I actually prefer writing with pen and paper precisely because it's slower. I can type around 84 wpm, and there's no real limit on how much text I can crank out that way. With actual literature as opposed to rambling on Slashdot, that's a drawback. Writing with a pen makes me more sparing and careful in my choice of words.
If a perfect copy of yourself was made and placed in a chair across the desk from you it would be as real and soulful and deserving of human rights as you.
Absolutely. It would not be me, however. It would be someone just like me, though becoming less so from the moment of copying onwards as we continued to diverge through our own unique experiences.
A computer copy, if computers can possess consciousness -- and who knows? -- would be much the same. It might even be better than the original if it could think faster, remember more, and had access to external knowledgebases. It would still, however, not be me, but rather someone like me.
So from my standpoint, the knowledge that someone like me would continue to exist after I am dead is about as exciting as being told that my appendix will be preserved forever in a jar. It doesn't change the fact that I'm going to die. To escape or at least postpone that eventuality, my hopes lie with biotechnology, not computer science.
I'd love to someday be able to have a conversation with myself, narcissistic as it sounds.
I've been doing this all my life. Here's a helpful beginner's hint: if you do it out loud, people will look at you funny.
This is actually a reasonable claim, however, we shouldnt take it to mean that the liquid metal coolant itself is evironmentally sound, just that the system, while in operation, is.
"While in operation" is the key phrase here. When it gets tossed in the trash when it's replaced by next years model, crushed in the garbage truck, and dumped into the landfill, it's another story altogether. In the sense that ATI is using the term, "environmentally safe" could apply equally well to nuclear fuel rods.
You know, I've always been quick to jump on the Apple sucks bandwagon ever since they deep-sixed my first love, the Apple II, but in this case, I couldn't care less.
Who but iPod users could possibly give a shit about anything related to iPods? Don't like the way Apple runs it? Well, there are plenty of perfectly workable competitors. They largely lack the fashionability of the iPod, but they work just fine and many of them are cheaper. Go get one and quit griping. There are also plenty of legal ways to get digital music online other than iTunes, and some of them have large collections and competitive prices. Go use them.
Despite Apple's early lead, which will likely erode over time, this is one field where there is plenty of competition and consumer choice. What Rosen is bitching about, presumably on Microsoft's tab, is that everyone hasn't chosen Microsoft's lackluster offerings in this department.
Firstly, this article is just marketing crap designed to make it easier for Red Hat and other distros to sell support contracts to PHBs. Don't take it too seriously.
Secondly, as noted by others, there are a couple of hidden assumptions in their sampling of Linux developers.
Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, Linux represents an infinitesimal fraction of FOSS software. It's just a bloody kernel. Making generalizations about FOSS on the basis of Linux is like writing a dissertation on western literature after reading one novel.
Fourthly, the article plainly ignores the many tens of thousands of us who are paid to do entirely different closed-source programming jobs, but who spend hours out of each day reading Slashdot and working on our own free software projects, totally unbeknownst to our employers.;)
What about common or garden mercury? Liquid at room temperature. Though you really don't want it to leak...
That's probably why. Can you imagine the product liability lawsuits when such systems begin to vent mercury vapor as they age (or get banged about at LAN parties)? May as well have a hardware-based random number generator built around an unshielded chunk of plutonium.;)
Don't know about you, but #3 strikes me as really plausible. I don't know if that makes me cynical or just experienced, but I don't see Tiger's behavior as odd, in the sense of "statistically unusual".
Don't forget about possibility #4, which is that they've been discussing this behind the scenes with Apple's lawyers, trying to get them to peaceably choose a different name. Jobs, being the notoriously stubborn guy that he is, refused, and over the last couple of days, Apple's lawyers finally told Tiger's lawyers that they could go fuck themselves in no uncertain terms. The Tiger lawyers, who might have thought up until the last moment that Apple would relent, then rush to file a lawsuit.
Now, that may be giving too much of the benefit of the doubt to TigerDirect, but not anywhere near as much as the Apple fanboy population is giving to Apple. It is worth remembering, after all, that Apple has a history of trying to run roughshod over other companies' trademarks, not the least example of which would be the use of, um, "Apple".
Just for the record, I've done a fair amount of business with both Apple and TigerDirect, and I haven't had any trouble with either of them.
But I go through this argument with my colleagues, who say that using short, descriptive variable names 'should' be enough as long as the code is well-organized.
Your colleagues are almost completely wrong. "Short, descriptive variable names" will do when the algorithm is trivial and its function obvious.
This afternoon, however, I wrote a chunk of code that takes a long series of colored line segments (identified by clr, x1, y1, x2, y2) and figures out how many closed polygons they describe. My variable names are all short and descriptive, but without at least a little introductory comment, most programmers probably wouldn't know what was going on without a whole lot of head-scratching. It's not that the code is that terribly complex, but all software ever does is move numbers around, and unless you know what the numbers are supposed to represent, it's just gibberish.
This is the goddamn stupidest thing I have ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying a lot. The idea that memo design led to the 9/11 attacks doesn't deserve a response, except for possibly making armpit noises. Designers are notorious for emphasizing form over content and overrating their minimal importance in the scheme of things, but for fuck's sake, it would be nice to believe -- all evidence to the contrary -- that the National Security Advisor and the President of the United States don't need spiffy document layouts to underscore the seriousness of international terrorist organizations flying jumbo jets into buildings.
If it's clear, simple design that's at issue, why not just have a crude drawing of a 747 flying into the White House with a 24-point header reading LOOK OUT, GEORGE!
Fuck. I'm going to have to wash my fucking brain after being around this much stupidity.
Just becuase it's closed doesn't mean it's not a standard
But it does mean it isn't as useful as an open standard.
The same goes for informal standards. I can write a program in ISO/ANSI C and be pretty sure it will compile on every major system and the majority of minor systems. If I write a program in PHP, knowing which version -- sometimes down to minor point revisions -- is a necessary preliminary.
(This isn't, incidentally, a dig against PHP, which I like (with some reservations) and make a decent living using daily. I am, however, faced with eventually having to migrate an enterprise app from PHP 4.x to PHP 5.x. The change is bad enough to make me consider circulating resumes.)
Perl is one of the better examples of an informal standard that is almost as good as a formal standard, mainly because the core developers bend over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility.
Most commercial file formats are really bad examples, and that's not just Microsoft. (Are you listening, Corel?) They're not documented most of the time, and they change frequently. Adobe stands as a good commercial counterexample in many cases. PostScript, PDF, and the Photoshop PSD format are well-documented.
For my money, though, I'll take an actual formal standard as the best of all possible worlds.
The key point that people seem to be missing when they object to McVoy's stance is that it is based on the specifics of the deal he offered to the community:
And there's the vital point you're missing -- contracts require the consent of all parties. "The open source community" or whatever you want to call it is not a legal entity. I'm a part of that community, as are most of us here, but no one gets to sign contracts for us. There was never any deal because there was no entity with whom to make a deal.
The practical problem here is that the three people in direct control of this situation were all acting in deliberate defiance of reality. McVoy is a fool for thinking that he could avoid reverse-engineering in a community essentially defined by reverse-engineering. Tridgell was a fool for thinking that McVoy, despite all indications to the contrary, wouldn't take his toys and go home. And Linus Torvalds continued his running foolishness, which is to pretend that everything is apolitical in a political system he has done more than almost anyone else to create.
McVoy wanted to provide material help to the community without hurting his business
Oh bullshit. McVoy wanted to use the community to promote his business. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's abundantly clear from McVoy's endless public tirades that altruism was not his primary motivation if it was a motivation at all.
That's bollocks. Reverse-engineering is not riding on the coat-tails of anyone. It ensures that the product is 100% compatible.
It's not just bollocks, it's rank hypocrisy coming from Linus Torvalds, who would be a completely unknown, minor software developer in Finland if he hadn't ridden -- dry-humped, actually -- on the coattails of Unix. The same goes for his last employer, whose business is built on a reverse-engineering of x86 microcode.
Ordinarily, I'm quite fond of Linus, but in this case, he's being a ridiculous ass.
The whole idea behind free software, IMHO, is that by encouraging reverse-engineering, among other forms of transparency, it ensures that software development is accelerated because you can't rest on your laurels. Your good ideas become the community's (and your competitors') good ideas, and you have to keep coming up with new good ideas to stay ahead.
This is the reverse of the closed source world where having had good ideas once entitles you to maintain a monopoly to the detriment of the consumer.
Like one of the most common ones I hear for why to switch to Linux is that Windows crashes all the time. Well, ok, maybe for that Linux user it did, I don't know, but for me it doesn't. It basically never crashes, even app crashes are pretty rare.
Disclaimer: I'm a systems software developer and a moderately enthusiastic Linux advocate.
My experience is much the same. Win2k and WinXP have been very solid for me. During the time I've been using them, I have had two or three crashes per year at most. I've had about the same number from Linux on my desktop machine. (My Linux servers, on the other hand, have only gone down when I shut them down on purpose for a hardware upgrade.)
In short, the whole Windows-crashes-all-the-time argument is outdated. Claiming otherwise will not improve one's credibility with Windows users. Nor will offering the GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop when talking to a design professional. Offering OpenOffice as an alternative to MS Office, on the other hand, can be compelling. It all depends on your needs. I still need -- thanks mostly to Adobe -- to dual boot.
Now, as far as Laura DiDio goes, the real credibility gap comes when you have a non-programmer examining actual source code -- as she did at the beginning of the SCO fiasco -- and acting as if she has the ability to reach an informed opinion. (We leave aside the question of whether SCO's peek-a-boo evidence displays, now long discredited in the courts, should have been taken seriously to begin with.) I'm not a doctor. If you showed me a human heart and a pig heart of approximately equal sizes, I'm not sure I could tell which was which. I know I'm not qualified to form an opinion, so I reserve judgment. Likewise, Laura DiDio is not a software engineer, and ought to have reserved judgment when she was looking at isolated code snippets that a qualified professional would have rejected as too small and too context-free to reach a conclusion in the first place.
Now, I'm not going to cast aspersions on the independence of DiDio or the Yankee Group. There may or may not be any bias stemming from funding. There clearly is a bias rooted in simple intellectual arrogance, or at the very least a failure to distinguish between business questions and technical questions. It's not necessary for these people to be whores; it's quite possible that they are simply honest people who are out of their depth and too conceited to realize it.
They certainly knew geometry and optics. What they didn't know was glass. Crystal lenses have been discovered all over the Mediterranean.
Ancient Greece isn't my specialty -- that would be Egypt -- but I know that by the time the Greeks were trading with the Egyptians, blown glass artifacts start showing up, initially as imports, and later as domestic products. The Egyptians had been making cast-glass jewelry for some time before that. I rather doubt they knew how to make optical-grade glass, though. That the Greeks knew about lenses is, however, established fact.
The Romans, on the other hand, used plate glass extensively in their windows. It only fell out of use at the end of the classic era, when the constant fighting of the middle ages made large, easily broken windows a liability for defenders.
If we could accept that we didn't always need new, perfect, shiny medicines and electronics, it would put them in a sane price range.
I don't know about you, but I kind of like the fact that when I get a prescription filled, barring pharmacist error, the drug I am buying is free of impurities and, for that matter, is actually the chemical I need. When it comes to molecules, a stray atom or two is often the difference between medicine and poison.
Likewise, if I'm fighting off acute pneumonia and it becomes necessary for me to go on a heart-lung machine, a system crash because of a faulty RAM chip is a matter of life and death.
I confess that I don't know much about pharmaceutical synthesis processes, but when it comes to solid-state electronics, perfect chips at affordable prices are chiefly the result of economies of scale and mature fabrication technologies. This is why you can get a $300 camcorder that will fit in your shirt pocket today, while a camcorder in 1979 -- as I recall from drooling over the Sears catalog as a child -- ran about $1100.
Now, I do know a lot about the economics of pharmaceuticals, having worked in that field, and I can tell you it's not the need for perfection that drives up the cost of drugs. It's a wide array of anti-competitive market forces. Contrary to what the President says, drugs aren't cheaper in Canada because Canadians have lower standards; it's because of differing market conditions. The drugs themselves are exactly the same.
I've got two observations to make here. Firstly, this article's claim to belong on Slashdot is tenuous at best. If simply using pharmaceuticals makes this a biotech story, we are in for an awful lot of biotech stories, mostly involving Courtney Love.
And secondly, despite that, this is one of the best-written articles to appear on Slashdot in some time. It smacks of actual journalism, which isn't something that happens often here.
Curious to see what this was doing to their stock price, I discovered that their ticker symbol has changed from SCOX to SCOXE.
Not knowing terribly much about the stock market, I can't say why this is. Was it imposed by NASDAQ? It seems a rather odd thing to undertake voluntarily under the circumstances. But maybe they did it so panicked investors wouldn't be able to find them in order to sell.
"SCOX? I'm afraid I can't process your sell order, sir -- there's no such company."
True enough in the long (or perhaps near) term.
Re:Has anyone but the reviewer even read this book
on
Blink, Take 2
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I've recommended it to all my friends and family.
Oh, you're one of those.
In all seriousness, I suspect that this book would not play too well with Slashdot readers simply because a large proportion of us are programmers or other technical types. We're already more than usually familiar with the subjective experience of the intuitive "blink". We're also, by nature, fairly practical, so if the book doesn't offer any useful information on harnessing intuition, it's going to be an exercise in been-there-done-that for most folks here.
Given that there is legitimate concern that we will soon reach -- and maybe already have -- peak oil production, the $80/bbl price may be competitive before too long.
The real problem is that there just aren't enough turkey guts in the world to replace crude oil, and the grain that the turkeys are fed is produced by an agricultural industry that is totally dependent on petroleum-derived fertilizers and pesticides.
Personally, I think this would be wonderful for ordinary restraining orders against stalkers. A very large number of women are assaulted and killed every year by men violating the restraining orders against them. If the police were automatically notified when the stalker got within a certain distance of the victim's home, workplace, daycare, etc., it would at least make life more difficult for the perp, and might result in a timely arrest that would save some poor battered woman's life.
MS Excel had tabs back during the Windows 3.x series. I rather expect there's still some prior art if you go back further, probably in the shareware world. I vaguely remember something like a tabbed interface in the text-mode MSDOS packet reader BlueWave.
Frankly, there hasn't been much new in the way of GUI features in a very long time. Most of the innovation since 1992 or so has been a) applying old features to new problems, b) elaborating on old features, and c) adding eye-candy to old features.
There isn't much of a difference between a ten-character password and a ten-word sentence except that the "character" set is larger, and not really by that much. Let me explain:
The average adult has a vocabulary of about 20k words, and actually uses much less than that on a routine basis. Let's be really generous, though, and assume we are dealing with highly literate people with a vocabulary of, oh say, 65536 words.;)
What you just implemented is a 16-bit character set, and your ten-word phrase is computationally equivalent to a twenty-character password in the 8-bit extended ASCII set.
You can complicate things by making it case sensitive, but I have a feeling that would be more trouble than it's worth with the average end user, who can't be relied upon to handle consistent capitalization. (Scroll up and down through the comments for pertinent examples.)
But it actually gets worse than this. Whereas a ten-character password consisting of random characters has no internal structure, natural language phrases and sentences do. Consequently, if you want to build a brute force password cracker for phrase-based passwords, you can save yourself a lot of time by checking the set of grammatically correct phrases first. After all, "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party" is a lot more likely to be someone's passphrase than "sniffle upchuck defenestrate furry therefore pretense macro recoil lemon beyond". It's no objection to say that a formal grammar for English won't match everyday use; you can just use something like the SEQUITUR algorithm to build an approximate real-world English grammar from Usenet postings, the Wikipedia database, or Google.
In other words, all this extra effort accomplished was to convert a ten-character password into something a bit less secure than a twenty-character password. Or, in the real world, where end users will be using things like five word passphrases, you get something roughly equivalent to a three-character password.
That this idea was proposed in the first place is a perfect example of mistaking data for its representation.
From the cited article: A few of the programs I use on Windows run special programs at system startup. Each of these programs pre-loads its own shared libraries, which in turn allows the program to launch more quickly later. At one point, the delay from the initial appearance of my desktop to my system being responsive enough for me to start using it was up to about five minutes. Why? Because it was running a dozen or so programs to make programs load faster. The irony didn't seem funny at the time, but it does now.
I've noticed this, too. Slashdot may not be the best place to ask this, but I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has to use Windows as well as Linux, so -- does anyone know how to prevent all of this pointless preloading so I can boot in under five minutes? No doubt, a lot of this comes from programs I need to have, but which I only use infrequently.
If you genuinely want to be a freedom fighter there, good luck. But judging from the frivolity of your post "here on slash-o-dot", you really seem to have no idea what you're getting into.
Lack of respect for the host culture is just the beginning of this dingbat's character flaws.
The really ugly part of this, IMHO, is his apparently total lack of interest in the restrictions that the average Chinese must live under. He's fine if he can get his jollies, and that's the end of his considerations.
Let's just say that if he gets busted for casually flouting the laws of mainland China, I won't be joining any letter-writing campaigns to secure his release. There are too many brave Chinese rotting in jails and labor camps for the crime of demanding freedom to worry about some twit who wants to live the privileged life while he's sucking up the dineros from their jailers.
But the Usenet will nonetheless become a smaller, less interesting place once AOL turns off its newsgroup servers.
What kind of crack is this guy smoking? That's like saying that a nice neighborhood will be smaller and less interesting without all the trailer parks on its fringes. Posts from AOL users tended to be interesting in the same way that "mystery meat" is mysterious.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually prefer writing with pen and paper precisely because it's slower. I can type around 84 wpm, and there's no real limit on how much text I can crank out that way. With actual literature as opposed to rambling on Slashdot, that's a drawback. Writing with a pen makes me more sparing and careful in my choice of words.
If a perfect copy of yourself was made and placed in a chair across the desk from you it would be as real and soulful and deserving of human rights as you.
Absolutely. It would not be me, however. It would be someone just like me, though becoming less so from the moment of copying onwards as we continued to diverge through our own unique experiences.
A computer copy, if computers can possess consciousness -- and who knows? -- would be much the same. It might even be better than the original if it could think faster, remember more, and had access to external knowledgebases. It would still, however, not be me, but rather someone like me.
So from my standpoint, the knowledge that someone like me would continue to exist after I am dead is about as exciting as being told that my appendix will be preserved forever in a jar. It doesn't change the fact that I'm going to die. To escape or at least postpone that eventuality, my hopes lie with biotechnology, not computer science.
I'd love to someday be able to have a conversation with myself, narcissistic as it sounds.
I've been doing this all my life. Here's a helpful beginner's hint: if you do it out loud, people will look at you funny.
This is actually a reasonable claim, however, we shouldnt take it to mean that the liquid metal coolant itself is evironmentally sound, just that the system, while in operation, is.
"While in operation" is the key phrase here. When it gets tossed in the trash when it's replaced by next years model, crushed in the garbage truck, and dumped into the landfill, it's another story altogether. In the sense that ATI is using the term, "environmentally safe" could apply equally well to nuclear fuel rods.
You know, I've always been quick to jump on the Apple sucks bandwagon ever since they deep-sixed my first love, the Apple II, but in this case, I couldn't care less.
Who but iPod users could possibly give a shit about anything related to iPods? Don't like the way Apple runs it? Well, there are plenty of perfectly workable competitors. They largely lack the fashionability of the iPod, but they work just fine and many of them are cheaper. Go get one and quit griping. There are also plenty of legal ways to get digital music online other than iTunes, and some of them have large collections and competitive prices. Go use them.
Despite Apple's early lead, which will likely erode over time, this is one field where there is plenty of competition and consumer choice. What Rosen is bitching about, presumably on Microsoft's tab, is that everyone hasn't chosen Microsoft's lackluster offerings in this department.
Firstly, this article is just marketing crap designed to make it easier for Red Hat and other distros to sell support contracts to PHBs. Don't take it too seriously.
;)
Secondly, as noted by others, there are a couple of hidden assumptions in their sampling of Linux developers.
Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, Linux represents an infinitesimal fraction of FOSS software. It's just a bloody kernel. Making generalizations about FOSS on the basis of Linux is like writing a dissertation on western literature after reading one novel.
Fourthly, the article plainly ignores the many tens of thousands of us who are paid to do entirely different closed-source programming jobs, but who spend hours out of each day reading Slashdot and working on our own free software projects, totally unbeknownst to our employers.
What about common or garden mercury? Liquid at room temperature. Though you really don't want it to leak...
;)
That's probably why. Can you imagine the product liability lawsuits when such systems begin to vent mercury vapor as they age (or get banged about at LAN parties)? May as well have a hardware-based random number generator built around an unshielded chunk of plutonium.
Don't know about you, but #3 strikes me as really plausible. I don't know if that makes me cynical or just experienced, but I don't see Tiger's behavior as odd, in the sense of "statistically unusual".
Don't forget about possibility #4, which is that they've been discussing this behind the scenes with Apple's lawyers, trying to get them to peaceably choose a different name. Jobs, being the notoriously stubborn guy that he is, refused, and over the last couple of days, Apple's lawyers finally told Tiger's lawyers that they could go fuck themselves in no uncertain terms. The Tiger lawyers, who might have thought up until the last moment that Apple would relent, then rush to file a lawsuit.
Now, that may be giving too much of the benefit of the doubt to TigerDirect, but not anywhere near as much as the Apple fanboy population is giving to Apple. It is worth remembering, after all, that Apple has a history of trying to run roughshod over other companies' trademarks, not the least example of which would be the use of, um, "Apple".
Just for the record, I've done a fair amount of business with both Apple and TigerDirect, and I haven't had any trouble with either of them.
But I go through this argument with my colleagues, who say that using short, descriptive variable names 'should' be enough as long as the code is well-organized.
Your colleagues are almost completely wrong. "Short, descriptive variable names" will do when the algorithm is trivial and its function obvious.
This afternoon, however, I wrote a chunk of code that takes a long series of colored line segments (identified by clr, x1, y1, x2, y2) and figures out how many closed polygons they describe. My variable names are all short and descriptive, but without at least a little introductory comment, most programmers probably wouldn't know what was going on without a whole lot of head-scratching. It's not that the code is that terribly complex, but all software ever does is move numbers around, and unless you know what the numbers are supposed to represent, it's just gibberish.
This is the goddamn stupidest thing I have ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying a lot. The idea that memo design led to the 9/11 attacks doesn't deserve a response, except for possibly making armpit noises. Designers are notorious for emphasizing form over content and overrating their minimal importance in the scheme of things, but for fuck's sake, it would be nice to believe -- all evidence to the contrary -- that the National Security Advisor and the President of the United States don't need spiffy document layouts to underscore the seriousness of international terrorist organizations flying jumbo jets into buildings.
If it's clear, simple design that's at issue, why not just have a crude drawing of a 747 flying into the White House with a 24-point header reading LOOK OUT, GEORGE!
Fuck. I'm going to have to wash my fucking brain after being around this much stupidity.
Just becuase it's closed doesn't mean it's not a standard
But it does mean it isn't as useful as an open standard.
The same goes for informal standards. I can write a program in ISO/ANSI C and be pretty sure it will compile on every major system and the majority of minor systems. If I write a program in PHP, knowing which version -- sometimes down to minor point revisions -- is a necessary preliminary.
(This isn't, incidentally, a dig against PHP, which I like (with some reservations) and make a decent living using daily. I am, however, faced with eventually having to migrate an enterprise app from PHP 4.x to PHP 5.x. The change is bad enough to make me consider circulating resumes.)
Perl is one of the better examples of an informal standard that is almost as good as a formal standard, mainly because the core developers bend over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility.
Most commercial file formats are really bad examples, and that's not just Microsoft. (Are you listening, Corel?) They're not documented most of the time, and they change frequently. Adobe stands as a good commercial counterexample in many cases. PostScript, PDF, and the Photoshop PSD format are well-documented.
For my money, though, I'll take an actual formal standard as the best of all possible worlds.
The key point that people seem to be missing when they object to McVoy's stance is that it is based on the specifics of the deal he offered to the community:
And there's the vital point you're missing -- contracts require the consent of all parties. "The open source community" or whatever you want to call it is not a legal entity. I'm a part of that community, as are most of us here, but no one gets to sign contracts for us. There was never any deal because there was no entity with whom to make a deal.
The practical problem here is that the three people in direct control of this situation were all acting in deliberate defiance of reality. McVoy is a fool for thinking that he could avoid reverse-engineering in a community essentially defined by reverse-engineering. Tridgell was a fool for thinking that McVoy, despite all indications to the contrary, wouldn't take his toys and go home. And Linus Torvalds continued his running foolishness, which is to pretend that everything is apolitical in a political system he has done more than almost anyone else to create.
McVoy wanted to provide material help to the community without hurting his business
Oh bullshit. McVoy wanted to use the community to promote his business. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's abundantly clear from McVoy's endless public tirades that altruism was not his primary motivation if it was a motivation at all.
That's bollocks. Reverse-engineering is not riding on the coat-tails of anyone. It ensures that the product is 100% compatible.
It's not just bollocks, it's rank hypocrisy coming from Linus Torvalds, who would be a completely unknown, minor software developer in Finland if he hadn't ridden -- dry-humped, actually -- on the coattails of Unix. The same goes for his last employer, whose business is built on a reverse-engineering of x86 microcode.
Ordinarily, I'm quite fond of Linus, but in this case, he's being a ridiculous ass.
The whole idea behind free software, IMHO, is that by encouraging reverse-engineering, among other forms of transparency, it ensures that software development is accelerated because you can't rest on your laurels. Your good ideas become the community's (and your competitors') good ideas, and you have to keep coming up with new good ideas to stay ahead.
This is the reverse of the closed source world where having had good ideas once entitles you to maintain a monopoly to the detriment of the consumer.
Like one of the most common ones I hear for why to switch to Linux is that Windows crashes all the time. Well, ok, maybe for that Linux user it did, I don't know, but for me it doesn't. It basically never crashes, even app crashes are pretty rare.
Disclaimer: I'm a systems software developer and a moderately enthusiastic Linux advocate.
My experience is much the same. Win2k and WinXP have been very solid for me. During the time I've been using them, I have had two or three crashes per year at most. I've had about the same number from Linux on my desktop machine. (My Linux servers, on the other hand, have only gone down when I shut them down on purpose for a hardware upgrade.)
In short, the whole Windows-crashes-all-the-time argument is outdated. Claiming otherwise will not improve one's credibility with Windows users. Nor will offering the GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop when talking to a design professional. Offering OpenOffice as an alternative to MS Office, on the other hand, can be compelling. It all depends on your needs. I still need -- thanks mostly to Adobe -- to dual boot.
Now, as far as Laura DiDio goes, the real credibility gap comes when you have a non-programmer examining actual source code -- as she did at the beginning of the SCO fiasco -- and acting as if she has the ability to reach an informed opinion. (We leave aside the question of whether SCO's peek-a-boo evidence displays, now long discredited in the courts, should have been taken seriously to begin with.) I'm not a doctor. If you showed me a human heart and a pig heart of approximately equal sizes, I'm not sure I could tell which was which. I know I'm not qualified to form an opinion, so I reserve judgment. Likewise, Laura DiDio is not a software engineer, and ought to have reserved judgment when she was looking at isolated code snippets that a qualified professional would have rejected as too small and too context-free to reach a conclusion in the first place.
Now, I'm not going to cast aspersions on the independence of DiDio or the Yankee Group. There may or may not be any bias stemming from funding. There clearly is a bias rooted in simple intellectual arrogance, or at the very least a failure to distinguish between business questions and technical questions. It's not necessary for these people to be whores; it's quite possible that they are simply honest people who are out of their depth and too conceited to realize it.
They certainly knew geometry and optics. What they didn't know was glass. Crystal lenses have been discovered all over the Mediterranean.
Ancient Greece isn't my specialty -- that would be Egypt -- but I know that by the time the Greeks were trading with the Egyptians, blown glass artifacts start showing up, initially as imports, and later as domestic products. The Egyptians had been making cast-glass jewelry for some time before that. I rather doubt they knew how to make optical-grade glass, though. That the Greeks knew about lenses is, however, established fact.
The Romans, on the other hand, used plate glass extensively in their windows. It only fell out of use at the end of the classic era, when the constant fighting of the middle ages made large, easily broken windows a liability for defenders.
If we could accept that we didn't always need new, perfect, shiny medicines and electronics, it would put them in a sane price range.
I don't know about you, but I kind of like the fact that when I get a prescription filled, barring pharmacist error, the drug I am buying is free of impurities and, for that matter, is actually the chemical I need. When it comes to molecules, a stray atom or two is often the difference between medicine and poison.
Likewise, if I'm fighting off acute pneumonia and it becomes necessary for me to go on a heart-lung machine, a system crash because of a faulty RAM chip is a matter of life and death.
I confess that I don't know much about pharmaceutical synthesis processes, but when it comes to solid-state electronics, perfect chips at affordable prices are chiefly the result of economies of scale and mature fabrication technologies. This is why you can get a $300 camcorder that will fit in your shirt pocket today, while a camcorder in 1979 -- as I recall from drooling over the Sears catalog as a child -- ran about $1100.
Now, I do know a lot about the economics of pharmaceuticals, having worked in that field, and I can tell you it's not the need for perfection that drives up the cost of drugs. It's a wide array of anti-competitive market forces. Contrary to what the President says, drugs aren't cheaper in Canada because Canadians have lower standards; it's because of differing market conditions. The drugs themselves are exactly the same.
I've got two observations to make here. Firstly, this article's claim to belong on Slashdot is tenuous at best. If simply using pharmaceuticals makes this a biotech story, we are in for an awful lot of biotech stories, mostly involving Courtney Love.
And secondly, despite that, this is one of the best-written articles to appear on Slashdot in some time. It smacks of actual journalism, which isn't something that happens often here.
Curious to see what this was doing to their stock price, I discovered that their ticker symbol has changed from SCOX to SCOXE.
Not knowing terribly much about the stock market, I can't say why this is. Was it imposed by NASDAQ? It seems a rather odd thing to undertake voluntarily under the circumstances. But maybe they did it so panicked investors wouldn't be able to find them in order to sell.
"SCOX? I'm afraid I can't process your sell order, sir -- there's no such company."
True enough in the long (or perhaps near) term.
I've recommended it to all my friends and family.
Oh, you're one of those.
In all seriousness, I suspect that this book would not play too well with Slashdot readers simply because a large proportion of us are programmers or other technical types. We're already more than usually familiar with the subjective experience of the intuitive "blink". We're also, by nature, fairly practical, so if the book doesn't offer any useful information on harnessing intuition, it's going to be an exercise in been-there-done-that for most folks here.
Given that there is legitimate concern that we will soon reach -- and maybe already have -- peak oil production, the $80/bbl price may be competitive before too long.
The real problem is that there just aren't enough turkey guts in the world to replace crude oil, and the grain that the turkeys are fed is produced by an agricultural industry that is totally dependent on petroleum-derived fertilizers and pesticides.
Personally, I think this would be wonderful for ordinary restraining orders against stalkers. A very large number of women are assaulted and killed every year by men violating the restraining orders against them. If the police were automatically notified when the stalker got within a certain distance of the victim's home, workplace, daycare, etc., it would at least make life more difficult for the perp, and might result in a timely arrest that would save some poor battered woman's life.
MS Excel had tabs back during the Windows 3.x series. I rather expect there's still some prior art if you go back further, probably in the shareware world. I vaguely remember something like a tabbed interface in the text-mode MSDOS packet reader BlueWave.
Frankly, there hasn't been much new in the way of GUI features in a very long time. Most of the innovation since 1992 or so has been a) applying old features to new problems, b) elaborating on old features, and c) adding eye-candy to old features.
There isn't much of a difference between a ten-character password and a ten-word sentence except that the "character" set is larger, and not really by that much. Let me explain:
;)
The average adult has a vocabulary of about 20k words, and actually uses much less than that on a routine basis. Let's be really generous, though, and assume we are dealing with highly literate people with a vocabulary of, oh say, 65536 words.
What you just implemented is a 16-bit character set, and your ten-word phrase is computationally equivalent to a twenty-character password in the 8-bit extended ASCII set.
You can complicate things by making it case sensitive, but I have a feeling that would be more trouble than it's worth with the average end user, who can't be relied upon to handle consistent capitalization. (Scroll up and down through the comments for pertinent examples.)
But it actually gets worse than this. Whereas a ten-character password consisting of random characters has no internal structure, natural language phrases and sentences do. Consequently, if you want to build a brute force password cracker for phrase-based passwords, you can save yourself a lot of time by checking the set of grammatically correct phrases first. After all, "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party" is a lot more likely to be someone's passphrase than "sniffle upchuck defenestrate furry therefore pretense macro recoil lemon beyond". It's no objection to say that a formal grammar for English won't match everyday use; you can just use something like the SEQUITUR algorithm to build an approximate real-world English grammar from Usenet postings, the Wikipedia database, or Google.
In other words, all this extra effort accomplished was to convert a ten-character password into something a bit less secure than a twenty-character password. Or, in the real world, where end users will be using things like five word passphrases, you get something roughly equivalent to a three-character password.
That this idea was proposed in the first place is a perfect example of mistaking data for its representation.
From the cited article: A few of the programs I use on Windows run special programs at system startup. Each of these programs pre-loads its own shared libraries, which in turn allows the program to launch more quickly later. At one point, the delay from the initial appearance of my desktop to my system being responsive enough for me to start using it was up to about five minutes. Why? Because it was running a dozen or so programs to make programs load faster. The irony didn't seem funny at the time, but it does now.
I've noticed this, too. Slashdot may not be the best place to ask this, but I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has to use Windows as well as Linux, so -- does anyone know how to prevent all of this pointless preloading so I can boot in under five minutes? No doubt, a lot of this comes from programs I need to have, but which I only use infrequently.
If you genuinely want to be a freedom fighter there, good luck. But judging from the frivolity of your post "here on slash-o-dot", you really seem to have no idea what you're getting into.
Lack of respect for the host culture is just the beginning of this dingbat's character flaws.
The really ugly part of this, IMHO, is his apparently total lack of interest in the restrictions that the average Chinese must live under. He's fine if he can get his jollies, and that's the end of his considerations.
Let's just say that if he gets busted for casually flouting the laws of mainland China, I won't be joining any letter-writing campaigns to secure his release. There are too many brave Chinese rotting in jails and labor camps for the crime of demanding freedom to worry about some twit who wants to live the privileged life while he's sucking up the dineros from their jailers.
From the article:
But the Usenet will nonetheless become a smaller, less interesting place once AOL turns off its newsgroup servers.
What kind of crack is this guy smoking? That's like saying that a nice neighborhood will be smaller and less interesting without all the trailer parks on its fringes. Posts from AOL users tended to be interesting in the same way that "mystery meat" is mysterious.