I'm curious what they will port to Linux from their other platforms. Even if they keep their latest stuff proprietary, IBM has quite a few older tools that have been pretty good. Regardless of whether you love or hate the interfaces, protocols and data formats, they have tended to be very robust. It would be nice to see some of the older ones appear as open source. For example, while I love CVS, I could imagine a couple of the features of CMVC being added to it.
Time Warner has been advertising digital cable here in Rochester for months. And I gather from the recent ads that they are installing now. I can just picture the standard being something different and costing some of the cable providers bigs bucks; a cost that will undoubtedly get passed along. As for me, I want a guarantee that when I go to digital cable that under no circumstances will I ever get the Golf Channel. If that happens, I won't get a single word out of my dad when he comes to visit.
It's counter-productive to assault Katz (or anyone else) for their faulty reasoning or pretentious posturing as an authority on these topics. The fact is they do need to be discussed. Even if the initial spark to the conversation was a bit weak, it's still a conversation worth having...
In fact, I initially thought about flaming the fact that so many journalists have such a shallow understanding of the topics they report that they grossly misrepresent them. However, I realized that I didn't intend that criticism toward Mr. Katz in this case. He is reporting someone else's ideas for discussion. I have to give him credit to for presenting them rather objectively.
This issue needs to be discussed by people like us. If we aren't familiar with the half thought out ideas that are being foisted onto the general public, we won't be prepared for some of the idiotic legislation that they may spawn to address the imagined crises. Politicians are less informed than journalists. They don't have the luxury of limiting the scope of what they will consider to general subjects about which they know something. They deal with the issues that arise, real or imagined.
False analogy - media are not self-reproducing
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 2
Media is not a species. It is the output of our species. Yes, we can increase our rate of output, and we are clearly doing that now. But population pressure does not apply to something which is not itself a population. We may well drown in our own output if we don't regulate it, but it remains our product, not a species unto itself.
As I am typing this, I am watching the banner ad where Tux tramples Redmond. Any long time Slashdot reader will have already seen it several times. Tux will eat them for lunch.
With one of them registering microsoft-.com and another commenting that short domain names being hard to come by, I have to wonder if at least some of them fully realized that they were exploiting a mistake when they registered those names. The guy who registered e-.com may not have known, and probably intended no harm, but registering a domain name using someone else's trademark is highly questionable squatting. Even if I were inclined to do it, I don't think I would do it to anyone who could afford the legal muscle to bankrupt me.
Brooks pointed out the problem of setting arbitrary limits on a particular programmer's code in Mythical Man Month. He was talking about setting limits on size primarily. And he noted that they caught programmers "throwing things over the fence" into somebody else's code. Now I am reading the newly published Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck. He describes a fear of touching another programmer's code as a factor in slowing down many projects.
By the way, it is worth comparing Extreme Programming with Eric Raymond's comments in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Karl Fogel's in his new book Open Source Development with CVS. If Beck is right that Extreme Programming can flatten the cost curve on changes over time from exponential to logarithmic, and if he is right about the essential characteristics that make Extreme Programming work, then the open source community beat him to it. It would be a sure indicator that open source is going to outstrip everything else in the long run. It is worth the effort to read Marc Stiegler's book Earthweb too for a view of how realtime online collaboration could potentially reduce turn-around time on many activities. He has a web site related to the book. Okay, you have your reading list for the week guys.
By the way, speaking of So Cal, I just want to say that it's about 72 degrees F and beautiful, just for you so-and-sos who have seen a solar eclipse.:)
Don't worry, the temperature does drop slightly during the eclipse and during totality the amount of harmful UV is significantly reduced. It will be safe for you to come outside and watch the next one, even in So. California.;-)
Okay, it is time to establish my credentials as a net.old.foggy, not that I expect anyone to believe me or care. This reminded me a bit of the Usenet Olympics. Okay, the content is different, but the excellent use of net references is dead on. There are two more olympiads in that directory. And not all of the naes you'll see are ancient history. Yup, back in my day, Sonny, all we had was text, and we were glad to have it because we knew people with online services that weren't connected to the Internet. Heck, we had to use it in the dark days before Al Gore invented it.
This raises the cost of working at home for the employer. I believe that employers are forbidden to differentiate between work-at-home and on site employees in determining salaries, raises, bonuses, hiring and firing. That means that one or both of two things will happen. The opportunities to work from home will diminish or inflation-adjusted salaries will decline across the board. The bottom line is that the compensation I can expect for exactly the same work next year that I had already expected to provide to my employer just went down regardless of where I do my work.
An individual's understanding of any field, especially one outside his personal expertise is... well, individual. I personally know a couple of very technologically savvy lawyers. I know more legally savvy geeks, but I know more geeks. I remember once explaining that different styles of programming wizardry can be defined metaphorically with different styles of magic. The one that is applicable here is wizardry itself. A wizard does not know everything, but how to find anything he needs to know.
It is hard to stay on the cutting edge of one's own specialty. A few very bright, very energetic people can stay on the cutting edge of broader fields or two fields. People with lives outside work are more limited. If you need to maintain competence in another field, it is better to maintain an overview. That, coupled with a good knowledge of where the best experts and resources can be found, and an understanding of the limits of your own knowledge is good enough.
The harm arises from people who don't know their own limitations or the limitations of their sources. There are any number of "experts" who are afraid to use the words "I don't know" for fear of being found out as charlatans. They talk a good game and can completely convince people outside their field, all the while passing off superficial understanding as expertise.
I suspect that the root of this is simple. It is a heady experience to be the expert that someone relies on. It is easy enough to take small steps outside of one's actual area of expertise. And it is horribly difficult to retract one of the expert statements. That would tend to discourage research that might uncover information that would contradict one's earlier pronouncements. In the end fame can undermine the very qualities that earned it in the first place.
Of course, there is also the simple case often described by the saying, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." A superficial understanding of a subject is a good way to become acquainted with only one side of a controversy. Since law is really only a set of societal rules for handling controversial situations, it is obvious enough that superficial knowledge has more potential for damage here than anywhere else.
My advice both for lawyers needed technical knowledge and techies needing legal knowledge is to acquire a broad overview personally. Be familiar with enough of the jargon and body of knowledge that you aren't easily snowed. Then find reliable experts and/or good resources for acquiring in depth knowledge as needed.
That's fine once you have a file, or at least something to pipe to stdin, but we are talking about a comic strip. I had to retype the text by hand. That requires a text editor. Okay, it doesn't require a text editor. The really masochistic can do it with adb.
The IMDB has also protected future access of anyone who contributes by allowing a download of the complete raw data and programs to extract from it. They don't make it particularly obvious to find it, but they don't hide it either. They restrict the ways that you can redistribute it, but they provide it complete for unlimited personal use. That has one of the desireable properties of open source: you are not dependent on their continued existance and goodwill for access to the data.
Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems-- EMACS and VI being two. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in Women. No, the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor-- complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.
It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text[4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse-- introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.
And a lot of different countries would LOVE to have true internationalization and localization done, so just by changing a message catalog (or adding to it) an operating system or application could be localized for a particular culture.
Jon, thanks for mentioning this. I'm not surprised since Linux International is hosting the mailing lists for the Free Translation Project teams. I wanted to mention that there are several projects going to to try to achieve internationalization of Linux and free software in general. If I have left any out of this list, please speak up.
The Free Translation Project, doing translation of the messages from free software into quite a few languages.
Did anyone else notice the copyright date? My only complaint about the rot13 is that there is no tool I know from automatically decrypting a comic strip. I had to type it into Emacs and M-x toggle-rot13-mode. Please, nobody make any nasty comments about the fact that I obviously have no aversion to typing.
Hey, The first words heard after midnight at the party I was at were:
"The lights are on. We still have power!"
"Let's call Gary and congratulate him on a job well done."
Half the people at the party were on call last night. Not a single pager or cell phone went off. And better still, mine didn't start going off at 6 am today. It was a quiet night.
I still want to find the most alarmist Y2K book for a review in a few weeks. I want one that made lots of specific predictions of disasters. I want power outages and plane crashes and nuclear melt downs. I want to give some hysterical author and publisher who spouted gloom and doom to increase sales exactly what they deserve... a really cutting review. And the later the publication date the better. That way we can honestly say that information about preparation for the Y2K non-event was available. I'm guessing from the lack of responses the last time I asked for recommendations on such a book, that none of us were reading any of them.
I haven't been able to find a story on this online yet, but CNN (on cable) did a live broadcast from the FAA command center in Herndon, Virginia a couple of minutes ago. They pointed out that all of the air traffic control and aviation systems are on GMT (I suspect they meant UTC, but I'm not sure about that). They reported that there were no planes reporting problems. I guess if we want to see planes falling out of the sky we have to head to a war zone. No thanks, I'll pass on that.
If the IRS isn't Y2K-compliant they'll be checking all of the returns by hand. And I can see them disallowing all kinds of deductions. If it is bad, but not as bad as you think, you may be stuck with the full cost of the shopping spree.
I didn't want official statements that have been through the spin-cycle already. I was looking for actual experiences of real nerds around the world... us.
I think there is a valid PR reason to do it. There are enough factors that are out of the control of any IT manager: the power to the building, connectivity to the net, etc. Even if you have taken every measure within your power to be sure that you are Y2K compliant, your site may disappear. And that is really bad for public relations. People get the wrong idea, and nobody fully believes that it wasn't your fault. If you voluntarily take a site down and then bring it up early on January 1st when you are sure that everything around you is okay, you look a bit overcautious. None of this means that I think that there is any reason to be worried. I don't. I expect a quiet night, and I am on call.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious what they will port to Linux from their other platforms. Even if they keep their latest stuff proprietary, IBM has quite a few older tools that have been pretty good. Regardless of whether you love or hate the interfaces, protocols and data formats, they have tended to be very robust. It would be nice to see some of the older ones appear as open source. For example, while I love CVS, I could imagine a couple of the features of CMVC being added to it.
Time Warner has been advertising digital cable here in Rochester for months. And I gather from the recent ads that they are installing now. I can just picture the standard being something different and costing some of the cable providers bigs bucks; a cost that will undoubtedly get passed along. As for me, I want a guarantee that when I go to digital cable that under no circumstances will I ever get the Golf Channel. If that happens, I won't get a single word out of my dad when he comes to visit.
In fact, I initially thought about flaming the fact that so many journalists have such a shallow understanding of the topics they report that they grossly misrepresent them. However, I realized that I didn't intend that criticism toward Mr. Katz in this case. He is reporting someone else's ideas for discussion. I have to give him credit to for presenting them rather objectively.
This issue needs to be discussed by people like us. If we aren't familiar with the half thought out ideas that are being foisted onto the general public, we won't be prepared for some of the idiotic legislation that they may spawn to address the imagined crises. Politicians are less informed than journalists. They don't have the luxury of limiting the scope of what they will consider to general subjects about which they know something. They deal with the issues that arise, real or imagined.
Media is not a species. It is the output of our species. Yes, we can increase our rate of output, and we are clearly doing that now. But population pressure does not apply to something which is not itself a population. We may well drown in our own output if we don't regulate it, but it remains our product, not a species unto itself.
As I am typing this, I am watching the banner ad where Tux tramples Redmond. Any long time Slashdot reader will have already seen it several times. Tux will eat them for lunch.
With one of them registering microsoft-.com and another commenting that short domain names being hard to come by, I have to wonder if at least some of them fully realized that they were exploiting a mistake when they registered those names. The guy who registered e-.com may not have known, and probably intended no harm, but registering a domain name using someone else's trademark is highly questionable squatting. Even if I were inclined to do it, I don't think I would do it to anyone who could afford the legal muscle to bankrupt me.
Brooks pointed out the problem of setting arbitrary limits on a particular programmer's code in Mythical Man Month. He was talking about setting limits on size primarily. And he noted that they caught programmers "throwing things over the fence" into somebody else's code. Now I am reading the newly published Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck. He describes a fear of touching another programmer's code as a factor in slowing down many projects.
By the way, it is worth comparing Extreme Programming with Eric Raymond's comments in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Karl Fogel's in his new book Open Source Development with CVS. If Beck is right that Extreme Programming can flatten the cost curve on changes over time from exponential to logarithmic, and if he is right about the essential characteristics that make Extreme Programming work, then the open source community beat him to it. It would be a sure indicator that open source is going to outstrip everything else in the long run. It is worth the effort to read Marc Stiegler's book Earthweb too for a view of how realtime online collaboration could potentially reduce turn-around time on many activities. He has a web site related to the book. Okay, you have your reading list for the week guys.
Don't worry, the temperature does drop slightly during the eclipse and during totality the amount of harmful UV is significantly reduced. It will be safe for you to come outside and watch the next one, even in So. California.
Okay, it is time to establish my credentials as a net.old.foggy, not that I expect anyone to believe me or care. This reminded me a bit of the Usenet Olympics. Okay, the content is different, but the excellent use of net references is dead on. There are two more olympiads in that directory. And not all of the naes you'll see are ancient history. Yup, back in my day, Sonny, all we had was text, and we were glad to have it because we knew people with online services that weren't connected to the Internet. Heck, we had to use it in the dark days before Al Gore invented it.
Now if we can just get her to pose in a Slashdot, Beware of Nerd T shirt ...
This raises the cost of working at home for the employer. I believe that employers are forbidden to differentiate between work-at-home and on site employees in determining salaries, raises, bonuses, hiring and firing. That means that one or both of two things will happen. The opportunities to work from home will diminish or inflation-adjusted salaries will decline across the board. The bottom line is that the compensation I can expect for exactly the same work next year that I had already expected to provide to my employer just went down regardless of where I do my work.
An individual's understanding of any field, especially one outside his personal expertise is ... well, individual. I personally know a couple of very technologically savvy lawyers. I know more legally savvy geeks, but I know more geeks. I remember once explaining that different styles of programming wizardry can be defined metaphorically with different styles of magic. The one that is applicable here is wizardry itself. A wizard does not know everything, but how to find anything he needs to know.
It is hard to stay on the cutting edge of one's own specialty. A few very bright, very energetic people can stay on the cutting edge of broader fields or two fields. People with lives outside work are more limited. If you need to maintain competence in another field, it is better to maintain an overview. That, coupled with a good knowledge of where the best experts and resources can be found, and an understanding of the limits of your own knowledge is good enough.
The harm arises from people who don't know their own limitations or the limitations of their sources. There are any number of "experts" who are afraid to use the words "I don't know" for fear of being found out as charlatans. They talk a good game and can completely convince people outside their field, all the while passing off superficial understanding as expertise.
I suspect that the root of this is simple. It is a heady experience to be the expert that someone relies on. It is easy enough to take small steps outside of one's actual area of expertise. And it is horribly difficult to retract one of the expert statements. That would tend to discourage research that might uncover information that would contradict one's earlier pronouncements. In the end fame can undermine the very qualities that earned it in the first place.
Of course, there is also the simple case often described by the saying, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." A superficial understanding of a subject is a good way to become acquainted with only one side of a controversy. Since law is really only a set of societal rules for handling controversial situations, it is obvious enough that superficial knowledge has more potential for damage here than anywhere else.
My advice both for lawyers needed technical knowledge and techies needing legal knowledge is to acquire a broad overview personally. Be familiar with enough of the jargon and body of knowledge that you aren't easily snowed. Then find reliable experts and/or good resources for acquiring in depth knowledge as needed.
I didn't catch it until the third pass. But it was New Year's Day. It took that long before I was up to typing anything about it.
That's fine once you have a file, or at least something to pipe to stdin, but we are talking about a comic strip. I had to retype the text by hand. That requires a text editor. Okay, it doesn't require a text editor. The really masochistic can do it with adb.
The IMDB has also protected future access of anyone who contributes by allowing a download of the complete raw data and programs to extract from it. They don't make it particularly obvious to find it, but they don't hide it either. They restrict the ways that you can redistribute it, but they provide it complete for unlimited personal use. That has one of the desireable properties of open source: you are not dependent on their continued existance and goodwill for access to the data.
Okay, I'm biased. But what other tool so obviously solves the problem of decoding a rot13'ed comic strip. M-x toggle-rot13-mode.
Jon, thanks for mentioning this. I'm not surprised since Linux International is hosting the mailing lists for the Free Translation Project teams. I wanted to mention that there are several projects going to to try to achieve internationalization of Linux and free software in general. If I have left any out of this list, please speak up.
There are also pages for internationalization and localization of several projects and distributions (URLs welcome).
Did anyone else notice the copyright date? My only complaint about the rot13 is that there is no tool I know from automatically decrypting a comic strip. I had to type it into Emacs and M-x toggle-rot13-mode. Please, nobody make any nasty comments about the fact that I obviously have no aversion to typing.
Hey, The first words heard after midnight at the party I was at were:
... a really cutting review. And the later the publication date the better. That way we can honestly say that information about preparation for the Y2K non-event was available. I'm guessing from the lack of responses the last time I asked for recommendations on such a book, that none of us were reading any of them.
"The lights are on. We still have power!"
"Let's call Gary and congratulate him on a job well done."
Half the people at the party were on call last night. Not a single pager or cell phone went off. And better still, mine didn't start going off at 6 am today. It was a quiet night.
I still want to find the most alarmist Y2K book for a review in a few weeks. I want one that made lots of specific predictions of disasters. I want power outages and plane crashes and nuclear melt downs. I want to give some hysterical author and publisher who spouted gloom and doom to increase sales exactly what they deserve
I haven't been able to find a story on this online yet, but CNN (on cable) did a live broadcast from the FAA command center in Herndon, Virginia a couple of minutes ago. They pointed out that all of the air traffic control and aviation systems are on GMT (I suspect they meant UTC, but I'm not sure about that). They reported that there were no planes reporting problems. I guess if we want to see planes falling out of the sky we have to head to a war zone. No thanks, I'll pass on that.
If the IRS isn't Y2K-compliant they'll be checking all of the returns by hand. And I can see them disallowing all kinds of deductions. If it is bad, but not as bad as you think, you may be stuck with the full cost of the shopping spree.
I didn't want official statements that have been through the spin-cycle already. I was looking for actual experiences of real nerds around the world ... us.
I made this point yesterday when I suggested that we should track Y2K non-events here. It is as valid now as it was then.
I think there is a valid PR reason to do it. There are enough factors that are out of the control of any IT manager: the power to the building, connectivity to the net, etc. Even if you have taken every measure within your power to be sure that you are Y2K compliant, your site may disappear. And that is really bad for public relations. People get the wrong idea, and nobody fully believes that it wasn't your fault. If you voluntarily take a site down and then bring it up early on January 1st when you are sure that everything around you is okay, you look a bit overcautious. None of this means that I think that there is any reason to be worried. I don't. I expect a quiet night, and I am on call.