We've already had this argument (i.e. design vs. a messy blob)--well, maybe we haven't had the argument but other people have. Remember this article from earlier today? The people over at kerneltrap.org have already fought this war. Linus says it's just evolution. If you want a better (or just different) desktop (or word processor, etc), go make one.
In my brand new (and probably lame) attempt to score karma, I would like to note that the Chaos Computer Club are talked about (some) in the book, The Hacker Crackdown.
Of course, probably everyone in the Universe (except for me that is, up until about 20 min ago) already knows that Bruce Sterling has written (or co-written or edited) a number of sci fi and/or "cyber" books. This one, however, (which is not fiction--we hope:-) ) deals mostly with
the 1990 assault on hackers, when law-enforcement officials successfully arrested scores of suspected illicit hackers and other computer-based law-breakers. These raids became symbolic of the debate between fighting serious computer crime and protecting civil liberties. However, The Hacker Crackdown is about far more than a series of police sting operations. It's a lively tour of three cyberspace subcultures--the hacker underworld, the realm of the cybercops, and the idealistic culture of the cybercivil libertarians.
(quote from Amazon)
Won't this just encourage corporations to sue over copyright infringement even more?
Who cares? If every man, woman, and child runs paradies of big corporations, the companies won't have anything to gain by sueing--you can't sue everyone and get away with it.
See those names in the number one slot in this list? Wonder how that happened? Simple. This college has a lot of computers. Let me see... I'd say there's 20 in the lab I'm in now.. then there's 60-70 in the lab I work in... 10 in the mathlab and 10 in the lab in the union...
Ok, now, out of all those computers, a few of them are Macs, a few of them are Linux boxes, and a few of them are Win9x boxes. ALL the rest of them run WinNT4 or Win2K. And on all of them (except the Macs), there is some verson of prime95 running. That's a whole lotta P-90 years.
I always wondered why Macs put one menu bar across the top of the screen. It always confuses PC users terribly. Actually, that's not what confuses them, what messes them up is that they expect that once they've closed the window, the program has exited--and of course it usually hasn't. Then they double click on the program icon to restart the program and come to me to complain that they can't start the program. (But if they were paying more attention to the menu at the top of the screen they'd notice that it changed when they double clicked the program icon.)
But getting back to the subject: I have to agree with you about menu placement; i.e. placing the menu bar at the top of the screen or some other static/easy-to-find location is better than putting it at the top of the floating window. This probably helps explain why I usually maximize the windows of the programs I'm using heavily.
Also, now that I think about it, Command-W is a much better shortcut for window-close than Alt-F4 because of the distances between the keys. And it really sucks having the maximize/restore widget right next to the window-close widget (I'm always hitting maximize on accident--hate that). I guess I'm gonna have to start customizing my GUI heavily.:-) hack hack hack
If the mouse is in all ways so much superior to the keyboard for speed, what's that funny console thing doing there in Mac OS X?
It seems clear (to me) that by (finally!) putting a console into their OS, Apple is admitting that there are some times when you really need a CLI (which implies using a keyboard for input as well).
Just to really drive this into the ground.. what's the faster way to type a message? The keyboard, or the mouse (using a bunch of little buttons on the screen representing letters and numbers)? I know, I'm being silly here, I just want to make a point.
Finally, It also seems clear (to me) that the GUI (with keyboard shortcuts) and the CLI (sometimes using a mouse for copy/paste) both have there place... that's why they're both still here.
Linux is a religion these days. Really. It may not have gods, but it has a fiercly defended ideology that really does border on the metaphysical.
That's dangerous talk there, friend. If it's a religion, how long will it be before the holy war becomes real--before people start bombing factories that make Windoze products? Sounds really crazy? It is!
fnord
Naturally Linus would like to distance himself from anyone who tries to call a chunk of code a religion. Look it's fun to run Linux and give MS the finger and all that, but there's gotta be limits. You've gotta keep those sanity checks and reality checks in your code (of conduct!). If you don't, you might wind up in a very strange and dangerous place. (Maybe hanging off the side of a building threatening to jump if the boss won't let you install Linux, I don't know.) Please, please, please, never start thinking of Linux as a religion.
Try Discordianism instead. fnord It's much safer.:-)
This is good. From what I skimmed of the message, they're still advocating a review process--they're only against publishing systems that take all of the rights away from the original author(s) of the paper, and/or those systems that charge extremely high fees to allow others to view the papers.
It's important to move away from systems like that 'cause they're bad (duh). However, it's also important that there still be some form of peer review; without it, it will be impossible to seperate the actual research from the line noise.
"Funny. I always thought that PowerPoint was already at least as destructive as macro viruses to corporate productivity. You ever watch a suit fiddle with his presentation?"
That's nothing. I work at the help desk for a large computer lab for college students. Many of the professors put their class notes (in the form of MS PowerPoint files) on a campus-wide shared network drive.
When the students want the notes for a
given class, they come into the lab, find the relevant files and print them. The problem is that MS defaults to printing "Slides" and this means that it will print one PowerPoint slide per page... many of the PowerPoint files have between 30-60 slides in them. The printer gets spammed. Of course, if things were actually set up properly, there would be a limit on how many pages people could print--but there isn't. Of course, if the lusers were a little more clueful, they wouldn't send 40-60 page print jobs--but their not.
MS is really only one large part in the general web of stupidity that makes daily computing suck.
While I'm sure you're right about Apache being fairly easy to administer, and I *know* you're right that anyone who bitches about it not being `point-and-click' has no business being a network admin, this got me thinking..
Perhaps, all of the point-and-click in IIS is a design flaw (that plus installing insecure by default--that's an obvious design flaw). I mean if the product *seems* really simple to use, then some (clueless) people will start to think that it really *is* simple and not pay attention to security at all.
I guess all I'm saying is complicated or dangerous things should look that way. They should not have nice big smiley faces or dopey `OK' buttons on them.
I'm sure if corporate lear jets had been flown into the MPAA/RIAA's HQ's, most of us would have said "hey, you missed a spot!".
Laugh, you know you want to.
No I don't. Of course I don't like RIAA or the MPAA, but I'm apalled that you would say this. You're indirectly (perhaps unintentionally) advocating the wholesale slaughter of humans--just because they happen to belong to an organization you hate. Do you think that all of them are evil? What about the secretaries? The janitors? What about the daughter/son of a woman who just happened to be visiting her friend that works there at the time the jets slam into the building?
I realize that you probably didn't intend your message to be interpreted this way. I'm just trying to say that the "war on MPAA/RIAA" is not the same as, and should not be treated in the same way as the "war on terrorism".
Killing people to make a point is *wrong*. Even if the people are lawyers.
Most Terms of Service agreements say, in essence, "we promise to protect your privacy unless it becomes inconvenient e.g. if the cops ask for your personal info, we'll give it to them".
Read the fine print guys. You (probably) agreed to this when you signed up for service.
Have you ever seen "Pump Up the Volume"? At one point, all these reporters are at the post office and they want to know who the "Happy Harry Hardon" post office box is registered to. The clerk says, "I'm sorry, policy says I can't give you that information." Then the cops show up, and one of them says, "But you will give it to me." To which the clerk responds, "I certainly will." [He does].
This is normal guys. If you don't like it, write your representatives. However, given the current political climate, I doubt you'll get far.
Usually when something bad happens that I want to know about, I just get enough info so that I know what happened and that's that.
This time though, every time I wake up, I'm like: I wonder if they've attacked anything else--quick! turn on the news to make sure the *world* is still there. I suspect this impulse will fade with time though.
(Btw: did you know you can get RealPlayer feeds from http://news.bbc.co.uk ?)
Please note: some of the stuff said here might sound a little harsh, but it's not really meant to. This is not a flame.
Capitalism sucks, and we all know it.
Yes, yes, yes capitalism sucks. This isn't a totally original observation, you know. The thing is--can YOU give us something better? Until this happens, capitalism shall remain dominant.
Think about it. When Jesus Christ was up and walking around, there was still a tax collector! Tax collector implies taxes. Taxes imply money. Money implies capitalism. It's been around for a *really* *long* time. It's gonna be hard to get rid of it.
Every time I think of it, I flash back to Gödel
Gödel's Incompleteness Thm (AFAIK) says that a system P, which might be complete, can't have its completeness proven in its own system. The upshot is that there must, in any set of logical systems, be at least one logical system whose completeness or correctness is simply assumed rather than proven. I'm not sure what this has to do with capitalism. It's not really a logical system anyway. Trying to apply mathematical reasoning to capitalism is like trying to apply it to English (it's a (not very logical) system too) or something. GIGO.
Of course, maybe I should just stick to writing poetry...
Poetry has sometimes played an important role in major political and sociological changes in the past. If you want things to change, you've gotta try to change peoples minds. If you write enough poetry, perhaps you can achieve this.
You know my parents tell me that back when they were young, they used to read a lot more science fiction than they do now.
Why'd they stop? 'Cause all the "dark future" stuff they read about kept coming true! Reality TV, Corporate owned gov'ments, cameras in your toliet...Gee, I guess we really do live in interesting times.
I like Sci-Fi (trek, B5, etc) but some fantasy novels just try too hard and end up making me bored. Should I even try to make it through LOTR?
For you, probably the answer would be: no. If you're mostly into just sci-fi, then most any fantasy, including Tolkien, will probably fail to excite you.
I say this on the basis that it used to apply to me. (I know, I know--that's no way to make an argument, but I'm doing it anyway.) I was all sci-fi and no fantasy when I was a kid. In high school, I was forced to read _The Hobbit_ and _The Fellowship of the Ring_ and I hated them. I can't stress that enough. My favorite character, Gandalf (favorite because: he's a wizard = posessor of secret knowlege = closest thing to a techie in a fantasy world) got killed off half-way through _Fellowship_ and the reading got that much worse from then on out.
Later on--years later--I learned what kind of a role the LOTR trilogy had in the grand scheme of things and I started to gain some respect for it. Then, for a while, my friends and I were into Magic: the Gathering. After we got tired of it, we tried Middle Earth: The Wizards and I got to see decent pictures of all those characters I'd read about a million years ago.
When they announced the movies, I decided to go back and finally make the effort to read the trilogy (at some point, I had listened to it as a series of abridged audio books). It went surprisingly well. The neat part was that I was already vaguely familiar with lots of general stuff from the card game and from hearing my friends talk about stuff from the books--stuff like Palantiri (sp), Sauron, Orodruin (sp?), Galadrial, hobbits, ringwraiths, Gollum (he's not technically a hobbit exactly), etc. Then, when reading the books, I got to learn how all these general pieces of information fit together to tell the story. I mean I already knew, for example, that the quest was to destroy The One Ring (a.k.a. The Ruling Ring, Isildur's Bane, The Precious, or just The Ring), and I even had a pretty good idea about how the goal was going to be acheived (because of the audio books), but I didn't know about all the adventure's they were going to have on the way (Faramir is cool!).
But back to the original question: Should you read LOTR? Maybe not, but you may want to make an effort to become familiar with it because it's actually embeded in popular culture. e.g. If you know what to listen for, there are Middle Earth references in a couple of Led Zepplin songs:
"In the darkest depths of *Mordor*...but *Gollum* and *The Evil One*...", "...*ringwraiths* are out in black." There's lots more I could say about it, but I'm tired and I have to go to class soon and I think I've "gushed" enough for one message.
P.S. oh yeah, almost forgot..
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
--
Furry cows moo and decompress.
tounge-in-cheek--recursion--question
on
Digital Copyright
·
· Score: 1
Okay, I gotta ask.. How would Ms. Jessica Litman feel if people violated the copyright of her book that's on the same topic?:-)
Patrick has this to say at the bottom of the page:
My main motivation was to "out-trick the tricker". I thought the chances of me making any money were very remote.... [As soon as... it was obvious he wasn't going to pay up,] I was just trying to avoid the situation where he said that I had made up either the whole thing or the emails where he agreed to multiple files.
I think the only reason Mike offered the $5000 prize was because he was convinced that the challenge was impossible. He probably thought that no one would ever take him up on it anyway. When I showed an interest, he couldn't believe his luck and allowed me to bend the rules a bit so he could get my $100.... This should be a lesson to anyone else who wants to set (or take) such challenges with high stakes.
When you set a (seemingly) impossible challenge, you've got to be really careful. Someone might just find a way to complete it. Especially if you don't give them very well-defined rules. I mean, obviously the whole reason why the person will be likely to find some alternative approach that borders on cheating is presicely because the task your setting for them is next to impossible. Remember Kirk and no-win scenerio...
One of the solution paths people often forget about is the one where you re-define the problem to something that's (moreeasily)solvable.:-)
Seriously, I kid you not, just last Wednesday in a computer class we were talking about possible computer interfaces for blind people and I mentioned the idea of using a big array of pins. I got the idea, of course, from those little toys with all the pins where you push the pins with your hand, then lay it on its side so that the impression of your hand is left in the pins.
Hey guys, what about Pirates of Silicon Valley? If Woz doesn't count as a hacker (at least in sense 6) than I don't know who does. He also understands the value of humor and play for their own sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Minor correction--Ok so it's just slightly yesterday now instead of today.
Of course, probably everyone in the Universe (except for me that is, up until about 20 min ago) already knows that Bruce Sterling has written (or co-written or edited) a number of sci fi and/or "cyber" books. This one, however, (which is not fiction--we hope :-) ) deals mostly with
Ok, now, out of all those computers, a few of them are Macs, a few of them are Linux boxes, and a few of them are Win9x boxes. ALL the rest of them run WinNT4 or Win2K. And on all of them (except the Macs), there is some verson of prime95 running. That's a whole lotta P-90 years.
I always wondered why Macs put one menu bar across the top of the screen. It always confuses PC users terribly. Actually, that's not what confuses them, what messes them up is that they expect that once they've closed the window, the program has exited--and of course it usually hasn't. Then they double click on the program icon to restart the program and come to me to complain that they can't start the program. (But if they were paying more attention to the menu at the top of the screen they'd notice that it changed when they double clicked the program icon.)
:-) hack hack hack
But getting back to the subject: I have to agree with you about menu placement; i.e. placing the menu bar at the top of the screen or some other static/easy-to-find location is better than putting it at the top of the floating window. This probably helps explain why I usually maximize the windows of the programs I'm using heavily.
Also, now that I think about it, Command-W is a much better shortcut for window-close than Alt-F4 because of the distances between the keys. And it really sucks having the maximize/restore widget right next to the window-close widget (I'm always hitting maximize on accident--hate that). I guess I'm gonna have to start customizing my GUI heavily.
If the mouse is in all ways so much superior to the keyboard for speed, what's that funny console thing doing there in Mac OS X?
It seems clear (to me) that by (finally!) putting a console into their OS, Apple is admitting that there are some times when you really need a CLI (which implies using a keyboard for input as well).
Just to really drive this into the ground.. what's the faster way to type a message? The keyboard, or the mouse (using a bunch of little buttons on the screen representing letters and numbers)? I know, I'm being silly here, I just want to make a point.
Finally, It also seems clear (to me) that the GUI (with keyboard shortcuts) and the CLI (sometimes using a mouse for copy/paste) both have there place... that's why they're both still here.
fnord
Naturally Linus would like to distance himself from anyone who tries to call a chunk of code a religion. Look it's fun to run Linux and give MS the finger and all that, but there's gotta be limits. You've gotta keep those sanity checks and reality checks in your code (of conduct!). If you don't, you might wind up in a very strange and dangerous place. (Maybe hanging off the side of a building threatening to jump if the boss won't let you install Linux, I don't know.) Please, please, please, never start thinking of Linux as a religion.
Try Discordianism instead. fnord It's much safer. :-)
This is good. From what I skimmed of the message, they're still advocating a review process--they're only against publishing systems that take all of the rights away from the original author(s) of the paper, and/or those systems that charge extremely high fees to allow others to view the papers.
It's important to move away from systems like that 'cause they're bad (duh). However, it's also important that there still be some form of peer review; without it, it will be impossible to seperate the actual research from the line noise.
When the students want the notes for a given class, they come into the lab, find the relevant files and print them. The problem is that MS defaults to printing "Slides" and this means that it will print one PowerPoint slide per page... many of the PowerPoint files have between 30-60 slides in them. The printer gets spammed. Of course, if things were actually set up properly, there would be a limit on how many pages people could print--but there isn't. Of course, if the lusers were a little more clueful, they wouldn't send 40-60 page print jobs--but their not.
MS is really only one large part in the general web of stupidity that makes daily computing suck.
While I'm sure you're right about Apache being fairly easy to administer, and I *know* you're right that anyone who bitches about it not being `point-and-click' has no business being a network admin, this got me thinking..
Perhaps, all of the point-and-click in IIS is a design flaw (that plus installing insecure by default--that's an obvious design flaw). I mean if the product *seems* really simple to use, then some (clueless) people will start to think that it really *is* simple and not pay attention to security at all.
I guess all I'm saying is complicated or dangerous things should look that way. They should not have nice big smiley faces or dopey `OK' buttons on them.
That's fine, just as long as you don't start killing people.
No I don't. Of course I don't like RIAA or the MPAA, but I'm apalled that you would say this. You're indirectly (perhaps unintentionally) advocating the wholesale slaughter of humans--just because they happen to belong to an organization you hate. Do you think that all of them are evil? What about the secretaries? The janitors? What about the daughter/son of a woman who just happened to be visiting her friend that works there at the time the jets slam into the building?
I realize that you probably didn't intend your message to be interpreted this way. I'm just trying to say that the "war on MPAA/RIAA" is not the same as, and should not be treated in the same way as the "war on terrorism".
Killing people to make a point is *wrong*. Even if the people are lawyers.
Most Terms of Service agreements say, in essence, "we promise to protect your privacy unless it becomes inconvenient e.g. if the cops ask for your personal info, we'll give it to them".
Read the fine print guys. You (probably) agreed to this when you signed up for service.
Have you ever seen "Pump Up the Volume"? At one point, all these reporters are at the post office and they want to know who the "Happy Harry Hardon" post office box is registered to. The clerk says, "I'm sorry, policy says I can't give you that information." Then the cops show up, and one of them says, "But you will give it to me." To which the clerk responds, "I certainly will." [He does].
This is normal guys. If you don't like it, write your representatives. However, given the current political climate, I doubt you'll get far.
Usually when something bad happens that I want to know about, I just get enough info so that I know what happened and that's that.
This time though, every time I wake up, I'm like: I wonder if they've attacked anything else--quick! turn on the news to make sure the *world* is still there. I suspect this impulse will fade with time though.
(Btw: did you know you can get RealPlayer feeds from http://news.bbc.co.uk ?)
Yes, yes, yes capitalism sucks. This isn't a totally original observation, you know. The thing is--can YOU give us something better? Until this happens, capitalism shall remain dominant.
Think about it. When Jesus Christ was up and walking around, there was still a tax collector! Tax collector implies taxes. Taxes imply money. Money implies capitalism. It's been around for a *really* *long* time. It's gonna be hard to get rid of it.
Gödel's Incompleteness Thm (AFAIK) says that a system P, which might be complete, can't have its completeness proven in its own system. The upshot is that there must, in any set of logical systems, be at least one logical system whose completeness or correctness is simply assumed rather than proven. I'm not sure what this has to do with capitalism. It's not really a logical system anyway. Trying to apply mathematical reasoning to capitalism is like trying to apply it to English (it's a (not very logical) system too) or something. GIGO.Poetry has sometimes played an important role in major political and sociological changes in the past. If you want things to change, you've gotta try to change peoples minds. If you write enough poetry, perhaps you can achieve this.
Why'd they stop? 'Cause all the "dark future" stuff they read about kept coming true! Reality TV, Corporate owned gov'ments, cameras in your toliet...Gee, I guess we really do live in interesting times.
It's a Brave New 1984.
For you, probably the answer would be: no. If you're mostly into just sci-fi, then most any fantasy, including Tolkien, will probably fail to excite you.
I say this on the basis that it used to apply to me. (I know, I know--that's no way to make an argument, but I'm doing it anyway.) I was all sci-fi and no fantasy when I was a kid. In high school, I was forced to read _The Hobbit_ and _The Fellowship of the Ring_ and I hated them. I can't stress that enough. My favorite character, Gandalf (favorite because: he's a wizard = posessor of secret knowlege = closest thing to a techie in a fantasy world) got killed off half-way through _Fellowship_ and the reading got that much worse from then on out.
Later on--years later--I learned what kind of a role the LOTR trilogy had in the grand scheme of things and I started to gain some respect for it. Then, for a while, my friends and I were into Magic: the Gathering. After we got tired of it, we tried Middle Earth: The Wizards and I got to see decent pictures of all those characters I'd read about a million years ago.
When they announced the movies, I decided to go back and finally make the effort to read the trilogy (at some point, I had listened to it as a series of abridged audio books). It went surprisingly well. The neat part was that I was already vaguely familiar with lots of general stuff from the card game and from hearing my friends talk about stuff from the books--stuff like Palantiri (sp), Sauron, Orodruin (sp?), Galadrial, hobbits, ringwraiths, Gollum (he's not technically a hobbit exactly), etc. Then, when reading the books, I got to learn how all these general pieces of information fit together to tell the story. I mean I already knew, for example, that the quest was to destroy The One Ring (a.k.a. The Ruling Ring, Isildur's Bane, The Precious, or just The Ring), and I even had a pretty good idea about how the goal was going to be acheived (because of the audio books), but I didn't know about all the adventure's they were going to have on the way (Faramir is cool!).
But back to the original question: Should you read LOTR? Maybe not, but you may want to make an effort to become familiar with it because it's actually embeded in popular culture. e.g. If you know what to listen for, there are Middle Earth references in a couple of Led Zepplin songs: "In the darkest depths of *Mordor*...but *Gollum* and *The Evil One*...", "...*ringwraiths* are out in black." There's lots more I could say about it, but I'm tired and I have to go to class soon and I think I've "gushed" enough for one message.
P.S. oh yeah, almost forgot..
--
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Okay, I gotta ask.. How would Ms. Jessica Litman feel if people violated the copyright of her book that's on the same topic? :-)
One of the solution paths people often forget about is the one where you re-define the problem to something that's (moreeasily)solvable. :-)
Seriously, I kid you not, just last Wednesday in a computer class we were talking about possible computer interfaces for blind people and I mentioned the idea of using a big array of pins. I got the idea, of course, from those little toys with all the pins where you push the pins with your hand, then lay it on its side so that the impression of your hand is left in the pins.
sigh... Every week of news seems to give me one more reason to move out of the U.S.