Well, patches are not nice and of course it would be better for customers if the product would be perfect from the start. It's true that the most software products are buggier than, for example, fifteen years ago. On the other hand, there are several reasons for the (lack of) quality of the modern computer software. Tight dead-lines, investors, competition, to name few. And of course it's always possible to cast some blame to the software engineer.
However...
I don't like that she is using age-old classics for fear mongering. "National security" and the bridge analogy to be specific.
Bugs themselves are rarely the problem when we are talking about "national security". For some odd reason it seems that people have forgot the importance of physical separation of the public network and sensitive information / infrastructure. It's stupid to blame the tools if the user is an idiot (and in this case I mean those "chief security officers", who design these braindead infrastructures for corporate networks).
I don't understand how anyone in their right minds could suggest any kind of regulatory system for the software quality. It's practically impossible to control and what if there is some sort of accident caused by some regulated and "certified" product? Is this certification (or what ever) a free pass for the software provider? This would turn to be an ultimate disclaimer for the software companies. Or - the other way around - the ultimate responsibility, which would lead to the point where there are no more software engineers because there is too much personal responsibility involved.
Besides, in my opinion, Daividson insults British people pretty badly and describes them as "slightly disrespectful of authority, and just a touch of criminal behaviour." I think that's not a very professional comment.
Anyway, this is what I'm thinking about of this whole article.
Are you serious? So, in other words, in the long run, releasing non-free (as in speech) software may lead to suppression, loss of human rights, oligarchy and tyranny? Oh come on!
Free software is a great philosophy and I have nothing against it, but comparing it as an equal to the human rights is just plain childish.
Well, I liked it. Not because of the animation, but because this short story reminded me of the surrealistic comics made by Marc-Antoine Mathieu. But then again, I like movies, which will drop the viewer in the middle of some strange reality and doesn't explain anything. Let the viewer figure out, how the world in question works and what the hell is going on (if anything). It's intriguing and it will tickle my imagination in the right kind of way.
There are few thing that I have missed in the OpenOffice Calc. The chart creation is not as painless as it is with Excel. In addition, it seems that it's not possible to set error margins for XY plot chart with individual error margins for upper and lower margin. It's possible to set a constant error margin for all point and for both upper and lower magrin, but it's not possible to define an individual error margin for each point separately and define greater margin for positive error than negative error. So, the XY plot is not so flexible as it could be and I cannot come up any work-around for that. Well, at least this was situation with OOo version 2.0.0. I haven't yet checked the latest version.
A bit of advice if someone in your family is depressed: Make sure someone goes with them to the Doctor & goes into the room with them.
Depressed people may not lie outright, but some of them won't be terribly forthcoming. Someone else needs to be there to tell the Doc how it is, otherwise the patient might not make much progress.
This is true and a very good advice. My wife has a chronic depression and doctor has asked me to visit frequently at the meetings so I can be questioned about recent uphills and downhills. Also there usually are quite a lot of detailed questions about her behaviour, which simply are easier to be answered by me rather than her, because some subtle changes usually are easier to spot by someone close to the patient rather than by the patient herself.
By that I meant that it's not so exact science as for example with (a classical example) with broken leg. With the leg you know how it broke, how it's going to cure itself and how to treat the damaged part so it will be healed properly (not the perfect example, I know). ECT is very empirical. Each patient is different and different dosage and positioning of electrodes will affect the results. The method of treatment and dosage are based on the response of the patient. So, while there have been a lot of studies, there is no universal formula which could be used to predict effects of the treatment. Also, there still isn't enough insormation to tell for sure, why some people react positively to the treatment and others don't.
medicine is an empirical science
This I agree, but still I feel that with other parts of medical science there are a lot more known information available and finding the real cause and designing effective treatment is more exact than with almost any psychological illnesses.
occurance and severity of ECT's side effects can be greatly reduced without reducing the treatment's effectiveness by using short duration pulses
This sounds awfully familiar. My wifes doctor talked something about this. If I recall correctly, that's the reason why my wife will receive only one very short pulse at every therapy session.
Anyway, you got me interested in to the MCT. Can you tell me what the acronym stands for? All I cound find was something called "magnetic seizure therapy". Could this be it?
This is something I know for a fact. You do not repeat the treatment. There has to be at least two days between shocks.
But anyway. I tend to agree. It's not "brain surgery". More like hit-and-hope-for-the-best kind of treatment. But it works when all else has already failed. So there is no any obvious alternatives available.
It tore her mind to bits! For months after the sessions she was confused, had massive memory loss (and those memories are gone for good) and suffered - possibly more than the depression itself. I think that one could compare it to resetting a computer by throwing a bucket of water over it. Quite possibly, its only effect is to press RESET on the brain and let it rebuild from there.
It's sad to hear that. For past two years, my wife has been given ECT several times, but there hasn't been any noticable side-effects. Some minor memory loss, but only temporarily (for few hours). She will receive the next treatment next week and she is looking forward to it. She said that it has been the only thing that has helped her with her chronic depression.
It seems that the reactions for the ECT are extremely unique and depend on the patient and menthods how to do the treatment. I have heard that for some patients the electric shock has been quite long and with quite high voltages, but at my wife's case, the shock is very mild and lasts only so far when the brain gives the certain feedback (to tell the truth, I don't know much about these technical details but I'm going to find out).
Yes, I admit that the ECT has its risks and it's not very scientific, but my wife received her therapy at a hospital which does active studing with this subject and after my inital sucpicion, I was surprised, how carefull the preparations were and how much was done to minimize the risks.
Anyway, I just thought that I would share my second-hand experiences on this subject because people tend to underline only the negative side of this matter.
I've known quite a few people that might be considered "a bit off", but as long as they are not hurting others, where's the harm in treating them as eccentrics or oddballs and just accepting them for how they are? Or does everyone have to "fit in" these days?
These kind or treatments are not usually designed for curing oddities or eccentric behaviour. Well, not at least at the present time and civilized societies. Not so long time ago things were different. Anyway, these treatments are for helping people with depression, which cannot be handled with therapy or medication. ECT is another choice, and while it seems to be effective (and it actually is, if done properly and using enough medical background studies) but we do need more subtle and more accurate methods for helping these cases.
Funny that you say "as long as they are not hurting others", well, hopefully these kind of studies are able to save depressed people who are trying to hurt themselves. For my opinion, suicide is not a proper treatment for severe depression.
Anyway, I can see your point, but I think that no one is trying to create any kind of sunny smily-face happy-happy-joy-joy society. There certainly is a model that is strived towards, but it is used for these seriously depressed people that cannot function properly. And this is only because there has to be some sort of measurement for "normal" so we can tell, when the treatment is going to the right direction (unfortunately, some times patient his/herself cannot be a reliable source for this kind of information).
I don't understand neither the original article title nor the Slashdot article title. How can GPL (or using GPL'ed software) violate the SOX, if GPL'ed software is used as the license permits? Reading the article didn't give me any insight about this issue.
My first own computer was Nokia MikroMikko 2. Pretty weird beast. It had two 720kB floppy drives, no hard drive, 720kB memory (or so I has been told), black text on white monitor and 80186 processor with MS-DOS 2.[something].
This machine was good only for text processing. However, this was the machine that gave me the spark to start my programming hobby and to learn x86 assembler with DOS debugger.
So, this is the future, eh? In Finland we already have had this kind of service for several years already. For example, our biggest mobile phone operator TeliaSonera has been offering a service, where you can query a location of your family members for quite a while now. All participants have to sing for the service separately and personally, so it should be relatively safe, but nonetheless it will give a power to stalk you girlfriend/wife/kids. And I have understood that this will give a location quite accurately (street address etc.).
Ralink manufactures chipsets for wireless cards and supplies GPL source code for drivers under Linux. I have an A-Link 802.11g card and it has pretty good support with newer distributions.
... with this issue is that it seems like there is some sort of systematic slander campaign in the US press to make the UN look bad. This thing has gone so far that now every time when someone mentions anything related to the UN, the most vocal part of the crowd will yell things about food for oil program and how the UN is The Great Evil. I don't know, how common this negative attitude is overall, but it's clear that the age-old attitude against the UN is raising its head again.
It has been interesting to see, how surprisingly many will state that the UN is same as the EU, which it isn't, and how ignorant the general population can sometimes be. (To these people I would recommend to take a quick look to the world history and how things have built up.) All this however is (at least in my opinion) a clear sing of some sort of anti-EU attitude that is growing in the USA and this can turn into something bigger and worse in the future. It looks like that the USA would really like to cut all connections to the outside world and start living in the isolation. This is especially sad, because there seems to be more and more issues nowadays that require international co-operation between countries. So, all this anti-EU and anti-UN crap I have seen lately is doing nothing good to anyone.
Personally, I don't care how is controlling the Internet as long as it is kept free and functional for everyone. Things have been working pretty decently so far, so why to change anything. But what I care is this ignorant mentality, which seems to color news stories related to EU or UN.
Finally, as far as I know, the UN is not a "nation". It doesn't have a nationality. This seems to be a thing that most people tend to forget. Also, I have understood that the UN does not have a single body or single agenda, which it is trying to pursue. The UN was designed to be a democratic organisation with different sub-organisations, which try to improve this world we are living in. Yes, sometimes some individuals might have some selfish motives, but in the general, the UN was meant to be something completely different what American people seems to think.
OK, now I stop this ranting. Sorry if my opinions hurt somebody. And sorry about my bad English. It just pisses me off to see this black and white thinking I've seen lately when reading news and forum postings.
This review is excellent. This is exactly what Linux community needs to make the operating system friendly enough to be interesting to new users. These kind of articles combined with the efforts like the one few days ago, where there was a bunch of flash movies about using the OpenOffice, are invaluable resource for non-computer-savvy people to get to know Linux-based environment better and especially to find the rich set of applications it can provide.
I would like to know what can break a habit without any obvious reason.
I used to be a quite heavy smoker and tried to quit many times with no success, but about a year ago I suddenly started to dislike the whole smoking thing and I just dropped the habit. I haven't yet figured out, what could have caused that. And I haven't yet had any desire to start again. However, now I have picked a habit of eating greasy foods and I would like to get rid of that in the same way I dropped smoking.
I think that people expect too much of Microsoft. The sad truth is that Microsoft - as a corporation - is not interested in advancing computer science, innovation or helping to create better tomorrow. They are in the business to make money. That's their only motive to be the biggest player in the business. I'm sure that investors are very happy, how Microsoft has been able to grow in the past 20 years.
Well, at least in my books Microsoft is just another greedy company. Nothing more. I don't expect them to do same things than universities and other research organisations who have passion to this segment of industry.
In a similar manner, if I send the Access Point a request to use it, and it allows that request, I am lawfully gaining entry.
But an average user doesn't necessarily understand your intentions, when "knocking" on theirs door. It's like knocking on someones door, who is known to be an innocent retard who doesn't understand that not all strangers are friendly and should be let in.
Society is full of loopholes, but it does not mean that we should always exploit them. It's common sense and courtesy, which are keeping our society a decent place to live.
Instead of exploiting these people, let's try to educate them.
Perl Golf, http://terje.perlgolf.org/, used to be my favourite programming related past time activity couple of years ago, when I programmed with Perl. Even though I haven't programmed with Perl in a log time, I still think that the Perl Golf is one of the coolest contest around.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, patches are not nice and of course it would be better for customers if the product would be perfect from the start. It's true that the most software products are buggier than, for example, fifteen years ago. On the other hand, there are several reasons for the (lack of) quality of the modern computer software. Tight dead-lines, investors, competition, to name few. And of course it's always possible to cast some blame to the software engineer.
However...
I don't like that she is using age-old classics for fear mongering. "National security" and the bridge analogy to be specific.
Bugs themselves are rarely the problem when we are talking about "national security". For some odd reason it seems that people have forgot the importance of physical separation of the public network and sensitive information / infrastructure. It's stupid to blame the tools if the user is an idiot (and in this case I mean those "chief security officers", who design these braindead infrastructures for corporate networks).
I don't understand how anyone in their right minds could suggest any kind of regulatory system for the software quality. It's practically impossible to control and what if there is some sort of accident caused by some regulated and "certified" product? Is this certification (or what ever) a free pass for the software provider? This would turn to be an ultimate disclaimer for the software companies. Or - the other way around - the ultimate responsibility, which would lead to the point where there are no more software engineers because there is too much personal responsibility involved.
Besides, in my opinion, Daividson insults British people pretty badly and describes them as "slightly disrespectful of authority, and just a touch of criminal behaviour." I think that's not a very professional comment.
Anyway, this is what I'm thinking about of this whole article.
Compare with free speech and free press.
Are you serious? So, in other words, in the long run, releasing non-free (as in speech) software may lead to suppression, loss of human rights, oligarchy and tyranny? Oh come on!
Free software is a great philosophy and I have nothing against it, but comparing it as an equal to the human rights is just plain childish.
I didn't know what the hell was going on.
Well, I liked it. Not because of the animation, but because this short story reminded me of the surrealistic comics made by Marc-Antoine Mathieu. But then again, I like movies, which will drop the viewer in the middle of some strange reality and doesn't explain anything. Let the viewer figure out, how the world in question works and what the hell is going on (if anything). It's intriguing and it will tickle my imagination in the right kind of way.
There are few thing that I have missed in the OpenOffice Calc. The chart creation is not as painless as it is with Excel. In addition, it seems that it's not possible to set error margins for XY plot chart with individual error margins for upper and lower margin. It's possible to set a constant error margin for all point and for both upper and lower magrin, but it's not possible to define an individual error margin for each point separately and define greater margin for positive error than negative error. So, the XY plot is not so flexible as it could be and I cannot come up any work-around for that. Well, at least this was situation with OOo version 2.0.0. I haven't yet checked the latest version.
Thanks for the information!
A bit of advice if someone in your family is depressed: Make sure someone goes with them to the Doctor & goes into the room with them.
Depressed people may not lie outright, but some of them won't be terribly forthcoming. Someone else needs to be there to tell the Doc how it is, otherwise the patient might not make much progress.
This is true and a very good advice. My wife has a chronic depression and doctor has asked me to visit frequently at the meetings so I can be questioned about recent uphills and downhills. Also there usually are quite a lot of detailed questions about her behaviour, which simply are easier to be answered by me rather than her, because some subtle changes usually are easier to spot by someone close to the patient rather than by the patient herself.
Not scientific how?
By that I meant that it's not so exact science as for example with (a classical example) with broken leg. With the leg you know how it broke, how it's going to cure itself and how to treat the damaged part so it will be healed properly (not the perfect example, I know). ECT is very empirical. Each patient is different and different dosage and positioning of electrodes will affect the results. The method of treatment and dosage are based on the response of the patient. So, while there have been a lot of studies, there is no universal formula which could be used to predict effects of the treatment. Also, there still isn't enough insormation to tell for sure, why some people react positively to the treatment and others don't.
medicine is an empirical science
This I agree, but still I feel that with other parts of medical science there are a lot more known information available and finding the real cause and designing effective treatment is more exact than with almost any psychological illnesses.
occurance and severity of ECT's side effects can be greatly reduced without reducing the treatment's effectiveness by using short duration pulses
This sounds awfully familiar. My wifes doctor talked something about this. If I recall correctly, that's the reason why my wife will receive only one very short pulse at every therapy session.
Anyway, you got me interested in to the MCT. Can you tell me what the acronym stands for? All I cound find was something called "magnetic seizure therapy". Could this be it?
wait, and repeat
This is something I know for a fact. You do not repeat the treatment. There has to be at least two days between shocks.
But anyway. I tend to agree. It's not "brain surgery". More like hit-and-hope-for-the-best kind of treatment. But it works when all else has already failed. So there is no any obvious alternatives available.
It tore her mind to bits! For months after the sessions she was confused, had massive memory loss (and those memories are gone for good) and suffered - possibly more than the depression itself. I think that one could compare it to resetting a computer by throwing a bucket of water over it. Quite possibly, its only effect is to press RESET on the brain and let it rebuild from there.
It's sad to hear that. For past two years, my wife has been given ECT several times, but there hasn't been any noticable side-effects. Some minor memory loss, but only temporarily (for few hours). She will receive the next treatment next week and she is looking forward to it. She said that it has been the only thing that has helped her with her chronic depression.
It seems that the reactions for the ECT are extremely unique and depend on the patient and menthods how to do the treatment. I have heard that for some patients the electric shock has been quite long and with quite high voltages, but at my wife's case, the shock is very mild and lasts only so far when the brain gives the certain feedback (to tell the truth, I don't know much about these technical details but I'm going to find out).
Yes, I admit that the ECT has its risks and it's not very scientific, but my wife received her therapy at a hospital which does active studing with this subject and after my inital sucpicion, I was surprised, how carefull the preparations were and how much was done to minimize the risks.
Anyway, I just thought that I would share my second-hand experiences on this subject because people tend to underline only the negative side of this matter.
I've known quite a few people that might be considered "a bit off", but as long as they are not hurting others, where's the harm in treating them as eccentrics or oddballs and just accepting them for how they are? Or does everyone have to "fit in" these days?
These kind or treatments are not usually designed for curing oddities or eccentric behaviour. Well, not at least at the present time and civilized societies. Not so long time ago things were different. Anyway, these treatments are for helping people with depression, which cannot be handled with therapy or medication. ECT is another choice, and while it seems to be effective (and it actually is, if done properly and using enough medical background studies) but we do need more subtle and more accurate methods for helping these cases.
Funny that you say "as long as they are not hurting others", well, hopefully these kind of studies are able to save depressed people who are trying to hurt themselves. For my opinion, suicide is not a proper treatment for severe depression.
Anyway, I can see your point, but I think that no one is trying to create any kind of sunny smily-face happy-happy-joy-joy society. There certainly is a model that is strived towards, but it is used for these seriously depressed people that cannot function properly. And this is only because there has to be some sort of measurement for "normal" so we can tell, when the treatment is going to the right direction (unfortunately, some times patient his/herself cannot be a reliable source for this kind of information).
http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/ It's stable and it does everything a web calendar should do.
I don't understand neither the original article title nor the Slashdot article title. How can GPL (or using GPL'ed software) violate the SOX, if GPL'ed software is used as the license permits? Reading the article didn't give me any insight about this issue.
My first own computer was Nokia MikroMikko 2. Pretty weird beast. It had two 720kB floppy drives, no hard drive, 720kB memory (or so I has been told), black text on white monitor and 80186 processor with MS-DOS 2.[something].
This machine was good only for text processing. However, this was the machine that gave me the spark to start my programming hobby and to learn x86 assembler with DOS debugger.
Maybe Yahoo! should start using a LISP again.
So, this is the future, eh? In Finland we already have had this kind of service for several years already. For example, our biggest mobile phone operator TeliaSonera has been offering a service, where you can query a location of your family members for quite a while now. All participants have to sing for the service separately and personally, so it should be relatively safe, but nonetheless it will give a power to stalk you girlfriend/wife/kids. And I have understood that this will give a location quite accurately (street address etc.).
Ralink manufactures chipsets for wireless cards and supplies GPL source code for drivers under Linux. I have an A-Link 802.11g card and it has pretty good support with newer distributions.
... with this issue is that it seems like there is some sort of systematic slander campaign in the US press to make the UN look bad. This thing has gone so far that now every time when someone mentions anything related to the UN, the most vocal part of the crowd will yell things about food for oil program and how the UN is The Great Evil. I don't know, how common this negative attitude is overall, but it's clear that the age-old attitude against the UN is raising its head again.
It has been interesting to see, how surprisingly many will state that the UN is same as the EU, which it isn't, and how ignorant the general population can sometimes be. (To these people I would recommend to take a quick look to the world history and how things have built up.) All this however is (at least in my opinion) a clear sing of some sort of anti-EU attitude that is growing in the USA and this can turn into something bigger and worse in the future. It looks like that the USA would really like to cut all connections to the outside world and start living in the isolation. This is especially sad, because there seems to be more and more issues nowadays that require international co-operation between countries. So, all this anti-EU and anti-UN crap I have seen lately is doing nothing good to anyone.
Personally, I don't care how is controlling the Internet as long as it is kept free and functional for everyone. Things have been working pretty decently so far, so why to change anything. But what I care is this ignorant mentality, which seems to color news stories related to EU or UN.
Finally, as far as I know, the UN is not a "nation". It doesn't have a nationality. This seems to be a thing that most people tend to forget. Also, I have understood that the UN does not have a single body or single agenda, which it is trying to pursue. The UN was designed to be a democratic organisation with different sub-organisations, which try to improve this world we are living in. Yes, sometimes some individuals might have some selfish motives, but in the general, the UN was meant to be something completely different what American people seems to think.
OK, now I stop this ranting. Sorry if my opinions hurt somebody. And sorry about my bad English. It just pisses me off to see this black and white thinking I've seen lately when reading news and forum postings.
This review is excellent. This is exactly what Linux community needs to make the operating system friendly enough to be interesting to new users. These kind of articles combined with the efforts like the one few days ago, where there was a bunch of flash movies about using the OpenOffice, are invaluable resource for non-computer-savvy people to get to know Linux-based environment better and especially to find the rich set of applications it can provide.
I would like to know what can break a habit without any obvious reason.
I used to be a quite heavy smoker and tried to quit many times with no success, but about a year ago I suddenly started to dislike the whole smoking thing and I just dropped the habit. I haven't yet figured out, what could have caused that. And I haven't yet had any desire to start again. However, now I have picked a habit of eating greasy foods and I would like to get rid of that in the same way I dropped smoking.
I think that people expect too much of Microsoft. The sad truth is that Microsoft - as a corporation - is not interested in advancing computer science, innovation or helping to create better tomorrow. They are in the business to make money. That's their only motive to be the biggest player in the business. I'm sure that investors are very happy, how Microsoft has been able to grow in the past 20 years.
Well, at least in my books Microsoft is just another greedy company. Nothing more. I don't expect them to do same things than universities and other research organisations who have passion to this segment of industry.
... and it will be pain in the ass to set up?
Functional programming and continuations. One present day example is the UnCommon Web, which is a web application framework implemented with continuations.
In a similar manner, if I send the Access Point a request to use it, and it allows that request, I am lawfully gaining entry.
But an average user doesn't necessarily understand your intentions, when "knocking" on theirs door. It's like knocking on someones door, who is known to be an innocent retard who doesn't understand that not all strangers are friendly and should be let in.
Society is full of loopholes, but it does not mean that we should always exploit them. It's common sense and courtesy, which are keeping our society a decent place to live.
Instead of exploiting these people, let's try to educate them.
Perl Golf, http://terje.perlgolf.org/, used to be my favourite programming related past time activity couple of years ago, when I programmed with Perl. Even though I haven't programmed with Perl in a log time, I still think that the Perl Golf is one of the coolest contest around.
One question:
What if you generate and submit a valid, existing, card number by accident?