This is the usual completely meaningless accounting, with a myriad of methodological flaws. You cannot make a general statement about bugginess of open-source vs. closed-source code. There are just too many variables to conduct a statistically meaningful study.
The reason why open source code is better bug-wise is very simple: the user of the code can fix the bugs. As a developer, I hate to depend on closed-source code. Why? Because *every* moderately large code, open or closed, has bugs, and they invariably show up at some point. I much rather go fix the issue myself that wait for some random amount of time (including forever) for someone else to fix the bug for me.
One of the top problems in CPU design is distributing the signal to every gate. It is very wasteful. Clockless CPUs are a revolution waiting to happen. And it will. The idea is just better in every respect. It will take effort to reengineer design tools and retrain designers, but they are far superior (now that we really know how to make them, which is a recent development).
The old business model is also far worse, so radios should really welcome the new era. Adding coverage used to require a huge investment in equipment. Content can now be distributed to the entire world in the form of podcasts and streams, which are much easier to scale, making the number of potential listeners and therefore revenue sources much much larger. Good content can now pay off far more handsomely. For example, my favorite station is outside my state, and it would have gone through very hard times without out-of-state contributions.
Peter Naur is an interesting character. For example, he dislikes the term "Computer Science", and prefers "Datalogy". He also gives Backus the whole credit for inventing BNF, which he calls the Backus Normal Form. I'm sure he has a better name for Algol-60...
Sure, but it's free, and it works much better than the email system in half the companies using Microsoft's solution. I've experienced plenty of MS based email systems that work really poorly, losing emails, breaking aliases after each reorganization, doing a bad job with spam and viruses, etc., and all of these for lots of cash (email sysadmins + software licenses). Outsourcing and outcosting email to Gmail is really attractive for plenty of organizations, especially small to medium size ones.
Universities and other educational institutions are another good market for this. Gmail's free, high-quality service is substantially better than anything I've seen in the three university email systems I've dealt with over the years. Let's face it. Gmail is works damn well, so it's hard to justify paying for a poorer service.
Google will censor search results in their new google.cn site, which is required by the Chinese government to run a search engine in their country. Their other sites, like google.com, are still as open as they were before (which means that the Chinese government is blocking some stuff anyway).
If those activities are worthy, people will pay for them. There is not need to hijack scientific publishing, which should be free as in "we already paid for the research with our taxes", to subsidize those activities.
If they were to offer a real publishing service, then I would pay for it. I'd like to give them content and they take care of fighting with Latex, Word or whatever formatting tool. They should take care of creating top-quality charts and plots. They should take care of storing my data and my programs, so anybody can double-check my results. That would be useful. The current state of affair is ridiculous. Authors do all the work, and they cannot even share the results on the Internet. Journals have no right to steal the copyright from authors. In the past, when publishing in journals was the only choice, they had us researchers enslaved. Not anymore and never again.
what effect would this have on the health of society?"
To make people think twice before murdering? Sounds pretty healthy to me.
I like to live in a country where the judge can gather evidence to resolve a crime. This is called the healthy rule of law, and has nothing to do with the government spying on the citizens, which is very unhealthy. This kind of confusion is really hurting our privacy rights.
Project Xanadu was founded by Ted Nelson in 1960 as the original hypertext project. It was referred to by Wired Magazine as longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry: the first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it wasn't until 1998 that (incomplete) software was released. In the meantime, the World Wide Web came into being, fulfilling many of the project's underlying visions.
His pretentious letter with no content whatsoever is a great example of this character, and of the worthless hypertext literature prior to the web. This was academic waste time at its best. Luckily, a despicable tekky got inspired, did some hard work, and gave us something useful and usable. He changed the history of mankind for ever. Others, like Dr. Nelson, only gave us a headache.
In an unprecedented prank, NASA engineers sent capsule with astrologer and her lawyer towards Mercury. Her parents sued over the suffering endured by her daughter while sharing the tiny capsule with a lawyer. "Ok, I must admit that part was not nice", said a nerdy NASA engineer. Oddly enough, this "astral trip" was part of a previous settlement...
The best part about the internet is, it's given everyone a voice.
The worst part about the internet is, it's given people like this a voice.
But, it takes 5 minutes of googling to find the problems with these alternative theories. In a sense, the Internet is the ultimate dream of peer reviewing, which is the foundation of modern science.
What else would you use to promote innovation? Posters in the restroom? Inspirational speeches by top management? Innovation is about allowing your employees to have lots of ideas, trying them out, and be open to take the few that really work, making billions out of them. Sure, this process can be terribly inefficient and expensive if poorly managed, but Google is probably smarter than that. Also, innovation is about smart, creative people having time to think and having little fear to be wrong. When you give the opportunity to innovate to the top talent Google hires, you cannot help but go well beyond your competitors. Guaranteed.
I'm not saying they will not screw up the business side, and go under. I'm saying that, in the technical side, their setup is just perfect. I cannot think of a better way of building an innovation juggernaut.
Oh, yes, and everytime I don't find something in yahoo, I used MSN search. It just works better.
Show me the query, and I'll believe you. Otherwise, I trust Google, the search engine that got us through the dark days of the web (remember the crap Altavista produced?). The Internet as a whole is far more useful thanks to Google. Glad to hear that Yahoo learned a lesson or two though. Others didn't.
This is an academic research paper, and one of the authors in in MS Research UK. He gets paid to come up with researchy ideas, not to build products or do anything related to MS's business. No P2P product will ever be release by MS based on this technology. Why in the world would they want to make a ton of enemies without making any money?
No, the kicker is that Google engineers read Slashdot, and they really care to improve their services. Wait and see. Either they drop Google Schole (which I doubt) and it will surpass everybody else.
Google Scholar is not an attempt to replicate repositories like citeseer and the like. It is a specialized search service! If I search for a paper using Scholar, I get links from many different repositories, and from the web site of the authors. That's what this is all about. Furthermore, as a researcher, I always use plain Google or Google Scholar to locate papers, and I do have access to every other service. Google is just better at it than any other service. Do you know why? Because it gets the job done without any brain damage search language, without broken links and it searches the whole web, not just your random journal list. Can Google Scholar improve? Sure, but the article is pretty biased against a free (as in beer) service.
Also, there are other great free indexes out there that are not even mentioned in the article, like DBLP.
How a Bookmaker and a Whiz Kid Took On an Extortionist -- and Won
Facing an online extortion threat, Mickey Richardson bet his Web-based business on a networking whiz from Sacramento who first beat back the bad guys, then helped the cops nab them. If you collect revenue online, you'd better read this.
CSO Magazine May 2005 By Scott Berinato
Saturday, Nov. 22, 2003, 7:57 a.m. Origins of an Onslaught The e-mail began, "Your site is under attack," and it gave Mickey Richardson two choices: "You can send us $40K by Western Union [and] your site will be protected not just this weekend but for the next 12 months," or, "If you choose not to pay...you will be under attack each weekend for the next 20 weeks, or until you close your doors."
Richardson runs BetCris.com, an online wagering site, one of hundreds of sites ensconced in Costa Rica that take bets from Americans (and others around the world) without concern for U.S. bookmaking laws. Richardson received the e-mail just as he and his competitors were preparing for the year's busiest wagering season. With pro and college football, pro and college basketball and other sports in full swing, and with Thanksgiving and Christmas about to create plenty of free time, BetCris and the others stood to rake in millions over the holidays. Richardson was even planning an advertising blitz for the season to drive new traffic to his site.
If BetCris went down, he knew his customers would find another online bookie, "which will cost you tens of thousands of dollars in lost wagers and customers," the extortionists reminded him.
Despite all that, the e-mail didn't have the fearsome effect on Richardson that the extortionists hoped it would. He just asked his network administrator, Glenn Lebumfacil, if they should be concerned. "I said--God, in hindsight, what an idiot--I said, 'We should be safe. I think our network is nice and tight,'" recalls Lebumfacil.
As a precaution, Richardson alerted his ISP, but essentially, he says, "We kind of fluffed it off." The veteran bookmaker didn't panic because, in fact, he had dealt with online extortionists before. Two years earlier, hackers crashed BetCris.com with a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, and then demanded by e-mail a $500 protection fee in eGold (an online form of trading bullion). Richardson paid without a second thought. Compared to downtime, $500 was trivial.
That first attack got his attention, though. Richardson consulted another industry veteran who confessed to having a similar problem, and who told Richardson to call a consultant named Barrett Lyon in Sacramento, Calif. Lyon didn't come to BetCris's offices--he had no interest in baby-sitting infrastructure in Costa Rica--but he did recommend some off-the-shelf products that had recently been developed specifically to fight DoS attacks. Lyon thought (actually he hoped) that he'd never hear from them again. Richardson and Lebumfacil were confident they had protected themselves.
When the attack finally came on that Saturday in November, sometime after that first e-mail but before 11:30 a.m., BetCris crashed hard. The off-the-shelf products Lyon had recommended survived less than 10 minutes. BetCris's ISP crashed, and then the ISP for BetCris's ISP crashed. Richardson ran to the IT department, where Lebumfacil was watching the biggest DoS attack he'd ever seen. He remembers feeling sick to his stomach.
At 1:03 p.m., another e-mail arrived. "I guess you have decided to fight instead of making a deal. We thought you were smart.... You have 1 hour to make a deal today or it will cost you $50K to make a deal on Sunday." Then they knocked BetCris.com offline again.
The Extortion Problem We know this about online extortion: It happens. Evidence of its prevalence or damage is speculative and anecdotal but useful nonetheless in guiding CSOs to understand the nature of the crime. Anecdotally, experts from law enforcement and information security consultants believe that perhaps one in 1
There are many technical problems with this change. It essentially undermines IDNA, which is now on standards track, by adding a level of guessing to the DNS that IDNA is explicitly designed to avoid. Further, it makes it appear that IDNs are only useful in domain names for web sites (and only for sites in.com and.net), and only at the second level. VGRS has said that their plug-in will not work with most of the ccTLDs, for example.
For example, if you enter.com in Internet Explorer for Windows, where "" is the single hex octet 0xE5, you see the screen shown in the attached file called "[lynn-message-to-iab-06jan03-]e5.tif". (Sorry about the TIFF image, but it's the only reliable format for PC screen dumps.) As you can see, VGRS makes wild guesses about what the user wanted, some of which are very clearly impossible. Worse yet, they do not include all of the legal guesses that they could have made. And, just to make it completely confusing to the user, not all of the choices work.
The DNS is not supposed to be a best-guess service, yet VGRS has turned.com and.net into this just before IDNA is to be an RFC. VGRS should not be allowed, through its monopoly on the.com and.net gTLDs, to destroy the coherence of the DNS for its own short-term profit. ICANN should demand that VGRS immediately stop giving incorrect answers to any query in.com and.net, and should instead follow the IETF standards. If VGRS refuses, ICANN should re-delegate the.com and.net zones to registries that are more willing to follow the DNS standards.
Yes, but (BIG BUT) the quality of science in the US is generally higher. No kidding. I'm a computer science researcher, and I'm tired of reading the low quality stuff that comes out of European countries. University systems in most European countries are very rigid and focus on the number (not the quality) of publications, so I see way too many rewrites of the same paper, too much theoretical non-sense that solves no problem whatsoever, and other useless stuff that completely inflates the number of "publications per capita". And don't give the "peer review" crap. Elsevier has a ton of dubious quality, "who-cares" science journals that are "peer reviewed". The submission they receive are so bad that they cannot really do much filtering. American Universities and the NSF are much better at maintaining standards, since the evaluation of candidates and funding proposals examines paper quantity *and* the place in which papers are published *and* the overall project/research line of a researcher.
(this is a counter-argument of the "per-capita publications"="better science" argument above; I'm not saying everything from Europe is bad -- it would be plain wrong to say that)
Slashdot Mirror
This is the usual completely meaningless accounting, with a myriad of methodological flaws. You cannot make a general statement about bugginess of open-source vs. closed-source code. There are just too many variables to conduct a statistically meaningful study. The reason why open source code is better bug-wise is very simple: the user of the code can fix the bugs. As a developer, I hate to depend on closed-source code. Why? Because *every* moderately large code, open or closed, has bugs, and they invariably show up at some point. I much rather go fix the issue myself that wait for some random amount of time (including forever) for someone else to fix the bug for me.
Too late, they ARE called clockless CPUs:_ CPUs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_design#Clockless
Yes, they are based on asynchronous digital logic, but calling them clockless is ok. They do NOT have a clock signal.
One of the top problems in CPU design is distributing the signal to every gate. It is very wasteful. Clockless CPUs are a revolution waiting to happen. And it will. The idea is just better in every respect. It will take effort to reengineer design tools and retrain designers, but they are far superior (now that we really know how to make them, which is a recent development).
The old business model is also far worse, so radios should really welcome the new era. Adding coverage used to require a huge investment in equipment. Content can now be distributed to the entire world in the form of podcasts and streams, which are much easier to scale, making the number of potential listeners and therefore revenue sources much much larger. Good content can now pay off far more handsomely. For example, my favorite station is outside my state, and it would have gone through very hard times without out-of-state contributions.
Put these crooks in jail, before they kill the Internet completely. These guys really really hate innovation.
Peter Naur is an interesting character. For example, he dislikes the term "Computer Science", and prefers "Datalogy". He also gives Backus the whole credit for inventing BNF, which he calls the Backus Normal Form. I'm sure he has a better name for Algol-60...
Sure, but it's free, and it works much better than the email system in half the companies using Microsoft's solution. I've experienced plenty of MS based email systems that work really poorly, losing emails, breaking aliases after each reorganization, doing a bad job with spam and viruses, etc., and all of these for lots of cash (email sysadmins + software licenses). Outsourcing and outcosting email to Gmail is really attractive for plenty of organizations, especially small to medium size ones. Universities and other educational institutions are another good market for this. Gmail's free, high-quality service is substantially better than anything I've seen in the three university email systems I've dealt with over the years. Let's face it. Gmail is works damn well, so it's hard to justify paying for a poorer service.
Agreed. The usual Deluxe and Premium please my macho pride much better.
Google will censor search results in their new google.cn site, which is required by the Chinese government to run a search engine in their country. Their other sites, like google.com, are still as open as they were before (which means that the Chinese government is blocking some stuff anyway).
If those activities are worthy, people will pay for them. There is not need to hijack scientific publishing, which should be free as in "we already paid for the research with our taxes", to subsidize those activities.
If they were to offer a real publishing service, then I would pay for it. I'd like to give them content and they take care of fighting with Latex, Word or whatever formatting tool. They should take care of creating top-quality charts and plots. They should take care of storing my data and my programs, so anybody can double-check my results. That would be useful. The current state of affair is ridiculous. Authors do all the work, and they cannot even share the results on the Internet. Journals have no right to steal the copyright from authors. In the past, when publishing in journals was the only choice, they had us researchers enslaved. Not anymore and never again.
As usual, too many typos in slashdot's stories, argh.
To make people think twice before murdering? Sounds pretty healthy to me.
I like to live in a country where the judge can gather evidence to resolve a crime. This is called the healthy rule of law, and has nothing to do with the government spying on the citizens, which is very unhealthy. This kind of confusion is really hurting our privacy rights.
From wikipedia:
His pretentious letter with no content whatsoever is a great example of this character, and of the worthless hypertext literature prior to the web. This was academic waste time at its best. Luckily, a despicable tekky got inspired, did some hard work, and gave us something useful and usable. He changed the history of mankind for ever. Others, like Dr. Nelson, only gave us a headache.
Let's see the other side of the story:
Don't slashdot them too hard, and please remember to disable your cache when you browse their pages (your brain's cache too!)... ;)
In an unprecedented prank, NASA engineers sent capsule with astrologer and her lawyer towards Mercury. Her parents sued over the suffering endured by her daughter while sharing the tiny capsule with a lawyer. "Ok, I must admit that part was not nice", said a nerdy NASA engineer. Oddly enough, this "astral trip" was part of a previous settlement...
What else would you use to promote innovation? Posters in the restroom? Inspirational speeches by top management? Innovation is about allowing your employees to have lots of ideas, trying them out, and be open to take the few that really work, making billions out of them. Sure, this process can be terribly inefficient and expensive if poorly managed, but Google is probably smarter than that. Also, innovation is about smart, creative people having time to think and having little fear to be wrong. When you give the opportunity to innovate to the top talent Google hires, you cannot help but go well beyond your competitors. Guaranteed.
I'm not saying they will not screw up the business side, and go under. I'm saying that, in the technical side, their setup is just perfect. I cannot think of a better way of building an innovation juggernaut.
Oh, yes, and everytime I don't find something in yahoo, I used MSN search. It just works better.
Show me the query, and I'll believe you. Otherwise, I trust Google, the search engine that got us through the dark days of the web (remember the crap Altavista produced?). The Internet as a whole is far more useful thanks to Google. Glad to hear that Yahoo learned a lesson or two though. Others didn't.
This is an academic research paper, and one of the authors in in MS Research UK. He gets paid to come up with researchy ideas, not to build products or do anything related to MS's business. No P2P product will ever be release by MS based on this technology. Why in the world would they want to make a ton of enemies without making any money?
No, the kicker is that Google engineers read Slashdot, and they really care to improve their services. Wait and see. Either they drop Google Schole (which I doubt) and it will surpass everybody else.
Google Scholar is not an attempt to replicate repositories like citeseer and the like. It is a specialized search service! If I search for a paper using Scholar, I get links from many different repositories, and from the web site of the authors. That's what this is all about. Furthermore, as a researcher, I always use plain Google or Google Scholar to locate papers, and I do have access to every other service. Google is just better at it than any other service. Do you know why? Because it gets the job done without any brain damage search language, without broken links and it searches the whole web, not just your random journal list. Can Google Scholar improve? Sure, but the article is pretty biased against a free (as in beer) service.
Also, there are other great free indexes out there that are not even mentioned in the article, like DBLP.
How a Bookmaker
and a Whiz Kid
Took On an Extortionist --
and Won
Facing an online extortion threat, Mickey Richardson bet his Web-based business on a networking whiz from Sacramento who first beat back the bad guys, then helped the cops nab them. If you collect revenue online, you'd better read this.
CSO Magazine
May 2005
By Scott Berinato
Saturday, Nov. 22, 2003, 7:57 a.m.
Origins of an Onslaught
The e-mail began, "Your site is under attack," and it gave Mickey Richardson two choices: "You can send us $40K by Western Union [and] your site will be protected not just this weekend but for the next 12 months," or, "If you choose not to pay...you will be under attack each weekend for the next 20 weeks, or until you close your doors."
Richardson runs BetCris.com, an online wagering site, one of hundreds of sites ensconced in Costa Rica that take bets from Americans (and others around the world) without concern for U.S. bookmaking laws. Richardson received the e-mail just as he and his competitors were preparing for the year's busiest wagering season. With pro and college football, pro and college basketball and other sports in full swing, and with Thanksgiving and Christmas about to create plenty of free time, BetCris and the others stood to rake in millions over the holidays. Richardson was even planning an advertising blitz for the season to drive new traffic to his site.
If BetCris went down, he knew his customers would find another online bookie, "which will cost you tens of thousands of dollars in lost wagers and customers," the extortionists reminded him.
Despite all that, the e-mail didn't have the fearsome effect on Richardson that the extortionists hoped it would. He just asked his network administrator, Glenn Lebumfacil, if they should be concerned. "I said--God, in hindsight, what an idiot--I said, 'We should be safe. I think our network is nice and tight,'" recalls Lebumfacil.
As a precaution, Richardson alerted his ISP, but essentially, he says, "We kind of fluffed it off." The veteran bookmaker didn't panic because, in fact, he had dealt with online extortionists before. Two years earlier, hackers crashed BetCris.com with a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, and then demanded by e-mail a $500 protection fee in eGold (an online form of trading bullion). Richardson paid without a second thought. Compared to downtime, $500 was trivial.
That first attack got his attention, though. Richardson consulted another industry veteran who confessed to having a similar problem, and who told Richardson to call a consultant named Barrett Lyon in Sacramento, Calif. Lyon didn't come to BetCris's offices--he had no interest in baby-sitting infrastructure in Costa Rica--but he did recommend some off-the-shelf products that had recently been developed specifically to fight DoS attacks. Lyon thought (actually he hoped) that he'd never hear from them again. Richardson and Lebumfacil were confident they had protected themselves.
When the attack finally came on that Saturday in November, sometime after that first e-mail but before 11:30 a.m., BetCris crashed hard. The off-the-shelf products Lyon had recommended survived less than 10 minutes. BetCris's ISP crashed, and then the ISP for BetCris's ISP crashed. Richardson ran to the IT department, where Lebumfacil was watching the biggest DoS attack he'd ever seen. He remembers feeling sick to his stomach.
At 1:03 p.m., another e-mail arrived. "I guess you have decided to fight instead of making a deal. We thought you were smart.... You have 1 hour to make a deal today or it will cost you $50K to make a deal on Sunday." Then they knocked BetCris.com offline again.
The Extortion Problem
We know this about online extortion: It happens. Evidence of its prevalence or damage is speculative and anecdotal but useful nonetheless in guiding CSOs to understand the nature of the crime. Anecdotally, experts from law enforcement and information security consultants believe that perhaps one in 1
Oh my God! I'm switching back to Internet Explorer right away!
Yes, but (BIG BUT) the quality of science in the US is generally higher. No kidding. I'm a computer science researcher, and I'm tired of reading the low quality stuff that comes out of European countries. University systems in most European countries are very rigid and focus on the number (not the quality) of publications, so I see way too many rewrites of the same paper, too much theoretical non-sense that solves no problem whatsoever, and other useless stuff that completely inflates the number of "publications per capita". And don't give the "peer review" crap. Elsevier has a ton of dubious quality, "who-cares" science journals that are "peer reviewed". The submission they receive are so bad that they cannot really do much filtering. American Universities and the NSF are much better at maintaining standards, since the evaluation of candidates and funding proposals examines paper quantity *and* the place in which papers are published *and* the overall project/research line of a researcher.
(this is a counter-argument of the "per-capita publications"="better science" argument above; I'm not saying everything from Europe is bad -- it would be plain wrong to say that)
The "best shelter" site is already down. You can try Google cache