What would it take for Slashdot to maintain a server for mirroring open source releases announced here? Then the release could be mirrored followed immediately by posting the announcement, with the URL for the Slashdot mirror. Particularly, I would think that Slashdot could mirror the major Linux distros and the GNU packages automatically just like some many other sites do. Forget trying to mirror every great free project on the planet. Just stick to the ones that every Slashdot reader is going to scamper off to get a copy of immediately.
If this is too much to ask, then please folks, when you submit release announcements, take the time to grab a copy of the distro's mirrors page and paste it into the story.
Read The Unix Philosophy and The Practice of Programming. The Unix view of how the universe should be isn't the only one. But those two books do a good job of explaining its strengths and how to leverage them, and why.
Read authors who disagree with each other. Decide whether the disagreements are dogma or practical. It is easy to get insulated from the real world by a single worldview. That worldview will serve you well until you meet an exception to it. Reading dissenting opinions is a good way to forearm yourself against that eventuality.
There actually was such a project, called DLT (Distributed Language Translation). You can find a write up of it here or here in Esperanto. The intermediate language used was indeed a variant of Esperanto.
Why don't geeks know how to build tension and suspense? Everybody knows the Honorable Mentions come before the Grand Prize. Tsk!
Regrettably, Suspense Accentuation Through Preceding Announcement of Minor Prizes has been patented by the folks who brought you the big awards' show starting with O whose name you dare not use because it is trademarked.
Re:Anonymity vs Free Speech
on
Anonymity
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· Score: 2
Anonymity is not equal to free speech. Anonymity just gives you an excuse to shrug off all responsibility for what you say and, in the case of the internet, do.
I recommend a book that refutes this argument in detail: The Unwanted Gaze : The Destruction of Privacy in America by Jeffrey Rosen. He points out that much of what we do depends on an expectation of privacy. What matters is that we may be watched. It alters our behavior. We avoid activities that might draw the disapproval of our neighbors, even though our neighbors have no legitimate interest in those activities.
The timing of this article is rather fortuitous. The Nobel Prize in Economics this year went to James J. Heckman and Daniel L. McFadden for their work studying how people make choices about where to live, what profession to pursue, how many hours to work, etc.
I have to second you on that. The Right To Read came off as alarmist when it was first published a few years ago. But as time goes on, I find myself saying, "Richard (Chicken Little) Stallman was right."
No country that I am aware of has directly stated in law that people have the right to freedom of thought. They come at it indirectly, protecting other freedoms that are the outward manifestations of it. The closest are references to freedom of conscience. I's starting to wonder if it is time to have a repository online for time-stamped, encrypted documents containing our personal thoughts on various technical topics, just to protect ourselves from having something too similar claimed as someone else's intellectual property tomorrow.
Is there anyone else out there who hears warning bells when reading the words, "Change your password immediately here." with a link? Has nobody ever heard of social engineering? I know that I'm not the only person on Slashdot with a mild case of paranoia.
[dsplat ducks under his desk to avoid being spotted by the black helicopters]
This just won't work. It may help somewhat. But the reason that competition works in the marketplace is that customers choose which product to buy and which company to buy from based on which best meets their needs. Those needs may be the lowest price, the best quality, the most conveniently located store, or any of a number of other factors.
Now, lets examine publically funded space programs. That's a good phrase, "publically funded". It tells us where the money is coming from. All of the tax payers foot the bill. Now, who decides where to make the purchase? Government officials. Note, I did not say "the government". I meant that this decision is made by specific people. Their motives may be laudable, but they cannot know the full and various motivations of the people whose money they are spending.
There's an interesting article entitled Sesame Street, Epistemology, and Freedom. The author argues that much of what is wrong in education and politics is a failure to teach children some of the important concepts in philosophy beyond the Sesame Street game of "One of these things is not like the others".
I'm reluctant to accept any argument that finds the one central problem. This article points out that that is precisely the problem. Essentially, politics has become an argument over whose abstraction will be accepted as the model for the issue, who gets to determine which are the two sides of the issue. Consider the similarity between multiple choice tests such as the SAT and ballots. Only one answer wins.
If they remove a significant amount of general-purpose code that isn't need on their platform, I could see the argument for calling it a separate OS. Personally, I would make the distinction on one of three conditions:
An actual code fork
Introduction of some incompatibility that would break existing apps
Porting to a significantly different architecture that can't run existing distros
The third is the weakest argument for calling it a different OS, but it is probably the one that applies. As long as they don't violate the GPL, I don't have a problem with them make the marketting decision of OS vs. distro whichever way makes them happy.
Go directly to their page on Nanix and read, among other things:
NANIX will become the standard operating system for these types of Internet connected devices." NANIX is a Linux-based operating system distribution optimized for small wireless Internet devices. Support will be included for power management, wireless connectivity (802.11, IRDA, Bluetooth), and non-conventional input/output such as handheld keyboards, voice-recognition, head mounted displays, and palm-sized LCD monitors. Support will also be provided for cameras, Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, MP3 music files, and broadband streaming audio/video. NANIX can be configured to function on a variety of systems ranging from laptops to small embedded computing devices.
If they play nice, this could provide some good support for small hardware. I would certainly like to be able to build some personal applications for handheld and wearable devices. I know that I perfer to be able to program any hardware I buy rather than just using the canned software that came with it. I don't always take advantage of that option, but it is a selling point to me.
And to take this the further, go join the EFF if you haven't already, step, suppose somone were to circumvent the protections on the TNEF format and write a program that could understand it, would you be liable under the DMCA section on anti-circumvention?
Since the e-mail was sent to you, that is evidence enough that the sender intended for you to read it. Using software that can understand the format cannot be construed as an attempt to violate the copyright.
Bruce spoke on a couple of panels at Chicon. I hope he'll forgive me, but I am reconstructing this from somewhat sleep deprived memories. He was quite frank about the fact that when he wrote Applied Cryptography, he believed that the proper use of cryptography could provide security. He said that his actual observations since then have convinced him that it is not possible for humans to use a system and for it to remain completely secure. The limits on human memory for pass phrases and the need for access to the secured data are two of the biggest problems. Although I don't remember him saying it outright, another is the limits to individuals' ability to stay up-to-date is another.
Another book for Unix programmers
on
Think Unix
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· Score: 2
The Unix Philosophy is a good book for examining some of the underlying concepts in what makes a good program. It cuts to the heart of why so many people love Unix. It distills what makes shells and pipes and I/O redirection such powerful concepts and warns against many of the things that happen in creeping featurism.
I agree with the analysis, but not completely with the conclusions. Certainly, even in Bazaar style projects there is central management. And even in Cathedral projects, good ideas originate outside of the central authority guiding the project. The dichotomy between the two is a metaphor to describe the degree of control that the central management of the project exerts, the degree of ownership that is claimed. It helps explain not the actual flow of information (ideas and code), but the psychology of the relationships between the actors.
There are elements of the Bazaar in Cathedral projects. Many of the elements of Emacs began as ideas that were never suggested by Richard Stallman. For all his coding talent and vision for the future of his creation, he is still one man. He eats and sleeps and lives the same 24 hour days as the rest of us. Others come up with answers to their own problems, scratching their own itches. His control has been as a gatekeeper, determining what is in and what is out.
The article itself gives examples of the Cathedral in Bazaar projects. But it overlooks the spirit of the participation. There is a feeling of shared ownership. To the extent that a volunteer participates in the project, he feels a joint ownership of it.
Perhaps I am merely stating my own impressions. I have contributed in minor ways to both styles of projects. Both are open enough for my taste. But I can feel the difference in the degree to which the control is perceived to be exercised. It is really a difference in management style rather than the presence or absence of management. But on such things a project can succeed or fail.
Think you'd be disqualified if you programmed your robot to destroy your corporate sponsors?
You get two minutes of power per round and no network connection, with a robot that weighs roughly the same as some of the smaller students. How much damage can you do?
I can't think of any audience better suited for plugging the FIRST competition to. It is a robotics competition that teams high schools with corporate sponsors. The teams build a robot in about 6 weeks from the time that they get the rules for the year's competition. My wife participated for two years and my own company sponsored a team for the first time last year. This could probably be called the Geek Olympics. It is intense and fun. If you get a chance to do it, grab on with both hands. And if you are on a first time team, find an older team that will mentor you. I know of at least one which has done exactly that.
The URLs that they are forwarding to are subject to change under the control of other companies. Microsoft certainly may be tracking usage. However, they may have also been building in the flexibility to change the URL without having to update the client software.
I went to the con but not to any of the panels I listed. There were at least a dozen simultaneous program tracks during the middle of the day. Between the overload and attending some of the children's programming with my 6 year old son, I missed a lot of interesting sounding panels.
Vernor Vinge suggests something of this sort in his latest Hugo and Prometheus award winning novel A Deepness In The Sky. One of his characters speculates on the power of providing the underlying layers of increasingly componentized software. Furthermore, Ken Thompson, in his classic article Reflections on Trusting Trust, discusses a mechanism for hiding a back door in such a way that it will be replicated with each revision of the software, and the source code for it cannot be found.
The point I am driving at is that currently these security holes are believed to be accidental. We are not far from seeing instances of them that are deliberately created. Open source offers some protection from that, if the source is actively read by numerous competent people. But when the code is linked from many sources, the program becomes vulnerable to the weakest link in the chain, the least well reviewed library.
Go fucking read - the same stuff is in EVERY White Wolf game. Why? To add an element of realism , gods forbid we should have anything but FANTASY in an RPG.
I got back from Chicon Monday night. There were a number of panels discussing exactly this, although in the context of fiction rather than games. They had titles like:
The Physics of Fantasy
The Fantasy of Physics
The Sources of Fantasy: Folklore
The Sources of Fantasy: History
The point of this is that even fiction that is acknowledged to depict the impossible must maintain a certain amount of internal consistency. It must make sense within its own context.
Slashdot Mirror
What would it take for Slashdot to maintain a server for mirroring open source releases announced here? Then the release could be mirrored followed immediately by posting the announcement, with the URL for the Slashdot mirror. Particularly, I would think that Slashdot could mirror the major Linux distros and the GNU packages automatically just like some many other sites do. Forget trying to mirror every great free project on the planet. Just stick to the ones that every Slashdot reader is going to scamper off to get a copy of immediately.
If this is too much to ask, then please folks, when you submit release announcements, take the time to grab a copy of the distro's mirrors page and paste it into the story.
Read The Unix Philosophy and The Practice of Programming. The Unix view of how the universe should be isn't the only one. But those two books do a good job of explaining its strengths and how to leverage them, and why.
Read authors who disagree with each other. Decide whether the disagreements are dogma or practical. It is easy to get insulated from the real world by a single worldview. That worldview will serve you well until you meet an exception to it. Reading dissenting opinions is a good way to forearm yourself against that eventuality.
And as we all know, that's a real time-saver when it accidentally falls in.
There actually was such a project, called DLT (Distributed Language Translation). You can find a write up of it here or here in Esperanto. The intermediate language used was indeed a variant of Esperanto.
Regrettably, Suspense Accentuation Through Preceding Announcement of Minor Prizes has been patented by the folks who brought you the big awards' show starting with O whose name you dare not use because it is trademarked.
I recommend a book that refutes this argument in detail: The Unwanted Gaze : The Destruction of Privacy in America by Jeffrey Rosen. He points out that much of what we do depends on an expectation of privacy. What matters is that we may be watched. It alters our behavior. We avoid activities that might draw the disapproval of our neighbors, even though our neighbors have no legitimate interest in those activities.
Talent, experience, a tight labor market, a location with a higher cost of living. Pick one or more and explain it yourself.
The timing of this article is rather fortuitous. The Nobel Prize in Economics this year went to James J. Heckman and Daniel L. McFadden for their work studying how people make choices about where to live, what profession to pursue, how many hours to work, etc.
I have to second you on that. The Right To Read came off as alarmist when it was first published a few years ago. But as time goes on, I find myself saying, "Richard (Chicken Little) Stallman was right."
No country that I am aware of has directly stated in law that people have the right to freedom of thought. They come at it indirectly, protecting other freedoms that are the outward manifestations of it. The closest are references to freedom of conscience. I's starting to wonder if it is time to have a repository online for time-stamped, encrypted documents containing our personal thoughts on various technical topics, just to protect ourselves from having something too similar claimed as someone else's intellectual property tomorrow.
Is there anyone else out there who hears warning bells when reading the words, "Change your password immediately here." with a link? Has nobody ever heard of social engineering? I know that I'm not the only person on Slashdot with a mild case of paranoia.
[dsplat ducks under his desk to avoid being spotted by the black helicopters]
This just won't work. It may help somewhat. But the reason that competition works in the marketplace is that customers choose which product to buy and which company to buy from based on which best meets their needs. Those needs may be the lowest price, the best quality, the most conveniently located store, or any of a number of other factors.
Now, lets examine publically funded space programs. That's a good phrase, "publically funded". It tells us where the money is coming from. All of the tax payers foot the bill. Now, who decides where to make the purchase? Government officials. Note, I did not say "the government". I meant that this decision is made by specific people. Their motives may be laudable, but they cannot know the full and various motivations of the people whose money they are spending.
David Friedman gives a good explanation of Public Choice Theory in the second half of Chapter 19: The Political Marketplace of his book Price Theory: An Intermediate Text.
There's an interesting article entitled Sesame Street, Epistemology, and Freedom. The author argues that much of what is wrong in education and politics is a failure to teach children some of the important concepts in philosophy beyond the Sesame Street game of "One of these things is not like the others".
I'm reluctant to accept any argument that finds the one central problem. This article points out that that is precisely the problem. Essentially, politics has become an argument over whose abstraction will be accepted as the model for the issue, who gets to determine which are the two sides of the issue. Consider the similarity between multiple choice tests such as the SAT and ballots. Only one answer wins.
The third is the weakest argument for calling it a different OS, but it is probably the one that applies. As long as they don't violate the GPL, I don't have a problem with them make the marketting decision of OS vs. distro whichever way makes them happy.
If they play nice, this could provide some good support for small hardware. I would certainly like to be able to build some personal applications for handheld and wearable devices. I know that I perfer to be able to program any hardware I buy rather than just using the canned software that came with it. I don't always take advantage of that option, but it is a selling point to me.
Since the e-mail was sent to you, that is evidence enough that the sender intended for you to read it. Using software that can understand the format cannot be construed as an attempt to violate the copyright.
Bruce spoke on a couple of panels at Chicon. I hope he'll forgive me, but I am reconstructing this from somewhat sleep deprived memories. He was quite frank about the fact that when he wrote Applied Cryptography, he believed that the proper use of cryptography could provide security. He said that his actual observations since then have convinced him that it is not possible for humans to use a system and for it to remain completely secure. The limits on human memory for pass phrases and the need for access to the secured data are two of the biggest problems. Although I don't remember him saying it outright, another is the limits to individuals' ability to stay up-to-date is another.
The Unix Philosophy is a good book for examining some of the underlying concepts in what makes a good program. It cuts to the heart of why so many people love Unix. It distills what makes shells and pipes and I/O redirection such powerful concepts and warns against many of the things that happen in creeping featurism.
Yes, but only because they aren't on the official parts list.
I agree with the analysis, but not completely with the conclusions. Certainly, even in Bazaar style projects there is central management. And even in Cathedral projects, good ideas originate outside of the central authority guiding the project. The dichotomy between the two is a metaphor to describe the degree of control that the central management of the project exerts, the degree of ownership that is claimed. It helps explain not the actual flow of information (ideas and code), but the psychology of the relationships between the actors.
There are elements of the Bazaar in Cathedral projects. Many of the elements of Emacs began as ideas that were never suggested by Richard Stallman. For all his coding talent and vision for the future of his creation, he is still one man. He eats and sleeps and lives the same 24 hour days as the rest of us. Others come up with answers to their own problems, scratching their own itches. His control has been as a gatekeeper, determining what is in and what is out.
The article itself gives examples of the Cathedral in Bazaar projects. But it overlooks the spirit of the participation. There is a feeling of shared ownership. To the extent that a volunteer participates in the project, he feels a joint ownership of it.
Perhaps I am merely stating my own impressions. I have contributed in minor ways to both styles of projects. Both are open enough for my taste. But I can feel the difference in the degree to which the control is perceived to be exercised. It is really a difference in management style rather than the presence or absence of management. But on such things a project can succeed or fail.
You get two minutes of power per round and no network connection, with a robot that weighs roughly the same as some of the smaller students. How much damage can you do?
I can't think of any audience better suited for plugging the FIRST competition to. It is a robotics competition that teams high schools with corporate sponsors. The teams build a robot in about 6 weeks from the time that they get the rules for the year's competition. My wife participated for two years and my own company sponsored a team for the first time last year. This could probably be called the Geek Olympics. It is intense and fun. If you get a chance to do it, grab on with both hands. And if you are on a first time team, find an older team that will mentor you. I know of at least one which has done exactly that.
The URLs that they are forwarding to are subject to change under the control of other companies. Microsoft certainly may be tracking usage. However, they may have also been building in the flexibility to change the URL without having to update the client software.
I went to the con but not to any of the panels I listed. There were at least a dozen simultaneous program tracks during the middle of the day. Between the overload and attending some of the children's programming with my 6 year old son, I missed a lot of interesting sounding panels.
Vernor Vinge suggests something of this sort in his latest Hugo and Prometheus award winning novel A Deepness In The Sky. One of his characters speculates on the power of providing the underlying layers of increasingly componentized software. Furthermore, Ken Thompson, in his classic article Reflections on Trusting Trust, discusses a mechanism for hiding a back door in such a way that it will be replicated with each revision of the software, and the source code for it cannot be found.
The point I am driving at is that currently these security holes are believed to be accidental. We are not far from seeing instances of them that are deliberately created. Open source offers some protection from that, if the source is actively read by numerous competent people. But when the code is linked from many sources, the program becomes vulnerable to the weakest link in the chain, the least well reviewed library.
I got back from Chicon Monday night. There were a number of panels discussing exactly this, although in the context of fiction rather than games. They had titles like:
The point of this is that even fiction that is acknowledged to depict the impossible must maintain a certain amount of internal consistency. It must make sense within its own context.