Bone microphone technology has been around for quite some time in the two-way radio communications biz, and it's much more discreet.
Yup. I remember trying out a few different consumer grade models marketed to ham radio operators in the mid 1990's.
As I recall, most of the cheap ones worked really badly. It took a great deal of fiddling to get them seated correctly, and when they were incorrectly seated one heard *only* hints of background noise and rustling. In order to insure that they worked, you basically had to walk around with your finger in your ear, more or less totally defeating the point of having an earphone in the first place.
The expensive, professional grade ones worked great. I carried on many a long conversation with a guy on a motorcycle using one. I don't know what sort of tricks they had to play in processing the audio to get a natural sounding voice, but he sounded like he was using a studio microphone in a quiet room. As I recall, he said he had to use wax to seat the thing in his ear - not exactly the sort of thing one would expect the average cell phone user to do on the subway - although that may have had more to do with keeping road noise out of his ear than coupling the mic to his skull.
But, it isn't too hard to see why people choose to be less than forthcoming about what they've done, especially then they know it's stupid.
I've certainly experienced the sensation of suddenly realizing I've done something dumb and that I need to talk to someone else in order to fix the problem. There's a very strong temptation to not mention what happened.
I've always forced myself to immediately own up to what's happened. But, that's only because I've spent years in a lab culture where hiding mistakes is a grave offense.
If I didn't know first hand what it's like to spend days trying to figure out why a piece of hardware failed only to learn that someone plugged it in backwards and then didn't tell anyone, I'd be mighty tempted to do the same.
My girlfriend recently did the same thing. I'm amazed to hear that it's happened to others as well.
I found it totally mind boggling. I can understand how someone who isn't paying attention could stick an RJ-45 plug into an RJ-11 jack, or bend a few pins by trying to stick a d-sub in backwards. But sticking a.5x1 cm connector into a 1x2 cm slot and not immediately recognizing that something is wrong seems almost incredible. How would you decide which side of the connector to use? It seems like it would be impossible to plug it in without asking, "Should I stick it on the left or the right side of the big connector?" which would seem to lead to the question, "why is one connector four times bigger than the other?"
None the less, I saw it happen and was called in when she was unable to diagnose the problem. (To her credit, she immediately told me she had unplugged and replaced the printer cable, instead of keeping it a secret.)
My favorite incompatible plug story took place in a lab full of physics students. We had a long cable run from some hardware to a computer using two lengths of wire joined with a 4-pin circular connector, tucked up in a wire rack along the ceiling. After years running at hundreds of baud without a hitch, the line suddenly stopped working.
We checked the whole cable and found an open on one of the four lines. We then took the segments apart, and found both halves worked perfectly. After an embarrassing amount of head-scratching and attempts to recreate the problem by stressing and flexing connectors and cables, we eventually realized what happened: the connectors which we had unplugged from each other were both the same gender.
Someone long ago had forcibly joined two male connectors together, and they just happened to get lucky and all 4 pins shorted against the appropriate mates and worked fine.
Apologies--if you were just criticizing the fact that "matching feature parity" is incomprehensibly redundant, then yes, I'll have to agree with that:) English is hard, especially when you're trying to formulate it over lunch.
No worries. That's all I meant. The actual content of your statement is perfectly clear (and quite worthwhile and interesting, for that matter.)
It was just a bit of pre-breakfast, curmudgeonly grammar slamming. Hope I didn't offend. (I've certainly said far, far sillier things in public.)
Everyone's talking, for example, about how IE7 is ripping off Firefox. I'm very careful to say that they're matching feature parity.
Matching feature parity? What sort of nonsense corporatebabble is that?
Sure, interviews are tough. It's easy to say something stupid without meaning to do so. But you really shouldn't announce that you're "very careful to say" something stupid.
It sounds like Blake Ross has been possessed by the spirit of a dead sales-department mid-level manager.
Now, please kill off my shortcuts like command-K, command-shift-3 (or 4), command-1, &c.
When choosing an operating system, the number one question to ask is, "Will it come out of the box with exactly the keyboard shortcuts I happen to already know, or will I have to spend an entire MINUTE changing them to match my preferences."
It was probably a bad example, but I'm sure there are cases where you wouldn't want to actually inhale the gas because it's toxic, but it could be educational (and possible) to recreate the smell using other non-toxic compounds?
Not a bad idea. You could imagine using the same technique to train soldiers to detect chemical agents, or to train emergency response workers to detect chemical hazards. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the fireman who has to search our lab after a major earthquake. I *know* what xenon difluoride and sulfuric acid smell like, and I'd still be scared to set foot in that place after a major shakeup.
The article makes it sound as though their device can hit 96 of 347 possible signatures. The question is whether it's possible to accurately reproduce the scent of dangerous substances with harmless ones. (I'm no biologist, much less an expert on olfaction - it could well be that the set of smells we actually encounter involve a much smaller basis that's spanned by the 96 already included.)
But, if you ask me, the "practical applications" the article mentions are still pretty far from practical. The only possibility that seems viable in the short term is being able to accurately reproduce a scent in order to add a single specific scent to an environment or product without spending hours of trial-and-error work in the lab. Bake fresh bread with a hundred slightly different recipes, find out which one is most appealing, and then copy it and add the smell to your vending-machine-biscuit production line. (I can only imagine that happens already, just less efficiently.)
By the time immersive virtual reality gets to a point where adding scent is anything but a dumb, distracting gimmick, I suggest that it will be far easier to throw a bit of scent directly at our brain rather than messing around with our noses.
Good point. I suppose we really ought to distinguish between the geek-vs-freak geeks and the geek-vs-nerd geeks to avoid confusion.
On the other hand, few people not already placed somewhere in the nerd-geek family would know about the former definition or care about the later, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
So what's the guy who skips a high school reunion to rebuild someones hacked mail server and set it up as an actual secure machine from bare metal? I supect that puts me even lower and in the loser catagory - paticulaurly since I took a few hours out to play GURPS.
Lower? Puts you on top, in my book. (Which end is the top depends on who you ask, I suppose.)
What else is a pastie? Never heard it mean anything but a snack.
By engineering do you mean like computer science/engineering or civil engineering? Cause if its the former, I disagree. Wise geeks become computer engineers so they can get paid to code popular video games.
Don't get me wrong - there are wonderful geeks in every field. (For that matter, I've met film geeks, literature geeks, dance geeks, and athletic geeks.) Engineering has traditionally been a stronghold, and geeks make up a large fraction of the population.
Its just that, at least around here, CS in particular has gotten a reputation as a way to earn a high-status position in society and has attracted a lot of people who really ought to be doing something else. (At least, that's what I see as an outsider who has spent little time in the department.)
I'm an engineering geek and I take massive offense to being grouped with "quantitative business disciplines":P Then again, I think anyone in grad school for anything should fall into the geek category (except some of the people sent back to get an MS by their employers, and not even all of those).
Didn't mean to offend. There are plenty of great geeks in engineering. But there also seem to be a nontrivial number who force you to ask, "why the hell are you in this field? Not only are you bad at it, but you don't even *like* engineering." There's the crowd I was referring to.
And for what its worth, I fully agree with you. Most grad students and virtually all PhD students are geeks, without question.
I will be even *more* nerdish by responsing to my own post... I think your taxonomy reflects how the erstwhile regional difference in usage has pretty much evaporated...
Hmm. Interesting.
I'm not so sure about that. I've gotten into some extended (if playful) arguments on this issue, especially from people who swap the nerd and geek definitions.
Time to go back and find out where they grew up and were schooled. It may be that regional differences persist. (I'm entirely west coast US myself.)
Nonsense, I say. Worse still - blasphemy! To place the nerds above the geeks is an offense of the worst kind.
There *is* a clear distinction and a value hierarchy among geeks, nerds, and dweebs, but you've got it all wrong.
What follows, I claim, is the one true classification of geekdom. It has stood up to rigorous peer review (loud arguments amongst drunken physics students) for years, and I stand by it.
A dweeb is someone without social skills who either doesn't recognize or is unable to accept that they are unusual. They constantly *try* to fit in, with disastrous results, and dedicate a significant portion of their daily lives to obsessing over how to pass as normal.
A nerd is someone without social skills or popular interests who recognizes that he or she is unlike most people and feels no shame in it.
A geek is a nerd with technical skills and passionate interests; in particular one who has a myopic dedication to a particular specialty. (This is the subspecies *true geek,* distinct from but related to the *common geek,* or nerd who is generally technically savvy and useful to have around.)
To summarize, the dweeb is the guy wearing a slightly out of fashion hipster shirt who generally creates embarrassing silences at parties by saying awkward things about pop stars or sports teams.
The nerd is the guy who skips the party in order to achieve moderately high scores on a popular video game while eating unheated canned peas with a spoon and listening to recordings of experimental music.
The geek is the guy who skips the party in order to code a popular video game, figure out the angle of repose one might expect for a pile of canned peas, or compose and record some experimental music.
On the college campus, geeks make up virtually the entire population of physics and math majors (as well as a majority in classics, many of the less trendy engineering sub-disciplines, linguistics, physical anthropology, and some of the more obscure languages.)
The nerds are the guys who drop out of school after one semester but stay in a college town working in a bookstore, where they get great discounts on whatever genre books they happen to like and talk to their geek friends about writing their own books yet never seem to actually finish any of them.
The dweebs largely end up in engineering or the quantitative business disciplines, in the hopes that they can earn enough money to buy the respect of powerful and attractive people. Those in engineering have a tough time of it, as they are publicly ignored by the normals whom they so admire while simultaneously earning the scorn and contempt of the geeks in their departments. Those in business do rather well, since they have a good chance at fooling their colleagues into thinking that they are geeks. (Normals may not invite geeks to parties, but they do like to hire them.)
Because it will make every download practically 10 times bigger across the entire board benefitting only the handful of people who might actually be interested in the code.
In order to fulfill your obligation under the GPL, you don't have to put the source in the same tar file as the binary, just on the same server. The user is still free to choose to download only the binary.
No, just the ones they distribute. Honestly, I don't
understand why this is such a big deal.
Yup. Seems like total nonsense to me.
Even if he chose to distribute the sources online, the resources required are trivial. A bzip'd source file is rarely much larger than binaries produced from it. We're talking about at most a factor of 2 difference in storage on the server even if he decided to independently place the source to every version of every binary online. And, there are many ways to cut that number down until it's a marginal increase in storage requirements.
There's no requirement that he distribute the source in an elaborate or easy to use way. Just write something that fetches the source to every used package and tosses them on the server somewhere every time a version is released. Remove the old ones from the server and offer to ship a dvd in exchange for handling costs.
Better yet, keep an up-to-date local copy and just check it into a cvs server with every release. (That way you only pay to store the diffs and have the source for every release available should anyone want it.)
If he's right and nobody actually wants or needs to get the source from him, then the additional bandwidth requirements will be tiny. On the other hand, if the added bandwidth *is* important, then it demonstrates that there's a very good reason to require source distribution.
Personally, I've never used a distro for which source packages aren't available. It seems like such an obvious step that I'd think twice before trusting someone who didn't do so automatically *before* getting a letter from the fsf.
Absolutely, ad campaigns should say nothing at all that the target audience understands, it might offend someone from another part of the world.
The key word here was *maybe*.
I suspect that, in reality, the reason the parent finds the phrase inappropriate is because it's stupid, not because he's Canadian.
What the hell does it mean to say that Theodore Roosevelt would download open office? For that matter, what's it mean to say that a software project written by an international collaboration of developers and available in a hundred languages is "for a free people?"
Surely there are more interesting things one can say about openoffice with a full page color advert. And, for that matter, better places to say it with $10'000.
If you're going to try to sell someone on the free software movement, you need a lot more than a single juvenile reference to some vague patriotic notion of "freedom." And, if you are going to try for a patriotic reference, there are much more appropriate images than Mount Rushmore. "Free as in big stone shrine to four US presidents with very different political philosophies, not free as in beer," just doesn't cut it.
What's more, if you're going to convince someone to try your software in particular, you could do a whole lot better than to try to sell them on free softwaremovement using a one page advert.
There's only one passage that actually tells you what the software *does*, and it's not only the smallest text on the page but it's also grammatical nonsense. If a friend told me in casual conversation that "Openoffice is the best slideshow, drawing, and database all-in-one clean package," I'd ask them how long they'd been learning English and offer to help them practice the language. If a friend told me he was planning to pay $10'000 to write that in a newspaper, I'd beg him to let someone else write the ad instead.
Re:Use ubuntuforums.org
on
Ubuntu Hacks
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· Score: 2, Insightful
These sound like basic HOWTOs to me, instead of hacks. And if you need Ubuntu HOWTOs, look no further than www.ubuntuforums.org.
Yup. Like so many other interesting concepts, the word hack has been all but destroyed by advertising-savvy editors.
It may be a great book, and I'm all in favor of people writing and reading books about linux. (Can't say I've ever bought any myself, since I've always been able to find more than enough information online, but I have no objection to them in principle.) But the title is just silly. It ought to be called something like "Using Ubantu Linux."
Installing Java and adding additional window managers is not a hack by any conceivable definition. You're selecting an existing tool and using it in *exactly* the way it was intended. If configuring X11 by editing the X11 config files as specified by the X11 man pages is a hack, then just about anything you do in the world must also be a hack.
"Hey man, check this out. I just hacked my brand new television." "Oh yeah? What did you do to it?" "I brought it home and plugged it in. Then I watched it!" "Awesome hack! You should write a book."
Why not just stream the video/photos in real-time to a satellite (encrypted of course) and not even worry about losing your data if the plane crashes? I imagine that's what the Predator drones do.
Transmitting your data is more or less equivalent to storing it on disk and then giving copies out to everyone. If they can't encrypt the data on the disk in the first place, they're better off not giving someone the chance to intercept it without having to get your plane to land on their airfield. Likewise, if their data is secure enough that they aren't worried about interception, then they don't need to worry about storing on disk either.
(Sure, you could imagine really complicated spread spectrum line-of-sight schemes that would make interception hard, but they're all vastly more expensive and hard to do than encrypting everything and keeping around enough diverse redundancy to satisfy the safety inspectors.)
It's no surprise that a lot of discoveries happen by accident. After all, that's more or less why they're called "discoveries," rather than "confirmations."
Sure, there are lots of non-accidental discoveries as well: You test a thousand samples looking a specific enzyme and discover that one of them has it. You take spectra over the course of months for a bunch of stars likely to have planets, analyze them looking for planets, and you discover that one of them has planets. You try to find a quantitative model to explain a bunch of specific data, and you end up finding one.
But most of the time you discover something really new either by getting lucky and stumbling across it or by looking at the world with an new instrument and figuring out the results. Either way, you can't know what it is you're looking for until you've found it.
Unfortunately, most of the examples cited by the articles aren't really discoveries at all. They're inventions. And some aren't really accidental. (The exception is the Nova site, which provides a thorough and engaging look at people expecting to find one thing and finding something else entirely.)
Velcro wasn't an accidental discovery, even according to the description in the article itself. A man picked up a natural object and observed it, noticed a particularly appealing characteristic, and then spent years struggling to reproduce it in a practical commercial product. That's about as non-accidental as you can get. It's a textbook (well, children's book) version of engineering, with no surprises anywhere in sight.
Is sex really such a big concern? I would rather know that people who want to have sex with children, have sex with robots.
Yup. I couldn't agree more.
It's scary to think that people who claim that permitting people to have sex with a robot shaped like a child is an ethical issue are attempting to control the debate over robot ethics.
Then again, many of us live in a country where people get jail time for drawing cartoons of sexualized children... so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. There's no limit to power of idiocy when it masquerades as morality.
Now, when we begin dealing with sentient robots created as sex objects, the discussion will become interesting.
1) If I may gently offer some advice -- being smarter than other people doesn't mean you always have to get your way. I get your technical point, but it's their network, not yours. Honestly, you'd be wise to learn that lesson now before you have to learn it with much more serious consequences in the future.
But in this case, it doesn't sound like he did anything out of line. They didn't forbid him to do what he was doing - they suddenly began blocking it as a security threat. He then a note to all the responsible parties explaining that it wasn't a security threat. The contractor saw that he was right and unblocked it, the school admins got pissed off because they were shown to be stupid in public and tried to take out their frustration on the student. The only thing he did wrong was expect the school to behave in a reasonable, professional manner.
Now, if he went back and did it again after being warned not to do it, that would be questionable judgment. (Good for the world perhaps, as bucking idiotic rules can, in the long run, cause rule makers to change their policies, but certainly bad for him in an immediate and personal way.) But there's nothing wrong with sending someone a letter saying, "You've misclassified what I'm doing as a security threat. It isn't." It sounds to me like the most approriate way to handle such a situation.
What about the late-breaking news that happiness(or not) is in your genes? What then?
A massive eugenics program. Once we're rid of all the unhappy, the world will be a wonderful place, and we can all work shitty jobs without having to worry about it.
I'm kidding, of course. Surely even if there is a genetic component to how happy we are, our daily activities must be important. I'd be amazed if it were shown that the knowledge that one is actively pursuing the career and lifestyle of their own choosing has little bearing on their happiness.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. I remember trying out a few different consumer grade models marketed to ham radio operators in the mid 1990's.
As I recall, most of the cheap ones worked really badly. It took a great deal of fiddling to get them seated correctly, and when they were incorrectly seated one heard *only* hints of background noise and rustling. In order to insure that they worked, you basically had to walk around with your finger in your ear, more or less totally defeating the point of having an earphone in the first place.
The expensive, professional grade ones worked great. I carried on many a long conversation with a guy on a motorcycle using one. I don't know what sort of tricks they had to play in processing the audio to get a natural sounding voice, but he sounded like he was using a studio microphone in a quiet room. As I recall, he said he had to use wax to seat the thing in his ear - not exactly the sort of thing one would expect the average cell phone user to do on the subway - although that may have had more to do with keeping road noise out of his ear than coupling the mic to his skull.
quite right. reverse that.
I certainly understand the frustration.
But, it isn't too hard to see why people choose to be less than forthcoming about what they've done, especially then they know it's stupid.
I've certainly experienced the sensation of suddenly realizing I've done something dumb and that I need to talk to someone else in order to fix the problem. There's a very strong temptation to not mention what happened.
I've always forced myself to immediately own up to what's happened. But, that's only because I've spent years in a lab culture where hiding mistakes is a grave offense.
If I didn't know first hand what it's like to spend days trying to figure out why a piece of hardware failed only to learn that someone plugged it in backwards and then didn't tell anyone, I'd be mighty tempted to do the same.
My girlfriend recently did the same thing. I'm amazed to hear that it's happened to others as well.
.5x1 cm connector into a 1x2 cm slot and not immediately recognizing that something is wrong seems almost incredible. How would you decide which side of the connector to use? It seems like it would be impossible to plug it in without asking, "Should I stick it on the left or the right side of the big connector?" which would seem to lead to the question, "why is one connector four times bigger than the other?"
I found it totally mind boggling. I can understand how someone who isn't paying attention could stick an RJ-45 plug into an RJ-11 jack, or bend a few pins by trying to stick a d-sub in backwards. But sticking a
None the less, I saw it happen and was called in when she was unable to diagnose the problem. (To her credit, she immediately told me she had unplugged and replaced the printer cable, instead of keeping it a secret.)
My favorite incompatible plug story took place in a lab full of physics students. We had a long cable run from some hardware to a computer using two lengths of wire joined with a 4-pin circular connector, tucked up in a wire rack along the ceiling. After years running at hundreds of baud without a hitch, the line suddenly stopped working.
We checked the whole cable and found an open on one of the four lines. We then took the segments apart, and found both halves worked perfectly. After an embarrassing amount of head-scratching and attempts to recreate the problem by stressing and flexing connectors and cables, we eventually realized what happened: the connectors which we had unplugged from each other were both the same gender.
Someone long ago had forcibly joined two male connectors together, and they just happened to get lucky and all 4 pins shorted against the appropriate mates and worked fine.
No worries. That's all I meant. The actual content of your statement is perfectly clear (and quite worthwhile and interesting, for that matter.)
It was just a bit of pre-breakfast, curmudgeonly grammar slamming. Hope I didn't offend. (I've certainly said far, far sillier things in public.)
Matching feature parity? What sort of nonsense corporatebabble is that?
Sure, interviews are tough. It's easy to say something stupid without meaning to do so. But you really shouldn't announce that you're "very careful to say" something stupid.
It sounds like Blake Ross has been possessed by the spirit of a dead sales-department mid-level manager.
When choosing an operating system, the number one question to ask is, "Will it come out of the box with exactly the keyboard shortcuts I happen to already know, or will I have to spend an entire MINUTE changing them to match my preferences."
Everything else is secondary.
Not a bad idea. You could imagine using the same technique to train soldiers to detect chemical agents, or to train emergency response workers to detect chemical hazards. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the fireman who has to search our lab after a major earthquake. I *know* what xenon difluoride and sulfuric acid smell like, and I'd still be scared to set foot in that place after a major shakeup.
The article makes it sound as though their device can hit 96 of 347 possible signatures. The question is whether it's possible to accurately reproduce the scent of dangerous substances with harmless ones. (I'm no biologist, much less an expert on olfaction - it could well be that the set of smells we actually encounter involve a much smaller basis that's spanned by the 96 already included.)
But, if you ask me, the "practical applications" the article mentions are still pretty far from practical. The only possibility that seems viable in the short term is being able to accurately reproduce a scent in order to add a single specific scent to an environment or product without spending hours of trial-and-error work in the lab. Bake fresh bread with a hundred slightly different recipes, find out which one is most appealing, and then copy it and add the smell to your vending-machine-biscuit production line. (I can only imagine that happens already, just less efficiently.)
By the time immersive virtual reality gets to a point where adding scent is anything but a dumb, distracting gimmick, I suggest that it will be far easier to throw a bit of scent directly at our brain rather than messing around with our noses.
Good point. I suppose we really ought to distinguish between the geek-vs-freak geeks and the geek-vs-nerd geeks to avoid confusion.
On the other hand, few people not already placed somewhere in the nerd-geek family would know about the former definition or care about the later, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
Interesting. I hadn't seen that. thanks.
Lower? Puts you on top, in my book. (Which end is the top depends on who you ask, I suppose.)
What else is a pastie? Never heard it mean anything but a snack.
Don't get me wrong - there are wonderful geeks in every field. (For that matter, I've met film geeks, literature geeks, dance geeks, and athletic geeks.) Engineering has traditionally been a stronghold, and geeks make up a large fraction of the population.
Its just that, at least around here, CS in particular has gotten a reputation as a way to earn a high-status position in society and has attracted a lot of people who really ought to be doing something else. (At least, that's what I see as an outsider who has spent little time in the department.)
Didn't mean to offend. There are plenty of great geeks in engineering. But there also seem to be a nontrivial number who force you to ask, "why the hell are you in this field? Not only are you bad at it, but you don't even *like* engineering." There's the crowd I was referring to.
And for what its worth, I fully agree with you. Most grad students and virtually all PhD students are geeks, without question.
Hmm. Interesting.
I'm not so sure about that. I've gotten into some extended (if playful) arguments on this issue, especially from people who swap the nerd and geek definitions.
Time to go back and find out where they grew up and were schooled. It may be that regional differences persist. (I'm entirely west coast US myself.)
Nonsense, I say. Worse still - blasphemy! To place the nerds above the geeks is an offense of the worst kind.
There *is* a clear distinction and a value hierarchy among geeks, nerds, and dweebs, but you've got it all wrong.
What follows, I claim, is the one true classification of geekdom. It has stood up to rigorous peer review (loud arguments amongst drunken physics students) for years, and I stand by it.
A dweeb is someone without social skills who either doesn't recognize or is unable to accept that they are unusual. They constantly *try* to fit in, with disastrous results, and dedicate a significant portion of their daily lives to obsessing over how to pass as normal.
A nerd is someone without social skills or popular interests who recognizes that he or she is unlike most people and feels no shame in it.
A geek is a nerd with technical skills and passionate interests; in particular one who has a myopic dedication to a particular specialty. (This is the subspecies *true geek,* distinct from but related to the *common geek,* or nerd who is generally technically savvy and useful to have around.)
To summarize, the dweeb is the guy wearing a slightly out of fashion hipster shirt who generally creates embarrassing silences at parties by saying awkward things about pop stars or sports teams.
The nerd is the guy who skips the party in order to achieve moderately high scores on a popular video game while eating unheated canned peas with a spoon and listening to recordings of experimental music.
The geek is the guy who skips the party in order to code a popular video game, figure out the angle of repose one might expect for a pile of canned peas, or compose and record some experimental music.
On the college campus, geeks make up virtually the entire population of physics and math majors (as well as a majority in classics, many of the less trendy engineering sub-disciplines, linguistics, physical anthropology, and some of the more obscure languages.)
The nerds are the guys who drop out of school after one semester but stay in a college town working in a bookstore, where they get great discounts on whatever genre books they happen to like and talk to their geek friends about writing their own books yet never seem to actually finish any of them.
The dweebs largely end up in engineering or the quantitative business disciplines, in the hopes that they can earn enough money to buy the respect of powerful and attractive people. Those in engineering have a tough time of it, as they are publicly ignored by the normals whom they so admire while simultaneously earning the scorn and contempt of the geeks in their departments. Those in business do rather well, since they have a good chance at fooling their colleagues into thinking that they are geeks. (Normals may not invite geeks to parties, but they do like to hire them.)
In order to fulfill your obligation under the GPL, you don't have to put the source in the same tar file as the binary, just on the same server. The user is still free to choose to download only the binary.
Yup. Seems like total nonsense to me.
Even if he chose to distribute the sources online, the resources required are trivial. A bzip'd source file is rarely much larger than binaries produced from it. We're talking about at most a factor of 2 difference in storage on the server even if he decided to independently place the source to every version of every binary online. And, there are many ways to cut that number down until it's a marginal increase in storage requirements.
There's no requirement that he distribute the source in an elaborate or easy to use way. Just write something that fetches the source to every used package and tosses them on the server somewhere every time a version is released. Remove the old ones from the server and offer to ship a dvd in exchange for handling costs.
Better yet, keep an up-to-date local copy and just check it into a cvs server with every release. (That way you only pay to store the diffs and have the source for every release available should anyone want it.)
If he's right and nobody actually wants or needs to get the source from him, then the additional bandwidth requirements will be tiny. On the other hand, if the added bandwidth *is* important, then it demonstrates that there's a very good reason to require source distribution.
Personally, I've never used a distro for which source packages aren't available. It seems like such an obvious step that I'd think twice before trusting someone who didn't do so automatically *before* getting a letter from the fsf.
The key word here was *maybe*.
I suspect that, in reality, the reason the parent finds the phrase inappropriate is because it's stupid, not because he's Canadian.
What the hell does it mean to say that Theodore Roosevelt would download open office? For that matter, what's it mean to say that a software project written by an international collaboration of developers and available in a hundred languages is "for a free people?"
Surely there are more interesting things one can say about openoffice with a full page color advert. And, for that matter, better places to say it with $10'000.
If you're going to try to sell someone on the free software movement, you need a lot more than a single juvenile reference to some vague patriotic notion of "freedom." And, if you are going to try for a patriotic reference, there are much more appropriate images than Mount Rushmore. "Free as in big stone shrine to four US presidents with very different political philosophies, not free as in beer," just doesn't cut it.
What's more, if you're going to convince someone to try your software in particular, you could do a whole lot better than to try to sell them on free softwaremovement using a one page advert.
There's only one passage that actually tells you what the software *does*, and it's not only the smallest text on the page but it's also grammatical nonsense. If a friend told me in casual conversation that "Openoffice is the best slideshow, drawing, and database all-in-one clean package," I'd ask them how long they'd been learning English and offer to help them practice the language. If a friend told me he was planning to pay $10'000 to write that in a newspaper, I'd beg him to let someone else write the ad instead.
Yup. Like so many other interesting concepts, the word hack has been all but destroyed by advertising-savvy editors.
It may be a great book, and I'm all in favor of people writing and reading books about linux. (Can't say I've ever bought any myself, since I've always been able to find more than enough information online, but I have no objection to them in principle.) But the title is just silly. It ought to be called something like "Using Ubantu Linux."
Installing Java and adding additional window managers is not a hack by any conceivable definition. You're selecting an existing tool and using it in *exactly* the way it was intended. If configuring X11 by editing the X11 config files as specified by the X11 man pages is a hack, then just about anything you do in the world must also be a hack.
"Hey man, check this out. I just hacked my brand new television."
"Oh yeah? What did you do to it?"
"I brought it home and plugged it in. Then I watched it!"
"Awesome hack! You should write a book."
Transmitting your data is more or less equivalent to storing it on disk and then giving copies out to everyone. If they can't encrypt the data on the disk in the first place, they're better off not giving someone the chance to intercept it without having to get your plane to land on their airfield. Likewise, if their data is secure enough that they aren't worried about interception, then they don't need to worry about storing on disk either.
(Sure, you could imagine really complicated spread spectrum line-of-sight schemes that would make interception hard, but they're all vastly more expensive and hard to do than encrypting everything and keeping around enough diverse redundancy to satisfy the safety inspectors.)
Well, with a truly *infinite* amount of luck, it's trivial. Just guess the pad and assume it's right. Problem solved.
But for those of us with access to only a finite amount of luck, you're correct.
It's no surprise that a lot of discoveries happen by accident. After all, that's more or less why they're called "discoveries," rather than "confirmations."
Sure, there are lots of non-accidental discoveries as well: You test a thousand samples looking a specific enzyme and discover that one of them has it. You take spectra over the course of months for a bunch of stars likely to have planets, analyze them looking for planets, and you discover that one of them has planets. You try to find a quantitative model to explain a bunch of specific data, and you end up finding one.
But most of the time you discover something really new either by getting lucky and stumbling across it or by looking at the world with an new instrument and figuring out the results. Either way, you can't know what it is you're looking for until you've found it.
Unfortunately, most of the examples cited by the articles aren't really discoveries at all. They're inventions. And some aren't really accidental. (The exception is the Nova site, which provides a thorough and engaging look at people expecting to find one thing and finding something else entirely.)
Velcro wasn't an accidental discovery, even according to the description in the article itself. A man picked up a natural object and observed it, noticed a particularly appealing characteristic, and then spent years struggling to reproduce it in a practical commercial product. That's about as non-accidental as you can get. It's a textbook (well, children's book) version of engineering, with no surprises anywhere in sight.
Yup. I couldn't agree more.
It's scary to think that people who claim that permitting people to have sex with a robot shaped like a child is an ethical issue are attempting to control the debate over robot ethics.
Then again, many of us live in a country where people get jail time for drawing cartoons of sexualized children... so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. There's no limit to power of idiocy when it masquerades as morality.
Now, when we begin dealing with sentient robots created as sex objects, the discussion will become interesting.
But in this case, it doesn't sound like he did anything out of line. They didn't forbid him to do what he was doing - they suddenly began blocking it as a security threat. He then a note to all the responsible parties explaining that it wasn't a security threat. The contractor saw that he was right and unblocked it, the school admins got pissed off because they were shown to be stupid in public and tried to take out their frustration on the student. The only thing he did wrong was expect the school to behave in a reasonable, professional manner.
Now, if he went back and did it again after being warned not to do it, that would be questionable judgment. (Good for the world perhaps, as bucking idiotic rules can, in the long run, cause rule makers to change their policies, but certainly bad for him in an immediate and personal way.) But there's nothing wrong with sending someone a letter saying, "You've misclassified what I'm doing as a security threat. It isn't." It sounds to me like the most approriate way to handle such a situation.
A massive eugenics program. Once we're rid of all the unhappy, the world will be a wonderful place, and we can all work shitty jobs without having to worry about it.
I'm kidding, of course.
Surely even if there is a genetic component to how happy we are, our daily activities must be important. I'd be amazed if it were shown that the knowledge that one is actively pursuing the career and lifestyle of their own choosing has little bearing on their happiness.