Let's see... we spend $125B a year in corporate welfare. NASA is asking for a little over $15B. Which one is most likely to see cuts?
The economic benefits of the space program go far beyond Tang and Hubble calendars. The space race is second only to war for causing advances in technology. (Not that it's a race anymore.) Sure, a lot of the funding goes to dog-and-pony type operations, and things that count more towards PR than knowledge; but considering the return rate for the knowledge we *do* glean, why the *HElL* are we so tight with funding?????
Taxing SF to fund NASA is like taxing full-contact sports to fund war, or taxing Big Wheels to fund roads. Everyone reaps the benefits (except those who die in the war, I guess); everyone should pay. Hell, they didn't ask if I wanted to help fund the S&L bailout; why should they ask short-sighted tight-fisted bastards if they want to fund space research?
If they want to use opt-in funding, they should do that for everything. I don't want to bail out Enron and Boeing and the airlines; send my money to NASA and university research, instead.
The Archos Studio is the coolest designed MP3 out there (IMHO, of course). But the Nomad Jukebox is the best sounding. I have a modded Jukebox (blue backlight, 20G drive) and it has (by far!) the best sound of any MP3 player I've heard (Neo, iPod, Archos Studio, and that one from Compaq).
Some missing features: no decent random function. I'd like to stick the damned thing on "random," and have it play from my entire library. Randomly. Also missing: decent navigation. It's easy to browse by artist and title, but not genre or song.
It does have Linux support: check out libnjb, the great Nomad Jukebox library from John Mechalas. Also, check out (shameless self-promotion) the Perl bindings, perlnjb.
I think a true componentized Windows would be a good thing.
Good for users. Not good for Microsoft. MS has made MS-Windows *less* modular in the past, simply for product tie-in. That's what the states are complaining about.
Not that they'll win. Microsoft has the public confused, the politicians either purchased or bamboozled, and the money to push any agenda they desire.
Yes! You are absolutely correct. And, while we're at it, let's have only one construction company (Tony's Houses) build houses, so the "user experience" of home-owning will be consistent. Further, let's make it so the home can only accomodate Tony's Houses refrigerators, ovens, and furniture.
The driveway should only accomodate Tony's Vehicles, too, since I would *hate* to think some third-party vehicle might "crash" into the house.
The OS should have *nothing* to do with applications. The OS should provide a common framework, and make it easy for applications to interoperate; it should not require the OS maker also make the applications. This is the hallmark of a terrible design, and a poor OS. Your claims are nothing but apologist rhetoric to rationalize Microsoft's monopolistic practices.
Joel was commenting about a study that indicates that software does "decay." In one old project, a lot files had to be touched for a simple change; then, after what amounts to a "refactoring," changes were more localized. after time, the old situation recurred, in which a lot of files had to be modified for a change.
Joel's reply (paraphrased) consisted of, "Well, perhaps for *that* study. But *my* code doesn't rot. I'm constantly refactoring it!" So he claims the study doesn't apply to his software, because he's constantly refactoring his code.
He needs either to read the questions before answering them, or get struck repeatedly with a Very Large Cluestick.
Once every open-sourcer has seen their marriage break up by installing Linux on their non-technical spouse's computer, they'll finally understand that, no, most people don't prefer command lines.
My S.O. is not a computer geek, but is fairly good with computers. She likes working at home on Linux, and complains regularly about MS-Win2k at work. She says, "It won't let me do anything."
Installing Linux hasn't destroyed my marriage. In fact, since I've installed Linux, she's agreed to marry me.
(Its value is lessened if any tom, dick, or harry can, and legally, get it elsewhere)
While I agree with your sentiment, I disagree with this statement. The value of something is not measured by the amount of money you get for it; the value is measured by the usefulness of the code.
Everyone brings up money as if it has some intrinsic property that makes the code worthwhile. The code is worthwhile if it is useful, whether it cost money or not.
"These guys are dicks," is not libel. "These guys are dicks because they raped my sister," is possibly libel, though only if expressed as fact, and not in some flame-fest.
Libelous comments are those that are expressed as fact and not opinion. The more fact-like and objective the context, the more likely they will be judged as libelous. Oh, and they also must be designed to harm the reputation of the comment's subject.
Don't confuse X windows with the desktop. X is far and above *anything* Aqua might be. X is designed for network-transparant use; Aqua is simply a desktop. Two totally different things.
Name one shortcoming of X. (Okay, I can name several-- but they are all similar to shortcomings in Aqua or the MS-Windows widget set.)
Applications: there are many shortcomings in the applications arena. Agreed.
Many tings are innovative in the Linux arena. The RTOS features finding their way into 2.5 are fairly innovative in a desktop OS, for instance. So is the whole Beauwolf clustering cconcept (WRT commodity operating systems). However, Desktop users just don't give a damn about either.
There are lots of reasons for users to switch; it will eventually happen. I suspect that within the next 5 years, we will see a dramatic drift from proprietary operating systems to Free operating systems. But not for any of the obvious reasons.
From the interns to the janitor to the CEO of any company, everybody is winging it. In fact, I'd wager that the farther up the line you go, the more they are winging it.
Most benchmarks on SPARC machines are done using gcc as the compiler. The Ultrasparc is a 64-bit machine; gcc does not compile 64-bit sparc binaries. (There is support, but it is still broken.) If you look at sheer IO, the sparc beats the livin' daylights out of *any* x86 machine. And if you compile using Sun's compiler, with full optimisation, there isn't an Athlon alive that'll out-perform a 950MHz ultrasparc in transactional data processing.
Or rendering, for that matter. There's a reason Pixar uses Sun machines for rendering.
First, what amounts to the "most successful" desktop currently has no fucking help whatsoever.
Second, gnome-apt is a graphical update utility. It is a frontend to apt-get. It doesn't look like windows update, but it acts like windows update. So strike-fucking-two.
It's idiots like you that want an MS-Windows clone that you don't have to pay for that make me sick. You have no clue what it is your looking at, but since it doesn't look like your 'leet Windows desktop, it must suck.
Y'know what? Bite me. Linux is a lot easier to use than MS-Windows. I know. I've installed it in places where computer newbies use it. And I *always* get comments along the lines of, "This is much easier than my computer at home."
So don't come up to me with your, "I know better than you, oldtimer" inexperienced diaper-assed attitude.
And the corporate numbers indicate that Unix is finally making an inroad *into* the corporate desktop.
So go home and play your 'leet games. I don't care. Quality is not measured by numbers; if that were so, Budweiser would truly be the best beer, and the Ford Escort would be the best car.
I have no elitest agenda. All I care about is that I have a good time programming, and that punks like you don't try to tell *me* how to spend my coding time.
BTW, you didn't illustrate anything except your own ignorance. I invalidated every point except one-- the MS-Office clone. And the best you can do is harp on obscure HOWTOs, instead of looking at KDE and GNOME help (which both provide more information that MS-Windows help), and apt-get, which has a damned good front end and is a better update utility than MS-Windows has.
1. We have that. It's called "KDE" or "GNOME," or even "Window Maker with ROX."
2. Uhm... It's coming?
3. You *are* seriously joking, right? Red Hat. Linuxcare. There are *lots* of others, including SUSE, Mandrake, and IBM.
4. What do you mean? Do you mean the CDs should have purty holograms on them? Or should the installer tell you how much better global warming will be once you've got everything installed? If you mean an easily-installed product that works right out of the box, I suggest SUSE. It installs better, easier, and faster than MS-Windows.
5. Rrrriiiiggghhht. Which release procedures should the kernel follow? And *who* has ever forced you to upgrade your kernel? I'm not even sure what you are getting at here.
6. apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (this assumes you use Debian, which negates SUSE, as suggested in 4. But SUSE has its own upgrade system. I use Debian.)
7. Yeah! And let's kill off support for alternative processors, too! All those subdirectories under/usr/src/linux/arch frighten and confuse me. Seriously, though, use webmin if you don't want to learn all about the strange and wonderful world of diverse configuration files. It does what you want, without you telling developers how to do their job.
8. man, info,/usr/doc, HOWTO, and my favorite, Google. It's there, man. It's there.
The only problem that exists in your list is #2, and it's a doozy. Abiword, Gnumeric, Koffice, and Open Office are coming along, but they still have some ways to go. They are good enough for me, but I don't use many office apps. Personally, I think office apps tend to suck slime, in concept and execution. But that's just me.
Now, please explain: you don't have time, but if someone can get 1k programmers together, they should call *you*? Whatever for?
Sun doesn't give a damn about selling Solaris. They care about selling hardware; and they make fucking *great* hardware. If Linux ran as well on high-end hardware as Solaris, Sun would be... well, maybe not *happy* to get out of the OS business, but *willing.*
They don't make money off their OS. They make money off their hardware. Linux does not yet scale as well to multi-processor machines (that is, hardware with *dozens* of processors). When Linux *does* support this class of machine as nicely as Solaris, Sun will most likely offer Linux on the high-end, as well.
It's dangerous to simply judge the security of an operating system simply on published vulnerabilities. First, discovering vulnerabilities is a non-trivial task; secondly, some operating systems recieve more frequent audits, resulting in a higher number of discovered vulnerabilities; and thirdly, some operating systems are more-transperant, resulting in a higher number of discovered vulnerabilities.
Take, for example, Solaris. Solaris is the most-used Unix in the world; it is under more external scrutiny than any other Unix, and so you can expect more discovered vulnerabilities than for HPUX or AIX. This doesn't mean AIX or HPUX are intrinsically more-secure; it just means more discovered vulnerabilities on Solaris.
(I don't claim AIX or HPUX is as insecure as Solaris; I'm just saying it's impossible to judge based on number of discovered vulnerabilities.
(And Solaris is pretty secure.)
Then, the BSD and Linux variants are more transperant; anyone can look at the source code, and so possible vulnerabilities are easier to identify.
Nice article, and excellent analysis. My quibbles don't undermine your conclusions; I just *hate* it when people simplify security to number of discovered vulnerabilities.
Sorry-- social darwinism was proved wrong long ago. The idea that our social "success" equates with biological "success" is the one of the most arrogant bastardisations of science in the last two hundred years, right up with the idea that blacks are inferior to whites. (Oddly enough, the two ideas are linked-- that was social darwinism before there was darwinism, and the arguments used to "prove" that were similar the the ones you just used to "prove" poor people are somehow inferior to rich people.)
Just because someone is poor does not make them genetically stupid, or genetically less-likely to survive.
Remember, biological success has to do with living long enough to breed a replacement population. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of your paycheck. The more times you pass on your genes, the more successful those genes are.
Favorite? The episode in which Peter Boyle is a psychic insurance salesman who "sees" things about people's deaths, all because he was sad the big bopper died instead of Waylon Jennings.
That episode had some of the greatest reasons why X-Files was good-- bizarre moments: "How pathetic. Death by autoerotic asphyxiation." Creepy moments: the scene with the murderer and the tarot reader. Funny moments: pretty much any scene with the Amazing Yappi.
This sucks. Apparently, NS-6 (and Mozilla) are not supported by the stupid Sharp web site. And though they list NS-4 as a compatible browser, they only have a link to download IE.
If we have vulnerable systems, it is likely that terrorists will use our own weaknesses against us. As is mentioned in the interview, the cost of bringing down our communication systems is fairly small.
Remember the Morris Worm? It brought the entire internet to its knees, and Robert Morris didn't mean to release it. What if a "virus" (more correctly, a worm or trojan) is created that destroys every MS-Windows installation? This means more than just Grandma Jane's computer-- I mean military, telecom, and hospital-controlling computer in the world.
The threat isn't that great. Although it wouldn't be expensive in the monetary sense, it would be hard to engineer. But as long as the threat *exists,* it must be considered a potential.
It's hard to believe that students going to extra effort would all fail if the teachers had useful projects that taught real computer science concepts rather than procuct familiarization.
One of the common complaints about higher education is the lack of true education. Especially in computer science, "education" amounts to brand training. They don't teach programming-- they teach Visual Basic. They don't teach networking-- they teach setting up MS-NT servers, and configuring Cisco routers.
90% of computing is crap. Then again, 90% of *everything* is crap. (Apologies to Robert Silverberg.)
Colleges cater to those who will pay the bills. It ain't the students. It's the corporations who can afford to give professors $100 just for a favorable mention during a lecture of their products. (Helloooo, Microsoft.)
We live in a fucked up world. Fortunately, it's less fucked-up than ever before.
Honestly, we *have no clue.* Well, maybe a couple of little clues. But we have one point of reference for *all* our theories of life. And one point is not enough to draw general conclusions.
Life could exist everywhere. Our universe tends to self-forming complex structures (suns, planets, galaxies, black holes, nuetron stars, crystals (snowflakes and such, for instance), language, radiators, jam, etc). So there's no reason life couldn't exist on the surface of neutron stars ("Dragon's Egg," by Robert Forward), or in the heliosphere of our own sun ("Sundiver," by David Brin) or in the depths of space (the known space universe of Larry Niven, for instance).
Hell, it was only 20 years ago we were shocked to discover bacteria and worms in the "lifeless" regions of our own earth.
The fact is, we have some ideas about how life began on earth (many different, mutually-exlusive theories exist), but we don't know. And so how can we know all the various conditions under which life can begin? Or even *can't* begin?
We are ignorant savages that believe we know what we are about. Like a 16-year-old, we think we know everything we need to know; but in reality, we are naive and untutored. That will change, I have no doubt. But until that point, we have a body of knowlege we are sure about, and a body of knowlege we *think* we are sure about (but which is completely bogus), and a whole bunch of knowlege we don't even know we lack.
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Let's see... we spend $125B a year in corporate welfare. NASA is asking for a little over $15B. Which one is most likely to see cuts?
The economic benefits of the space program go far beyond Tang and Hubble calendars. The space race is second only to war for causing advances in technology. (Not that it's a race anymore.) Sure, a lot of the funding goes to dog-and-pony type operations, and things that count more towards PR than knowledge; but considering the return rate for the knowledge we *do* glean, why the *HElL* are we so tight with funding?????
Taxing SF to fund NASA is like taxing full-contact sports to fund war, or taxing Big Wheels to fund roads. Everyone reaps the benefits (except those who die in the war, I guess); everyone should pay. Hell, they didn't ask if I wanted to help fund the S&L bailout; why should they ask short-sighted tight-fisted bastards if they want to fund space research?
If they want to use opt-in funding, they should do that for everything. I don't want to bail out Enron and Boeing and the airlines; send my money to NASA and university research, instead.
6 MB cache? The UltraSparc III has an 8 MB cache. Intel is still playing catch-up.
Of course, it wan't that long ago I was excited to have 8MB *RAM*.
Okay, for all the "no linux software" posts:
libnjb is a fantastic Linux library for interfacing with the Nomad Jukebox. There are lots of links that take you to software.
The Archos Studio is the coolest designed MP3 out there (IMHO, of course). But the Nomad Jukebox is the best sounding. I have a modded Jukebox (blue backlight, 20G drive) and it has (by far!) the best sound of any MP3 player I've heard (Neo, iPod, Archos Studio, and that one from Compaq).
Some missing features: no decent random function. I'd like to stick the damned thing on "random," and have it play from my entire library. Randomly. Also missing: decent navigation. It's easy to browse by artist and title, but not genre or song.
It does have Linux support: check out libnjb, the great Nomad Jukebox library from John Mechalas. Also, check out (shameless self-promotion) the Perl bindings, perlnjb.
I think a true componentized Windows would be a good thing.
Good for users. Not good for Microsoft. MS has made MS-Windows *less* modular in the past, simply for product tie-in. That's what the states are complaining about.
Not that they'll win. Microsoft has the public confused, the politicians either purchased or bamboozled, and the money to push any agenda they desire.
Yes! You are absolutely correct. And, while we're at it, let's have only one construction company (Tony's Houses) build houses, so the "user experience" of home-owning will be consistent. Further, let's make it so the home can only accomodate Tony's Houses refrigerators, ovens, and furniture.
The driveway should only accomodate Tony's Vehicles, too, since I would *hate* to think some third-party vehicle might "crash" into the house.
The OS should have *nothing* to do with applications. The OS should provide a common framework, and make it easy for applications to interoperate; it should not require the OS maker also make the applications. This is the hallmark of a terrible design, and a poor OS. Your claims are nothing but apologist rhetoric to rationalize Microsoft's monopolistic practices.
Joel was commenting about a study that indicates that software does "decay." In one old project, a lot files had to be touched for a simple change; then, after what amounts to a "refactoring," changes were more localized. after time, the old situation recurred, in which a lot of files had to be modified for a change.
Joel's reply (paraphrased) consisted of, "Well, perhaps for *that* study. But *my* code doesn't rot. I'm constantly refactoring it!" So he claims the study doesn't apply to his software, because he's constantly refactoring his code.
He needs either to read the questions before answering them, or get struck repeatedly with a Very Large Cluestick.
Once every open-sourcer has seen their marriage break up by installing Linux on their non-technical spouse's computer, they'll finally understand that, no, most people don't prefer command lines.
My S.O. is not a computer geek, but is fairly good with computers. She likes working at home on Linux, and complains regularly about MS-Win2k at work. She says, "It won't let me do anything."
Installing Linux hasn't destroyed my marriage. In fact, since I've installed Linux, she's agreed to marry me.
Uhm... Apache is the most common web server.
I know that's what you meant. My illness forces me to compulsively correct things like this, though.
(Its value is lessened if any tom, dick, or harry can, and legally, get it elsewhere)
While I agree with your sentiment, I disagree with this statement. The value of something is not measured by the amount of money you get for it; the value is measured by the usefulness of the code.
Everyone brings up money as if it has some intrinsic property that makes the code worthwhile. The code is worthwhile if it is useful, whether it cost money or not.
Otherwise: right on, Man!
"These guys are dicks," is not libel. "These guys are dicks because they raped my sister," is possibly libel, though only if expressed as fact, and not in some flame-fest.
Libelous comments are those that are expressed as fact and not opinion. The more fact-like and objective the context, the more likely they will be judged as libelous. Oh, and they also must be designed to harm the reputation of the comment's subject.
Of course, IANAL. YMMV. Accept no subsitute.
Uhmm...
Don't confuse X windows with the desktop. X is far and above *anything* Aqua might be. X is designed for network-transparant use; Aqua is simply a desktop. Two totally different things.
Name one shortcoming of X. (Okay, I can name several-- but they are all similar to shortcomings in Aqua or the MS-Windows widget set.)
Applications: there are many shortcomings in the applications arena. Agreed.
Many tings are innovative in the Linux arena. The RTOS features finding their way into 2.5 are fairly innovative in a desktop OS, for instance. So is the whole Beauwolf clustering cconcept (WRT commodity operating systems). However, Desktop users just don't give a damn about either.
There are lots of reasons for users to switch; it will eventually happen. I suspect that within the next 5 years, we will see a dramatic drift from proprietary operating systems to Free operating systems. But not for any of the obvious reasons.
I think it'll be political.
most managers are just winging it.
That's an understatement. Everybody's winging it.
From the interns to the janitor to the CEO of any company, everybody is winging it. In fact, I'd wager that the farther up the line you go, the more they are winging it.
Some are just better at it than others.
By what measurement?
Most benchmarks on SPARC machines are done using gcc as the compiler. The Ultrasparc is a 64-bit machine; gcc does not compile 64-bit sparc binaries. (There is support, but it is still broken.) If you look at sheer IO, the sparc beats the livin' daylights out of *any* x86 machine. And if you compile using Sun's compiler, with full optimisation, there isn't an Athlon alive that'll out-perform a 950MHz ultrasparc in transactional data processing.
Or rendering, for that matter. There's a reason Pixar uses Sun machines for rendering.
Ignorant bullshit.
First, what amounts to the "most successful" desktop currently has no fucking help whatsoever.
Second, gnome-apt is a graphical update utility. It is a frontend to apt-get. It doesn't look like windows update, but it acts like windows update. So strike-fucking-two.
It's idiots like you that want an MS-Windows clone that you don't have to pay for that make me sick. You have no clue what it is your looking at, but since it doesn't look like your 'leet Windows desktop, it must suck.
Y'know what? Bite me. Linux is a lot easier to use than MS-Windows. I know. I've installed it in places where computer newbies use it. And I *always* get comments along the lines of, "This is much easier than my computer at home."
So don't come up to me with your, "I know better than you, oldtimer" inexperienced diaper-assed attitude.
And the corporate numbers indicate that Unix is finally making an inroad *into* the corporate desktop.
So go home and play your 'leet games. I don't care. Quality is not measured by numbers; if that were so, Budweiser would truly be the best beer, and the Ford Escort would be the best car.
I have no elitest agenda. All I care about is that I have a good time programming, and that punks like you don't try to tell *me* how to spend my coding time.
BTW, you didn't illustrate anything except your own ignorance. I invalidated every point except one-- the MS-Office clone. And the best you can do is harp on obscure HOWTOs, instead of looking at KDE and GNOME help (which both provide more information that MS-Windows help), and apt-get, which has a damned good front end and is a better update utility than MS-Windows has.
Get a life. More than that, grow a brain.
1. We have that. It's called "KDE" or "GNOME," or even "Window Maker with ROX."
/usr/src/linux/arch frighten and confuse me. Seriously, though, use webmin if you don't want to learn all about the strange and wonderful world of diverse configuration files. It does what you want, without you telling developers how to do their job.
/usr/doc, HOWTO, and my favorite, Google. It's there, man. It's there.
2. Uhm... It's coming?
3. You *are* seriously joking, right? Red Hat. Linuxcare. There are *lots* of others, including SUSE, Mandrake, and IBM.
4. What do you mean? Do you mean the CDs should have purty holograms on them? Or should the installer tell you how much better global warming will be once you've got everything installed? If you mean an easily-installed product that works right out of the box, I suggest SUSE. It installs better, easier, and faster than MS-Windows.
5. Rrrriiiiggghhht. Which release procedures should the kernel follow? And *who* has ever forced you to upgrade your kernel? I'm not even sure what you are getting at here.
6. apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (this assumes you use Debian, which negates SUSE, as suggested in 4. But SUSE has its own upgrade system. I use Debian.)
7. Yeah! And let's kill off support for alternative processors, too! All those subdirectories under
8. man, info,
The only problem that exists in your list is #2, and it's a doozy. Abiword, Gnumeric, Koffice, and Open Office are coming along, but they still have some ways to go. They are good enough for me, but I don't use many office apps. Personally, I think office apps tend to suck slime, in concept and execution. But that's just me.
Now, please explain: you don't have time, but if someone can get 1k programmers together, they should call *you*? Whatever for?
Sun's design has to be it that much better.
Oh, it is. It is.
Sun doesn't give a damn about selling Solaris. They care about selling hardware; and they make fucking *great* hardware. If Linux ran as well on high-end hardware as Solaris, Sun would be... well, maybe not *happy* to get out of the OS business, but *willing.*
They don't make money off their OS. They make money off their hardware. Linux does not yet scale as well to multi-processor machines (that is, hardware with *dozens* of processors). When Linux *does* support this class of machine as nicely as Solaris, Sun will most likely offer Linux on the high-end, as well.
It's dangerous to simply judge the security of an operating system simply on published vulnerabilities. First, discovering vulnerabilities is a non-trivial task; secondly, some operating systems recieve more frequent audits, resulting in a higher number of discovered vulnerabilities; and thirdly, some operating systems are more-transperant, resulting in a higher number of discovered vulnerabilities.
Take, for example, Solaris. Solaris is the most-used Unix in the world; it is under more external scrutiny than any other Unix, and so you can expect more discovered vulnerabilities than for HPUX or AIX. This doesn't mean AIX or HPUX are intrinsically more-secure; it just means more discovered vulnerabilities on Solaris.
(I don't claim AIX or HPUX is as insecure as Solaris; I'm just saying it's impossible to judge based on number of discovered vulnerabilities.
(And Solaris is pretty secure.)
Then, the BSD and Linux variants are more transperant; anyone can look at the source code, and so possible vulnerabilities are easier to identify.
Nice article, and excellent analysis. My quibbles don't undermine your conclusions; I just *hate* it when people simplify security to number of discovered vulnerabilities.
Security is much more complex than that.
Sorry-- social darwinism was proved wrong long ago. The idea that our social "success" equates with biological "success" is the one of the most arrogant bastardisations of science in the last two hundred years, right up with the idea that blacks are inferior to whites. (Oddly enough, the two ideas are linked-- that was social darwinism before there was darwinism, and the arguments used to "prove" that were similar the the ones you just used to "prove" poor people are somehow inferior to rich people.)
Just because someone is poor does not make them genetically stupid, or genetically less-likely to survive.
Remember, biological success has to do with living long enough to breed a replacement population. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of your paycheck. The more times you pass on your genes, the more successful those genes are.
Favorite? The episode in which Peter Boyle is a psychic insurance salesman who "sees" things about people's deaths, all because he was sad the big bopper died instead of Waylon Jennings.
That episode had some of the greatest reasons why X-Files was good-- bizarre moments: "How pathetic. Death by autoerotic asphyxiation." Creepy moments: the scene with the murderer and the tarot reader. Funny moments: pretty much any scene with the Amazing Yappi.
Yep. The only thing it missed was Black Lung.
This sucks. Apparently, NS-6 (and Mozilla) are not supported by the stupid Sharp web site. And though they list NS-4 as a compatible browser, they only have a link to download IE.
Fucking brilliant.
If we have vulnerable systems, it is likely that terrorists will use our own weaknesses against us. As is mentioned in the interview, the cost of bringing down our communication systems is fairly small.
Remember the Morris Worm? It brought the entire internet to its knees, and Robert Morris didn't mean to release it. What if a "virus" (more correctly, a worm or trojan) is created that destroys every MS-Windows installation? This means more than just Grandma Jane's computer-- I mean military, telecom, and hospital-controlling computer in the world.
The threat isn't that great. Although it wouldn't be expensive in the monetary sense, it would be hard to engineer. But as long as the threat *exists,* it must be considered a potential.
- Tony
It's hard to believe that students going to extra effort would all fail if the teachers had useful projects that taught real computer science concepts rather than procuct familiarization.
One of the common complaints about higher education is the lack of true education. Especially in computer science, "education" amounts to brand training. They don't teach programming-- they teach Visual Basic. They don't teach networking-- they teach setting up MS-NT servers, and configuring Cisco routers.
90% of computing is crap. Then again, 90% of *everything* is crap. (Apologies to Robert Silverberg.)
Colleges cater to those who will pay the bills. It ain't the students. It's the corporations who can afford to give professors $100 just for a favorable mention during a lecture of their products. (Helloooo, Microsoft.)
We live in a fucked up world. Fortunately, it's less fucked-up than ever before.
Honestly, we *have no clue.* Well, maybe a couple of little clues. But we have one point of reference for *all* our theories of life. And one point is not enough to draw general conclusions.
Life could exist everywhere. Our universe tends to self-forming complex structures (suns, planets, galaxies, black holes, nuetron stars, crystals (snowflakes and such, for instance), language, radiators, jam, etc). So there's no reason life couldn't exist on the surface of neutron stars ("Dragon's Egg," by Robert Forward), or in the heliosphere of our own sun ("Sundiver," by David Brin) or in the depths of space (the known space universe of Larry Niven, for instance).
Hell, it was only 20 years ago we were shocked to discover bacteria and worms in the "lifeless" regions of our own earth.
The fact is, we have some ideas about how life began on earth (many different, mutually-exlusive theories exist), but we don't know. And so how can we know all the various conditions under which life can begin? Or even *can't* begin?
We are ignorant savages that believe we know what we are about. Like a 16-year-old, we think we know everything we need to know; but in reality, we are naive and untutored. That will change, I have no doubt. But until that point, we have a body of knowlege we are sure about, and a body of knowlege we *think* we are sure about (but which is completely bogus), and a whole bunch of knowlege we don't even know we lack.
That's what's so cool about the universe.