Then again, LISP invented everything by similar stretchies.
I love lisp - but CLOS gives me the creeps. It may
be OO - but it reeks of pre-processor magic to me.
I think smalltalk invented the
cosmic hierarchy
(aka "object model") as we know it.
Microsoft's scripting support has been lacking in a lot of ways ever since batch files.
This has got to be the blandest understatements I
have ever seen on slashdot.
I use Windows for many things and think Visual
Studio is an excellent development environment. It
is what emacs should have been. That said, I've
never really felt at home in Windows because of
the awful, dane-bramaged, evil, despicable,
cluster that is the Windows console command shell.
Cygwin makes it a little better, but does not
interoperate with Windows in many ways that you
would expect. eg: shortcuts are not symlinks,
endline conventions are not handled invisbly,
drag and drop not fully supported, cut and paste
still limited by native console libraries, etc.
Python also goes a long way to automating tasks
like dumping excel spreadsheets to csv format,
find and replacing a name in a large number of
documents, etc.
I hope Microsoft can deliver all this with
a single set of tools. I'll certainly use it.
For someone who has never had to kick a habit, like drugs, drinking, sex, smoking, etc... it's easy to stand there and laugh at those of us who have been there and tell us simply to "stop" or "don't".
You are not a unique or beautiful snowflake. We have
all had problems and difficulties in our lives.
Many of us have beat addiction of some sort. I
feel fully justified with responding "stop" and
"don't" to someone complaining about an addiction.
My understanding is that what they want to do is require or ISPs to monitor all users and give all information to the goverment.
No. They want to have ISPs give the ability for
the government to tap the ISP's networks at will.
Isnt this basically impossible? First off, the bandwidth requirements alone would make the process unfeasable. The whole reason the internet is a called a network and not a bus is that the information is distributed. This distribution is what makes the internet possible. Funneling all the information into centralized locations would violate the network topology.
Watching all traffic is currently impossible. More
likely will be profiling. Port 80, to a search
engine, looking for "los alamos" "theoretical"
"nuclear" "weapons" might get your ip flagged for
more attention. Use encryption on your email?
Expect your unencrypted traffic to be watched more
carefully - IM, IRC, http.
This
kind of thing is already in production test. The
major problems right now are still political and
administrative.
I agree with your basic point that this will not
very effective outside the US, but that will not
stop or slow deployment.
Because the government of the world's largest democracy just told the world's biggest business to go soak its head.
I love it when people call India a democracy. The
caste system is a very effective means of
keeping the proles in check. Hell, in India they are
not even proles, proles are at least human.
As others have pointed out - Microsoft is hardly
the world's largest business.
How exactly does hiring a US-based team obviate the need for harc-core requirements definition? Will the US team work for free if the customer's requirements specification was screwed up?
Most projects with any real scope miss tons of
requirements. This means that the team and customer have to negotiate date or feature slips. Much harder to do if the two cannot meet face to face.
Reeds Law is very true. All networks are proof of this. A single phone line was absolutely worthless, but as thousands and then millions of phone lines were added to the network, each individual phone line become that much more valuable. The same holds true of for fax machines, internet connections and smart mobs
The phone network is a good example of why increasing the size of a network can reduce the value of nodes and network. eg: The US switch to
10
digits. Need another? The ridiculous UK numbering
system, only new numbers need additional digits.
Both schemes damage existing subscribers by adding
complexity and the need for more intelligence in
management systems.
Complexity in networks is to management software
what heat is to electrical engineers. This is also
why Apple and MS networks fail when they reach a
certain size (determined by the amount of
forethought dedicated to network growth).
Worst case for Microsoft is that the "cheap licenses" contract is no longer binding. The university still has to obtain licenses for the software it's already using.
Worst case for Microsoft is losing the chance to
get
students to accept Windows as a standard.
If funds are low, the college stops using that
software and goes with something less expensive.
The budget is not always mutable.
Example: "ghoti" spells fish. "gh" as in "trough". "o" as in "women". "ti" as in "station".
There are valid reasons for the 15% of English
that is 'odd', and none of those resons allow
'ghoti' to be pronounced 'fish'.
giga as 'jiga' is correct, but like 'forte' or
'demesne' apt to get a strange look from most.
Re:Hmmmm, interesting. It still sucked.
on
Taken?
·
· Score: 1
True, but I would say that morals are the rules
for generating ethics. It is the difference between
studying a language and linguistics.
I read your journal review and am going to give
AI a second viewing.
Re:Hmmmm, interesting. It still sucked.
on
Taken?
·
· Score: 1
What is the duty of a creator to the created? Why
were humans so worried by replicants transcending
their programming and developing their own
emotional responses? What is intelligence?
Although Blade Runner is a fairly
straightforward story, the motivations that set up
the story are not.
Witness the sometimes saccharine p.c.-sweetness of "Star Trek."
Earth. Glory Season.
Re:Hmmmm, interesting. It still sucked.
on
Taken?
·
· Score: 2
If you think AI was even superficially similar to Blade Runner, you need to watch one or both of the movies again. Both movies deal with human-shaped robots in the not-too-distant future. That's where the similarities end.
Some themes always show up when fiction involves
a created being that can communicate
with its creator. That may be the similarity to
which Mr. AC refers.
Re:Since google isn't publicly held...
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 2
The article mentions the problem of profit
demand from shareholders leading to yahoo
giving in on the obAds.
I'm sure Google will let shareholders know
that positive user experience is part of the
value of Google. Nothing would kill that value
faster than a blinking, flashing, trashpage.
Ever seen a porn ad on Google?
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The fact that the default SafeSearch setting
prevents these ads from showing up seems reasonable.
As a developer, I would like to know that I can count on certain libraries being included in the distributions for which I write code. I would also like to feel confidant that the libraries will stay backward compatible so that I don't have to keep rewriting / recompiling my products for new versions.
Preach it brother.:)
This is a serious problems with libraries, that
seems to be
especially bad in the free software world.
Sometimes the changes are just trivial silliness:
add/remove a param from an initialization function
and recompile. Obnoxious, but not the end of the
world. Other times the changes are deeper and
require a fair amount of work. The frustration is
that there is no standard about what can change in
major, minor, and patch revisions.
A simple set of rules that govern:
When an API function can be removed. Major after deprecation marking for full revision.
When a param change requiring a cast may be
made. Compile visible, but not link visible. Minor
When a param change requiring relinking can
be made. Major
How internal functions are named. I prefer a trailing underscore.
When external structs can be changed. Major.
yadda, yadda, yadd
The dev branch of a library would not be subject
to these kinds of rules, and dist maintainers
should never use such a branch.
Have you ever worked at a big company? I've worked at a few, and my personal experience is that in really large companies (say, more than 1000 employees) this very particular organizational rot sets in... When the people making the decisions are so removed from their customers, they just stop caring. And if there is no competition to make them care, they'll just get fat and sleepy, and their customers will fall behind.
I've worked at a big company. I would not consider
1000 a really large company (large regional
maybe). Large companies can be much more
responsive and effective than a small company
in many industries.
The problem is that you cannot make money in
a consumer service business if you let your
customers determine your actions, your actions
must determined by the competive environment.
How comfortable would you be deploying a solution (hardware or software) where the fundamental design isn't even understood? How the heck do you fix such a thing once it's deployed?
In this case it does not matter much. The method
used to sort data is not likely to be visible in
the design.
Any program that lives through
multiple maintainers (esp. any interns) likely
has code that no one understands. Layers of
compatability requirements mean you can never
change the softwares behaviour, but no one can
figure out everything the software is doing.
Ever see modules
with comments like:
/* XXX: 09/17/97 - What does this do? */
if (someglobal->_pt->getTarget()->foo() ==
MAGIC_COOKIE_42 + 7)
Maybe with some inconsistently applied attempts
at a naming convention thrown in to repel all
attempts to figure out what the code is doing.
I don't have first-hand experience with it myself, but it's something I've always considered.
Make sure you do a trial first. I've tried the
service twice and found it slow and sometimes
buggy. The selection of books is okay. I have
access to a books24x7 corporate account through
my employer, and it is a
slightly more polished service with about the
same selection of tech books. Neither of these
services is something I'd pay for yet.
They are _not_ patenting Regular Expressions or Regular Experssion that run against packet data. Again, it's the fudemental "signature" events they are patenting. Much like a new programming language patenting some proprietary classes.
I've used packet content and state signatures to generate events
for proxies or FSM transitions for quite some
time. A match-event
pairing seems a natural way to achieve this.
I agree it is not like they are patenting
'grep', but this is a new application
of an old idea, rather than a new idea.
This notion of having md5sums to verify integrity is useless if the hash value and the actual binary are stored on the same server, where both can be compromised at the same time.
Exactly. The system under discussion is better
because the checksum is stored remotely. There is
still the possibility that 'ls' or 'md5sum' or
'md5' or 'libcrypt.so' or... ANYTHING has
been compromised on the local system to return
a result that looks okay.
A paranoid could only only feel good about this
type of system by
checking files with statically compiled binaries
stored on read-only media, the identity of the
remote server verified by private key, the
integrity of the remote data verififed by
private key, and all this done with randomly
generated
names for everything to avoid triggering pattern
recognition on 'security' 'md5' or the like by
any trojan lurking in the kernel or libc.
Re:4 days?? Is this as scary as it sounds?
on
DreamHack Winter 2002
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Is the non-showering of geeks the cause of them not dating, or is not showering just a result of no woman being interested in them?
The non-showering variety of geek you are
referring to are those who for some reason
are very late to mature physically. What ten year
old with a new toy is interested in taking a bath?
Once puberty does start they are very anti-social
because of unfair treatment because they lag
behind their peers in social development. Once
in puberty they are unable to pick up social and
sexual cues - this includes hygiene motivation.
By the time puberty is done you wind up with
comic book guy. He is now interested in women, but
lacks the basic skills or attention to hygiene
needed to attract them.
Then again I'm biased because I don't like cell phones in the first place.
Too right. I'm waiting for some jackass
with that nokia tone and the ring volume cranked up
to be beat bloody with the offending phone when he
lets it ring continuously in public.
Slashdot Mirror
I love lisp - but CLOS gives me the creeps. It may be OO - but it reeks of pre-processor magic to me. I think smalltalk invented the cosmic hierarchy (aka "object model") as we know it.
This has got to be the blandest understatements I have ever seen on slashdot.
I use Windows for many things and think Visual Studio is an excellent development environment. It is what emacs should have been. That said, I've never really felt at home in Windows because of the awful, dane-bramaged, evil, despicable, cluster that is the Windows console command shell.
Cygwin makes it a little better, but does not interoperate with Windows in many ways that you would expect. eg: shortcuts are not symlinks, endline conventions are not handled invisbly, drag and drop not fully supported, cut and paste still limited by native console libraries, etc.
Python also goes a long way to automating tasks like dumping excel spreadsheets to csv format, find and replacing a name in a large number of documents, etc.
I hope Microsoft can deliver all this with a single set of tools. I'll certainly use it.
You are not a unique or beautiful snowflake. We have all had problems and difficulties in our lives. Many of us have beat addiction of some sort. I feel fully justified with responding "stop" and "don't" to someone complaining about an addiction.
No. They want to have ISPs give the ability for the government to tap the ISP's networks at will.
Isnt this basically impossible? First off, the bandwidth requirements alone would make the process unfeasable. The whole reason the internet is a called a network and not a bus is that the information is distributed. This distribution is what makes the internet possible. Funneling all the information into centralized locations would violate the network topology.
Watching all traffic is currently impossible. More likely will be profiling. Port 80, to a search engine, looking for "los alamos" "theoretical" "nuclear" "weapons" might get your ip flagged for more attention. Use encryption on your email? Expect your unencrypted traffic to be watched more carefully - IM, IRC, http.
This kind of thing is already in production test. The major problems right now are still political and administrative.
I agree with your basic point that this will not very effective outside the US, but that will not stop or slow deployment.
I love it when people call India a democracy. The caste system is a very effective means of keeping the proles in check. Hell, in India they are not even proles, proles are at least human.
As others have pointed out - Microsoft is hardly the world's largest business.
Most projects with any real scope miss tons of requirements. This means that the team and customer have to negotiate date or feature slips. Much harder to do if the two cannot meet face to face.
The phone network is a good example of why increasing the size of a network can reduce the value of nodes and network. eg: The US switch to 10 digits. Need another? The ridiculous UK numbering system, only new numbers need additional digits. Both schemes damage existing subscribers by adding complexity and the need for more intelligence in management systems.
Complexity in networks is to management software what heat is to electrical engineers. This is also why Apple and MS networks fail when they reach a certain size (determined by the amount of forethought dedicated to network growth).
Worst case for Microsoft is losing the chance to get students to accept Windows as a standard. If funds are low, the college stops using that software and goes with something less expensive. The budget is not always mutable.
There are valid reasons for the 15% of English that is 'odd', and none of those resons allow 'ghoti' to be pronounced 'fish'.
giga as 'jiga' is correct, but like 'forte' or 'demesne' apt to get a strange look from most.
I read your journal review and am going to give AI a second viewing.
Although Blade Runner is a fairly straightforward story, the motivations that set up the story are not.
Earth. Glory Season.
Some themes always show up when fiction involves a created being that can communicate with its creator. That may be the similarity to which Mr. AC refers.
I'm sure Google will let shareholders know that positive user experience is part of the value of Google. Nothing would kill that value faster than a blinking, flashing, trashpage.
The fact that the default SafeSearch setting prevents these ads from showing up seems reasonable.
A synopsis of the PC vs. console debate can be found here
The story of A.I. is much like the best stories by Phil K. Dick, philosophical, but not heavy-handed.
Minority report is one of PKDs concept stories. Take a "what if..." and run with it. Entertaining, but the surface is pretty much all there is to it.
Preach it brother. :)
This is a serious problems with libraries, that seems to be especially bad in the free software world. Sometimes the changes are just trivial silliness: add/remove a param from an initialization function and recompile. Obnoxious, but not the end of the world. Other times the changes are deeper and require a fair amount of work. The frustration is that there is no standard about what can change in major, minor, and patch revisions.
A simple set of rules that govern:
- When an API function can be removed. Major after deprecation marking for full revision.
- When a param change requiring a cast may be
made. Compile visible, but not link visible. Minor
- When a param change requiring relinking can
be made. Major
- How internal functions are named. I prefer a trailing underscore.
- When external structs can be changed. Major.
- yadda, yadda, yadd
The dev branch of a library would not be subject to these kinds of rules, and dist maintainers should never use such a branch.I've worked at a big company. I would not consider 1000 a really large company (large regional maybe). Large companies can be much more responsive and effective than a small company in many industries.
The problem is that you cannot make money in a consumer service business if you let your customers determine your actions, your actions must determined by the competive environment.
In this case it does not matter much. The method used to sort data is not likely to be visible in the design.
Any program that lives through multiple maintainers (esp. any interns) likely has code that no one understands. Layers of compatability requirements mean you can never change the softwares behaviour, but no one can figure out everything the software is doing.
Ever see modules with comments like:
if (someglobal->_pt->getTarget()->foo() == MAGIC_COOKIE_42 + 7)
Maybe with some inconsistently applied attempts at a naming convention thrown in to repel all attempts to figure out what the code is doing.
Make sure you do a trial first. I've tried the service twice and found it slow and sometimes buggy. The selection of books is okay. I have access to a books24x7 corporate account through my employer, and it is a slightly more polished service with about the same selection of tech books. Neither of these services is something I'd pay for yet.
I've used packet content and state signatures to generate events for proxies or FSM transitions for quite some time. A match-event pairing seems a natural way to achieve this.
I agree it is not like they are patenting 'grep', but this is a new application of an old idea, rather than a new idea.
Exactly. The system under discussion is better because the checksum is stored remotely. There is still the possibility that 'ls' or 'md5sum' or 'md5' or 'libcrypt.so' or ... ANYTHING has
been compromised on the local system to return
a result that looks okay.
A paranoid could only only feel good about this type of system by checking files with statically compiled binaries stored on read-only media, the identity of the remote server verified by private key, the integrity of the remote data verififed by private key, and all this done with randomly generated names for everything to avoid triggering pattern recognition on 'security' 'md5' or the like by any trojan lurking in the kernel or libc.
The non-showering variety of geek you are referring to are those who for some reason are very late to mature physically. What ten year old with a new toy is interested in taking a bath? Once puberty does start they are very anti-social because of unfair treatment because they lag behind their peers in social development. Once in puberty they are unable to pick up social and sexual cues - this includes hygiene motivation.
By the time puberty is done you wind up with comic book guy. He is now interested in women, but lacks the basic skills or attention to hygiene needed to attract them.
Too right. I'm waiting for some jackass with that nokia tone and the ring volume cranked up to be beat bloody with the offending phone when he lets it ring continuously in public.
Hmm, maybe Texas will lead the way on this...