So call it a co-op system. The kids are providing a useful service to the schools, and doing something that they seem to enjoy, while helping their community and learning at the same time. I don't really see a "child labor" problem in that. If these kids weren't working in schools and going to schools, they would probably be selling things in the streets, working long hours doing heavy labor on the family farm, or something along those lines. The truth is that projects like this may not be possible without the "labor" of children. If they were not working, they would not be home watching cartoons. Cambodia is a nation that has had its culture and economy devistated by years of Communist misrule. There are not a lot of options for rural children. Better that they work in a school during the day than that they wander into a mine field.
Agreed. I don't think this sort of thing should go on libraries. It was installed on computers at my school for a while when I was in HS, and it was worse than useless. It blocked access to useful sights, and probably allowed access to thousands of porn sites (didn't poke around looking for them, but that would be my guess). But, if you consider the demographic that their software was targeting, there is a reason that they included the sites that they did. That was my main point.
On parrot law: one more proof that there is little fundamental consensus in society. If I rules, killing parrots would not only be legal, but mandatory.;)
I don't really know that anarchism is or isn't what little kids are ready for, and not being a parent, I don't care. As I mentioned before, my point was to show that there was a rationale, one based on the perceptions of the intended market of the product, behind why certain sites like that of Manson, ICP, and Chumbawumba were placed in the block list. Note that this != to: "they are slightly non-mainstream, and therefore it is my personal belief that they should be censored". My personal belief is that censorware is based on a number of flawed principles, but I wanted to point out that if you consider the market that they are targeting, than placing these bands in the list makes a lot of sense for them.
Not my point at all. What I was saying is that there is a reason that the sort of people that feel that SmartFilter needs to be installed on things would feel like Chumbawumba should be on the list. Not that it is right or wrong that they are possibly on the list because of their political beliefs. I was just saying that their selection might not be as arbitrary as it appears to someone who doesn't have the same (perhaps irrational) fears as the sort of people that think that filters are needed. The earlier posts seemed to imply that the selection was arbitrary, and I was trying to point out that it makes sense if you consider the market that the makers of the product are trying to appeal to.
Well, these filters are marketed to parents who are trying to keep kids away from obscene material. Lesse. . . ICP has a song that deals with screwing corpses, and Manson will sing about screwing anything that will raise an eyebrow. Chumbawumba espouse anarchist philosophy, not of itself harmful but maybe not what six year olds are ready for. I have nothing against any of these bans on artistic grounds (I was a big Manson fan for a while in high school, actually), but their material is not quite what young 'uns are ready to be exposed to, from the point of view of a person interested in buying this software to use with young kids. These filters are a product, like any other. They target a market, and they tailor to that market. As such, blocking ICP and Manson are within reason. It's the stuff about blocking random computer and sports sites that are signs that the software is uninteligent, and people who wish to use it should think twice before buying it. Remember, this stuff is a product aimed at conservative and concerned parents, not a system of values that is going to be forced upon you unless someone does something boneheaded like force this garbage to be on all public systems. A filter program is exactly some fools idea of what is right and wrong. It is not a general view of society, and would be worthless if it were, because as I can tell there aren't many general consensuses available in society, except maybe "don't kill stuff that can talk, except maybe parrots". Filters are a product. We shouldn't elevate them to a status that they don't really have.
The intention of Java is to be almost completely object oriented, for applications where object orientation is most useful. Disliking it because it is too object-orineted is like disliking Lisp for being too functional, or assembler for being too terse. That's how they were meant to be, for problems for which that property is useful. As for short and easy functions, how about the incantation to malloc() as opposed to 'new'? One of the things that makes Java fun to me is that it frees you up to focus on the problem, and not system level issues. It is a language that is close to the problem, not the machine. Each one has their place. But I would hate trying to port an application from one platform to the other that featured direct frame buffer access and no bloated, difficult API's. Abstractions (like API's) that help keep a check on machine-dependant operations(like direct frame buffer access) are what makes code portable and maintainable. And can even make coding fun, when you notice that you're spending your time solving the problem that you set out to deal with, instead of making sure that memory pointers aren't wandering into oblivion and counting in hexidecimal. But the good thing is that everyone has their own definition of fun. Some days, counting in hex may be fun. Like the days when I have 16 fingers;)
Yeah, the capitolization convention is just that: a convention. Regular Java compilers don't give a damn what you name variables, or how you name them, as long as you follow typical (C style) conventions about not naming things after keywords, or using operators as the first character or something. Sounds like VisualAge is just particularly fascist, and that you have some wacky people forcing coding guidelines on you(the getter and setter for *every* field blows my mind by the way. Can we all say "missing the point"?).
Text I/O is a bitch in Java. That's unarguable, to me. I have to look it up every time I need to read from the console. But Java wasn't really meant to be reading from the console. If I want an easy way to read text input, play pattycake with it and then send it to stdout, I'd be using Perl, or C or C++ for more complex apps. What Java has going for it is (when coded with code OOP style) a very well-thought out and fairly consistant object oriented structure that is pretty quick to develop in, thanks to good error checking at the compiler level and fun stuff like garbage collection. It also has a well-defined framework for writing cross-platform GUI's. That doesn't make it well suited to every task. But C, C++, Perl, Lisp, or Motorolla 68K assembler aren't suited to every task either.
Where it fits a specific need or makes it easier to solve a problem, I love Java. Otherwise, chuck it and use what's appropriate. Geeze, and I hope you can force that manager/admin person to look up what OOP means some time. . . "That's how it's done in the industry" == "All the other lemmings are doing it. .."
I think what he meant was that with dull knives, one tends to use more force than you would otherwise, which means that when the knife sleeps you end up with a nice, deep puncture wound, instead of a nick from a sharp knife moving at lower speed that hits you. You're right about pressure and spoons, of course, but the general rule with knives is that ones that are a little bit dull are more dangerous than sharper ones. Dull knives encourage excesive force, and foolish habits that are painfully unlearned the next time you pick up a sharp knife.
I think that there is a little bit of a difference. The loadable modules that Linux uses right now are primarily device driver style modules, and are loaded into kernel-space when they load. What the article is talking about is the inability right now under Linux to add significant system-level features (the example given was networking stacks) outside of kernel space. So there is not a way to extend the kernel in Linux without directly fooling with kernel code, one way or another. This hurts the maintainability of the system, as the amount of stuff lying around inside the kernel grows and grows. Additionally, the monolithic style (according to the writer) lacks a nice strong abstraction barrier that makes it possible to alter components individually without breaking something in the system. If the line between where things like basic kernel services and things like device interactions or networking is not clear in the code, than the odds are that if you alter one of them, you're going to end up having to alter them all. In an ideal world, the layer of abstraction insulates the rest of the system from changes. You want to rip out the old memory management code entire and put in a new one? Great. As long as you provide the same interface (API calls & c.), nothing else should need to be altered. This is of, of course, an ideal situation. Systems that are designed that well are few and far between, but in general a little extra abstraction is going to save you maintenance headaches in the long run, which can be very important on a system like Linux, which is going to go through multiple iterations and have significant modification done to it on a semi-regular basis. Generally, this is a long term problem and not an immediate one. No one is going to complain next week that non-modularity is ruining their life (okay, the guy who wrote the article), but in 5 years, when the code base has swollen more, and when advances in hardware make the performance ding due to using a more modular solution less noticable, than there may be some harried kernel hackers bemoaning the complexity (and ugliness) of a system that has grown without good abstraction and without a good non-kernel space module system.
On a mildly tangential side note, Quang Duc is something of a big figure for the Vietnamese Buddhist community in Saigon now, basically considered a martyr who used his own life to alert the world to the repression that was taking place in Vietnam at the time, which is probably why Rage used the photo for their cover. His heart, which refused to burn after multiple attempted cremations of his remains, is enshrined as a relic to this day in a temple in Vietnam.
That was Thich Quang Duc commiting suicide by self-immolation in a square in Saigon to protest the repression of Buddhists by the American-supported South Vietnamese government. The government in power was strongly Catholic, a holdover from French colonial days, and put a lot of time into angering the countries Buddhists, arresting their leaders, raiding temples, and banning the observance of holidays. The origonal photo was taken by a guy named Malcolm Brown for the AP newswire. Not, as the digital image seems to imply, by a monk with a camera. ..
I think the poster wasn't being specific enough. What he meant to say is that if you are running ICQ and then log into AIM with that ICQ number, it will disconnect you from ICQ and give you the "Your ICQ number is in use at another computer" message. I've seen it several times in the past couple days while me and my roomates played with the system.
I'm not really sure that anyone ever believed that college constituted learning "everything you need to learn for the rest of your life" in one "four year stint". Most people in business today are not doing exactly what they learned in college. Outside of academia, it is highly unlikely that your field of study in college is going to determine what job you get. And even if you take a job in a related field, even in the non-information world, you are going to be expected to learn a lot more depth in that area, or to learn business aspects that are not related to the technical aspect.
As has been driven into the ground in earlier posts, college is more about learning to learn for that lifelong cycle of learning than it is about acquiring all you'll ever need to know at once. True, not much you learn in college or grad school is going to make you a better modern programmer. But, a robust college CS or IT program might do a good job of teaching you how to quickly evaluate and learn a language, how to understand larger conceptual issues in writing a program, and how to go about learning the real-world techniques that will make you a better programmer.
correct me if i'm wrong, but i haven't seen a standard system for writing inflexions with text.
You're half right and half wrong. There are several standard systems for transcribing tonal languages. The most common ones for Chinese are the Wade-Giles system and the Pinyin system. Similar schemes exist for Vietnamese, Thai, and just about any other language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet. However, each langauge has its own transliteration system, and some languages vary significantly. Two books on teaching Thai may use completely different punctuation to express the same tone. Hence the importance of learning the actual alphabet. A lot of translation systems are outdated, weird, or just bloody minded. Both Chinese transliteration systems seem to go miles out of their way to be counter-intuitive, representing Engligh d sounds with t and English t sounds with d.
As for ASCII limitations, any transliteration system can be put into ASCII, from Chinese to Pali. And Unicode makes it possible to put a lot of non-ASCII characters into a standard representation. I'm not sure what the current system for representing Chinese is- I was pretty sure that there were some systems based on a reduced character set, but don't recall much else.
Yeah, the quote concerning MS's move towards service-based software is a little confusing (or deceptive, depending on your take). The service based approach that the Times was talking about initially concerns taking software and customizing it, or offering support, much like the models that Red Hat and others use now. The software itself is free, but you pay for additional support, convenience, and if you want something very unique done. The service model that MS has in mind (and this I have heard directly out of Steve Balmer's mouth at a speach) is more like a cable subscription, where instead of owning anything on your own machine, applications are fed to you on a metered or by-period rate. Two very, very different models that sound deceptively similar when all they say is "service based"
There would be a whole different debate if AOL had sanctioned an official release of Gnutella (after the fashion of the Napster trial), but considering that Gnutella was allegedly developed and released without their consent, it would seem that there is little ground for them to be held liable. Can you be held liable for something that an employee of yours does without your permission? Seems a little dubious. The last time that I checked, development on the origonal Nullsoft Gnutella client had stopped at the Gnutella site in favor of clonese using the same protocol, meaning that they would be basically sued for the development of a communications protocol. Maybe we ought to go after the authors of The Infinite Monkey Protocol for cruelty to animals. ..
I think exactly what upsets so many heavily involved people is that politics is becoming just another hobby the United States. Politics was, we are told, at one point more than a hobby. In the days of the Civil Rights movement, or when the country was at war (you know, the old type of war where it took more than a week to finish it), you could not look at politics as being just one more interest, on par with model building or golf. I think that people are angry because the relative prosperity in which we live has made people complacent. At the risk of sounding like that Comedy Central ad, people who have been on the receiving end of a government that abuses its citizens and allows no political voice to them have a hard time understanding how you could have the right to influence your government, and yet choose not to participate, or to make choices based on who has the better head shot or the catchier website name. When votes are held in 3rd world countries that haven't had the chance before, turnouts are usually huge. Maybe it is just because the experience is novel, but the conventional view is that democracy is a rare privalege to most people, and that the non-voting US public looks like spoiled children by comparison. I think there is some validity to that complaint; the statistics clearly indicate that most Americans take democracy for granted, trusting that others won't vote in someone who might do them wrong.
/*begin joke*/Maybe we ought to suspend voting for a few years, and see how people react to having no voice in government by force, instead of by choice. Maybe contraryness can give a boost to the democratic process. . ./*end joke*/
Quite right. I would say if anything, there may be more of a barrier to work desktop adoption than to home users. Home users use a computer because they want to; business users include more people who use one because they have to, and rely heavily on their IT departments to make them do anything. Additionally, all the major pieces that a home user would want are already in place, or will be soon (like when Mozilla gets a little farther along, and the next round of updates hit KDE, Gnome, and Star Office). Meanwhile, we're still missing some out-of-the-box solutions for stuff like collaberation, and the existing office sweets lack some ease-of-use features that will make them more palatable to non-techy business types and PHB's the world over. Meanwhile, motivated home users that are genuinely interested in their computers can continue to install the gradually improving releases to their hearts content.
Still gonna be a fwe years before I get grandma building a custom kernel, however. But it may well happen well before some of the people I work with (at an 'Internet' company, or at the 'Internet' branch of a brick-and-morter) will be able to handle it.
A good interview. I'm consistantly impressed with the candor and openness that Linus exhibits when he talks about a project that is, in a big way, his baby. He has no trouble admitting the shortcomings of Linux, nor any trouble touching on its strengths. His comments prove that it is possible to be a very strong advocate without resorting to extremism or flame warring. How many people who aren't nearly as involved as Linus can wade into the OS debate while maintaining some perspective? Linus Torvalds will convince more people of the virtues of Linux with his balanced take on the issue than any given hundred/. "M$ is the evil empire, windoze sucks, Linux roolz" posters.
My father's a nut. He felt that our cat (Rex) wasn't getting enough mail, and was feeling left out. So he signed my cat up for a subscription to one of the numerous fishing magazines that he used to read. We immediately started getting offers to subscribe to other mags, mostly fishing and hunting. The best was when they would send notices with messages like "Will Rex bring down a big buck this season?" for hunting magazines. We got a call offering our cat credit cards. Finally, he received a free membership in the National Rifle Association, complete with membership card and decals. They would send surveys on our views on gun control, which my mother would fill out in the cat's name and return. We put the decals on his litter box, and to this day I carry the membership card with his name. I sometimes use the story for those irritating "getting to know you" sessions at seminars for work or school- they ask you to tell something interesting about yourself, and everyone talks about their kids or enjoying golf. I tell them my father enrolled my cat in a gun club. People usually remember me.
Wow, those variables with the same names that are pronounced in different tones must irritate the hell out of you. ..
My girlfriend keeps trying to teach me bits and pieces of Thai so I can impress her parents, but I consistantly sound like Zippy the Pinhead because I'm tone deaf. "How was the test?" "Oh, it was pretty leaning backwards."
On a semi-related note (lingustics), they did a study that found that folks that speak tonal languages develop a limited form of perfect pitch that allows them to detect changes in tone. There's a theory that everyone is born with this ability, but looses it if not exposed to tonal languages. Bad knews for us farang trying to pick up an Asian language. ..
I think it depends on what sort of standardization you're talking about. I agree that we shouldn't be forcing people to look at their environment in a single way. Everyone should be free to alter the nature of their work environment however they please.
But the problem is there is *no* standard baseline right now at all. If I wanted to train the 35 customer service reps on a Linux system, I have to pick wich window manager, which desktop manager, configure its basic setup, and then design the ground-zero level training for that specific interface myself.
With a standard in terms of 1) how you write aps for a GUI, and 2)a baseline look and feel and interaction that I can expect to be available, if not default, on any system I sit down at, I solve two very gnarly problems: that of getting developers to write aps that run properly with my system (wouldn't you rather write to one standard and be able to easily run it anywhere instead of writing to 4?), and that of getting a basic and universal interfacing system that is suitable for training newbies with skills that can be used in multiple locations. Power users can still go above and beyond (and even around) the baseline interface, but I have something consistant to introduce people to, that they can take with them to multiple computers/departments/companies.
All in all, I think (or hope) what the Foundation is aiming at is not locking down a single appearance or setup that cannot be altered, but instead providing a baseline that you can expect to be present on multiple systems, as well as simplifying the process of writing aps for the desktop.
Instead of thinking of it as a straightjacket that can't be modified, think of a desktop standard as being like the QWERTY standard for keyboard layout. Qwerty isn't best for everyone. So if you want, you can put in a split-key board, a dvorak board, a chording system, or remap your keys to your heart's content. But if someone else sits down at your machine and needs to use it, they can always plug a generic QWERTY in, read in the default keybinds, and start cooking. And you yourself might like your Dvorak board a lot, but if you changed jobs and suddenly discovered that your only option was to learn chording on a ten-key board of some sort, it would lengthen your learning curve significantly. But you could always put in the standard QWERTY board you learned in high school to get some work donw while you tried to find the manual for the chorder.
Making a standard isn't about limiting your control, or eliminating features that some users like or need. It's about making a lowest common denominator that you always have the option of falling back to when the above-and-beyond solution isn't the one you need.
I don't understand your point on 1. How does giving adults a card that allows unfettered net access equate to sheltered adults. Secondly, this is a laundromat, not a library. If you want to research llama sex, great. Go to the library or the school, use their net connection, or flip through the card catalog. If you want to get the sports scores while you wait for your underoos to dry, than it isn't going to much matter that kids don't have full access. All they need is a narrow band of entertainment sites.
I don't think that will work quite as well as you think it will. First of all, while you might be uncomfortable checking out pron in public, there are many who are not so particular. My grandmother(!) worked next to a man in a state govrnment office who spent all his idle moments looking at explicit sex picks and autopsy shots. What happens when he visits the laundromat, and little 5 year old Timmy sits looking around his shoulder while waiting for his dad to finish sudsing the linens?
Secondly, phrases like "community members may object to" are vague enough to be useless. It will create more problems posting something this vague than it will solve. Say someone reads some potentially offensive though not pornographic jokes or cartoons. A prudish customer witnesses it, and reports the other customer. You have now just lost one of your customers, either because the person viewing the jokes is angry to be banned from net access, or you lose the reporter, who gets offended that you will not ban access. That or staff will spend their time resolving endless disputes about what constitutes material that is suitable for the community.
We have to remember that this is a business, and not a school or a community center. The goal is to provide the customer with the most value while creating as few headaches and legal values as possible for the staff and the customers. Restricting the service to a very narrow selection of sites is probably the only way to make this work without creating a massive administrative and potential legal hassle. Trying to create a community-consensus project is something to tackle in our schools and libraries, not in the laundromat.
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So call it a co-op system. The kids are providing a useful service to the schools, and doing something that they seem to enjoy, while helping their community and learning at the same time. I don't really see a "child labor" problem in that. If these kids weren't working in schools and going to schools, they would probably be selling things in the streets, working long hours doing heavy labor on the family farm, or something along those lines. The truth is that projects like this may not be possible without the "labor" of children. If they were not working, they would not be home watching cartoons. Cambodia is a nation that has had its culture and economy devistated by years of Communist misrule. There are not a lot of options for rural children. Better that they work in a school during the day than that they wander into a mine field.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Agreed. I don't think this sort of thing should go on libraries. It was installed on computers at my school for a while when I was in HS, and it was worse than useless. It blocked access to useful sights, and probably allowed access to thousands of porn sites (didn't poke around looking for them, but that would be my guess). But, if you consider the demographic that their software was targeting, there is a reason that they included the sites that they did. That was my main point.
;)
On parrot law: one more proof that there is little fundamental consensus in society. If I rules, killing parrots would not only be legal, but mandatory.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I don't really know that anarchism is or isn't what little kids are ready for, and not being a parent, I don't care. As I mentioned before, my point was to show that there was a rationale, one based on the perceptions of the intended market of the product, behind why certain sites like that of Manson, ICP, and Chumbawumba were placed in the block list. Note that this != to: "they are slightly non-mainstream, and therefore it is my personal belief that they should be censored". My personal belief is that censorware is based on a number of flawed principles, but I wanted to point out that if you consider the market that they are targeting, than placing these bands in the list makes a lot of sense for them.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Not my point at all. What I was saying is that there is a reason that the sort of people that feel that SmartFilter needs to be installed on things would feel like Chumbawumba should be on the list. Not that it is right or wrong that they are possibly on the list because of their political beliefs. I was just saying that their selection might not be as arbitrary as it appears to someone who doesn't have the same (perhaps irrational) fears as the sort of people that think that filters are needed. The earlier posts seemed to imply that the selection was arbitrary, and I was trying to point out that it makes sense if you consider the market that the makers of the product are trying to appeal to.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Well, these filters are marketed to parents who are trying to keep kids away from obscene material. Lesse. . . ICP has a song that deals with screwing corpses, and Manson will sing about screwing anything that will raise an eyebrow. Chumbawumba espouse anarchist philosophy, not of itself harmful but maybe not what six year olds are ready for. I have nothing against any of these bans on artistic grounds (I was a big Manson fan for a while in high school, actually), but their material is not quite what young 'uns are ready to be exposed to, from the point of view of a person interested in buying this software to use with young kids. These filters are a product, like any other. They target a market, and they tailor to that market. As such, blocking ICP and Manson are within reason. It's the stuff about blocking random computer and sports sites that are signs that the software is uninteligent, and people who wish to use it should think twice before buying it. Remember, this stuff is a product aimed at conservative and concerned parents, not a system of values that is going to be forced upon you unless someone does something boneheaded like force this garbage to be on all public systems. A filter program is exactly some fools idea of what is right and wrong. It is not a general view of society, and would be worthless if it were, because as I can tell there aren't many general consensuses available in society, except maybe "don't kill stuff that can talk, except maybe parrots". Filters are a product. We shouldn't elevate them to a status that they don't really have.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
The intention of Java is to be almost completely object oriented, for applications where object orientation is most useful. Disliking it because it is too object-orineted is like disliking Lisp for being too functional, or assembler for being too terse. That's how they were meant to be, for problems for which that property is useful. As for short and easy functions, how about the incantation to malloc() as opposed to 'new'? One of the things that makes Java fun to me is that it frees you up to focus on the problem, and not system level issues. It is a language that is close to the problem, not the machine. Each one has their place. But I would hate trying to port an application from one platform to the other that featured direct frame buffer access and no bloated, difficult API's. Abstractions (like API's) that help keep a check on machine-dependant operations(like direct frame buffer access) are what makes code portable and maintainable. And can even make coding fun, when you notice that you're spending your time solving the problem that you set out to deal with, instead of making sure that memory pointers aren't wandering into oblivion and counting in hexidecimal. ;)
But the good thing is that everyone has their own definition of fun. Some days, counting in hex may be fun. Like the days when I have 16 fingers
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Text I/O is a bitch in Java. That's unarguable, to me. I have to look it up every time I need to read from the console. But Java wasn't really meant to be reading from the console. If I want an easy way to read text input, play pattycake with it and then send it to stdout, I'd be using Perl, or C or C++ for more complex apps. What Java has going for it is (when coded with code OOP style) a very well-thought out and fairly consistant object oriented structure that is pretty quick to develop in, thanks to good error checking at the compiler level and fun stuff like garbage collection. It also has a well-defined framework for writing cross-platform GUI's. That doesn't make it well suited to every task. But C, C++, Perl, Lisp, or Motorolla 68K assembler aren't suited to every task either.
Where it fits a specific need or makes it easier to solve a problem, I love Java. Otherwise, chuck it and use what's appropriate. Geeze, and I hope you can force that manager/admin person to look up what OOP means some time. . . ."
"That's how it's done in the industry" == "All the other lemmings are doing it. .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I think what he meant was that with dull knives, one tends to use more force than you would otherwise, which means that when the knife sleeps you end up with a nice, deep puncture wound, instead of a nick from a sharp knife moving at lower speed that hits you. You're right about pressure and spoons, of course, but the general rule with knives is that ones that are a little bit dull are more dangerous than sharper ones. Dull knives encourage excesive force, and foolish habits that are painfully unlearned the next time you pick up a sharp knife.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I think that there is a little bit of a difference. The loadable modules that Linux uses right now are primarily device driver style modules, and are loaded into kernel-space when they load. What the article is talking about is the inability right now under Linux to add significant system-level features (the example given was networking stacks) outside of kernel space. So there is not a way to extend the kernel in Linux without directly fooling with kernel code, one way or another. This hurts the maintainability of the system, as the amount of stuff lying around inside the kernel grows and grows. Additionally, the monolithic style (according to the writer) lacks a nice strong abstraction barrier that makes it possible to alter components individually without breaking something in the system. If the line between where things like basic kernel services and things like device interactions or networking is not clear in the code, than the odds are that if you alter one of them, you're going to end up having to alter them all. In an ideal world, the layer of abstraction insulates the rest of the system from changes. You want to rip out the old memory management code entire and put in a new one? Great. As long as you provide the same interface (API calls & c.), nothing else should need to be altered. This is of, of course, an ideal situation. Systems that are designed that well are few and far between, but in general a little extra abstraction is going to save you maintenance headaches in the long run, which can be very important on a system like Linux, which is going to go through multiple iterations and have significant modification done to it on a semi-regular basis. Generally, this is a long term problem and not an immediate one. No one is going to complain next week that non-modularity is ruining their life (okay, the guy who wrote the article), but in 5 years, when the code base has swollen more, and when advances in hardware make the performance ding due to using a more modular solution less noticable, than there may be some harried kernel hackers bemoaning the complexity (and ugliness) of a system that has grown without good abstraction and without a good non-kernel space module system.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
On a mildly tangential side note, Quang Duc is something of a big figure for the Vietnamese Buddhist community in Saigon now, basically considered a martyr who used his own life to alert the world to the repression that was taking place in Vietnam at the time, which is probably why Rage used the photo for their cover. His heart, which refused to burn after multiple attempted cremations of his remains, is enshrined as a relic to this day in a temple in Vietnam.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
That was Thich Quang Duc commiting suicide by self-immolation in a square in Saigon to protest the repression of Buddhists by the American-supported South Vietnamese government. The government in power was strongly Catholic, a holdover from French colonial days, and put a lot of time into angering the countries Buddhists, arresting their leaders, raiding temples, and banning the observance of holidays. The origonal photo was taken by a guy named Malcolm Brown for the AP newswire. Not, as the digital image seems to imply, by a monk with a camera. . .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I think the poster wasn't being specific enough. What he meant to say is that if you are running ICQ and then log into AIM with that ICQ number, it will disconnect you from ICQ and give you the "Your ICQ number is in use at another computer" message. I've seen it several times in the past couple days while me and my roomates played with the system.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Ah, you mean Frisbyterianism. . .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
As has been driven into the ground in earlier posts, college is more about learning to learn for that lifelong cycle of learning than it is about acquiring all you'll ever need to know at once. True, not much you learn in college or grad school is going to make you a better modern programmer. But, a robust college CS or IT program might do a good job of teaching you how to quickly evaluate and learn a language, how to understand larger conceptual issues in writing a program, and how to go about learning the real-world techniques that will make you a better programmer.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
You're half right and half wrong. There are several standard systems for transcribing tonal languages. The most common ones for Chinese are the Wade-Giles system and the Pinyin system. Similar schemes exist for Vietnamese, Thai, and just about any other language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet. However, each langauge has its own transliteration system, and some languages vary significantly. Two books on teaching Thai may use completely different punctuation to express the same tone. Hence the importance of learning the actual alphabet. A lot of translation systems are outdated, weird, or just bloody minded. Both Chinese transliteration systems seem to go miles out of their way to be counter-intuitive, representing Engligh d sounds with t and English t sounds with d.
As for ASCII limitations, any transliteration system can be put into ASCII, from Chinese to Pali. And Unicode makes it possible to put a lot of non-ASCII characters into a standard representation. I'm not sure what the current system for representing Chinese is- I was pretty sure that there were some systems based on a reduced character set, but don't recall much else.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Yeah, the quote concerning MS's move towards service-based software is a little confusing (or deceptive, depending on your take). The service based approach that the Times was talking about initially concerns taking software and customizing it, or offering support, much like the models that Red Hat and others use now. The software itself is free, but you pay for additional support, convenience, and if you want something very unique done. The service model that MS has in mind (and this I have heard directly out of Steve Balmer's mouth at a speach) is more like a cable subscription, where instead of owning anything on your own machine, applications are fed to you on a metered or by-period rate. Two very, very different models that sound deceptively similar when all they say is "service based"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
There would be a whole different debate if AOL had sanctioned an official release of Gnutella (after the fashion of the Napster trial), but considering that Gnutella was allegedly developed and released without their consent, it would seem that there is little ground for them to be held liable. Can you be held liable for something that an employee of yours does without your permission? Seems a little dubious. The last time that I checked, development on the origonal Nullsoft Gnutella client had stopped at the Gnutella site in favor of clonese using the same protocol, meaning that they would be basically sued for the development of a communications protocol. Maybe we ought to go after the authors of The Infinite Monkey Protocol for cruelty to animals. . .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
/*begin joke*/Maybe we ought to suspend voting for a few years, and see how people react to having no voice in government by force, instead of by choice. Maybe contraryness can give a boost to the democratic process. . . /*end joke*/
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Still gonna be a fwe years before I get grandma building a custom kernel, however. But it may well happen well before some of the people I work with (at an 'Internet' company, or at the 'Internet' branch of a brick-and-morter) will be able to handle it.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
A good interview. I'm consistantly impressed with the candor and openness that Linus exhibits when he talks about a project that is, in a big way, his baby. He has no trouble admitting the shortcomings of Linux, nor any trouble touching on its strengths. His comments prove that it is possible to be a very strong advocate without resorting to extremism or flame warring. How many people who aren't nearly as involved as Linus can wade into the OS debate while maintaining some perspective? Linus Torvalds will convince more people of the virtues of Linux with his balanced take on the issue than any given hundred /. "M$ is the evil empire, windoze sucks, Linux roolz" posters.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
My father's a nut. He felt that our cat (Rex) wasn't getting enough mail, and was feeling left out. So he signed my cat up for a subscription to one of the numerous fishing magazines that he used to read. We immediately started getting offers to subscribe to other mags, mostly fishing and hunting. The best was when they would send notices with messages like "Will Rex bring down a big buck this season?" for hunting magazines. We got a call offering our cat credit cards. Finally, he received a free membership in the National Rifle Association, complete with membership card and decals. They would send surveys on our views on gun control, which my mother would fill out in the cat's name and return. We put the decals on his litter box, and to this day I carry the membership card with his name. I sometimes use the story for those irritating "getting to know you" sessions at seminars for work or school- they ask you to tell something interesting about yourself, and everyone talks about their kids or enjoying golf. I tell them my father enrolled my cat in a gun club. People usually remember me.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
My girlfriend keeps trying to teach me bits and pieces of Thai so I can impress her parents, but I consistantly sound like Zippy the Pinhead because I'm tone deaf. "How was the test?" "Oh, it was pretty leaning backwards."
On a semi-related note (lingustics), they did a study that found that folks that speak tonal languages develop a limited form of perfect pitch that allows them to detect changes in tone. There's a theory that everyone is born with this ability, but looses it if not exposed to tonal languages. Bad knews for us farang trying to pick up an Asian language. . .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
But the problem is there is *no* standard baseline right now at all. If I wanted to train the 35 customer service reps on a Linux system, I have to pick wich window manager, which desktop manager, configure its basic setup, and then design the ground-zero level training for that specific interface myself.
With a standard in terms of 1) how you write aps for a GUI, and 2)a baseline look and feel and interaction that I can expect to be available, if not default, on any system I sit down at, I solve two very gnarly problems: that of getting developers to write aps that run properly with my system (wouldn't you rather write to one standard and be able to easily run it anywhere instead of writing to 4?), and that of getting a basic and universal interfacing system that is suitable for training newbies with skills that can be used in multiple locations. Power users can still go above and beyond (and even around) the baseline interface, but I have something consistant to introduce people to, that they can take with them to multiple computers/departments/companies.
All in all, I think (or hope) what the Foundation is aiming at is not locking down a single appearance or setup that cannot be altered, but instead providing a baseline that you can expect to be present on multiple systems, as well as simplifying the process of writing aps for the desktop.
Instead of thinking of it as a straightjacket that can't be modified, think of a desktop standard as being like the QWERTY standard for keyboard layout. Qwerty isn't best for everyone. So if you want, you can put in a split-key board, a dvorak board, a chording system, or remap your keys to your heart's content. But if someone else sits down at your machine and needs to use it, they can always plug a generic QWERTY in, read in the default keybinds, and start cooking. And you yourself might like your Dvorak board a lot, but if you changed jobs and suddenly discovered that your only option was to learn chording on a ten-key board of some sort, it would lengthen your learning curve significantly. But you could always put in the standard QWERTY board you learned in high school to get some work donw while you tried to find the manual for the chorder.
Making a standard isn't about limiting your control, or eliminating features that some users like or need. It's about making a lowest common denominator that you always have the option of falling back to when the above-and-beyond solution isn't the one you need.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I don't understand your point on 1. How does giving adults a card that allows unfettered net access equate to sheltered adults. Secondly, this is a laundromat, not a library. If you want to research llama sex, great. Go to the library or the school, use their net connection, or flip through the card catalog. If you want to get the sports scores while you wait for your underoos to dry, than it isn't going to much matter that kids don't have full access. All they need is a narrow band of entertainment sites.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Secondly, phrases like "community members may object to" are vague enough to be useless. It will create more problems posting something this vague than it will solve. Say someone reads some potentially offensive though not pornographic jokes or cartoons. A prudish customer witnesses it, and reports the other customer. You have now just lost one of your customers, either because the person viewing the jokes is angry to be banned from net access, or you lose the reporter, who gets offended that you will not ban access. That or staff will spend their time resolving endless disputes about what constitutes material that is suitable for the community.
We have to remember that this is a business, and not a school or a community center. The goal is to provide the customer with the most value while creating as few headaches and legal values as possible for the staff and the customers. Restricting the service to a very narrow selection of sites is probably the only way to make this work without creating a massive administrative and potential legal hassle. Trying to create a community-consensus project is something to tackle in our schools and libraries, not in the laundromat.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"