I use linux for complete control and configurability. That might appeal to the overclockers. But after using any enjoying Ubuntu for a few months, I went back to the configurability of KDE/Debian. Once again I have the exact desktop and the exact set of tools I want -- plus some impress-anyone items like Katapult and AmaroK. I think the overclockers would like this flexibility, but they'd also need Windows for showing off their l33t machines at LAN parties: games only available on Windows are part of *their* toolset. So they may as well stay with Windows for at least another five years until that changes.
The bright side, it seems to me, is that PHP's openness means even if the developers are slack, the bugs can still be disclosed without IP litigation threats.
Also, he's given the developers a week or two of warning before March. If there's anything *that* serious in there, actually known to the developers, the fix could conceivably be ready by the time the bug is announced.
I run PHP sites, and I'd rather see the bugs public and being patched, than known only to the developers (we hope).
Paine? Too late. Read John Locke's "Letter Concerning Toleration" (from the 1690's) for the first, the best, and the most influential expression of this idea. It was after the English Civil war and the contemporaneous Thirty Years War in Northern Europe, in particular, that Christian thinkers developed the concept of 'toleration', realizing that there simply had to be a better way of solving problems at the macro and the micro level.
My own view is that Islam now must choose the same step forward for itself. Even if that means its factions are, for now, allowed to fight amongst themselves. External pressures can't compel this kind of choice.
Here's Stanford on Locke, anyway:
In Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, he develops several lines of arguments that are intended to establish the proper spheres for religion and politics. His central claims are that government should not use force to try to bring people to the true religion and that religious societies are voluntary organizations that have no right to use coercive power over their own members or those outside their group. One recurring line of argument that Locke uses is explicitly religious. Locke argues that neither the example of Jesus nor the teaching of the New Testament gives any indication that force is a proper way to bring people to salvation. He also frequently points out what he takes to be clear evidence of hypocrisy, namely that those who are so quick to persecute others for small differences in worship or doctrine are relatively unconcerned with much more obvious moral sins that pose an even greater threat to their eternal state.
(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political /#5)
If you play in the Superbowl and win, and your friends congratulate you, you don't say "What are the odds of my friends congratulating me for winning the Superbowl? There are 300,000,000 million Americans and only a few dozen have friends who congratulated them for winning the 2007 Super Bowl. That is rare, this is proof of divine intervention in my life."
The correct analogy would involve you having no idea whether other Americans exist, but thinking: "Hmm, the more Americans there were, the lower the likelihood of intelligent design would be."
I know! Inform them by email and REQUIRE a receipt! So that they know that we know that they know...
OK, what if direct enforcement isn't the idea? Maybe the idea is that if they find a registered person using a false identity (easier to detect), then it's clear that they're up to no good?
Well, there were a few of us involved. But my personal confession reads as follows:
I wrote scripts that let end users change their own pages. I integrated Wysiwyg editors into CMS systems. I coded some wiki-markup processors. I made design changes friendly for non-techies. I wrote image thumbnailers, and CSS-generators that used customer preferences.
I didn't know it was wrong! I was just following orders! Everyone was doing it! Lots of others killed him more than I did!
Well I preferred the great Australian poet Les Murray's take on "sprawl" -- a far better use of a great-sounding word:
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
If even large accounting firms are bright enough to have some skills in 'forensic accounting' and so on, I'd be surprised if the whole UK police force didn't employ at least someone with hacking skills. The interesting ethical modifier is the get-out-of-jail card they have in using them. If they get caught on official business they just wave the badge and go their way. Likewise, they likely see its most distasteful sides. I wonder what affect this would have on their attitudes to hacking in their personal life?
To give a corresponding example, a friend of the family is a highway patrol officer here in Australia: he drives some very highly tuned and customized cars that have little trouble catching almost anything that's legal to drive here. Sometimes the people he catches imagine that he's a fellow rev-head, and want to discuss the mechanics of his car. This is a mistake, as he has simply no interest in speeding, and absolutely no patience with it. On the one hand, because he can speed with impunity, and does so all the time, there's no thrill factor to it, apart from the physical sensation. Secondly, the more he has to walk around crash scenes picking up body parts and trying to figure out which bags to put them in, the slower and slower his off-duty driving becomes.
Is there a corresponding effect in 'white hat' hacking? Does exposure to real hacker crime, combined with hacking as a job, actually result in a decreased interest in hacking in private life?
Seriously, how many Slashdot readers are there? Plenty, I'd say.
Let's all start saying "Closed Office" when we reference the best-known closed-source Office package, and when asked to clarify, select any one of the excellent and obvious answers to that question.
Not Open Office, the other one.
The one that you can't just fix yourself when it breaks ("Imagine of your car bonnet was welded shut, and you couldn't even pay a mechanic to fix the engine?").
The one that keeps you opening your wallet.
That said, in companies where employees are managed by individuals that are not skilled in the art of their employees (take IT, for instance), then there's the risk of being perceived as not working as hard.
There are other ways for things to go wrong. You can wind up on the 'do we really need these people?' list for many reasons:
Small misunderstandings can accumulate in the manager's mind. If you're not there, you don't pick up on small attitude changes.
Email and IM can generate misunderstandings that would not occur in a normal conversation.
You're an intangible: upper management may question why they're subsidizing your apparent holiday, and your boss may not be able to persuade them otherwise.
You may discover and solve technical problems, but management, who never had to experience the existence of the problem, may not appreciate teh scope of this.
When you're onsite and miss a deadline, they may have seen you working consistently at it, and have no issue with your commitment -- they're as likely to just shrug and assume the deadline wasn't well thought through. When you're not there, it's anyone's guess what they'll think.
Basically, I now take it as axiomatic that without 'face time', misunderstandings inevitably accumulate. I've found you can only set up telecommuting arrangements after working onsite for a while, and developing trust, and that it's easier in small companies, or when you're essentially contracting. But if the people who trust you change jobs for any reason, you're back in a precarious position, because you can't build relational trust reliably from a distance.
I'm presently in a fabulous situation whereby my boss drives near my house on his own way to work, so any work meetings we need also take place offsite. That maintains all the face-to-face communication we need, is great for my productivity (since I don't have to go *anywhere*), and gives him a good excuse to stay out of the office once or twice a week also. But it wouldn't work if I weren't (at minimum) in the same city.
(I can't comment on whether video conferencing can produce the required level of communication; I think it may; never tried it.)
I'll pick the box marked, "American Rocket Scientists".
NASA has ostensibly used the metric system since about 1990, the statement said, but English units are still employed on some missions, and a few projects use both. NASA uses both English and metric aboard the International Space Station. The dual strategy led to the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter robotic probe in 1999; a contractor provided thruster firing data in English units while NASA was calculating in metric.
A school district in Massachusetts today voted to remove all references to "imperial" and "metric" from their science and mathematics curricula, after complaints from a parent that 'cubits' were not receiving equal time in the classroom. A spokeswoman for the district board said today that if scientists themselves cannot agree on the matter...
"Astronomers further said that they had decoded part of a computer signal from the star systems in question, possibly a signal 1,000,000,000 years old! It said, 'Please wait, Java loading.'"
I live not far from the Sydney Opera House, and though I haven't been measuring things there, I haven't seen any sign of it getting closer to the water. Certainly not a whole island worth of closer. Likewise I would expect somewhere like Venice to be in the news if its gradual descent into the ocean were suddenly to accelerate, threatening all that tourism. Ditto the pacific islands; or anywhere people have jetties or wharves that would need rebuilding.
Is it possible that sea levels could change in the Indian ocean while remaining constant in other parts of the globe? That's what seems odd here. Or is this likely to be local, run-of-the-mill geology at work, and people seeing what they (justifiably, IMHO) expect to see?
Natural wonder is what gives us good science, not legislated answers. The wonder can be theological -- or merely aesthetic -- but there is utterly no substitute for it. Wonder can involve naivete, but also offers us the best shot at correction.
I remember writing a fractal generator on an Atari 800 in the Australian outback when I was twelve (based on one of Scientific American's Mathematical Recreations articles: six hours to generate a 40x40 picture). Get kids appreciating this kind of beauty and you will get science for free; they'll line up to do it.
I think it's historically inarguable that religion is more fertile ground than skepticism for wonder: it has a deeper affinity for worth and value apart from which (as we see today) science is by and large reduced to business interests. Recognise the link between religions and wonder, and start to use it, instead of being spooked by fundies into adopting the same combatative ideas as they.
IIRC about 40% of the founding members of the Royal Academy were Puritans, despite being less than a few percent of the wider population; all through the 1700s and 1800s clerical pastimes very often included the natural sciences: their motivation was largely wonder (as an aspect of worship, no less: you can imagine the diligence of people like Mendel). The advances of the later 19th century would have been impossible without the vast body of observational data they generated. And the field, above all others, that they changed, was zoology.
Learn from history: Encourage wonder and you will get people asking questions, and finding answers for themselves. Legislate approved answers and you will be ignored (and very rightly so).
> By doing nothing, Google is as guilty as the Chinese government.
This is not a scaleable moral argument. You yourself, as a matter of practical necessity, do absolutely nothing about *most* of the moral issues you are aware of (slavery in Sudan, anyone?). That doesn't make you guilty of those things. In most aspects of life we have to choose our battles.
You need to say why Google should have chosen this issue as their line in the sand. The argument has been put forward that it is better for them to do what they can within the law, such as it is, in China, rather than leave the Chinese audience to Chinese search engines which by being local can fall much more squarely under Party control. Even a partial Google is better than none at all, and still moves the country toward freedom of information (albiet more slowly).
Or that's what they argue, anyway. Why not deal with the argument, rather than handing out moral-high-horse generalisations whose end effect might well be worse for those who have much more to lose? This kind of action / inaction / pseudo-action can also constitute an abdication of responsibility.
There are a few killer designer-friendly features that just don't seem to have enough mindshare amongst developers to make it into GIMP, but slicing is the BIG issue.
(For the non-designers: Slicing means having multiple subimage exports from the same picture, arranged by green transparent rectangular overlays which snap-to-rules and each have their own export/compression settings. It's graphically analogous to scripting in the sense that it doesn't just make you work faster; you actually work significantly differently once you grasp the possibilities).
This was where Fireworks took on Photoshop and comprehensively beat it for a few years, partly by the ease of slicing and partly because of its lovely styles/vectors integration. It had all this in 2000 or so.
I'm hoping Inkscape will adopt a slicing tool, but GIMP has needed one for some time now. The python/perl ruler-based slicing tools are pretty painful once you've used Fireworks, ImageReady or Photoshop.
Slashdot karma has no particular affect on my enjoyment of the website.
If I'm playing a game, and I have a red flashing light over my head that says "LOOT THIEF", that, however, will impact my opportunities within the game, and my enjoyment of it -- especially if I'm paying money for the privilege.
The problem is that no part of a game 'regulates' gameplay, as if from heaven -- it only changes the nature of the game being played. Lots of people will be delighted to discover the "apportioning blame" sub-game ('tag' would be the basic archetype).
When asked to substantiate his claim that he "didn't have time to check [his] reply" the Slashdot poster known only as 'ewg' said, "Well, it's kind of like not being able to afford to", and quietly retired from public life, saying only that he (or she, or it) "Needed to spend more time on the talk show circuit".
When and if contacted for comment, Oprah Winfrey -- by her own account an "American TV presenter", whatever that may be, and who cares, and not me -- said she could neither confirm nor deny anything these days, that she preferred it that way, and that she read somewhere that 90% of facts may or may not be something-or-other, but we should love them JUST THE SAME.
I've never been able to sustain it (getting busy at work seems to wreck the cycle), but even as a card-carrying night-person the most effective sleep pattern I've ever had has involved getting up at 6am, having a completely fruit-based breakfast, going straight to the gym for an hour of cardio or weights, by the end of which I'm really awake, being at work by 8am (I live 4 mins from work, and really recommend it), and thereby being being absolutely stuffed by around 9 at night, and ready for a solid 8+ hrs of sleep. You're out of sync with a lot of people, but your alertness is amazing. I went into UrbanMonkMode (TM) for my own personal 'Summer of Code' (yep, southern hemisphere) on the holidays and I was amazed at how much good stuff I wrote in a single solid week following this pattern -- problems I'd toyed around with for a few years were knocked over one after the other. The combination of sleep cycle, diet and exercise has an impressive affect on coding ability.
Slashdot Mirror
I use linux for complete control and configurability. That might appeal to the overclockers. But after using any enjoying Ubuntu for a few months, I went back to the configurability of KDE/Debian. Once again I have the exact desktop and the exact set of tools I want -- plus some impress-anyone items like Katapult and AmaroK. I think the overclockers would like this flexibility, but they'd also need Windows for showing off their l33t machines at LAN parties: games only available on Windows are part of *their* toolset. So they may as well stay with Windows for at least another five years until that changes.
What the world needs now is the "One STEAMPUNK Laptop Per Child" program.
Give the little blighters some aesthetic sense, I say.
The bright side, it seems to me, is that PHP's openness means even if the developers are slack, the bugs can still be disclosed without IP litigation threats.
Also, he's given the developers a week or two of warning before March. If there's anything *that* serious in there, actually known to the developers, the fix could conceivably be ready by the time the bug is announced.
I run PHP sites, and I'd rather see the bugs public and being patched, than known only to the developers (we hope).
Paine? Too late. Read John Locke's "Letter Concerning Toleration" (from the 1690's) for the first, the best, and the most influential expression of this idea. It was after the English Civil war and the contemporaneous Thirty Years War in Northern Europe, in particular, that Christian thinkers developed the concept of 'toleration', realizing that there simply had to be a better way of solving problems at the macro and the micro level.
My own view is that Islam now must choose the same step forward for itself. Even if that means its factions are, for now, allowed to fight amongst themselves. External pressures can't compel this kind of choice.
Here's Stanford on Locke, anyway:
The correct analogy would involve you having no idea whether other Americans exist, but thinking: "Hmm, the more Americans there were, the lower the likelihood of intelligent design would be."
You may be on to something there...
I know! Inform them by email and REQUIRE a receipt! So that they know that we know that they know...
OK, what if direct enforcement isn't the idea? Maybe the idea is that if they find a registered person using a false identity (easier to detect), then it's clear that they're up to no good?
> ... it wasn't me.
No, I was there, and... it was me.
Well, there were a few of us involved. But my personal confession reads as follows:
I wrote scripts that let end users change their own pages. I integrated Wysiwyg editors into CMS systems. I coded some wiki-markup processors. I made design changes friendly for non-techies. I wrote image thumbnailers, and CSS-generators that used customer preferences.
I didn't know it was wrong! I was just following orders! Everyone was doing it! Lots of others killed him more than I did!
*Moves to Brazil*
Well I preferred the great Australian poet Les Murray's take on "sprawl" -- a far better use of a great-sounding word:
Read more
If even large accounting firms are bright enough to have some skills in 'forensic accounting' and so on, I'd be surprised if the whole UK police force didn't employ at least someone with hacking skills. The interesting ethical modifier is the get-out-of-jail card they have in using them. If they get caught on official business they just wave the badge and go their way. Likewise, they likely see its most distasteful sides. I wonder what affect this would have on their attitudes to hacking in their personal life?
To give a corresponding example, a friend of the family is a highway patrol officer here in Australia: he drives some very highly tuned and customized cars that have little trouble catching almost anything that's legal to drive here. Sometimes the people he catches imagine that he's a fellow rev-head, and want to discuss the mechanics of his car. This is a mistake, as he has simply no interest in speeding, and absolutely no patience with it. On the one hand, because he can speed with impunity, and does so all the time, there's no thrill factor to it, apart from the physical sensation. Secondly, the more he has to walk around crash scenes picking up body parts and trying to figure out which bags to put them in, the slower and slower his off-duty driving becomes.
Is there a corresponding effect in 'white hat' hacking? Does exposure to real hacker crime, combined with hacking as a job, actually result in a decreased interest in hacking in private life?
Seriously, how many Slashdot readers are there? Plenty, I'd say. Let's all start saying "Closed Office" when we reference the best-known closed-source Office package, and when asked to clarify, select any one of the excellent and obvious answers to that question. Not Open Office, the other one. The one that you can't just fix yourself when it breaks ("Imagine of your car bonnet was welded shut, and you couldn't even pay a mechanic to fix the engine?"). The one that keeps you opening your wallet.
There are other ways for things to go wrong. You can wind up on the 'do we really need these people?' list for many reasons:
Basically, I now take it as axiomatic that without 'face time', misunderstandings inevitably accumulate. I've found you can only set up telecommuting arrangements after working onsite for a while, and developing trust, and that it's easier in small companies, or when you're essentially contracting. But if the people who trust you change jobs for any reason, you're back in a precarious position, because you can't build relational trust reliably from a distance.
I'm presently in a fabulous situation whereby my boss drives near my house on his own way to work, so any work meetings we need also take place offsite. That maintains all the face-to-face communication we need, is great for my productivity (since I don't have to go *anywhere*), and gives him a good excuse to stay out of the office once or twice a week also. But it wouldn't work if I weren't (at minimum) in the same city.
(I can't comment on whether video conferencing can produce the required level of communication; I think it may; never tried it.)
I'll pick the box marked, "American Rocket Scientists".
SPACE.com -- NASA Finally Goes Metric (8 Jan 2007)
Maybe the conversion "isn't rocket science", and therein lies the problem?
A school district in Massachusetts today voted to remove all references to "imperial" and "metric" from their science and mathematics curricula, after complaints from a parent that 'cubits' were not receiving equal time in the classroom. A spokeswoman for the district board said today that if scientists themselves cannot agree on the matter...
From the article:
"Astronomers further said that they had decoded part of a computer signal from the star systems in question, possibly a signal 1,000,000,000 years old! It said, 'Please wait, Java loading.'"
I live not far from the Sydney Opera House, and though I haven't been measuring things there, I haven't seen any sign of it getting closer to the water. Certainly not a whole island worth of closer. Likewise I would expect somewhere like Venice to be in the news if its gradual descent into the ocean were suddenly to accelerate, threatening all that tourism. Ditto the pacific islands; or anywhere people have jetties or wharves that would need rebuilding.
Is it possible that sea levels could change in the Indian ocean while remaining constant in other parts of the globe? That's what seems odd here. Or is this likely to be local, run-of-the-mill geology at work, and people seeing what they (justifiably, IMHO) expect to see?
Natural wonder is what gives us good science, not legislated answers. The wonder can be theological -- or merely aesthetic -- but there is utterly no substitute for it. Wonder can involve naivete, but also offers us the best shot at correction.
I remember writing a fractal generator on an Atari 800 in the Australian outback when I was twelve (based on one of Scientific American's Mathematical Recreations articles: six hours to generate a 40x40 picture). Get kids appreciating this kind of beauty and you will get science for free; they'll line up to do it.
I think it's historically inarguable that religion is more fertile ground than skepticism for wonder: it has a deeper affinity for worth and value apart from which (as we see today) science is by and large reduced to business interests. Recognise the link between religions and wonder, and start to use it, instead of being spooked by fundies into adopting the same combatative ideas as they.
IIRC about 40% of the founding members of the Royal Academy were Puritans, despite being less than a few percent of the wider population; all through the 1700s and 1800s clerical pastimes very often included the natural sciences: their motivation was largely wonder (as an aspect of worship, no less: you can imagine the diligence of people like Mendel). The advances of the later 19th century would have been impossible without the vast body of observational data they generated. And the field, above all others, that they changed, was zoology.
Learn from history: Encourage wonder and you will get people asking questions, and finding answers for themselves. Legislate approved answers and you will be ignored (and very rightly so).
This is not a scaleable moral argument. You yourself, as a matter of practical necessity, do absolutely nothing about *most* of the moral issues you are aware of (slavery in Sudan, anyone?). That doesn't make you guilty of those things. In most aspects of life we have to choose our battles.
You need to say why Google should have chosen this issue as their line in the sand. The argument has been put forward that it is better for them to do what they can within the law, such as it is, in China, rather than leave the Chinese audience to Chinese search engines which by being local can fall much more squarely under Party control. Even a partial Google is better than none at all, and still moves the country toward freedom of information (albiet more slowly).
Or that's what they argue, anyway. Why not deal with the argument, rather than handing out moral-high-horse generalisations whose end effect might well be worse for those who have much more to lose? This kind of action / inaction / pseudo-action can also constitute an abdication of responsibility.
Everything dies, baby that's a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
-- Springsteen, "Atlantic City"
"The dark-matter that you can see is clearly not the TRUE dark-matter."
-- Serious Black (attrib.)
> As powerful as GIMP is...
There are a few killer designer-friendly features that just don't seem to have enough mindshare amongst developers to make it into GIMP, but slicing is the BIG issue.
(For the non-designers: Slicing means having multiple subimage exports from the same picture, arranged by green transparent rectangular overlays which snap-to-rules and each have their own export/compression settings. It's graphically analogous to scripting in the sense that it doesn't just make you work faster; you actually work significantly differently once you grasp the possibilities).
This was where Fireworks took on Photoshop and comprehensively beat it for a few years, partly by the ease of slicing and partly because of its lovely styles/vectors integration. It had all this in 2000 or so.
I'm hoping Inkscape will adopt a slicing tool, but GIMP has needed one for some time now. The python/perl ruler-based slicing tools are pretty painful once you've used Fireworks, ImageReady or Photoshop.
Slashdot karma has no particular affect on my enjoyment of the website.
If I'm playing a game, and I have a red flashing light over my head that says "LOOT THIEF", that, however, will impact my opportunities within the game, and my enjoyment of it -- especially if I'm paying money for the privilege.
The problem is that no part of a game 'regulates' gameplay, as if from heaven -- it only changes the nature of the game being played. Lots of people will be delighted to discover the "apportioning blame" sub-game ('tag' would be the basic archetype).
When asked to substantiate his claim that he "didn't have time to check [his] reply" the Slashdot poster known only as 'ewg' said, "Well, it's kind of like not being able to afford to", and quietly retired from public life, saying only that he (or she, or it) "Needed to spend more time on the talk show circuit".
When and if contacted for comment, Oprah Winfrey -- by her own account an "American TV presenter", whatever that may be, and who cares, and not me -- said she could neither confirm nor deny anything these days, that she preferred it that way, and that she read somewhere that 90% of facts may or may not be something-or-other, but we should love them JUST THE SAME.
I've never been able to sustain it (getting busy at work seems to wreck the cycle), but even as a card-carrying night-person the most effective sleep pattern I've ever had has involved getting up at 6am, having a completely fruit-based breakfast, going straight to the gym for an hour of cardio or weights, by the end of which I'm really awake, being at work by 8am (I live 4 mins from work, and really recommend it), and thereby being being absolutely stuffed by around 9 at night, and ready for a solid 8+ hrs of sleep. You're out of sync with a lot of people, but your alertness is amazing. I went into UrbanMonkMode (TM) for my own personal 'Summer of Code' (yep, southern hemisphere) on the holidays and I was amazed at how much good stuff I wrote in a single solid week following this pattern -- problems I'd toyed around with for a few years were knocked over one after the other. The combination of sleep cycle, diet and exercise has an impressive affect on coding ability.
Interesting point and all, but seriously dude... that is quite some hypothetical.
OCTOPUS: GurgleRarrr! *attacks*
ME: *oof* Ex-CUSE me, but I SPECIFICALLY requested the shark.
OCTOPUS: *slinks away, professionally embarrassed*