Free software released the artist from the constraints of having to fit in with someone else's idea of what software or technology he should be allowed to use, leaving him free to be creative and follow his own unique path.
Because he could fix gimp bugs in a snap and pay me to design and implement for him his own half-gimp-half-emacs-half-manbearpig tool.
This is a story about how free software simply does the job and gets out of the way, not about how the starving artist is also a programmer or can afford one.
The story about why the free software simply does the job and gets out of the way, that's probably an interesting one.
I totally agree. Debian is great, but as they don't have as good release cycle as Ubuntu,
If you ever go over to Ubuntu's brainstorm, or bugzilla, or forums, or... wherever, you'll see that people are screaming for a rolling release schedule (at least for some packages; I happen to notice nexuiz and wesnoth).
Ever tried Debian Testing? That's exactly what you get: stuff that doesn't break [except rarely] and is updated on a good schedule.
You have the crash test dummies [i.e. users of unstable, experimental or worse] to take the worst blows for you, yet you get the packages as soon as they filter through that.
Since packages aren't updated at the same time, when stuff breaks, it's one thing that breaks. When Ubuntu breaks, the breakage is nasty, and it breaks for everyone at the same time, so there's no one who has found out what to do about it yet.
Surely what is required is to isolate the sensitive information, so that it can be protected.
That's a great idea that in practice will leak your information. The reason is that _every_ application that touches your data needs to know that it should keep your data confidential.
Broswers know to not cache data transfered over https. It knows the data was encrypted, it knows to be smart with it [for "protective" value of smart].
When you have a program that reads a file through a transparent layer of encryption, it never sees the "please-be-careful-with-this" label, and so the desktop search engine will index all the strings, the editor will write backups to . or/tmp, and so forth. All the apps think they need to do is respect what you meant by your mode bits (if you're on *nix), so it'll chmod/umask the/tmp copy the right way. If someone grabs your disk and you didn't encrypt/tmp, you lose.
And no, encrypting/tmp won't fix it: you need to know that everything the user of the data can write to is encrypted if you want to be sure. I only know one way that I can somewhat confidently say solves the problem: encrypt everything. [and then there's the network, but we'll save that for another decade;)]
Only encrypting the sensitive data is like carrying water in bucket used for target practice: stuff will leak.
what are the disadvantages of PGP in terms of high-performance computational research?
O(1);)
Here's a brief experiment I ran: dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/jonas/zeroes bs=1048576 count=1024; that is, writing one gig of zeroes to a disk encrypted with ubuntu's disk encryption from the 8.04 alternative installer.
I saw a roughly constant ~30% CPU usage from kcryptd, going from 25% to 35%, on a 2.13GHz Pentium M (in a thinkpad t43p). So I have 1.5 GHz worth of cycles left.
Hard disk write speed was about 30 megs per second, but oscillating in big leaps. I did my observations with conky, sampling in one-second intervals, but conky is known to sometimes merge two samples. That's probably not the only factor, disk writes are most efficient when clumped together into one big (much preferably sequential) write, so I'd assume the kernel does this.
You haven't told us what your disk usage patterns are. But if you're doing one big read, one big computation, and then one big write, there's going to be zero impact (almost): there was lots of CPU capacity left.
Another low impact scenario is that you have a server that reads work units from disk, hand them to clients, gets results and writes the results back [I assume clients don't need any disk activity]. There you can read a bunch of work units in advance while the server is idle, then hand them out instantaneously when needed.
Aside: bugger, fault in my experiment: I didn't look at the CPU usage of kernel code that's not in the process table. Take what I say with a grain of salt.
But: do the measurement in your own world. My software, hardware and artificial measured usage pattern may differ from yours, subtly but enough that my conclusion doesn't transfer. Be scientific about it:)
a Demos study suggests. Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said.
How about the demotivational impact of having authority used against you, stripping away your own?
At a company where I worked, we had to show up for brief (10m) morning meetings, and we had to hand in our weekly reports saying what we accomplished. If you could make leprechauns write your code while you read slashdot, more power to you. If you had to go shopping for tobacco for five minutes before taking a smoking break (whenever you wanted), off you went. Add wii tennis after lunch and beer plus more wii tennis on fridays:)
They adjusted their hiring policy down a little while I worked there, from "add 90%" to "add 75%" or something like that. Yeah, all that long leash really made people not work, that is why they needed more; not because of the profitability of their work.
If people slack off at work rather than at home, who cares as long as their job is done in time? Employ and pay people based on their ability to provide value, not on how hard they must work to do so. Fire the numbskulls, moneyshower the brainiacs.
Maybe I'm just getting old (I am 25 after all), but who wants to sit at their computer at watch music videos?
Let's see, you got sub-TV video quality levels, you don't have the convenience of a playlist, and you don't have the slick and trendy host who's "hip, rad, and down with it"* to tell you which songs you should want to buy.
* I'm convinced that's what the kids say these days.
Thankfully, at the time of writing the MTV Music website was making this process easier on its Firefox 3 visitors by automatically checking the accept box whenever any agreement is viewed.
I sure as hell hope this is ironic. It's my vague recollection that there are laws (or court findings) against the default behavior being entering into a contract.
In US contract law, there has to be a meeting of the minds for a contract to be formed. That is, both parties have to believe they agree on what the contract says. (Source: female lawyer from the defcon media archives; can't remember exactly who though)
When you click next without having read the contract, have the minds met? If the checkbox is on by default, you implicitly say you do, but did you mean to do that?
In any case, if it's not illegal, it's something that smells wrong.
Consider this: when you install Debian or Ubuntu, you're asked whether you want to install popularity-contest, a program that reports anonymous usage data [which packages are installed, when have they last been used].
I trust the Debian project and Canonical to not misuse that data, and to aggregate enough of it such that usage patterns which could identify individuals with high probability are lost in the aggregation process.
But it's still the right thing for Debian and Ubuntu not installing popularity-contest unless the user explicitly wants to.
Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes.
So the probability of one person making no mistakes is 1 - 0.005% = 1 - 0.00005 = 0.99995. The probability of all 5000 people all making no mistakes is 0.99995 to the power of 5000, or 0.778796. The probability of at least one mistake is 1 - 0.778796 = 0.221204.
Or roughly one in four.
That leaves the question of what the impact of one mistake is. If it's dropping, inserting, or changing one vote, then that's probably acceptable unless the race is that close.
If it's misreading a digit when you report the number up the tree, it might have a much larger impact.
E-voting is a long term investment and staring at the initial costs is useless.
For the sake of the argument, I accept that. What does it do? Count faster and save money.
What are the costs? People are less able to generate correct ballots. Almost no one understands how the technology works, and thus are not truly able to trust the results. It becomes very easy for the machine makers to manipulate the outcome.
Voting is such an important part of democracy that doing it right is worth almost any amount of money. And speed? I'd rather have the people's candidate in a week than the machine makers' candidate in an hour. Even if I disagree with the people and agree with the machine makers.
Just like science, it's the process that's important, not so much the results.
In the U.S. Republic the execution of Socrates would have never happened, because the government would guarantee his right to jury trial in front of an impartial, his right to speak freely regardless of how ridiculous his idea sounded, and protected him from a Demos trying to kill him "just because we don't like him".
O_o. Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot.
Wouldn't the constitution give Socrates the right to a fair trial? Or do you plan on changing it to "" if enough people are for it?
Tex and LaTeX have lived for 25 years (http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/feb98/0307.html). While not exactly a word processor, it's what I use instead of one.
I'm not sure what the definition of "same" is in this context, but I suspect what I'll be using 10 years in the future will still be called LaTeX and will largely be compatible.
And to guard against incompatibility, I can write a script that compiles all my LaTeX documents with all my LaTeX installations and reports errors; this should easen my burden of updating my old documents to produce the same output when new versions come out. Assuming the new versions won't be as slow-moving target as they are now.
I can also archive compiled pdfs so as to have a canonical rendering to compare against, and if all else fails copy-paste my text out of.
And if I'm really worried, I create a virtual machine with a snapshot of my LaTeX documents and my current LaTeX installation(s), and assume that in ten years I can run the vm.
if they want to compare browser with browser, they need to do it on the same platform (hardware). if they want to compare hardware, they need to do it with the same software.
True.
too many variables, this means nothing.
False.
Comparing PS3 + Sony Software to Dell box + Microsoft software doesn't tell you how each individual component performs, comparatively. That much is true. But it does tell you something about how each system as a whole performs, compared to the other.
As a typical end-user of those systems, is there anything that's more relevant? Great, so I can know how well IE performs on a PS3, or how well the PS3 browser performs on windows. But I'm not going to install one platform's browser on the other platform; remember, typical end-user.
Slashdot Mirror
2010: the year of common sense on the desktop.
I just love making abundantly clear through my actions that I didn't even bother to read the summary.
I blame the editors ;)
Free software released the artist from the constraints of having to fit in with someone else's idea of what software or technology he should be allowed to use, leaving him free to be creative and follow his own unique path.
Because he could fix gimp bugs in a snap and pay me to design and implement for him his own half-gimp-half-emacs-half-manbearpig tool.
This is a story about how free software simply does the job and gets out of the way, not about how the starving artist is also a programmer or can afford one.
The story about why the free software simply does the job and gets out of the way, that's probably an interesting one.
That coin, especially the back, has to be one of the ugliest things I've ever seen.
The distended anus of the child of tubgirl and Rick Astley?
I totally agree. Debian is great, but as they don't have as good release cycle as Ubuntu,
If you ever go over to Ubuntu's brainstorm, or bugzilla, or forums, or ... wherever, you'll see that people are screaming for a rolling release schedule (at least for some packages; I happen to notice nexuiz and wesnoth).
Ever tried Debian Testing? That's exactly what you get: stuff that doesn't break [except rarely] and is updated on a good schedule.
You have the crash test dummies [i.e. users of unstable, experimental or worse] to take the worst blows for you, yet you get the packages as soon as they filter through that.
Since packages aren't updated at the same time, when stuff breaks, it's one thing that breaks. When Ubuntu breaks, the breakage is nasty, and it breaks for everyone at the same time, so there's no one who has found out what to do about it yet.
You guys know women????
If I have Ubuntu why the hell do I want 3 Apples?
Do you have any numbers to back this up?
Here's some numbers: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1012285&cid=25566509
Make of them what you will :)
Surely what is required is to isolate the sensitive information, so that it can be protected.
That's a great idea that in practice will leak your information. The reason is that _every_ application that touches your data needs to know that it should keep your data confidential.
Broswers know to not cache data transfered over https. It knows the data was encrypted, it knows to be smart with it [for "protective" value of smart].
When you have a program that reads a file through a transparent layer of encryption, it never sees the "please-be-careful-with-this" label, and so the desktop search engine will index all the strings, the editor will write backups to . or /tmp, and so forth. All the apps think they need to do is respect what you meant by your mode bits (if you're on *nix), so it'll chmod/umask the /tmp copy the right way. If someone grabs your disk and you didn't encrypt /tmp, you lose.
And no, encrypting /tmp won't fix it: you need to know that everything the user of the data can write to is encrypted if you want to be sure. I only know one way that I can somewhat confidently say solves the problem: encrypt everything. [and then there's the network, but we'll save that for another decade ;)]
Only encrypting the sensitive data is like carrying water in bucket used for target practice: stuff will leak.
what are the disadvantages of PGP in terms of high-performance computational research?
O(1) ;)
Here's a brief experiment I ran: dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/jonas/zeroes bs=1048576 count=1024; that is, writing one gig of zeroes to a disk encrypted with ubuntu's disk encryption from the 8.04 alternative installer.
I saw a roughly constant ~30% CPU usage from kcryptd, going from 25% to 35%, on a 2.13GHz Pentium M (in a thinkpad t43p). So I have 1.5 GHz worth of cycles left.
Hard disk write speed was about 30 megs per second, but oscillating in big leaps. I did my observations with conky, sampling in one-second intervals, but conky is known to sometimes merge two samples. That's probably not the only factor, disk writes are most efficient when clumped together into one big (much preferably sequential) write, so I'd assume the kernel does this.
You haven't told us what your disk usage patterns are. But if you're doing one big read, one big computation, and then one big write, there's going to be zero impact (almost): there was lots of CPU capacity left.
Another low impact scenario is that you have a server that reads work units from disk, hand them to clients, gets results and writes the results back [I assume clients don't need any disk activity]. There you can read a bunch of work units in advance while the server is idle, then hand them out instantaneously when needed.
Aside: bugger, fault in my experiment: I didn't look at the CPU usage of kernel code that's not in the process table. Take what I say with a grain of salt.
But: do the measurement in your own world. My software, hardware and artificial measured usage pattern may differ from yours, subtly but enough that my conclusion doesn't transfer. Be scientific about it :)
That's why you don't have just one person doing a particular task, you have several people do it and compare results.
Let's say that everything is done by two people, and there's only one possible mistake to make. Still 5000 people.
The probability of everything being A-ok is 1 - (1 - 0.00005**2)**2500 =~ 6.25e-6. Six out of a million.
Everything done by three people, 2.08e-10.
Yep, it works. And it isn't rocket science, it's math :)
Downsides: one half (third) the speed, or two (three) times as many people.
Here's my fictional top 3 as told by popularity-contest: [obvious packages]
Are you saying that only the top three matter? That's absurd. If you don't, aren't putting forth any arguments for your position.
The '???' steps come a little early in these. Sorry about that.
Yeah, I'm confused. When do they collect underpants?
a Demos study suggests. Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said.
How about the demotivational impact of having authority used against you, stripping away your own?
At a company where I worked, we had to show up for brief (10m) morning meetings, and we had to hand in our weekly reports saying what we accomplished. If you could make leprechauns write your code while you read slashdot, more power to you. If you had to go shopping for tobacco for five minutes before taking a smoking break (whenever you wanted), off you went. Add wii tennis after lunch and beer plus more wii tennis on fridays :)
They adjusted their hiring policy down a little while I worked there, from "add 90%" to "add 75%" or something like that. Yeah, all that long leash really made people not work, that is why they needed more; not because of the profitability of their work.
If people slack off at work rather than at home, who cares as long as their job is done in time? Employ and pay people based on their ability to provide value, not on how hard they must work to do so. Fire the numbskulls, moneyshower the brainiacs.
You're doing it wrong! http://xkcd.com/303/
Says you:
will destroy any remaining dignity the internet may have once had
Says DNA:
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Says I:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1011281&cid=25553165
Maybe I'm just getting old (I am 25 after all), but who wants to sit at their computer at watch music videos?
Let's see, you got sub-TV video quality levels, you don't have the convenience of a playlist, and you don't have the slick and trendy host who's "hip, rad, and down with it"* to tell you which songs you should want to buy.
* I'm convinced that's what the kids say these days.
Here's what a quick look on the site says:
Top Rated:
<img/>
Never Gonna Give You Up
By Rick Astley
ffs, /.
Thankfully, at the time of writing the MTV Music website was making this process easier on its Firefox 3 visitors by automatically checking the accept box whenever any agreement is viewed.
I sure as hell hope this is ironic. It's my vague recollection that there are laws (or court findings) against the default behavior being entering into a contract.
In US contract law, there has to be a meeting of the minds for a contract to be formed. That is, both parties have to believe they agree on what the contract says.
(Source: female lawyer from the defcon media archives; can't remember exactly who though)
When you click next without having read the contract, have the minds met? If the checkbox is on by default, you implicitly say you do, but did you mean to do that?
In any case, if it's not illegal, it's something that smells wrong.
Consider this: when you install Debian or Ubuntu, you're asked whether you want to install popularity-contest, a program that reports anonymous usage data [which packages are installed, when have they last been used].
I trust the Debian project and Canonical to not misuse that data, and to aggregate enough of it such that usage patterns which could identify individuals with high probability are lost in the aggregation process.
But it's still the right thing for Debian and Ubuntu not installing popularity-contest unless the user explicitly wants to.
-- Jonas K
but there is no such thing as a democracy for the few
Forget about the few. There is no such thing as a democracy for some/.
We aren't ever going to be stupid like them.
And that's coming from someone who chooses to live in hell's freezer.
Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes.
So the probability of one person making no mistakes is 1 - 0.005% = 1 - 0.00005 = 0.99995. The probability of all 5000 people all making no mistakes is 0.99995 to the power of 5000, or 0.778796. The probability of at least one mistake is 1 - 0.778796 = 0.221204.
Or roughly one in four.
That leaves the question of what the impact of one mistake is. If it's dropping, inserting, or changing one vote, then that's probably acceptable unless the race is that close.
If it's misreading a digit when you report the number up the tree, it might have a much larger impact.
E-voting is a long term investment and staring at the initial costs is useless.
For the sake of the argument, I accept that. What does it do? Count faster and save money.
What are the costs? People are less able to generate correct ballots. Almost no one understands how the technology works, and thus are not truly able to trust the results. It becomes very easy for the machine makers to manipulate the outcome.
Voting is such an important part of democracy that doing it right is worth almost any amount of money. And speed? I'd rather have the people's candidate in a week than the machine makers' candidate in an hour. Even if I disagree with the people and agree with the machine makers.
Just like science, it's the process that's important, not so much the results.
--Jonas K
In the U.S. Republic the execution of Socrates would have never happened, because the government would guarantee his right to jury trial in front of an impartial, his right to speak freely regardless of how ridiculous his idea sounded, and protected him from a Demos trying to kill him "just because we don't like him".
O_o. Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot.
Wouldn't the constitution give Socrates the right to a fair trial? Or do you plan on changing it to "" if enough people are for it?
Tex and LaTeX have lived for 25 years (http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/feb98/0307.html). While not exactly a word processor, it's what I use instead of one.
I'm not sure what the definition of "same" is in this context, but I suspect what I'll be using 10 years in the future will still be called LaTeX and will largely be compatible.
And to guard against incompatibility, I can write a script that compiles all my LaTeX documents with all my LaTeX installations and reports errors; this should easen my burden of updating my old documents to produce the same output when new versions come out. Assuming the new versions won't be as slow-moving target as they are now.
I can also archive compiled pdfs so as to have a canonical rendering to compare against, and if all else fails copy-paste my text out of.
And if I'm really worried, I create a virtual machine with a snapshot of my LaTeX documents and my current LaTeX installation(s), and assume that in ten years I can run the vm.
Not all bits rot.
--Jonas K
if they want to compare browser with browser, they need to do it on the same platform (hardware). if they want to compare hardware, they need to do it with the same software.
True.
too many variables, this means nothing.
False.
Comparing PS3 + Sony Software to Dell box + Microsoft software doesn't tell you how each individual component performs, comparatively. That much is true. But it does tell you something about how each system as a whole performs, compared to the other.
As a typical end-user of those systems, is there anything that's more relevant? Great, so I can know how well IE performs on a PS3, or how well the PS3 browser performs on windows. But I'm not going to install one platform's browser on the other platform; remember, typical end-user.