...implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor...
Are you kidding? They did Elite on that platform. Subtracting losses from profits doesn't even *need* a multiply.
Elite did a whole bunch more tricks which were pretty groundbreaking at the time and very much nailed to not just the CPU but the entire system it was developed on - how in God's name it ever got ported to other platforms I have no idea. Total rewrite?
Oh, high level languages existed back then. Heck, C and most of the basic aspects of Unix existed back then.
However, technology in computing tends to start with really big systems and work its way down through midrange, then servers, then PCs and finally into embedded devices. Reasonably high-level compiled languages are one thing among many that did this.
Once again the tool is blamed for the usage - there is nothing wrong with spreadsheets per se, its the user that needs to have the boundaries clearly defined.
How can you clearly define boundaries when spreadsheets support 65,000 rows or more and can bring in data from other spreadsheet files?
I don't know about you, but my newspapers constantly have articles on how the schools have no budget and the teachers are poor and the buildings are falling apart and yadda yadda yadda. You'd think they'd jump at a chance to save some cash, no matter how little.
As an industry (for want of a better word), education can sometimes be very resistant to change - largely because they often perceive change as being for its own sake than for any real benefit.
I would not be surprised - in fact, I'd be astonished if it weren't the case - to learn of schools still keeping a couple of clapped-out 386 and 486 PCs running DOS around for just one specific piece of software which is wheeled out for one lesson once a year because it won't work under Windows and they haven't yet found an alternative.
Anyway, with the goals in hand the problem of "Most educational software is poorly written for Windows." shouldn't be an issue, it's hard for me to write educational software because I don't have kids or experience teaching them... but with the right organisation I'd be happy to oblige.
You have no idea how close you are to nailing the exact problem right there.
Most developers quite frankly aren't terribly good at explaining things. It's a skill like any other and to be any good at it you have to practise.
Unfortunately, it's also pretty f*cking fundamental for software in an educational context. Your average curriculum just says "pupils must understand X, Y and Z". How you get the pupils to understand X, Y and Z is the teacher's problem.
So you generally wind up with an application developed by a teacher which explains X, Y and Z beautifully but requires admin rights, actively resists any attempt to install it network-wide through GPO or what have you (hey, what's the problem with visiting every station with a CD-ROM and typing "start, run, D:\setup"?), assumes that any printing you want to do will be through a printer directly attached to the USB port and is generally a PITA - or you wind up with an application which doesn't force the IT staff into a pitched battle but doesn't actually explain anything at all.
Guess which one is chosen by teachers? (And rightly so...)
It's very rare to have a piece of educational software which is both painless to manage and explains ideas nicely. Any software developer looking to do a half-decent job would have to collaborate with at least one or two absolutely first-class teachers. These are remarkably difficult to find.
I've got a baseless and unsupportable hypothesis (based on my lack of personal experience and lack of research) that teachers are afraid of technology, because their students know it better than them. And as a result, students are not getting the exposure to tech they need.
I'd agree with this.
I'd even go one step further and say that when it finally becomes painfully obvious that a given student almost certainly knows far more about the computers than any member of staff (which happens with at least one or two students per year), staff tend to be absolutely terrified of that student.
It just takes some (pretty serious) change in your work-flow.
Ding ding!
It required you, someone who we can safely assume is fairly techie (or you wouldn't be posting to/.) to make some serious changes in your work-flow.
Multiply those changes by everyone in the organisation and throw in re-building existing business process which expect Word documents and you now know how come it takes something pretty huge to make an organisation radically change the day to day operations of their business.
Oh and there are only 66 employees. I would bet your nearest grocery store is larger than that.
Not only that, my nearest grocery store makes more money, has a business plan which doesn't involve suing anyone with the audacity to shop elsewhere and isn't generally viewed within any particular industry as being managed by a deranged, pathetic idiot who in any other business would have been very publicly sacked years ago.
So far the only questionable selection that concerns me.
The RIAA have been misusing the DMCA for the longest period of time. The person that drafted the law even admits that the RIAA is abusing the law.
Yet whenever people say "If you don't want a law to be abused, don't write it in such a way that it's wide open to abuse" the stock reply is not "that's too hard" but "I don't think that will happen".
Seriously, try it. Write to a politician about an upcoming law that hasn't been passed yet and is easily open to abuse.
A lawyer's first responsibility is to the court, not the client. They are supposed to represent the client to the best of their ability, but not at the expense of the court. The simple fact that this particular lawyer has had at least one of the judges recommend sanctions speaks volumes about just what kind of morals they have.
Not true. Any professional's first responsibility is to the profession.
Now, that may mean different things in different contexts. While I can't imagine it would ever mean knowingly lying in a court of law, at the same time it doesn't mean you have to give your client the third degree to confirm with absolute certainty that the story they're giving you is true.
They make fire safes that are specially designed to not reach the temperature where digital media will be harmed.
This is very true, but such fire safes do not address the issue of the fire brigade not letting you anywhere near the building until it's cooled down and then when you finally do get in having what little remains of the roof falling on your head while you try to get to the safe.
You can't very easily quantify crime prevention - which means it's very hard to say with any level of certainty what it's achieving.
Most governments seem to be full of empire builders, however, and what better way to build an empire than start out with a department where you can at least in theory fabricate every single piece of evidence regarding how effective you are and nobody can ever prove this?
How? My mail client makes an SSL connection to my mail server, which is located in a different country. It makes an SSL connection some time later to a gmail, hotmail, or whatever, server some time later. The recipient then makes an SSL connection to their server and gets the mail. Without cooperation of one or more parties in this chain, it's very difficult to say that I have been communicating with any specific individual.
The great majority of inter-domain email on the Internet today isn't sent over SSL. Even when it is, it's very unusual that proper certificate checking to eliminate man in the middle attacks is carried out.
On that I beg to differ. The incompetence was something the RIAA was at all times aware of, and condoned. They didn't care if they got 20,000 or so 'false positives'. This was about creating a climate of terror. They were interested in getting something done cheaply, and it creating widespread fear.
Does that mean you could in theory dob them into the authorities for being terrorists?
it would be quite better if the resisdents of the UK did boot these scumbags out on their arse but I bet like the US at least a third of them are foolish enough to give their government that kind of power... the "only terrorists are against this massive spying" rhetoric is far too prevelant for the average joe to successfully fight this nonsense and the politicians who suggested this nonsense.
It's very unusual for any government to voluntarily relinquish some of its power. I don't think any major political party would do so if they came to power tomorrow.
You're talking about the same government that is more than happy to redistrbute wealth from one class of citizens to another to appease the masses. Given a choice between satisfying the population's need for "protect me from the ter'rists" legislation and having the economy take a hit due to the crippling of security which do you think is most likely?
Most governments do that, this is what tax bands are all about.
However in the UK they tax the poor and those on middle incomes and hand it out to the rich. Haven't worked out the logic behind that one.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the biggest problem with how the legal system works today. It is no longer functioning in line with how society works.
As far as the legal system is concerned, except in extreme circumstances (eg. you're suspected of violent crime) you may continue to go about your life more-or-less as per normal between arrest and court appearance and no punishment is meted out unless and until you are found guilty.
If your livelihood depends on something they've taken for evidence - well, that's your problem. In days gone by you could go out and buy, say, a new toolkit and carry on with your job as per usual, but the law hasn't changed to account for the fact that that's not possible if the tool in question is a computer which is going to be taken and held indefinitely.
Furthermore, as far as society is concerned, quite often "arrest == guilt".
I wonder how successful they are at breaking into Linux boxes? Or monitoring ssh connections? I'm sure they can crack an individual box, given enough time, but I'm really wondering about their capabilities. I'm guessing they can bone Windows boxes fairly easy but a hardened Linux box or Mac...not so easy. Even with the resources of the state. Either they have keys to all the encryption schemes being used for data transmission or they're using these powers to go after the low-hanging fruit.
I imagine the low-hanging fruit represents 99% of cases that exist in the first place. The other 1% are sufficiently well-funded and almost certainly backed up by corrupt government officials (if not wholly corrupt governments) that all the evidence in the world won't take them out of circulation.
The reason I think this is:
1. SSL, PGP et al may well prevent law enforcement snooping. But they don't prevent law enforcement knowing that fred@hotmail.com is regularly exchanging email with a number of known terrorists. This kind of information in and of itself would very likely put fred@hotmail.com in the spotlight for further investigation.
2. The larger the criminal organisation, the more people have to become involved. Sooner or later you may well wind up having someone involved who (either by accident or design) leads law enforcement to you. The only real solution to this is setting out your organisation in a cell-based structure - but once you do this you lose a lot of the coherence that comes from a more pyramid-shaped organisational structure. Fine if you're just a bunch of people fighting for a common cause, rather less fine if you happen to be operating a drug cartel.
It seems that the "professional" security people, mostly in the US, have gotten a bit carried away with themselves. From police and security guards unilaterally deciding that photography is dangerous and not allowed, to the US border guard who took it upon himself to bark at me last week that Canada has 175 known active terrorist organizations, many of these people seem to have lost any professionalism they might once have had.
Remember there's no such thing as a professional security guard. It's not really a job which attracts people looking to carve themselves out a high-powered intellectual career.
Part of me wonders how much of this kind of thing comes from overzealous security guards and their line managers deciding to invent rules and how much genuinely comes from head office.
Amtrak security was even filmed saying filming isn't allowed, when a news crew was interviewing Amtrak's spokesperson, who very clearly was saying there's no policy forbidding filming or taking photographs: http://www.myfoxdc.com/myfox/pages/ContentDetail?contentId=6664418
A beautiful piece of footage dropped right in their laps there - you've got chief spokesman saying "no idea what the problem is" and security guard saying "stop filming" both in the frame simultaneously and NOBODY says either to chief spokesman "Well, we obviously have an issue here" or to security guard "Do you realise who this man who's just told us this is OK is?"
Well, the Irish have been terrible terrorists in the UK over the last few decades. Still, the cahnces of a fellow being a murderer just because he's Irish are pretty low, so picking on a chap for that is a little harsh.
I'd describe the Muslim terrorists as being significantly worse.
What the hell is wrong with that woman? More to the point, what the hell is wrong with us? In any sane society a person like that would've been strung up from a lamppost a long time ago.
She's the product of a party which is obsessed with micromanaging the citizens of the country. A party which got to power by ruthlessly instilling discipline within its own membership - in other words, "follow the party line to the letter or get out".
Jack Straw and David Blunkett were almost as bad. Tony Blair has openly gone on record as saying that he doesn't consider the civil liberties argument against ID cards to be a particularly strong one.
There is no fscking chance you'll find anyone in a remotely senior position within the current Labour party who's prepared to contradict the party line - particularly when the arguments presented in favour always boil down to "it will drastically reduce crime" - never something that's easy to argue against.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? They did Elite on that platform. Subtracting losses from profits doesn't even *need* a multiply.
Elite did a whole bunch more tricks which were pretty groundbreaking at the time and very much nailed to not just the CPU but the entire system it was developed on - how in God's name it ever got ported to other platforms I have no idea. Total rewrite?
Oh, high level languages existed back then. Heck, C and most of the basic aspects of Unix existed back then.
However, technology in computing tends to start with really big systems and work its way down through midrange, then servers, then PCs and finally into embedded devices. Reasonably high-level compiled languages are one thing among many that did this.
Once again the tool is blamed for the usage - there is nothing wrong with spreadsheets per se, its the user that needs to have the boundaries clearly defined.
How can you clearly define boundaries when spreadsheets support 65,000 rows or more and can bring in data from other spreadsheet files?
I don't know about you, but my newspapers constantly have articles on how the schools have no budget and the teachers are poor and the buildings are falling apart and yadda yadda yadda.
You'd think they'd jump at a chance to save some cash, no matter how little.
As an industry (for want of a better word), education can sometimes be very resistant to change - largely because they often perceive change as being for its own sake than for any real benefit.
I would not be surprised - in fact, I'd be astonished if it weren't the case - to learn of schools still keeping a couple of clapped-out 386 and 486 PCs running DOS around for just one specific piece of software which is wheeled out for one lesson once a year because it won't work under Windows and they haven't yet found an alternative.
Anyway, with the goals in hand the problem of "Most educational software is poorly written for Windows." shouldn't be an issue, it's hard for me to write educational software because I don't have kids or experience teaching them... but with the right organisation I'd be happy to oblige.
You have no idea how close you are to nailing the exact problem right there.
Most developers quite frankly aren't terribly good at explaining things. It's a skill like any other and to be any good at it you have to practise.
Unfortunately, it's also pretty f*cking fundamental for software in an educational context. Your average curriculum just says "pupils must understand X, Y and Z". How you get the pupils to understand X, Y and Z is the teacher's problem.
So you generally wind up with an application developed by a teacher which explains X, Y and Z beautifully but requires admin rights, actively resists any attempt to install it network-wide through GPO or what have you (hey, what's the problem with visiting every station with a CD-ROM and typing "start, run, D:\setup"?), assumes that any printing you want to do will be through a printer directly attached to the USB port and is generally a PITA - or you wind up with an application which doesn't force the IT staff into a pitched battle but doesn't actually explain anything at all.
Guess which one is chosen by teachers? (And rightly so...)
It's very rare to have a piece of educational software which is both painless to manage and explains ideas nicely. Any software developer looking to do a half-decent job would have to collaborate with at least one or two absolutely first-class teachers. These are remarkably difficult to find.
I've got a baseless and unsupportable hypothesis (based on my lack of personal experience and lack of research) that teachers are afraid of technology, because their students know it better than them. And as a result, students are not getting the exposure to tech they need.
I'd agree with this.
I'd even go one step further and say that when it finally becomes painfully obvious that a given student almost certainly knows far more about the computers than any member of staff (which happens with at least one or two students per year), staff tend to be absolutely terrified of that student.
It just takes some (pretty serious) change in your work-flow.
Ding ding!
It required you, someone who we can safely assume is fairly techie (or you wouldn't be posting to /.) to make some serious changes in your work-flow.
Multiply those changes by everyone in the organisation and throw in re-building existing business process which expect Word documents and you now know how come it takes something pretty huge to make an organisation radically change the day to day operations of their business.
Oh and there are only 66 employees. I would bet your nearest grocery store is larger than that.
Not only that, my nearest grocery store makes more money, has a business plan which doesn't involve suing anyone with the audacity to shop elsewhere and isn't generally viewed within any particular industry as being managed by a deranged, pathetic idiot who in any other business would have been very publicly sacked years ago.
"Sell" is a bit too strong a word - that implies that someone buys it.
So far the only questionable selection that concerns me.
The RIAA have been misusing the DMCA for the longest period of time. The person that drafted the law even admits that the RIAA is abusing the law.
Yet whenever people say "If you don't want a law to be abused, don't write it in such a way that it's wide open to abuse" the stock reply is not "that's too hard" but "I don't think that will happen".
Seriously, try it. Write to a politician about an upcoming law that hasn't been passed yet and is easily open to abuse.
A lawyer's first responsibility is to the court, not the client. They are supposed to represent the client to the best of their ability, but not at the expense of the court. The simple fact that this particular lawyer has had at least one of the judges recommend sanctions speaks volumes about just what kind of morals they have.
Not true. Any professional's first responsibility is to the profession.
Now, that may mean different things in different contexts. While I can't imagine it would ever mean knowingly lying in a court of law, at the same time it doesn't mean you have to give your client the third degree to confirm with absolute certainty that the story they're giving you is true.
They make fire safes that are specially designed to not reach the temperature where digital media will be harmed.
This is very true, but such fire safes do not address the issue of the fire brigade not letting you anywhere near the building until it's cooled down and then when you finally do get in having what little remains of the roof falling on your head while you try to get to the safe.
You can't very easily quantify crime prevention - which means it's very hard to say with any level of certainty what it's achieving.
Most governments seem to be full of empire builders, however, and what better way to build an empire than start out with a department where you can at least in theory fabricate every single piece of evidence regarding how effective you are and nobody can ever prove this?
If it's using Macrovision, you can buy little boxes that sit inline to remove this, I think they're normally called macrovision removers or somesuch.
How? My mail client makes an SSL connection to my mail server, which is located in a different country. It makes an SSL connection some time later to a gmail, hotmail, or whatever, server some time later. The recipient then makes an SSL connection to their server and gets the mail. Without cooperation of one or more parties in this chain, it's very difficult to say that I have been communicating with any specific individual.
The great majority of inter-domain email on the Internet today isn't sent over SSL. Even when it is, it's very unusual that proper certificate checking to eliminate man in the middle attacks is carried out.
On that I beg to differ. The incompetence was something the RIAA was at all times aware of, and condoned. They didn't care if they got 20,000 or so 'false positives'. This was about creating a climate of terror. They were interested in getting something done cheaply, and it creating widespread fear.
Does that mean you could in theory dob them into the authorities for being terrorists?
it would be quite better if the resisdents of the UK did boot these scumbags out on their arse but I bet like the US at least a third of them are foolish enough to give their government that kind of power... the "only terrorists are against this massive spying" rhetoric is far too prevelant for the average joe to successfully fight this nonsense and the politicians who suggested this nonsense.
It's very unusual for any government to voluntarily relinquish some of its power. I don't think any major political party would do so if they came to power tomorrow.
You're talking about the same government that is more than happy to redistrbute wealth from one class of citizens to another to appease the masses. Given a choice between satisfying the population's need for "protect me from the ter'rists" legislation and having the economy take a hit due to the crippling of security which do you think is most likely?
Most governments do that, this is what tax bands are all about.
However in the UK they tax the poor and those on middle incomes and hand it out to the rich. Haven't worked out the logic behind that one.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the biggest problem with how the legal system works today. It is no longer functioning in line with how society works.
As far as the legal system is concerned, except in extreme circumstances (eg. you're suspected of violent crime) you may continue to go about your life more-or-less as per normal between arrest and court appearance and no punishment is meted out unless and until you are found guilty.
If your livelihood depends on something they've taken for evidence - well, that's your problem. In days gone by you could go out and buy, say, a new toolkit and carry on with your job as per usual, but the law hasn't changed to account for the fact that that's not possible if the tool in question is a computer which is going to be taken and held indefinitely.
Furthermore, as far as society is concerned, quite often "arrest == guilt".
I wonder how successful they are at breaking into Linux boxes? Or monitoring ssh connections? I'm sure they can crack an individual box, given enough time, but I'm really wondering about their capabilities. I'm guessing they can bone Windows boxes fairly easy but a hardened Linux box or Mac...not so easy. Even with the resources of the state. Either they have keys to all the encryption schemes being used for data transmission or they're using these powers to go after the low-hanging fruit.
I imagine the low-hanging fruit represents 99% of cases that exist in the first place. The other 1% are sufficiently well-funded and almost certainly backed up by corrupt government officials (if not wholly corrupt governments) that all the evidence in the world won't take them out of circulation.
The reason I think this is:
1. SSL, PGP et al may well prevent law enforcement snooping. But they don't prevent law enforcement knowing that fred@hotmail.com is regularly exchanging email with a number of known terrorists. This kind of information in and of itself would very likely put fred@hotmail.com in the spotlight for further investigation.
2. The larger the criminal organisation, the more people have to become involved. Sooner or later you may well wind up having someone involved who (either by accident or design) leads law enforcement to you. The only real solution to this is setting out your organisation in a cell-based structure - but once you do this you lose a lot of the coherence that comes from a more pyramid-shaped organisational structure. Fine if you're just a bunch of people fighting for a common cause, rather less fine if you happen to be operating a drug cartel.
It seems that the "professional" security people, mostly in the US, have gotten a bit carried away with themselves. From police and security guards unilaterally deciding that photography is dangerous and not allowed, to the US border guard who took it upon himself to bark at me last week that Canada has 175 known active terrorist organizations, many of these people seem to have lost any professionalism they might once have had.
Remember there's no such thing as a professional security guard. It's not really a job which attracts people looking to carve themselves out a high-powered intellectual career.
Part of me wonders how much of this kind of thing comes from overzealous security guards and their line managers deciding to invent rules and how much genuinely comes from head office.
Amtrak security was even filmed saying filming isn't allowed, when a news crew was interviewing Amtrak's spokesperson, who very clearly was saying there's no policy forbidding filming or taking photographs:
http://www.myfoxdc.com/myfox/pages/ContentDetail?contentId=6664418
A beautiful piece of footage dropped right in their laps there - you've got chief spokesman saying "no idea what the problem is" and security guard saying "stop filming" both in the frame simultaneously and NOBODY says either to chief spokesman "Well, we obviously have an issue here" or to security guard "Do you realise who this man who's just told us this is OK is?"
Well, the Irish have been terrible terrorists in the UK over the last few decades. Still, the cahnces of a fellow being a murderer just because he's Irish are pretty low, so picking on a chap for that is a little harsh.
I'd describe the Muslim terrorists as being significantly worse.
We had a team of terrorists attempt to blow up public transport without first ensuring that their explosives worked.
We had an attempt to drive a car full of petrol and propane cylinders into Glasgow airport. Fail on two counts:
1. Believing Hollywood physics.
2. Choosing Glasgow of all places.
What kind of idiot terrorist uses tactics which wouldn't scare a timid kitten?
Hang on a minute, you sound like you know what you're talking about! What are you doing on /. ?
What the hell is wrong with that woman? More to the point, what the hell is wrong with us? In any sane society a person like that would've been strung up from a lamppost a long time ago.
She's the product of a party which is obsessed with micromanaging the citizens of the country. A party which got to power by ruthlessly instilling discipline within its own membership - in other words, "follow the party line to the letter or get out".
Jack Straw and David Blunkett were almost as bad. Tony Blair has openly gone on record as saying that he doesn't consider the civil liberties argument against ID cards to be a particularly strong one.
There is no fscking chance you'll find anyone in a remotely senior position within the current Labour party who's prepared to contradict the party line - particularly when the arguments presented in favour always boil down to "it will drastically reduce crime" - never something that's easy to argue against.