Ask yourself if you really want to work for a company that would assume that anyone with your name is you [SNIP] Think of this as an IQ test of a potential employer. If one brings it up, point out to them, in detail, how easy it would have been to determine this wasn't you, then walk out of the interview and be thankful you've dodged a bullet.
Companies aren't homogeneous. There must be lots of firms with really poor HR departments but really great IT or Engineering departments. The trick is to get past the HR people, and having the same name as some undesirable makes that harder.
Apple provide significant funding for two important academic projects, LLVM and clang. (I wouldn't be surprised to see clang+llvm supplant gcc on some architectures by 2010.)
There is a compromise between running as Administrator and limping along as a peon: use DropMyRights to run major internet-facing apps without full administrator access. (You patch the icons and Start Menu entries for the apps to run DropMyRights which then runs the.exe.) It's not a 100% solution, but it does help.
The main weakness of this approach is that Windows has dozens of ways to launch applications, and it's impossible to get DropMyRights to intercept all of them. There's a related tool, StripMyRights, which gives you two ways to make any.exe always run with limited rights, but I haven't tried it yet.
In actual fact we currently produce enough food for over 7 billion people. (Some is turned into ethanol, some grain is used to fatten up meat animals, some food goes to overweight people like me... all because food prices are historically low.) The reason millions of people are starving today has nothing to do with global production shortages -- it's because of political failures.
Yes, Valve's insight is good sense, but it's not common sense: the big publishers are still paranoid about "piracy". Too many senior executives are unable (or unwilling?) to move away from the ship-boxes-to-retail-stores mindset (which even the big Music Manufacturers are now starting to discard).
The post and the first FA are misleading. The law does not create a presumption of guilt; it just requires every ISP to "adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of repeat infringer['s accounts]". It's a really bad law, with no explanation of "appropriate circumstances", how the ISP is supposed to decide that a customer is a copyright "infringer", etc... but it is not as terrible as people are saying.
Meanwhile, here in Australia the Federal government still plans to introduce a censorship system that is as bad as people are saying.
So the latest tussle in the ongoing trans-Tasman rivalry sees Australia easily win the Stupendous Stupidity in Internet Governance award for summer 2008/9.
The 169-page report by Judge Tunis makes the situation quite clear by collecting facts and inviting the reader to draw an obvious conclusion. You don't have to read the whole thing to Get It: just reading the footnotes is enough (especially footnote 8, which starts on page 39). That conclusion? Thompson has a serious mental illness.
I wonder if he has Borderline Personality Disorder, but IANAPP (I Am Not A Psychiatrist or Psychologist). I'd be interested in hearing from an expert. Even better would be Thompson getting the expert medical help he so badly needs.
I've found SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder and Renderer) quite useful. It's a Windows GUI for several FOSS libraries, including FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, mppenc and FFmpeg2theora. It even has a clunky-but-usable batch file conversion facility. Home page: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
As it happens, Apple are not that keen on gcc, for (I gather) both technical and licensing reasons. That's why they are funding the clang project. It's a new compiler for C, C++ and Objective C, with lots of great technical features. It's original aims include licensing designed to allow it to "be used for commercial projects". I would not be suprised to see clang and llvm supplant gcc one day.
Those of us who submitted comments on this issue to the ACCC got email this week, with 900k of PDF documents attached. The biggest document (42 pages!) is a detailed analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the Paypal-only rule in terms of the ACCC's statutory responsibilities. It's an impressive piece of work, and makes a strong case that those disadvantages outweigh the (small, perhaps even tiny) advantages. (You can get it via this HTML page.)
Alex Belits has the first explanation of the sudden desire for Windows on these devices that makes any sense to me.
Partial Summary: commercial laptop manufacturers see declining sales for their new low-end laptop lines, and hope that switching to Windows will make those lines profitable again. OLPC sees too few developers and hopes that switching to Windows will attract enough new developers to form a critical mass. Both are going to be disappointed...
I'm quite inclusionist (see my user page), but I can see one good argument for deletionism: Wikipedia doesn't have enough editors to keep our articles in good condition as it is, and having a separate article about every episode of every notable television show ever broadcast would spread our workforce far too thin. As it is, a lot of our articles about popular culture are (to put it politely) in need of improvement.
On the other hand, I contend that Wikipedia's notability standards for things which do not get much mainstream media coverage (eg., webcomics, blogs) are also in need of improvement.
What someone should do is set up a wiki (or, better yet, a whole bunch of wikis) for pop-culture topics. Then people who want to write about Star Trek, the Narnia books, etc, etc could create as many articles as they want. Oh, wait.
Yes, Wikipedia is not reliable, but that doesn't stop it from being extremely useful.
Treating Wikipedia as authoritative is a Never A Good Idea, but most articles give a useful overview (if skim over the details and ignore obvious vandalism etc) and, more importantly, contain lots of useful hyperlinks. Clicking on the interesting-looking links can quickly get you to trustworthy documents, or at least tell you which books you need to read. Yes, there is lots of vandalism at Wikipedia, but it's almost always self-evident. (If you're familiar with Wikipedia, you can generally tell how credible an article is from it's discussion page and/or edit history.)
While some Wikipedia articles are quite useless, there are hundreds of excellent articles which can be trusted (modulo vandalism). For instance, the article about ASCII is very good, IMO. (Full disclosure: I've edited it; my Wikipedia username is "Chris Chittleborough".) The articles about computer technologies tend to be fairly good in general.
When I submitted the article, I should have included a link to Bill Roggio's blog post about deploying the device. D'oh.
I'm glad to see my submission sparking some good discussion. (But I was surprised that only toupsie (heh!) caught the reference to a book by Glenn Reynolds, AKA Instapundit.)
It's true that the DoD has good reasons for requiring equipment to be "infantry-proof". The difference between "good" and "good enough" matters in most fields of human activity, and has done for millennia. The infantry themselves often prefer quick and dirty; this device is, in a way, just another of thousands of in-the-field innovations... only a lot more high-tech.
"Dark Corners"? Those corners aren't just dark, they're full of grues. And they're not just corners, they're entire dungeons. All dark, and full of enormous, very hungry grues...
That's a disgraceful piece of "journalism". It's a fairly shallow recounting of issues with the GPLv3 and so on, mixed in with pathetic, shoddy smears of RMS. I write as someone who is (to say the least) not a big fan of RMS's politics nor of his technical work over the last few years*, but I couldn't see any valid non-trivial criticism of RMS in that article.
Forbes and Lyons should be ashamed of this article.
(BTW, notice how hard they work on getting their target audience to "Click here to see which tech companies Stallman's attack could hurt"?)
* His earlier coding projects (Emacs, early versions of gcc, etc) are stunning achievements. To expect anyone to keep up that standard of work would be wild-eyed optimism.
They arranged for all US-Europe post to be shipped via Bermuda, so that they could open every letter.
The letter openers did detect some Nazi spies in America. (There were no Nazi spies operating in Britain during the WW2; the Twenty Committee (20 = XX = double cross) turned every single one of them.)
William Stevenson's book, A Man Called Intrepid, is about the activities of Sir William Stephenson and other intelligence leaders during WW2. It is not an autobiography; in fact, it is not really a biography.
(This book was one of the first published after the Ultra secret, Colossus, Bletchley Park etc were declassified 30 years after WW2. It's a good read, full of fascinating information. For instance, did you know that Rommel's success was largely due to the U.S. State Department? It may still be one of the better single-volume histories of Allied intelligence during WW2. However it is not—how shall I put it?—a book that a good historian would use as a primary source.)
The book does say what Mr. Cringely says it does, but it's alarming to see him describe it as an autobiography.
DROD is the worst time-sink I have ever encountered. I spend way too much time on it. But it's a superb game, especially if you have a CaravelNet subscription.
TFA doesn't quite "get" DROD. It is a pure puzzle game with a tongue-in-cheek premise ("Deadly Rooms of Death") and a surreal background. The community is a big part of the fun. Most of the entertainment value comes from community created "holds", not just the hold that comes with the game.
The game runs on Windows and Linux. A Mac version is on the way. Demos are available.
If you do buy the game, be sure to get a CaravelNet subscription as well. Being able to see how other players solved a room adds an suprising amount to the game. (Well, at least I was suprised.) The other benefits are also worth-while.
The extra cost for a CaravelNet account may seem like
Sure, someone else would have done Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and even Special Relativity.
But not General Relativity. It wasn't until the late 1960s that anyone else added significantly to Einstein's work on General Relativity. I guess it's fair to say that Einstein was at least 5 decades ahead of the rest of the human race!
This urban legend is based on a true story. The linguistics professor was J. L. Austin, the interjector was Sydney Morgenbesser, a philosophy professor and the interjection was "Yeah, Yeah".
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser .
Will x86 machines dominate desktop computing in 2010? It's hard to see where any alternative could come from. I find this prospect quite dismal. Hence my tendency to sometimes day-dream about a world in which Good Design would be more important than Good Marketing or (in this case) rational user risk management.
So actually I agree with slavemowgli's rebuttal of my post:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Ask yourself if you really want to work for a company that would assume that anyone with your name is you [SNIP] Think of this as an IQ test of a potential employer. If one brings it up, point out to them, in detail, how easy it would have been to determine this wasn't you, then walk out of the interview and be thankful you've dodged a bullet.
Companies aren't homogeneous. There must be lots of firms with really poor HR departments but really great IT or Engineering departments. The trick is to get past the HR people, and having the same name as some undesirable makes that harder.
Apple provide significant funding for two important academic projects, LLVM and clang. (I wouldn't be surprised to see clang+llvm supplant gcc on some architectures by 2010.)
There is a compromise between running as Administrator and limping along as a peon: use DropMyRights to run major internet-facing apps without full administrator access. (You patch the icons and Start Menu entries for the apps to run DropMyRights which then runs the .exe.) It's not a 100% solution, but it does help.
.exe always run with limited rights, but I haven't tried it yet.
The main weakness of this approach is that Windows has dozens of ways to launch applications, and it's impossible to get DropMyRights to intercept all of them. There's a related tool, StripMyRights, which gives you two ways to make any
In actual fact we currently produce enough food for over 7 billion people. (Some is turned into ethanol, some grain is used to fatten up meat animals, some food goes to overweight people like me ... all because food prices are historically low.) The reason millions of people are starving today has nothing to do with global production shortages -- it's because of political failures.
Yes, Valve's insight is good sense, but it's not common sense: the big publishers are still paranoid about "piracy". Too many senior executives are unable (or unwilling?) to move away from the ship-boxes-to-retail-stores mindset (which even the big Music Manufacturers are now starting to discard).
The post and the first FA are misleading. The law does not create a presumption of guilt; it just requires every ISP to "adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of repeat infringer['s accounts]". It's a really bad law, with no explanation of "appropriate circumstances", how the ISP is supposed to decide that a customer is a copyright "infringer", etc ... but it is not as terrible as people are saying.
Meanwhile, here in Australia the Federal government still plans to introduce a censorship system that is as bad as people are saying.
So the latest tussle in the ongoing trans-Tasman rivalry sees Australia easily win the Stupendous Stupidity in Internet Governance award for summer 2008/9.
I wonder if he has Borderline Personality Disorder, but IANAPP (I Am Not A Psychiatrist or Psychologist). I'd be interested in hearing from an expert. Even better would be Thompson getting the expert medical help he so badly needs.
Groklaw has also brought to light (and made easily accessible and searchable) the flaws in the OOXML comedy ...
There really is a fine line between comedy and tragedy, isn't there?
I've found SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder and Renderer) quite useful. It's a Windows GUI for several FOSS libraries, including FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, mppenc and FFmpeg2theora. It even has a clunky-but-usable batch file conversion facility. Home page: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
As it happens, Apple are not that keen on gcc, for (I gather) both technical and licensing reasons. That's why they are funding the clang project. It's a new compiler for C, C++ and Objective C, with lots of great technical features. It's original aims include licensing designed to allow it to "be used for commercial projects". I would not be suprised to see clang and llvm supplant gcc one day.
Well done, ACCC!
All the Wikimedia wikis, including Wikipedia, provide a good public web-based API for querying the underlying database. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php.
Alex Belits has the first explanation of the sudden desire for Windows on these devices that makes any sense to me.
...
Partial Summary: commercial laptop manufacturers see declining sales for their new low-end laptop lines, and hope that switching to Windows will make those lines profitable again. OLPC sees too few developers and hopes that switching to Windows will attract enough new developers to form a critical mass. Both are going to be disappointed
For details, Read The Whole Thing. Highly recommended.
I'm quite inclusionist (see my user page), but I can see one good argument for deletionism: Wikipedia doesn't have enough editors to keep our articles in good condition as it is, and having a separate article about every episode of every notable television show ever broadcast would spread our workforce far too thin. As it is, a lot of our articles about popular culture are (to put it politely) in need of improvement.
On the other hand, I contend that Wikipedia's notability standards for things which do not get much mainstream media coverage (eg., webcomics, blogs) are also in need of improvement.
What someone should do is set up a wiki (or, better yet, a whole bunch of wikis) for pop-culture topics. Then people who want to write about Star Trek, the Narnia books, etc, etc could create as many articles as they want. Oh, wait.
I haven't looked into Slashdot's tag system yet. Can anyone tell me how to tag an article with "In Your Dreams"?
Treating Wikipedia as authoritative is a Never A Good Idea, but most articles give a useful overview (if skim over the details and ignore obvious vandalism etc) and, more importantly, contain lots of useful hyperlinks. Clicking on the interesting-looking links can quickly get you to trustworthy documents, or at least tell you which books you need to read. Yes, there is lots of vandalism at Wikipedia, but it's almost always self-evident. (If you're familiar with Wikipedia, you can generally tell how credible an article is from it's discussion page and/or edit history.)
While some Wikipedia articles are quite useless, there are hundreds of excellent articles which can be trusted (modulo vandalism). For instance, the article about ASCII is very good, IMO. (Full disclosure: I've edited it; my Wikipedia username is "Chris Chittleborough".) The articles about computer technologies tend to be fairly good in general.
I'm glad to see my submission sparking some good discussion. (But I was surprised that only toupsie (heh!) caught the reference to a book by Glenn Reynolds, AKA Instapundit.)
It's true that the DoD has good reasons for requiring equipment to be "infantry-proof". The difference between "good" and "good enough" matters in most fields of human activity, and has done for millennia. The infantry themselves often prefer quick and dirty; this device is, in a way, just another of thousands of in-the-field innovations ... only a lot more high-tech.
"Dark Corners"? Those corners aren't just dark, they're full of grues. And they're not just corners, they're entire dungeons. All dark, and full of enormous, very hungry grues ...
That's a disgraceful piece of "journalism". It's a fairly shallow recounting of issues with the GPLv3 and so on, mixed in with pathetic, shoddy smears of RMS. I write as someone who is (to say the least) not a big fan of RMS's politics nor of his technical work over the last few years*, but I couldn't see any valid non-trivial criticism of RMS in that article.
Forbes and Lyons should be ashamed of this article.
(BTW, notice how hard they work on getting their target audience to "Click here to see which tech companies Stallman's attack could hurt"?)
* His earlier coding projects (Emacs, early versions of gcc, etc) are stunning achievements. To expect anyone to keep up that standard of work would be wild-eyed optimism.
The letter openers did detect some Nazi spies in America. (There were no Nazi spies operating in Britain during the WW2; the Twenty Committee (20 = XX = double cross) turned every single one of them.)
(This book was one of the first published after the Ultra secret, Colossus, Bletchley Park etc were declassified 30 years after WW2. It's a good read, full of fascinating information. For instance, did you know that Rommel's success was largely due to the U.S. State Department? It may still be one of the better single-volume histories of Allied intelligence during WW2. However it is not—how shall I put it?—a book that a good historian would use as a primary source.)
The book does say what Mr. Cringely says it does, but it's alarming to see him describe it as an autobiography.
TFA doesn't quite "get" DROD. It is a pure puzzle game with a tongue-in-cheek premise ("Deadly Rooms of Death") and a surreal background. The community is a big part of the fun. Most of the entertainment value comes from community created "holds", not just the hold that comes with the game.
The game runs on Windows and Linux. A Mac version is on the way. Demos are available.
If you do buy the game, be sure to get a CaravelNet subscription as well. Being able to see how other players solved a room adds an suprising amount to the game. (Well, at least I was suprised.) The other benefits are also worth-while. The extra cost for a CaravelNet account may seem like
But not General Relativity. It wasn't until the late 1960s that anyone else added significantly to Einstein's work on General Relativity. I guess it's fair to say that Einstein was at least 5 decades ahead of the rest of the human race!
This urban legend is based on a true story. The linguistics professor was J. L. Austin, the interjector was Sydney Morgenbesser, a philosophy professor and the interjection was "Yeah, Yeah". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser .
So actually I agree with slavemowgli's rebuttal of my post :-)