GoogOS.. GooOS? Had they decided to re-brand SuSE, we'd probably be seeing a GooSE Linux. And surely their OpenOffice.org version will be called GoogOOo.
Perhaps the reason why there aren't more women in tech is that they're more prone to watching soaps instead of writing code for fun?
You don't turn some airhead blonde into a tech wizard by persuading her that she'll get to play out her dreams of twisting hunks around her middle finger by learning C++. They've been to school, they know better...;-)
Seriously, the geek girls I know are probably insulted by this very idea.
In a more general case, companies in the modern world are in a very difficult position as more and more power is moved away from governments to corporations and we turn more and more from citizens to consumers who vote with wallets instead of ballots.
The problem is choosing between complete non-discriminatory neutrality in the market -- which means you are seen as an evil cold utilitarian money-grabbing machine and get hated by people -- and actually taking positions and influencing things according to some set of values, which means you are hated by people because you are excercising power over something.
All entities in positions of power have this problem (compare with US foreign policy). This is one of the reasons why I prefer keeping things simple, clear-cut and old-fashioned: companies focused on doing what they do and being checked by politics when neccessary. This provides for two different power mechanisms that, hopefully, will maintain some sort of sensible balance.
That considered, maybe in this case it would indeed be best if Google just did what they do best and let China block them if they so choose, without going out of their way to actually accomodate...
Orkut just failed to peak and come, no matter how hard they tried... sometimes one just isn't in the mood. To make sure yours doesn't fail, don't drink too much and make sure she doesn't have a headache.
If you like the ability to compress complex meanings into a single word, you should try Finnish then. Swedish doesn't even get close. Our longest word is
Epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän
Which is, of course, so horribly synthetic that it doesn't really even mean anything -- it could perhaps be used as a part of a short sentence that expresses an idea close to "I wonder if it would work even without its unsystematization?", but at least is technically a member of the set of words you can produce from the grammar;-)
I never understood why some parents seem to have such a huge need these days to control their childrens' time and outright "program" it. Sure, it is important to encourage them to do varied things and get out some and excercise and stuff like that, but isn't it a bit overbearing to tell them what to do on time that is clearly their own time, supposing that they've already done their homework, cleaned their room, done the dishes, mowed the lawn, walked the dog, painted the fence etc?
Allocating one's own free time as best suits you is an important part of a child's freedom and it also teaches responsibility about making choices with what you have... namely time in this case.
Since I was six, I've spent the majority of my free time on the computer, because I chose to. Yeah, a lot of that time was spent playing games and not neccessarily coding something leet, but this was at least the time when it took some understanding of computers to get a game to run in the first place (autoexec.bat and config.sys tuning to get enough RAM, for example..)
Unsurprisingly I got into IT and I can at least claim to be one of those old-school people who have an actual passion for computing instead of being some dot-com-era leftover money-chasing goon from a degree mill.
I do understand that if the kid is turning into a total couch potato or net junkie, it's probably a cause for discussion... but even in that case, just I wouldn't believe in the power of hard limits on usage... would you go confiscate your daughter's violin if she was "spending too much time practising"?
A lot of amateurs who are used to getting the cool moving pictures at the back of their compact consumer cameras automatically assume that DSLRs are inferior because they "lack" the preview. One I know even _returned_ a 350D because of this. It is, of course, a totally useless feature if you're shooting seriously, for various reasons, and I must educate people about this to no end... those that instantly spring to mind would be
- Image quality. In a DSRL you see _with your own eyes_ whatever is going to hit the sensor, through whatever optics you've got attached. This is going to be superior to any crappy LCD, unless perhaps you're working with very low light coming through due to some weird filters, or something like that. I bet you couldn't even properly do a manual focus when neccessary if you didn't use your eyeball as a direct measuring device. My idiot cousin got one of these leet cams that actually have a fake eyepiece by having a screen behind it, and he was like laughing his ass off at my "old-fashioned" (350D) camera that didn't do the AD/DA loop between lens and his eye. Try explaining to people like that that he's just getting reduced quality... even in the debrief screen, a serious photographer is going to look at the histogram, NOT the shown image because it just doesn't tell you anything about the exposure.
- Battery life. You won't be able to keep the screen on for long before you run out of charge.
- You _need_ a proper posture to hold the camera steady when shooting, and the traditional way of doing it -- holding the camera to your eye and stabilizing against your face and body is the way to go. If you were going to shoot while looking at the back of the camera, your camera shake is going to be humongous, esp. if you've got long optics attached.
The fact that cars became harder to tinker with came with the commoditization of cars, and the same is happening with computer technology. I have a theory that as any technology moves out of the domain of the first-adopter tech-wiz geeks, it becomes "hard to tinker with" because by definition, by then you're selling to not the hardcore geek but to the general Joe User who doesn't want to tinker or further the tech for its own sake. This requires mechanisms that by neccessity end up being beyond the reach of any single individual, no matter how talented, because of the added complexity required to be "idiot-proof".
Any technology will, over the course of its more widespread adoption, experience an increasing divergence between what its users want it to accomplish and how much they are able/willing to invest of their own effort to actually make it happen. This is because both sides of this equation will move away from each other: requirements increase due to competition, while the user will be more and more less well versed in the technology's specific domain. If this was not the case, the cost of adopting the tech would be prohibitively high for the user, whose specialization is better invested somewhere else.
Cars are hard to service by yourself because most people just "want it to go" (and go "well") and this has to be provided for, which increases complexity, partly because you can't outsource to the car's owner. The same will happen with computers, and computer security.
As sad as it is, I think it is a very normal development that a single one person is soon no longer able to excercise complete control over a computer system. I am 26 now and I was probably among the last generation that was able to totally control a system (something like a C64). I can't claim that I would be able to 0wn my Linux box to such a degree anymore; I can only have full grasp of one level of it (some kind of application programming with C as the lowest level). I am totally out of my depth, for example, with the Linux kernel source.
We just have to live with the idea that just perhaps with the widespread adoption of computing, we may have to relinquish the thought that a single person would be able to handle the whole stack... interestingly, as this has happened throughout history, it may imply that the modern-day übergeek who wants to completely dominate a field should probably go study Genetics instead of CS...
Are you saying the appeal of the feeds remains roughly the same regardless of whether you take a look at them before or after using what they're printed on?:-)
You are absolutely correct. I do "tech support" for most of my friends and family, and I always recommend getting a NAT box between them and their ADSL line, keeping automatic updates on in Windows and not doing anything stupid, such as opening suspicious attachments. That's it. No problems for me or then, ever, and if there are problems, it's almost always their fault because they didn't follow the last rule.
The last time I saw my cousin's laptop it was so stuck on something that it wouldn't even manage to finish booting before nearly freezing. F-Secure's antivirus program was hogging up all system resources, and the firewall was acting funny as well. They hadn't, of course, been updated for ages. All of her security programs had come on some ISP's CD, which tend to be a bit shaky to begin with. So, I uninstalled all of that crud, ran all the missing patches into Windows and moved her to my safety regime. Everything has been fine ever since.
The lesson to be learned here is that people are not interested in playing with anti-virus programs and firewalls, and therefore they see it as a neccessary evil, which when neglected or misused is going to cause grief when they subsequently fail to protect. Are people really going to be able to differentiate between two processes that both want to communicate somewhere outside the box, one of which is something legitimate and something not? No, and this is why they either reflexively allow everything (I've got a virus!) or refuse everything (my program broke!).
End-user's security products are a sham. They slow down the machine and the user for worse cost/benefit than simpler solutions.
Alternatively, people could try to get a clue and be smart consumers and not be early adopters who are going to suffer from all the crap. If manufacturers' early sales start to hurt from crappy first releases, their quality will go up.
Peered networks which are not in most cases owned by anything American. What is the phenomenon of modern Internet emerges from the co-operation and participation of numerous individuals, corporations and institutions worldwide. You can't seriously claim that someone or something that developed the underlying technology has any claim over the emergent end result of everyone getting together to use those technologies, connect their systems together and use the resultant commons for everyone's mutual benefit.
IMO it would only be fair to ensure the Internet remains as much a "common carrier" as possible, and someone demanding unilateral control is already enough cause for concern... an interesting analogy would be a network of private roads. It is (hypothetically, entertain the idea) mutually beneficial for all to allow travel through one's own stretch of road if that means that you can drive over other people's roads where-ever you want. If someone came around and said that he has the right to write the rules of the road because he invented the idea of the road, I don't think it would fly.
IIRC until a certain point in fetal development you can cut off pieces of the fetus and it'll heal just fine. This goes beyond the simple stem cell capacity to specialize into whatever is neccessary. The genes that allow this eventually get switched off and we lose the ability. Fetuses heal really well otherwise too, for example early enough prenatal surgery leaves no scars.
Time to start writing for a grant application for research where arms are chopped off fetuses...:-)
Re:Ever notice the names of industry lobby groups.
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 1
...often convey meanings or philosophies exactly opposite of those actually espoused by the organisation?
Similar to how those countries that have the words "Democratic Republic" or something to that effect in their names, usually aren't.
Well, the movie was mostly in angsty, awkward silences, as befits any good Scandinavian movie production.:)
A small gripe.. strictly speaking Finland is not Scandinavian, and I have always thought myself that our non-talkativeness is considered a specifically Finnish trait even in our neighbourhood. Just compare and constrast the local stereotypes the Nordic peoples have of each other.
I dislike the Swedes in particular trying to co-opt our national character when it is, for once, becoming cool;-)
Everyone can identify with working hard (even if what you do is nefarious) and having to defend it in some way.
No I can't, really.
I always preferred getting along and co-operating, but admittedly I'm old-fashioned that way. Guess I haven't been brainwashed yet by the Ayn Rand cult of mandatory survivalism.:-)
I'm just your usual run of the mill moron in the 130-140 range, but I'll pipe in... being a genius makes you deserve special treatment in the area of having to learn "simple facts" (i.e. most of the school curriculum) exactly how? Maybe it would help your social skills and all that if you learned the same stuff as everybody else instead of complaining -- it shouldn't be difficult for someone of your mental prowess.
Guess what? Most other kids thought they were "made to learn boring stuff" too (i.e. most seem to think this of history). A good school curriculum is balanced and "forces" a kid to try out something he doesn't neccessarily even enjoy... just because he might, and he certainly needs to know all sorts of things even if he didn't write the next book on it in the future.
So.. uh... the "0h no3s I'm being oppressed by the EVIL public school system because it's not worthy of teh genius!" defense is weak in my eyes, at least the way you put it, because it makes it seem like combined elitism and laziness. Sure, I was bored in school most of the time, but I did my schoolwork quickly and spent the remaining time developing myself as I pleased. Even my social skills didn't suffer because I wasn't locked away from peers into some über-intensive education program. As a matter of fact, I had more time for other kids because I didn't have to sweat the school so much.
Ok, that came off as harsh, apologies.. I couldn't help it.;)
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GoogOS.. GooOS? Had they decided to re-brand SuSE, we'd probably be seeing a GooSE Linux. And surely their OpenOffice.org version will be called GoogOOo.
Perhaps the reason why there aren't more women in tech is that they're more prone to watching soaps instead of writing code for fun?
;-)
You don't turn some airhead blonde into a tech wizard by persuading her that she'll get to play out her dreams of twisting hunks around her middle finger by learning C++. They've been to school, they know better...
Seriously, the geek girls I know are probably insulted by this very idea.
In a more general case, companies in the modern world are in a very difficult position as more and more power is moved away from governments to corporations and we turn more and more from citizens to consumers who vote with wallets instead of ballots.
The problem is choosing between complete non-discriminatory neutrality in the market -- which means you are seen as an evil cold utilitarian money-grabbing machine and get hated by people -- and actually taking positions and influencing things according to some set of values, which means you are hated by people because you are excercising power over something.
All entities in positions of power have this problem (compare with US foreign policy). This is one of the reasons why I prefer keeping things simple, clear-cut and old-fashioned: companies focused on doing what they do and being checked by politics when neccessary. This provides for two different power mechanisms that, hopefully, will maintain some sort of sensible balance.
That considered, maybe in this case it would indeed be best if Google just did what they do best and let China block them if they so choose, without going out of their way to actually accomodate...
... how many sperm does an average keyboard have per square cm, and for how long are they alive?
I too got curious about what the results would be if this piece of software was presented with a shot of an exposed other end of a body.
At least it should be able to detect one huge, deep wrinkle, plus a major bacteria-filled pore!
Might indeed catch colon cancer in the process.
that those minimal spanning tree algorithms I learned in university would come in handy!! :-)
Orkut just failed to peak and come, no matter how hard they tried... sometimes one just isn't in the mood. To make sure yours doesn't fail, don't drink too much and make sure she doesn't have a headache.
Epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän
Which is, of course, so horribly synthetic that it doesn't really even mean anything -- it could perhaps be used as a part of a short sentence that expresses an idea close to "I wonder if it would work even without its unsystematization?", but at least is technically a member of the set of words you can produce from the grammar ;-)
My thoughts exactly... "Oh noes!! This is sure going to cut into my supply of pics of pretty naked Asian girls!" :(
There's no mention of this in the Bible. It almost smacks of Evolution, so of course it can't be true.
I never understood why some parents seem to have such a huge need these days to control their childrens' time and outright "program" it. Sure, it is important to encourage them to do varied things and get out some and excercise and stuff like that, but isn't it a bit overbearing to tell them what to do on time that is clearly their own time, supposing that they've already done their homework, cleaned their room, done the dishes, mowed the lawn, walked the dog, painted the fence etc?
Allocating one's own free time as best suits you is an important part of a child's freedom and it also teaches responsibility about making choices with what you have... namely time in this case.
Since I was six, I've spent the majority of my free time on the computer, because I chose to. Yeah, a lot of that time was spent playing games and not neccessarily coding something leet, but this was at least the time when it took some understanding of computers to get a game to run in the first place (autoexec.bat and config.sys tuning to get enough RAM, for example..)
Unsurprisingly I got into IT and I can at least claim to be one of those old-school people who have an actual passion for computing instead of being some dot-com-era leftover money-chasing goon from a degree mill.
I do understand that if the kid is turning into a total couch potato or net junkie, it's probably a cause for discussion... but even in that case, just I wouldn't believe in the power of hard limits on usage... would you go confiscate your daughter's violin if she was "spending too much time practising"?
Now all American soldiers will look like Mr. Freeze and spew inane one-liners at Iraqis... "I'll put joo in da koolah!!"
It's a UNIX system! I know this!
A lot of amateurs who are used to getting the cool moving pictures at the back of their compact consumer cameras automatically assume that DSLRs are inferior because they "lack" the preview. One I know even _returned_ a 350D because of this. It is, of course, a totally useless feature if you're shooting seriously, for various reasons, and I must educate people about this to no end... those that instantly spring to mind would be
- Image quality. In a DSRL you see _with your own eyes_ whatever is going to hit the sensor, through whatever optics you've got attached. This is going to be superior to any crappy LCD, unless perhaps you're working with very low light coming through due to some weird filters, or something like that. I bet you couldn't even properly do a manual focus when neccessary if you didn't use your eyeball as a direct measuring device. My idiot cousin got one of these leet cams that actually have a fake eyepiece by having a screen behind it, and he was like laughing his ass off at my "old-fashioned" (350D) camera that didn't do the AD/DA loop between lens and his eye. Try explaining to people like that that he's just getting reduced quality... even in the debrief screen, a serious photographer is going to look at the histogram, NOT the shown image because it just doesn't tell you anything about the exposure.
- Battery life. You won't be able to keep the screen on for long before you run out of charge.
- You _need_ a proper posture to hold the camera steady when shooting, and the traditional way of doing it -- holding the camera to your eye and stabilizing against your face and body is the way to go. If you were going to shoot while looking at the back of the camera, your camera shake is going to be humongous, esp. if you've got long optics attached.
The fact that cars became harder to tinker with came with the commoditization of cars, and the same is happening with computer technology. I have a theory that as any technology moves out of the domain of the first-adopter tech-wiz geeks, it becomes "hard to tinker with" because by definition, by then you're selling to not the hardcore geek but to the general Joe User who doesn't want to tinker or further the tech for its own sake. This requires mechanisms that by neccessity end up being beyond the reach of any single individual, no matter how talented, because of the added complexity required to be "idiot-proof".
Any technology will, over the course of its more widespread adoption, experience an increasing divergence between what its users want it to accomplish and how much they are able/willing to invest of their own effort to actually make it happen. This is because both sides of this equation will move away from each other: requirements increase due to competition, while the user will be more and more less well versed in the technology's specific domain. If this was not the case, the cost of adopting the tech would be prohibitively high for the user, whose specialization is better invested somewhere else.
Cars are hard to service by yourself because most people just "want it to go" (and go "well") and this has to be provided for, which increases complexity, partly because you can't outsource to the car's owner. The same will happen with computers, and computer security.
As sad as it is, I think it is a very normal development that a single one person is soon no longer able to excercise complete control over a computer system. I am 26 now and I was probably among the last generation that was able to totally control a system (something like a C64). I can't claim that I would be able to 0wn my Linux box to such a degree anymore; I can only have full grasp of one level of it (some kind of application programming with C as the lowest level). I am totally out of my depth, for example, with the Linux kernel source.
We just have to live with the idea that just perhaps with the widespread adoption of computing, we may have to relinquish the thought that a single person would be able to handle the whole stack... interestingly, as this has happened throughout history, it may imply that the modern-day übergeek who wants to completely dominate a field should probably go study Genetics instead of CS...
Are you saying the appeal of the feeds remains roughly the same regardless of whether you take a look at them before or after using what they're printed on? :-)
You are absolutely correct. I do "tech support" for most of my friends and family, and I always recommend getting a NAT box between them and their ADSL line, keeping automatic updates on in Windows and not doing anything stupid, such as opening suspicious attachments. That's it. No problems for me or then, ever, and if there are problems, it's almost always their fault because they didn't follow the last rule.
The last time I saw my cousin's laptop it was so stuck on something that it wouldn't even manage to finish booting before nearly freezing. F-Secure's antivirus program was hogging up all system resources, and the firewall was acting funny as well. They hadn't, of course, been updated for ages. All of her security programs had come on some ISP's CD, which tend to be a bit shaky to begin with. So, I uninstalled all of that crud, ran all the missing patches into Windows and moved her to my safety regime. Everything has been fine ever since.
The lesson to be learned here is that people are not interested in playing with anti-virus programs and firewalls, and therefore they see it as a neccessary evil, which when neglected or misused is going to cause grief when they subsequently fail to protect. Are people really going to be able to differentiate between two processes that both want to communicate somewhere outside the box, one of which is something legitimate and something not? No, and this is why they either reflexively allow everything (I've got a virus!) or refuse everything (my program broke!).
End-user's security products are a sham. They slow down the machine and the user for worse cost/benefit than simpler solutions.
Alternatively, people could try to get a clue and be smart consumers and not be early adopters who are going to suffer from all the crap. If manufacturers' early sales start to hurt from crappy first releases, their quality will go up.
And what does the Internet consist of?
Peered networks which are not in most cases owned by anything American. What is the phenomenon of modern Internet emerges from the co-operation and participation of numerous individuals, corporations and institutions worldwide. You can't seriously claim that someone or something that developed the underlying technology has any claim over the emergent end result of everyone getting together to use those technologies, connect their systems together and use the resultant commons for everyone's mutual benefit.
IMO it would only be fair to ensure the Internet remains as much a "common carrier" as possible, and someone demanding unilateral control is already enough cause for concern... an interesting analogy would be a network of private roads. It is (hypothetically, entertain the idea) mutually beneficial for all to allow travel through one's own stretch of road if that means that you can drive over other people's roads where-ever you want. If someone came around and said that he has the right to write the rules of the road because he invented the idea of the road, I don't think it would fly.
IIRC until a certain point in fetal development you can cut off pieces of the fetus and it'll heal just fine. This goes beyond the simple stem cell capacity to specialize into whatever is neccessary. The genes that allow this eventually get switched off and we lose the ability. Fetuses heal really well otherwise too, for example early enough prenatal surgery leaves no scars.
:-)
Time to start writing for a grant application for research where arms are chopped off fetuses...
Similar to how those countries that have the words "Democratic Republic" or something to that effect in their names, usually aren't.
Well, the movie was mostly in angsty, awkward silences, as befits any good Scandinavian movie production. :)
A small gripe.. strictly speaking Finland is not Scandinavian, and I have always thought myself that our non-talkativeness is considered a specifically Finnish trait even in our neighbourhood. Just compare and constrast the local stereotypes the Nordic peoples have of each other.
I dislike the Swedes in particular trying to co-opt our national character when it is, for once, becoming cool ;-)
Everyone can identify with working hard (even if what you do is nefarious) and having to defend it in some way.
No I can't, really.
I always preferred getting along and co-operating, but admittedly I'm old-fashioned that way. Guess I haven't been brainwashed yet by the Ayn Rand cult of mandatory survivalism. :-)
I'm just your usual run of the mill moron in the 130-140 range, but I'll pipe in... being a genius makes you deserve special treatment in the area of having to learn "simple facts" (i.e. most of the school curriculum) exactly how? Maybe it would help your social skills and all that if you learned the same stuff as everybody else instead of complaining -- it shouldn't be difficult for someone of your mental prowess.
;)
Guess what? Most other kids thought they were "made to learn boring stuff" too (i.e. most seem to think this of history). A good school curriculum is balanced and "forces" a kid to try out something he doesn't neccessarily even enjoy... just because he might, and he certainly needs to know all sorts of things even if he didn't write the next book on it in the future.
So.. uh... the "0h no3s I'm being oppressed by the EVIL public school system because it's not worthy of teh genius!" defense is weak in my eyes, at least the way you put it, because it makes it seem like combined elitism and laziness. Sure, I was bored in school most of the time, but I did my schoolwork quickly and spent the remaining time developing myself as I pleased. Even my social skills didn't suffer because I wasn't locked away from peers into some über-intensive education program. As a matter of fact, I had more time for other kids because I didn't have to sweat the school so much.
Ok, that came off as harsh, apologies.. I couldn't help it.
It would give a whole new meaning to the concept of "the man on the moon" :-)
Oh well, maybe I'll just think of etching him onto my Powerbook once I get one...