Not just universities! My ISP (att.net) pulled their pop server behind the firewall four days ago with absolutely no warning, making it impossible for me to get my e-mail without dialling in at 56k. Blech.
And, typically, all the support people I talked to claimed that it was "always that way".
And, to anyone who might know, the evolution of a programmer page has code that looks like LISP (senior year in high school). Is this so?
If you mean college senior, yes, that's lisp.
Also, will the code for the master programmer compile?
That's Windows COM code, some IDL, some C++. I suspect yes, though like anything COM, it'd take a while to get things set up right. I'm not about to try!
I used to have a "Real programmers" quotes along the line of "Real men don't eat Quiche" that were quite amusing. Along the lines of "Real programmers don't use Pascal in an ide, they write assembly code with 'cat'".
Anyone who could point me to the original list would be thanked profusely.
I've never known a truly great programmer that didn't have both lots of experience and a bookshelf full of coding books. You need both.
Many books leverage your experience. You read something and say "aha! This would have made that project go better!" or "I wish I'd realized that back then". Without the experience, you tend to think "Well, gee, why's that important?" and forget something really important.
To not read much is to think you can reinvent computer science yourself. You'll end up getting good at the few things you've figured out yourself, or from friends, but you'll miss a whole raft of neat tricks, great methods and just a whole bunch of other stuff that makes people good programmers.
I've had the misfortune of working on code written by "experienced" people who didn't like to read much. It isn't pretty.
Personally, I think the problem isn't so much the rushing in as it is the refusal to admit that something isn't working. Personally, I like rushing to code. Spitting code out is a great way to find all the flaws in your assumptions. But in order to do this right, you have to realize that you are probably not writing production code. Throw some stuff out there, then pull back and delete everything that is crap (which will be nearly everything.) Then you know all of the issues and can create something really elegant. I've found bad assumptions in a half hour of coding that were missed in days, or even weeks, of design.
Unfortunately, people get wedded to existing code. People tend to underestimate the time it will take to fix buggy, unmaintainable code and overestimate how long it will take to rewrite code. Getting in the habit of throwing stuff out, and rewriting is a very good thing, IMO.
But we want them to be less restrained when deciding what to block. The less restrained they are, the more likely they'll hit the favorite sites of their customers. This will cause their customers to complain, and hopefully, realize the folly of the whole thing in the end.
But I doubt the censorware people will be able to block all porn, or even the majority of it, without blocking so much other stuff as to make any machine that uses their software nearly useless as a web browser. So you get to hit them from both sides. You yell at them for allowing the porn through while their customers bitch about the blocking of sites they want to see. Repeat often enough and it becomes obvious that censorware does not work. People are willing to put up with stuff if it "saves the children". If they see a report, once a month, about how censorware fails to "save the children", they start questioning the point of putting up with software that blocks too much.
The thing that struck me most about this article is that the writer seems to have missed the boat on the whole open source community issue. First and foremost linux is written by the linux community for the linux community. It is not as the author assumes written and aimed as a weapon against Microsoft.
Well, I'm not so sure he's the one who missed the boat here. The way I understand it, he wrote some stuff that described some very real defficiencies in Linux and got lots of mail of the order on "Stop s*cking Bill Gates d*ck idiot Lunix rules!". Any boats missed were missed by the mailers.
It should be obvious that if you truly believe that Linux is written, first and foremost for the Linux community you wouldn't be all that driven to criticize someone who said that Linux wasn't very good for the novice end user.
The trouble is that many of the flames are self-deluding. They complain about any criticisms Linux, even when the criticisms are completely justified. If this happens too often, people will stop listening to all criticisms, assuming that they are all unjustified.
I remember back in the early days, the biggest flamewars were "Apple ][ vs. Commodore 64". In many ways, the participants there were the same sorts as the worst flamers here. Usually it is someone young and niave, who has only really seen one system. They get themselves invested in that one system and feel the need to prove it in order to prove that their investment wasn't unfounded. And so they flame anything that even looks like a criticism of their favored OS.
But despite their loudness, the majority understand that every system has its strengths and its weaknesses. Unfortunately, if the idiots are too loud, and burn people too often, those on the outside will shut everyone out, idiot and otherwise.
Every system has its weaknesses. So does Linux. Sending blizzards of mail to correct something that was incorrect is good. Sending blizzards of misinformed mail pretending that black is white because otherwise your OS isn't perfect makes everyone look bad, makes people ignore criticism and is just generally counterproductive.
Even Linus Torvalds says that someday something better than Linux will come along. Don't be one of the fools that is so blinded by partisanship that they get left behind when this happens.
If you really want to get anywhere with many of these people, you really need to accentuate the false negatives, not the false positives. Most of these censor types will excuse false negatives just as that guy did. Either they'll figure out some reason why it is ok, or imply that it is worth it to mistakenly block a few sites to "save the children". Since most people only half listen to the real arguments, they'll just come away confused.
Instead, accentuate examples of offensive porn that wasn't blocked. Do this even if you don't think porn is bad. The reason is that it undercuts their whole argument. If you can show that censorware will never effectively block porn in the real world, there ceases to be any purpose for censorware and you don't even have to get into an argument about what is "offensive", and whether people have the right to look at offensive stuff. It will be hard for censorware types to respond to this other than to say "the next version will work". Harp on this enough, and people will start to realize that it will never work.
Besides, "Censorware allows your children to see porn!" is a much catchier headline then "Censorware keeps your children from seeing 'The offspring'". It'll make the evening news much more often.
So if I were you, I'd start searching that mass of unblocked data for porn sites. If you can show that a significant percentage of porn is not blocked, you'll win the argument.
One thing that is rarely mentioned when talking about the German hyperinflation of the thirties is the boon it was to the German farmer. Farmers that had previously been in hock up to their eyeballs (much like the American farmer today) found themselves able to pay off their mortgages with the equivalent of $100.
Just for kicks, I through the following numbers into my calculator with my salary: Inflation of 10% a month. Salary increase of 5% a month. In other words, a salary not keeping up with inflation. Yet over that time, my food+housing costs actually decline in real terms, because while my food costs double, my monthly mortgage is effectively halved. Since my mortgage is a lot higher then my food cost, I am actually better off even with inflation increasing faster than my salary, at least in the short term!
Then add to that the fact that the value of my house goes up 1.79 times.
(All this ignores the secondary effects, being that all those lower mortgage payments hurt the banks, which make it harder for companies to borrow, which causes layoffs, which could take my salary to $0, etc, etc.)
Gold is itself not immune to inflation. The difference is that while inflation in paper money is controlled by the people who issue the paper, inflation in gold is totally dependent on external events. Find a big new source of gold and its value drops. This is not farfetched. It happend to the spanish in the 16th century.
Also bear in mind that the price of gold is today about what it was twenty years ago, despite the fact that inflation has just about doubled prices over that time period.
A gold backed currency works on the theory that it prevents the government from mucking with things too much. The government can't create new gold like it can new paper money, and this prevents governments from causing too much inflation. But it does not prevent any control. Imagine what would happen to the price of gold if the US government decided to sell everything in Fort Knox tomorrow... And it also depends on the amount of gold in circulation being basically related to the size of the population.
That probably depends on how likely you are to want to continue listening to the same stuff.
But anyway, I think one underrealized application for this is to play mp3s off of your own hard drive. The $300 price (if true) is pretty cheap for something of this sort. Though how good the software is will make a big difference.
I've been looking for something exactly like this. Something that would allow me to store my hundreds of cds, and provide jukebox like access to them. I've been in the process of throwing it together myself, but having it all prebuilt would be nice.
It helps, obviously, if you've already got a home network setup.
These things won't be of much use in a car without some sort of wireless connection to the internet. But as you say, it would make radio listening more attractive out of the car. If these become popular, it could end up improving radio in general, as "local" stations find themselves competing nationwide. It is a lot easier to compete as the second "classic rock" station in a medium size city then it is to compete as the 3956th "classic rock" station available over the internet. If a significant percentage of radio listeners start using these devices, they'll be a huge incentive for these stations to differentiate themselves.
If you are interested in mp3s in your car, you can check out cajun for a homebrew version. I was going to go that route at home until I saw this thing. (Though just buying something isn't quite as fun...)
Very, very few programmers are actually donating labor. They are donating the results of their labor. There is a huge difference.
You can't go out there and say "I need a programmer to do X for me" and expect to have much luck getting anyone unless X is interesting. And then you can bet they'll do it their own way.
from each according to his ability, to each according to his need
Ah, but this line is completely, utterly and totally untrue in both the "Open Source" and "Free Software" worlds. The "community" can "need" a certain sort of e-mail client, but can't make ESR (the guy with the ability) make one for me. The "communitay" can "need" a certain sort of Emacs mod, but it can't make RMS (the guy with the ability) make one for me. Were I to try either case, I'd get laughed at. Even if I was dirt poor and really did need it.
A much more accurate version would be "from each according to what he wants to do to whoever happens to want it."
The depends on what one means when one says "one believes in Open Source".
You can:
Believe that "Software Should be Free" and all source code should be released to the public regardless.
Believe that releasing the source improves program quality in a manner that usually brings more benefits then the lost revenue caused be the source release.
While both are "open source" beliefs, one does not preclude some closed source projects. Everything I've heard about Torvalds leads me to believe that he is in the second camp.
This is, while true and interesting, besides the point in the article in question in that Metcalfe isn't talking about RMS. He is talking about Linus Torvalds. As we all know, they don't necessarily hold the same opinion.
There are some who say that everything should be Open Source. There are some who say that Open Source is lunacy. Then there is everyone else in between. Everything I've read about Torvalds is that he is one of those in between folks. (As is ESR, and many others.)
Unfortunately, people like black and white ideas, so they tend to make the mistake in assuming that when someone says "X is sometimes good" or "X is usually good" that they actually mean "X is always good". Then they brand them a hypocrite when they do anything buy X. But the error is not in the alleged hypocrite but in the accuser.
This isn't just an "Open Source" issue. This sort of mistake goes on everywhere in every sort of politics. It is, unfortunately, what tends to drive out the middle on contensious issues.
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Not just universities! My ISP (att.net) pulled their pop server behind the firewall four days ago with absolutely no warning, making it impossible for me to get my e-mail without dialling in at 56k. Blech.
And, typically, all the support people I talked to claimed that it was "always that way".
And, to anyone who might know, the evolution of a programmer page has code that looks like LISP (senior year in high school). Is this so?
If you mean college senior, yes, that's lisp.
Also, will the code for the master programmer compile?
That's Windows COM code, some IDL, some C++. I suspect yes, though like anything COM, it'd take a while to get things set up right. I'm not about to try!
I used to have a "Real programmers" quotes along the line of "Real men don't eat Quiche" that were quite amusing. Along the lines of "Real programmers don't use Pascal in an ide, they write assembly code with 'cat'".
Anyone who could point me to the original list would be thanked profusely.
But yeah, I agree.
Real programmers use "ex". (or, under Micro$oft stuff, "edlin".)
Many books leverage your experience. You read something and say "aha! This would have made that project go better!" or "I wish I'd realized that back then". Without the experience, you tend to think "Well, gee, why's that important?" and forget something really important.
To not read much is to think you can reinvent computer science yourself. You'll end up getting good at the few things you've figured out yourself, or from friends, but you'll miss a whole raft of neat tricks, great methods and just a whole bunch of other stuff that makes people good programmers.
I've had the misfortune of working on code written by "experienced" people who didn't like to read much. It isn't pretty.
Unfortunately, people get wedded to existing code. People tend to underestimate the time it will take to fix buggy, unmaintainable code and overestimate how long it will take to rewrite code. Getting in the habit of throwing stuff out, and rewriting is a very good thing, IMO.
But we want them to be less restrained when deciding what to block. The less restrained they are, the more likely they'll hit the favorite sites of their customers. This will cause their customers to complain, and hopefully, realize the folly of the whole thing in the end.
But I doubt the censorware people will be able to block all porn, or even the majority of it, without blocking so much other stuff as to make any machine that uses their software nearly useless as a web browser. So you get to hit them from both sides. You yell at them for allowing the porn through while their customers bitch about the blocking of sites they want to see. Repeat often enough and it becomes obvious that censorware does not work. People are willing to put up with stuff if it "saves the children". If they see a report, once a month, about how censorware fails to "save the children", they start questioning the point of putting up with software that blocks too much.
Well, I'm not so sure he's the one who missed the boat here. The way I understand it, he wrote some stuff that described some very real defficiencies in Linux and got lots of mail of the order on "Stop s*cking Bill Gates d*ck idiot Lunix rules!". Any boats missed were missed by the mailers.
It should be obvious that if you truly believe that Linux is written, first and foremost for the Linux community you wouldn't be all that driven to criticize someone who said that Linux wasn't very good for the novice end user.
The trouble is that many of the flames are self-deluding. They complain about any criticisms Linux, even when the criticisms are completely justified. If this happens too often, people will stop listening to all criticisms, assuming that they are all unjustified.
I remember back in the early days, the biggest flamewars were "Apple ][ vs. Commodore 64". In many ways, the participants there were the same sorts as the worst flamers here. Usually it is someone young and niave, who has only really seen one system. They get themselves invested in that one system and feel the need to prove it in order to prove that their investment wasn't unfounded. And so they flame anything that even looks like a criticism of their favored OS.
But despite their loudness, the majority understand that every system has its strengths and its weaknesses. Unfortunately, if the idiots are too loud, and burn people too often, those on the outside will shut everyone out, idiot and otherwise.
Every system has its weaknesses. So does Linux. Sending blizzards of mail to correct something that was incorrect is good. Sending blizzards of misinformed mail pretending that black is white because otherwise your OS isn't perfect makes everyone look bad, makes people ignore criticism and is just generally counterproductive.
Even Linus Torvalds says that someday something better than Linux will come along. Don't be one of the fools that is so blinded by partisanship that they get left behind when this happens.
If you really want to get anywhere with many of these people, you really need to accentuate the false negatives, not the false positives. Most of these censor types will excuse false negatives just as that guy did. Either they'll figure out some reason why it is ok, or imply that it is worth it to mistakenly block a few sites to "save the children". Since most people only half listen to the real arguments, they'll just come away confused.
Instead, accentuate examples of offensive porn that wasn't blocked. Do this even if you don't think porn is bad. The reason is that it undercuts their whole argument. If you can show that censorware will never effectively block porn in the real world, there ceases to be any purpose for censorware and you don't even have to get into an argument about what is "offensive", and whether people have the right to look at offensive stuff. It will be hard for censorware types to respond to this other than to say "the next version will work". Harp on this enough, and people will start to realize that it will never work.
Besides, "Censorware allows your children to see porn!" is a much catchier headline then "Censorware keeps your children from seeing 'The offspring'". It'll make the evening news much more often.
So if I were you, I'd start searching that mass of unblocked data for porn sites. If you can show that a significant percentage of porn is not blocked, you'll win the argument.
It would be nice if there was a "reviews" topic, given the increasing number of book reviews showing up here.
Just for kicks, I through the following numbers into my calculator with my salary: Inflation of 10% a month. Salary increase of 5% a month. In other words, a salary not keeping up with inflation. Yet over that time, my food+housing costs actually decline in real terms, because while my food costs double, my monthly mortgage is effectively halved. Since my mortgage is a lot higher then my food cost, I am actually better off even with inflation increasing faster than my salary, at least in the short term!
Then add to that the fact that the value of my house goes up 1.79 times.
(All this ignores the secondary effects, being that all those lower mortgage payments hurt the banks, which make it harder for companies to borrow, which causes layoffs, which could take my salary to $0, etc, etc.)
Gold is itself not immune to inflation. The difference is that while inflation in paper money is controlled by the people who issue the paper, inflation in gold is totally dependent on external events. Find a big new source of gold and its value drops. This is not farfetched. It happend to the spanish in the 16th century.
Also bear in mind that the price of gold is today about what it was twenty years ago, despite the fact that inflation has just about doubled prices over that time period.
A gold backed currency works on the theory that it prevents the government from mucking with things too much. The government can't create new gold like it can new paper money, and this prevents governments from causing too much inflation. But it does not prevent any control. Imagine what would happen to the price of gold if the US government decided to sell everything in Fort Knox tomorrow... And it also depends on the amount of gold in circulation being basically related to the size of the population.
That probably depends on how likely you are to want to continue listening to the same stuff.
But anyway, I think one underrealized application for this is to play mp3s off of your own hard drive. The $300 price (if true) is pretty cheap for something of this sort. Though how good the software is will make a big difference.
I've been looking for something exactly like this. Something that would allow me to store my hundreds of cds, and provide jukebox like access to them. I've been in the process of throwing it together myself, but having it all prebuilt would be nice.
It helps, obviously, if you've already got a home network setup.
These things won't be of much use in a car without some sort of wireless connection to the internet. But as you say, it would make radio listening more attractive out of the car. If these become popular, it could end up improving radio in general, as "local" stations find themselves competing nationwide. It is a lot easier to compete as the second "classic rock" station in a medium size city then it is to compete as the 3956th "classic rock" station available over the internet. If a significant percentage of radio listeners start using these devices, they'll be a huge incentive for these stations to differentiate themselves.
Very, very few programmers are actually donating labor. They are donating the results of their labor. There is a huge difference.
You can't go out there and say "I need a programmer to do X for me" and expect to have much luck getting anyone unless X is interesting. And then you can bet they'll do it their own way.
Ah, but this line is completely, utterly and totally untrue in both the "Open Source" and "Free Software" worlds. The "community" can "need" a certain sort of e-mail client, but can't make ESR (the guy with the ability) make one for me. The "communitay" can "need" a certain sort of Emacs mod, but it can't make RMS (the guy with the ability) make one for me. Were I to try either case, I'd get laughed at. Even if I was dirt poor and really did need it.
A much more accurate version would be "from each according to what he wants to do to whoever happens to want it."
You can:
- Believe that "Software Should be Free" and all source code should be released to the public regardless.
- Believe that releasing the source improves program quality in a manner that usually brings more benefits then the lost revenue caused be the source release.
While both are "open source" beliefs, one does not preclude some closed source projects. Everything I've heard about Torvalds leads me to believe that he is in the second camp.This is, while true and interesting, besides the point in the article in question in that Metcalfe isn't talking about RMS. He is talking about Linus Torvalds. As we all know, they don't necessarily hold the same opinion.
One would hope, but then, a browse of his archives show another article where he likened Stallman to Marx and Torvalds to Lenin.
The whole "Animal Farm" is, of course, used to imply that open source is communist. Sigh.
Unfortunately, people like black and white ideas, so they tend to make the mistake in assuming that when someone says "X is sometimes good" or "X is usually good" that they actually mean "X is always good". Then they brand them a hypocrite when they do anything buy X. But the error is not in the alleged hypocrite but in the accuser.
This isn't just an "Open Source" issue. This sort of mistake goes on everywhere in every sort of politics. It is, unfortunately, what tends to drive out the middle on contensious issues.
Now you did it. We're going to get another three part series about how someone told him to "accept the hatemail or die".