> "public interest" as a code word for "what I want."
I think it is pretty clear to anyone that posts on slashdot are subjective statements and any references to "public interest" is going to reflect the poster's opinion about what those interests are...
> Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote.
I second that! If you look at why the concept of the corporation was invented anyway it was primarily because it eased the beurocratic overhead of making sure all the investors received their investment returns and could collectively manage a project.
I would argue, with modern tools, one could set up a system with independent contractors (think Ebay) that could achieve the same effectiveness without the foolish idea that "corporations are legally just like people".
You make a good point, except that I would argue in each of the cases the corporations are asking for non-competitive protections from the government that go pretty strongly against the libertarian ideal.
I have no problem with companies having free speech and selling deficient products (such as with DRM, undocumented code, etc.) but I want to have the option not to buy these products or have my tax dollars go to these products.
Is it just me, or do all politics lately revolve around this same theme?
Corporate lobbies push for proprietary voting machines, the public interest is for open-source voting machines. Corporate lobbies want extensions to patent laws, public interest is to reasonably limit patent protections. Corpate lobbies want to DRM everything with legal enforcement, public interest is to have fair use.
The more explanations I hear as to why corporate lobbying is a necessary evil, the more convinced I become of how much of a negative influence they are having on our society.
...but then, on slashdot we're probably all just hopeless libertarians anyway;)
Well, if you're programming for a GBA, my rule of thumb breaks down a bit. Moore's law and high-level graphics libraries just aren't helpful enough (yet) on such a platform. (on a PC, I would say you should just have John Carmack/etc worry about vsyncs and buy his library)
As for the "wallhacks" comment, that's an interesting point that complicates the discussion quite a bit... I might have a comment on that after some thought:)
You make many good points here and I agree with what you say mostly...my post was somewhat simplified for the sake of conciseness...
Clearly, I made some assumptions in my initial post: The most important being that given moore's law, most "function calls" in a typical application now are well below 1 miliseconds per call. My argument is that, with such speedy functions, you can afford a lot of performance loss in the name of cleaner code in most cases- And if not, chances are a library already exists to do the "dirty work" in the few cases where hard optimization is needed.
There are some types of "function calls" that are greater than 1ms: These include functions that perform web queries or database queries: In these cases (and I suspect your anecdote most likely involves one or the other) clearly performance can become a problem with a poor design. However, the interest of clean code and good performance are usually not a conflicting in this case as people often make out (IMHO): The key is to use caching on the client to improve performance, which also has great code benefits (it allows the technical and logical aspects of the query to be decoupled) and a clean code design usually still is quite compatible with good performance.
Although I am probably a bit out on a limb here, I would argue that the kinds of problems you describe in your case study were possibly due to not taking the whole process of "clean code over optimization" far enough and instead the designers created an ugly hybrid of performance/elegance that took short cuts that were the primary culprit. Just my thoughts on the matter...
...are doomed to repeat the biggest trap in computer programming over and over again:
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
If there's only one rule in computer programming a person ever learns, "Hoare's dictum" is the one I would choose.
Almost all modern languages have extensive libraries available to handle common programming tasks and can handle the vast majority of optimizations you speak of automatically. This means that 99.99% of the time you shouldn't be thinking about optimizations at all. Unless you're John Carmack or you're writing a new compiler from scratch (and perhaps you are) or involved in a handful of other activities you're making a big big mistake if your spending any time worrying about these things. There are far more important things to worry about, such as writing code that can be understood by others, can easily be units tested, etc.
A few years ago I used to write C/C++/asm code extensively and used to be obsessed with performance and optimization. Then, one day, I had an epiphany and started writing code that is about 10 times slower than my old code (different in computer language and style) and infinitely easier to understand and expand. The only time I optimize now is at the very very end of development when I have solid profiler results from the final product that show noticable delays for the end user and this only happens rarely.
Of course, this is just my own personal experience and others may see things differently.
The moment you use the coffee shop's pc, all bets are off, for the reasons you outlined. Note, I said in my post that you take your own PC to the coffee shop (one of the "free wifi" places). From what I understand, in this process can be done securely, at least theoretically.
If you point www.yahoo.com at another site, the program would notice that the certificate of the new site (if it WAS generated by a 1st tier DA) does not have the proper yahoo url- I don't think this could be done without getting at least a couple of warning messages from the browser- That's how I understand it, at least.
Let's suppose you take your PC to a coffee shop and want to read your stock-r-us.com stock portfolio...
...even though there are already PLENTY of free certificate providers out there today, stocks-r-us has to pay big big bucks to one of a few certificate agencies- There's absolutely, positively, no way around this currently, for complex reasons that are hard to explain briefly, but I'll give it a shot...
First of all, there are two things, at the minimum, you need to talk to stocks-r-us over the internet securely from a coffee shop:
1. An encrypted communication channel (this is handled by public key and symmetric key encryption protocols)
2. A guarantee that the person you are talking to over the 'net really is stocks-r-us and not an impostor.
All this fancy talk in this slashdot story involves this second step in this process... so how can you get this no-impostor guarantee? Well, the most basic way would be to ask stocks-r-us a secret question only they could answer, sort of like a "secret handshake". An SSL certificate is simply a "secret handshake". (well, not so simply, but just accept this idea for now...) So in order to make sure the company you're talking to over the 'net is your stocks-r-us, you check to see if they know the stocks-r-us secret handshake. Problem solved...
...or not: This works fine if YOU know how to recognize the stocks-r-us secret handshake, but, for technical reasons, this is only possible if your computer and stocks-r-us have chatted in the past (i.e. you've used your computer before to sheck your stocks) if not, there's no way you can get the jimmy on how to tell a genuine stocks-r-us secret handshake.
This is where a certificate authority comes in: You can get a third person (whose handshake you do know) to give you stocks-r-us' secret handshake. There are many many organizations that offer free (or not free) services to act as this third person (i.e. as a "CA") So stocks-r-us can just sign up with one of these companies to give them the secret handshake info- Problem solved...
...or not: The user of their has to already know the handshake of the CA for this to work ahead of time, or the proverbial "house of cards" will just fall apart anyway... How can they be sure you already have the "secret hanshake" of this third person/CA?
Well, the answer is pretty goofy... the "handshake" of the CA has to be "hardwired" into every copy of Firefox/Internetexplorer/Safari/etc when it is installed. If you go to the settings of your browser, you'll see a list of CAs already placed in by Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla/etc right out of the box! That's the only way this could work...
...so you might be wondering: Don't the CA companies in this initial list of built-in handshakes have some kind of monopoly/oligopoly? The answer, of course, is YES: These special CAs charge monopoly-style prices for their services for this very reason. The point of this slashdot article is that an non-profit group wants to somehow make Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla/etc to put it in this super-duper "handshake" list, but it promises it won't charge everyone big bucks who wants to use them as their third party.
(I'm no expert on this, so any experts are welcome to reply to my post to make any corrections if there are any errors of substance...)
Well, let's say Alice gives the other her public key- Why not just have them send her the full password encrypted in her public key and she can check if it's the correct password? What is the checkerboard of carbon paper needed for, then?
As for mentioning quantum, I agree words like "quantum" and "relativity" are often used more for effect than substance, but if you read an intro on quantum cryptography, it reads almost exactly like this story- see for yourself:
3 Simple Reasons
on
Whereables?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
1. Battery life- Batteries haven't been keeping up with other computer components in terms of improvements. A hefty CPU just drains them too quickly- And without a hefty CPU a Palm PC form factor is more practical.
2. Headaches- Nobody has figured out how to make an eyeglass display that doesn't cause lots of complaints about migranes. The atari VR system and the Nintendo VR both got killed by this.
3. Dork factor- Until Apple releases an iWearable and tempts all the hipster-wannabes with commercials, you just can't walk around with this gear in public without feeling weird- Just like with MP3 players pre-ipod.
I'm no cryptography expert, but the secret positions of the carbon paper need to go into "an envelope only Alice can open"- Nowhere in this essay is it explained how this "envelope" is created technologically or how the recipient can interact with it, making the analogy pretty useless (unless I'm missing something). Also, it says that SSH doesn't help with man-in-the-middle attacks, but a third party signing agency, I believe, solves that problem, from what I understand.
This "envelope" sounds suspiciously how quantum cryptography works- Is this just an explanation of "quantum cryptography" without mentioning "quantum cryptography"? I'm confused...
The author of the ABC article basically says that he can just "feel" that Microsoft is in bad shape- Having just finished the new book Blink, I notice there are close similarities between the book and the kind of subconscious feeling the author is describing about Microsoft (I must admit, I feel them, too...)
It's all about the live act now...
on
Death of the Album?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Bands" that can't put on a decent live show aren't real bands anyway. If you can play live well, there will always be opportunities for you. recorded music is just going to become an advert for live performances.
...that WE have abandoned- Nuclear Is STILL our Future!
Biofuel (ethanol, etc.) are net negative sources of fuel: The harvesting of biomass ethanol requires more fuel for trucks, processing, etc. than the ethanol contains.
Gasoline, Natural Gas and Coal are scarce and major polutants.
Hydrogen is a great portable fuel, but is only a transfer medium, not a primary source.
Wind and Solar are too costly.
Safe nucear technology is THE ONLY serious solution to the looming crisis.
With a system like this you could just buy a mondo cell phone plan and use your cell for all your calls- When you're at home, you just plug in the phone, and now it's your home phone number- I like it!
The WIMP metaphor (windows, icons, menus, pointing device) is just flawed as a general solution for using a computer. Yes, it helps beginners in the learning process, but it is NOT practical for advanced computer use.
The operating systems that don't suck understand this: Basically, most Linux apps are just front ends for command-line utilities that do the real work- If they aren't command-line based they still have very independent abstract non-GUI modules that handle the actual labor (such as the gecko rendering engine for mozilla.)
OSX also is beginning to view the GUI as just a fantastic front end to a UNIX infrastructure.
The sucky OSes are the ones that don't distinguish between the GUI and the real programs- MS Windowses and Apple OS9 were like that and these are/were both pretty ugly to work under, in my opinion.
It's really practical, even as a guy, to have a bag strapped over the shoulder- Unfortunately, guys never used to do that, because it's what used to be called a Man Purse which was considered pretty weird and goofy.
Then, out of nowhere, people started calling them messenger bags to link them with the cool, stylish image of a messenger courier- For no good reason, this now has enabled any guy to carry a shoulder bag while remaining "cool".
In the same way, it used to be a bit dorky to run around with a mp3-playing computer doodad in public even though it's fun and more practical than a CD player.
Apple leveraged their "coolness" to rebrand the uber-geeky mp3-computer into a fashion item, so that people can use a practical tool without feeling weird and goofy.
This is the same old "camel's nose under the tent" like Intel putting DRM in silicon on their CPUs: We're doing it so you can protect the privacy of your documents!
Don't believe this BS- Geeeeee, I wonder how the camera knows where you are all the time? Maybe it does it with a postioning system attached to your body broadcast to a central server? Boy, thanks for protecting my privacy, guys!
Slashdot Mirror
> "public interest" as a code word for "what I want."
I think it is pretty clear to anyone that posts on slashdot are subjective statements and any references to "public interest" is going to reflect the poster's opinion about what those interests are...
> Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote.
I second that! If you look at why the concept of the corporation was invented anyway it was primarily because it eased the beurocratic overhead of making sure all the investors received their investment returns and could collectively manage a project.
I would argue, with modern tools, one could set up a system with independent contractors (think Ebay) that could achieve the same effectiveness without the foolish idea that "corporations are legally just like people".
You make a good point, except that I would argue in each of the cases the corporations are asking for non-competitive protections from the government that go pretty strongly against the libertarian ideal.
I have no problem with companies having free speech and selling deficient products (such as with DRM, undocumented code, etc.) but I want to have the option not to buy these products or have my tax dollars go to these products.
Is it just me, or do all politics lately revolve around this same theme?
;)
Corporate lobbies push for proprietary voting machines, the public interest is for open-source voting machines.
Corporate lobbies want extensions to patent laws, public interest is to reasonably limit patent protections.
Corpate lobbies want to DRM everything with legal enforcement, public interest is to have fair use.
The more explanations I hear as to why corporate lobbying is a necessary evil, the more convinced I become of how much of a negative influence they are having on our society.
...but then, on slashdot we're probably all just hopeless libertarians anyway
I've had my iPod shuffle for a couple of weeks now and have not heard any Steely Dan yet- Thank God!
Well, if you're programming for a GBA, my rule of thumb breaks down a bit. Moore's law and high-level graphics libraries just aren't helpful enough (yet) on such a platform. (on a PC, I would say you should just have John Carmack/etc worry about vsyncs and buy his library)
:)
As for the "wallhacks" comment, that's an interesting point that complicates the discussion quite a bit... I might have a comment on that after some thought
I'm LISP all the way, baby! :)
You make many good points here and I agree with what you say mostly...my post was somewhat simplified for the sake of conciseness...
Clearly, I made some assumptions in my initial post: The most important being that given moore's law, most "function calls" in a typical application now are well below 1 miliseconds per call. My argument is that, with such speedy functions, you can afford a lot of performance loss in the name of cleaner code in most cases- And if not, chances are a library already exists to do the "dirty work" in the few cases where hard optimization is needed.
There are some types of "function calls" that are greater than 1ms: These include functions that perform web queries or database queries: In these cases (and I suspect your anecdote most likely involves one or the other) clearly performance can become a problem with a poor design. However, the interest of clean code and good performance are usually not a conflicting in this case as people often make out (IMHO): The key is to use caching on the client to improve performance, which also has great code benefits (it allows the technical and logical aspects of the query to be decoupled) and a clean code design usually still is quite compatible with good performance.
Although I am probably a bit out on a limb here, I would argue that the kinds of problems you describe in your case study were possibly due to not taking the whole process of "clean code over optimization" far enough and instead the designers created an ugly hybrid of performance/elegance that took short cuts that were the primary culprit. Just my thoughts on the matter...
There is a long debate about who said it first. Read here
...are doomed to repeat the biggest trap in computer programming over and over again:
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
If there's only one rule in computer programming a person ever learns, "Hoare's dictum" is the one I would choose.
Almost all modern languages have extensive libraries available to handle common programming tasks and can handle the vast majority of optimizations you speak of automatically. This means that 99.99% of the time you shouldn't be thinking about optimizations at all. Unless you're John Carmack or you're writing a new compiler from scratch (and perhaps you are) or involved in a handful of other activities you're making a big big mistake if your spending any time worrying about these things. There are far more important things to worry about, such as writing code that can be understood by others, can easily be units tested, etc.
A few years ago I used to write C/C++/asm code extensively and used to be obsessed with performance and optimization. Then, one day, I had an epiphany and started writing code that is about 10 times slower than my old code (different in computer language and style) and infinitely easier to understand and expand. The only time I optimize now is at the very very end of development when I have solid profiler results from the final product that show noticable delays for the end user and this only happens rarely.
Of course, this is just my own personal experience and others may see things differently.
The moment you use the coffee shop's pc, all bets are off, for the reasons you outlined. Note, I said in my post that you take your own PC to the coffee shop (one of the "free wifi" places). From what I understand, in this process can be done securely, at least theoretically.
If you point www.yahoo.com at another site, the program would notice that the certificate of the new site (if it WAS generated by a 1st tier DA) does not have the proper yahoo url- I don't think this could be done without getting at least a couple of warning messages from the browser- That's how I understand it, at least.
Let's suppose you take your PC to a coffee shop and want to read your stock-r-us.com stock portfolio...
...even though there are already PLENTY of free certificate providers out there today, stocks-r-us has to pay big big bucks to one of a few certificate agencies- There's absolutely, positively, no way around this currently, for complex reasons that are hard to explain briefly, but I'll give it a shot...
...or not: This works fine if YOU know how to recognize the stocks-r-us secret handshake, but, for technical reasons, this is only possible if your computer and stocks-r-us have chatted in the past (i.e. you've used your computer before to sheck your stocks) if not, there's no way you can get the jimmy on how to tell a genuine stocks-r-us secret handshake.
...or not: The user of their has to already know the handshake of the CA for this to work ahead of time, or the proverbial "house of cards" will just fall apart anyway... How can they be sure you already have the "secret hanshake" of this third person/CA?
First of all, there are two things, at the minimum, you need to talk to stocks-r-us over the internet securely from a coffee shop:
1. An encrypted communication channel (this is handled by public key and symmetric key encryption protocols)
2. A guarantee that the person you are talking to over the 'net really is stocks-r-us and not an impostor.
All this fancy talk in this slashdot story involves this second step in this process... so how can you get this no-impostor guarantee? Well, the most basic way would be to ask stocks-r-us a secret question only they could answer, sort of like a "secret handshake". An SSL certificate is simply a "secret handshake". (well, not so simply, but just accept this idea for now...) So in order to make sure the company you're talking to over the 'net is your stocks-r-us, you check to see if they know the stocks-r-us secret handshake. Problem solved...
This is where a certificate authority comes in: You can get a third person (whose handshake you do know) to give you stocks-r-us' secret handshake. There are many many organizations that offer free (or not free) services to act as this third person (i.e. as a "CA") So stocks-r-us can just sign up with one of these companies to give them the secret handshake info- Problem solved...
Well, the answer is pretty goofy... the "handshake" of the CA has to be "hardwired" into every copy of Firefox/Internetexplorer/Safari/etc when it is installed. If you go to the settings of your browser, you'll see a list of CAs already placed in by Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla/etc right out of the box! That's the only way this could work...
...so you might be wondering: Don't the CA companies in this initial list of built-in handshakes have some kind of monopoly/oligopoly? The answer, of course, is YES: These special CAs charge monopoly-style prices for their services for this very reason. The point of this slashdot article is that an non-profit group wants to somehow make Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla/etc to put it in this super-duper "handshake" list, but it promises it won't charge everyone big bucks who wants to use them as their third party.
(I'm no expert on this, so any experts are welcome to reply to my post to make any corrections if there are any errors of substance...)
Well, let's say Alice gives the other her public key- Why not just have them send her the full password encrypted in her public key and she can check if it's the correct password? What is the checkerboard of carbon paper needed for, then?
As for mentioning quantum, I agree words like "quantum" and "relativity" are often used more for effect than substance, but if you read an intro on quantum cryptography, it reads almost exactly like this story- see for yourself:
here
1. Battery life- Batteries haven't been keeping up with other computer components in terms of improvements. A hefty CPU just drains them too quickly- And without a hefty CPU a Palm PC form factor is more practical.
2. Headaches- Nobody has figured out how to make an eyeglass display that doesn't cause lots of complaints about migranes. The atari VR system and the Nintendo VR both got killed by this.
3. Dork factor- Until Apple releases an iWearable and tempts all the hipster-wannabes with commercials, you just can't walk around with this gear in public without feeling weird- Just like with MP3 players pre-ipod.
I'm no cryptography expert, but the secret positions of the carbon paper need to go into "an envelope only Alice can open"- Nowhere in this essay is it explained how this "envelope" is created technologically or how the recipient can interact with it, making the analogy pretty useless (unless I'm missing something). Also, it says that SSH doesn't help with man-in-the-middle attacks, but a third party signing agency, I believe, solves that problem, from what I understand. This "envelope" sounds suspiciously how quantum cryptography works- Is this just an explanation of "quantum cryptography" without mentioning "quantum cryptography"? I'm confused...
The author of the ABC article basically says that he can just "feel" that Microsoft is in bad shape- Having just finished the new book Blink, I notice there are close similarities between the book and the kind of subconscious feeling the author is describing about Microsoft (I must admit, I feel them, too...)
"Bands" that can't put on a decent live show aren't real bands anyway. If you can play live well, there will always be opportunities for you. recorded music is just going to become an advert for live performances.
...that WE have abandoned- Nuclear Is STILL our Future!
Biofuel (ethanol, etc.) are net negative sources of fuel: The harvesting of biomass ethanol requires more fuel for trucks, processing, etc. than the ethanol contains.
Gasoline, Natural Gas and Coal are scarce and major polutants.
Hydrogen is a great portable fuel, but is only a transfer medium, not a primary source.
Wind and Solar are too costly.
Safe nucear technology is THE ONLY serious solution to the looming crisis.
With a system like this you could just buy a mondo cell phone plan and use your cell for all your calls- When you're at home, you just plug in the phone, and now it's your home phone number- I like it!
The WIMP metaphor (windows, icons, menus, pointing device) is just flawed as a general solution for using a computer. Yes, it helps beginners in the learning process, but it is NOT practical for advanced computer use.
The operating systems that don't suck understand this: Basically, most Linux apps are just front ends for command-line utilities that do the real work- If they aren't command-line based they still have very independent abstract non-GUI modules that handle the actual labor (such as the gecko rendering engine for mozilla.)
OSX also is beginning to view the GUI as just a fantastic front end to a UNIX infrastructure.
The sucky OSes are the ones that don't distinguish between the GUI and the real programs- MS Windowses and Apple OS9 were like that and these are/were both pretty ugly to work under, in my opinion.
...somewhere in the back of my head there is a little voice that says "these people care that I get good search results above all else".
Microsoft just can't ever give people that feeling- It's against their nature.
If I have a live or unreleased track on my computer, will their software still broadcast it to others?
Anyone know?
It's really practical, even as a guy, to have a bag strapped over the shoulder- Unfortunately, guys never used to do that, because it's what used to be called a Man Purse which was considered pretty weird and goofy.
Then, out of nowhere, people started calling them messenger bags to link them with the cool, stylish image of a messenger courier- For no good reason, this now has enabled any guy to carry a shoulder bag while remaining "cool".
In the same way, it used to be a bit dorky to run around with a mp3-playing computer doodad in public even though it's fun and more practical than a CD player.
Apple leveraged their "coolness" to rebrand the uber-geeky mp3-computer into a fashion item, so that people can use a practical tool without feeling weird and goofy.
This is the same old "camel's nose under the tent" like Intel putting DRM in silicon on their CPUs: We're doing it so you can protect the privacy of your documents!
Don't believe this BS- Geeeeee, I wonder how the camera knows where you are all the time? Maybe it does it with a postioning system attached to your body broadcast to a central server? Boy, thanks for protecting my privacy, guys!