While working at a major research institute library, the head librarian asked a few of us whether we could burn a book. Any book, for example some Office 95 manual that nobody has checked out since way into the last millennium. There were a few muffled answers, which turned into more of a philosophical question: Would you willingly destroy knowledge (or art, as with the stories of religions), knowing that on one side it would make space for new books which we would otherwise have to pass up, and on the other side someone might turn up, wanting to use it for some purpose we didn't imagine at the time of destroying it?
Not everything, not by far. The DRY principle still applies - Don't version control stuff that is already in another repository or files that can be generated from your own or others' files automatically (i.e., binaries, but not personal settings). Otherwise, you'll be wasting lots of disk + network resources (when others' files are updated), you'll get a much more complicated repository, and you might end up with legal liabilities for distributing without permission.
Bingo! This must be swallowing up billions or trillions of work hours every year. If we could just teach for loops, if statements and GNU tools (grep, find, rename and a DVCS would be a good start) to the office workers, we could save so much...
It would be interesting to hear from the producers themselves what would make them develop for Linux. More unified platform? DRM acceptance? Or is it uniquely a question of number of users? The last one rings a bit strange, since both Mac and Linux are very small market segments.
While in secondary school I heard that someone I know had overheard her daughter (13 or so) discuss with her friends framing their teacher for molestation because she (the teacher) was being an ass. Of course the mother got hugely upset with her daughter, but is it any wonder that people are super paranoid about everything from childhood photos (especially if it's not your own kid) to helping out a lost or hurt child?
At a recent CERN colloquium, Evangelos Eleftheriou of IBM Research advocated using Flash cache & SSDs as an extra storage layer between RAM and old-fashioned harddisks. I think the argument was simply that price and performance is between both, and is foreseen to stay that way for the foreseeable future, so it's the most economic option for now.
The fact that it *can* affect sleep and concentration is no reason to say that it *always* will, and what you ingest (in any way) legally should be nobody's business! It seems like some people think that N drinks per week on average means N/7 drinks every day, or N/21 drinks every work day. Lots of people get stone drunk every Saturday and work just fine on Monday. And even if they don't, there's such a thing as catching up on slack, or just plain being more productive than the next guy.
D'you know, I almost didn't post this for fear that someone would read it and think, "So he gets stone drunk every Saturday"? That is not how the world should be.
Who has ever worked as a developer without admin rights without going crazy? I mean, unless you're working with Windows application programming, in which case you have pretty much one choice for IDE, why would you ever let yourself be constrained to the handful of apps that some random assembly of developers and/or managers have sanctified? I have a script to install all the software I need - It's some 40 packages, takes about five minutes to install, and covers everything from PNGCrush to Eclipse. I probably install on average two packages per day, if only to do some one-time task or check if it's a better alternative for something else. Not having admin rights would be like those developers (they do exist) who never use power tools because they might "stop working" suddenly and then they'll need to work in the equivalent of Notepad while the sysadmins restart, reboot, and/or reinstall.
The GNOME menu is great, but I wish Synaptic was anything near as navigable. Or maybe they should simply drop it for Ubuntu Software Center, since it's clearly superior unless you're already at the apt-get level.
Everywhere you come across "obscurity" in security, it's about the algorithm - It should not be enough to know the algorithm to easily recover the password or trick the verification process. True security should be equally hard to break for the original developer, the admin, the user, or Mr Schneier.
There seems to be a very common notion that the study and implementation of usability is for wimps and people who should have kept out of science, real nerds/geeks don't need no stinkin' GUI, user testing is boring and expensive, you see where this is going. And the really sad thing is that managers don't care much either, as long as the result is below their personal pain threshold. So we end up with interfaces which are barely usable to computer literates, and thus unusable to anyone with less experience. This has nothing to do with OSS, it's an industry thing.
Maybe it would improve if there was some way to sort the extension search results (in-browser and on the web site) by reported stability. Maybe this could even be generated automatically, by correlating crash reports with installed extensions.
Sorry, but you might want to check up on what web sites, extensions and spyware you're running. Computers have this annoying habit of doing what you tell them to do, rather than what you want them to do. I've been using Firefox since 0.6, and I keep seeing these comments about huge problems, never* experiencing them myself. I don't have high end machines, and I've never had more than 2 GB of RAM. Been running Firefox on Windows XP, then FreeBSD (keep up the good work!) and now Ubuntu.
* As in, whenever I do, it's trivial to identify the culprit/on the web site/ - Java applets (those were the days), Flash (hi Flashblock), or JavaScript. The only site that has been consistently slow is Delicious since those yahoos took over, and the only extension that has been slowing things to a halt is, ironically, NoScript.
Depends which settings are available. If the users can have a not-so-arcane interface to change the time, startup passwords and which features (as in "wi-fi", *not* "3-com PCI-e wireless mumbo-jumbo v3.14") they want to enable, that's all for the better.
"Assumptions about metaphysics are unprovable/unfalsifiable, so science can say nothing about it (the very topic of this article)"
Sorry, no. As explained elsewhere, if there is no evidence for something (e.g., an afterlife), it is as nonsensical to believe in it as believing in absolutely anything else for which there is no evidence (e.g., a teapot floating between Earth and the moon, Thor, Yahweh, fairies or little green men). Without evidence, all of those are equally unlikely, i.e. somewhere between zero and very low (at least if people have been looking for evidence for a long time).
After reading the Discworld series and any other Pratchett books I could get my hands on, I find that quote the most obviously nonsensical part of all his writings. To see why, simply replace "justice" and/or "mercy" with any compound phenomenon such as "ocean" or "wind". I believe we have firmly established scientific evidence for both, and yet they do not appear from looking at their individual components. Gert Nygårdshaug put it very well in "Fortellernes marked" ("The Storytellers' Market"), saying essentially that the original meaning of "belief" requires evidence to back it up, and everything else is superstition.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a Chernobyl chicken!
Sorry, hard to measure. Which apparently lots of people think is the same as impossible to measure, or fuzzy (== social scienc-y == boring).
While working at a major research institute library, the head librarian asked a few of us whether we could burn a book. Any book, for example some Office 95 manual that nobody has checked out since way into the last millennium. There were a few muffled answers, which turned into more of a philosophical question: Would you willingly destroy knowledge (or art, as with the stories of religions), knowing that on one side it would make space for new books which we would otherwise have to pass up, and on the other side someone might turn up, wanting to use it for some purpose we didn't imagine at the time of destroying it?
Not everything, not by far. The DRY principle still applies - Don't version control stuff that is already in another repository or files that can be generated from your own or others' files automatically (i.e., binaries, but not personal settings). Otherwise, you'll be wasting lots of disk + network resources (when others' files are updated), you'll get a much more complicated repository, and you might end up with legal liabilities for distributing without permission.
Bingo! This must be swallowing up billions or trillions of work hours every year. If we could just teach for loops, if statements and GNU tools (grep, find, rename and a DVCS would be a good start) to the office workers, we could save so much...
Sounds like it's time for some pink box testing
It would be interesting to hear from the producers themselves what would make them develop for Linux. More unified platform? DRM acceptance? Or is it uniquely a question of number of users? The last one rings a bit strange, since both Mac and Linux are very small market segments.
How about years? It's still September...
+5, sad.
Ouch!
While in secondary school I heard that someone I know had overheard her daughter (13 or so) discuss with her friends framing their teacher for molestation because she (the teacher) was being an ass. Of course the mother got hugely upset with her daughter, but is it any wonder that people are super paranoid about everything from childhood photos (especially if it's not your own kid) to helping out a lost or hurt child?
At a recent CERN colloquium, Evangelos Eleftheriou of IBM Research advocated using Flash cache & SSDs as an extra storage layer between RAM and old-fashioned harddisks. I think the argument was simply that price and performance is between both, and is foreseen to stay that way for the foreseeable future, so it's the most economic option for now.
Then there's the final candidate, who's been an axe-murdering hermit since '93.
The fact that it *can* affect sleep and concentration is no reason to say that it *always* will, and what you ingest (in any way) legally should be nobody's business! It seems like some people think that N drinks per week on average means N/7 drinks every day, or N/21 drinks every work day. Lots of people get stone drunk every Saturday and work just fine on Monday. And even if they don't, there's such a thing as catching up on slack, or just plain being more productive than the next guy.
D'you know, I almost didn't post this for fear that someone would read it and think, "So he gets stone drunk every Saturday"? That is not how the world should be.
Who has ever worked as a developer without admin rights without going crazy? I mean, unless you're working with Windows application programming, in which case you have pretty much one choice for IDE, why would you ever let yourself be constrained to the handful of apps that some random assembly of developers and/or managers have sanctified? I have a script to install all the software I need - It's some 40 packages, takes about five minutes to install, and covers everything from PNGCrush to Eclipse. I probably install on average two packages per day, if only to do some one-time task or check if it's a better alternative for something else. Not having admin rights would be like those developers (they do exist) who never use power tools because they might "stop working" suddenly and then they'll need to work in the equivalent of Notepad while the sysadmins restart, reboot, and/or reinstall.
The GNOME menu is great, but I wish Synaptic was anything near as navigable. Or maybe they should simply drop it for Ubuntu Software Center, since it's clearly superior unless you're already at the apt-get level.
Everywhere you come across "obscurity" in security, it's about the algorithm - It should not be enough to know the algorithm to easily recover the password or trick the verification process. True security should be equally hard to break for the original developer, the admin, the user, or Mr Schneier.
Proof by quote, and hence by opinion.
There seems to be a very common notion that the study and implementation of usability is for wimps and people who should have kept out of science, real nerds/geeks don't need no stinkin' GUI, user testing is boring and expensive, you see where this is going. And the really sad thing is that managers don't care much either, as long as the result is below their personal pain threshold. So we end up with interfaces which are barely usable to computer literates, and thus unusable to anyone with less experience. This has nothing to do with OSS, it's an industry thing.
Maybe it would improve if there was some way to sort the extension search results (in-browser and on the web site) by reported stability. Maybe this could even be generated automatically, by correlating crash reports with installed extensions.
jQuery + jQuery UI is only ~30kb
No, it's 272kB minified
Sorry, but you might want to check up on what web sites, extensions and spyware you're running. Computers have this annoying habit of doing what you tell them to do, rather than what you want them to do. I've been using Firefox since 0.6, and I keep seeing these comments about huge problems, never* experiencing them myself. I don't have high end machines, and I've never had more than 2 GB of RAM. Been running Firefox on Windows XP, then FreeBSD (keep up the good work!) and now Ubuntu.
* As in, whenever I do, it's trivial to identify the culprit /on the web site/ - Java applets (those were the days), Flash (hi Flashblock), or JavaScript. The only site that has been consistently slow is Delicious since those yahoos took over, and the only extension that has been slowing things to a halt is, ironically, NoScript.
Depends which settings are available. If the users can have a not-so-arcane interface to change the time, startup passwords and which features (as in "wi-fi", *not* "3-com PCI-e wireless mumbo-jumbo v3.14") they want to enable, that's all for the better.
"Assumptions about metaphysics are unprovable/unfalsifiable, so science can say nothing about it (the very topic of this article)"
Sorry, no. As explained elsewhere, if there is no evidence for something (e.g., an afterlife), it is as nonsensical to believe in it as believing in absolutely anything else for which there is no evidence (e.g., a teapot floating between Earth and the moon, Thor, Yahweh, fairies or little green men). Without evidence, all of those are equally unlikely, i.e. somewhere between zero and very low (at least if people have been looking for evidence for a long time).
After reading the Discworld series and any other Pratchett books I could get my hands on, I find that quote the most obviously nonsensical part of all his writings. To see why, simply replace "justice" and/or "mercy" with any compound phenomenon such as "ocean" or "wind". I believe we have firmly established scientific evidence for both, and yet they do not appear from looking at their individual components. Gert Nygårdshaug put it very well in "Fortellernes marked" ("The Storytellers' Market"), saying essentially that the original meaning of "belief" requires evidence to back it up, and everything else is superstition.