Note, of course, that Moglen is referring to the entire category of WIMP GUIs, not just MacOS. In fact, he reserves his harshest criticism for Slashdot's favorite whipping boy:
I lost that war in the early 1980s, [...], because the fundamental turn in the technology - which we see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is Windows, the really crippled version.
The real point he was getting at is that user-friendly systems often discourage people from exploring the depths of their computers, in the same way that modern high school boys don't tinker with cars the way boys did in the 50s. (note: "boys" is in the original article). If the interface is easy and the guts are not user-serviceable, then fewer people will become hackers (in the positive sense of the word).
His obvious mistake is that if the interface is difficult, fewer people will use computers overall, so the absolute hacker count won't be much different. The key is not an interface that forces people to get their hands dirty just to use it, but instead design the whole system so it's easy to modify. An OS that comes with full documentation, editors, and a compiler pre-installed will encourage the development of more programmers, no matter how nice a GUI you put on top.
They aren't harboring spammers, but they are harboring spam-tool makers.
The main problem is that this level of blocking goes far beyond the original intent of the RBL. The Blackhole was only supposed to block known current sources of spam. Over the years it has experienced mission creep and now goes after spam accomplices (e.g. affiliated web pages & email boxes) as well as accessories (e.g. email harvesting software). That is too many tasks for a single list!
RBL's original mission is a good idea, and could even be palatable to major backbone providers. For example, imagine if Verizon and UUnet were subscribers to the more-focused version. Millions of people would be better off instantly. Within months, RBL would put itself out of business -- anyone on the list would scramble like mad to get off or else go out of business from lack of traffic.
MAPS has already implemented multiple parallel lists -- RBL, RSS, DUL, etc. It's time to break up the RBL into 3 separate components with appropriately narrow targets.
I wonder if their CTO (aka their MCSE) threw all the CC#s into an Access database on their one big server (also running Exchange)? Just kidding... I hope.
Google also started at Stanford? Hmm...1998. Sheesh, that's not so long ago. I can say the same about Yahoo!, and I'm sure plenty of others here can too.
Side topic: you know how most baby boomers remember exactly where they were when they heard JFK was shot? I have that kind of memory for exactly two things: when the Challenger blew up, and when my Yahoo bookmark (in Mosaic) redirected from stanford.edu to yahoo.com. I had already seen the bad side of internet commerce, but Yahoo was when I realized there could also be good witches in the world.
Scroll forward five years. Yahoo is an enourmous "portal" that actually makes a profit. Canter & Siegel have faded away, but their descendants thrive like cockroaches. Where will Google be five years from now?
And there are also two versions of this article on Slashdot right now. Usually there's at least a few days lag before accidentally reposting identical stories. Someone didn't even check the last few hours of new articles...
Science fantasy authors love to write stories about "silicon-based life", but anyone with sufficient training in biochemistry can tell you silicon won't work as a basis for organic life.
And if you're going to consider even more exotic ideas ("photonic life" a la Star Trek, or neutronium life), you might as well be discussing ghosts and gremlins. They're just as plausible.
The main candidates out there are carbon/water life vaguely similar to stuff on Earth, and possibly machine intelligence (previously built by carbon/water life).
If you don't want to use the plugin...
on
Google And Privacy
·
· Score: 2
...or if you use any OS + browser combination other than Windows + IE. Someone in a topic several months ago posted this javascript, and now I use it all the time. Save it as a browser bookmark.
Note that the first part will search based on any highlighted text in your browser window, which might send a document.referrer to Google depending on how your browser is configured. IMO, that's a fair price to use a great search engine.
Games don't have enough literary depth to carry over into film.
But the truly sad part of this whole debacle is that DND does have the literary depth that those video games lack. Solomon's movie apparently didn't use any of it.
TSR owns enormous worlds full of stories the movie could have drawn upon, such as the Forgotten Realms. Anyone who's played any of the Bioware games has already been there. For example, some of the Icewind Dale novels made the NYT bestseller lists. I bet their author, R A Salvatore, would have been happy to write a decent screenplay instead of the neophyte hacks that Solomon hired.
I suspect the problem boils down to licensing. The movie probably didn't have rights to anything except the DND name. The question is whether TSR was unwilling to provide more, or did Solomon not bother to ask for help?
there also has been a proposal to deal with tracing a DOS.
I remember that too. I think it was probably this article. Also, ingress filtering was discussed (on the main page) not long ago.
The main problem with the "added tags" proposal is the same problem with egress filters -- it only works if the majority of ISPs are willing to spend money and time updating their routers. Given that egress filtering would flat out stop spoofed DDoS attacks, while tagging would only identify them, the proposal did not generate much interest.
They ask for your phone number whenever you want to run their little search engine?
Whenever a random web site asks for my phone number or email address without a good clear reason, I just use WHOIS and fill in their own address. Then I make sure to check all of the little boxes that say "We sometimes share this information with our valued friends. Would you like them to spam you too?" They probably remove themselves from the spam list pretty quickly, but it's fun to try anyways.
Stuff like SmartFilter sure makes me glad I work for a university whose head security admin's philosophy is "most of our students are smart enough to get around any blocking I might install, so I don't bother."
I'd love to have Open's level of security, but it won't run on my older Mac clone (PowerBase 240) and its 3rd party USB card. Guess I'll try NetBSD instead. Net runs on pretty much anything made after the last Toaster Mac.
Seems like a reasonable idea (from a 2nd year physics major) but then again I'm no expert on super-conductors or magnetic fields.
I agree. It's actually quite simple to see how this would work. The judder effect occurs when you place a metal object inside a supercooled magnetic cylinder. So all you need to do is:
Enclose the departure and arrival points (such as Earth and Alpha Centauri) together inside of a big cylinder.
Fill the cylinder with liquid helium.
Place the niobium-tin spaceship at the departure point.
Magnetize the whole shebang.
Spaceship quickly judders from point A to point B.
The government of Mexico is being sued by Hellmans for use of their trademark. They claim that some customers attempting to buy five bottles of their smooth delicious condiment were illegally redirected to a Mexican independence celebration instead.
Agreed. From the release announcement, it looks like 1.5 addresses most of the complaints in the discussion of 1.4.3 -- FFS soft updates, improved VM, IPsec, etc. Just about everything except SMP.
the storm that sweeps in when they blow the shield wall and pumelts their shields into uselessness,
That was not a storm. One puny wave of sand, then it was over. Look up, and it was still sunny. It was supposed to be a monstrous level-5-hurricane of a storm.
since you saw that bit you must have watched it almost to the end.
For the record, the attack started right before the 10pm commercials, and it's when I turned off the TV.
use of captured 'thoptors to maintain air superiority is not unreasonable,
Except that the freaking storm was supposed to take care of that. Can't fly if the skies are full of sand and lightning. They replaced a smart element from the book with bad CGI airships. Why?
I watched the first hour or less of each night, and gave up in annoyance each time. Some of my gripes:
Cheap Effects
The title credits, where "Dune" breaks up into puzzle-piece chunks. Blowing away as individual sand particles would have looked much better. Or were they using hand-me-down Wintel desktops to do the renders?
The opening shot of Arakeen (landscape view of a big fortress, Shield Wall in the background) was just a static matte. It was probably just an oil painting, and it showed. Definitely should have been a 3D panning shot instead.
The worms somehow moved across the desert by magic. I only saw two scenes, each about a second long, that actually showed undulating segments to provide locomotion. The rest of the time they looked like fish lures being pulled forward by an invisible cord.
Desert backgrounds behind characters in close-up invariably looked fake. Lighting angles were usually way off.
Bad Storytelling
Lots of gaps in the backstory. My wife (never read Dune) tried to watch and got lost. The motivations of the supporting roles were mostly omitted.
Missing scenes. Paul sends a bunch of men into the desert to summon worms, but we never hear about them again. Paul says he's waiting for a great storm before he attacks, but then there is no storm during the attack scene.
Instead, he uses stolen thopters to destroy the enemy airships. Where did that come from? Not the book.
I just noticed, was there no background music in most scenes? It felt a live action play-along of some folks standing in front of a Dune movie screen, only the movie wasn't playing.
I knew I wasn't the only one chagrined and disappointed by the Aqua interface.
Damn straight. The most bone-chilling comment on Aqua that I've read so far came from Bruce Tognazzini, usability guru and founder of the Apple Human Interface Group -- the main guy responsible for the stuff you love/hate about the Mac GUI. His quote:
I'm trying to get my Mac fully tricked out before January, when the Mac operating system is no more. At that point, I want my machine perfect, so I can go as long as possible before switching over to Windows.
Tog was probably gone by the time OS 8 added tabbed windows, but I definitely would have a bad time using a Mac without them. And FinderPop.
My Frontier: First Encounters site (a game not available on Mac or Linux) has 4 times as many Linux hits as Mac hits.
Don't forget that most "Linux machines" are also Windows machines. Linux on the desktop (as opposed to the server) is usually dual boot x86. This will skew your platform results in various predictable ways.
For my organization's web site, we get roughly 90% Windows, 8% Mac, 1% Unix (with all major spiders & bots excluded). Also quite predictable, due to differences in content.
Since you can simulate Life on a computer, Life cannot compute anything that a computer cannot.
Not quite. You're forgetting the eensy detail about having an infinite Life grid (or Turing tape) to work with. But for practical purposes (except that there aren't many practical uses for Turing emulation) yes, digital computers do the same stuff. That's a big reason why people still learn about Turing machines.
Hmm... if you could create a physical Life grid (not necessarily infinte, but it would have to be really big) it might be able to solve NP-complete problems quickly due to massive parallelism (each cell being a very simple ALU & 1 bit memory).
While it's true that many of the screwups in Palm Beach County are due to stupidity or carelessness on the part of the voters, it's also true that a better layout could have prevented about half of the mistakes. (Eliminating punch-card machines would cover the other half). Both the voters and the election officials are to blame here.
For starters, walking is hard enough that it takes the most advanced computational systems in the world about a year to figure out how to walk at all, and another several years to do it gracefully.
The human foot does an insane number of adjustments every second to keep you standing on it. You're right that emulating the inner ear's balance sensor would solve the problem. But that means you have to understand the inner ear (and what the brain does with that data) first, and we're not there yet.
Neither is right or wrong or more or less efficient.
There is at least one situation where Intel's byte order is less efficient -- when you are trying to read or search hex data manually. For example, let's say you need to find instances of the value 1075594032. In hex that's 401C4330, so you punch it in to a search box, and voila, not found.
Oops, you should have said 1C403043, that's so intuitive. Yes, it's not a big deal and it doesn't come up very often. But it's still just plain wrong.
This is absolute garbage. The government is not your mother.
Yeah, and those laws about minimum wage and child labor also have to go! Let's take this all the way. Companies should be allowed to schedule 80 hour work weeks at $5/hour. They should also be allowed to require employees to live in company-owned housing ($200/week), eat at the company cafeteria ($100/week), and shop at the company stores (whatever is left).
I'm not making this up -- 100 years ago big factory towns operated on this exact principle. Let's go back to the good old days?
exclude payment in kind, and it would mean that if you happen to WIN something, you'd actually get to keep it.
Still an exploitable loophole. For example, IWON.com -- the more you surf, the more chances you can win. So switch an ordinary company to a prize-based business model -- the more work you do, the more chances you can win. Even if you managed to build a law that excludes typical weekly wages, I doubt you could prevent bonuses and non-salary compensation from being relabled as tax-exempt "winnings".
just because the value decreases doesn't mean it's driven any less.
True. I would guess your local government wanted a "progressive" tax plan. More of that social encouragement (coercion) at work. Perhaps you should run for office?
they used to post the amount of taxes being paid per gallon at every gasoline pump
Where do you live? In Maryland the tax (48c) is posted on every pump, just as you mention. 48 cents out of $1.50 or more is much less than you pay in other industrial nations.
Slashdot Mirror
Note, of course, that Moglen is referring to the entire category of WIMP GUIs, not just MacOS. In fact, he reserves his harshest criticism for Slashdot's favorite whipping boy:
The real point he was getting at is that user-friendly systems often discourage people from exploring the depths of their computers, in the same way that modern high school boys don't tinker with cars the way boys did in the 50s. (note: "boys" is in the original article). If the interface is easy and the guts are not user-serviceable, then fewer people will become hackers (in the positive sense of the word).
His obvious mistake is that if the interface is difficult, fewer people will use computers overall, so the absolute hacker count won't be much different. The key is not an interface that forces people to get their hands dirty just to use it, but instead design the whole system so it's easy to modify. An OS that comes with full documentation, editors, and a compiler pre-installed will encourage the development of more programmers, no matter how nice a GUI you put on top.
The main problem is that this level of blocking goes far beyond the original intent of the RBL. The Blackhole was only supposed to block known current sources of spam. Over the years it has experienced mission creep and now goes after spam accomplices (e.g. affiliated web pages & email boxes) as well as accessories (e.g. email harvesting software). That is too many tasks for a single list!
RBL's original mission is a good idea, and could even be palatable to major backbone providers. For example, imagine if Verizon and UUnet were subscribers to the more-focused version. Millions of people would be better off instantly. Within months, RBL would put itself out of business -- anyone on the list would scramble like mad to get off or else go out of business from lack of traffic.
MAPS has already implemented multiple parallel lists -- RBL, RSS, DUL, etc. It's time to break up the RBL into 3 separate components with appropriately narrow targets.
From Netcraft: The site creditcards.com runs Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98.
I wonder if their CTO (aka their MCSE) threw all the CC#s into an Access database on their one big server (also running Exchange)? Just kidding... I hope.
Google also started at Stanford? Hmm...1998. Sheesh, that's not so long ago. I can say the same about Yahoo!, and I'm sure plenty of others here can too.
Side topic: you know how most baby boomers remember exactly where they were when they heard JFK was shot? I have that kind of memory for exactly two things: when the Challenger blew up, and when my Yahoo bookmark (in Mosaic) redirected from stanford.edu to yahoo.com. I had already seen the bad side of internet commerce, but Yahoo was when I realized there could also be good witches in the world.
Scroll forward five years. Yahoo is an enourmous "portal" that actually makes a profit. Canter & Siegel have faded away, but their descendants thrive like cockroaches. Where will Google be five years from now?
And there are also two versions of this article on Slashdot right now. Usually there's at least a few days lag before accidentally reposting identical stories. Someone didn't even check the last few hours of new articles...
Science fantasy authors love to write stories about "silicon-based life", but anyone with sufficient training in biochemistry can tell you silicon won't work as a basis for organic life.
And if you're going to consider even more exotic ideas ("photonic life" a la Star Trek, or neutronium life), you might as well be discussing ghosts and gremlins. They're just as plausible.
The main candidates out there are carbon/water life vaguely similar to stuff on Earth, and possibly machine intelligence (previously built by carbon/water life).
...or if you use any OS + browser combination other than Windows + IE. Someone in a topic several months ago posted this javascript, and now I use it all the time. Save it as a browser bookmark.
Note that the first part will search based on any highlighted text in your browser window, which might send a document.referrer to Google depending on how your browser is configured. IMO, that's a fair price to use a great search engine.
But the truly sad part of this whole debacle is that DND does have the literary depth that those video games lack. Solomon's movie apparently didn't use any of it.
TSR owns enormous worlds full of stories the movie could have drawn upon, such as the Forgotten Realms. Anyone who's played any of the Bioware games has already been there. For example, some of the Icewind Dale novels made the NYT bestseller lists. I bet their author, R A Salvatore, would have been happy to write a decent screenplay instead of the neophyte hacks that Solomon hired.
I suspect the problem boils down to licensing. The movie probably didn't have rights to anything except the DND name. The question is whether TSR was unwilling to provide more, or did Solomon not bother to ask for help?
I remember that too. I think it was probably this article. Also, ingress filtering was discussed (on the main page) not long ago.
The main problem with the "added tags" proposal is the same problem with egress filters -- it only works if the majority of ISPs are willing to spend money and time updating their routers. Given that egress filtering would flat out stop spoofed DDoS attacks, while tagging would only identify them, the proposal did not generate much interest.
Whenever a random web site asks for my phone number or email address without a good clear reason, I just use WHOIS and fill in their own address. Then I make sure to check all of the little boxes that say "We sometimes share this information with our valued friends. Would you like them to spam you too?" They probably remove themselves from the spam list pretty quickly, but it's fun to try anyways.
Stuff like SmartFilter sure makes me glad I work for a university whose head security admin's philosophy is "most of our students are smart enough to get around any blocking I might install, so I don't bother."
I'd love to have Open's level of security, but it won't run on my older Mac clone (PowerBase 240) and its 3rd party USB card. Guess I'll try NetBSD instead. Net runs on pretty much anything made after the last Toaster Mac.
I agree. It's actually quite simple to see how this would work. The judder effect occurs when you place a metal object inside a supercooled magnetic cylinder. So all you need to do is:
See? Easy!
The government of Mexico is being sued by Hellmans for use of their trademark. They claim that some customers attempting to buy five bottles of their smooth delicious condiment were illegally redirected to a Mexican independence celebration instead.
Agreed. From the release announcement, it looks like 1.5 addresses most of the complaints in the discussion of 1.4.3 -- FFS soft updates, improved VM, IPsec, etc. Just about everything except SMP.
That was not a storm. One puny wave of sand, then it was over. Look up, and it was still sunny. It was supposed to be a monstrous level-5-hurricane of a storm.
since you saw that bit you must have watched it almost to the end.For the record, the attack started right before the 10pm commercials, and it's when I turned off the TV.
use of captured 'thoptors to maintain air superiority is not unreasonable,Except that the freaking storm was supposed to take care of that. Can't fly if the skies are full of sand and lightning. They replaced a smart element from the book with bad CGI airships. Why?
I watched the first hour or less of each night, and gave up in annoyance each time. Some of my gripes:
Cheap Effects- The title credits, where "Dune" breaks up into puzzle-piece chunks. Blowing away as individual sand particles would have looked much better. Or were they using hand-me-down Wintel desktops to do the renders?
- The opening shot of Arakeen (landscape view of a big fortress, Shield Wall in the background) was just a static matte. It was probably just an oil painting, and it showed. Definitely should have been a 3D panning shot instead.
- The worms somehow moved across the desert by magic. I only saw two scenes, each about a second long, that actually showed undulating segments to provide locomotion. The rest of the time they looked like fish lures being pulled forward by an invisible cord.
- Desert backgrounds behind characters in close-up invariably looked fake. Lighting angles were usually way off.
Bad StorytellingDamn straight. The most bone-chilling comment on Aqua that I've read so far came from Bruce Tognazzini, usability guru and founder of the Apple Human Interface Group -- the main guy responsible for the stuff you love/hate about the Mac GUI. His quote:
Tog was probably gone by the time OS 8 added tabbed windows, but I definitely would have a bad time using a Mac without them. And FinderPop.
Don't forget that most "Linux machines" are also Windows machines. Linux on the desktop (as opposed to the server) is usually dual boot x86. This will skew your platform results in various predictable ways.
For my organization's web site, we get roughly 90% Windows, 8% Mac, 1% Unix (with all major spiders & bots excluded). Also quite predictable, due to differences in content.
Not quite. You're forgetting the eensy detail about having an infinite Life grid (or Turing tape) to work with. But for practical purposes (except that there aren't many practical uses for Turing emulation) yes, digital computers do the same stuff. That's a big reason why people still learn about Turing machines.
Hmm... if you could create a physical Life grid (not necessarily infinte, but it would have to be really big) it might be able to solve NP-complete problems quickly due to massive parallelism (each cell being a very simple ALU & 1 bit memory).
While it's true that many of the screwups in Palm Beach County are due to stupidity or carelessness on the part of the voters, it's also true that a better layout could have prevented about half of the mistakes. (Eliminating punch-card machines would cover the other half). Both the voters and the election officials are to blame here.
Hey, don't forget the MC 68328 series, which is currently used in all Palm PDAs. When will NetBSD port to that?
very interested in NetBSD/ppc, just wishing the install process wasn't such a pain...
For starters, walking is hard enough that it takes the most advanced computational systems in the world about a year to figure out how to walk at all, and another several years to do it gracefully.
The human foot does an insane number of adjustments every second to keep you standing on it. You're right that emulating the inner ear's balance sensor would solve the problem. But that means you have to understand the inner ear (and what the brain does with that data) first, and we're not there yet.
There is at least one situation where Intel's byte order is less efficient -- when you are trying to read or search hex data manually. For example, let's say you need to find instances of the value 1075594032. In hex that's 401C4330, so you punch it in to a search box, and voila, not found.
Oops, you should have said 1C403043, that's so intuitive. Yes, it's not a big deal and it doesn't come up very often. But it's still just plain wrong.
Yeah, and those laws about minimum wage and child labor also have to go! Let's take this all the way. Companies should be allowed to schedule 80 hour work weeks at $5/hour. They should also be allowed to require employees to live in company-owned housing ($200/week), eat at the company cafeteria ($100/week), and shop at the company stores (whatever is left).
I'm not making this up -- 100 years ago big factory towns operated on this exact principle. Let's go back to the good old days?
Still an exploitable loophole. For example, IWON.com -- the more you surf, the more chances you can win. So switch an ordinary company to a prize-based business model -- the more work you do, the more chances you can win. Even if you managed to build a law that excludes typical weekly wages, I doubt you could prevent bonuses and non-salary compensation from being relabled as tax-exempt "winnings".
just because the value decreases doesn't mean it's driven any less.True. I would guess your local government wanted a "progressive" tax plan. More of that social encouragement (coercion) at work. Perhaps you should run for office?
they used to post the amount of taxes being paid per gallon at every gasoline pumpWhere do you live? In Maryland the tax (48c) is posted on every pump, just as you mention. 48 cents out of $1.50 or more is much less than you pay in other industrial nations.