Forgive my ignorance about domain registration, but why can't whatever body controls it just refuse to allow offensive names. Another post said they initially reserved names with offensive words.
If I try to register "www.kill-jews.com", isn't there someone who can say, "No, you can't have that name?"
Or are there just too many registration requests to examine them all.
Finally, I almost wouldn't mind if they have their own doman names. I mean, racism, sexism are awful, but I don't plan on surfing to www.kkk.com, and if they are refused offensive names, what is to stop them from registering, say, "www.linuxrocks.com" and posting hate content? At least there is less chance I'll accidently hit their crap.
I'm not sure if I understand the point of a closed beta release of GPLed software. Isn't one of the benefits of open source that you release the code, warning people it's 'beta' and unstable and everyone works together to make the fixes?
If they do release GPLed code and a competitor fixes it and releases it, then Corel is free to incorporate the fixes into there own code, saving themselves some effort.
It seems as though Corel doesn't just fail to understand the GPL, they also don't seem to understand how open source development is supposed to work.
But I doubt that Sun would stop at the office. Microsoft starting off with software for the home PC (Flight Sim is the first Microsoft product [other than DOS] that I encountered). They branched into the office and now are going after the enterprise/server markets (and, well, every other market =) ). If Sunray boxes turned up in Offices with Netscape & StarPortal people will start to purchase them for home use. Then the same old battle will start with a Dictator trying to crush everyone else. They'll start to tout Sunray as a game machine, even if it is a terrible idea, simply to conquer more. Never under estimate greed!
You are correct on a couple of points, but you ignore your own analgy:
1) Yes, doctors are capable of great evil (or harm due to incompotence)
2) Automechanics & Telephone operators don't need a code of ethics. Although, if a mechanic claims to have fixed your brakes, but doesn't and you get into a car accident, you should sue.
Doctors, however, do have to take an oath to follow a code of ethics and in many situations, computer programmers are much more akin to doctors. People's lives and a great deal of money rely on functioning software. The current licence agreements that more or less say, "No matter how crappy and negligently written our software is, we're responsible for exactly zero loss of income or life" are ridiculous.
However, I'm not all for required Certification, because it would kill a lot of open source projects, and even hobbyist coders who just want to stick there stuff on the Net for others to play with.
Now, if these women are willing to buy a ticket and fly across the country just for the chance to net themselves a geek, why not just wander down to the nearest university and hunt around in the engineering or comp sci faculties. (Note: if you are having trouble finding nerdy boys, head downwards...the computer labs are often in the basement)
Mind you, Palo Alto probably has pretty good weather, so you're not entirely wasting your vacation.
I read somewhere that while a lot of researchers would agree water isn't required for life, nor does life have to be carbon-based, we tend to look for those things because they would probably be easiest for us to recognize. But you're right, it is possible to miss interesting stuff when we stick too closely to our assumptions (there was a recent Discovery article about microbes found deeper under the Earth's surface than expected and they were ignored for a long time because they were smaller than most biologists thought microbes could be).
Still, I wouldn't be susprised to see water/carbon-based life being the norm. Life on Earth has evolved that exploits seemingly every possible strategy and resource available (apparently there is a species of worms so specialized, it only lives in wooden beer vats!) and yet on a molecular level, all life on this planet is pretty homogenous. If there were good, viable alternatives, you would expect them to have evolved and be competing.
It generates programs written in assembly, albeit an assembly language that runs on a virtual machine (this prevents nasty things like a mutated program trashing your computer).
So, it is human readable as far as assembler goes =)
I was a little disappointed that the authors didn't mention Tierra, the a-life system that Avida was based on. Tierra has been around since the 80s and can be found at: the Tierra homepage.
The programs that evolve in Tierra get pretty interesting, and include the evolution of parasites and virus programs. Pretty neat stuff!
But why would they do that? Since all of their code (except the proprietary office apps) are going to be released, then anyone with a bit of time on their hands can download it for free...ie. they probably don't plan on making much money off of selling their Linux distribution. What they need is lots of people to sell WordPerfect to.
If I was Corel, I would want every Linux user running WordPerfect Office, so it would be advantageous to make it run great on any distribution. Linux is probably going to expand into the desktop market, so Corel wants to get entrenched early and their distribution is probably intended to help expand the market.
But it would be idiotic to snub other editions of Linux.
I think I buy that brand of food for my cat! However, she's starting to get a little chubby, so I think I'm going to switch to kibibytes...they're lower in fat I hear.
The Nutshell series may be intended as merely a command reference, but a lot of us use them as tutorials as well and there are a number of good reasons for this:
1) They're generally cheap. As a starving student, I was much more willing to spend $19.95 on Java in a Nutshell than one of the more expensive titles.
2) Long term value. Once you get through the tutorial book, it's often not useful as a reference, you want shorter & more succint info instead of pages and pages of detail. If the book can be a reference AND teach you the language, you get more value for your dollar.
3) Previous titles in the Nutshell series have been useful as learning aids. I picked up most of my Java knowledge from the Scribble example in Java in a Nutshell.
The reviewer was simply anticipating how many of us would try to use the book and advising us accordingly.
Hmm...it sort of sounds like our professor's tales of the mainframe days when students had to pay for their computing time. It didn't sound like a lot of fun, but apparently you learned to make sure your code was bug free before you handed your punch cards over the batch-operator guy =)
I think a neat distributed project would be some sort of AI-system. Neural nets and GAs are suited for parallel projects, so it would be really cool if we could get a few thousands computers hooked together in a neural net. I'd be curious to see how many processors would have to be hooked up before it got really could at natural language processing or playing Go or something.
Oddly, I had this idea while sipping coffee right before I took a look at/. this morning =)
I don't mean to go off on a tangent, but it's great to see that Linux reporting seems to be getting more and more accurate. You used to have to wince a lot at the misconceptions and errors that showed up in news articles about Linux, but this one summarized things well and I didn't see any glaring mistakes.
But why do you think that OS software can't be as thoroughly tested as commercial software? If I'm running a hospital OR, I would sure as hell test and software I'll be using, commercial or OS, before I hook it up.
Something else to consider...what would you trust more, software developped by volunteers where no-one is making money or software developped by a commercial firm who might feel pressure to push a product onto the market quickly. Or worse yet,would you trust systems from a commercial company that may produce mediocre software, but have a fantastic marketing team?
In some ways, like product honesty and openness, OS is probably *better* for medical software.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, the computer industry has a long tradition of not being accountable for software (even commercial) killing people.
In a computer ethics book (don't have the title handy) I read, there were some articles about a software controling the doses of radiation applied to cancer patients in therapy. Apparently, the software was buggy enough that it would often give the wrong dosage. Sometimes, the patient would get no radiation and in a few cases, patients were zapped with something like 100 times the amount of radiation they were supposed to get. There were a few deaths, but I don't believe the software manufacturers were ever held responsible.
I don't see why open source systems should held accountable when commercial products aren't.
Is anyone else getting nervous about how M$ is starting to pepper their press releases with the term 'Open' more and more. They are pushing for Open messaging standards, their W2K site was an Open test.
Are they riding Open Source hype or are they getting ready to embrace and extend the Open Source term?
I think upgrade inertia will help mitigate some of the compatibility problems. I'm working for a fairly large gov't department (5000+ employees) and we just moved up to Win95 on the desktop last year.
Companies won't want to upgrade every few months, so they will always lag behind and that will give the bleeding-edge stuff time to mature and stabilize. My guess is that things will fall out so that the bigger companies SGI, IBM,... will end up stuck with the 'standards compliance, documentation, etc' grunt work and the hackers will keep getting to do the cool stuff.
And we're already used to Win-style backward compatibility, so Linux probably couldn't do any worse.
Maybe we'll see Linux Certified Systems Engineers appearing:)
Hmm....is anyone up to date on alien currency exchange rates?
If ET *does* buy into my patented multi-level marketing plan, which has worked for thousands of Earthlings, and absolutely legal and guaranteed to earn you $5000/week while you loose 50 lbs/month, I'm going to need to know how much of his money it takes to make just $9.99 US.
In terms of Important Computer Geeks, I think Von Neumann or Turing would have to be considered WAY more influential than Bill or Linus, since they both fairly key to getting the whole ball rolling.
(I decided to vote for Von Neumann since he was also deeply involved in the US's atomic weapons program in WW2)
Janet Reno is going to have a few issues then with Canada's crytography policy. The following is taken from an Industry Canada web site:
Canada's Cryptography Policy Summary of Canada's Cryptography Policy
MINISTER MANLEY OUTLINES CANADIAN CRYPTOGRAPHY POLICY
OTTAWA, October 1, 1998 -- John Manley, Minister of Industry, today announced the elements of Canada's Cryptography Policy. Cryptography is a set of technologies used to provide security for electronic transmissions and of information stored on computer systems and networks such as the Internet. This policy is an essential component of the Canadian Electronic Commerce Strategy, designed to make Canada a world leader in the use of electronic commerce by the year 2000.
The policy allows Canadians to develop, import and use whatever cryptography products they wish and does not impose mandatory key recovery requirements or a licensing regime. "This policy is good for the Canadian economy," said Minister Manley. "It supports the increased use of electronic commerce products and services in Canada, as well as the export of Canadian information technologies to other countries."
Slashdot Mirror
>> What do you want to do now TELL ME!
:)
>> > smell bill
>> BILL GATES smell of POO!!!
>> > shoot bill
But would actually go like:
> shoot bill
With what?
> with gun
Huh?
> shoot bill with gun
Which gun: the pearl handled six shooter gun or the glossy black uzi gun?
> the uzi
Huh?
> sht bill with glossy black uzi gun
I don't understand sht
> shot bill with glossy black uzi gun
The glossy black uzi gun is not loaded
and so on...
:)
-Dana (I miss Infocom!)
Forgive my ignorance about domain registration, but why can't whatever body controls it just refuse to allow offensive names. Another post said they initially reserved names with offensive words.
If I try to register "www.kill-jews.com", isn't there someone who can say, "No, you can't have that name?"
Or are there just too many registration requests to examine them all.
Finally, I almost wouldn't mind if they have their own doman names. I mean, racism, sexism are awful, but I don't plan on surfing to www.kkk.com, and if they are refused offensive names, what is to stop them from registering, say, "www.linuxrocks.com" and posting hate content? At least there is less chance I'll accidently hit their crap.
-Dana
I'm not sure if I understand the point of a closed beta release of GPLed software. Isn't one of the benefits of open source that you release the code, warning people it's 'beta' and unstable and everyone works together to make the fixes?
If they do release GPLed code and a competitor fixes it and releases it, then Corel is free to incorporate the fixes into there own code, saving themselves some effort.
It seems as though Corel doesn't just fail to understand the GPL, they also don't seem to understand how open source development is supposed to work.
Dana
But I doubt that Sun would stop at the office. Microsoft starting off with software for the home PC (Flight Sim is the first Microsoft product [other than DOS] that I encountered). They branched into the office and now are going after the enterprise/server markets (and, well, every other market =) ). If Sunray boxes turned up in Offices with Netscape & StarPortal people will start to purchase them for home use. Then the same old battle will start with a Dictator trying to crush everyone else. They'll start to tout Sunray as a game machine, even if it is a terrible idea, simply to conquer more. Never under estimate greed!
-Dana
You are correct on a couple of points, but you ignore your own analgy:
1) Yes, doctors are capable of great evil (or harm due to incompotence)
2) Automechanics & Telephone operators don't need a code of ethics. Although, if a mechanic claims to have fixed your brakes, but doesn't and you get into a car accident, you should sue.
Doctors, however, do have to take an oath to follow a code of ethics and in many situations, computer programmers are much more akin to doctors. People's lives and a great deal of money rely on functioning software. The current licence agreements that more or less say, "No matter how crappy and negligently written our software is, we're responsible for exactly zero loss of income or life" are ridiculous.
However, I'm not all for required Certification, because it would kill a lot of open source projects, and even hobbyist coders who just want to stick there stuff on the Net for others to play with.
-dl
The last I heard, David Bowie was wealthiest entertainer in Britain, and worth close to a billion dollars. I doubt he's overly concerned with money!
Now, if these women are willing to buy a ticket and fly across the country just for the chance to net themselves a geek, why not just wander down to the nearest university and hunt around in the engineering or comp sci faculties. (Note: if you are having trouble finding nerdy boys, head downwards...the computer labs are often in the basement)
Mind you, Palo Alto probably has pretty good weather, so you're not entirely wasting your vacation.
Dana
I read somewhere that while a lot of researchers would agree water isn't required for life, nor does life have to be carbon-based, we tend to look for those things because they would probably be easiest for us to recognize. But you're right, it is possible to miss interesting stuff when we stick too closely to our assumptions (there was a recent Discovery article about microbes found deeper under the Earth's surface than expected and they were ignored for a long time because they were smaller than most biologists thought microbes could be).
Still, I wouldn't be susprised to see water/carbon-based life being the norm. Life on Earth has evolved that exploits seemingly every possible strategy and resource available (apparently there is a species of worms so specialized, it only lives in wooden beer vats!) and yet on a molecular level, all life on this planet is pretty homogenous. If there were good, viable alternatives, you would expect them to have evolved and be competing.
Dana
(I may be talking out of my ass too =) )
It generates programs written in assembly, albeit an assembly language that runs on a virtual machine (this prevents nasty things like a mutated program trashing your computer).
So, it is human readable as far as assembler goes =)
I was a little disappointed that the authors didn't mention Tierra, the a-life system that Avida was based on. Tierra has been around since the 80s and can be found at: the Tierra homepage.
The programs that evolve in Tierra get pretty interesting, and include the evolution of parasites and virus programs. Pretty neat stuff!
But why would they do that? Since all of their code (except the proprietary office apps) are going to be released, then anyone with a bit of time on their hands can download it for free...ie. they probably don't plan on making much money off of selling their Linux distribution. What they need is lots of people to sell WordPerfect to.
If I was Corel, I would want every Linux user running WordPerfect Office, so it would be advantageous to make it run great on any distribution. Linux is probably going to expand into the desktop market, so Corel wants to get entrenched early and their distribution is probably intended to help expand the market.
But it would be idiotic to snub other editions of Linux.
I think I buy that brand of food for my cat! However, she's starting to get a little chubby, so I think I'm going to switch to kibibytes...they're lower in fat I hear.
The Nutshell series may be intended as merely a command reference, but a lot of us use them as tutorials as well and there are a number of good reasons for this:
1) They're generally cheap. As a starving student, I was much more willing to spend $19.95 on Java in a Nutshell than one of the more expensive titles.
2) Long term value. Once you get through the tutorial book, it's often not useful as a reference, you want shorter & more succint info instead of pages and pages of detail. If the book can be a reference AND teach you the language, you get more value for your dollar.
3) Previous titles in the Nutshell series have been useful as learning aids. I picked up most of my Java knowledge from the Scribble example in Java in a Nutshell.
The reviewer was simply anticipating how many of us would try to use the book and advising us accordingly.
-dl
Hmm...it sort of sounds like our professor's tales of the mainframe days when students had to pay for their computing time. It didn't sound like a lot of fun, but apparently you learned to make sure your code was bug free before you handed your punch cards over the batch-operator guy =)
Damn! That should read 'really good at natural...'
OH! That's what the preview button is for =)
I think a neat distributed project would be some sort of AI-system. Neural nets and GAs are suited for parallel projects, so it would be really cool if we could get a few thousands computers hooked together in a neural net. I'd be curious to see how many processors would have to be hooked up before it got really could at natural language processing or playing Go or something.
/. this morning =)
Oddly, I had this idea while sipping coffee right before I took a look at
-dl
I don't mean to go off on a tangent, but it's great to see that Linux reporting seems to be getting more and more accurate. You used to have to wince a lot at the misconceptions and errors that showed up in news articles about Linux, but this one summarized things well and I didn't see any glaring mistakes.
It's nice to see!
Actually, they did put a disclaimer. In the commercial, it actually said:
Harrier Jet 7,000,000 pepsi points
(Just Kidding)
Although, I'd heard the commercial was different in Canada and the U.S. (I guess Pepsi Canada is a little smarter than Pepsi U.S.A. =) )
But why do you think that OS software can't be as thoroughly tested as commercial software? If I'm running a hospital OR, I would sure as hell test and software I'll be using, commercial or OS, before I hook it up.
Something else to consider...what would you trust more, software developped by volunteers where no-one is making money or software developped by a commercial firm who might feel pressure to push a product onto the market quickly. Or worse yet,would you trust systems from a commercial company that may produce mediocre software, but have a fantastic marketing team?
In some ways, like product honesty and openness, OS is probably *better* for medical software.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, the computer industry has a long tradition of not being accountable for software (even commercial) killing people.
In a computer ethics book (don't have the title handy) I read, there were some articles about a software controling the doses of radiation applied to cancer patients in therapy. Apparently, the software was buggy enough that it would often give the wrong dosage. Sometimes, the patient would get no radiation and in a few cases, patients were zapped with something like 100 times the amount of radiation they were supposed to get. There were a few deaths, but I don't believe the software manufacturers were ever held responsible.
I don't see why open source systems should held accountable when commercial products aren't.
Is anyone else getting nervous about how M$ is starting to pepper their press releases with the term 'Open' more and more. They are pushing for Open messaging standards, their W2K site was an Open test.
Are they riding Open Source hype or are they getting ready to embrace and extend the Open Source term?
I think upgrade inertia will help mitigate some of the compatibility problems. I'm working for a fairly large gov't department (5000+ employees) and we just moved up to Win95 on the desktop last year.
:)
Companies won't want to upgrade every few months, so they will always lag behind and that will give the bleeding-edge stuff time to mature and stabilize. My guess is that things will fall out so that the bigger companies SGI, IBM,... will end up stuck with the 'standards compliance, documentation, etc' grunt work and the hackers will keep getting to do the cool stuff.
And we're already used to Win-style backward compatibility, so Linux probably couldn't do any worse.
Maybe we'll see Linux Certified Systems Engineers appearing
Hmm....is anyone up to date on alien currency exchange rates?
If ET *does* buy into my patented multi-level marketing plan, which has worked for thousands of Earthlings, and absolutely legal and guaranteed to earn you $5000/week while you loose 50 lbs/month, I'm going to need to know how much of his money it takes to make just $9.99 US.
In terms of Important Computer Geeks, I think Von Neumann or Turing would have to be considered WAY more influential than Bill or Linus, since they both fairly key to getting the whole ball rolling.
(I decided to vote for Von Neumann since he was also deeply involved in the US's atomic weapons program in WW2)
-dl
Janet Reno is going to have a few issues then with Canada's crytography policy. The following is taken from an Industry Canada web site:
Canada's Cryptography Policy
Summary of Canada's Cryptography Policy
MINISTER MANLEY OUTLINES CANADIAN CRYPTOGRAPHY POLICY
OTTAWA, October 1, 1998 -- John Manley, Minister of Industry, today announced the elements of Canada's Cryptography Policy. Cryptography is a set of technologies used to provide security for electronic transmissions and of information stored on computer systems and networks such as the Internet. This policy is an essential component of the Canadian Electronic Commerce Strategy, designed to make Canada a world leader in the use of electronic commerce by the year 2000.
The policy allows Canadians to develop, import and use whatever cryptography products they wish and does not impose mandatory key recovery requirements or a licensing regime. "This policy is good for the Canadian economy," said Minister Manley. "It supports the increased use of electronic commerce products and services in Canada, as well as the export of Canadian information technologies to other countries."