Okay, now I gotta know. You work in Santa Barbara, presumably (you lucky bastard -- I'd give my left nut to be back there). Last I read, Santa Barbara was full of little tech companies. Why do you keep *working* somewhere like that with so many other options? I mean, seriously, I've read of places where the IT department is an absolute horror story, and if they're making one's life miserable, instead of being miserable about it, wouldn't it be easier to just start working somewhere where they're out to help instead of hinder?
I mean, yes, it's some effort, but if someone wanted me to write software in Fortran 77 using EVE on a VMS box, I'd start looking for something else, just because this is not what I'd prefer to do with my days.
Or work from home.
Hmm.
You know, I wonder if, someday in the future, we might have "office service" companies. People telecommute an increasing amount, as it lets them live independently of the constraints of who they work with, but we're still struggling with the problem of providing a different "psychological environment" for work to help get you into a "work mode". Some people have a home office, but really, there's a legitimate argument for certain services that are only worthwhile to provide to an office -- redundant Internet connections, commercial shredding, various forms of physical security, IT services, people to socialize with at lunch, etc. But I could see an "office company" that simply provides people with work environments near their houses, and specializes in excellent telecommuting and remote access services.
There have been improvements (TS can get $$$, though, as I understand it), but it is a decidedly valid statement that Unix boxes are much more usable remotely. I fire up ssh, have GNU screen startup automatically on all remotely-initiated sessions, and have a wonderful environment to work in. It really is just like being in front of the system. I've been known to write one-liner distributed applications using netcat in the course of work.
Terminal Services is a usable system for remotely dealing with a computer in a pinch, but nobody is going to claim that it's comparable to working on the local computer -- you're looking at a big remote desktop, for starters.
I think Stallman might get a bit irritable about that.
I *do* think that if you provide something via the regular, non-authenticated Web, you should be prepared to allow people to mirror that item, and not to have control over when that item *stops* being offered. Because that's just how the Web *works*, and trying to apply meatspace rules to the Web, where costs of replication and distribution are vastly different from meatspace, just doesn't make sense.
Hertzfeld (and Woz, Raskin, and similar) are a lot more responsible for the amazing technical strides made by Apple than Jobs, who inexplicably seems to get the lion's share of the glory. Jobs is notable for (a) cheating his "friend" Woz out of their shared earnings on the first Apples, (b) always blowing his own horn as loudly as possible and appearing in as many magazines as possible, (c) being an incredible prick towards those who worked with him, (d) refusing to acknowledge the daughter he fathered out of wedlock. He is not a Nice Person.
Okay, I know that everyone likes throwing out wisecracks about the headline, which was ever-so-cleverly chosen by the article submitter, but consider the article for a moment.
This is about the accuracy of clinical trial research. This is not about market research studies in the latest clothes fashions. Medicine is an extremely lucrative and risky field -- being associated with the group that pushes through the next Viagra can ensure that your family becomes the next Rockefellers. Your only opposition is the FDA (and the politicians that influence it, which are always hungry for money, which you have lots of).
There is a tremendous amount of pressure on pharmaceutical researchers to produce favorable results. Let's say that you're a new, idealistic researcher who runs some tests on a new drug that your employer wants to market. Your tests show that our drug produces an increased rate of cancer? Well, been nice having you work here...bye. Bob down the hall has consistently gotten us much better results to feed to the FDA for approval. We really don't know how or why he gets better results, but he's definitely the man we want on the job. Sure, maybe twenty years down the road there will be some complaining, but *we didn't know*...*we did all our due dilligence and somehow our results just wound up showing that our drug was okay*.
And even the more innocent "conclusive results" become suspect. A pharmaceutical doesn't want "inconclusive results", where "further tests are recommended". They have a bloody lifetime on the product ticking away, and a competition breathing down their neck. They want some scientist to sign off on this thing with a nice firm "Okay" or "Not Okay", or else what are they paying the guy for? He's not here to do ivory tower work -- he's here to serve the company, which is in the business of extracting savings from aging and achy baby boomers and subsidies paid for by their tax-paying children.
What is being said is that a full third of examined clinical trials were essentially horseshit. This is really not a laughing matter.
I'd like to say how smug and pleased I feel that, just this once, it isn't the United States with the new idiotic copyright law to push through -- that someone else is doing something stupid in the IP world that the US is doing right. Makes me feel downright patriotic. In the US, *we* don't hate archive.org and Google. So there!
It will need to install on machines next to Window, leaving that completely intact and easy to return to, and carry over all or nearly all of the user's data and settings.
Not going to happen. Doesn't happen with Mac OS. Too much proprietary setting information that changes format from version to version. This is a significant convenience, but I do not see it as crucial to adoption. People reconfigure all their apps when they upgrade their computer anyway -- Windows has extremely poor support for retaining application settings.
A user should be able to install Fedora Core 4 and go grab the latest Firefox release from Download.com and have it work without the need for finding and installing compat-libstdc++ or whatever.
I'll give that the environment is not perfect, and could be improved, but running a program, getting a list of packages and just choosing what you want and having it all automatically downloaded and installed (with dependencies autohandled, just as they have been for a long time) it's honestly easier to use than the Windows world. I'll give you that not everything is packaged, but I am a developer and power user, and I have only a few binaries in/usr/local/bin (thus unpackaged), and most of those were things that I wrote. Of the others, an nzb client, a readline wrapper to add readline support to apps that lack it (not of interest to the typical user), and a fuse userspace utility are the only things sitting in there. ~/bin contains a few more unpackaged things, but again almost everything was written by me -- the exceptions include a bin2iso converter, a grep colorizer, an ebook converter, a process memory dumper, a Gnutella client that I hack on, a parity file generator, an X11 memory usage analysis program, two interactive fiction game runtimes, a console MUD client, a console UNIX-DOS linefeed converter, a pair of programs to pack and unpack executables for reverse engineering, and a Super Nintendo emulator. A couple of those programs would be interesting to the typical user, but most probably would not. The rest of the binaries on my system come from just usage of yum. I will admit that configuring yum properly to use third-party repositories is a bit of a pain, but it's not *that* hard, and there are step-by-step instructions on dag/dries/atrpms/etc. And that's really the only unusual step.
The problem comes in when people treat Linux distros as they do proprietary software, which is designed around systems where all the vendors can't cooperate to provide downloads, because they *sell* their software. They start hunting around webpages to download software, when all they have to do is just fire up their package downloader. And compat-libstdc++ and friends get handled automatically.
Asking them to figure out complex system library and kernel compatibility issues is a one way ticket off of their desktop.
Is asking them to try synaptic or yum or another package manager?
I mean, Windows Update has at least as complex an interface, and Windows users are expected to use *that*.
I guess that some users might want somethng a bit more like Red Carpet -- a package manager that does a bit more hand-holding ("click on this square if you want a program to write letters with, and this one if you want to get games"), but it really isn't *that* complex. It's just different.
Regular People shouldn't have to (guess or learn enough to) choose between Gnome and KDE when they're installing your product.
IIRC, Fedora Core lets you choose which desktop environment you want to use every time you log in -- it's not as if trying it out is that bad. (I can't be sure of this, because I just use sawfish+gkrellm+xbindkeys, but I distinctly remember seeing a friend using a vanilla Fedora Core having a menu to select.)
Regular People don't need 15-20 mediocre games in a highly visible Games menu at the top of the Applications list.
Morality is a common social phenomenon. It is too widespread for someone to claim that it is parasitic in nature -- it must be a meme that is symbiotic with human society (which is not equivalent to being symbiotic with individual humans, but may still assist the survival of individuals' progeny).
The problem is public-good problems, where rational, self-good optimizing agents produce a globally non-optimal result. This is the great bane of society, and a tremendous amount of the complexity in things we do are involved in dealing with this problem.
Several social mechanisms have sprung up to address public good problems.
The first is government. Government has the ability to shift the values of games so that they are no longer public good problems. They generally do this by imposing penalties. For instance, nobody is going to spend the money to build an interstate highway system on their own -- the cost to them will exceed the benefit. However, it is in society's interest to produce said interstate highway system. So we all agree to produce a government that will tax people, jail those who do not pay the tax, and then produce a highway system. This eliminates the public good problem.
A second one is morality. It may not be in my immediate self-interest (or at least given what my brain can rationally predict) to avoid cheating someone. However, we are not perfectly rational creatures, and if a social meme can evolve that latches on to some non-rational structure of my brain, and force me to irrationally avoid cheating that person, this will be beneficial to the continuation of society, which is generally beneficial to the continuation of my decendents. Thus, morality is a positive to my society, at least barring the introduction of a superior social structure that can solve the same problem.
Morality solves some public-good problems that government cannot -- the government may not be able to enforce laws for every situation where morality tells you not to do something.
As many people have observed, the idea of morality being absolute is, quite obviously, ridiculous. While laws may be based on morality, morality is a pragmatically advantageous meme -- it can evolve separately in various societies to deal with slightly different conditions and challenges.
Morality needs a "hook" to convince (generally rational, self-interested) people to adopt it. There's no reason for someone to simply "be moral" for the sake of "being moral". Sometimes emotion can fill this role. Emotion is a common mechanism that we evolved to provide occasional "patches" to rationality. For example, while it may be an evolutionarily good idea to protect our children, it is not immediately self-benefiting (it serves our bloodline, not ourselves), and in any case the benefits of having surviving descendents (which are generally long-term) may not be immediately apparent to the rational mind, even if they could be explained in such terms. This explains, for instance, revulsion at, say, killing babies or love for spouse or children. However, emotion is generally a very basic thing. It is not much tied up in rational thought -- there are very basic triggers that fire it -- certain shapes, scents, and temperatures fire off lust in us, for example. It is difficult to quickly "train" emotion to rapidly deal with changing social conditions (and if we could, we would be too easily attackable by parasitic memes that would take advantage of us).
This need for a hook to get people to adopt morality and the inability of emotion to fully provide the hook is one reason religion and morality have often become closely intertwined. Religion ranges the full gamut of highly symbiotic to highly parasitic behavior. It has become expert in exploiting irrationalities and emotion in human nature to spread, protect itself, and survive. One way that a religion can greatly improve its symbiotic nature and thus its long-term prospects is by adopting moral elements -- morality is thus generally sym
Some may argue that the consumer is hurt by anti-competitive behavior. That's true, but the opposite can be true as well.
Yes, but said opposite is true in the same fashion that theoretically all the air molecules to one side of you could whack you at the same time that all the air molecules on the other side of you happen to be leaving the vicinity, thus knocking you through a wall. It's not that it's inconceivable -- it's just that it hasn't happened before and doesn't seem very likely to ever happen.
So what are the advantages of the TLD approach that caused this to get approved?
See, your problem is that you are a perfectly rational, nice-guy engineer type who has an interest in building good systems. From your standpoint, it makes exactly no sense -- it's actually a bad idea, if anything, which is why you can expect Berners-Lee to oppose it.
The thing is that the registrars (and the ever-evil Verisign, which has taken abuse of power to a fine art) have too godamn much influence at ICANN, and every time a new TLD gets approved they make more money. Especially nice for them is the fact that every company that owns domains immediately buys them for every new TLD, so they are working their way up to a nice, expensive, business-class product.
Back in the day I did a lot of programming against specific operation system API such as Windows and UNIX and had the classic books for each environment. Now that programming environments such as Java and C# exist most of those book just gathering dust.
[minor irritation]
Yes. You are (according to your webpage) an Eclipse developer. This means that you would not be likely to run into OS-specific things any more than a Win32 developer would care about the details of how named pipes are handled on Unix.
I admit that most new lines of code out there are probably internal-use stuff that drive websites. For applications like these, getting the application out with a minimum of cost and use of expensive developer time is important, and if there are other concerns, they lie in the realm of reliability of security. Yes, performance doesn't matter much for systems like these, and it's fine to write these in Java.
However, there *are* those of us that still write embedded code, real-time code, CPU-intensive games, code for horizontal market applications (while I'm less familiar with C#'s prospects, Java has pretty much been a unilateral failure when it came to taking over the horizontal market application space -- take Corel's abortive attempt, for instance), libraries, and code for systems that do many things at once.
When I sit down to hack on, say, a P2P client, I don't write the thing in Java (granted, some people have). I don't do it because it's a background application that eats CPU cycles, and I don't want it bogging down my computer any more than possible. I don't want want hundreds of thousands of people to throw away megs of memory.
How the UNIX API changed that much since 1993?
C99 came out and a bunch of features got added. Threading, realtime scheduling, 64-bit support, large file support, IPC stuff has changed.
I personally like all the stories describing the "advanced security" around the thing (where actually security is no different than it would be with any book -- just the contract is slightly different.)
I think it's really cool that (a) reading and (b) fantasy are popular among kids, but I also kind of wish that a few others authors would dillute the pool so that we can have an end to the Potter madness.
Despite all this, you really have to hand it to the Chinese government. Consider that:
* There is a legitimate concern that people reading articles critical of the government will cause enough upset to collapse the government.
* The number of people involved that you are trying to black out information to number in the billions.
* You can successfully convince a majority of these billions of people that it is in their own best interest to give up their own ability to decide what to read or say.
I mean, yes, it's distasteful and all that, but beautifully executed. I don't think *I* could sucker 1.3 billion people, no matter how hard I tried.
Actually, I was pretty impressed that they managed to push through their one-child policy as well -- that had to be a hell of a tough sell.
Next time you fly, refuse to show them your photo ID at the check-in counter, and when they insist that its "..the law", ask them to show it to you. They can't, because there is no such law.
The airlines don't need a law, because they are a private industry.
If I'm the pilot of a boat, and I happen to disallow anyone who doesn't show photo ID onboard, that's my business. I own the boat, I can do what I want. If the airlines wanted to mandate that each passenger have sex with a goat before boarding one of their planes, they could add such a requirement as well.
Now, placing such a requirements on all *planes* doesn't exist. If you want to fly as a passenger with your buddy Bob Smith, who does crop dusting, he isn't going to require a photo ID, nor does he need to. It's a pretty safe bet that damn few charter pilots are going to demand photo ID from their passengers before going up.
The requirement is one placed by the airlines to gain access to their airplanes. If you want to set up an airline that doesn't require photo access to board, I'm sure that you are welcome to do so (and suffer the customer concern and insurance issues that will follow).
So, basically, you can refuse to show the check-in counter your ID (which is, admittedly, your right) and they can refuse to let you on their plane (which is their right).
And everyone just happily hands over their ID, without a single second-thought about how much they're being tracked.
Every time an imp warps in, all the lights dim. This couldn't be done realistically with precomputed light maps.
Sure it could. It's pretty simple to produce a light with a static position and vary the brightness dynamically -- just multiply the brightness of the lightmap texture. (I think Crystal Space calls this a "pseudo-dynamic" light.)
Now, if those lights were hanging chandeliers being knocked around by bullets, then things would be different...
FWIW, I have a different opinion of Doom III. I don't have a problem with the "realism" of a flashlight being available -- for the love of God, this isn't a hardcore sim. ID wanted to move away from just constantly increasing game speed and occasionally having the added necessary tactic to improve FPS gaming -- they introduced highly limited visiblity fighting.
I didn't really like playing Doom III all that much, but then again I didn't like watching Citizen Kane much...but that doesn't mean that it wasn't important to the film industry and it didn't bring a lot of improvements.
Besides, Carmack is a Good Guy towards the open source world, and he's built up a truckload of good karma.
And by the way, if you seriously think there is even a little bit of validity that the assertion that the American Revolutionary Army could be terrorists,
The colonial army did all kinds of things that would be considered nasty and underhanded for the time.
One thing was to sit and snipe, continuously, from outside enemy range, rather than fighting. Sure, maybe it didn't follow someone's "warfare ethics" of the time, but it worked.
Bin Laden *could* theoretically whip up a bunch of people into a frenzy, go march them out and have them hurl themselves against a bunch of US tanks. It would be tactically stupid, have no impact, and would be vastly inferior to blowing up the WTC, but he could do it. But he's no more of an idiot than George Washington was, and isn't going to do that.
Watch the excellent movie Lawrence of Arabia. Besides being one of the most incredible classic movies out there, it demonstrates the way the West has been treating the Middle East since World War I. Understandably, some people are very unhappy with this.
The time after World War II was a great example. Quick, simplified summary of why a lot of Arabs don't like the US:
* Nobody in Europe or the US particularly liked Jews before World War I. (A good deal of this was due to the fact that Jews formed a disproportionately influential part of the professional class that was finishing off the last of the old peasant/aristocracy.) There was plenty of discriminatory law against them -- in some European countries they couldn't own land and the like.
* World War I happened, pretty much a power grab on the part of a bunch of European and Asian nations. Arabia, which was a backwater at the time, had British troops all over it due to combat in the area. Britain being Britain, it decided to start sticking its fingers in Arabian politics and "administrate" things.
* Germany, which had been stomped in World War I, had laws produced during the liberal Weimar Republic (post WWI, pre-WWII) which essentially ensured that Jews would be treated as equal citizens in a number of ways. Not surprisingly, Jewish immigration to Germany increased.
* World War II happened. It was essentially a backlash against all the rather nasty things that (France, especially) Germany's opponents in World War I had rather vindictively done to it after the Treaty of Versailles. Among other things, this included Jews. Hitler originally wanted to deport Jews to somewhere outside of Germany (Madagascar was a popular choice), but eventually (particularly due to France not cooperating) slid towards the extermination of German Jews.
* World War II ended. There were huge numbers of Jews who had had their property siezed by the Nazi Party and had to be relocated somewhere. Nobody in Europe or the US really wanted a huge influx of Jews, especially poor refugees. One convenient solution to the problem was that there had been a Zionist movement for some time present in the Jewish community to establish a Jewish state. The logical solution to kill all birds with one stone? Simply designate a chunk of the Jews' Promised Land as a permanent residence for them. That would stick them all off somewhere where nobody would have to worry about them, and they (or at least the Zionist movement) would be happy. The problem is that this area was already occupied by a number of not-very-powerful Arabic people (and the land, while not as religiously significant to the Muslims as the Jews, still had many religiously significant places). These Arabs were brushed aside, as the US and other European nations liked the idea a good deal.
* Clashes with Israeli nationalist settlers and Arabic residents of the area grew, and a number of Arabic nations decided to kick the Jewish invaders out. The US refused to militarily intervene and save Israel, but had provided Israel with some rather nice military hardware. Using this hardware, Israel handily stomped the armies of the surrounding Arabic countries t
He thinks Christians and Jews are abominations and must be exterminated.
Having encountered one too many Southern Baptists who think that the entire non-US world is part of a vast conspiracy to "get" the US, I can't help but sympathize with the man here.
Rational people do not blow themselves up.
Rational people don't enlist in Delta Force, either. Guess we have a large number of nutcases shooting at and blowing each other up, eh?
(Problem is, one half of them is doing so on my tax dollar)
I dunno, how is making people learn to speak another language less inclusive?
Because it's long-term beneficial. It's the same logic that leads you not to jump off a cliff to avoid a bee that is stinging you -- taking the pain in the short term for an overwhelming long-term benefit is often worth it.
However, if you have government with terms, and government is essentially evaluated in the court of public opinion based on short-term performance, you may never see change (consider the US, *still* using the archaic Imperial system that even Britain has given up -- simply in air-spacc disasters along and off-the-cuff, I remember one satellite and one 747 running out of fuel).
Art is a form of nonverbal idea and emotion communication. It is probably *very difficult* to build a machine that can produce good art, since the production of art that a human would consider good is simply a problem of understanding the human mind. When I want to see what feelings or ideas a painting that I'm creating evokes, I always have an ongoing human test subject -- me. Computers do not have this.
Creating art from a computer requires not just learning and processing capabilities similar to those of a human but the experience and similar emotions to those of a human, or accurate understanding of such mechanisms.
However, while such a problem is one of the final problems that AI would be able to solve in terms of simulating a human accurately (since the machine have a very accurate model of much of the human mind), there is certainly no reason to think that it is impossible; I see no insumountable barrier.
Ah, yes. Good ol' primitive and violent use-of-vigilante-force-to-enforce-social-norms. How wonderful.
It's actually less severe than it used to be. Fifty years ago, we gave forced lobotomies to sex offenders.
The sex offender is a wonderful political device, because he or she is the one object that can be completely dehumanized and used as an utter boogeyman for whatever point needs to be achived. Want to censor the Internet? Remember, you're doing it to protect children from sex offenders. Want new domestic monitoring powers? Well, today you need them because of terrorists, but sex offenders were the popular device not too long ago. Before that, it was homosexuals or communists, the sort of person that must be stopped regardless of the means necessary or of the personal privacy sacrifices involved. They aren't people, after all -- they're just dangerous monsters.
Isn't politics wonderful? It's such a refined art, too. First, you have to isolate your target group from the people you want to rise against them. You can't have them be seen as people, or even have a human face. As a good example -- lots of catonic people are killed each year. People didn't care about terminating Terry Schavio until some footage of her got on TV, at which people everyone treated her as their own child.
Interestingly enough, the psychological process has been nicely documented by the Genocide Watch folks (who are really more interested with the process being extended to step 8, where mass killings come in, rather than the politically-valuable-and-useful step 6). Killing people off doesn't usually buy you much, and you run the risk of actually defeating the dangerous villian that you've built up in your populace's minds...then you're a fish out of water.
Take drug dealers. Thanks to DARE and other friendly propaganda, drug dealers have been portrayed as something roughly akin to Freddy Kruger. In the early part of the 20th century, drug *users* (including marijuana users) were portrayed as dangerous, out-of-control and sex-crazed types -- the same monsters. And look at all the wonderful executive branch law enforcement powers that were provided in response by a frightened populace -- quite rewarding.
* Another good offensive example, "pan", the popular GTK newsreader, started life as the "Pimp Ass Newsreader". It was hosted on superpimp.org (which, to this day, redirects to pan's homepage), and I suspect that the effort to purge the offensive background from pan and popular usage was not trivial.
* Occasionally open source names simply collide. The open source world is actually pretty good about this (partly because of the good databases of open source software), but the "Firebird" phase of Firefox's development collided with an open-source database project.
* Names for basic utilities that should be newbie-accessable should not seem bizarre. Of all the package management tools out there, I think the only two that were actually descriptively named were "Redhat Package Manager" and "A Package Tool" -- which became "rpm", and "apt", not necessarily intuitive, as they cleverly were converted into unrelated-sounding acronyms. We also have "emerge", "yum", "yup", "smart"...when the first thing that a new Linux user is expected to do is to type "yum update", he starts to wonder exactly what the rest of the commands look like.
* Some of the flood of clever acronyms that sound like something entirely unrelated -- "touch", or Time Of User CHange, "bash" for "Bourne Again SHell", "fish" (a utility designed to make software installation easier for new Linux users, yet named something that would never occur to a new user, and also having the same name as the Friendly Interactive SHell), and GNOME (the GNU Network Object Model Environment, a forced acronym if ever I heard one -- though I suppose that it was probably chosen in preference to GNUDE).
* Another common "play off an earlier command", "tac" is the reverse spelling of "cat", which is short for "concatenate files". "tac" reverses files before concatenating them. It is, of course, unrelated to "tic" and "toe", which are two commands for working with terminal description files (toe being a rather forced acronym to maintain the joke).
The reason CLI software is considered "hard to use" is not because it requires some kind of unusual talent, but because its normal mode of operation is one that that does not constantly display available options at all times during use. As a result, users of CLI software must use their software frequently enough to keep a list of all operations and the keystrokes to invoke them in their head to gain speed from use of the CLI. Why many authors seem to deliberately choose counterintuitive software names to try to make this task more difficult for a new user is beyond me.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, now I gotta know. You work in Santa Barbara, presumably (you lucky bastard -- I'd give my left nut to be back there). Last I read, Santa Barbara was full of little tech companies. Why do you keep *working* somewhere like that with so many other options? I mean, seriously, I've read of places where the IT department is an absolute horror story, and if they're making one's life miserable, instead of being miserable about it, wouldn't it be easier to just start working somewhere where they're out to help instead of hinder?
I mean, yes, it's some effort, but if someone wanted me to write software in Fortran 77 using EVE on a VMS box, I'd start looking for something else, just because this is not what I'd prefer to do with my days.
Or work from home.
Hmm.
You know, I wonder if, someday in the future, we might have "office service" companies. People telecommute an increasing amount, as it lets them live independently of the constraints of who they work with, but we're still struggling with the problem of providing a different "psychological environment" for work to help get you into a "work mode". Some people have a home office, but really, there's a legitimate argument for certain services that are only worthwhile to provide to an office -- redundant Internet connections, commercial shredding, various forms of physical security, IT services, people to socialize with at lunch, etc. But I could see an "office company" that simply provides people with work environments near their houses, and specializes in excellent telecommuting and remote access services.
There have been improvements (TS can get $$$, though, as I understand it), but it is a decidedly valid statement that Unix boxes are much more usable remotely. I fire up ssh, have GNU screen startup automatically on all remotely-initiated sessions, and have a wonderful environment to work in. It really is just like being in front of the system. I've been known to write one-liner distributed applications using netcat in the course of work.
Terminal Services is a usable system for remotely dealing with a computer in a pinch, but nobody is going to claim that it's comparable to working on the local computer -- you're looking at a big remote desktop, for starters.
I think Stallman might get a bit irritable about that.
I *do* think that if you provide something via the regular, non-authenticated Web, you should be prepared to allow people to mirror that item, and not to have control over when that item *stops* being offered. Because that's just how the Web *works*, and trying to apply meatspace rules to the Web, where costs of replication and distribution are vastly different from meatspace, just doesn't make sense.
"Nerd" is negative.
"Geek" was negative, but at least in the OSS world, has taken on a decidedly positive flavor.
Have you ever witnessed a mob killing or fatal attack on some glasses wearing kid, whilst people are yelling "Die Nerd!"?
Skipped junior high, did we?
Hertzfeld (and Woz, Raskin, and similar) are a lot more responsible for the amazing technical strides made by Apple than Jobs, who inexplicably seems to get the lion's share of the glory. Jobs is notable for (a) cheating his "friend" Woz out of their shared earnings on the first Apples, (b) always blowing his own horn as loudly as possible and appearing in as many magazines as possible, (c) being an incredible prick towards those who worked with him, (d) refusing to acknowledge the daughter he fathered out of wedlock. He is not a Nice Person.
Okay, I know that everyone likes throwing out wisecracks about the headline, which was ever-so-cleverly chosen by the article submitter, but consider the article for a moment.
This is about the accuracy of clinical trial research. This is not about market research studies in the latest clothes fashions. Medicine is an extremely lucrative and risky field -- being associated with the group that pushes through the next Viagra can ensure that your family becomes the next Rockefellers. Your only opposition is the FDA (and the politicians that influence it, which are always hungry for money, which you have lots of).
There is a tremendous amount of pressure on pharmaceutical researchers to produce favorable results. Let's say that you're a new, idealistic researcher who runs some tests on a new drug that your employer wants to market. Your tests show that our drug produces an increased rate of cancer? Well, been nice having you work here...bye. Bob down the hall has consistently gotten us much better results to feed to the FDA for approval. We really don't know how or why he gets better results, but he's definitely the man we want on the job. Sure, maybe twenty years down the road there will be some complaining, but *we didn't know*...*we did all our due dilligence and somehow our results just wound up showing that our drug was okay*.
And even the more innocent "conclusive results" become suspect. A pharmaceutical doesn't want "inconclusive results", where "further tests are recommended". They have a bloody lifetime on the product ticking away, and a competition breathing down their neck. They want some scientist to sign off on this thing with a nice firm "Okay" or "Not Okay", or else what are they paying the guy for? He's not here to do ivory tower work -- he's here to serve the company, which is in the business of extracting savings from aging and achy baby boomers and subsidies paid for by their tax-paying children.
What is being said is that a full third of examined clinical trials were essentially horseshit. This is really not a laughing matter.
I'd like to say how smug and pleased I feel that, just this once, it isn't the United States with the new idiotic copyright law to push through -- that someone else is doing something stupid in the IP world that the US is doing right. Makes me feel downright patriotic. In the US, *we* don't hate archive.org and Google. So there!
It will need to install on machines next to Window, leaving that completely intact and easy to return to, and carry over all or nearly all of the user's data and settings.
/usr/local/bin (thus unpackaged), and most of those were things that I wrote. Of the others, an nzb client, a readline wrapper to add readline support to apps that lack it (not of interest to the typical user), and a fuse userspace utility are the only things sitting in there. ~/bin contains a few more unpackaged things, but again almost everything was written by me -- the exceptions include a bin2iso converter, a grep colorizer, an ebook converter, a process memory dumper, a Gnutella client that I hack on, a parity file generator, an X11 memory usage analysis program, two interactive fiction game runtimes, a console MUD client, a console UNIX-DOS linefeed converter, a pair of programs to pack and unpack executables for reverse engineering, and a Super Nintendo emulator. A couple of those programs would be interesting to the typical user, but most probably would not. The rest of the binaries on my system come from just usage of yum. I will admit that configuring yum properly to use third-party repositories is a bit of a pain, but it's not *that* hard, and there are step-by-step instructions on dag/dries/atrpms/etc. And that's really the only unusual step.
Not going to happen. Doesn't happen with Mac OS. Too much proprietary setting information that changes format from version to version. This is a significant convenience, but I do not see it as crucial to adoption. People reconfigure all their apps when they upgrade their computer anyway -- Windows has extremely poor support for retaining application settings.
A user should be able to install Fedora Core 4 and go grab the latest Firefox release from Download.com and have it work without the need for finding and installing compat-libstdc++ or whatever.
I'll give that the environment is not perfect, and could be improved, but running a program, getting a list of packages and just choosing what you want and having it all automatically downloaded and installed (with dependencies autohandled, just as they have been for a long time) it's honestly easier to use than the Windows world. I'll give you that not everything is packaged, but I am a developer and power user, and I have only a few binaries in
The problem comes in when people treat Linux distros as they do proprietary software, which is designed around systems where all the vendors can't cooperate to provide downloads, because they *sell* their software. They start hunting around webpages to download software, when all they have to do is just fire up their package downloader. And compat-libstdc++ and friends get handled automatically.
Asking them to figure out complex system library and kernel compatibility issues is a one way ticket off of their desktop.
Is asking them to try synaptic or yum or another package manager?
I mean, Windows Update has at least as complex an interface, and Windows users are expected to use *that*.
I guess that some users might want somethng a bit more like Red Carpet -- a package manager that does a bit more hand-holding ("click on this square if you want a program to write letters with, and this one if you want to get games"), but it really isn't *that* complex. It's just different.
Regular People shouldn't have to (guess or learn enough to) choose between Gnome and KDE when they're installing your product.
IIRC, Fedora Core lets you choose which desktop environment you want to use every time you log in -- it's not as if trying it out is that bad. (I can't be sure of this, because I just use sawfish+gkrellm+xbindkeys, but I distinctly remember seeing a friend using a vanilla Fedora Core having a menu to select.)
Regular People don't need 15-20 mediocre games in a highly visible Games menu at the top of the Applications list.
Actually, I don't think that
Morality is a common social phenomenon. It is too widespread for someone to claim that it is parasitic in nature -- it must be a meme that is symbiotic with human society (which is not equivalent to being symbiotic with individual humans, but may still assist the survival of individuals' progeny).
The problem is public-good problems, where rational, self-good optimizing agents produce a globally non-optimal result. This is the great bane of society, and a tremendous amount of the complexity in things we do are involved in dealing with this problem.
Several social mechanisms have sprung up to address public good problems.
The first is government. Government has the ability to shift the values of games so that they are no longer public good problems. They generally do this by imposing penalties. For instance, nobody is going to spend the money to build an interstate highway system on their own -- the cost to them will exceed the benefit. However, it is in society's interest to produce said interstate highway system. So we all agree to produce a government that will tax people, jail those who do not pay the tax, and then produce a highway system. This eliminates the public good problem.
A second one is morality. It may not be in my immediate self-interest (or at least given what my brain can rationally predict) to avoid cheating someone. However, we are not perfectly rational creatures, and if a social meme can evolve that latches on to some non-rational structure of my brain, and force me to irrationally avoid cheating that person, this will be beneficial to the continuation of society, which is generally beneficial to the continuation of my decendents. Thus, morality is a positive to my society, at least barring the introduction of a superior social structure that can solve the same problem.
Morality solves some public-good problems that government cannot -- the government may not be able to enforce laws for every situation where morality tells you not to do something.
As many people have observed, the idea of morality being absolute is, quite obviously, ridiculous. While laws may be based on morality, morality is a pragmatically advantageous meme -- it can evolve separately in various societies to deal with slightly different conditions and challenges.
Morality needs a "hook" to convince (generally rational, self-interested) people to adopt it. There's no reason for someone to simply "be moral" for the sake of "being moral". Sometimes emotion can fill this role. Emotion is a common mechanism that we evolved to provide occasional "patches" to rationality. For example, while it may be an evolutionarily good idea to protect our children, it is not immediately self-benefiting (it serves our bloodline, not ourselves), and in any case the benefits of having surviving descendents (which are generally long-term) may not be immediately apparent to the rational mind, even if they could be explained in such terms. This explains, for instance, revulsion at, say, killing babies or love for spouse or children. However, emotion is generally a very basic thing. It is not much tied up in rational thought -- there are very basic triggers that fire it -- certain shapes, scents, and temperatures fire off lust in us, for example. It is difficult to quickly "train" emotion to rapidly deal with changing social conditions (and if we could, we would be too easily attackable by parasitic memes that would take advantage of us).
This need for a hook to get people to adopt morality and the inability of emotion to fully provide the hook is one reason religion and morality have often become closely intertwined. Religion ranges the full gamut of highly symbiotic to highly parasitic behavior. It has become expert in exploiting irrationalities and emotion in human nature to spread, protect itself, and survive. One way that a religion can greatly improve its symbiotic nature and thus its long-term prospects is by adopting moral elements -- morality is thus generally sym
Some may argue that the consumer is hurt by anti-competitive behavior. That's true, but the opposite can be true as well.
Yes, but said opposite is true in the same fashion that theoretically all the air molecules to one side of you could whack you at the same time that all the air molecules on the other side of you happen to be leaving the vicinity, thus knocking you through a wall. It's not that it's inconceivable -- it's just that it hasn't happened before and doesn't seem very likely to ever happen.
So what are the advantages of the TLD approach that caused this to get approved?
See, your problem is that you are a perfectly rational, nice-guy engineer type who has an interest in building good systems. From your standpoint, it makes exactly no sense -- it's actually a bad idea, if anything, which is why you can expect Berners-Lee to oppose it.
The thing is that the registrars (and the ever-evil Verisign, which has taken abuse of power to a fine art) have too godamn much influence at ICANN, and every time a new TLD gets approved they make more money. Especially nice for them is the fact that every company that owns domains immediately buys them for every new TLD, so they are working their way up to a nice, expensive, business-class product.
Back in the day I did a lot of programming against specific operation system API such as Windows and UNIX and had the classic books for each environment. Now that programming environments such as Java and C# exist most of those book just gathering dust.
[minor irritation]
Yes. You are (according to your webpage) an Eclipse developer. This means that you would not be likely to run into OS-specific things any more than a Win32 developer would care about the details of how named pipes are handled on Unix.
I admit that most new lines of code out there are probably internal-use stuff that drive websites. For applications like these, getting the application out with a minimum of cost and use of expensive developer time is important, and if there are other concerns, they lie in the realm of reliability of security. Yes, performance doesn't matter much for systems like these, and it's fine to write these in Java.
However, there *are* those of us that still write embedded code, real-time code, CPU-intensive games, code for horizontal market applications (while I'm less familiar with C#'s prospects, Java has pretty much been a unilateral failure when it came to taking over the horizontal market application space -- take Corel's abortive attempt, for instance), libraries, and code for systems that do many things at once.
When I sit down to hack on, say, a P2P client, I don't write the thing in Java (granted, some people have). I don't do it because it's a background application that eats CPU cycles, and I don't want it bogging down my computer any more than possible. I don't want want hundreds of thousands of people to throw away megs of memory.
How the UNIX API changed that much since 1993?
C99 came out and a bunch of features got added. Threading, realtime scheduling, 64-bit support, large file support, IPC stuff has changed.
I personally like all the stories describing the "advanced security" around the thing (where actually security is no different than it would be with any book -- just the contract is slightly different.)
I think it's really cool that (a) reading and (b) fantasy are popular among kids, but I also kind of wish that a few others authors would dillute the pool so that we can have an end to the Potter madness.
Despite all this, you really have to hand it to the Chinese government. Consider that:
* There is a legitimate concern that people reading articles critical of the government will cause enough upset to collapse the government.
* The number of people involved that you are trying to black out information to number in the billions.
* You can successfully convince a majority of these billions of people that it is in their own best interest to give up their own ability to decide what to read or say.
I mean, yes, it's distasteful and all that, but beautifully executed. I don't think *I* could sucker 1.3 billion people, no matter how hard I tried.
Actually, I was pretty impressed that they managed to push through their one-child policy as well -- that had to be a hell of a tough sell.
Next time you fly, refuse to show them your photo ID at the check-in counter, and when they insist that its "..the law", ask them to show it to you. They can't, because there is no such law.
The airlines don't need a law, because they are a private industry.
If I'm the pilot of a boat, and I happen to disallow anyone who doesn't show photo ID onboard, that's my business. I own the boat, I can do what I want. If the airlines wanted to mandate that each passenger have sex with a goat before boarding one of their planes, they could add such a requirement as well.
Now, placing such a requirements on all *planes* doesn't exist. If you want to fly as a passenger with your buddy Bob Smith, who does crop dusting, he isn't going to require a photo ID, nor does he need to. It's a pretty safe bet that damn few charter pilots are going to demand photo ID from their passengers before going up.
The requirement is one placed by the airlines to gain access to their airplanes. If you want to set up an airline that doesn't require photo access to board, I'm sure that you are welcome to do so (and suffer the customer concern and insurance issues that will follow).
So, basically, you can refuse to show the check-in counter your ID (which is, admittedly, your right) and they can refuse to let you on their plane (which is their right).
And everyone just happily hands over their ID, without a single second-thought about how much they're being tracked.
I agree that we have way too much tracking.
If Marathon was scary, Marathon Infinity was *very* scary.
Every time an imp warps in, all the lights dim. This couldn't be done realistically with precomputed light maps.
Sure it could. It's pretty simple to produce a light with a static position and vary the brightness dynamically -- just multiply the brightness of the lightmap texture. (I think Crystal Space calls this a "pseudo-dynamic" light.)
Now, if those lights were hanging chandeliers being knocked around by bullets, then things would be different...
FWIW, I have a different opinion of Doom III. I don't have a problem with the "realism" of a flashlight being available -- for the love of God, this isn't a hardcore sim. ID wanted to move away from just constantly increasing game speed and occasionally having the added necessary tactic to improve FPS gaming -- they introduced highly limited visiblity fighting.
I didn't really like playing Doom III all that much, but then again I didn't like watching Citizen Kane much...but that doesn't mean that it wasn't important to the film industry and it didn't bring a lot of improvements.
Besides, Carmack is a Good Guy towards the open source world, and he's built up a truckload of good karma.
And by the way, if you seriously think there is even a little bit of validity that the assertion that the American Revolutionary Army could be terrorists,
The colonial army did all kinds of things that would be considered nasty and underhanded for the time.
One thing was to sit and snipe, continuously, from outside enemy range, rather than fighting. Sure, maybe it didn't follow someone's "warfare ethics" of the time, but it worked.
Bin Laden *could* theoretically whip up a bunch of people into a frenzy, go march them out and have them hurl themselves against a bunch of US tanks. It would be tactically stupid, have no impact, and would be vastly inferior to blowing up the WTC, but he could do it. But he's no more of an idiot than George Washington was, and isn't going to do that.
Watch the excellent movie Lawrence of Arabia. Besides being one of the most incredible classic movies out there, it demonstrates the way the West has been treating the Middle East since World War I. Understandably, some people are very unhappy with this.
The time after World War II was a great example. Quick, simplified summary of why a lot of Arabs don't like the US:
* Nobody in Europe or the US particularly liked Jews before World War I. (A good deal of this was due to the fact that Jews formed a disproportionately influential part of the professional class that was finishing off the last of the old peasant/aristocracy.) There was plenty of discriminatory law against them -- in some European countries they couldn't own land and the like.
* World War I happened, pretty much a power grab on the part of a bunch of European and Asian nations. Arabia, which was a backwater at the time, had British troops all over it due to combat in the area. Britain being Britain, it decided to start sticking its fingers in Arabian politics and "administrate" things.
* Germany, which had been stomped in World War I, had laws produced during the liberal Weimar Republic (post WWI, pre-WWII) which essentially ensured that Jews would be treated as equal citizens in a number of ways. Not surprisingly, Jewish immigration to Germany increased.
* World War II happened. It was essentially a backlash against all the rather nasty things that (France, especially) Germany's opponents in World War I had rather vindictively done to it after the Treaty of Versailles. Among other things, this included Jews. Hitler originally wanted to deport Jews to somewhere outside of Germany (Madagascar was a popular choice), but eventually (particularly due to France not cooperating) slid towards the extermination of German Jews.
* World War II ended. There were huge numbers of Jews who had had their property siezed by the Nazi Party and had to be relocated somewhere. Nobody in Europe or the US really wanted a huge influx of Jews, especially poor refugees. One convenient solution to the problem was that there had been a Zionist movement for some time present in the Jewish community to establish a Jewish state. The logical solution to kill all birds with one stone? Simply designate a chunk of the Jews' Promised Land as a permanent residence for them. That would stick them all off somewhere where nobody would have to worry about them, and they (or at least the Zionist movement) would be happy. The problem is that this area was already occupied by a number of not-very-powerful Arabic people (and the land, while not as religiously significant to the Muslims as the Jews, still had many religiously significant places). These Arabs were brushed aside, as the US and other European nations liked the idea a good deal.
* Clashes with Israeli nationalist settlers and Arabic residents of the area grew, and a number of Arabic nations decided to kick the Jewish invaders out. The US refused to militarily intervene and save Israel, but had provided Israel with some rather nice military hardware. Using this hardware, Israel handily stomped the armies of the surrounding Arabic countries t
He thinks Christians and Jews are abominations and must be exterminated.
Having encountered one too many Southern Baptists who think that the entire non-US world is part of a vast conspiracy to "get" the US, I can't help but sympathize with the man here.
Rational people do not blow themselves up.
Rational people don't enlist in Delta Force, either. Guess we have a large number of nutcases shooting at and blowing each other up, eh?
(Problem is, one half of them is doing so on my tax dollar)
I dunno, how is making people learn to speak another language less inclusive?
Because it's long-term beneficial. It's the same logic that leads you not to jump off a cliff to avoid a bee that is stinging you -- taking the pain in the short term for an overwhelming long-term benefit is often worth it.
However, if you have government with terms, and government is essentially evaluated in the court of public opinion based on short-term performance, you may never see change (consider the US, *still* using the archaic Imperial system that even Britain has given up -- simply in air-spacc disasters along and off-the-cuff, I remember one satellite and one 747 running out of fuel).
Art is a form of nonverbal idea and emotion communication. It is probably *very difficult* to build a machine that can produce good art, since the production of art that a human would consider good is simply a problem of understanding the human mind. When I want to see what feelings or ideas a painting that I'm creating evokes, I always have an ongoing human test subject -- me. Computers do not have this.
Creating art from a computer requires not just learning and processing capabilities similar to those of a human but the experience and similar emotions to those of a human, or accurate understanding of such mechanisms.
However, while such a problem is one of the final problems that AI would be able to solve in terms of simulating a human accurately (since the machine have a very accurate model of much of the human mind), there is certainly no reason to think that it is impossible; I see no insumountable barrier.
Ah, yes. Good ol' primitive and violent use-of-vigilante-force-to-enforce-social-norms. How wonderful.
It's actually less severe than it used to be. Fifty years ago, we gave forced lobotomies to sex offenders.
The sex offender is a wonderful political device, because he or she is the one object that can be completely dehumanized and used as an utter boogeyman for whatever point needs to be achived. Want to censor the Internet? Remember, you're doing it to protect children from sex offenders. Want new domestic monitoring powers? Well, today you need them because of terrorists, but sex offenders were the popular device not too long ago. Before that, it was homosexuals or communists, the sort of person that must be stopped regardless of the means necessary or of the personal privacy sacrifices involved. They aren't people, after all -- they're just dangerous monsters.
Isn't politics wonderful? It's such a refined art, too. First, you have to isolate your target group from the people you want to rise against them. You can't have them be seen as people, or even have a human face. As a good example -- lots of catonic people are killed each year. People didn't care about terminating Terry Schavio until some footage of her got on TV, at which people everyone treated her as their own child.
Interestingly enough, the psychological process has been nicely documented by the Genocide Watch folks (who are really more interested with the process being extended to step 8, where mass killings come in, rather than the politically-valuable-and-useful step 6). Killing people off doesn't usually buy you much, and you run the risk of actually defeating the dangerous villian that you've built up in your populace's minds...then you're a fish out of water.
Take drug dealers. Thanks to DARE and other friendly propaganda, drug dealers have been portrayed as something roughly akin to Freddy Kruger. In the early part of the 20th century, drug *users* (including marijuana users) were portrayed as dangerous, out-of-control and sex-crazed types -- the same monsters. And look at all the wonderful executive branch law enforcement powers that were provided in response by a frightened populace -- quite rewarding.
Anyone else having serious Furby deja vu?
A few more:
* Another good offensive example, "pan", the popular GTK newsreader, started life as the "Pimp Ass Newsreader". It was hosted on superpimp.org (which, to this day, redirects to pan's homepage), and I suspect that the effort to purge the offensive background from pan and popular usage was not trivial.
* Occasionally open source names simply collide. The open source world is actually pretty good about this (partly because of the good databases of open source software), but the "Firebird" phase of Firefox's development collided with an open-source database project.
* Names for basic utilities that should be newbie-accessable should not seem bizarre. Of all the package management tools out there, I think the only two that were actually descriptively named were "Redhat Package Manager" and "A Package Tool" -- which became "rpm", and "apt", not necessarily intuitive, as they cleverly were converted into unrelated-sounding acronyms. We also have "emerge", "yum", "yup", "smart"...when the first thing that a new Linux user is expected to do is to type "yum update", he starts to wonder exactly what the rest of the commands look like.
* Some of the flood of clever acronyms that sound like something entirely unrelated -- "touch", or Time Of User CHange, "bash" for "Bourne Again SHell", "fish" (a utility designed to make software installation easier for new Linux users, yet named something that would never occur to a new user, and also having the same name as the Friendly Interactive SHell), and GNOME (the GNU Network Object Model Environment, a forced acronym if ever I heard one -- though I suppose that it was probably chosen in preference to GNUDE).
* Another common "play off an earlier command", "tac" is the reverse spelling of "cat", which is short for "concatenate files". "tac" reverses files before concatenating them. It is, of course, unrelated to "tic" and "toe", which are two commands for working with terminal description files (toe being a rather forced acronym to maintain the joke).
The reason CLI software is considered "hard to use" is not because it requires some kind of unusual talent, but because its normal mode of operation is one that that does not constantly display available options at all times during use. As a result, users of CLI software must use their software frequently enough to keep a list of all operations and the keystrokes to invoke them in their head to gain speed from use of the CLI. Why many authors seem to deliberately choose counterintuitive software names to try to make this task more difficult for a new user is beyond me.