"The OSX method of program bundles avoids dependency problems, but introduces the inefficiency of reducing code sharing,"
Uh. No. A method of program bundles which includes the concepts of standard name-and-version-based location of code actually increases the ease (and decreases the complexity) of code sharing. OSX may not support this, but they are only part way along the road I suggest.
You do realize I assume that you are calling the python library distribution and installation system (cheeseshop, setup_tools etc.) fucktarded. Because it works on pretty much precisely the principles I advocated, albeit at a slightly smaller scale.
Whoever moderated the parent as flamebait is abusing the moderation system to promote their opinion on a point of valid relevant technical debate. Immature.
The real problem is that Linux distributions, taken together or individually, presents developers with too many completely unnecessary choices as to where essential library files can be put, and also, there is no standard version naming and locating convention.
Package managers are a complex solution to a problem that need not have existed in the first place, if it was realized that unnecessary choice is deadly dangerous, in the world of large-scale software interoperability.
There does not need to be any choice for where on a file system a given application or a given library should be located. That should be completely determined by the app or library name, version (using a standard versioning scheme), variant (using a standard variant naming scheme), and origin person-or-organization, using a standard organization identifying scheme.
It goes without saying that there should also be a standard globally unique URI for such libraries and apps (including the unique name, version, variant, origin identification).
So there should be no choice about where on the internet to get it (except for the choice involved in a standard mirroring URI scheme), and no choice about where to put it.
With this discipline, obviously needed in today's universe of code, all such package management, as well as dependency acquisition and installation, could be managed by a single unified and incredibly simple automated package manager; call it the TPM (trivial package manager).
I predict that's the direction things will move. It's the direction they should move. All programmers repeat after me: -Unnecessary choice is (the root of all;) evil -The default shall be good
Yes. It's a religion. But it's good for you. Now eat your vegetables.
I think it's a pretty "good thing"tm but would be better if it looks for identical versions of library files (in other locations than where it wants them) on the target computer, and just creates symbolic links to those files as long as their permissions are ok.
Web design guidelines for a long time: "Make sure it works on a 1024x768 screen"
We are beyond the WAP browser / Palm Pilot mobile interface.
You need a bit of clever web app design to make it easy to do a few things well with relatively few clicks, for mobile use convenience (can I get this done before the bus arrives / rain soaks my phone) but there is a convergence in what you can do with mobile UI and desktop UI webapps.
It's just the way we are. We are here (survived evolution) because we do stuff. i.e. We are animals with lots of sensors and information processing, so we perceive and model the surrounding world, and move ourselves so we minimize threats and maximize opportunities to gain survival-enhancing resources.
So it's built into us to do things rather than lie around. What those things are doesn't particularly matter, as long as enough of us are doing things that help them survive, so it continues.
Is there any higher purpose there? Probably not. It's just "I do therefore I am." (In all possible senses of the words:)
Is there a direction to it all nonetheless? Well, humans' particular overall survival strategy is "vertical" (increasing awareness of surroundings, increasingly complex action and the building of increasingly pervasive, complex and functional self-sustaining artificial systems.) rather than "horizontal" (multiply in the gazillions and support rapid physical evolution of biological form.)
So the direction is to increase our "chrono-gnostic horizon" (perception and understanding of events further out in spacetime from our location) so we can do increasingly sophisticated and more far-reaching interventions to tame a larger chunk of our environment and make it work toward our increased survival probability with lower energy expenditure per unit of increase of survival probability. Yep that's about it. If that's not enough, tough.
However, if you put content on the publicly accessible Worldwide Web, you have no valid grounds to complain if someone creates a mashup comprised of links to your specific content pages and images. Even if they surround those links (or frames/images) with ads. They did not copy them. They referred to them, and there is no such thing as a don't-refer right (to published material).
If you like, you can technically block access to the content based on the referrer attribute in the request, but that's about it.
I'd just like to point out that "recount" is a procedure designed to correct for inaccuracies in human-counted elections.
The concept of recount does not make sense for a computer-counted vote. A recount would get the same result every time, or something is REALLY wrong.
The equivalent of "recount" (purpose-wise) for a computerized election is:
Code and process review + security(privacy & integrity) analysis + Random ballot receipt audit
A fragile democracy is one where, among other things,
no-one trusts the current paper-ballot voting system, because it is highly manipulated and corrupted.
Many countries fall into this category. Iran is a notable recent case.
They could use a well-principled Internet voting system administered by a UN agency.
You could run the election for a month to prevent voter intimidation. You could have the computer, rather than the dictator's cronies, count the votes.
There would be no more 10% to 20% discrepencies in the claimed voting results.
Well, math and science are telling us that slowing global warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions is going to require 80% to 100% reductions in our net ghg emissions pretty quick (within less than 50 years). Figures approximate but in the right ballpark.
So if you actually wanted that problem solved, you'd want to vote for a politician proposing responsible ways of getting the most radical technological and economic transitions possible done as fast as possible.
You'd want to vote for a politician in favor of technological and economic changes which are likely to effectively impact the physical climate system and eco-systems, in a beneficial direction, rather than a politician who mouths similar words, but whose policies can be shown to be window-dressing with no chance of having measurable impact on the problems.
Seriously, though: Large scale serious problems like global warming, ecological services calculations, etc require a deep and broad grasp of math and logic.
Understanding geopolitical problems and economic problems at a fundamental level requires understanding of the math of complex systems.
In short: - If you want to be in charge, and do the wrong things, you can get by without math and without believing in what
math and science say about the world. - If you want to be in charge and do the right things, you need deep insight into mathematical and scientific explanations of aspects of the world and aspects of collective societal behavior. - If you want to vote for the people who will do the wrong things on the big problems and opportunities, you can get by without math. - If you want to vote for the people who will do the right things on the big problems and opportunities, you need lots of math to figure out who's probably on the best track to viable solutions.
Try holding your AM radio close to your laptop (or desktop computer for that matter).
Right now the health effects of various kinds of EM fields or various kinds of modulations of fields, if those health effects exist, appear to be below the threshold at which our current population health studies can reliably detect the correlations or causal effects.
So we are left in the uncomfortable position of saying "we don't know", and we don't even have any well-founded probabilistic guesses.
When you are in a "we don't know" state about some purported causal connection, you either have to study it more, with better and larger, and more expensive studies, or you have to just live with a "we don't know" state.
The problem with "we don't know" states is that literally, your guess is as good as mine.
So here we have a case where there are clear benefits to a technology, and no proven health impacts, but some people have concerns. If I were those parents, I would be much more concerned about sugar & simple-carbohydrate poisoning effects of the kind of food and drinks the students are probably consuming in and around school. That's something we can prove is going to kill a lot of them before ripe old age.
If I can just surf on my slightly future smartphone to an html 5 website and watch videos all day long, I am using a fair chunk of bandwidth I suppose. But I am just "using the web browser" from an app perspective.
i.e. I really don't see what control of particular apps has to do with control of bandwith usage etc.
First, give me stuff that will affect all of humanity for a time period of 50 years or more,
then, stuff that affects everyone everywhere for about 5 to 10 years
1-2 years
then getting more local (my nation or region, my city or local region)
I should be able to flip which is more important, the effect-time or the geographic scale, and be able to flip the order I care more about in terms of local, state, national, regional, global
Detecting spam-like vandalism would seem to be fairly easy.
Far more insidious is politically spun issue-framing masquerading as objective description of events or topics.
It is truly amazing what you can hide in there by using high-falutin', officious, grammatically correct language to accomplish your spin. Oft' times you can even fool the domain experts.
Physicists say that everything is either "spin-UP" or "spin-DOWN". Master spin-doctors say the same thing.
Unless you are a fighter pilot or a Ninja assassin, quick thinking isn't always the most helpful skill / strategy.
"Decide in haste / Repent at leisure"
"Twice measured / Once Cut"
I think we need a new emphasis on Ent-like pondering. Most of the most important problems that humans collectively have to solve in this day and age have global and hundred-year-long consequences. Thinking carelessly but having your solution proposal a day early is likely to be counter-productive.
We need to learn how to do some slow, considered, quality thinking about those kinds of things before we act. We need to hang out with the problem, try out different conceptualizations of it and its context, model and explore the scenarios, and then take a tentative and retractable step forward.
With thinking, it's quality, not quantity/speed, that counts. (Holy crap! Is that a lion?)
On the bright side, they've added the "believable" tomatometer to itunes movie reviews, but it's pretty obvious from the vacuous generic positive platitudes that many of the "user" reviews are bought and paid for.
Slashdot Mirror
"The OSX method of program bundles avoids dependency problems, but introduces the inefficiency of reducing code sharing,"
Uh. No. A method of program bundles which includes the concepts of standard name-and-version-based location of code actually increases the ease (and decreases the complexity) of code sharing. OSX may not support this, but they are only part way along the road I suggest.
You do realize I assume that you are calling the python library distribution and installation system (cheeseshop, setup_tools etc.) fucktarded. Because it works on pretty much precisely the principles I advocated, albeit at a slightly smaller scale.
Whoever moderated the parent as flamebait is abusing the moderation system to promote their opinion on a point of valid relevant technical debate. Immature.
The real problem is that Linux distributions, taken together or individually, presents developers with too many completely unnecessary choices as to where essential library files can be put, and also, there is no standard version naming and locating convention.
Package managers are a complex solution to a problem that need not have existed in the first place, if it was realized that unnecessary choice is deadly dangerous, in the world of large-scale software interoperability.
There does not need to be any choice for where on a file system a given application or a given library should be located. That should be completely determined by the app or library name, version (using a standard versioning scheme), variant (using a standard variant naming scheme), and origin person-or-organization, using a standard organization identifying scheme.
It goes without saying that there should also be a standard globally unique URI for such libraries and apps (including the unique name, version, variant, origin identification).
So there should be no choice about where on the internet to get it (except for the choice involved in a standard mirroring URI scheme), and
no choice about where to put it.
With this discipline, obviously needed in today's universe of code, all such package management, as well as dependency acquisition and installation, could be managed by a single unified and incredibly simple automated package manager; call it the TPM (trivial package manager).
I predict that's the direction things will move. It's the direction they should move. ;) evil
All programmers repeat after me:
-Unnecessary choice is (the root of all
-The default shall be good
Yes. It's a religion. But it's good for you. Now eat your vegetables.
I think it's a pretty "good thing"tm but would be better if
it looks for identical versions of library files (in other locations than where it wants them) on
the target computer, and just creates symbolic links to those files as long as their permissions
are ok.
Humans =
Programmers / Engineers / Mathematicians / Scientists (5% ?)
+ The "Detail-Averse" (aka "users" aka "consumers") (95% ?)
Thus the success of blog technology, facebook etc when
a "home page" and a 2-page HTML 1.0 manual arguably should
have sufficed.
for me anymore.
Let's see: Mobile:
iPad 1024x768 screen resolution
Current Subnotebook (also mobile): 1366x768
iPhone4 960x640
Web design guidelines for a long time:
"Make sure it works on a 1024x768 screen"
We are beyond the WAP browser / Palm Pilot mobile interface.
You need a bit of clever web app design to make it easy to do
a few things well with relatively few clicks, for mobile use convenience
(can I get this done before the bus arrives / rain soaks my phone)
but there is a convergence in what you can do with mobile UI and desktop UI webapps.
the arrogant @$$hole in the polyester suit.
It's a good thing we have choice in the market.
Prediction: They're going to lose all their open source franchises
as developers and customers walk out.
But regarding why we do anything at all...
It's just the way we are. We are here (survived evolution) because we do stuff.
i.e. We are animals with lots of sensors and information processing, so we
perceive and model the surrounding world, and move ourselves so we minimize
threats and maximize opportunities to gain survival-enhancing resources.
So it's built into us to do things rather than lie around.
What those things are doesn't particularly matter, as long as enough of us
are doing things that help them survive, so it continues.
Is there any higher purpose there? Probably not. It's just "I do therefore I am." :)
(In all possible senses of the words
Is there a direction to it all nonetheless? Well, humans' particular overall survival
strategy is "vertical" (increasing awareness of surroundings, increasingly complex action and the building of
increasingly pervasive, complex and functional self-sustaining artificial systems.)
rather than "horizontal" (multiply in the gazillions and support rapid physical evolution of biological form.)
So the direction is to increase our "chrono-gnostic horizon" (perception and understanding of events further
out in spacetime from our location) so we can do increasingly sophisticated and more far-reaching interventions
to tame a larger chunk of our environment and make it work toward our increased survival probability with lower
energy expenditure per unit of increase of survival probability. Yep that's about it. If that's not enough, tough.
you do have legal grounds for action
So yes, there is copyright.
However, if you put content on the publicly accessible Worldwide Web, you have no valid
grounds to complain if someone creates a mashup comprised of links to your specific content
pages and images. Even if they surround those links (or frames/images) with ads.
They did not copy them. They referred to them, and there is
no such thing as a don't-refer right (to published material).
If you like, you can technically block access to the content based on the referrer attribute in the request,
but that's about it.
It's been said before but I'll say it again :)
Redundancy and distribution are the only viable solutions for long-term persistence of information.
Bunkers are bunk. Major problem that we all know where this one is now.
I'd just like to point out that "recount" is a procedure designed to correct for inaccuracies in human-counted
elections.
The concept of recount does not make sense for a computer-counted vote. A recount would get the same
result every time, or something is REALLY wrong.
The equivalent of "recount" (purpose-wise) for a computerized election is:
Code and process review + security(privacy & integrity) analysis + Random ballot receipt audit
A fragile democracy is one where, among other things,
no-one trusts the current paper-ballot voting system,
because it is highly manipulated and corrupted.
Many countries fall into this category.
Iran is a notable recent case.
They could use a well-principled Internet voting system
administered by a UN agency.
You could run the election for a month to prevent
voter intimidation. You could have the computer,
rather than the dictator's cronies, count the votes.
There would be no more 10% to 20% discrepencies in
the claimed voting results.
I for one welcome our new bot overlords
Well, math and science are telling us that slowing global warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions is going to require
80% to 100% reductions in our net ghg emissions pretty quick (within less than 50 years). Figures approximate but in the
right ballpark.
So if you actually wanted that problem solved, you'd want to vote for a politician proposing responsible ways of getting the
most radical technological and economic transitions possible done as fast as possible.
You'd want to vote for a politician in favor of technological and economic changes which are likely to effectively impact
the physical climate system and eco-systems, in a beneficial direction, rather than a politician who mouths similar
words, but whose policies can be shown to be window-dressing with no chance of having measurable impact on the
problems.
"90% of this game is one-half mental"
Seriously, though: Large scale serious problems like global warming, ecological services calculations, etc require
a deep and broad grasp of math and logic.
Understanding geopolitical problems and economic problems
at a fundamental level requires understanding of the math of complex systems.
In short:
- If you want to be in charge, and do the wrong things, you can get by without math and without believing in what
math and science say about the world.
- If you want to be in charge and do the right things, you need deep insight into mathematical and scientific
explanations of aspects of the world and aspects of collective societal behavior.
- If you want to vote for the people who will do the wrong things on the big problems and opportunities, you
can get by without math.
- If you want to vote for the people who will do the right things on the big problems and opportunities, you need lots
of math to figure out who's probably on the best track to viable solutions.
Try holding your AM radio close to your laptop (or desktop computer for that matter).
Right now the health effects of various kinds of EM fields or various kinds of modulations of fields,
if those health effects exist, appear to be below the threshold at which
our current population health studies can reliably detect the correlations or
causal effects.
So we are left in the uncomfortable position of saying "we don't know", and we don't even
have any well-founded probabilistic guesses.
When you are in a "we don't know" state about some purported causal connection, you either
have to study it more, with better and larger, and more expensive studies, or you have to just
live with a "we don't know" state.
The problem with "we don't know" states is that literally, your guess is as good as mine.
So here we have a case where there are clear benefits to a technology, and no proven health impacts,
but some people have concerns. If I were those parents, I would be much more concerned about
sugar & simple-carbohydrate poisoning effects of the kind of food and drinks the students are probably
consuming in and around school. That's something we can prove is going to kill a lot of them before
ripe old age.
If I can just surf on my slightly future smartphone to an html 5 website and watch videos all day long,
I am using a fair chunk of bandwidth I suppose. But I am just "using the web browser" from an app perspective.
i.e. I really don't see what control of particular apps has to do with control of bandwith usage etc.
First, give me stuff that will affect all of humanity for a time period of 50 years or more,
then, stuff that affects everyone everywhere for about 5 to 10 years
1-2 years
then getting more local (my nation or region, my city or local region)
I should be able to flip which is more important, the effect-time or the geographic scale,
and be able to flip the order I care more about in terms of local, state, national, regional, global
Give me everything according to what's currently generally newsworthy
Except, leave out:
- Celebrity, Paris Hilton (the person, not the building)
- American Football, Basketball, Baseball, Car Racing
Detecting spam-like vandalism would seem to be fairly easy.
Far more insidious is politically spun issue-framing masquerading as objective description
of events or topics.
It is truly amazing what you can hide in there by using high-falutin', officious,
grammatically correct language to accomplish your spin. Oft' times you can even fool the
domain experts.
Physicists say that everything is either "spin-UP" or "spin-DOWN". Master spin-doctors
say the same thing.
Unless you are a fighter pilot or a Ninja assassin, quick thinking isn't always the most helpful skill / strategy.
"Decide in haste / Repent at leisure"
"Twice measured / Once Cut"
I think we need a new emphasis on Ent-like pondering. Most of the most important problems that humans
collectively have to solve in this day and age have global and hundred-year-long consequences. Thinking
carelessly but having your solution proposal a day early is likely to be counter-productive.
We need to learn how to do some slow, considered, quality thinking about those kinds of things before
we act. We need to hang out with the problem, try out different conceptualizations of it and its context,
model and explore the scenarios, and then take a tentative and retractable step forward.
With thinking, it's quality, not quantity/speed, that counts.
(Holy crap! Is that a lion?)
The Conservative government in Canada is similar to the Republicans in the USA.
And in the immortal words of Stephen Colbert:
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
On the bright side, they've added the "believable" tomatometer to itunes movie reviews,
but it's pretty obvious from the vacuous generic positive platitudes that many of the "user"
reviews are bought and paid for.