It doesn't seem to me that line-bundle was particularly blaming Bill Gates, Windows, or Microsoft. Using extensions in filename as the identifier of file-type is a common and long-standing practice, but it's also problematic.
Is that really the way all DEs handle scripts, by the executable flag? Like I know I can rename a shell script as "test.txt" and still run it from the command line, but if I double-click on that file from Gnome, KDE, of Xfce, will it run or will it open it in a text editor?
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or something, but that's what the old MacOS used to do. Of course, it became a problem because, if you transfered the files to some other filesystem, you could lose that metadata. With OSX, Apple switched over to using extensions in order to have greater compatibility.
It doesn't completely solve the problem, though. It was still possible to change the icon of programs and documents, and I don't know of anything that prevented people from disguising a program as a document. Another option would be for the OS to use some kind of overlay on every application's icon so that you know it's an executable file. Of course, there still wouldn't be any protection against users ignoring that overlay, so it's not quite so simple.
OSX hides extensions, too, and what's arguably worse, OSX allows you to arbitrarily replace the icon of any file, thereby allowing you to disguise files more easily. Don't some Linux DEs do the same thing?
It's sort of unfortunate that we rely on filename extensions to identify file type at all. Users have a tendency to accidentally remove extensions when they're renaming if you don't hide them. But then if you hide them, then users are missing the single most important cue as to what file-type a file is.
...implying that this technology would be a suitable replacement for the HDMI cable carrying an uncompressed stream between player and TV
Or for streaming a full 1080p signal from one player to another. Consider people who have multiple TVs and computers in the same house and therefore multiple devices capable of playing HD movies. You have a movie on one device and want to play it on another. Your options right now would be to compress the video, run cable (not use wireless networking), or wait for it to buffer/copy over from one machine to another. Actually running cable might not even quite be fast enough, if it's true that you need 3Gbps, considering most consumer hardware doesn't support faster than 1Gbps ethernet.
Maybe they're looking for uncompressed (as in lossless) 1080p instead of compressed 720p? I don't have numbers, but offhand 3Gbps sounds like it could be right for that.
s for your question, a wiped drive is fairly obvious, unless you set your bios clock 100's of times and do stuff incrementally, create a range of files with chronological creation/modification/access times, populate the event logs with a smooth span of times, and not leave any smoking guns
What about a disk image? Like if I had access to a second computer with no offending files, and I imaged the contents of that drive over? Is that detectable?
What matters to me is whether it is and how much it's usable.
Yes, and that's a popular sort of opinion on this site, that "it works" is equivalent to "there's nothing wrong with it." I'm just saying that, to me, if a program stands out as clearly not being developed for the operating system I'm working on, then I count that as a problem.
Not because of anything so stupid "it offends my aesthetic sensibilities", but because if I'm noticing it as I'm using it, then to me it implies that there are probably inconsistencies with the rest of the OS that are sufficient to break my concentration. Like I said, OpenOffice is getting much better in that regard, but it's still feeling slightly out of place for me.
At this point, I don't count NeoOffice as being far different. I used NeoOffice for years, and even donated money. But that was back when OpenOffice didn't have a native OSX port. Now they look about the same, and perform about the same. Do you have anything in NeoOffice that you can point to as being better than the OpenOffice version?
Yes, iTunes has this problem on Windows. What's your point? I also felt it was a problem with Mozilla before Firefox came along, and it's still a problem with Quicktime, and Safari and Chrome to a lesser extent.
Pidgin on Windows, however, looks pretty native while still using GTK. Firefox is perhaps the reigning champion IMO for a cross-platform program that actually feels at-home on Windows, Linux, and OSX. So clearly it's possible. OpenOffice has been getting much better about this on both Windows and OSX, but it's still not-quite there as far as I'm concerned.
I haven't been a big complainer about the looks, but I can understand. It's not so much that it's horrible in itself, but it has had times where it seemed out of place on either Windows or OSX (particular OSX before it was a native application). It had the feel of a program that had been ported over from another platform-- which, fair enough, it was a program ported over from another platform. But when I'm using a program and I can tell it wasn't designed for the system I'm running it on, I count that as a problem.
I don't know what you do about it. Maybe just not trust people to do a good job?
There may be something that could be done to help. I suspect sometimes that people could be educated better and supported more, but I don't know how you accomplish that. I know recruiting is pretty bad. There's lots of work to do and a lot of people who can't find decent work. And yes, I think some of it is the commitment to a fast buck rather than robust sustainable business. I don't know how to fix that either.
You don't have to be better than someone at their job to know when they've done a good job or when they've screwed up. I'm not a very good writer, but I have some ability to identify good writing or bad writing. I'm not a programmer at all, but if a released application crashes constantly, then I might safely guess that the programmer screwed up somewhere along the line. I don't think I need to be able to run a bank all by myself in order to know that someone at AIG screwed up.
Well, if you're looking for a journalist's job, I hope that you could write one hell of a cover letter, at least.
You're right, but I can't help but wonder whether that's unfortunate. Is the most important qualification for a journalist that he can write really clever and impressive journalist-y prose? There's definitely a sort of writing you see these days in newspapers and magazines, and it's really great and pretty and reads like the sort of writing you'd expect to win awards, but it's awful.
Every time I read an article on something I know much about, it's misleading, filled with inaccuracies, buries the main idea, and often enough, completely misses the point. Plus it's hard to read because it's too flowery and self-indulgent.
All of this is just to say, maybe being able to write one hell of a cover letter isn't so much the point. Maybe it's better to find someone who's honest, thorough, and clear.
Yeah, well I'm also being terrifically unclear, I think, about a terrifically hard to grasp idea. Einstein's explanation would be both more detailed and more clear.
It's about people and companies making a professional living supplying news in a non-professional manner.... it's only people who can write good resumes that will get the job. It's the same in all industries.
I think you're right about it being a wide-spread problem. It really only took a month in my first job to realize that most people at the company-- and it was a successful company-- weren't any good at their jobs. I was awestruck and wondered, "How can a company of such incompetent people be so successful?" and then I realized it was because our competitors were equally incompetent. It didn't take me much longer of looking around and talking to people to decide that it wasn't limited to my industry. Most people are not good at their jobs.
I think that's why the banking system is in the state it's in. You have a bunch of people running these banks who aren't good at their jobs. They're doing what seems to be working for their colleagues and competitors, but it's the blind leading the blind. No one knows what they're doing.
If that doesn't fill you with dread and terror, realize that it's the same for your doctors, your policemen, and everyone else who your life depends on. They're probably not very good at their jobs and they don't know what they're doing.
It is mostly "star-struck fan time" when journalists interview the politicians and famous people.
It might actually be worse than that. Lots of journalists know that if they ask real questions and press for real answers, the person they're interviewing won't like it, and will stop submitting to the interview. The journalist will get a reputation for being difficult, and other people won't give them interviews either.
So they might not be that they're star struck, but instead kissing ass to get access. And then there's laziness. It's hard to do a good job.
Yeah, but to nitpick a nitpick about a nitpick, everyone here is sort of right. When I originally said 1 light-year, I was thinking about the fact that from the point of view from any given particle, no particle will be >1 light-year from that particle after one year (unless space-time is being warped). So from the frame of any one particle, the maximum distance another particle can have from that particle is 1 light-year.
However, the maximum distance any two particles can have from each other after a year from *any* frame of reference is 2 years (assuming no expansion of space). So I would say that I wasn't wrong, but the original nitpick was a nit worthy of being picked.
But probably you already knew that, and were just nice enough to defend my original statement.
Sorry, I may have misread you a little. So yes, if you had a point that you wanted to call a "stationary center", then from that "stationary" frame of reference, two other particles may be 2 light-years apart after a year. However, after the big bang, it would still not be possible for any two particles to be more than 1 light-year apart unless some of those particles were traveling faster than light.
No. Sorry, I know that makes all the sense in the world, except strangely that's not how it works.
Ok, so here's another really strange part: any point in space can be thought of as the "stationary center" of the big bang. When you ask "where did the big bang happen?" any point in space will serve just as well as the place. And that's not because we don't know where the location is, it's because all the points in space used to be in the same place, which was the center of the big bang. Space itself expanded.
So anyway, (and this is not talking about the big bang, but just normal physics now) imagine you're sitting on Earth and you watch two spaceships, each going in opposite directions at 99.9999% the speed of light, then after a year each will be approximately 1 light year away from you, making them 2 light years apart. However, in the same situation, if you're sitting on either spaceship, then after a year the other spaceship will only be 1 light year away.
they're trying to say that if space warping happened slightly after the big bang then that might actually mean it is possible to do it now.
Well supposedly space is warped slightly by ordinary particles, right? (gravity?) If there was a "big bang" then what happened shortly after the big bang would be more than "slight".
I think the point they were trying to make about the big bang was not that it's possible to warp space (which happens), but that it must be physically possible to warp space to such a degree so as to allow matter to travel faster than light. The theory is that, at the time of the big bang, space was expanding faster than light, so that one year after the big bang particles would be more than 1 light-year apart from each other. So that would mean that those particles were moving faster than light, and it would be an example of faster-than-light travel already happening.
Of course, I don't know how they know how fast things were moving after the big bang. Even if you were there to observe it, there wouldn't be anything periodic to compare the motion to (no sun for the earth to go around, and so no "year" measurement). But then even ignoring that, I'd think that an event like the big bang would distort time, too. But I guess some really smart mathematician must have figured it out, right?
It would be nice to see (and make sense bandwidth wise) CNN distributing their video content with embedded advertisements in torrents. How popular would they be? I'm not sure. But it would give P2P advocates a case to cry foul when the government tries to regulate the software & protocol.
Why would any of the news channels want to do that? You're suggesting it'd be great because it would invalidate the marginalization of P2P technology by media companies that are threatened by P2P activity. But then those news organizations are all owned by those same media companies.
The big media companies (including the large news organizations) want broadcast networks. It gives them control over their own product and makes competition more difficult. Even if the bittorrent would make their lives much easier, I doubt you're going to see these companies adopt its use anytime soon.
Google indexing files is at a different level than peer-to-peer communications. That a Web server is a "P2P application" is murky...
I think you're missing the point. The Internet is not a broadcast system. Communication is two-way, and there's nothing about the Internet itself that designates one computer as a "client" and another as a "server". Your computer may only be configured for being a client or a server, or you may use firewalls to block certain communications, but as far as the Internet is concerned, every computer is both a client and a server at the same time. Therefore it is a peer-to-peer network.
There's nothing murky about web servers allowing peer-to-peer file sharing. Files are made available on web servers, and then transmitted through HTTP. This file transmission is from one peer to another.
However, it's not clear in the other direction. As written, the FTP server would need to request uploads from a client. This isn't the case; uploads are client-initiated and accepted by the server.
What's the difference between a computer requesting a download from a server and a server requesting an upload from a client? Nothing if they're peers on the same network, and they're both servers. This is what I think people fail to recognize: there's nothing all that whacky and different about so-called P2P applications.
Programs like Kazaa have two basic components:
They include server software that shares the contents of a drive or directory. It doesn't really matter what protocol this server uses. It could be FTP or HTTP (no different from normal FTP or HTTP server software), except that they tend to use protocols that work more easily through firewalls.
They include the ability to find the files that other peers are making available through that protocol. This component is really no different from a search engine, though it may be specialized and decentralized.
So imagine I wrote a program that installed apache on everyone's computer, shared out a directory, and then registered with a central server which compiled and maintained an index of which files were available on which server. I would end up with something functionally equivalent to Napster but technologically equivalent to what we call "the web".
They're not trying to make peer-to-peer communication illegal at all.
This particular piece of legislation may not be trying to make it illegal, but people are trying. People are trying to vilify legitimate activity on the Internet by conflating "peer-to-peer networking" with "copyright infringment" which they're also trying to conflate with "people who give top-secret security information to terrorists".
Of course there's a problem when people are installing server software without understanding what they're doing. If someone is computer illiterate, I don't recommend that they install something like Limewire, but it's not because I think P2P is evil. I also don't recommend anyone install Apache on anything but a test machine unless they know what they're doing. Something like Limewire may itself be bad, and anything downloaded from unknown sources should be considered suspect.
But there's nothing wrong in abstract with P2P networking (including file sharing).
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It doesn't seem to me that line-bundle was particularly blaming Bill Gates, Windows, or Microsoft. Using extensions in filename as the identifier of file-type is a common and long-standing practice, but it's also problematic.
'firefox foo.html'
And there was a script in your path called "firefox\ foo.html"?
OK, I'm being ridiculous, but it's not as though CLIs are completely fool-proof either.
You think that will stop users from accidentally removing the extension? Have you ever worked helpdesk?
Murphy's Law applies. If the user can mess things up, they will.
Is that really the way all DEs handle scripts, by the executable flag? Like I know I can rename a shell script as "test.txt" and still run it from the command line, but if I double-click on that file from Gnome, KDE, of Xfce, will it run or will it open it in a text editor?
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or something, but that's what the old MacOS used to do. Of course, it became a problem because, if you transfered the files to some other filesystem, you could lose that metadata. With OSX, Apple switched over to using extensions in order to have greater compatibility.
It doesn't completely solve the problem, though. It was still possible to change the icon of programs and documents, and I don't know of anything that prevented people from disguising a program as a document. Another option would be for the OS to use some kind of overlay on every application's icon so that you know it's an executable file. Of course, there still wouldn't be any protection against users ignoring that overlay, so it's not quite so simple.
OSX hides extensions, too, and what's arguably worse, OSX allows you to arbitrarily replace the icon of any file, thereby allowing you to disguise files more easily. Don't some Linux DEs do the same thing?
It's sort of unfortunate that we rely on filename extensions to identify file type at all. Users have a tendency to accidentally remove extensions when they're renaming if you don't hide them. But then if you hide them, then users are missing the single most important cue as to what file-type a file is.
...implying that this technology would be a suitable replacement for the HDMI cable carrying an uncompressed stream between player and TV
Or for streaming a full 1080p signal from one player to another. Consider people who have multiple TVs and computers in the same house and therefore multiple devices capable of playing HD movies. You have a movie on one device and want to play it on another. Your options right now would be to compress the video, run cable (not use wireless networking), or wait for it to buffer/copy over from one machine to another. Actually running cable might not even quite be fast enough, if it's true that you need 3Gbps, considering most consumer hardware doesn't support faster than 1Gbps ethernet.
Maybe they're looking for uncompressed (as in lossless) 1080p instead of compressed 720p? I don't have numbers, but offhand 3Gbps sounds like it could be right for that.
s for your question, a wiped drive is fairly obvious, unless you set your bios clock 100's of times and do stuff incrementally, create a range of files with chronological creation/modification/access times, populate the event logs with a smooth span of times, and not leave any smoking guns
What about a disk image? Like if I had access to a second computer with no offending files, and I imaged the contents of that drive over? Is that detectable?
Just curious.
What matters to me is whether it is and how much it's usable.
Yes, and that's a popular sort of opinion on this site, that "it works" is equivalent to "there's nothing wrong with it." I'm just saying that, to me, if a program stands out as clearly not being developed for the operating system I'm working on, then I count that as a problem.
Not because of anything so stupid "it offends my aesthetic sensibilities", but because if I'm noticing it as I'm using it, then to me it implies that there are probably inconsistencies with the rest of the OS that are sufficient to break my concentration. Like I said, OpenOffice is getting much better in that regard, but it's still feeling slightly out of place for me.
At this point, I don't count NeoOffice as being far different. I used NeoOffice for years, and even donated money. But that was back when OpenOffice didn't have a native OSX port. Now they look about the same, and perform about the same. Do you have anything in NeoOffice that you can point to as being better than the OpenOffice version?
Yes, iTunes has this problem on Windows. What's your point? I also felt it was a problem with Mozilla before Firefox came along, and it's still a problem with Quicktime, and Safari and Chrome to a lesser extent.
Pidgin on Windows, however, looks pretty native while still using GTK. Firefox is perhaps the reigning champion IMO for a cross-platform program that actually feels at-home on Windows, Linux, and OSX. So clearly it's possible. OpenOffice has been getting much better about this on both Windows and OSX, but it's still not-quite there as far as I'm concerned.
I haven't been a big complainer about the looks, but I can understand. It's not so much that it's horrible in itself, but it has had times where it seemed out of place on either Windows or OSX (particular OSX before it was a native application). It had the feel of a program that had been ported over from another platform-- which, fair enough, it was a program ported over from another platform. But when I'm using a program and I can tell it wasn't designed for the system I'm running it on, I count that as a problem.
I don't know what you do about it. Maybe just not trust people to do a good job?
There may be something that could be done to help. I suspect sometimes that people could be educated better and supported more, but I don't know how you accomplish that. I know recruiting is pretty bad. There's lots of work to do and a lot of people who can't find decent work. And yes, I think some of it is the commitment to a fast buck rather than robust sustainable business. I don't know how to fix that either.
Do you know what to do about it?
You don't have to be better than someone at their job to know when they've done a good job or when they've screwed up. I'm not a very good writer, but I have some ability to identify good writing or bad writing. I'm not a programmer at all, but if a released application crashes constantly, then I might safely guess that the programmer screwed up somewhere along the line. I don't think I need to be able to run a bank all by myself in order to know that someone at AIG screwed up.
Well, if you're looking for a journalist's job, I hope that you could write one hell of a cover letter, at least.
You're right, but I can't help but wonder whether that's unfortunate. Is the most important qualification for a journalist that he can write really clever and impressive journalist-y prose? There's definitely a sort of writing you see these days in newspapers and magazines, and it's really great and pretty and reads like the sort of writing you'd expect to win awards, but it's awful.
Every time I read an article on something I know much about, it's misleading, filled with inaccuracies, buries the main idea, and often enough, completely misses the point. Plus it's hard to read because it's too flowery and self-indulgent.
All of this is just to say, maybe being able to write one hell of a cover letter isn't so much the point. Maybe it's better to find someone who's honest, thorough, and clear.
Yeah, well I'm also being terrifically unclear, I think, about a terrifically hard to grasp idea. Einstein's explanation would be both more detailed and more clear.
It's about people and companies making a professional living supplying news in a non-professional manner.... it's only people who can write good resumes that will get the job. It's the same in all industries.
I think you're right about it being a wide-spread problem. It really only took a month in my first job to realize that most people at the company-- and it was a successful company-- weren't any good at their jobs. I was awestruck and wondered, "How can a company of such incompetent people be so successful?" and then I realized it was because our competitors were equally incompetent. It didn't take me much longer of looking around and talking to people to decide that it wasn't limited to my industry. Most people are not good at their jobs.
I think that's why the banking system is in the state it's in. You have a bunch of people running these banks who aren't good at their jobs. They're doing what seems to be working for their colleagues and competitors, but it's the blind leading the blind. No one knows what they're doing.
If that doesn't fill you with dread and terror, realize that it's the same for your doctors, your policemen, and everyone else who your life depends on. They're probably not very good at their jobs and they don't know what they're doing.
It is mostly "star-struck fan time" when journalists interview the politicians and famous people.
It might actually be worse than that. Lots of journalists know that if they ask real questions and press for real answers, the person they're interviewing won't like it, and will stop submitting to the interview. The journalist will get a reputation for being difficult, and other people won't give them interviews either.
So they might not be that they're star struck, but instead kissing ass to get access. And then there's laziness. It's hard to do a good job.
... the maximum distance any two particles can have from each other after a year from *any* frame of reference is 2 light-years...
Ok, fixed that. That'll learn me to post drunk.
Yeah, but to nitpick a nitpick about a nitpick, everyone here is sort of right. When I originally said 1 light-year, I was thinking about the fact that from the point of view from any given particle, no particle will be >1 light-year from that particle after one year (unless space-time is being warped). So from the frame of any one particle, the maximum distance another particle can have from that particle is 1 light-year.
However, the maximum distance any two particles can have from each other after a year from *any* frame of reference is 2 years (assuming no expansion of space). So I would say that I wasn't wrong, but the original nitpick was a nit worthy of being picked.
But probably you already knew that, and were just nice enough to defend my original statement.
Sorry, I may have misread you a little. So yes, if you had a point that you wanted to call a "stationary center", then from that "stationary" frame of reference, two other particles may be 2 light-years apart after a year. However, after the big bang, it would still not be possible for any two particles to be more than 1 light-year apart unless some of those particles were traveling faster than light.
No. Sorry, I know that makes all the sense in the world, except strangely that's not how it works.
Ok, so here's another really strange part: any point in space can be thought of as the "stationary center" of the big bang. When you ask "where did the big bang happen?" any point in space will serve just as well as the place. And that's not because we don't know where the location is, it's because all the points in space used to be in the same place, which was the center of the big bang. Space itself expanded.
So anyway, (and this is not talking about the big bang, but just normal physics now) imagine you're sitting on Earth and you watch two spaceships, each going in opposite directions at 99.9999% the speed of light, then after a year each will be approximately 1 light year away from you, making them 2 light years apart. However, in the same situation, if you're sitting on either spaceship, then after a year the other spaceship will only be 1 light year away.
Crazy, I know. Want to know why? Read this book.
they're trying to say that if space warping happened slightly after the big bang then that might actually mean it is possible to do it now.
Well supposedly space is warped slightly by ordinary particles, right? (gravity?) If there was a "big bang" then what happened shortly after the big bang would be more than "slight".
I think the point they were trying to make about the big bang was not that it's possible to warp space (which happens), but that it must be physically possible to warp space to such a degree so as to allow matter to travel faster than light. The theory is that, at the time of the big bang, space was expanding faster than light, so that one year after the big bang particles would be more than 1 light-year apart from each other. So that would mean that those particles were moving faster than light, and it would be an example of faster-than-light travel already happening.
Of course, I don't know how they know how fast things were moving after the big bang. Even if you were there to observe it, there wouldn't be anything periodic to compare the motion to (no sun for the earth to go around, and so no "year" measurement). But then even ignoring that, I'd think that an event like the big bang would distort time, too. But I guess some really smart mathematician must have figured it out, right?
It would be nice to see (and make sense bandwidth wise) CNN distributing their video content with embedded advertisements in torrents. How popular would they be? I'm not sure. But it would give P2P advocates a case to cry foul when the government tries to regulate the software & protocol.
Why would any of the news channels want to do that? You're suggesting it'd be great because it would invalidate the marginalization of P2P technology by media companies that are threatened by P2P activity. But then those news organizations are all owned by those same media companies.
The big media companies (including the large news organizations) want broadcast networks. It gives them control over their own product and makes competition more difficult. Even if the bittorrent would make their lives much easier, I doubt you're going to see these companies adopt its use anytime soon.
Google indexing files is at a different level than peer-to-peer communications. That a Web server is a "P2P application" is murky...
I think you're missing the point. The Internet is not a broadcast system. Communication is two-way, and there's nothing about the Internet itself that designates one computer as a "client" and another as a "server". Your computer may only be configured for being a client or a server, or you may use firewalls to block certain communications, but as far as the Internet is concerned, every computer is both a client and a server at the same time. Therefore it is a peer-to-peer network.
There's nothing murky about web servers allowing peer-to-peer file sharing. Files are made available on web servers, and then transmitted through HTTP. This file transmission is from one peer to another.
However, it's not clear in the other direction. As written, the FTP server would need to request uploads from a client. This isn't the case; uploads are client-initiated and accepted by the server.
What's the difference between a computer requesting a download from a server and a server requesting an upload from a client? Nothing if they're peers on the same network, and they're both servers. This is what I think people fail to recognize: there's nothing all that whacky and different about so-called P2P applications.
Programs like Kazaa have two basic components:
So imagine I wrote a program that installed apache on everyone's computer, shared out a directory, and then registered with a central server which compiled and maintained an index of which files were available on which server. I would end up with something functionally equivalent to Napster but technologically equivalent to what we call "the web".
They're not trying to make peer-to-peer communication illegal at all.
This particular piece of legislation may not be trying to make it illegal, but people are trying. People are trying to vilify legitimate activity on the Internet by conflating "peer-to-peer networking" with "copyright infringment" which they're also trying to conflate with "people who give top-secret security information to terrorists".
Of course there's a problem when people are installing server software without understanding what they're doing. If someone is computer illiterate, I don't recommend that they install something like Limewire, but it's not because I think P2P is evil. I also don't recommend anyone install Apache on anything but a test machine unless they know what they're doing. Something like Limewire may itself be bad, and anything downloaded from unknown sources should be considered suspect.
But there's nothing wrong in abstract with P2P networking (including file sharing).