed to purchase extended warranty, doing it thru HP would likely shut me down for weeks, I can't afford that.)
In Win'9x this is a pain, but manageable thanks to being able to disable hardware in the device manager. I sincerely doubt most Windows users could handle this without help however. It really interferes with my Linux RH5.2 installation (due to my newbieness, no doubt!) I've mucked with isapnptools until I'm blue in the face and have yet to get my ISA PNP Awe64 recognized. Yes, I've read all relevant HOWTOs.
Autoprobing the video turns up the Crystal chip set, not the TNT Riva. This I can work around, once the driver is ready, but it does mean that X configuration has to be done manually.
Like windows auto-setup, when it works, its a blesssing. However the instant anything goes wrong, it makes everything very much harder.
I'm not blaming Linux or integration for these problems, I realize that I was just unlucky, and need to learn more as well. But I would like to see such integration accompanied by a simple method of disabling integrated devices in hardware (like a jumper!). While I'm at it, please no more PNP cards/chips that can't disable PNP! I'd much rather have to determine my IO, DMA, and IRQ settings than be unable to change or set them easily.
This is the part I think some folks (including me) are concerned about:
"Linux for the masses will be consistent across all platforms. No multiple distributions or window managers. One and only one of each. "
I have no problems whatsoever with a special distribution for the masses, but to say that we must all live with a distribution or window manager designed solely for the computer illiterate just isn't acceptable.
To attract users at the cost of driving away developers is not going to help. Linux can support both, and it should.
The notion that Windows only presents one way of doing things is completely false. I can run programs by the Run prompt, the Start menu, clicking shortcuts, using a DOS Window as a CLI, double clicking from Explorer, etc. This hasn't interfered with Window's usability, apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at water molecules flowing thru a pipe, you'll see that they speed up when the pipe narrows. This is exactly contrary to what happens when people driving encounter a narrow place in the road. They have to merge, so someone will brake, you can count on it.
If cars were under central control, a computer could merge them and speed them up simultaneously on encountering a narrow place. I don't think there is any way to teach individuals to safely speed up and merge.
Jim
I think people have to stop thinking of 100% reliability as a feasible goal. After all, malfunctioning cars kill people every year, its a price of using cars in our society, and though there are lawsuits no one really expects cars to be 100% reliable.
:)
IANAL, but a friend of mine who's had some law school told me the operative phrase was "honest best effort". You can be sued for negligence in an accident if there is something you should have done to prevent the accident, but didn't. This has to be the test of liability, not the undeniable fact that people were damaged.
Large software is just too complex to test all cases, no matter how many years of test cases you generate. There are often assumptions during such testing anyway, such as the hardware CPU being without faults. If the chip glitches and the software doesn't handle it, who is at fault now?
I see medical software being a big problem for BOTH proprietary and open source models. I think open source definitely provides some advantages. The number of trivial suits is likely somewhat decreased because there's no real money to go after, OSS is not rich. From the customer's point of view, at least the entire codebase is available for inspection. This should avoid letting rushed-out-the-door spaghetti code loose on a patient! It also means better accountability because if the software vendor did something really stupid that they should have caught, you can prove it. Finally, it would make it far more difficult to settle software liability suits with a monetary reward and non-disclosure agreement - the fault is there for anyone who wants to look, and will be fixed. This last point, that bugs WILL be fixed when found, is what really matters, IMO.
Just one last point though. Medical software bazaars can't be anything like Linux. The emphasis has to be purely on bug avoidance and fixing, not on feature rollouts. No itch scratching here, sorry. It would also require far more management and review in terms of which patches are allowed, so could possibly be rather frustrating to work on. Once released, even if a feature is broken it might be better to disable it than attempt to fix it, unless it is truly critical. This isn't how Microsoft does software either though, that's for sure.
Jim
Absolutely. I don't especially fault ISPs for this behavior of canning sites (nor admire it!), and you're right it has little to do with how many there are. With zillions of ISPs though, a site can easily find another ISP that is willing to take them on (until the next threat at least.) If the choice narrows it will get much harder to "route around" censorship, that's all.
Jim
I hear what you're saying. I think a more analogous situation would be the broadcast TV networks with their virtual lock on content before cable appeared. Its much easier for an interest group like the xtian right, e.g., to pressure an oligarchy than a distributed network of providers. ISPs have been rather ready and willing to take down sites at the slightest hint of a lawsuit. If there are only a few ISPs that means some sites will be effectively banned from the internet. As you say oligarchies are not necessarily bad, but I don't want one to control any aspect of the internet, if it can be avoided.
Jim
Good point. I can also see the xtian right and censorware manufacturers being excited about having a comprehensive list of sites that need shutting down/blocking. If people want to remain unpublicized on search engines, they should be able to. Respecting ROBOTS.TXT is a simple solution already available, and I hope FAST will come around on this.
It gets even more weird if you follow the FUDBuster link at the top of the story. One of the stories "busted" is by Jesse :)
Jim
A story over at Blue's News:
l ay=19990802&topic=everything#Gates to Charities: Not So Fast!_Monday
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/blammo.pl?disp
suggests that the "unrelated story" may not be entirely factual. It seems to be true in intent perhaps, but then Windows is intended to be bug free too...
Jim
Thanks Eric, I was starting to wonder if maybe there was something wrong with me after all. :) I'm glad someone else believes in this.
I think that 35 is too young, for me it started when I was about 42 (47 now). We aren't in a recession right now either, I shudder to think what that's going to be like.
I've also learned what I needed to know from manuals as I needed it. I do embedded assembly code for DSP processors as a contractor and the typical situation is that the part is brand new with a new instruction set, and sometimes, new architecture.
I think a large part of the problem is the job shops that have taken over the market. The people running these places don't understand the computer field and are forced to use really unrealistic tools like buzzword resume searches and age to determine suitability. I've never experienced age discrimination interviewing in an engineering department, its just difficult to get that far these days. It's usually someone I've worked for before that calls me.
Jim
DSP chips are optimized mainly for speed in operations like multiply and accumulate. They are incredibly more programmable than the analog circuits they replace, but far from suitable for any general computing application such as an OS, e.g.
WinModems use the x86 processor to do DSP operations, something they're not very good at. Other modems have a DSP chip that is optimized for just those sorts of operations, but less reprogrammable than most microprocesors.
Jim
Don't know links, but how about the first paper on public key encryption?
I'd be more interested in a broad set of interesting links about the internet, open source, and hacker culture rather than something too historical or self important. It would be a good place to point someone who was trying to find a clue or a good read.
Jim
I agree there's not much point to rooting for either side here.
:)
This is corporate war and expecting either side to respect moral or ethical considerations is somewhat naive. Holding them to legality may prove tough enough. I'm sure the fact that AOL is using IE has crossed Microsoft's mind.
AOL, Sun, Netscape, IBM etc may be the allies of Linux and open source, but they can't be counted its friends. When the chips are down and survival is at stake, their responsibilities to their stockholders don't legally allow it. Not saying they don't make good allies, but only when their purposes happen to align with ours.
Sit back and watch folks, MS and AOL aren't listening anyway.
Jim
I don't know... the security at Black Mesa didn't seem that hot either -- didn't slow Freeman down much anyway :).
Jim
>If you don't like driver's licenses, then don't drive (ok, that's a tough one).
Yeah, but not too bad. I'm 47, live in the Bay Area Valley and have never had a driver's license. I wouldn't want to try it with a family however! I do need a California ID, or I can't cash my paychecks. They just aren't impressed when you show up with a birth cerificate.
>Don't like credit cards, pay cash.
Also never had one of these. For a period of a few years it was very difficult to cash checks (at my home branch) or use them due to lack of a second ID, usually requiring special permission from some manager. This has pretty much gone away today, most all places take just a California ID. (But don't try to rent something like a U-Haul or a movie!)
My point is that if life-critical functions require something, the "freedom not to use it" is pretty hollow.
I wish more places would use COD, phone billing, be willing to start cash accounts for customers, or at least accept ATM cards.
Funny thing is, I might even tolerate a national ID card, just so I definitely DIDN'T have to have any OTHER form of identification. As it is credit cards are the default national ID, and I don't trust those companies any more than the government. Its pretty well known, anyone "connected" can access the damn database.
I'd want to be able to take a look at the card with my computer though and see exactly what information was on it, and what was accessed(and by whom) recently. If a store got too nosy, they wouldn't see me again. If the government or an employer got too nosy then legal recourse should be possible.
Jim
Nothing wrong with TV as a hardware device, other than being a little low res. I find them very useful for watching movies occasionally.
So I would recommend tossing the antenna and the cable connection and all that miserable content they provide -- and keeping the TV.
Jim
Do you really want to see a situation where lots of competing companies are all laying their own broadband infrastructure? This doesn't strike me as being very reliable or efficient for the end user. Cable companies can't even manage their existing cable system, I can't see it getting simpler with multiple networks. Not to mention the chaos from having roads torn up all over the country to lay new cable runs.
Keep in mind that Microsoft would love to own the cable systems and has plenty of money to buy them. Its only those nasty government regulators stopping them.
If the roads had been built by a private company would you say that someone who wanted access to them for commerce should build their own redundant road system?
Inarguably the investment in building the infrastructure should be rewarded. I think it probably has been already by years of effective monopoly, but never mind. No one is objecting to a reasonable fee for access.
Excuse me, but "free market"? What free market?After corporations have spent so much time and money lobbying governments for laws giving them advantages I think its a little late to talk about a free market.
The US subsidizes corporations regularly. Overseas ads for tobacco companies, artificially low gas prices, farm surplus controls, etc. Its a shame our founding fathers didn't think to separate business and the state. If these are allowed though, I'm inclined to think careful, well planned, minimalist, interference for social purposes is also fair play.
Personally, I'm not any kind of ist, socialist, capitalist, whateverist. I avoid istism because it leads to considering ideas in terms of faith and dogma rather than objective, pragmatic, and challengeable criteria. The problem with the "socialist" experiments in this country isn't their interference with a "free" market, they're implementation issues. Political baggage, inefficiency, and the inability to scrap them and try again when they don't work is closer.
So does subsidizing internet access for kids who don't have it make sense? How do you handle parents who think the internet is evil? Would built-in filtering be required (or constitutional)? What kind of computers would they be, Windows? Linux? Internet Appliances? How much more money would be required for training and administration? There are lots of reasons why this might not work well. Isn't it more useful to discuss those than to simply FUD it by calling it socialism? Getting our kids, all our kids, up to speed on the Internet and computer usage has wide implications for our global competitiveness. No matter whether you're a socialist or capitalist it might make sense to at least consider it.
Thats a good point. However three years ago it was $650, which comes out to over 13% per year lately (since the last sale of the building). If this is a blip, well and fine, but if the curve is exponential, might as well move now .
BTW, I was born here, I didn't choose to move to this area. I just don't like the thought of losing friends I've had all my life, otherwise I would have moved long ago.
Jim
Plus Humorix has the opensourced Slashdot Simulator v0.2, written in Perl (really). Now THAT's parody :).
h tml
http://i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/index.s
Still I think that flames aren't really required when a joke falls flat. Lack of laughter is usually painful enough.
Jim
I moved into a small one bedroom apartment in Sunnyvale in 1982, and I still live there. In that time my rent has increased from $360/mo to $950/mo. There has been no significant work done to the apartment in that time other than regular maintenance. The building has changed owners twice, and both times a large rent increase followed. As the article mentions, if I wanted to move I'd have to pay at least $150/mo more.
I do independent contract work, so sometimes have to survive some months between jobs. This has been getting harder and harder as the rent has increased and its beginning to be a real problem. I can relate to the possibility of not being able to stay housed and will probably relocate to a studio while I can still afford one. Its obvious that I can forget about retiring around here.
San Francisco isn't much better, but they have rent control. So once you've moved in, you can get a relatively cheap price by just remaining there for some years. Or if you're really lucky, find a lease to assume.
Jim
I'm not sure that integration is an unmixed blessing with respect to configuration issues.
I was recently forced to buy a cheap HP Pavillion 6330 when my old system died, and of course it had video and sound built into the motherboard, both Crystal chip sets. Well the sound chip died after three days of use, and the video chip won't support 3d graphics for games, so I've got little choice but to replace them with expansion adapters. (The store won't swap the computer because I failed to purchase extended warranty, doing it thru HP would likely shut me down for weeks, I can't afford that.)
In Win'9x this is a pain, but manageable thanks to being able to disable hardware in the device manager. I sincerely doubt most Windows users could handle this without help however. It really interferes with my Linux RH5.2 installation (due to my newbieness, no doubt!) I've mucked with isapnptools until I'm blue in the face and have yet to get my ISA PNP Awe64 recognized. Yes, I've read all relevant HOWTOs.
Autoprobing the video turns up the Crystal chip set, not the TNT Riva. This I can work around, once the driver is ready, but it does mean that X configuration has to be done manually.
Like windows auto-setup, when it works, its a blesssing. However the instant anything goes wrong, it makes everything very much harder.
I'm not blaming Linux or integration for these problems, I realize that I was just unlucky, and need to learn more as well. But I would like to see such integration accompanied by a simple method of disabling integrated devices in hardware (like a jumper!). While I'm at it, please no more PNP cards/chips that can't disable PNP! I'd much rather have to determine my IO, DMA, and IRQ settings than be unable to change or set them easily.
Jim
This is the part I think some folks (including me) are concerned about:
"Linux for the masses will be consistent across all platforms. No multiple distributions or window managers. One and only one of each. "
I have no problems whatsoever with a special distribution for the masses, but to say that we must all live with a distribution or window manager designed solely for the computer illiterate just isn't acceptable.
To attract users at the cost of driving away developers is not going to help. Linux can support both, and it should.
The notion that Windows only presents one way of doing things is completely false. I can run programs by the Run prompt, the Start menu, clicking shortcuts, using a DOS Window as a CLI, double clicking from Explorer, etc. This hasn't interfered with Window's usability, apparently.
Choice is good.