Whatever country the machine is located in doesn't really mean anything these days. The language is English so the potential user base covers a lot of the Earth's population.
Another use might be to analyze the DNA data and try to locate some abnormal gene patterns common with the criminals. Something like a gene which modifies a hormone xyz in the brain, where excessive modified xyz causes "criminal behaviour".
With a small amount of effort you can eliminate the majority of buffer overflow bugs, for example.
I was arguing that there is no way even this "small amount of effort" will be done, since feature X for users is seen as much more important than going through the entire code base changing things.
Of course this depends on the language used. With Java you probably would not care about buffer overflows. With C you could use a string-processing library which didn't have problems with buffer overflows. Depending on how you do it, it's still slow and expensive to fix. After fixing you need to test to make sure you didn't break anything which previously worked.
As for security just being designed in, I think in reality it would require many revisions of the design until a suitable one is found. Fixing a lot of old code is slow and expensive. Rewriting old programs is even more so.
And often the marketing department, or the customer's marketing department, or a big dumb influential customer's customer overrides common sense in design issues. Regardless of the risks the Feature Must Be There.
Why couldn't e.g. a dog be sentient? I've spent enough time with those to know that they appear to be quite sentient, have their own will, own quirks, etc.
And what makes you think sentience is something binary? I think it's fuzzy. A dog is sentient, but not so much as a human being. A fly is sentient, but not so much as a parrot. For example, you could say (these numbers are made up) that a parrot is 10% to 30% sentient in a human scale. Some advanced space aliens might be 250% sentient in human scale. And so on.
Like you said, intelligence might occur in varying levels among animals. Why wouldn't sentience? Sentience, intelligence, anything regarding the mind's capabilities is varying even among humans, let alone different species.
Most (well, almost all meaning practically every single) spam advertises companies of dubious nature. Companies I've never heard of, or companies I never want to hear from.
I've never received spam from any of the biggest or well-known companies. I don't think anyone has, but this is a subjective opinion.
If so, I think it concludes that spam is ineffective as a marketing tool. If it had any positive net effect, I'm sure a bunch of Fortune 500 companies would be using it already.
Not to mention they'd have hammered through some spam-happy law in the US Congress.
Isn't it the BUYERS who buy all that stuff advertised in spam we should be worried about? They are the ones who make it worthwhile. They are the ones which cause spam to be sent, and they are the ones for which all of us have to suffer in the form of bandwidth wasted for nothing.
Judging from my limited incoming spam experiences, I feel USA might contain most if not all of the buyers. Some people I know get French spam, and spam in other languages, but that's a very small minority.
And if you check out those domains to where the URL inside the spam points to, and do some digging, you end up with some Hicksville, USA company.
Why would anyone buy anything from a spammer, that's something I can't understand.
You don't have to buy the consumption-designed shiny discs from the biggest store. Check out the alternative sources, e.g. small privately-owned record labels instead.
Ask yourself: what is the kind of music I like? What music evokes a lot of response in you, what do I dig? Be selfish. It's your taste, and nobody elses. The biggest hurdle is to find out exactly what you are looking for. Then find bands who do that kind of music. A good resource for starting your hunting is to put your favorite artists to All Music Guide and checking out the artists from the same genre.
You might be surprised how many good artists there are in various small labels and generally outside the "evil media machine". Depends on your taste of music though.
And besides, if you buy quality music that you very much like mainly for listening (because it gives you something personally), and not just some noise engineered for instant consumption, you'll be much happier.
The point is NOT to just buy music, but to find from a store music which gives YOU nice experiences.
Well, well. Yet another Microsoft-sponsored article with FUD!
First of all, the article is ignoring a simple fact: Linus did not write Linux as it is today in that couple of months. He only wrote the core of the kernel, and improved gradually upon that. The community was there helping in programming and sending in changes ever since he publicized Linux.
However, the Samizdat paper IS correct in the sense that the Open Source development model (called a "hybrid model" in the paper in order to dilute the idea) is inherently faster and better than any cathedral-like development models of the proprietary software industry. They base their argument around that, but twist it around like any good spin doctors.
Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporations b) not in the best interest of IT workers in America c) at a serious expense to the investment community, an entity betting on the success of intellectual property in the marketplace.
Notice the a) and c). This is the crux of the issue and the reason why we see such Microsoft-sponsored FUD appear. The a) and c) do not give a rats ass about b), but they must mask their attempts to be such. The b) is a decoy. The real issue here is money. The real issue is about people who would rather get themselves rich than to see something which benefits all people.
And the argument about Linux developers not being legally accountable as their contributions are based on trust... As far as I know, there is an EULA in all Microsoft (and other proprietary) software, which reject any legal responsibility. So how does the Microsoft way of "software is provided as-is, with NO WARRANTY of any kind, express or implied" differ from similar Linux statement?
I think that the Open Source community should respond to all these allegations by making a site which outlines the war between Microsoft and free software. Starting from the depths of history, covering the SCO offensive, going through the black ops of crackers breaking into certain free software sites, examining the massive anti-Linux, anti-Open Source advertisement campaign by Microsoft, dissecting the various paid articles appearing in computer magazines worldwide and analyzing the AdTI research funded by Microsoft.
Make it factual, and don't offend with style when you can offend with substance.
You could use the Schneier's Street Performer protocol with Open Source software. The idea is simply this: release the next version of the software only after a certain amount of money has been received. Repeat.
Of course this doesn't work if the entire development is in a publicly readable place e.g. a CVS repository, so the access to that should be restricted. The released version would be Open Source, of course. Some would not pay and still copy it, but who cares, it's Open Source! If nobody pays, there will be no further versions.
Also, there's nothing wrong in writing Open Source software, but you would be crazy to do it as your day job without funding. Write it as a hobby, the way it should be. Fund it with something else, if need be. Also, don't get involved with companies without a good lawyer and written contracts.
When you are inside a system which is built on the concept of money, you have to take that into account. If the world was Open Source, everything for free to everyone, and you'd have the idea of Money brought into it, the idea would probably not live long, since it's alien to that system. Likewise in reality... Don't start playing with money unless you want to play by the rules that powerful idea requires.
Or, you could write a new license which demands all corporations and other for-profit entities to pay for using that software, but non-profits and individuals would get away for free like it is now. Kind of like the Qt license.
Really, you want to put plutonium, polonium, or other dirty bomb materials in the hands of the general public?
No, and I don't want nuclear weapons in the hands of governments either.
But what's keeping some ordinary person from collecting 5000 smoke detectors, extracting the (weakly) radioactive material, doing some rudimentary enriching and coming up with a "dirty bomb"?
...why not just use that? Or use the computer to modify that to any programming language you want?
How do you prove the correctness of the reference implementation?
Why not just write all software with the reference implementation, and let the computer fill in the dots. Think paint by numbers brought to coding. You draw the picture, jot some of the numbers, the computer infers the rest.
The simple answer: ordinary people don't care that much. And they won't generate bad PR.
For instance, ordinary people have trouble finding the options to set the home page of MSIE to their liking. Everything seems too complex. Web pages are cluttered with tons of information normal people don't need. (By the way, the Google home page is a good example of design which is easy to grasp for anyone)
Ordinary people are just glad to get away with shopping in Amazon as easy as possible. If Amazon is going to track their behaviour and show them advertisements, there's a good chance they don't care, for example:
they don't understand they are being tracked
even if they do, they don't see how tracking will immediately affect their lives - it's "online", it's not "reality"
they don't understand what things can be found out by tracking them, since it's all too fuzzy and complex "internet" with "computers"
This is not to say ordinary people are stupid or anything. Most people don't have time to delve deeply into anything other than what they have to do daily at work or as a hobby. So, all this "online and computer thing" becomes a murky place they don't quite understand. Let alone the intricacies of what the web shop is going to do with the tracking information it gets from you.
Ignorance is bliss, but if you take away that ignorance, if you educate the ordinary people, they will know better. You could try to educate some computer-illiterate persons you know.
For example, you can play with the idea of Google (or any super-popular search engine) storing "everything" it indexes as well as all search strings. Playing along with some other big web companies, it's possible to pinpoint your traces inside Google. Then suppose an anti-bovine military regime takes over the USA. If the Google searches you've done have been "cowherding", "love for cows", "zen of moo" etc. there would be a good chance you'd get a visit from the Homeland Secret Police or such and get thrown to a concentration camp for anti-governmental behaviour (or just thrown there, it's not like they'd need a reason). Try telling something like that to your grandparents or parents, or aunt, or whoever is not well versed with computers. Will they consider it science fiction? Probably, and rightly so. But it's a distantly plausible scenario, nevertheless. A small amount of paranoia is healthy, if only to be aware of the possibilities.
I'm sure you can find other far-fetched examples yourself. For the ordinary person, however, this kind of example is something they cannot imagine themselves. Since they cannot imagine it, they cannot see it as a threat (or a possibility or a good thing). They have to rely on the advice of others.
And remember, you can kill with a hammer or you can build a house. It's the same with any technology. It's not good or evil by itself, but its use defines where it'll land in that rating.
"The bosses" want predictability, they want continuity, they want to be sure that if KFG drops his tools and leaves in a frenzy, the next guy can do his job (not 100 % exact but as long as it gets done). "The bosses" do not want some soloist of whom they have no idea what he is going to be doing next, no idea about when he is at work, they don't like one who doesn't think about the overall picture (the process).
When a large group is working together, there has to be a certain unity in how and when the things are done. It's like "paranoid democracy": if all others are insane, then the few sane people are seen as insane, as they differ from the majority. If all others are using Hungarian notation (just an example), then the super-skilled Genius has to use that too, even though the Genius (and some of the others) sees the Hungarian notation as quite sucky. The soloists hurt the overall productivity by not being in unison. Of course you could try to argue about dropping the Hungarian notation. But if you can't, then you just have to live with it.
As long as certain parameters are fixed (like the coding convention example above), good bosses shouldn't care a rat's ass about how you make things done, what your internal process is. If you like to zone out watching the wall and snapping your fingers, they shouldn't care about that.
Or you might just have had bad bosses, that's possible too. Nobody is perfect. Also, if your workplace brings death to all creativity, it's a really sucky place to work in, no matter what the bosses are like.
Cray is dying. The days of fat government sales have been over for a long time. It's only logical to discredit your competitors, especially if you stand to lose a lot because of them.
This is nothing new, nor anything special. For instance, if you've looked at the latest computer magazines, Microsoft is doing the same kind of "it sucks" argument to anything related to Linux in a wide front. For example, Apache lost to IIS in a review, and IIS became the Editor's Choice in one magazine. In the next issue of the magazine there will be somekind of "debunking Linux myths" article. (This certain computer magazine is nothing special, even though it has become a nothing short of an unfunny joke paper written by people who don't have a clue. Some of their readers do have a clue, that's why they cancel their subscription.)
So, to sum it up: it doesn't matter what the reality is, the people who decide only see the image which is created for them. Even if that image is wrong, that's the only thing they decision makers are going to see. They don't have the time or the energy to investigate things thoroughly on their own. This is why Microsoft pays the magazines to write garbage. This is why a Cray executive talks garbage.
That process sounds like something a well-functioning software company would use: the reviews, record keeping, testing. The difference with the industry is that the product will ship eventually, even if it has bugs.
With the Linux development cycle, I'd say things are tested perhaps even more than those industry software products. There are differences too: only the relevant functionality is tested (i.e. the functionality, does it work properly for all users who use it). There's no point in testing e.g. some obscure boundary value for an API call to SCSI subsystem, which would cause a panic, if such a call could never be called and is never used by anyone.
The biggest difference is nevertheless the lack of records during testing... unless you consider the bug database to be such. In a way, the test cases are found a posteriori (with regard to the release of the software), sort of, instead of a priori, as is the case with commercial software.
To answer shortly: yes, something like that. An easy language is not necessarily expressive enough. Please read on, I realized only now that I was conflicting myself.
In case you haven't worked in the industry, there are many other dimensions to "programming" than just pumping out code. You have to send mails for some trivial tasks, do this, do that, take care of various oddjobs, keep up-to-date something which could very well be automated, removed completely, or made as simple as possible, etc. etc. This is what I meant with "making it easy".
The programming languages we use now are not the best possible. They could be better. Have you written anything in the industry, using the C language? It's horrible. C++ is only slightly better. As for Java, I have no personal experience with that, but I'd imagine it's just as cumbersome and tedious as any other languages. We could use something better, e.g. functional programming languages, or something totally different. Or use the existing languages in a more smart way, with vastly improved utility libraries, so that the wheel would not have to be re-invented every single time. We could also educate the non-programmer peer groups to make it as easy as possible for the programmers.
Easy language does not necessarily equate to a convenient programming environment, even if the language could be understood by everyone. Think, if everyone had to use Basic, or Logo. They're both easy languages. But where's the expressive power...? The convenience is lost.
Not everyone can be programmers. That's just a fact of life. Even if the industry had a need for 10000 "professional" people with skills in x, but there's only 150 very good ones available, then dumping those mediocre or bad 9850 into the system by dumbing the whole system down for the lowest common denominators will make the capable 150 also lousy, and the results will also suck. Maybe this is an overtly elitist point of view, and if it offends somebody, I am sorry, but it's my opinion.
Ah. Nobody seemed to understand that there will not be a change to the better unless people actively try to make things better. Simply accepting the fact that "my money is now being processed by a broken ATM, built by a company with glaring security holes, and running an OS from a security-challenged company" does not help make the ATMs more secure!
Then again, if you don't have the money or the power to make a change (=you are poor), it's going to be difficult to do anything (unless you appear in large numbers). There's not much you can do, and the ATM builders know this.
To sum it up: "The poor can eat cake. And use broken-by-design ATMs".
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever country the machine is located in doesn't really mean anything these days. The language is English so the potential user base covers a lot of the Earth's population.
You get huge dynamics, huge frequency resolution, etc. but with what speakers will you be able to reproduce the sound?
Having your normal speakers with SACD is like having muddy broken bottoms of a Coca Cola bottle as eyeglasses when watching holograms.
Another use might be to analyze the DNA data and try to locate some abnormal gene patterns common with the criminals. Something like a gene which modifies a hormone xyz in the brain, where excessive modified xyz causes "criminal behaviour".
With a small amount of effort you can eliminate the majority of buffer overflow bugs, for example.
I was arguing that there is no way even this "small amount of effort" will be done, since feature X for users is seen as much more important than going through the entire code base changing things.
Of course this depends on the language used. With Java you probably would not care about buffer overflows. With C you could use a string-processing library which didn't have problems with buffer overflows. Depending on how you do it, it's still slow and expensive to fix. After fixing you need to test to make sure you didn't break anything which previously worked.
As for security just being designed in, I think in reality it would require many revisions of the design until a suitable one is found. Fixing a lot of old code is slow and expensive. Rewriting old programs is even more so.
And often the marketing department, or the customer's marketing department, or a big dumb influential customer's customer overrides common sense in design issues. Regardless of the risks the Feature Must Be There.
Why couldn't e.g. a dog be sentient? I've spent enough time with those to know that they appear to be quite sentient, have their own will, own quirks, etc.
And what makes you think sentience is something binary? I think it's fuzzy. A dog is sentient, but not so much as a human being. A fly is sentient, but not so much as a parrot. For example, you could say (these numbers are made up) that a parrot is 10% to 30% sentient in a human scale. Some advanced space aliens might be 250% sentient in human scale. And so on.
Like you said, intelligence might occur in varying levels among animals. Why wouldn't sentience? Sentience, intelligence, anything regarding the mind's capabilities is varying even among humans, let alone different species.
Time to market, constrained budget, less resources. These things of modern software development chaos do not equate to "more secure programs".
And no, there is no magic bullet to that either.
Most (well, almost all meaning practically every single) spam advertises companies of dubious nature. Companies I've never heard of, or companies I never want to hear from.
I've never received spam from any of the biggest or well-known companies. I don't think anyone has, but this is a subjective opinion.
If so, I think it concludes that spam is ineffective as a marketing tool. If it had any positive net effect, I'm sure a bunch of Fortune 500 companies would be using it already.
Not to mention they'd have hammered through some spam-happy law in the US Congress.
Who gives a hell where it comes from?
Isn't it the BUYERS who buy all that stuff advertised in spam we should be worried about? They are the ones who make it worthwhile. They are the ones which cause spam to be sent, and they are the ones for which all of us have to suffer in the form of bandwidth wasted for nothing.
Judging from my limited incoming spam experiences, I feel USA might contain most if not all of the buyers. Some people I know get French spam, and spam in other languages, but that's a very small minority.
And if you check out those domains to where the URL inside the spam points to, and do some digging, you end up with some Hicksville, USA company.
Why would anyone buy anything from a spammer, that's something I can't understand.
Ask yourself: what is the kind of music I like? What music evokes a lot of response in you, what do I dig? Be selfish. It's your taste, and nobody elses. The biggest hurdle is to find out exactly what you are looking for. Then find bands who do that kind of music. A good resource for starting your hunting is to put your favorite artists to All Music Guide and checking out the artists from the same genre.
You might be surprised how many good artists there are in various small labels and generally outside the "evil media machine". Depends on your taste of music though.
And besides, if you buy quality music that you very much like mainly for listening (because it gives you something personally), and not just some noise engineered for instant consumption, you'll be much happier.
The point is NOT to just buy music, but to find from a store music which gives YOU nice experiences.
Well, well. Yet another Microsoft-sponsored article with FUD!
First of all, the article is ignoring a simple fact: Linus did not write Linux as it is today in that couple of months. He only wrote the core of the kernel, and improved gradually upon that. The community was there helping in programming and sending in changes ever since he publicized Linux.
However, the Samizdat paper IS correct in the sense that the Open Source development model (called a "hybrid model" in the paper in order to dilute the idea) is inherently faster and better than any cathedral-like development models of the proprietary software industry. They base their argument around that, but twist it around like any good spin doctors.
Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporations b) not in the best interest of IT workers in America c) at a serious expense to the investment community, an entity betting on the success of intellectual property in the marketplace.
Notice the a) and c). This is the crux of the issue and the reason why we see such Microsoft-sponsored FUD appear. The a) and c) do not give a rats ass about b), but they must mask their attempts to be such. The b) is a decoy. The real issue here is money. The real issue is about people who would rather get themselves rich than to see something which benefits all people.
And the argument about Linux developers not being legally accountable as their contributions are based on trust... As far as I know, there is an EULA in all Microsoft (and other proprietary) software, which reject any legal responsibility. So how does the Microsoft way of "software is provided as-is, with NO WARRANTY of any kind, express or implied" differ from similar Linux statement?
I think that the Open Source community should respond to all these allegations by making a site which outlines the war between Microsoft and free software. Starting from the depths of history, covering the SCO offensive, going through the black ops of crackers breaking into certain free software sites, examining the massive anti-Linux, anti-Open Source advertisement campaign by Microsoft, dissecting the various paid articles appearing in computer magazines worldwide and analyzing the AdTI research funded by Microsoft.
Make it factual, and don't offend with style when you can offend with substance.
RSA, DH and SHA-1 are not patented (anymore).
For RSA the US patent has expired (Sep 2000). The expiration of the patent was one of the drivers which made RSA appear in more products than ever.
For DH the US patent has expired (Apr 1997).
SHA-1 is not patent-encumbered.
Of course, those were US patents. If anything is not patented in your country, a US patent doesn't really touch you.
You could use the Schneier's Street Performer protocol with Open Source software. The idea is simply this: release the next version of the software only after a certain amount of money has been received. Repeat.
Of course this doesn't work if the entire development is in a publicly readable place e.g. a CVS repository, so the access to that should be restricted. The released version would be Open Source, of course. Some would not pay and still copy it, but who cares, it's Open Source! If nobody pays, there will be no further versions.
Also, there's nothing wrong in writing Open Source software, but you would be crazy to do it as your day job without funding. Write it as a hobby, the way it should be. Fund it with something else, if need be. Also, don't get involved with companies without a good lawyer and written contracts.
When you are inside a system which is built on the concept of money, you have to take that into account. If the world was Open Source, everything for free to everyone, and you'd have the idea of Money brought into it, the idea would probably not live long, since it's alien to that system. Likewise in reality... Don't start playing with money unless you want to play by the rules that powerful idea requires.
Or, you could write a new license which demands all corporations and other for-profit entities to pay for using that software, but non-profits and individuals would get away for free like it is now. Kind of like the Qt license.
Really, you want to put plutonium, polonium, or other dirty bomb materials in the hands of the general public?
No, and I don't want nuclear weapons in the hands of governments either.
But what's keeping some ordinary person from collecting 5000 smoke detectors, extracting the (weakly) radioactive material, doing some rudimentary enriching and coming up with a "dirty bomb"?
...why not just use that? Or use the computer to modify that to any programming language you want?
How do you prove the correctness of the reference implementation?
Why not just write all software with the reference implementation, and let the computer fill in the dots. Think paint by numbers brought to coding. You draw the picture, jot some of the numbers, the computer infers the rest.
Could it have been a planet located at the position where the current asteroid belt is? Something hit it, blew it up, rocks fell everywhere and so on.
The simple answer: ordinary people don't care that much. And they won't generate bad PR.
For instance, ordinary people have trouble finding the options to set the home page of MSIE to their liking. Everything seems too complex. Web pages are cluttered with tons of information normal people don't need. (By the way, the Google home page is a good example of design which is easy to grasp for anyone)
Ordinary people are just glad to get away with shopping in Amazon as easy as possible. If Amazon is going to track their behaviour and show them advertisements, there's a good chance they don't care, for example:
This is not to say ordinary people are stupid or anything. Most people don't have time to delve deeply into anything other than what they have to do daily at work or as a hobby. So, all this "online and computer thing" becomes a murky place they don't quite understand. Let alone the intricacies of what the web shop is going to do with the tracking information it gets from you.
Ignorance is bliss, but if you take away that ignorance, if you educate the ordinary people, they will know better. You could try to educate some computer-illiterate persons you know.
For example, you can play with the idea of Google (or any super-popular search engine) storing "everything" it indexes as well as all search strings. Playing along with some other big web companies, it's possible to pinpoint your traces inside Google. Then suppose an anti-bovine military regime takes over the USA. If the Google searches you've done have been "cowherding", "love for cows", "zen of moo" etc. there would be a good chance you'd get a visit from the Homeland Secret Police or such and get thrown to a concentration camp for anti-governmental behaviour (or just thrown there, it's not like they'd need a reason). Try telling something like that to your grandparents or parents, or aunt, or whoever is not well versed with computers. Will they consider it science fiction? Probably, and rightly so. But it's a distantly plausible scenario, nevertheless. A small amount of paranoia is healthy, if only to be aware of the possibilities.
I'm sure you can find other far-fetched examples yourself. For the ordinary person, however, this kind of example is something they cannot imagine themselves. Since they cannot imagine it, they cannot see it as a threat (or a possibility or a good thing). They have to rely on the advice of others.
And remember, you can kill with a hammer or you can build a house. It's the same with any technology. It's not good or evil by itself, but its use defines where it'll land in that rating.
When a large group is working together, there has to be a certain unity in how and when the things are done. It's like "paranoid democracy": if all others are insane, then the few sane people are seen as insane, as they differ from the majority. If all others are using Hungarian notation (just an example), then the super-skilled Genius has to use that too, even though the Genius (and some of the others) sees the Hungarian notation as quite sucky. The soloists hurt the overall productivity by not being in unison. Of course you could try to argue about dropping the Hungarian notation. But if you can't, then you just have to live with it.
As long as certain parameters are fixed (like the coding convention example above), good bosses shouldn't care a rat's ass about how you make things done, what your internal process is. If you like to zone out watching the wall and snapping your fingers, they shouldn't care about that.
Or you might just have had bad bosses, that's possible too. Nobody is perfect. Also, if your workplace brings death to all creativity, it's a really sucky place to work in, no matter what the bosses are like.
...this serves these SCO fucks right once and for all. Their stock price is slowly oozing through the floor.
Cray is dying. The days of fat government sales have been over for a long time. It's only logical to discredit your competitors, especially if you stand to lose a lot because of them.
This is nothing new, nor anything special. For instance, if you've looked at the latest computer magazines, Microsoft is doing the same kind of "it sucks" argument to anything related to Linux in a wide front. For example, Apache lost to IIS in a review, and IIS became the Editor's Choice in one magazine. In the next issue of the magazine there will be somekind of "debunking Linux myths" article. (This certain computer magazine is nothing special, even though it has become a nothing short of an unfunny joke paper written by people who don't have a clue. Some of their readers do have a clue, that's why they cancel their subscription.)
So, to sum it up: it doesn't matter what the reality is, the people who decide only see the image which is created for them. Even if that image is wrong, that's the only thing they decision makers are going to see. They don't have the time or the energy to investigate things thoroughly on their own. This is why Microsoft pays the magazines to write garbage. This is why a Cray executive talks garbage.
Lobbying is pretty powerful stuff.
That process sounds like something a well-functioning software company would use: the reviews, record keeping, testing. The difference with the industry is that the product will ship eventually, even if it has bugs.
With the Linux development cycle, I'd say things are tested perhaps even more than those industry software products. There are differences too: only the relevant functionality is tested (i.e. the functionality, does it work properly for all users who use it). There's no point in testing e.g. some obscure boundary value for an API call to SCSI subsystem, which would cause a panic, if such a call could never be called and is never used by anyone.
The biggest difference is nevertheless the lack of records during testing... unless you consider the bug database to be such. In a way, the test cases are found a posteriori (with regard to the release of the software), sort of, instead of a priori, as is the case with commercial software.
I mean... how the hell do they know if you tell the truth or not?
So just go ahead and register.
The OpenEEG people aim to create an affordable EEG kit. There's already some schematics for home tinkerers.
Now I feel bad because I didn't pay attention to learning electronics when I was younger...
I will gladly explain.
To answer shortly: yes, something like that. An easy language is not necessarily expressive enough. Please read on, I realized only now that I was conflicting myself.
In case you haven't worked in the industry, there are many other dimensions to "programming" than just pumping out code. You have to send mails for some trivial tasks, do this, do that, take care of various oddjobs, keep up-to-date something which could very well be automated, removed completely, or made as simple as possible, etc. etc. This is what I meant with "making it easy".
The programming languages we use now are not the best possible. They could be better. Have you written anything in the industry, using the C language? It's horrible. C++ is only slightly better. As for Java, I have no personal experience with that, but I'd imagine it's just as cumbersome and tedious as any other languages. We could use something better, e.g. functional programming languages, or something totally different. Or use the existing languages in a more smart way, with vastly improved utility libraries, so that the wheel would not have to be re-invented every single time. We could also educate the non-programmer peer groups to make it as easy as possible for the programmers.
Easy language does not necessarily equate to a convenient programming environment, even if the language could be understood by everyone. Think, if everyone had to use Basic, or Logo. They're both easy languages. But where's the expressive power...? The convenience is lost.
Not everyone can be programmers. That's just a fact of life. Even if the industry had a need for 10000 "professional" people with skills in x, but there's only 150 very good ones available, then dumping those mediocre or bad 9850 into the system by dumbing the whole system down for the lowest common denominators will make the capable 150 also lousy, and the results will also suck. Maybe this is an overtly elitist point of view, and if it offends somebody, I am sorry, but it's my opinion.
Ah. Nobody seemed to understand that there will not be a change to the better unless people actively try to make things better. Simply accepting the fact that "my money is now being processed by a broken ATM, built by a company with glaring security holes, and running an OS from a security-challenged company" does not help make the ATMs more secure!
Then again, if you don't have the money or the power to make a change (=you are poor), it's going to be difficult to do anything (unless you appear in large numbers). There's not much you can do, and the ATM builders know this.
To sum it up: "The poor can eat cake. And use broken-by-design ATMs".
Do you get it now?
The poor can eat cake. And use a broken-by-design ATMs.