Seriously? There was nothing more important or interesting going on than some nebbish mumbling about the importance of packaging? Even for Apple fanboyism, this reaches new depths. "The boxes sit on shelves serving as a constant reminder of the beauty within." I wish there was a more appropriate and genteel response to that than, "Get a life!", but there you are.
Missing the forest for the trees
on
The PHP Singularity
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've programmed in every major language and several minor ones from the 1970's to the present day, never mind design methodologies. They all have their relative strengths and weaknesses, but at the end of the day, the only thing that really recommends one over the other is a) what's available, and b) what you're most familiar with. No widely used language is "broken" any more than any natural spoken language is broken. No one ever says, hey, this novel would be much easier to write if we were taking advantage of the greater expressive power of Indonesian instead of kludgy old Lithuanian.
Aside from juvenile cliquishness and fashion obsession, every language flamefest starts with people obsessing on some awkward feature of the dominant language du jour, and then concluding that all of their problems would be solved if we all switched to some other language without that awkward feature. Of course, tomorrow's language (or methodology, editor, coding standard, platform) has its own awkward qualities that will only become apparent once it collides with the real world on a large scale, setting the stage for the day after tomorrow's language. Rarely does anyone pull their head out of their compiler/interpreter long enough to recognize that it's the real world that's awkward, and no amount of switching between fundamentally equivalent machine-parseable languages is going to change that.
Instead, we keep implementing the same stuff over and over in one language after another until the pace of real progress slows so much that we can actually get excited that the document viewer we're trying to port everything over to is receiving a "major" new features in HTML5 that will allow it to get a little closer to matching the desktop GUI functionality of twenty years ago, only not as well and with the added requirement of several orders of magnitude more hardware power required to keep it going.
But by all means, let's get rid of PHP if that makes it easier to imagine that we're doing something besides reinventing the same old wheel and doing it badly.
Unfortunately, most people have next to no understanding of mathematics beyond some rote memorization from school. This is just another example of people confusing analog signals with magic. To be fair, the actual researchers involved probably understand this quite well, but the scientifically uneducated class from which science and technology journalists are drawn is another matter.
The non-mathematical version, for those interested, is that yes, analog signals are continuous and so can occupy an infinite number of states. The reason you can't get infinite bandwidth out of that is because both the transmitters and receivers have limited precision, and because there is always noise, which is another manifestation of the Second Law. For example, there are an infinite number of real numbers between 0 and 1. If you could actually use all of that space, you could encode any amount of information in an arbitrarily short signal. (Well, there's a limit to that, too, for which see Georg Cantor.) In practice, you can't use all of that space, because your instruments might distinguish quite well between 0.001 and 0.002, but they can't reliably tell the difference between 0.001 and 0.0005. On top of that, there is noise, which is also a big topic, but you can think of it as a random fluctuation in the signal. If the ambient noise varies between 0.0 and 0.0005 in the same example, you can't even reliably tell the difference between 0.001 and 0.002.
What the parent is getting at is that laws of physics, being derived from observations of nature with limited precision, might occasionally be overturned by better observations. Fundamental mathematical principles, on the other hand, are much more reliable. There might be a difference between rest mass and inertial mass that we could exploit for thrustless propulsion. It's extremely unlikely, but it can't be ruled out. But there is zero possibility that 2 + 2 will ever equal anything other than four. Shannon's limit and, for that matter, the Nyquist sampling theorem are a little more complex than a simple integer sum, but the actual math for both would fit on an index card with plenty of room to spare to blather on about "infinite" analog signals. We use digital signals most of the time these days because it makes the hardware easier to design, but neither digital nor analog can be used to make an end run around the Second Law.
What the researchers in TFA claim to have figured out is another way to use part of the signal outside of the frequency domain to stuff data into. It's a really ingenious approach that might be quite useful if it pans out in actual practice, but it's not magic, and it's not infinite.
We figure out a way to enhance human mental acuity, and the very first thing we apply it to is training snipers. Interspecies communication? Military dolphins. Never mind nuclear physics.
If we were as good at anything as we are at killing each other and stealing each other's stuff, we might have a chance. Hell, if we were even more interested in something else -- and no, screwing doesn't count.
So our first steps into bridging the biological/electronic divide involve what is essentially an artificial parasite? Somehow, I fear it will not be long before some medical researcher who has read too much Douglas Hofstadter thinks of taking it to the next level of abstraction by monitoring intestinal health using parasitic instruments attached to tapeworms.
It is a lesson we continually fail to learn: Industries built on government subsidy suffer when those subsidies begin to go away, even if the product itself is sound.
The lesson "we" continually fail to learn is that not everything is a vindication of one's favorite economic-religious theory. Every time there is an increase in demand for something, investments pour into the relevant industries far in excess of that demand, and most of those ventures fail before a handful of them succeed and become the dominant players. There's nothing magical about either the market or subsidies. Subsidies are just market forces, like weather influencing crop prices or international trade policy influencing imports and exports. The theoretical free market in which prices are not "manipulated" does not and cannot exist in the real world because it is ultimately based on human beings, and humans manipulate everything they can. It doesn't matter whether the influx of cash comes from subsidies or sales: companies benefit while the cash flows in, and they suffer when it stops flowing. Money is money.
Email is simply not a medium I would even consider using for sending sensitive information precisely because there are countless places between me and my correspondents where a message could be intercepted. In such circumstances, encrypting my email would simply alert anyone watching that something sensitive is being transmitted. And since the only "anyone watching" that I'd worry about is the government, why bother attracting the attention? If they want to know what I'm sending, all they have to do is wait for me to go to work, enter my house, and install a keylogger on my box. It's not like they even need warrants nowadays for that crap.
If I was going to do something I wanted to hide from the government -- and let's face it, that would almost have to be a major federal felony -- and if I absolutely had to have documentation and accomplices, none of it would be in electronic form to begin with, never mind transmitted over the public internet. Encryption is useful for governments and major corporations that are basically above the law. It's not terribly useful for private citizens unless you're just trying to hide your porn folder from your roommate.
...but I stopped counting how many times the author recommended trying to cost people their jobs for actually doing them after the third time. I'd like to offer something more insightful in response, but I'm afraid I'm left with "What a smug asshole."
So when do malware and cyber attacks become a weapon or act of war that warrant a real-world military response?
Same as every other war. Whenever the arms industry, the mass media, and whatever industries want the raw resources of the purported attacker manage to get the public frothed up enough that opportunists in the executive and legislative branches feel secure about being reelected if they start a war. There's not a lot of point in coming up with cover stories ahead of time.[1] There's always plenty of time between the campaign contributions and the actual deployment of the fleets to test ad campaigns and slogans with the focus groups.
[1] Unless you're a think tank or a private military contractor that's scored a nice, fat, no-bid contract to come up with lurid scenarios that can be used to drive news coverage to shore up public support for even more military spending.
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
I will credit Google with letting people retrieve their data, but its usefulness is greatly reduced without the applications it was designed for.
They call it the cloud because people have gotten wise to being offered low prices on the Brooklyn Bridge.
This is about as newsworthy as Ron Paul declaring that he plans to remodel my kitchen. Barring a long series of astronomically unlikely events, he's not going to get anywhere close to having the authority to do so. Providing passing entertainment on Slashdot during a slow news day may well be his high water mark.
As far as I can tell, we're hard-wired to derive pleasure from independence and self-reliance, probably because it's an advantageous trait in evolutionary terms.
Many years ago, I was into vintage Volkswagens for a while. As anyone who has owned one of these beasts can tell you, they're extremely unreliable and require more or less constant maintenance to keep running, and unless you're prepared to do it yourself, you'd better have a lot of money to hand to the dwindling number of mechanics who know how to work on the damn things. I had never worked on cars before or been particular interested in doing so, but I adapted to necessity, and after a while, I got good enough at it to keep my ancient VW running most of the time.
On one hand, it was annoying to have the thing break down by the side of the road, but on the other, there was a really quite profound sense of satisfaction in being able to open the engine compartment, figure out what was wrong, fix it, and pull back into traffic. In practical terms, this was pointless, of course -- my time and money would have been better spent on buying something more reliable, which I eventually did -- but the emotional payoff surprised me with its intensity. I've heard similar sentiments come from hobbyists of all kinds, farmers, craftsmen, etc.
All that said, I'm not sure it's the main factor in OSS evangelism. The type of person who programs for fun is generally attracted to exploring complexity and mastering it, and the parallel seems to be more like what puzzle fans of all kinds get out of their hobby. When someone tries to convince someone else to use a complex (if powerful) tool over the droolproof commercial product they're currently satisfied with, it has a lot more in common with trying to turn them on to a favorite hobby than with an expression of self-reliance.
This is like asking whether nose-picking is going to obsolete butt-scratching. I mean, sure, there's an answer ("probably not"), but even if it does, the only discernible effect will be the usual six-month lag before TV journalists catch up to whatever bit of jargon replaces "tweet".
Even if you owned a file that was without a shadow of a doubt pirated, that doesn't matter if they can't prove you SHARED it.
I hate to hit you with this, but the whole "shadow of a [reasonable] doubt" standard applies to criminal cases, not civil suits. Even in criminal cases, we're talking about reasonable doubts, not the sort of infinitely elastic justifications that small, grouchy children in the back seat on road trips give about how they really didn't touch each other. In a civil case, the standard is the preponderance of the evidence which, even if it's on your side, will cost you an arm and a leg to prove, with the usual result being that you'll settle for an arm to be able to keep the leg.
Not that I would ever do such a thing -- cough, cough -- but if I was pirating mp3s and wanted to store them on a remote server under the control of someone else, which is not very smart to begin with, I sure as hell wouldn't pick a service run by the music industry or one of its primary partners like, just for the sake of argument, Apple.
Ergo, I read this story as an excessively wordy way to say that, yes, if you are dumb as a fucking rock, the odds that you'll get caught doing something illegal are higher than average.
Another disillusioned techie writes another anti-tech book about the way technology has made the general public dumber than it already is. Film at eleven.
People were, by and large, already dumber than rocks. This is, after all, the same species that wandered around in its current form for about 200,000 years before anyone noticed that seeds make plants, and only figured out in the last century or so that disease is caused by microorganisms and not evil spirits -- and still, a lot of people aren't convinced. The only thing that has changed is that people who previously did or said stupid things in private can now share them with the world on Facebook and YouTube.
That said, it's nice to see that the author is is a technology professional. Most of these books are written by liberal arts majors who are embittered by the presence of iPhones at their poetry slams.
Any time there's a story like this -- discounting the ones that are obviously bullshit, purely theoretical, and/or glaring violations of the Second Law -- there's a certain number of people who pile on with comments that boil down to, "It's not perfect for all possible applications, so screw it."
Get used to it. We've already done most of the easy, general stuff. We'll stumble across some more every great once in a while, but from here on out, most of it is going to be hard-won and highly specific, and when it seems like we've made a giant breakthrough, it's going to be the result of countless threads of research converging, not some singular Eureka! moment.
Of course, it's always been that way to some extent. People notice the first time something is accomplished -- the light bulb, powered flight, organ transplants -- but never hear about or pay attention to the innumerable incremental improvements that are made after the initial splash, even if our daily lives depend on them in ways too numerous to mention. And that still ignores the fact that the "initial breakthrough" is usually the result of years or generations of tireless work.
Yeah, it'll be great to have laser ignition in my engine, better mileage, lower emissions, yada yada yada. These are good things and would be tremendously beneficial, but I can think of a dozen applications off the top of my head that could use cheap, powerful lasers, most of which involve manufacturing, including desktop manufacturing. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a gazillion medical and scientific applications that would benefit as well.
Physical force is certainly entertaining, but it's a waste of effort. If you want to destroy any magnetic recording medium, all you have to do is heat it past its Curie point. In the case of hard drives, a decently hot fire will do nicely. A bunch of waste paper and cardboard in a steel drum will burn more than hot enough. If you're still bent on brute force, disassemble the drive and use sandpaper on the platter surfaces. Dropping them into hydrochloric acid will also do the trick -- the hardware store grade they call muriatic acid is good enough -- though you'll have more to clean up that way. Punching a few holes in the case and dropping it into a bucket of bleach will probably work as well, as will any strong oxidizer.
I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI and the NSA are amused at the amount of paranoia they've been able to generate in this area.
There's a theorem in imaging that says you cannot focus a light source to create a beam any more intense then at the surface of what is emitting the light. A consequence of this is that you cannot heat something to hotter than the surface temperature of the sun by concentrating sunlight in any way, even if you had a lens the size of the solar system. The spot size that you get will just keep getting bigger.
That's true, but it only applies to imaging optics. Non-imaging optics, hyperbolic concentrators being one of the commoner cases, are not subject to this limitation. If I'm remembering right -- it's been about 25 years -- there was pioneering work done at the University of Chicago in the late 80's using hyperbolic concentrators to achieve concentrations considerably above those of the surface of the sun. This doesn't violate the Second Law because you only get the amount of light that falls into the collector, minus losses due to absorption and scattering. There are limits to non-imaging concentrators, too, but those revolve around the refractive index of the reflector material, which limits the range of useful hyperbolic profiles and thus the level of concentration achieved. Back when I was paying closer attention to this area, the highest-performing concentrators were using corundum, which is a tad pricey for large-scale work.
Second, the only people who want everything to be done in one language are those clueless zealots everyone finds an excuse not to hang out with after work.
Third, even if one language completely dominated the niche category of handheld consumer devices, it would mean nothing outside that niche.
'I suspect that the majority of users are more likely to be satisfied with KDE 4.6 than GNOME 3.'
I'm certain that the majority of users are likely to wish developers would stop fucking with the interface they're already comfortable and familiar with and find something more useful to do with their time.
Not exactly correct. Take wordstar for example and compare it to any modern program. Fonts? Yea right you where lucky if the screen could display bold and italics. Graphics? What? Spell checker? It was a separate program you ran.
A more informative comparison might be made between Office 97 and Office 2010. The overwhelming majority of the features in Office 2010 were already present in Office 97, but I could comfortably run Office 97 on a 100 MHz Pentium with 8 megs of RAM and have several other programs, including Photoshop, open at the same time with little or no noticeable lag. The resource requirements have grown much, much faster than the functionality.
Surprisingly, it was enough to run databases, word processors and complex, professional software. Today's iPad is equipped with 512MB of RAM (roughly one thousand times more), and some reviewers complain it's a bit on the low side.
This is not surprising at all. The general trend over the intervening three decades has been to trade efficiency for development time. The result is applications that are often less responsive than their primitive predecessors which were written in hand-coded assembly language. Moreover, because most users -- especially corporate users -- only upgrade their software when they replace their machines, often when a new package has increased hardware demands, there's a feedback effect between hardware and software vendors, with less efficient resource hogging software driving hardware sales which in turn drives the sales of new licenses for established software. As application categories mature -- when was the last time you saw a new word processor or spreadsheet feature worth paying for an upgrade? -- this becomes the only driver of substantial new sales.
Software has to get worse for both industries to maintain their desired growth rates. And because technical users ceased to be the majority of users decades ago, the industry has largely managed to get away with it. I had hoped FOSS software would have reversed this trend since FOSS is largely free of market pressures, but the Free Software folks could never sully themselves by making end-user-friendly software, and the Open Source folks were bent on imitating the very corporations they despised. Ergo, you can have Microsoft Office hog your resources or have OpenOffice.org hog your resources or you can use emacs or vim to write your documents in LaTeX. The user gets screwed either way, profits continue as normal for Intel, Apple, and Microsoft, and FOSS remains a minor player in userspace.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? There was nothing more important or interesting going on than some nebbish mumbling about the importance of packaging? Even for Apple fanboyism, this reaches new depths. "The boxes sit on shelves serving as a constant reminder of the beauty within." I wish there was a more appropriate and genteel response to that than, "Get a life!", but there you are.
I've programmed in every major language and several minor ones from the 1970's to the present day, never mind design methodologies. They all have their relative strengths and weaknesses, but at the end of the day, the only thing that really recommends one over the other is a) what's available, and b) what you're most familiar with. No widely used language is "broken" any more than any natural spoken language is broken. No one ever says, hey, this novel would be much easier to write if we were taking advantage of the greater expressive power of Indonesian instead of kludgy old Lithuanian.
Aside from juvenile cliquishness and fashion obsession, every language flamefest starts with people obsessing on some awkward feature of the dominant language du jour, and then concluding that all of their problems would be solved if we all switched to some other language without that awkward feature. Of course, tomorrow's language (or methodology, editor, coding standard, platform) has its own awkward qualities that will only become apparent once it collides with the real world on a large scale, setting the stage for the day after tomorrow's language. Rarely does anyone pull their head out of their compiler/interpreter long enough to recognize that it's the real world that's awkward, and no amount of switching between fundamentally equivalent machine-parseable languages is going to change that.
Instead, we keep implementing the same stuff over and over in one language after another until the pace of real progress slows so much that we can actually get excited that the document viewer we're trying to port everything over to is receiving a "major" new features in HTML5 that will allow it to get a little closer to matching the desktop GUI functionality of twenty years ago, only not as well and with the added requirement of several orders of magnitude more hardware power required to keep it going.
But by all means, let's get rid of PHP if that makes it easier to imagine that we're doing something besides reinventing the same old wheel and doing it badly.
Shannon's limit is a Mathematical principle.
Unfortunately, most people have next to no understanding of mathematics beyond some rote memorization from school. This is just another example of people confusing analog signals with magic. To be fair, the actual researchers involved probably understand this quite well, but the scientifically uneducated class from which science and technology journalists are drawn is another matter.
The non-mathematical version, for those interested, is that yes, analog signals are continuous and so can occupy an infinite number of states. The reason you can't get infinite bandwidth out of that is because both the transmitters and receivers have limited precision, and because there is always noise, which is another manifestation of the Second Law. For example, there are an infinite number of real numbers between 0 and 1. If you could actually use all of that space, you could encode any amount of information in an arbitrarily short signal. (Well, there's a limit to that, too, for which see Georg Cantor.) In practice, you can't use all of that space, because your instruments might distinguish quite well between 0.001 and 0.002, but they can't reliably tell the difference between 0.001 and 0.0005. On top of that, there is noise, which is also a big topic, but you can think of it as a random fluctuation in the signal. If the ambient noise varies between 0.0 and 0.0005 in the same example, you can't even reliably tell the difference between 0.001 and 0.002.
What the parent is getting at is that laws of physics, being derived from observations of nature with limited precision, might occasionally be overturned by better observations. Fundamental mathematical principles, on the other hand, are much more reliable. There might be a difference between rest mass and inertial mass that we could exploit for thrustless propulsion. It's extremely unlikely, but it can't be ruled out. But there is zero possibility that 2 + 2 will ever equal anything other than four. Shannon's limit and, for that matter, the Nyquist sampling theorem are a little more complex than a simple integer sum, but the actual math for both would fit on an index card with plenty of room to spare to blather on about "infinite" analog signals. We use digital signals most of the time these days because it makes the hardware easier to design, but neither digital nor analog can be used to make an end run around the Second Law.
What the researchers in TFA claim to have figured out is another way to use part of the signal outside of the frequency domain to stuff data into. It's a really ingenious approach that might be quite useful if it pans out in actual practice, but it's not magic, and it's not infinite.
We figure out a way to enhance human mental acuity, and the very first thing we apply it to is training snipers. Interspecies communication? Military dolphins. Never mind nuclear physics.
If we were as good at anything as we are at killing each other and stealing each other's stuff, we might have a chance. Hell, if we were even more interested in something else -- and no, screwing doesn't count.
So our first steps into bridging the biological/electronic divide involve what is essentially an artificial parasite? Somehow, I fear it will not be long before some medical researcher who has read too much Douglas Hofstadter thinks of taking it to the next level of abstraction by monitoring intestinal health using parasitic instruments attached to tapeworms.
It is a lesson we continually fail to learn: Industries built on government subsidy suffer when those subsidies begin to go away, even if the product itself is sound.
The lesson "we" continually fail to learn is that not everything is a vindication of one's favorite economic-religious theory. Every time there is an increase in demand for something, investments pour into the relevant industries far in excess of that demand, and most of those ventures fail before a handful of them succeed and become the dominant players. There's nothing magical about either the market or subsidies. Subsidies are just market forces, like weather influencing crop prices or international trade policy influencing imports and exports. The theoretical free market in which prices are not "manipulated" does not and cannot exist in the real world because it is ultimately based on human beings, and humans manipulate everything they can. It doesn't matter whether the influx of cash comes from subsidies or sales: companies benefit while the cash flows in, and they suffer when it stops flowing. Money is money.
Email is simply not a medium I would even consider using for sending sensitive information precisely because there are countless places between me and my correspondents where a message could be intercepted. In such circumstances, encrypting my email would simply alert anyone watching that something sensitive is being transmitted. And since the only "anyone watching" that I'd worry about is the government, why bother attracting the attention? If they want to know what I'm sending, all they have to do is wait for me to go to work, enter my house, and install a keylogger on my box. It's not like they even need warrants nowadays for that crap.
If I was going to do something I wanted to hide from the government -- and let's face it, that would almost have to be a major federal felony -- and if I absolutely had to have documentation and accomplices, none of it would be in electronic form to begin with, never mind transmitted over the public internet. Encryption is useful for governments and major corporations that are basically above the law. It's not terribly useful for private citizens unless you're just trying to hide your porn folder from your roommate.
...but I stopped counting how many times the author recommended trying to cost people their jobs for actually doing them after the third time. I'd like to offer something more insightful in response, but I'm afraid I'm left with "What a smug asshole."
So when do malware and cyber attacks become a weapon or act of war that warrant a real-world military response?
Same as every other war. Whenever the arms industry, the mass media, and whatever industries want the raw resources of the purported attacker manage to get the public frothed up enough that opportunists in the executive and legislative branches feel secure about being reelected if they start a war. There's not a lot of point in coming up with cover stories ahead of time.[1] There's always plenty of time between the campaign contributions and the actual deployment of the fleets to test ad campaigns and slogans with the focus groups.
[1] Unless you're a think tank or a private military contractor that's scored a nice, fat, no-bid contract to come up with lurid scenarios that can be used to drive news coverage to shore up public support for even more military spending.
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
I will credit Google with letting people retrieve their data, but its usefulness is greatly reduced without the applications it was designed for.
They call it the cloud because people have gotten wise to being offered low prices on the Brooklyn Bridge.
This is about as newsworthy as Ron Paul declaring that he plans to remodel my kitchen. Barring a long series of astronomically unlikely events, he's not going to get anywhere close to having the authority to do so. Providing passing entertainment on Slashdot during a slow news day may well be his high water mark.
As far as I can tell, we're hard-wired to derive pleasure from independence and self-reliance, probably because it's an advantageous trait in evolutionary terms.
Many years ago, I was into vintage Volkswagens for a while. As anyone who has owned one of these beasts can tell you, they're extremely unreliable and require more or less constant maintenance to keep running, and unless you're prepared to do it yourself, you'd better have a lot of money to hand to the dwindling number of mechanics who know how to work on the damn things. I had never worked on cars before or been particular interested in doing so, but I adapted to necessity, and after a while, I got good enough at it to keep my ancient VW running most of the time.
On one hand, it was annoying to have the thing break down by the side of the road, but on the other, there was a really quite profound sense of satisfaction in being able to open the engine compartment, figure out what was wrong, fix it, and pull back into traffic. In practical terms, this was pointless, of course -- my time and money would have been better spent on buying something more reliable, which I eventually did -- but the emotional payoff surprised me with its intensity. I've heard similar sentiments come from hobbyists of all kinds, farmers, craftsmen, etc.
All that said, I'm not sure it's the main factor in OSS evangelism. The type of person who programs for fun is generally attracted to exploring complexity and mastering it, and the parallel seems to be more like what puzzle fans of all kinds get out of their hobby. When someone tries to convince someone else to use a complex (if powerful) tool over the droolproof commercial product they're currently satisfied with, it has a lot more in common with trying to turn them on to a favorite hobby than with an expression of self-reliance.
There was way too much experimentation and innovation going on in the NoSQL world. This should help kill it.
This is like asking whether nose-picking is going to obsolete butt-scratching. I mean, sure, there's an answer ("probably not"), but even if it does, the only discernible effect will be the usual six-month lag before TV journalists catch up to whatever bit of jargon replaces "tweet".
Even if you owned a file that was without a shadow of a doubt pirated, that doesn't matter if they can't prove you SHARED it.
I hate to hit you with this, but the whole "shadow of a [reasonable] doubt" standard applies to criminal cases, not civil suits. Even in criminal cases, we're talking about reasonable doubts, not the sort of infinitely elastic justifications that small, grouchy children in the back seat on road trips give about how they really didn't touch each other. In a civil case, the standard is the preponderance of the evidence which, even if it's on your side, will cost you an arm and a leg to prove, with the usual result being that you'll settle for an arm to be able to keep the leg.
Not that I would ever do such a thing -- cough, cough -- but if I was pirating mp3s and wanted to store them on a remote server under the control of someone else, which is not very smart to begin with, I sure as hell wouldn't pick a service run by the music industry or one of its primary partners like, just for the sake of argument, Apple.
Ergo, I read this story as an excessively wordy way to say that, yes, if you are dumb as a fucking rock, the odds that you'll get caught doing something illegal are higher than average.
Another disillusioned techie writes another anti-tech book about the way technology has made the general public dumber than it already is. Film at eleven.
People were, by and large, already dumber than rocks. This is, after all, the same species that wandered around in its current form for about 200,000 years before anyone noticed that seeds make plants, and only figured out in the last century or so that disease is caused by microorganisms and not evil spirits -- and still, a lot of people aren't convinced. The only thing that has changed is that people who previously did or said stupid things in private can now share them with the world on Facebook and YouTube.
That said, it's nice to see that the author is is a technology professional. Most of these books are written by liberal arts majors who are embittered by the presence of iPhones at their poetry slams.
Any time there's a story like this -- discounting the ones that are obviously bullshit, purely theoretical, and/or glaring violations of the Second Law -- there's a certain number of people who pile on with comments that boil down to, "It's not perfect for all possible applications, so screw it."
Get used to it. We've already done most of the easy, general stuff. We'll stumble across some more every great once in a while, but from here on out, most of it is going to be hard-won and highly specific, and when it seems like we've made a giant breakthrough, it's going to be the result of countless threads of research converging, not some singular Eureka! moment.
Of course, it's always been that way to some extent. People notice the first time something is accomplished -- the light bulb, powered flight, organ transplants -- but never hear about or pay attention to the innumerable incremental improvements that are made after the initial splash, even if our daily lives depend on them in ways too numerous to mention. And that still ignores the fact that the "initial breakthrough" is usually the result of years or generations of tireless work.
Yeah, it'll be great to have laser ignition in my engine, better mileage, lower emissions, yada yada yada. These are good things and would be tremendously beneficial, but I can think of a dozen applications off the top of my head that could use cheap, powerful lasers, most of which involve manufacturing, including desktop manufacturing. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a gazillion medical and scientific applications that would benefit as well.
Physical force is certainly entertaining, but it's a waste of effort. If you want to destroy any magnetic recording medium, all you have to do is heat it past its Curie point. In the case of hard drives, a decently hot fire will do nicely. A bunch of waste paper and cardboard in a steel drum will burn more than hot enough. If you're still bent on brute force, disassemble the drive and use sandpaper on the platter surfaces. Dropping them into hydrochloric acid will also do the trick -- the hardware store grade they call muriatic acid is good enough -- though you'll have more to clean up that way. Punching a few holes in the case and dropping it into a bucket of bleach will probably work as well, as will any strong oxidizer.
I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI and the NSA are amused at the amount of paranoia they've been able to generate in this area.
There's a theorem in imaging that says you cannot focus a light source to create a beam any more intense then at the surface of what is emitting the light. A consequence of this is that you cannot heat something to hotter than the surface temperature of the sun by concentrating sunlight in any way, even if you had a lens the size of the solar system. The spot size that you get will just keep getting bigger.
That's true, but it only applies to imaging optics. Non-imaging optics, hyperbolic concentrators being one of the commoner cases, are not subject to this limitation. If I'm remembering right -- it's been about 25 years -- there was pioneering work done at the University of Chicago in the late 80's using hyperbolic concentrators to achieve concentrations considerably above those of the surface of the sun. This doesn't violate the Second Law because you only get the amount of light that falls into the collector, minus losses due to absorption and scattering. There are limits to non-imaging concentrators, too, but those revolve around the refractive index of the reflector material, which limits the range of useful hyperbolic profiles and thus the level of concentration achieved. Back when I was paying closer attention to this area, the highest-performing concentrators were using corundum, which is a tad pricey for large-scale work.
First, this is just flamebait.
Second, the only people who want everything to be done in one language are those clueless zealots everyone finds an excuse not to hang out with after work.
Third, even if one language completely dominated the niche category of handheld consumer devices, it would mean nothing outside that niche.
Slow news day?
'I suspect that the majority of users are more likely to be satisfied with KDE 4.6 than GNOME 3.'
I'm certain that the majority of users are likely to wish developers would stop fucking with the interface they're already comfortable and familiar with and find something more useful to do with their time.
Not exactly correct. Take wordstar for example and compare it to any modern program.
Fonts? Yea right you where lucky if the screen could display bold and italics.
Graphics? What?
Spell checker? It was a separate program you ran.
A more informative comparison might be made between Office 97 and Office 2010. The overwhelming majority of the features in Office 2010 were already present in Office 97, but I could comfortably run Office 97 on a 100 MHz Pentium with 8 megs of RAM and have several other programs, including Photoshop, open at the same time with little or no noticeable lag. The resource requirements have grown much, much faster than the functionality.
Surprisingly, it was enough to run databases, word processors and complex, professional software. Today's iPad is equipped with 512MB of RAM (roughly one thousand times more), and some reviewers complain it's a bit on the low side.
This is not surprising at all. The general trend over the intervening three decades has been to trade efficiency for development time. The result is applications that are often less responsive than their primitive predecessors which were written in hand-coded assembly language. Moreover, because most users -- especially corporate users -- only upgrade their software when they replace their machines, often when a new package has increased hardware demands, there's a feedback effect between hardware and software vendors, with less efficient resource hogging software driving hardware sales which in turn drives the sales of new licenses for established software. As application categories mature -- when was the last time you saw a new word processor or spreadsheet feature worth paying for an upgrade? -- this becomes the only driver of substantial new sales.
Software has to get worse for both industries to maintain their desired growth rates. And because technical users ceased to be the majority of users decades ago, the industry has largely managed to get away with it. I had hoped FOSS software would have reversed this trend since FOSS is largely free of market pressures, but the Free Software folks could never sully themselves by making end-user-friendly software, and the Open Source folks were bent on imitating the very corporations they despised. Ergo, you can have Microsoft Office hog your resources or have OpenOffice.org hog your resources or you can use emacs or vim to write your documents in LaTeX. The user gets screwed either way, profits continue as normal for Intel, Apple, and Microsoft, and FOSS remains a minor player in userspace.