Ummm. Canadian Content laws? Which dicatate that at least x% of the music played is by Canadian artists? And God Forbid someone would want to watch Fox News...
When you compare prices, you generally pick the cheapest prices available. For Linux, that comes to $0.00 if you're willing to put up with support equivalent to Microsoft's.
If you want to pick some arbitrary source for Linux that costs a lot more than that, then let's be fair and pick an expensive version of Windows, too. (I'd gladly sell you a copy of Windows for $50,000,000. Does that mean that Linux is almost 50 million dollars cheaper than Windows?)
Back in the early 80's, color CRT's started to become available. People's reaction was remarkably similar to current reaction to 3-D desktops. Some people thought is was pretty, and that was enough. Lots of people wondered what good it was, and whether expending more than one bit per pixel was really a good use of memory. Would X become bloated? Would bit-blit still work? Some programmers who liked black and white better because they found it easier to read.
True, smugness isn't a monopoly. But I'd have to say Canadians have plenty of it. Here's my favorite story: I was walking through downtown Waterloo, Ont. one Sunday morning. An old lady was pulled over with a map spread out on her front fender, obviously completely lost. Turned out she was driving back home to Guelph from winter in Florida and had taken the wrong exit. After I showed her how to get there, she said, "I'm so glad to be back in Canada! No American would ever stop and help me like you did. Those people are so rude!" I considered a few nasty come-backs, but ultimately just smiled and walked away.
Climate is as good as the northern tier of the US, which also sucks. Which is why it's being depopulated as people move to nicer places.
Wages are low, and the cost of living is not nearly low in proportion. Well, that was 10 years ago, maybe things have changed.
Taxes are really, really high, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what I was getting for them. Health care was free, but it totally sucked compared to the US. Canadians who didn't want to wait 6mo for a routine procedure commonly went to the US and paid. I wasn't on welfare; maybe if I had been I'd feel differently.
I dunno. I lived up there for a few years. Anyone who puts up with the climate, wages, taxes, Canadian Content laws, utterly rampant political correctness, and (worst of all) the unbelievably smug, supercilious attitude toward anything non-Canadian cannot be all that intelligent.
I clicked on the first link you cite, from the NY Times. The first thing I read is this:
Study of disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.
By FORD FESSENDEN and JOHN M. BRODER
George W. Bush would have won even if the Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount that the Florida court had ordered to go forward.
Digging a little further also didn't turn up any support for your contention. The closest I found was that if the Florida courts had ordered a state-wide recount of all rejected ballots, which no one including Gore asked for, then Gore might have won. (Or not.)
So my question is, did you provide the citations in the hope that people would believe your interpretation without bothering to read them?
Oh, come on. Vog Orbis Q6 is, for all practical purposes, audibly indistinguishable from FLAC. I'd be willing to bet significant amounts of money that you cannot reliably detect the different on any actual musical recording.
Well, if you don't like them, you don't like them; I won't try to convince you that your taste is wrong. However, your stated reasons for disliking SF seem odd.
Personnally, I find that SF is usually more concerned about a good story than other genres. A typical non-SF novel (at least these days) seems far more concerned with the minutia of human relationships than any "story." Not that there's anything wrong with that. To pick a random example, I read "High Fidelity" last week. Excellent book. However, there is basically no "story" at all. It's all about the emotions of humorously disfunctional people. Of course, there's a school of literature critism that says that character development is everything and plot doesn't matter. If that's your point, I simply disagree. Luckily, there seem to be plenty of authors that cater to each of our tastes.
As far as pretentiousness and quality of writing goes, it seems about equal to non-SF. Some is pretentious, some is not. Can anything match the pretentiousness or political bile of Leon Uris or Norman Mailer?
No, I think you're wrong. It is trivial. It wasn't done because the physical media (VCRs) didn't support it. Once the physical media supported it, it was completely trivial.
Back in the 1970's, it was obvious that widespread use of solar energy was just around the corner. After all, it was clear that we would run out of oil by the mid-1980's at the latest. So people actually studied the environmental costs of solar power. One of the more amusing findings was that we could expect hundreds of deaths per year due to homeowners falling off their roofs while trying to install or repair solar panels.
I think basing the new system on Debian (or any other existing distribution) would be a mistake. Not for technical reasons, but political ones. A new distribution would have a coolness factor that would attract new contributers, and also attract some contributers from existing projects. People would have a sense that they were getting in on the ground floor and creating something important. There would be a sense that everyone was starting from the same point, and that influence and leadership would be based on merit.
Contrast that with using an existing distribution. First, a lot of potential contributers don't see it as particularly new or cool, so they're less likely to join. Second, there is an entrenched contributer base. A lot of the old timers who have been working on the distribution feel somewhat put off by the new folks who want to change stuff, and the new guys feel that they're at a disadvantage in getting their ideas heard. Third, if you pick any existing distribution, there are a fairly large group of potential contributers who don't like that distribution for one reason or another. It doesn't really matter why---it still has an effect.
Start from scratch. Borrow useful GPL'ed code from everywhere. The beauty of GPL is that you can use a lot of the work done by Debian, RedHat, etc., without trying to work within those organizations.
I play a lot of chess, and I "prune search trees" all the time. Whenever I way to myself "oops, that loses a piece; no need to look further" I have pruned a search tree.
During a Capitol Hill press conference today, DNC Chairman Roy Romer implied that President Bush may be responsible for recent geomagnetic anomalies. "Is it a coincidence that these problems are happening after one of the worst weeks for U.S. troops in Iraq since 9/11? And isn't it interesting that Haliburton, a corporation with close ties to the Vise President, is heavily involved in both Iraq and in magnetic sensing technology?" He went on to call for a special investigator.
J.S. Bach had over 20 children and in the opinion of many was the greatest composer who ever lived. He was also probably the greatest keyboard player of his day, and an expert on pipe organs.
I dunno. In my late 30's I went with the flow and moved from programming to managing programmers. After a few years, I was doing fine, but I realized that my life kinda sucked. All the stuff I really enjoyed doing, I didn't have any time to do anymore. So I moved back into programming and haven't regretted it for a minute. I'm 47, working with people ranging from early 20's to early 40's, and I really don't notice any agism. Of course, maybe they're mocking me and I don't notice; my eyesight isn't what it once was:-)
The "major funding" he took credit for wasn't to "create" the internet, it was one of many funding initiatives over the years to expand the internet. The internet was created before Gore was in congress.
1. Until very recently, end games have been the weak point of computer programs. Not withstanding end-game databases, which allow them to play a few endings perfectly, they have trouble making plans if there are more than a half-dozen pieces on the board. Recently, they've gotten a lot better, but they are still far from perfect.
2. Openings should be a strong point for computers, but Gary got an advantage in the opening in *every* game in the match. As you point out, the problem for computers is that humans look at their opponents openings, try to figure out weak points, and prepare traps for their opponents. Computers don't do this yet.
3. As you say, in the middle game, computers display a strange dichotomy. In quiet positions, they make stupid moves. E.g., in a couple games with Gary the computer played h3 (P-KR3), a move that had nothing to do with the game and weakened the kingside. On the other hand, they are deadly tacticians. Once Gary commited to an attack, things became tactical and the computer was very tough to beat; it found lots of weird-looking defenses that just barely worked.
What's impressive to me is that Kramnik is beating Fritz quite handily (2.5-0.5 at the moment) at a task for which Fritz is immensely better than the average human. Comparing Fritz to the average chess player is like comparing a Formula One race car to the average horse. (Imagine if there were a few dozen horses in the world who could run 250 mph.)
A later post pointed out that Linus was wrong. They actually did both tests: one test created and destroyed threads as fast as possible; the other created 100K threads first and then killed them all.
Nah. Large numbers of malicious identities vouching for each other is actually good. As soon as you figure out that one of them is bogus, you can blacklist all of them.
There is nothing to prevent the bad client to send a copy of somebody's elses signature of the file's checksum. Public Key Authentication is used to verify whether already received data is actually from so and so. It cannot be used to authenticate not yet sent data.
I write a message that says, "File X, which has md5 sum Y, is good file." Notice that I didn't publish the content to begin with; I'm just vouching for the fact that it seems worthwhile. Then I sign that message with my private key and post to the net under the name FooBar. You see a message from FooBar, whom you trust because FooBar hasn't led you wrong in the past. You first check to make sure the message is really from FooBar by using FooBar's public key. (You kept a copy from previous messages.) If I'm not FooBar, the signature doesn't ckeck out, and you ignore the message---maybe 512 bytes wasted. If I am FooBar, it does check out. Then you look for a file named X with md5 sum Y. If you find it, you download it. If you find a server that tells you the sum is Y but then gives you something with a different sum, you have found a bogus server, and you don't use that server anymore.
If bogus servers are a big problem, then you need to identify good servers, again using a web of trust. I.e., periodically send out messages that look like "The following servers seem to be bogus: X, Y, Z". (Bogus means that they are lying about the md5 sums of their content.) Again, you sign those messages so that people who trust you can believe the results.
It is absolutely true that someone can trade good stuff for a year to become trusted, and then suddenly serve up junk. But of course, they can only do that once or twice. Then they aren't trusted anymore. And in the mean time, they have served up lots of good stuff.
Mr Chen apparently does not understand public key cryptography. Using a "web of trust" does in fact work.
The author writes
For the uninitiated, checksums work by examining a file and creating a string that "fingerprints" the data. It can be used in many situations, but the most common application is to verify that a file has been correctly transfered. The basic idea, in relation to P2P, is that every file on a user's computer is checksummed, and this checksum is then published to everyone else. Then, it may be possible to create a directory of "correct" checksums, to make sure you are actually downloading what you want. Although this idea works for newsgroups and some other centralized services, it does not with P2P. Basically, it comes down to the fact that you must trust whomever is actually doing the checksumming, or else they can just lie and publish false checksums. In the case of P2P networks, the checksumming is done by the same person you want to figure out if you can trust! As far as I know, this is an unresolvable problem.
This is not an unresolvable problem at all; this is where web of trust comes in. The basic idea is for the publisher to sign the checksum using his or her private key. Others can then verify the signature using the publishers public key. This allows me to verify, using only a few bytes of information, that a publisher named SecretAgent did indeed publish a file. If I know that SecretAgent has previously published a lot of "good" files, then the file is probably good. If I don't have any experience with SecretAgent, but I do know that PrivateBenji is trustworthy, and PrivateBenji vouches for SecretAgent, then the file is probably good.
The author fundamentally misunderstands webs of trust:
Another idea that is often proposed is moderation, specifically "webs of trust." That is, people keep lists of people they trust, and then they implicitly trust (often with diminishing degree) the people they trust, and so on. In the context of P2P, the each user would then receive a "trust rating," reflecting the number of people that trust them. However, this can also be defeated fairly easily, by creating groups of malicious users that trust each other - then, untrustworthy users may have high scores leading to problems in the future. This kind of fraud has happened on eBay, where people give themselves recommendations to mislead future partners.
A web of trust is not a "trust rating" ala eBay. A web of trust is a specific group of people who vouch for each other. Creating a malicious group of people who trust each other does not cause problems. (In fact, it can actually help.) If I trust A, based on experience, and if A trusts B, based on experience, then I can probably trust B. The fact that C, D, and E are malicious doesn't cause problems, because neither A nor B trusts them.
Correction: it's very difficult to make a profit selling open-source software. But RedHat isn't trying to do that. They are selling all sorts of services that are needed when companies use such software. RedHat is a service company, not a software vendor.
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Ummm. Canadian Content laws? Which dicatate that at least x% of the music played is by Canadian artists? And God Forbid someone would want to watch Fox News...
When you compare prices, you generally pick the cheapest prices available. For Linux, that comes to $0.00 if you're willing to put up with support equivalent to Microsoft's.
If you want to pick some arbitrary source for Linux that costs a lot more than that, then let's be fair and pick an expensive version of Windows, too. (I'd gladly sell you a copy of Windows for $50,000,000. Does that mean that Linux is almost 50 million dollars cheaper than Windows?)
Back in the early 80's, color CRT's started to become available. People's reaction was remarkably similar to current reaction to 3-D desktops. Some people thought is was pretty, and that was enough. Lots of people wondered what good it was, and whether expending more than one bit per pixel was really a good use of memory. Would X become bloated? Would bit-blit still work? Some programmers who liked black and white better because they found it easier to read.
True, smugness isn't a monopoly. But I'd have to say Canadians have plenty of it. Here's my favorite story: I was walking through downtown Waterloo, Ont. one Sunday morning. An old lady was pulled over with a map spread out on her front fender, obviously completely lost. Turned out she was driving back home to Guelph from winter in Florida and had taken the wrong exit. After I showed her how to get there, she said, "I'm so glad to be back in Canada! No American would ever stop and help me like you did. Those people are so rude!" I considered a few nasty come-backs, but ultimately just smiled and walked away.
Climate is as good as the northern tier of the US, which also sucks. Which is why it's being depopulated as people move to nicer places.
Wages are low, and the cost of living is not nearly low in proportion. Well, that was 10 years ago, maybe things have changed.
Taxes are really, really high, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what I was getting for them. Health care was free, but it totally sucked compared to the US. Canadians who didn't want to wait 6mo for a routine procedure commonly went to the US and paid. I wasn't on welfare; maybe if I had been I'd feel differently.
I dunno. I lived up there for a few years. Anyone who puts up with the climate, wages, taxes, Canadian Content laws, utterly rampant political correctness, and (worst of all) the unbelievably smug, supercilious attitude toward anything non-Canadian cannot be all that intelligent.
Digging a little further also didn't turn up any support for your contention. The closest I found was that if the Florida courts had ordered a state-wide recount of all rejected ballots, which no one including Gore asked for, then Gore might have won. (Or not.)
So my question is, did you provide the citations in the hope that people would believe your interpretation without bothering to read them?
Oh, come on. Vog Orbis Q6 is, for all practical purposes, audibly indistinguishable from FLAC. I'd be willing to bet significant amounts of money that you cannot reliably detect the different on any actual musical recording.
Well, if you don't like them, you don't like them; I won't try to convince you that your taste is wrong. However, your stated reasons for disliking SF seem odd.
Personnally, I find that SF is usually more concerned about a good story than other genres. A typical non-SF novel (at least these days) seems far more concerned with the minutia of human relationships than any "story." Not that there's anything wrong with that. To pick a random example, I read "High Fidelity" last week. Excellent book. However, there is basically no "story" at all. It's all about the emotions of humorously disfunctional people. Of course, there's a school of literature critism that says that character development is everything and plot doesn't matter. If that's your point, I simply disagree. Luckily, there seem to be plenty of authors that cater to each of our tastes.
As far as pretentiousness and quality of writing goes, it seems about equal to non-SF. Some is pretentious, some is not. Can anything match the pretentiousness or political bile of Leon Uris or Norman Mailer?
No, I think you're wrong. It is trivial. It wasn't done because the physical media (VCRs) didn't support it. Once the physical media supported it, it was completely trivial.
Back in the 1970's, it was obvious that widespread use of solar energy was just around the corner. After all, it was clear that we would run out of oil by the mid-1980's at the latest. So people actually studied the environmental costs of solar power. One of the more amusing findings was that we could expect hundreds of deaths per year due to homeowners falling off their roofs while trying to install or repair solar panels.
I think basing the new system on Debian (or any other existing distribution) would be a mistake. Not for technical reasons, but political ones. A new distribution would have a coolness factor that would attract new contributers, and also attract some contributers from existing projects. People would have a sense that they were getting in on the ground floor and creating something important. There would be a sense that everyone was starting from the same point, and that influence and leadership would be based on merit.
Contrast that with using an existing distribution. First, a lot of potential contributers don't see it as particularly new or cool, so they're less likely to join. Second, there is an entrenched contributer base. A lot of the old timers who have been working on the distribution feel somewhat put off by the new folks who want to change stuff, and the new guys feel that they're at a disadvantage in getting their ideas heard. Third, if you pick any existing distribution, there are a fairly large group of potential contributers who don't like that distribution for one reason or another. It doesn't really matter why---it still has an effect.
Start from scratch. Borrow useful GPL'ed code from everywhere. The beauty of GPL is that you can use a lot of the work done by Debian, RedHat, etc., without trying to work within those organizations.
I play a lot of chess, and I "prune search trees" all the time. Whenever I way to myself "oops, that loses a piece; no need to look further" I have pruned a search tree.
During a Capitol Hill press conference today, DNC Chairman Roy Romer implied that President Bush may be responsible for recent geomagnetic anomalies. "Is it a coincidence that these problems are happening after one of the worst weeks for U.S. troops in Iraq since 9/11? And isn't it interesting that Haliburton, a corporation with close ties to the Vise President, is heavily involved in both Iraq and in magnetic sensing technology?" He went on to call for a special investigator.
...except parse a program that isn't indented correctly :-)
-mike
J.S. Bach had over 20 children and in the opinion of many was the greatest composer who ever lived. He was also probably the greatest keyboard player of his day, and an expert on pipe organs.
I dunno. In my late 30's I went with the flow and moved from programming to managing programmers. After a few years, I was doing fine, but I realized that my life kinda sucked. All the stuff I really enjoyed doing, I didn't have any time to do anymore. So I moved back into programming and haven't regretted it for a minute. I'm 47, working with people ranging from early 20's to early 40's, and I really don't notice any agism. Of course, maybe they're mocking me and I don't notice; my eyesight isn't what it once was :-)
The "major funding" he took credit for wasn't to "create" the internet, it was one of many funding initiatives over the years to expand the internet. The internet was created before Gore was in congress.
1. Until very recently, end games have been the weak point of computer programs. Not withstanding end-game databases, which allow them to play a few endings perfectly, they have trouble making plans if there are more than a half-dozen pieces on the board. Recently, they've gotten a lot better, but they are still far from perfect.
2. Openings should be a strong point for computers, but Gary got an advantage in the opening in *every* game in the match. As you point out, the problem for computers is that humans look at their opponents openings, try to figure out weak points, and prepare traps for their opponents. Computers don't do this yet.
3. As you say, in the middle game, computers display a strange dichotomy. In quiet positions, they make stupid moves. E.g., in a couple games with Gary the computer played h3 (P-KR3), a move that had nothing to do with the game and weakened the kingside. On the other hand, they are deadly tacticians. Once Gary commited to an attack, things became tactical and the computer was very tough to beat; it found lots of weird-looking defenses that just barely worked.
What's impressive to me is that Kramnik is beating Fritz quite handily (2.5-0.5 at the moment) at a task for which Fritz is immensely better than the average human. Comparing Fritz to the average chess player is like comparing a Formula One race car to the average horse. (Imagine if there were a few dozen horses in the world who could run 250 mph.)
A later post pointed out that Linus was wrong. They actually did both tests: one test created and destroyed threads as fast as possible; the other created 100K threads first and then killed them all.
Nah. Large numbers of malicious identities vouching for each other is actually good. As soon as you figure out that one of them is bogus, you can blacklist all of them.
I write a message that says, "File X, which has md5 sum Y, is good file." Notice that I didn't publish the content to begin with; I'm just vouching for the fact that it seems worthwhile. Then I sign that message with my private key and post to the net under the name FooBar. You see a message from FooBar, whom you trust because FooBar hasn't led you wrong in the past. You first check to make sure the message is really from FooBar by using FooBar's public key. (You kept a copy from previous messages.) If I'm not FooBar, the signature doesn't ckeck out, and you ignore the message---maybe 512 bytes wasted. If I am FooBar, it does check out. Then you look for a file named X with md5 sum Y. If you find it, you download it. If you find a server that tells you the sum is Y but then gives you something with a different sum, you have found a bogus server, and you don't use that server anymore.
If bogus servers are a big problem, then you need to identify good servers, again using a web of trust. I.e., periodically send out messages that look like "The following servers seem to be bogus: X, Y, Z". (Bogus means that they are lying about the md5 sums of their content.) Again, you sign those messages so that people who trust you can believe the results.
It is absolutely true that someone can trade good stuff for a year to become trusted, and then suddenly serve up junk. But of course, they can only do that once or twice. Then they aren't trusted anymore. And in the mean time, they have served up lots of good stuff.
The author writes
This is not an unresolvable problem at all; this is where web of trust comes in. The basic idea is for the publisher to sign the checksum using his or her private key. Others can then verify the signature using the publishers public key. This allows me to verify, using only a few bytes of information, that a publisher named SecretAgent did indeed publish a file. If I know that SecretAgent has previously published a lot of "good" files, then the file is probably good. If I don't have any experience with SecretAgent, but I do know that PrivateBenji is trustworthy, and PrivateBenji vouches for SecretAgent, then the file is probably good.
The author fundamentally misunderstands webs of trust:
A web of trust is not a "trust rating" ala eBay. A web of trust is a specific group of people who vouch for each other. Creating a malicious group of people who trust each other does not cause problems. (In fact, it can actually help.) If I trust A, based on experience, and if A trusts B, based on experience, then I can probably trust B. The fact that C, D, and E are malicious doesn't cause problems, because neither A nor B trusts them.
Windows didn't come with my computer.
Correction: it's very difficult to make a profit selling open-source software. But RedHat isn't trying to do that. They are selling all sorts of services that are needed when companies use such software. RedHat is a service company, not a software vendor.