I'm all for the copyright police -- as long as their #1 enforcement priority is in ensuring fair use. Write that into their charter, and give us strongly codified fair use laws, and it'll have my seal of approval.
You can't say people spontaneously floating off the earth is impossible, just that it is inconsistent with current theories about how the universe works.
It's not inconsistent at all. Just ask anyone who's found themselves suddenly bouyant in an tornado. Now that's what I call thermodynamic!;-)
What the hell do you need cannabis for? You've got the best beer in the world! The only reason people smoke here in the U.S. is because of the beer choices we are left with: Bud, Miller and Coors.;-)
Thankfully, I live close enough to the New Belgium Brewing Company. Mmmm... Fat Tire.
When they say Unix, they mean "vendor lock-in OS". They mean the platform-specific OS that's needed to run on HP servers (HPUX), or Sun servers (Solaris), or IBM servers (AIX), or SGI servers (IRIX), etc. It's a clear distinction in my mind.
Unix = incompatible, vendor lock. Linux = compatible, architecture neutral.
Think of it that way and it will sound natural in no time.:-)
He said easier. Given the option to run NT & Exceed or Linux, the Linux option wins hands down. I've done both and Exceed is a clunky POS in comparison. And if you need NT, use VMware. NT, VMware & Linux is still cheaper than NT & Exceed. And it's a far more useable system.
I've been in IT for over 10 years, and it seems so many times you find people in IT who will happily blather on about the "Visitor" pattern or another such topic (a useful pattern, to be sure), but who for the life of them can't remember any of the basic sort algorithms. It kills me; algorithms are still fundamental component of our toolkit. We can't ignore them
Oh horsepucky! It's important to know these things if one is writing libraries. Application programmers have little need for this knowledge. Their tools should provide it for them. You don't need to be a scientist to build a car (or even an automobile engine) these days. Software engineering has long since advanced past the point that one need be a computer scientist to write computer applications.
Name them after geographic features. You can group them by region (state, country, continent) and you have near infinite growth potential. You can name them after cities & towns, rivers & streams, mountains, lakes, etc.
"'Charley Pride: A Tribute to Jim Reeves.' Did that CD really need copy-protecting?"
Well, the idea here, as in many unsavory endeavors, is to establish a precedent. Go after something nobody should notice and then claim "but we've been doing it for so long and the consumers accepted it."
Byte ordering is arbitrary if you don't give a hoot about interoperability or standards. It's not called "network byte order" for nothing. It's the default byte ordering for all RFC-defined internet protocols -- including Kerberos itself.
Almost all network software uses "hton*" and "ntoh*" functions to convert the byte ordering from host to network byte order and reverse. On big-endian machines they happen to be NOPs. So now what? Everyone implementing the protocol on big-endian machines has to implement their "itoh*" and "htoi*" ("idiot to host", "host to idiot") functions. And to implement any software portably you'll need the same functions on little-endian systems as well. OK, so now you can write your non-portable apps without the "ntohl" -- that's OK if don't care about playing nice with others. Those of use who work in heterogenous environments and write software for a living do care.
Sure, network byte ordering is arbitary. But big-endian was chosen long ago and causes no harm. What Microsoft did is just a good way to piss off folks who care about everyone playing nice on the internet.
Here's another fellow that just reads the headlines of the marketing speil he's fed. He is obviously talking out of his hindquarters.
C/C++ are still widely used and widely supported. Most shops do not dictate the implementation language. That decision is left to the project leads. Software engineering projects at most companies vary in scope greatly. Some projects must be done at a lower level than Java and require C/C++ or even assembly. For other projects, Python might be a more reasonable choice. Hell, for some projects Lisp or Guile might be the language of choice. Just because it is uncommon does not mean that choices don't exist.
In any case there is a wide range of tools available. The only folks saying that Java and.NET are all that there is are Sun and Microsoft. You just don't see Guido or Larry or Bjarne sending out PR statements that frequently.
Your key misunderstanding is that you seem to believe that copyright is a natural right.
The plain fact is that government *grants* a copyright to the creator to encourage the continued creation of new works. By allowing the creator a monopoly on their creation, they can profit from it. But in the end, the ultimate goal is to move the creation of intellectual property into its natural domain -- the public domain. Without a fair balance, copyright holders no longer have a key incentive to produce more creative works, and the public is deprived of the use of these creative ideas.
QWERTY has reached a steady state (of sorts). But I've got to tell you, this MS Natural keyboard isn't all that similar to the IBM Selectric layout I learned to type on. The QWERTY keyboard has been evolved to better handle a changed environment.
Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive practices? I never thought I'd live to see the day. This can't be happening. There must be a rational explanation. There must be a bug in all those other browsers, or a security vulnerability. Microsoft is only trying to help. I'm sure of it.
What good is it banning encryption here if Osama Bin Laden [sic] is in Afganistan.
1. People in his group alledgedly communicated with the attackers (or someone linked to the attackers) inside the United States to arrange the details of the attack. And the attackers had to communicate amongst themselves (again, inside the U.S.) to coordinate the attack.
2. The fewer "hard" encryption problems for the NSA to crack, the more resources they can dedicate to cracking the encrypted messages of the enemies of the state.
Re:It's been said before...
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 1
As much as I repect the wisdom of our founding fathers, I respectfully submit that spouting 200 year old quotes about liberty is not helpful or applicable in the least.
OK... so we in the U.S. should just throw out the constitution then? Obviously that much wisdom is too much for the general public to comprehend. Maybe I should just ask the baby-sitter what the best way to keep the country safe is. She's an expert at keeping human beings that cannot think for themselves safe from harm.
The right to free speech and due process; the delicate balance of power among the three branches of the government; the right to vote... we don't need that stinkin' 200 year old wisdom.
Is that really what you meant to say?!?
The Liberty of the American Citizen is even more important in this time of crisis that at times of peace. It is that Liberty which unites us as a nation.
When I first saw the headline for this article I read it as "Programmable PIIIs" as in Pentium-III. And I was shocked I tell you. Shocked! I'd never heard of such nonsense!
Millions of people aware of these issues? Don't delude yourself. While there are a hell of a lot more "isolated geeks" in this world than there were a decade ago, John Q. Public still is blissfully ignorant of most of these issues. Sure, they might have read about Napster in the newspaper, but after their MEGO* moment in the second paragraph, they quickly turned to the meaningless color graph on the sidebar of their USA Today to sooth their brains.
There are still painfully few in the mainstream who understand Napster, encryption issues, and open source software, and the impact they have on society. Even more surprising is the growing percentage of people in the computer industry who are ignorant of these issues.
Have you had an intelligent conversation on encryption and how it affects society with anyone outside the computer industry lately? I sure haven't. And newspaper articles on the subject are usually simplified to the point of banality.
Of course, we must all realize that our expectation that a majority of citizens invest the time to understand these issues and their importance to society is a bit unrealistic. Most folks are more interested in who's playing in the final four, who their favorite movie star is boning (or getting boned by) this week, or who is having Elvis' alien love child.
Choice of language can (and does) have an amazingly profound impact on the success of many programming projects. It, like talent, design, etc. all contribute to the likelyhood of the completion, adoption and maintainability of a software product.
Python's main strength is compactness of expression -- without the loss of information on intent. It is really easy for programmers to comprehend other programmers' Python code. In many cases it is not even necessary to have ever seen Python code prior.
This ease of comprehension is the key to Python's success. I've witnessed more than one programming project run into trouble because the cost of communicating programmer intent was so high that it became hard to actually get any coding done.
I've encountered more than a few languages that reach a breaking point after a certain level of complexity. I'm sure Python has its breaking point (and my guess would be that involves issues with weak typing and code validation) but I have yet to see those limits reached.
Any open, publicly shared network will be subject to cache or data poisoning, as described in this article. Freenet and Mojo Nation will be just as susceptible as Gnutella or Napster to this sort of attack. And I think the Hughes/DirecTV hacker war shows that commercial entities are likely to use this sort of tactic to protect their interests.
You need some sort of trust relationship between the peers to prevent this sort of attack. It is possible a SlashDot-like moderation system to rate the trustworthiness of the peers could lessen the impact of such attacks.
We are on the cusp of a long forseen revolution: evolutionary pressure on the human race based on hereditary meta-data (genetics). I think Darwin would be truly amazed.
This practice will put greater financial burden on those predisposed to inheritable deseases. Unfortunately, this will lead to an already forseen consequence caused by the fact that the poor reproduce at a higher rate than the well-off... de-evolution.;-)
Ah well, you win some, you lose some. It's a damn good thing that human ingenuity of a few people can help make up for buggy genetic coding of many.
That can easily be resolved should the embedded community release a stock version of the embedded OS. And it looks like this is exactly what will be happpening. A common embedded OS, with freely available source, distributed by a consortium of developers. And they can get around the custom hardware issues by using binary modules, which are perfectly legal to use with the Linux kernel.
I don't think you need to worry about anyone picketting at the Fridgidaire plant because of GPL violations...
See this aarticle for a refutation of Misner's flawed work. They point out that the serious problems that Misner attributes to Yilmaz theory actually applies to GR, not Yilmaz theory!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for the copyright police -- as long as their #1 enforcement priority is in ensuring fair use. Write that into their charter, and give us strongly codified fair use laws, and it'll have my seal of approval.
Not that there's a chance in hell...
What the hell do you need cannabis for? You've got the best beer in the world! The only reason people smoke here in the U.S. is because of the beer choices we are left with: Bud, Miller and Coors. ;-)
Thankfully, I live close enough to the New Belgium Brewing Company. Mmmm... Fat Tire.
When they say Unix, they mean "vendor lock-in OS". They mean the platform-specific OS that's needed to run on HP servers (HPUX), or Sun servers (Solaris), or IBM servers (AIX), or SGI servers (IRIX), etc. It's a clear distinction in my mind.
:-)
Unix = incompatible, vendor lock.
Linux = compatible, architecture neutral.
Think of it that way and it will sound natural in no time.
He said easier. Given the option to run NT & Exceed or Linux, the Linux option wins hands down. I've done both and Exceed is a clunky POS in comparison. And if you need NT, use VMware. NT, VMware & Linux is still cheaper than NT & Exceed. And it's a far more useable system.
Thanks for playing... try again.
Name them after geographic features. You can group them by region (state, country, continent) and you have near infinite growth potential. You can name them after cities & towns, rivers & streams, mountains, lakes, etc.
It's the best naming convention I've seen yet.
"'Charley Pride: A Tribute to Jim Reeves.' Did that CD really need copy-protecting?"
Well, the idea here, as in many unsavory endeavors, is to establish a precedent. Go after something nobody should notice and then claim "but we've been doing it for so long and the consumers accepted it."
Byte ordering is arbitrary if you don't give a hoot about interoperability or standards. It's not called "network byte order" for nothing. It's the default byte ordering for all RFC-defined internet protocols -- including Kerberos itself.
Almost all network software uses "hton*" and "ntoh*" functions to convert the byte ordering from host to network byte order and reverse. On big-endian machines they happen to be NOPs. So now what? Everyone implementing the protocol on big-endian machines has to implement their "itoh*" and "htoi*" ("idiot to host", "host to idiot") functions. And to implement any software portably you'll need the same functions on little-endian systems as well. OK, so now you can write your non-portable apps without the "ntohl" -- that's OK if don't care about playing nice with others. Those of use who work in heterogenous environments and write software for a living do care.
Sure, network byte ordering is arbitary. But big-endian was chosen long ago and causes no harm. What Microsoft did is just a good way to piss off folks who care about everyone playing nice on the internet.
Here's another fellow that just reads the headlines of the marketing speil he's fed. He is obviously talking out of his hindquarters.
.NET are all that there is are Sun and Microsoft. You just don't see Guido or Larry or Bjarne sending out PR statements that frequently.
C/C++ are still widely used and widely supported. Most shops do not dictate the implementation language. That decision is left to the project leads. Software engineering projects at most companies vary in scope greatly. Some projects must be done at a lower level than Java and require C/C++ or even assembly. For other projects, Python might be a more reasonable choice. Hell, for some projects Lisp or Guile might be the language of choice. Just because it is uncommon does not mean that choices don't exist.
In any case there is a wide range of tools available. The only folks saying that Java and
Your key misunderstanding is that you seem to believe that copyright is a natural right.
The plain fact is that government *grants* a copyright to the creator to encourage the continued creation of new works. By allowing the creator a monopoly on their creation, they can profit from it. But in the end, the ultimate goal is to move the creation of intellectual property into its natural domain -- the public domain. Without a fair balance, copyright holders no longer have a key incentive to produce more creative works, and the public is deprived of the use of these creative ideas.
QWERTY has reached a steady state (of sorts). But I've got to tell you, this MS Natural keyboard isn't all that similar to the IBM Selectric layout I learned to type on. The QWERTY keyboard has been evolved to better handle a changed environment.
If you must visit MSN with your Linux/Mozilla browser, you can get in by adding the following line to your junkbuster config file:
user-agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0)
Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive practices? I never thought I'd live to see the day. This can't be happening. There must be a rational explanation. There must be a bug in all those other browsers, or a security vulnerability. Microsoft is only trying to help. I'm sure of it.
1. People in his group alledgedly communicated with the attackers (or someone linked to the attackers) inside the United States to arrange the details of the attack. And the attackers had to communicate amongst themselves (again, inside the U.S.) to coordinate the attack.
2. The fewer "hard" encryption problems for the NSA to crack, the more resources they can dedicate to cracking the encrypted messages of the enemies of the state.
The right to free speech and due process; the delicate balance of power among the three branches of the government; the right to vote... we don't need that stinkin' 200 year old wisdom.
Is that really what you meant to say?!?
The Liberty of the American Citizen is even more important in this time of crisis that at times of peace. It is that Liberty which unites us as a nation.
If that's the case then this may have been a breach in airport that we (the U.S.) were not prepared for.
/. would post a poll, and we'd find out the awful truth... that CowboyNeal is the most popular OS on modern military hardware.
Millions of people aware of these issues? Don't delude yourself. While there are a hell of a lot more "isolated geeks" in this world than there were a decade ago, John Q. Public still is blissfully ignorant of most of these issues. Sure, they might have read about Napster in the newspaper, but after their MEGO* moment in the second paragraph, they quickly turned to the meaningless color graph on the sidebar of their USA Today to sooth their brains.
There are still painfully few in the mainstream who understand Napster, encryption issues, and open source software, and the impact they have on society. Even more surprising is the growing percentage of people in the computer industry who are ignorant of these issues.
Have you had an intelligent conversation on encryption and how it affects society with anyone outside the computer industry lately? I sure haven't. And newspaper articles on the subject are usually simplified to the point of banality.
Of course, we must all realize that our expectation that a majority of citizens invest the time to understand these issues and their importance to society is a bit unrealistic. Most folks are more interested in who's playing in the final four, who their favorite movie star is boning (or getting boned by) this week, or who is having Elvis' alien love child.
* MEGO - My eyes glaze over
Choice of language can (and does) have an amazingly profound impact on the success of many programming projects. It, like talent, design, etc. all contribute to the likelyhood of the completion, adoption and maintainability of a software product.
Python's main strength is compactness of expression -- without the loss of information on intent. It is really easy for programmers to comprehend other programmers' Python code. In many cases it is not even necessary to have ever seen Python code prior.
This ease of comprehension is the key to Python's success. I've witnessed more than one programming project run into trouble because the cost of communicating programmer intent was so high that it became hard to actually get any coding done.
I've encountered more than a few languages that reach a breaking point after a certain level of complexity. I'm sure Python has its breaking point (and my guess would be that involves issues with weak typing and code validation) but I have yet to see those limits reached.
You need some sort of trust relationship between the peers to prevent this sort of attack. It is possible a SlashDot-like moderation system to rate the trustworthiness of the peers could lessen the impact of such attacks.
We are on the cusp of a long forseen revolution: evolutionary pressure on the human race based on hereditary meta-data (genetics). I think Darwin would be truly amazed.
;-)
This practice will put greater financial burden on those predisposed to inheritable deseases. Unfortunately, this will lead to an already forseen consequence caused by the fact that the poor reproduce at a higher rate than the well-off... de-evolution.
Ah well, you win some, you lose some. It's a damn good thing that human ingenuity of a few people can help make up for buggy genetic coding of many.
Now where did I leave my genetic debugger?
That can easily be resolved should the embedded community release a stock version of the embedded OS. And it looks like this is exactly what will be happpening. A common embedded OS, with freely available source, distributed by a consortium of developers. And they can get around the custom hardware issues by using binary modules, which are perfectly legal to use with the Linux kernel.
I don't think you need to worry about anyone picketting at the Fridgidaire plant because of GPL violations...
See this aarticle for a refutation of Misner's flawed work. They point out that the serious problems that Misner attributes to Yilmaz theory actually applies to GR, not Yilmaz theory!