I don't know. It's interesting to watch what has to be an internal struggle for many companies that are both technology and media companies, like AOL-Time-Warner or Sony. I don't think the RIAA would actually contend that technology companies are bad; they rely on those companies' cooperation to include stronger DRM in consumer electronics and computers, as well as often being technology companies themselves.
In your referenced article, Disney accuses Mac of promoting piracy. Well, in some degree, they do. I'm not defending it, but its important to note that an accusation towards 3% of the PC market is hardly the same as going after, say, Dell. Technology is the media industry's friend, so long as they manage to control its use.
I use an Aurora fountain pen I got cheap, on sale, for like $20 or so. I know that sounds like a lot for a pen, but I've had it for probably four years and it is only slightly the worse for wear. I refill the ink from a bottle every week or two, though it can take cartridges instead.
Fountain pens are messier--I sometimes have ink stains on my fingers--and the ink smears easier if you are a lefty, but they also allow me to write comfortably and exressively. I have incredibly poor handwriting, and the pen does nothing to overcome that. But I can do sketches with it, I can write in many different styles, and I get a quality of line, with a varying thickness, far better than I would with a cheap ballpoint (though I always seem to have a number of those available for jotting notes, etc).
I hate writing by hand; it's slow, messy, and often painful. And it may be silly, but writing with a nice implement makes it at least a little more tolerable.
Unfortunately, the NetBSD port has stalled due to lack of man
power. We believe most of the hard stuff has already been done, and
are hoping to get the ball rolling again soon. In hindsight, a FreeBSD
4 port might have been more useful to the community. Any volunteers?:-)
I think you miss the point. City streets are open to all, but in the given region, they are, indeed, all owned by the city.
A Linux monopoly, however, is a lot like an automobile monopoly or a candy bar monopoly. I don't mean that in the sense that automobiles or candy bars would all be made by one company, but rather that people solely use cars for personal local transportation rather than horses or steam-buggies.
The assumption behind this report appears to be that Linux is monolithic, in the same sense that Windows or other commercial software is monolithic. The CCAGW would hardly complain about HTTP or SMTP monopolies, since those protocols are open to all and exclusive to none; there is no complaint that proprietary alternatives to HTTP are "barred from competing for state contracts."
My guess would be that CCAGW have seen some reports saying that Linux admins cost more and Linux can cost more--entirely possible, though it is hard to find unbiased reports on both sides, it seems--and made the blanket assumption that this would stifle competition.
And they have a point, to some degree; when faced with Open Source competition, MS have typically lowered the costs of their products considerably, preferring to sell at a loss rather than lose market share. And this may be whats best for the state. But I think CCAGW are also somewhat mislead and over-reacting; obviously there would still be plenty of competition, and I think there may be valid philosophical reasons that a government should go Open Source as well.
As far as I know, the requirements for that would be pretty small, actually. You don't need realtime data transmission; you just need something fast enough to transfer the chunk to each node, I assume. Just because its animation, its no different than any other large data-processing being done by clustering. The data is easily predictable enough that it can be broken up for a bunch of nodes; so much, in fact, that BORG allows you to break up a rendering job into batches for independent computers to do, without clustering (sorta like SETI@Home).
No, no, no. You've got it all wrong. The reason MS doesn't want consumers to claim is because they just want to help California's underfunded public education system.
The more claimants, the less money MS is allowed to give to help Californian children.
To clarify for those who don't know what he's talking about, neither does he. It doesn't make sense to read from an unopened filehandle; this is not something you can do in 5.6. The whole point of filehandles is that you can open the file once and then use the handle to read from it, rather than having to, say, open it every single time you want to access the file. If you haven't opened it first, of course, the filehandle is meaningless.
And, no, I didn't fall for your troll. But I may as well let those of us who don't know Perl know that you don't, either. "Perl hacker" my ass.
No, I know a troll when I see one. I posted because I didn't want others to think it was a good idea. I'll give you that much credit that you managed to fool a few dumbasses with mod points on slashdot. Whoop de do. Your life is complete.
Seriously, though, I really am curious what sort of silly pleasure you get out of this. Why is trolling so much fun for you? And, if you don't mind my asking, are you 13 or not? Just curious.
Incidentally, Tirel, your signature really gives away your identity. Can't we just call you Krapongor?
I mean, seriously. Did your dad beat you, or your mom not tell you she loved you? What sort of emotional issues would lead you to get such satisfaction from acting like an immature 13 year old on the Internet? Or are you a 13 year old (if so, trust me, you'll feel stupid about this when you're older)?
Yeah, thats a pretty poor idea. See, first off, I think you are wrong about what the Soundex algorithm does. It categorizes names by similar phenomes, not by similar spelling. So it would recommend, say, yeehaw.com (is there one) as a replacement for yahooo.com, when obviously that should be yahoo.com.
Second, and far more important, you forget that DNS is used for more than just web browsing. As someone pointed out above, what about protocols that do not support that search page? How do you present a search page to IRC users? Sure, you could just redirect them, but then you'd have all sorts of mistaken redirections. It would suck.
Far better to leave it to the surfer's choice. As is, many browsers redirect to a search page if the host-name lookup fails. Thats the best method; it avoids issues with other protocols, with DNS caching of false replacements, or any of the other issues, while giving the surfer's browser full control over how to implement it, what search engine to use, etc. There is no real loss by leaving it to the browser, but many gains. Think. Then speak.
Mensa member, eh? Beware of arrogance and stupidity.
No, I think you are right. But you misunderstand what I mean. My point was not that he was a leader--he's not, in that sense. But when Linus speaks, people listen. Case in point.
He's not stupid, but he really does come across as only interested in the technology. He admits it, of course, and far be it for me to hold that against someone. But it strikes me as funny that someone who really seems to be limited, by choice, to the technology, would be looked to as a ideological leader, as well.
This isn't criticism. But I think to some degree, there are those who are ideological leaders--Lessig springs to mind; his philosophical and legal insight is incredible--and there are technological visionaries. But the two aren't necessarily the same.
At least one team using Aibo's (that at the University of Pennsylvania, who, I believe, came in third internationally this year) used (again, if I remember right; I could be off base here but there was talk about this) some sort of audio communications using the sensory capabilities of the dogs.
Supposedly the real challenge was programming them to do the proper distinguishing between their signals and the cheers of the raving audience.
Re:I'm not an American...
on
TIA Project to End
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This was allegedly the case with Echelon (many, many prior stories about it here on Slashdot). Allegedly, as I said, there was an agreement between the five signing nations (US, UK, Australia, Germany, and someone else...) to "share" information on each other's citizens to circumvent restrictions.
To be fair, a lot of this really is hype, though. I doubt that much of this went on in a very general scrope--though possibly isolated incidents like industrial espionage ofpersonal vendettas are more likely--simply because that amount of information takes way too much time to do any reasonable processing with. They don't have the manpower.
This was the one interesting (from an academic viewpoint) aspect of TIA. How can you process so much information from so many different sources in so many different forms, and build any real predictions or patterns in it? Especially when we don't really even have any samples of "terrorist-like activity." I mean, what, do terrorists all run up their credit card debt before killing themselves, figuring they won't have to deal with it anyway?
That doesn't work for me. I once even had a telemarketer tell me "You're a jerk," and hang up (she said I had a chance to win 500,000 dollars, and I asked her what kind of dollars--chocolate dollars or American dollars (because you never can be too sure these days)).
I'd suggest that maybe it's because you, as you said, smile at them, but I can't really see how that helps, over the phone and all.
If you want to claim that assembly is the future of programming, I don't think we'll have a particularly useful discussion. Being able to understand and modify assembly is certainly worthwhile for optimization, but comparing assembly to Java is like comparing apples and crack-whores, if you'll pardon the expression.
As for C being strongly or weakly typed, I suggest you check out this page. Certainly, C could be considered either in the proper context, and I don't want to debate it. Nonetheless, I think it's a bit dishonest to try to lump C in with PHP and Perl, which I would think was the implication of "weakly typed" in our context (or such was my assumption).
You don't mention any PHP or Perl experience in there, so I'll try to fill you in. Working on other people's code in either of those two languages, unless very well documented, sucks. I use both PHP and Perl for small projects I need to whip up quickly, such as a simple web-application or dynamic content on a webpage. But for a large-scale project, it would be hell. I'd choose JSP.
My apologies, I've never done more with Python than just look at it a few times. I made an incorrect assumption.
That said, I think you are probably right about coding mistakes, but I think my point is still valid. Strong typing does not relieve you from mistakes, for sure, but it does help prevent some of them. While this is certainly up to the coder, I consider that worth the minimal extra trouble of casting variables.
And to be clear, no, I'm not trying to be partisan. My post was merely a reaction to one I saw as arrogant and unwilling to admit even the clear advantages of certain systems; claiming that strongly typed languages are universally, inherently inferior is simply silly. I never tried to claim that PHP or Perl were themselves inferior for being weakly typed. Each language serves a purpose; C++ happens to serve its purpose, as does Java, far better than PHP, Perl or, for that matter, assembly.
I think that speaks well for your credibility. You've been at "this programming thing" for a long time, eh? I assume the only languages you've used have been scripting languages like Perl, PHP, and Python? Or perhaps you program enterprise-level applications entirely in assembly, eh? Cut me a break. Strong typing is a core requirement in any serious programming language (don't get me wrong; I'm a huge fan of Perl and PHP has its uses, but neither are meant for the sort of tasks you might use C, C++, or Java for--and vice versa; C, C++, and Java are hardly meant for quick-n-dirty scripting).
And don't get so arrogant. "Study...and you'll understand," right? I understand a few things. In my experience, programmers--myself included--benefit greately from the checks and controls of strong typing. Without it, the compiler cannot make sure that you, the coder, aren't doing something stupid. And yes, you can say, "well, I don't do that sort of thing and don't need no stinkin' machine to help me out" but thats just ignorant. The entire process of programming is one of interpreting human ideas into machine instructions. That's a task people aren't particularly good at, and the more help we can get, the better. That's why you don't program entire apps in assembly, thats why we have compilers check for syntax errors, unreachable statements, and other stupid things, and thats why we have strongly typed languages to make sure we aren't doing something stupid.
Oh, and you ever have to work on a legacy app someone programmed in PHP or Perl or some other weakly-typed language? It's pure hell.
No. There was some talk--stemming, apparently, from this InFocus article on SecurityFocus--that a few federal laws, most of which were not intended to apply in this case or in anything similar to this case. There is no active movement, as far as I know, among out legislators to illegalize honeypots; rather, the question was whether other laws may unintentionally make honeypots illegal, the feeling being that attackers caught by such a honeypot might in turn sue their captors.
It's probably worth pointing out that this discussion took place on Bugtraq, the Symantec-owned full-disclosure mailing-list, a few days ago. Apparently, this is more of a misquote than anything. See http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/337333.
Isn't this (more or less) the point of a honeypot? Granted, the owners would presumably step in if they saw anything extremely dangerous going on, but this is fairly common,tried-and-true practice. Ever read _The Cuckoo's Egg_?
What's to be said for doing something you enjoy? I look forward to going to work, not because it pays well--it doesn't, at the moment--but because I work on projects that I go home and think about, and want to keep working on even at the end of the day.
If I were an MBA, I'd go home and want to forget about work. I'd dread going in the morning. I'd have gobs of money to spend on distracting myself from my horrible job with all sorts of expensive toys and drug addictions, but that's not exactly what I'd consider ideal.
Hopefully, I'll be fortunate enough to never have a job I want to retire from. Not because I can't, but because its far more fun that sitting around playing golf or motoring around in a yacht and eating dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon.
Slashdot Mirror
In your referenced article, Disney accuses Mac of promoting piracy. Well, in some degree, they do. I'm not defending it, but its important to note that an accusation towards 3% of the PC market is hardly the same as going after, say, Dell. Technology is the media industry's friend, so long as they manage to control its use.
Fountain pens are messier--I sometimes have ink stains on my fingers--and the ink smears easier if you are a lefty, but they also allow me to write comfortably and exressively. I have incredibly poor handwriting, and the pen does nothing to overcome that. But I can do sketches with it, I can write in many different styles, and I get a quality of line, with a varying thickness, far better than I would with a cheap ballpoint (though I always seem to have a number of those available for jotting notes, etc).
I hate writing by hand; it's slow, messy, and often painful. And it may be silly, but writing with a nice implement makes it at least a little more tolerable.
Unfortunately, the NetBSD port has stalled due to lack of man power. We believe most of the hard stuff has already been done, and are hoping to get the ball rolling again soon. In hindsight, a FreeBSD 4 port might have been more useful to the community. Any volunteers? :-)
A Linux monopoly, however, is a lot like an automobile monopoly or a candy bar monopoly. I don't mean that in the sense that automobiles or candy bars would all be made by one company, but rather that people solely use cars for personal local transportation rather than horses or steam-buggies.
The assumption behind this report appears to be that Linux is monolithic, in the same sense that Windows or other commercial software is monolithic. The CCAGW would hardly complain about HTTP or SMTP monopolies, since those protocols are open to all and exclusive to none; there is no complaint that proprietary alternatives to HTTP are "barred from competing for state contracts."
My guess would be that CCAGW have seen some reports saying that Linux admins cost more and Linux can cost more--entirely possible, though it is hard to find unbiased reports on both sides, it seems--and made the blanket assumption that this would stifle competition.
And they have a point, to some degree; when faced with Open Source competition, MS have typically lowered the costs of their products considerably, preferring to sell at a loss rather than lose market share. And this may be whats best for the state. But I think CCAGW are also somewhat mislead and over-reacting; obviously there would still be plenty of competition, and I think there may be valid philosophical reasons that a government should go Open Source as well.
As far as I know, the requirements for that would be pretty small, actually. You don't need realtime data transmission; you just need something fast enough to transfer the chunk to each node, I assume. Just because its animation, its no different than any other large data-processing being done by clustering. The data is easily predictable enough that it can be broken up for a bunch of nodes; so much, in fact, that BORG allows you to break up a rendering job into batches for independent computers to do, without clustering (sorta like SETI@Home).
No, I know. It was a joke. But yeah, you did make a good point.
The more claimants, the less money MS is allowed to give to help Californian children.
To clarify for those who don't know what he's talking about, neither does he. It doesn't make sense to read from an unopened filehandle; this is not something you can do in 5.6. The whole point of filehandles is that you can open the file once and then use the handle to read from it, rather than having to, say, open it every single time you want to access the file. If you haven't opened it first, of course, the filehandle is meaningless.
And, no, I didn't fall for your troll. But I may as well let those of us who don't know Perl know that you don't, either. "Perl hacker" my ass.
Seriously, though, I really am curious what sort of silly pleasure you get out of this. Why is trolling so much fun for you? And, if you don't mind my asking, are you 13 or not? Just curious.
I mean, seriously. Did your dad beat you, or your mom not tell you she loved you? What sort of emotional issues would lead you to get such satisfaction from acting like an immature 13 year old on the Internet? Or are you a 13 year old (if so, trust me, you'll feel stupid about this when you're older)?
Second, and far more important, you forget that DNS is used for more than just web browsing. As someone pointed out above, what about protocols that do not support that search page? How do you present a search page to IRC users? Sure, you could just redirect them, but then you'd have all sorts of mistaken redirections. It would suck.
Far better to leave it to the surfer's choice. As is, many browsers redirect to a search page if the host-name lookup fails. Thats the best method; it avoids issues with other protocols, with DNS caching of false replacements, or any of the other issues, while giving the surfer's browser full control over how to implement it, what search engine to use, etc. There is no real loss by leaving it to the browser, but many gains. Think. Then speak.
Mensa member, eh? Beware of arrogance and stupidity.
"This isn't criticism." Read the post before you reply.
No, I think you are right. But you misunderstand what I mean. My point was not that he was a leader--he's not, in that sense. But when Linus speaks, people listen. Case in point.
This isn't criticism. But I think to some degree, there are those who are ideological leaders--Lessig springs to mind; his philosophical and legal insight is incredible--and there are technological visionaries. But the two aren't necessarily the same.
Supposedly the real challenge was programming them to do the proper distinguishing between their signals and the cheers of the raving audience.
To be fair, a lot of this really is hype, though. I doubt that much of this went on in a very general scrope--though possibly isolated incidents like industrial espionage ofpersonal vendettas are more likely--simply because that amount of information takes way too much time to do any reasonable processing with. They don't have the manpower.
This was the one interesting (from an academic viewpoint) aspect of TIA. How can you process so much information from so many different sources in so many different forms, and build any real predictions or patterns in it? Especially when we don't really even have any samples of "terrorist-like activity." I mean, what, do terrorists all run up their credit card debt before killing themselves, figuring they won't have to deal with it anyway?
That doesn't work for me. I once even had a telemarketer tell me "You're a jerk," and hang up (she said I had a chance to win 500,000 dollars, and I asked her what kind of dollars--chocolate dollars or American dollars (because you never can be too sure these days)).
I'd suggest that maybe it's because you, as you said, smile at them, but I can't really see how that helps, over the phone and all.
So you remain resolute in a world filled with fans of Object Oriented programming? You must be really good or really stupid.
As for C being strongly or weakly typed, I suggest you check out this page. Certainly, C could be considered either in the proper context, and I don't want to debate it. Nonetheless, I think it's a bit dishonest to try to lump C in with PHP and Perl, which I would think was the implication of "weakly typed" in our context (or such was my assumption).
You don't mention any PHP or Perl experience in there, so I'll try to fill you in. Working on other people's code in either of those two languages, unless very well documented, sucks. I use both PHP and Perl for small projects I need to whip up quickly, such as a simple web-application or dynamic content on a webpage. But for a large-scale project, it would be hell. I'd choose JSP.
That said, I think you are probably right about coding mistakes, but I think my point is still valid. Strong typing does not relieve you from mistakes, for sure, but it does help prevent some of them. While this is certainly up to the coder, I consider that worth the minimal extra trouble of casting variables.
And to be clear, no, I'm not trying to be partisan. My post was merely a reaction to one I saw as arrogant and unwilling to admit even the clear advantages of certain systems; claiming that strongly typed languages are universally, inherently inferior is simply silly. I never tried to claim that PHP or Perl were themselves inferior for being weakly typed. Each language serves a purpose; C++ happens to serve its purpose, as does Java, far better than PHP, Perl or, for that matter, assembly.
I think that speaks well for your credibility. You've been at "this programming thing" for a long time, eh? I assume the only languages you've used have been scripting languages like Perl, PHP, and Python? Or perhaps you program enterprise-level applications entirely in assembly, eh? Cut me a break. Strong typing is a core requirement in any serious programming language (don't get me wrong; I'm a huge fan of Perl and PHP has its uses, but neither are meant for the sort of tasks you might use C, C++, or Java for--and vice versa; C, C++, and Java are hardly meant for quick-n-dirty scripting).
And don't get so arrogant. "Study...and you'll understand," right? I understand a few things. In my experience, programmers--myself included--benefit greately from the checks and controls of strong typing. Without it, the compiler cannot make sure that you, the coder, aren't doing something stupid. And yes, you can say, "well, I don't do that sort of thing and don't need no stinkin' machine to help me out" but thats just ignorant. The entire process of programming is one of interpreting human ideas into machine instructions. That's a task people aren't particularly good at, and the more help we can get, the better. That's why you don't program entire apps in assembly, thats why we have compilers check for syntax errors, unreachable statements, and other stupid things, and thats why we have strongly typed languages to make sure we aren't doing something stupid.
Oh, and you ever have to work on a legacy app someone programmed in PHP or Perl or some other weakly-typed language? It's pure hell.
No. There was some talk--stemming, apparently, from this InFocus article on SecurityFocus--that a few federal laws, most of which were not intended to apply in this case or in anything similar to this case. There is no active movement, as far as I know, among out legislators to illegalize honeypots; rather, the question was whether other laws may unintentionally make honeypots illegal, the feeling being that attackers caught by such a honeypot might in turn sue their captors.
It's probably worth pointing out that this discussion took place on Bugtraq, the Symantec-owned full-disclosure mailing-list, a few days ago. Apparently, this is more of a misquote than anything. See http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/337333.
Isn't this (more or less) the point of a honeypot? Granted, the owners would presumably step in if they saw anything extremely dangerous going on, but this is fairly common,tried-and-true practice. Ever read _The Cuckoo's Egg_?
If I were an MBA, I'd go home and want to forget about work. I'd dread going in the morning. I'd have gobs of money to spend on distracting myself from my horrible job with all sorts of expensive toys and drug addictions, but that's not exactly what I'd consider ideal.
Hopefully, I'll be fortunate enough to never have a job I want to retire from. Not because I can't, but because its far more fun that sitting around playing golf or motoring around in a yacht and eating dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon.