Way long ago my PC reservation strategy in the overcrowded IBM PC lab was to swap the keyboard cables for two machines facing each other back to back. The keyboard lights would still work normally, but you couldn't see any text coming up on the screen you were facing (DOS era) so most people thought the machine was mysteriously non-functional and left it alone.
I've got an "Intel inside Pentium !!!" sticker over top of the irritatingly bright blue Logitech logo on the top of my giant Logitech mouse (the one that comes closest to fitting my hand). Can still see a bit of the blue glow from behind the word "Intel".
I can't believe the whining I'm reading about the incompatibility of sex and intellect. Intellect is not an automatic life sentence of playing the snivelling git, though it might be hard to determine this hanging around on Slashdot.
The Man Who Knew Infinity A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
p.129 Mingled reverence and sex appeal, if it can be imagined, accrued to the Wranglers...
p.130 Of course, the Wooden Spoon was strictly a consolation prize. The honor accorded the Senior Wrangler, on the other hand, was no laughing matter, but clung to him, like an aura, for a lifetime. "If one person were consensus All-American, a Rhodes scholar, and Bachelor of the Year," observed one account aimed at American readers, "he would not come close to commanding the lasting distinction that came to the Senior Wrangler."
While we're discussing the terminally uncool outcomes of child prodigy, how about Alicia Witt?
The problem with many bright children is that their intellect comes at the expense of their social development. So the solution is to let these kids stultify among their peers for ten years in the hope that *some* social grace is imprinted upon them (by no means guaranteed) on the theory that intellect is harder to damage (a smart person who stultifies for ten years still ends up being smarter than the next guy, however much potential is lost in the meanwhile).
A friend of mine (female no less) recently quoted to me this passage from the short story Brennbar's Rant by John Irving.
'Of course', I went on, 'people with intelligence really constitute one of the smallest minority groups. They have to endure the wallowing sheep-mindedness and flagrant idiocy of what's forever being popular. Popularity is probably the greatest insult to an intelligent person. Hence', I said, with a gesture to Brennbar, who was resembling a still life, 'acne is a perfect metaphor for the feeling of being unpopular, which every intelligent person must suffer. Intelligence is unpopular, of course. Nobody likes an intelligent person. Intelligent perople are not to be trusted. We suspect that their intellgence hides a kind of perversity. It's a little like thinking that people with pimples are unclean.'
What did Intel put into the water supply to cause people to say these things? When the Tualatin first came out, the impressive power/watt rating was tantamount to a well kept secret. Intel had no intent or desire to sell these chips into any market segment aside from high-end laptops. You could *buy* a VIA Epia board. Or you could *download* a Tualatin spec. sheet and drool over the heat production so low you hardly noticed the fact that you didn't have one.
If VIA finally manages to deliver the C7M, it's a rather capable chip with good power/watt performance, plus a few other significant differentiations: super small BGA package size, and the integrated crypto accelerators outperforming a Pentium IV on some tasks by an order of magnitude.
Meanwhile, I'm sure Intel will introduce yet another product in their product line that they never intend to scale beyond a fraction of a percent of their production volume, yet it will nevertheless materialize in every comparative review about what Intel 'has' (and you don't).
The concept that APL code is "hard to maintain" is correct to first approximation, but it's more myth than reality when one digs deeper into the question. Most of the densest lines of code I once concocted in APL were 100% maintenance free: efficient and correct over the entire usable operand range. The density of the code squeezed out many degrees of freedom for making stupid errors even before you began.
There were other factors, having little to do with code density, that made APL systems hard to maintain. One was the psychological feeling that written twenty lines of comments to describe one line of code was somehow ungainly. I overcame this feeling within myself rather early. In fact, I wrote so many lines of comments for each line of code that my first work-term supervisor wrote a program to crawl through all the functions in one of my workspaces to *remove* every line of comment I had written, because he somehow thought he would understand my code better if he could fit it all onto the screen at once. His problem was that he didn't understand the *concepts* in my code. One of the things about raw APL code is that there are few surface markers that distinguish necessary manipulations from deep concepts. In my C language code, the necessary manipulations are largely gathered together in the initialization statements for local variables. Well, how much a language design should be based on protecting the programming team from supreme idiocy?
The second factor that made APL hard to maintain is that that it tried to force every concept to become a nail. The array primitive was surprisingly powerful, but it just didn't handle certain kinds of data aggregates at all well. And neither could you push this structure in the lexical direction, because there was no regex facility either.
And finally, the notion of a "workspace" was itself suspect. Every function was it's own text. There was no text anywhere that declared or described or controlled all the global variables that the workspace would necessarily include. There was no textual grouping of related functions into a higher-order interface or language facility. These decisions were made because APL originated in the teletype era. It had nothing to do with expressive density.
I think there is also an illusion at work that if you spend the day performing a maintenance task by visiting twenty source files and pawing through several thousand lines of code, that you are working with some greater efficiency than the guy who spent the whole day staring at single screenful of starkly beautiful APL scratchings. That's not so obvious to me having been there.
OK, here's the thing. In APL if a programmer decided to cut corners and forsake the "stark beauty" that made APL a workable language, there was precious little left behind on the surface to betray the sloppy work standard. Take one look at a C program written by a programming in a sloppy mindset, you know right away you are maintaining the droolings of an idiot. In APL, it could take you an hour to parse beneath the surface to find that same incompetence leaping out. The C language has far more expressive scope for the droolings of idiots and I guess those markers are worth a lot at the end of the day.
There aren't so many of us in this thread with the background to actually do so. I learned APL when I took a calculas course at the local university because I was applying to schools out of province where calculas was taught in the terrible idea known as "grade 13". The math course allowed me access to the CS lab and I soon started to thrive on being able to write programs in APL that ran a *lot* faster (sometimes factors of 10) than any of the programs written in compiled Pascal by the CS undergraduates (what a bunch of lamers).
One needs to understand that in APL (as interpreted as it gets) is that certain idioms applied to large arrays are essentially super-compiled, in much the same way that the C++ non-container vector[[bool]] did funky stuff until they killed it (they have killed it by now, haven't they?) It was no small benefit to me in my jousting with the lamers that in APL I could focus all my talents on choosing the best algorithm, because I was never more than 80 keystrokes away from a major breakthrough. Except when the problem demanded certain kinds of data structures where APL was inherently unsuitable. It's a good thing no one ever challenged me to the fastest program to implement a position tree.
I learned a lot from my time with APL because it reduces certain aspects of programming to its bare essentials, while saying almost nothing about anything else. I learned which portions of the programming task can be delegated to a superior notation, and which portions can't. For the most part I liked the APL notation. Stupid manipulations of the rank vector (reshape) using the rho operator to effect extra arguments to a function call, that was life in the gutter. So were the trig operators for that matter.
At the same time, I don't miss most of the symbols / operators all that much either. There are three that have stuck with me ever since. The max/min (round up/down) operators (bar with a flat bit to the right at the top or bottom) and the high minus (minus sign tangent to the top of the regular digits).
Let's assume we have a C language implementation from the day when an integer was 16 bits and a long was 32 bits. For this C language host, the expression -32768 does *not* do what one first supposes: represent the least possible 16-bit signed integer value, because this is parsed as the negation operator applied to the long integer constant 32768. How stupid. Give me back my high minus sign! The constant ambiguity between subtracting a positive constant and adding a negative constant does *not* help one in recalling to mind the derivation of the formula involved (with the original symmetries intact).
Other symbols from APL I've continued to use in my own notation are the take and drop operators (preserving the overtake and undertake semantics) and the encode / decode operators. All the rest I've discarded.
The other bugaboo I've retained having learned early how to think APL-style are definitions of the modulus operator (% in C/C++) for a positive modulus B, does not ALWAYS return a value on the semi-open interval [0..B). Howls of disgust when this function does anything different for negative values of A, a fraud of the highest magnitude perpetrated by the same idiots who neglected to supply the high minus sign in every other language I know.
I must however reserve the innermost circle of hell, following along in P.J. Plaugher's footsteps, for those who implement malloc(0) to cause an "instructional" abend.
In my view, the concept of "relevent ad" is akin to "relevent spam". Yes, someone could send me a spam concerning a product I badly need and don't know about but I am 100% certain that the cost of deleting all the spams I didn't want exceeds the value of any "golden spam" I might ever receive. And even then, that's giving too much credit to the golden spam. If it's something I need badly enough, it will come to my attention regardless, through other channels that require less dumpster fishing.
The ad companies are always after the emotional response. How about I save my emotions for the people I care about? In this materialistic culture we relate to each other through our possessions and the ad medium itself serves and promotes this. I see it as a form of subjugation / exploitation to have your identity transferred from your person (which is forever your own) to your possessions (which corporations control).
There was a study that showed that the human brain is hard-wired to respond to certain types of emotional content in the environment (anger, hostility) and that it is very nearly impossible (for the general population) to suppress this.
There seems to be a similar effect at work concerning social explanations. In any situation where there is a social explanation (Linus exists in a special circumstance) it seems as if a dominant segment of the population becomes incapable of exploring the alternatives.
Which came first? Linus's privileged role, or his talent / aptitude / being in the right place at the right time / judgement / whatever? If his role derives from his talent and experience, then does his role explain his attitude or does his attitude explain his role?
He might now be in a privileged situation. And it might not matter at all to the question at hand. There are two ways to ignore a standard. One is careless neglect (those requirements bug me, I won't read it) and the other requires extreme competence (that feature will mess up a lot of other stuff, but if I obey exactly these portions, then I won't break much existing code, and everyone can get along with the result, and we won't poison our system with massive breakage in getting there).
A spec. is a great substitute for murky thinking, and a terrible substitute for clear thinking. Linus seems to believe that clear thinking is not possible without paying close attention to the reality at hand. If one is paying close attention to the reality at hand, and thinking clearly about what remains to be accomplished, a spec. serves in an advisory capacity at best.
I've never read a spec. of any significance that didn't at some point say step 2: tie your shoelaces together and proceed down stairs. The most sophisticated specs. encourage you to do this without realizing what's going on until it's way too late.
That's interesting to us because it's what's happening now. It's nothing compared to the development of X-rays, or the discovery that blood circulates, that we breathe oxygen, or the Krebs cycle, etc - all of which allowed us to peer "inside the box" and were discovered more than 100 years ago. That just re-supports my notion of tunnel vision.
No, it just resupports your tunnel vision about how you define tunnel vision. X-rays were discovered in 1895. That's hardly 1700. I don't know anyone who wouldn't consider x-rays the *beginning* of the innovations that followed. Krebs cycle was discovered in 1937. But note that unlike DNA, this is the metabolism, not the source code. Try to find two discoveries of a similar magnitude before 1900 (within a forty year period) where Newton wasn't responsible for both of them.
You're way overstating the significance of significance. Lots of stuff discovered a long time ago was of incredible significance, but that really means very little when all of these discoveries are linked together in a continuous chain.
Things have changed. The discoveries come faster than before, the dissemination is wider and faster than ever before, the discoveries increasingly relate directly to the source code of the systems under study, and the discoveries increasingly leverage the platform of discovery itself. Back in 1950 when DNA was first discovered, we barely had a suitable technology to record the human genome (microfiche?), or access the useful bits even if we could stuff it into a large building. Like we're going to make a ton of progress on proteomics recording the genome on microfiche. These involutions matter.
I read aldaily all the time. I don't buy the relativism of relativism. Things have changed. Use your brain.
Charlatan is a an easy brush to apply to anyone making extraordinary claims as Kurzweil does. He's the interesting charlatan you can't ignore, because nothing he says is entirely wrong. It's all wrong, but it isn't at the same time.
I wouldn't hold his lack of historical context against him, unless the human genome was decoded in year 1700. Or even just functional MRI. Or any technology that allowed us to peer "inside the box" on our own construction. This is roughly the difference between playing with hidden menus on your set-top box, or decompiling the firmware.
Where Kurzweil falls short of the mark--ridiculously short--is ignoring the couplings between technical progress and political progress. Technological progress can only accelerate so much before the political force becomes the rate limiting term. One sees this effect already with stem cell research being banned for political reasons, despite (or maybe because) almost everyone involved concedes the staggering potential for life-altering discoveries.
If we manage to find the cure for aging (which will no doubt be so expensive at first only the rich can afford it) before we achieve singularity AI, then the largest insurrection in human history will begin and that will be end of it: privileged immortals clashing against the mortal hordes until nothing remains. Coming to a gated community in California real soon now.
Instead of "open source" this should be called "august source" after the inclusive policies of the Augusta National Golf Club. Also known as "if you have to ask, we won't admit you".
The red cloud of outrage obscured my vision. Man I'd like to send that guy into space wearing a puffy suit to make some repairs using a sharp pair of kitchen scissors. He might have to pause long enough to use his brain for once rather than reciting monotonously from the gospel of the Needy 500.
While Cisco finds the vulnerability "in house" and sits on it for gawd knows how long, the "researchers" are out there finding vulnerabilities with no guidelines from Cisco *ahead of time* that "oh, we know about that one, so it doesn't count".
His wife must love him, he believes in telepathy. Somehow the researchers are supposed to know which defects Cisco has already found in house and not waste their time finding those ones again.
Translation: we don't give a rat's ass how much time these people invest finding these defects, and mostly we would rather they all went away.
Oh, and by the way, the stock in trade of these people is to make Cisco look good. Those who don't make Cisco look good are the bad guys. And Cisco deserves this, because we charitably give out credit when people find bugs we didn't tell them not to bother finding.
We talk abot information as it were a quark in the atomic model. The interesting structure is two levels up, above the protons and neutrons, in the periodic table. There are as many different kinds of "information" as there are elements in the periodic table.
The sloppy use of information as an amorphous aggregate already places the speaker at the level of those incapable of holding more than one distinct idea in mind at the same time.
And then there is the crowd so proud of their ability to distinguish speech from beer. Such high spectral resolution. Truly amazing.
The fundamental stupidity of this topic is the burried premise that you can go around and change your IP stack like a flavour of ice-cream. FreeBSD has *never* had a bad TCP/IP stack as far back as I know the history.
The vast majority of what makes a great carbureted engine carries forward for the transition to fuel injection: precision tolerances, metalurgy, balance, lubricant flow, etc. But until the combustion chamber is reworked for fuel injection, it won't impress anyone. In case anyone hasn't figured it out, we're talking about the dying gasp of the lamentable Pentium IV: let's run it at 20,000 rpm with a second radiator behind the trunk, then we won't have to fix anything else.
Lately, FreeBSD confesses their engine has become a little cluttered with fancy new pollution controls. Along with tweaking the fuel injectors, they are making quick work of cleaning up the superficial clutter at the same time.
In the decade between 1985 and 1995 one of the great battles in the software development industry was against the instinct of every software team to roll up their sleeves and "write it again". This is the same idiot warmed over. No respect for fifteen years of engineering tradition, or instinct for what portion of that tradition carries forward, or the degree of difficulty involved. Would trade his Porsche for a Hyundai if some Porsche design engineer confessed some minor aspect of their technology was a little long in the tooth. But he knows how to press submit on slashdot, so he's all set in the life skills dept. Oh, brave new world that has such people in it.
That's funny. The newly potent Apple "gears up". What was the term for Apple when it took them ten years to adopt a true demand-page VM and non-cooperative multitasking, which they were "geared up" to promise the whole while? And all those years they "geared up" to tell us that the first truly compelling Apple computer system would be Unix on Intel? The most powerful gears at Apple are the ones that power their reality-distortion fog machine. There's a scene in the Truman Show where Truman finally clues in that the same cars are going around and around on a preprogrammed loop. That's how I feel about the Apple bandwagon. Except lately the upmarket Ladas have been replaced with downmarket Lexes. It's an improvement, I admit. Still, there's something about the Apple Corporation that causes me to make funny noises while drawing strange pictures in the bathroom mirror.
OK, if I were to write a daemon for my zombie Linux cluster that originates SSH root login attempts to machines distributed world wide, I would have no idea that any of my zombies might be passively monitored by any of the systems where my zombies have tried to slip their digits into the root user hotpants.
What the author meant to say is that the attacker would have no idea that this particular host was engaged in passive monitoring. Whoopee dig doo. The puppet master of a zombie cluster has no awareness of any host it zombines are bombarding until some wall is breached.
Let's make this even more colourful. The internet is a like a giant, super crowded night club where the vast majority of the patrons are so drunk or drugged up they fail to even notice random hands prying into their pants. Yes, the internet is pretty darn strange in some ways. And what a clever mode of attack we must confront.
Spare me. Save your breath on this point for a future article about administrating a honey pot.
The premise of this article is about controlling other people. If a Linux distribution exists that perfectly satisfies a niche community of fifty users, it's existence in the count of "distributions available" is no concern to anyone apart from those who interests would be best served by encouraging the herd at large to migrate along the deepest ruts.
Note to such people: go away and leave me alone to make my own choices.
Within the software universe, the knee-jerk monoculture thesis has been thoroughly disproved. It often proves faster to develop a given system by prototyping it once, learning something in the process, then throwing away the code and beginning again. The driving force behind diversity is to have more prototypes in play so that we can learn more things in parallel.
The claim behind this article reduces to the notion that "life would be so much easier if we just put the entire kernel under a single giant mutex". A lot of things certainly would be easier if the complexity of the end product exceeded the complexity of the process that creates the end product.
We'd also be better off if we could somehow innoculate the community against entertaining propositions as foolish as this one. There are too many bad ideas floating around out there about what would be good for the Linux community. We'd all be much happier if we could just settle on three of the most important bad ideas to argue about.
It certainly would represent a moment of supreme personal gratification in my tedious life of small forevers to wave an improbably white wand and relegate all the whinging morons to the bathtub at the end of the universe. I'd certainly love to send out an intergalactic memo cancelling stupidity once and for all, but no, the battle against stupidly always manages to degenerate into parking cars one by one by one by one, and you think, it must be possible for the universe to work a better way, and then you look around and see that everyone who falls prey to this sentiment becomes a bathtub commander.
That explanation is based on the premise that there are no concurrent genetic repair mechanisms which might be overwhelmed by the rate of genetic damage.
Slashdot Mirror
Way long ago my PC reservation strategy in the overcrowded IBM PC lab was to swap the keyboard cables for two machines facing each other back to back. The keyboard lights would still work normally, but you couldn't see any text coming up on the screen you were facing (DOS era) so most people thought the machine was mysteriously non-functional and left it alone.
I've got an "Intel inside Pentium !!!" sticker over top of the irritatingly bright blue Logitech logo on the top of my giant Logitech mouse (the one that comes closest to fitting my hand). Can still see a bit of the blue glow from behind the word "Intel".
we won't be fooled again
It means your head and hands end up burried in a bowling ball bag in backwoods New Jersey.
This design does not create "pull" on the leeward side. There is no such thing as a negative aerodynamic force.
There goes all my CMOS. And here I thought N type and P type materials differed in the transport of electrons versus holes.
The Man Who Knew Infinity
A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
While we're discussing the terminally uncool outcomes of child prodigy, how about Alicia Witt?
http://www.the-sopranos.com/cast/aliciawitt.htm
The problem with many bright children is that their intellect comes at the expense of their social development. So the solution is to let these kids stultify among their peers for ten years in the hope that *some* social grace is imprinted upon them (by no means guaranteed) on the theory that intellect is harder to damage (a smart person who stultifies for ten years still ends up being smarter than the next guy, however much potential is lost in the meanwhile).
A friend of mine (female no less) recently quoted to me this passage from the short story Brennbar's Rant by John Irving.
What did Intel put into the water supply to cause people to say these things? When the Tualatin first came out, the impressive power/watt rating was tantamount to a well kept secret. Intel had no intent or desire to sell these chips into any market segment aside from high-end laptops. You could *buy* a VIA Epia board. Or you could *download* a Tualatin spec. sheet and drool over the heat production so low you hardly noticed the fact that you didn't have one.
If VIA finally manages to deliver the C7M, it's a rather capable chip with good power/watt performance, plus a few other significant differentiations: super small BGA package size, and the integrated crypto accelerators outperforming a Pentium IV on some tasks by an order of magnitude.
Meanwhile, I'm sure Intel will introduce yet another product in their product line that they never intend to scale beyond a fraction of a percent of their production volume, yet it will nevertheless materialize in every comparative review about what Intel 'has' (and you don't).
The concept that APL code is "hard to maintain" is correct to first approximation, but it's more myth than reality when one digs deeper into the question. Most of the densest lines of code I once concocted in APL were 100% maintenance free: efficient and correct over the entire usable operand range. The density of the code squeezed out many degrees of freedom for making stupid errors even before you began.
There were other factors, having little to do with code density, that made APL systems hard to maintain. One was the psychological feeling that written twenty lines of comments to describe one line of code was somehow ungainly. I overcame this feeling within myself rather early. In fact, I wrote so many lines of comments for each line of code that my first work-term supervisor wrote a program to crawl through all the functions in one of my workspaces to *remove* every line of comment I had written, because he somehow thought he would understand my code better if he could fit it all onto the screen at once. His problem was that he didn't understand the *concepts* in my code. One of the things about raw APL code is that there are few surface markers that distinguish necessary manipulations from deep concepts. In my C language code, the necessary manipulations are largely gathered together in the initialization statements for local variables. Well, how much a language design should be based on protecting the programming team from supreme idiocy?
The second factor that made APL hard to maintain is that that it tried to force every concept to become a nail. The array primitive was surprisingly powerful, but it just didn't handle certain kinds of data aggregates at all well. And neither could you push this structure in the lexical direction, because there was no regex facility either.
And finally, the notion of a "workspace" was itself suspect. Every function was it's own text. There was no text anywhere that declared or described or controlled all the global variables that the workspace would necessarily include. There was no textual grouping of related functions into a higher-order interface or language facility. These decisions were made because APL originated in the teletype era. It had nothing to do with expressive density.
I think there is also an illusion at work that if you spend the day performing a maintenance task by visiting twenty source files and pawing through several thousand lines of code, that you are working with some greater efficiency than the guy who spent the whole day staring at single screenful of starkly beautiful APL scratchings. That's not so obvious to me having been there.
OK, here's the thing. In APL if a programmer decided to cut corners and forsake the "stark beauty" that made APL a workable language, there was precious little left behind on the surface to betray the sloppy work standard. Take one look at a C program written by a programming in a sloppy mindset, you know right away you are maintaining the droolings of an idiot. In APL, it could take you an hour to parse beneath the surface to find that same incompetence leaping out. The C language has far more expressive scope for the droolings of idiots and I guess those markers are worth a lot at the end of the day.
There aren't so many of us in this thread with the background to actually do so. I learned APL when I took a calculas course at the local university because I was applying to schools out of province where calculas was taught in the terrible idea known as "grade 13". The math course allowed me access to the CS lab and I soon started to thrive on being able to write programs in APL that ran a *lot* faster (sometimes factors of 10) than any of the programs written in compiled Pascal by the CS undergraduates (what a bunch of lamers).
One needs to understand that in APL (as interpreted as it gets) is that certain idioms applied to large arrays are essentially super-compiled, in much the same way that the C++ non-container vector[[bool]] did funky stuff until they killed it (they have killed it by now, haven't they?) It was no small benefit to me in my jousting with the lamers that in APL I could focus all my talents on choosing the best algorithm, because I was never more than 80 keystrokes away from a major breakthrough. Except when the problem demanded certain kinds of data structures where APL was inherently unsuitable. It's a good thing no one ever challenged me to the fastest program to implement a position tree.
I learned a lot from my time with APL because it reduces certain aspects of programming to its bare essentials, while saying almost nothing about anything else. I learned which portions of the programming task can be delegated to a superior notation, and which portions can't. For the most part I liked the APL notation. Stupid manipulations of the rank vector (reshape) using the rho operator to effect extra arguments to a function call, that was life in the gutter. So were the trig operators for that matter.
At the same time, I don't miss most of the symbols / operators all that much either. There are three that have stuck with me ever since. The max/min (round up/down) operators (bar with a flat bit to the right at the top or bottom) and the high minus (minus sign tangent to the top of the regular digits).
Let's assume we have a C language implementation from the day when an integer was 16 bits and a long was 32 bits. For this C language host, the expression -32768 does *not* do what one first supposes: represent the least possible 16-bit signed integer value, because this is parsed as the negation operator applied to the long integer constant 32768. How stupid. Give me back my high minus sign! The constant ambiguity between subtracting a positive constant and adding a negative constant does *not* help one in recalling to mind the derivation of the formula involved (with the original symmetries intact).
Other symbols from APL I've continued to use in my own notation are the take and drop operators (preserving the overtake and undertake semantics) and the encode / decode operators. All the rest I've discarded.
The other bugaboo I've retained having learned early how to think APL-style are definitions of the modulus operator (% in C/C++) for a positive modulus B, does not ALWAYS return a value on the semi-open interval [0..B). Howls of disgust when this function does anything different for negative values of A, a fraud of the highest magnitude perpetrated by the same idiots who neglected to supply the high minus sign in every other language I know.
I must however reserve the innermost circle of hell, following along in P.J. Plaugher's footsteps, for those who implement malloc(0) to cause an "instructional" abend.
In my view, the concept of "relevent ad" is akin to "relevent spam". Yes, someone could send me a spam concerning a product I badly need and don't know about but I am 100% certain that the cost of deleting all the spams I didn't want exceeds the value of any "golden spam" I might ever receive. And even then, that's giving too much credit to the golden spam. If it's something I need badly enough, it will come to my attention regardless, through other channels that require less dumpster fishing.
The ad companies are always after the emotional response. How about I save my emotions for the people I care about? In this materialistic culture we relate to each other through our possessions and the ad medium itself serves and promotes this. I see it as a form of subjugation / exploitation to have your identity transferred from your person (which is forever your own) to your possessions (which corporations control).
Example after the fact: Peter Gutman on X.509.
There was a study that showed that the human brain is hard-wired to respond to certain types of emotional content in the environment (anger, hostility) and that it is very nearly impossible (for the general population) to suppress this.
There seems to be a similar effect at work concerning social explanations. In any situation where there is a social explanation (Linus exists in a special circumstance) it seems as if a dominant segment of the population becomes incapable of exploring the alternatives.
Which came first? Linus's privileged role, or his talent / aptitude / being in the right place at the right time / judgement / whatever? If his role derives from his talent and experience, then does his role explain his attitude or does his attitude explain his role?
He might now be in a privileged situation. And it might not matter at all to the question at hand. There are two ways to ignore a standard. One is careless neglect (those requirements bug me, I won't read it) and the other requires extreme competence (that feature will mess up a lot of other stuff, but if I obey exactly these portions, then I won't break much existing code, and everyone can get along with the result, and we won't poison our system with massive breakage in getting there).
A spec. is a great substitute for murky thinking, and a terrible substitute for clear thinking. Linus seems to believe that clear thinking is not possible without paying close attention to the reality at hand. If one is paying close attention to the reality at hand, and thinking clearly about what remains to be accomplished, a spec. serves in an advisory capacity at best.
I've never read a spec. of any significance that didn't at some point say step 2: tie your shoelaces together and proceed down stairs. The most sophisticated specs. encourage you to do this without realizing what's going on until it's way too late.
That's interesting to us because it's what's happening now. It's nothing compared to the development of X-rays, or the discovery that blood circulates, that we breathe oxygen, or the Krebs cycle, etc - all of which allowed us to peer "inside the box" and were discovered more than 100 years ago. That just re-supports my notion of tunnel vision.
No, it just resupports your tunnel vision about how you define tunnel vision. X-rays were discovered in 1895. That's hardly 1700. I don't know anyone who wouldn't consider x-rays the *beginning* of the innovations that followed. Krebs cycle was discovered in 1937. But note that unlike DNA, this is the metabolism, not the source code. Try to find two discoveries of a similar magnitude before 1900 (within a forty year period) where Newton wasn't responsible for both of them.
You're way overstating the significance of significance. Lots of stuff discovered a long time ago was of incredible significance, but that really means very little when all of these discoveries are linked together in a continuous chain.
Things have changed. The discoveries come faster than before, the dissemination is wider and faster than ever before, the discoveries increasingly relate directly to the source code of the systems under study, and the discoveries increasingly leverage the platform of discovery itself. Back in 1950 when DNA was first discovered, we barely had a suitable technology to record the human genome (microfiche?), or access the useful bits even if we could stuff it into a large building. Like we're going to make a ton of progress on proteomics recording the genome on microfiche. These involutions matter.
I read aldaily all the time. I don't buy the relativism of relativism. Things have changed. Use your brain.
Charlatan is a an easy brush to apply to anyone making extraordinary claims as Kurzweil does. He's the interesting charlatan you can't ignore, because nothing he says is entirely wrong. It's all wrong, but it isn't at the same time.
I wouldn't hold his lack of historical context against him, unless the human genome was decoded in year 1700. Or even just functional MRI. Or any technology that allowed us to peer "inside the box" on our own construction. This is roughly the difference between playing with hidden menus on your set-top box, or decompiling the firmware.
Where Kurzweil falls short of the mark--ridiculously short--is ignoring the couplings between technical progress and political progress. Technological progress can only accelerate so much before the political force becomes the rate limiting term. One sees this effect already with stem cell research being banned for political reasons, despite (or maybe because) almost everyone involved concedes the staggering potential for life-altering discoveries.
If we manage to find the cure for aging (which will no doubt be so expensive at first only the rich can afford it) before we achieve singularity AI, then the largest insurrection in human history will begin and that will be end of it: privileged immortals clashing against the mortal hordes until nothing remains. Coming to a gated community in California real soon now.
Instead of "open source" this should be called "august source" after the inclusive policies of the Augusta National Golf Club. Also known as "if you have to ask, we won't admit you".
s/cisco/cisco|oracle/g
The red cloud of outrage obscured my vision. Man I'd like to send that guy into space wearing a puffy suit to make some repairs using a sharp pair of kitchen scissors. He might have to pause long enough to use his brain for once rather than reciting monotonously from the gospel of the Needy 500.
While Cisco finds the vulnerability "in house" and sits on it for gawd knows how long, the "researchers" are out there finding vulnerabilities with no guidelines from Cisco *ahead of time* that "oh, we know about that one, so it doesn't count".
His wife must love him, he believes in telepathy. Somehow the researchers are supposed to know which defects Cisco has already found in house and not waste their time finding those ones again.
Translation: we don't give a rat's ass how much time these people invest finding these defects, and mostly we would rather they all went away.
Oh, and by the way, the stock in trade of these people is to make Cisco look good. Those who don't make Cisco look good are the bad guys. And Cisco deserves this, because we charitably give out credit when people find bugs we didn't tell them not to bother finding.
Hopefully people will soon realize that electricity is a better energy source than petroleum.
We talk abot information as it were a quark in the atomic model. The interesting structure is two levels up, above the protons and neutrons, in the periodic table. There are as many different kinds of "information" as there are elements in the periodic table.
The sloppy use of information as an amorphous aggregate already places the speaker at the level of those incapable of holding more than one distinct idea in mind at the same time.
And then there is the crowd so proud of their ability to distinguish speech from beer. Such high spectral resolution. Truly amazing.
The fundamental stupidity of this topic is the burried premise that you can go around and change your IP stack like a flavour of ice-cream. FreeBSD has *never* had a bad TCP/IP stack as far back as I know the history.
The vast majority of what makes a great carbureted engine carries forward for the transition to fuel injection: precision tolerances, metalurgy, balance, lubricant flow, etc. But until the combustion chamber is reworked for fuel injection, it won't impress anyone. In case anyone hasn't figured it out, we're talking about the dying gasp of the lamentable Pentium IV: let's run it at 20,000 rpm with a second radiator behind the trunk, then we won't have to fix anything else.
Lately, FreeBSD confesses their engine has become a little cluttered with fancy new pollution controls. Along with tweaking the fuel injectors, they are making quick work of cleaning up the superficial clutter at the same time.
In the decade between 1985 and 1995 one of the great battles in the software development industry was against the instinct of every software team to roll up their sleeves and "write it again".
This is the same idiot warmed over. No respect for fifteen years of engineering tradition, or instinct for what portion of that tradition carries forward, or the degree of difficulty involved. Would trade his Porsche for a Hyundai if some Porsche design engineer confessed some minor aspect of their technology was a little long in the tooth. But he knows how to press submit on slashdot, so he's all set in the life skills dept. Oh, brave new world that has such people in it.
inconsistent unrecoverable pure and simple
That's funny. The newly potent Apple "gears up". What was the term for Apple when it took them ten years to adopt a true demand-page VM and non-cooperative multitasking, which they were "geared up" to promise the whole while? And all those years they "geared up" to tell us that the first truly compelling Apple computer system would be Unix on Intel? The most powerful gears at Apple are the ones that power their reality-distortion fog machine. There's a scene in the Truman Show where Truman finally clues in that the same cars are going around and around on a preprogrammed loop. That's how I feel about the Apple bandwagon. Except lately the upmarket Ladas have been replaced with downmarket Lexes. It's an improvement, I admit. Still, there's something about the Apple Corporation that causes me to make funny noises while drawing strange pictures in the bathroom mirror.
Dvorak is two shots and an olive short of a making a martini. Amazing what he can serve up from wood alcohol and a bottle of aftershave.
OK, if I were to write a daemon for my zombie Linux cluster that originates SSH root login attempts to machines distributed world wide, I would have no idea that any of my zombies might be passively monitored by any of the systems where my zombies have tried to slip their digits into the root user hotpants.
What the author meant to say is that the attacker would have no idea that this particular host was engaged in passive monitoring. Whoopee dig doo. The puppet master of a zombie cluster has no awareness of any host it zombines are bombarding until some wall is breached.
Let's make this even more colourful. The internet is a like a giant, super crowded night club where the vast majority of the patrons are so drunk or drugged up they fail to even notice random hands prying into their pants. Yes, the internet is pretty darn strange in some ways. And what a clever mode of attack we must confront.
Spare me. Save your breath on this point for a future article about administrating a honey pot.
The premise of this article is about controlling other people. If a Linux distribution exists that perfectly satisfies a niche community of fifty users, it's existence in the count of "distributions available" is no concern to anyone apart from those who interests would be best served by encouraging the herd at large to migrate along the deepest ruts.
Note to such people: go away and leave me alone to make my own choices.
Within the software universe, the knee-jerk monoculture thesis has been thoroughly disproved. It often proves faster to develop a given system by prototyping it once, learning something in the process, then throwing away the code and beginning again. The driving force behind diversity is to have more prototypes in play so that we can learn more things in parallel.
The claim behind this article reduces to the notion that "life would be so much easier if we just put the entire kernel under a single giant mutex". A lot of things certainly would be easier if the complexity of the end product exceeded the complexity of the process that creates the end product.
We'd also be better off if we could somehow innoculate the community against entertaining propositions as foolish as this one. There are too many bad ideas floating around out there about what would be good for the Linux community. We'd all be much happier if we could just settle on three of the most important bad ideas to argue about.
It certainly would represent a moment of supreme personal gratification in my tedious life of small forevers to wave an improbably white wand and relegate all the whinging morons to the bathtub at the end of the universe. I'd certainly love to send out an intergalactic memo cancelling stupidity once and for all, but no, the battle against stupidly always manages to degenerate into parking cars one by one by one by one, and you think, it must be possible for the universe to work a better way, and then you look around and see that everyone who falls prey to this sentiment becomes a bathtub commander.
Ouch, I have such a pain in my diode.
That explanation is based on the premise that there are no concurrent genetic repair mechanisms which might be overwhelmed by the rate of genetic damage.
The word "therefore" is grossly overrated.