How are you supposed to use a spreadsheet to calculate your taxes when there is no standard for formulas in spreadsheets?
You read the formulas off the web in a textual format (they're pretty much affine linear and \cases). Then you input them manually in your own spreadsheet. Done.
Except, as another poster has noted: there's a web service which does it for you already. I just thought I'd point out the option of doing a little work on your own.
Every iPhone app I have (yes, that's the iPhone famous for "not multitasking") stores complete state information when it exits.
That's a really cool idea. Maybe one could define some kind of abstract, generic "state" that any application could store.
Then we could write a library that automatically stored each application's state when the user switched away from it.
Maybe the computer could even switch really really fast between multiple applications, such that (say) the music player could have a little time slice to prepare a sound wave, then the web browser could get some time to grab and render web pages, then... you know, back and forth.
Maybe we could even put that library inside the OS, in the kernel. If only we had a good name. How about libsched or something?
I'm not dumb enough to say anything I want to keep private over a cel phone anyway.
"Hi, lover. Let's get it on tonight. I love it when you {lick my {balls,pussy}, put whipped cream up my butt and eat it back out while you pour hot wax on my nipples and whip me with your sister watching}."
100% of encryption is insecure, if you throw enough resources into breaking it.
Suppose I'm thinking of a number x between 1 and 10. I choose a uniformly random number y between 1 and 10. I transmit z = (x + y) modulo 10 over the wire, which you get to look at. Let's say I transmit z = 7. Which number x am I thinking of?
No matter what you do, you can do no better than guessing. You might know that 4 is my favourite number, but that's independent of the value of z. Seeing the cipher text provides you with no additional information over what you already know.
It's impractical, because the person decrypting needs to know the y I chose, so I have to send that too, in some way. You can do quantum key distribution if you have the infrastructure for it (which you don't), or you can give them a 1TB drive full of pre-chosen y-values if you meet with them in person (which you don't if they're ebay/visa/${e-shop}).
Not all crypto can be broken. Only well over 99% of it:)
[you're] delusional. The most important fact is that no one actually gives a shit about your phone calls
Parent never said "they're out to get me." He just said he didn't trust wifi. I don't trust that no one at my CS dept. Will sniff the wireless network (and my slashdot password)---I'm not certain of it. But I use it anyways.
Where do you pick out the delusional thoughts, rather than just fear and mistrust?
its just the implementation that people & organizations botch.
That reminds me of a general notion: in economy, in theory, some things are best left to government. Say, building infrastructure, running a police force, internalizing negative externalities through pollution regulation, etc..
But if no political system can be made to exist where the government actually does well what it (in theory) is the right "person" to do, is it really a good idea to leave it to government? If the market does worse than the theoretical best solution but the government in practice does even worse even though in theory it should do better, why leave it to the government?
(You can flip it around and say "Market Failure" if you want a pro-government story to explain this.)
Having a monopoly on assigning internet names and/or numbers might mean that in the current political and economic reality, any organization that handles the monopoly will botch it and screw the users.
If that is the case (I'm not sure that it is, but if), maybe a network architecture that doesn't have the monopoly will produce a better internet, even though in theory it should be worse?
This is not a definitive answer. It's a question. One I think people designing internetworking infrastructure should ask themselves.
ISP's don't have to provide $X Mb/s connection, they can provide $X/2 Mb/s [...] every consumer doubles their internet bill
Why? Isn't there just as much infrastructure to maintain, and just as many bytes to transfer? Wouldn't the cost of that stay constant? Or does 100% of your bill go to keeping customer records and (oh wait, you may be on to something) customer service? If the custserv load increases, I might believe you. Otherwise, what's the reason for doubling the bill?
encryption is required for it to work at all
Erm, why?
consumers have redundancy (not only for their own net connection, but throughout the entire path as well)
What does the multi-homed-ness of endpoints have to do with redundancy in the core / on the backbone?
Last advantage is that torrent-like downloads can take place without the need for special p2p software.
What do you consider "torrent-like"? Sure, you can make multiple parallel requests, but you can do that while single-homed today. Don't you need some code to merge the responses into a coherent file or byte sequence*? Don't you need some code to decide which peers to send to? Don't you want that code to make smart decisions, i.e. send to the ones that send most to you, in order to entice them to send more to you? (If everybody employs this strategy, the bandwidth allocation converges to a market equilibrium.)
(* Hey, I'm getting a whacky idea: that's exactly what TCP does, by receiving beyond the window. Maybe we could... hmm... nah...)
a govt is unlikely to fund a global TOR rollout:-)
How did TOR enter the picture?
Don't take what I say as criticism: your idea may be wonderful and sense-making. I just don't quite seem to understand why it is (if it is). Please help me understand.
At my university, when I move from the room where I give TA sessions to my own office, I disconnect from a wifi AP and reconnect to another. This causes programs to see themselves as disconnected from the internet.
That's fine for web browsing (just hit reload if you were browsing the web while your laptop was in your back pack) or downloading with wget (resume with -c). But it sucks if you were streaming audio with mplayer: now you have to restart the stream and seek to where you were, which you might not know exactly.
It'd be much better if mplayer knew to hang back for a while and then restart downloading where it left off. Similarly for ssh: it disconnects, so I have to reconnect.
What would a session layer do for me? It would let me save some local state I could give to the other end of the connection to say "This is where we were, let's pick things up from there", following a disconnect.
The idea would be for the applications to try reconnecting and resuming the session when they see they're on the net again, even if on a different IP address.
Would that be solved with IP mobility (as, say, in IPv6)? Somewhat, but not completely. A session layer would, I think, allow me to move my network connection between different machines: instead of disconnecting from IRC-on-my-desktop and reconnecting on my laptop, producing a part+join, I could just move the session over (assuming the application supported it)---but not move all traffic over to my laptop.
Some applications support half-baked sessions (range requests for HTTP lets wget continue with -c, for instance).
What I want is for almost all applications to support suspending and resuming the connection. I want communication to be not between hosts or interfaces, but between conceptual entities---e.g. "Jonas Köker" and "Some Audio Streaming Service"; but I'll settle for "Jonas' wget" and "Service's httpd"; this communication should transcend changes in the lower layer(s): if I need to change IP address or reopen a socket, why should (not does, why should) I care? Why should the endpoint? Why can't we manage a bit of state that lets us pick up from where we left when we resume a connection?
I'd recommend going with x2x, if you have two X servers and nothing more.
The idea behind Synergy is really good. The execution is piss-poor.
Say I'm on one machine and type the compose key sequence for "aring" (å). Synergy looks in a hard-coded table for equivalences and decides to send (IIRC) [compose key, a, *]. Fine, except that doesn't work on my other machine. And it doesn't read ~/.XCompose at all, so all my nice greek letters and weird math symbols don't get tunnelled over:(
Well, you could of course use the new under-construction version. But it doesn't have clipboard support. And the configuration file structure is completely undocumented (use the source). And it consists of a bunch of programs you have to run in concert, with no instruction as to how.
Compare with x2x: $ ssh otherbox "x2x -east -from localhost:10 -to:0" &. Go. It does nearly everything right, as far as I'm concerned.
The only thing I'd miss is having x2x suitable for gaming; synergy lets you hit scroll lock to "capture yourself" on the display you're currently on, and it switches to sending fake relative (rather than absolute) motion events in that case.
Just a friendly warning. Consider using x2x if it solves the right problem; if it doesn't, synergy doesn't either, and if it does, it does it better than synergy in most respects.
I get modded down as a troll everytime I post it, but it has to be said...liberals are maniacally pro-government because they hate the lack of control in a free market society.
Could your troll modding be because people don't take kindly to having words and opinions---especially ones they disagree with---put in their mouth?
I mean, you're painting with a rather broad brush, here: "liberals [think/want/believe...]". All those liberals think alike? Just like centrists and right-wingers, they all think alike too, right?
How does "Conservatives/Libertarians are maniacally anti-government because they don't like it providing the control over a free market that is necessary for said market not to degenerate into cartels and monopolies" sound? Now, I don't mean that; I'm just trying to illustrate something.
If there were true competition in the market, the government wouldn't need to do anything.
Right. But there won't be.
Last mile wiring is a natural monopoly: there's a high cost to burying the fibre that goes to your house. Most likely you're only going to be a customer at one ISP. If you want, say, five competitors, that means four unused wires.
That means each ISP has to charge each customer on average at least five times what it cost to bury the fibre.
It would be much more effective to bury one set of wires, have one organization maintain that set of wires, and then let different companies compete on delivering different services (telephony, internet, television) over those wires.
And if you're the first company to connect a wire to Joe's house, when the first competitor shows up, you could offer Joe free internet until the competitor goes away. Then you could jack up his rates to make up for the lost profit when he's back to being locked in to your service.
If there were true competition, the government wouldn't need to step in. But there isn't. So "We The People" need to step in, using the government as our tool.
Unfortunately, our tool apparently doesn't always obey our commands or do what we want.
A valuable part of being in school was learning how to interact with new people, larger groups, and authority respectfully and responsibly.
I don't think any of my classmates ever convinced me they could interact respectfully with me---quite on the contrary. Instead, they taught me that if I make people dislike me they will make my life hell for eight years, and that I have no control over whether people like me or not.
And authorities? No authority figure ever earned my respect. Maybe if they had done something about the bullies, instead of blaming me for overreacting and telling me to {count to ten, take a deep breath, ignore the bullies, just walk away from them}.
So I didn't learn to interact respectfully and responsibly with new people, or large groups, or authorities, because none of them ever earned my respect. Instead I learned to seek out solitude and knowledge at the nearby public library (they had books and internets).
That worked fine, of course, until I started feeling a need to have sex with girls (and feel loved, and such). I had no clue about what to say and what to do, and I was afraid to try things out, because I had learned the consequences of people not liking me. So I went lonely and unloved for so unbearably long.
The world. So lonesome. So depressing. I want out.
This could happen to your children. Don't put them in those mad places. Put them somewhere where they can become whole human beings who have confidence in themselves, who can trust other people, and who have learned that they are loved and there will always be a helping hand. Don't let them become what I have become. Please. Spare them the pain.
Average users don't WANT control over their computers. Go ahead. Give it to them. Explain that they need to right-click on the icon and choose "Run as Administrator," or that they need to run spyware scans, or virus scans, or allow the machine to install updates, or use Browser X instead of Browser Y, or manage a filesystem in a clean and organized way. What do they say? Come on, we've all heard it.
I don't think you need to do any of that on OS X. And I don't think people complain much about OS X in the way you described.
Yet there's this terminal application that gives the users total control and the power to fuck up their machines, royally.
The freedom to make your own choices if you want, but with sane default choices made for you.
(Man, I wish I could say that Linux is 100% there with a straight face...)
You don't expect to run arbitrary code on your DVR (or at least most people don't)
No, I just expect to run my choice of entertainment software, which is mostly but not entirely stable over time.
I just want Frozen Bubble, Battle for Wesnoth and Nexuiz on my Wii. Nothing arbitrary, just those games. In the eyes of Nintendo, that is arbitrary.
Similarly for tivo/apple/$name, of course. I don't want my TV-box, or my telephony-box, or my $box to be a general purpose device. But I want the way it serves a specific purpose to be the way I choose.
And that can only really happen if the device is general purpose.
Many consumers don't care, and even LIKE, the idea of being locked in to the App Store, because it introduces a significant amount of security.
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both." -- Benjamin Franklin
As another poster has mentioned, this is happening in the car industry: engines are locked off, so that only Ford mechanics can work on Ford engines. Ford sells cheap cars, people buy them, then Ford bleeds them out of cash on service because they have a monopoly.
People gave up their freedom and got screwed.
When your interests conflict with Apple's, do you think Apple will serve yours? Why? When a non-Apple music playback application would suit you best, but Apple won't let you have it, despite people wanting to give it to you, will you thank Apple for keeping the App Store clean and safe from competition^Wviruses?
Also, I encourage you to have a look at the underhand C code contest. How competent do you think the QA workers are? How diligent? Exactly what is the safety you're buying?
I guess it's just an "implementation issue". Ah, the chorus of the pure theorist...
Here's a thought (I haven't decided whether I agree with it):
Would it make sense to divide the work of creating AI into the Getting Ideas part and the Turning Ideas Into Code part? The idea being that you can let people who are good at one part do that part, and let people who are good at the other do the other part. (That goes back to Adam Smith, division of labour.)
Suppose a physicist establishes a theory about the reflection of light which (among other things) can be used to make more efficient solar cells. Yet he doesn't make any solar cells. Would he be met with the same attitude? Is that "just an implementation issue" too?
Or say an astronomer discovers a new celestial object. Do people poo-poo him because he hasn't gone there?:P (Okay, this one is stretching it...)
I'm not saying your attitude is wrong. I'm wondering, and I hope some of you smart slashdotters can help me figure it out, why computer science researchers get met with the "You haven't turned it into a prototype (or product!) yet, come back when you have."
I think it's because what CS research creates is very close to what Software Engineers (/programmers) create: algorithms. Moreover, the algorithms created by research always solve a particular problem, because that's what algorithms do. In some sense, all CS research is applied, but since it's still research it's not applied enough---it's not a product.
Contrast that with what most scientific fields do: "prove" declarative claims about how the world works (quantum mechanics, planetary motion, natural selection, thermoelectric effect,...). An algorithm relates to a declarative claim (about its correctness), but it has an imperative "(you can) Do this:... (and only this)" bit attached to it that most other fields don't have.
I think I can find an exception in the field of medicine---much medical research is into the safety and effectiveness of "algorithms" for treating particular diseases (input chemical X). But they test finished "implementations"---you can't really figure out what chemical X does without inputting it and seeing what happens. Not yet, anyways---humans are big and complex, and to the best of my knowledge there isn't a good, complete model of how they work; that's unlike CS, where we can read a program and reason about what it does without running it.
I think it's the similarity between research output and engineering output that makes many people want researchers to do the engineers' job.
Would it really be a good thing if they did?
(That's not to say we should have a low bar for evidence for "truth", such as correctness or (for more fuzzy domains) effectiveness and usefulness.)
It sounded from your original post like you thought we shouldn't venture out into space at all. I see that's not really your opinion. I think we can agree on some things then:)
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody has been breaking the first rule of [...]
FTFY.
See also http://xkcd.com/676/
gamesexcel.com
I think they might have some of the same issues as that Expert Sexchange site.
How are you supposed to use a spreadsheet to calculate your taxes when there is no standard for formulas in spreadsheets?
You read the formulas off the web in a textual format (they're pretty much affine linear and \cases). Then you input them manually in your own spreadsheet. Done.
Except, as another poster has noted: there's a web service which does it for you already. I just thought I'd point out the option of doing a little work on your own.
Every iPhone app I have (yes, that's the iPhone famous for "not multitasking") stores complete state information when it exits.
That's a really cool idea. Maybe one could define some kind of abstract, generic "state" that any application could store.
Then we could write a library that automatically stored each application's state when the user switched away from it.
Maybe the computer could even switch really really fast between multiple applications, such that (say) the music player could have a little time slice to prepare a sound wave, then the web browser could get some time to grab and render web pages, then... you know, back and forth.
Maybe we could even put that library inside the OS, in the kernel. If only we had a good name. How about libsched or something?
Nah, that'd never work.
nice considering how crappy trackpad pointing is.
I totally agree: track pads are the horror. Track points (clit mice) are good, though---at least I like the one on my Thinkpad t43p.
Give them a try (if you can).
If you want to be fucking paranoid, be paranoid all the way.
By being able to read source code, but not have an electron microscope, you force the bad guys to use more expensive and laborious obscurity.
I'm for raising the bar on them---maybe they're not omnipotent.
While it's true that there's shit they can do, it's also true that there's NOTHING you can do about it.
Not with that attitude at least...
So, are you really that naive, or you have financial interests in some phone^Hy crypto technology?
More likely.
I'm not dumb enough to say anything I want to keep private over a cel phone anyway.
"Hi, lover. Let's get it on tonight. I love it when you {lick my {balls,pussy}, put whipped cream up my butt and eat it back out while you pour hot wax on my nipples and whip me with your sister watching}."
See also http://bash.org/?246405
100% of encryption is insecure, if you throw enough resources into breaking it.
Suppose I'm thinking of a number x between 1 and 10. I choose a uniformly random number y between 1 and 10. I transmit z = (x + y) modulo 10 over the wire, which you get to look at. Let's say I transmit z = 7. Which number x am I thinking of?
No matter what you do, you can do no better than guessing. You might know that 4 is my favourite number, but that's independent of the value of z. Seeing the cipher text provides you with no additional information over what you already know.
It's impractical, because the person decrypting needs to know the y I chose, so I have to send that too, in some way. You can do quantum key distribution if you have the infrastructure for it (which you don't), or you can give them a 1TB drive full of pre-chosen y-values if you meet with them in person (which you don't if they're ebay/visa/${e-shop}).
Not all crypto can be broken. Only well over 99% of it :)
</pedantic>
[you're] delusional. The most important fact is that no one actually gives a shit about your phone calls
Parent never said "they're out to get me." He just said he didn't trust wifi. I don't trust that no one at my CS dept. Will sniff the wireless network (and my slashdot password)---I'm not certain of it. But I use it anyways.
Where do you pick out the delusional thoughts, rather than just fear and mistrust?
its just the implementation that people & organizations botch.
That reminds me of a general notion: in economy, in theory, some things are best left to government. Say, building infrastructure, running a police force, internalizing negative externalities through pollution regulation, etc..
But if no political system can be made to exist where the government actually does well what it (in theory) is the right "person" to do, is it really a good idea to leave it to government? If the market does worse than the theoretical best solution but the government in practice does even worse even though in theory it should do better, why leave it to the government?
(You can flip it around and say "Market Failure" if you want a pro-government story to explain this.)
Having a monopoly on assigning internet names and/or numbers might mean that in the current political and economic reality, any organization that handles the monopoly will botch it and screw the users.
If that is the case (I'm not sure that it is, but if), maybe a network architecture that doesn't have the monopoly will produce a better internet, even though in theory it should be worse?
This is not a definitive answer. It's a question. One I think people designing internetworking infrastructure should ask themselves.
ISP's don't have to provide $X Mb/s connection, they can provide $X/2 Mb/s [...] every consumer doubles their internet bill
Why? Isn't there just as much infrastructure to maintain, and just as many bytes to transfer? Wouldn't the cost of that stay constant? Or does 100% of your bill go to keeping customer records and (oh wait, you may be on to something) customer service? If the custserv load increases, I might believe you. Otherwise, what's the reason for doubling the bill?
encryption is required for it to work at all
Erm, why?
consumers have redundancy (not only for their own net connection, but throughout the entire path as well)
What does the multi-homed-ness of endpoints have to do with redundancy in the core / on the backbone?
Last advantage is that torrent-like downloads can take place without the need for special p2p software.
What do you consider "torrent-like"? Sure, you can make multiple parallel requests, but you can do that while single-homed today. Don't you need some code to merge the responses into a coherent file or byte sequence*? Don't you need some code to decide which peers to send to? Don't you want that code to make smart decisions, i.e. send to the ones that send most to you, in order to entice them to send more to you? (If everybody employs this strategy, the bandwidth allocation converges to a market equilibrium.)
(* Hey, I'm getting a whacky idea: that's exactly what TCP does, by receiving beyond the window. Maybe we could... hmm... nah...)
a govt is unlikely to fund a global TOR rollout :-)
How did TOR enter the picture?
Don't take what I say as criticism: your idea may be wonderful and sense-making. I just don't quite seem to understand why it is (if it is). Please help me understand.
Step 2: add a Session Layer.
Why? First, a motivating example.
At my university, when I move from the room where I give TA sessions to my own office, I disconnect from a wifi AP and reconnect to another. This causes programs to see themselves as disconnected from the internet.
That's fine for web browsing (just hit reload if you were browsing the web while your laptop was in your back pack) or downloading with wget (resume with -c). But it sucks if you were streaming audio with mplayer: now you have to restart the stream and seek to where you were, which you might not know exactly.
It'd be much better if mplayer knew to hang back for a while and then restart downloading where it left off. Similarly for ssh: it disconnects, so I have to reconnect.
What would a session layer do for me? It would let me save some local state I could give to the other end of the connection to say "This is where we were, let's pick things up from there", following a disconnect.
The idea would be for the applications to try reconnecting and resuming the session when they see they're on the net again, even if on a different IP address.
Would that be solved with IP mobility (as, say, in IPv6)? Somewhat, but not completely. A session layer would, I think, allow me to move my network connection between different machines: instead of disconnecting from IRC-on-my-desktop and reconnecting on my laptop, producing a part+join, I could just move the session over (assuming the application supported it)---but not move all traffic over to my laptop.
Some applications support half-baked sessions (range requests for HTTP lets wget continue with -c, for instance).
What I want is for almost all applications to support suspending and resuming the connection. I want communication to be not between hosts or interfaces, but between conceptual entities---e.g. "Jonas Köker" and "Some Audio Streaming Service"; but I'll settle for "Jonas' wget" and "Service's httpd"; this communication should transcend changes in the lower layer(s): if I need to change IP address or reopen a socket, why should (not does, why should) I care? Why should the endpoint? Why can't we manage a bit of state that lets us pick up from where we left when we resume a connection?
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Layer.
I'd recommend going with x2x, if you have two X servers and nothing more.
The idea behind Synergy is really good. The execution is piss-poor.
Say I'm on one machine and type the compose key sequence for "aring" (å). Synergy looks in a hard-coded table for equivalences and decides to send (IIRC) [compose key, a, *]. Fine, except that doesn't work on my other machine. And it doesn't read ~/.XCompose at all, so all my nice greek letters and weird math symbols don't get tunnelled over :(
Well, you could of course use the new under-construction version. But it doesn't have clipboard support. And the configuration file structure is completely undocumented (use the source). And it consists of a bunch of programs you have to run in concert, with no instruction as to how.
Compare with x2x: $ ssh otherbox "x2x -east -from localhost:10 -to :0" &. Go. It does nearly everything right, as far as I'm concerned.
The only thing I'd miss is having x2x suitable for gaming; synergy lets you hit scroll lock to "capture yourself" on the display you're currently on, and it switches to sending fake relative (rather than absolute) motion events in that case.
Just a friendly warning. Consider using x2x if it solves the right problem; if it doesn't, synergy doesn't either, and if it does, it does it better than synergy in most respects.
I get modded down as a troll everytime I post it, but it has to be said...liberals are maniacally pro-government because they hate the lack of control in a free market society.
Could your troll modding be because people don't take kindly to having words and opinions---especially ones they disagree with---put in their mouth?
I mean, you're painting with a rather broad brush, here: "liberals [think/want/believe ...]". All those liberals think alike? Just like centrists and right-wingers, they all think alike too, right?
How does "Conservatives/Libertarians are maniacally anti-government because they don't like it providing the control over a free market that is necessary for said market not to degenerate into cartels and monopolies" sound? Now, I don't mean that; I'm just trying to illustrate something.
If there were true competition in the market, the government wouldn't need to do anything.
Right. But there won't be.
Last mile wiring is a natural monopoly: there's a high cost to burying the fibre that goes to your house. Most likely you're only going to be a customer at one ISP. If you want, say, five competitors, that means four unused wires.
That means each ISP has to charge each customer on average at least five times what it cost to bury the fibre.
It would be much more effective to bury one set of wires, have one organization maintain that set of wires, and then let different companies compete on delivering different services (telephony, internet, television) over those wires.
And if you're the first company to connect a wire to Joe's house, when the first competitor shows up, you could offer Joe free internet until the competitor goes away. Then you could jack up his rates to make up for the lost profit when he's back to being locked in to your service.
If there were true competition, the government wouldn't need to step in. But there isn't. So "We The People" need to step in, using the government as our tool.
Unfortunately, our tool apparently doesn't always obey our commands or do what we want.
60 years ago most people did not even own a television, let alone even know about the existence of the internet.
60 years ago was $((2010 - 60)) = 1950. The ARPANET is from 1969.
Am I to blame for being unaware of what role Cyberdyne Systems will play 19 years from now? ;-)
At worst, you're missing out on half the argument because you don't care to acknowledge anything other than what you care to see.
I think your parent was excluding topics they found boring, not viewpoints opposing their own.
A valuable part of being in school was learning how to interact with new people, larger groups, and authority respectfully and responsibly.
I don't think any of my classmates ever convinced me they could interact respectfully with me---quite on the contrary. Instead, they taught me that if I make people dislike me they will make my life hell for eight years, and that I have no control over whether people like me or not.
And authorities? No authority figure ever earned my respect. Maybe if they had done something about the bullies, instead of blaming me for overreacting and telling me to {count to ten, take a deep breath, ignore the bullies, just walk away from them}.
So I didn't learn to interact respectfully and responsibly with new people, or large groups, or authorities, because none of them ever earned my respect. Instead I learned to seek out solitude and knowledge at the nearby public library (they had books and internets).
That worked fine, of course, until I started feeling a need to have sex with girls (and feel loved, and such). I had no clue about what to say and what to do, and I was afraid to try things out, because I had learned the consequences of people not liking me. So I went lonely and unloved for so unbearably long.
The world. So lonesome. So depressing. I want out.
This could happen to your children. Don't put them in those mad places. Put them somewhere where they can become whole human beings who have confidence in themselves, who can trust other people, and who have learned that they are loved and there will always be a helping hand. Don't let them become what I have become. Please. Spare them the pain.
Average users don't WANT control over their computers. Go ahead. Give it to them. Explain that they need to right-click on the icon and choose "Run as Administrator," or that they need to run spyware scans, or virus scans, or allow the machine to install updates, or use Browser X instead of Browser Y, or manage a filesystem in a clean and organized way. What do they say? Come on, we've all heard it.
I don't think you need to do any of that on OS X. And I don't think people complain much about OS X in the way you described.
Yet there's this terminal application that gives the users total control and the power to fuck up their machines, royally.
The freedom to make your own choices if you want, but with sane default choices made for you.
(Man, I wish I could say that Linux is 100% there with a straight face...)
You don't expect to run arbitrary code on your DVR (or at least most people don't)
No, I just expect to run my choice of entertainment software, which is mostly but not entirely stable over time.
I just want Frozen Bubble, Battle for Wesnoth and Nexuiz on my Wii. Nothing arbitrary, just those games. In the eyes of Nintendo, that is arbitrary.
Similarly for tivo/apple/$name, of course. I don't want my TV-box, or my telephony-box, or my $box to be a general purpose device. But I want the way it serves a specific purpose to be the way I choose.
And that can only really happen if the device is general purpose.
(And runs Linux :D)
Many consumers don't care, and even LIKE, the idea of being locked in to the App Store, because it introduces a significant amount of security.
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both." -- Benjamin Franklin
As another poster has mentioned, this is happening in the car industry: engines are locked off, so that only Ford mechanics can work on Ford engines. Ford sells cheap cars, people buy them, then Ford bleeds them out of cash on service because they have a monopoly.
People gave up their freedom and got screwed.
When your interests conflict with Apple's, do you think Apple will serve yours? Why? When a non-Apple music playback application would suit you best, but Apple won't let you have it, despite people wanting to give it to you, will you thank Apple for keeping the App Store clean and safe from competition^Wviruses?
Also, I encourage you to have a look at the underhand C code contest. How competent do you think the QA workers are? How diligent? Exactly what is the safety you're buying?
I guess it's just an "implementation issue". Ah, the chorus of the pure theorist...
Here's a thought (I haven't decided whether I agree with it):
Would it make sense to divide the work of creating AI into the Getting Ideas part and the Turning Ideas Into Code part? The idea being that you can let people who are good at one part do that part, and let people who are good at the other do the other part. (That goes back to Adam Smith, division of labour.)
Suppose a physicist establishes a theory about the reflection of light which (among other things) can be used to make more efficient solar cells. Yet he doesn't make any solar cells. Would he be met with the same attitude? Is that "just an implementation issue" too?
Or say an astronomer discovers a new celestial object. Do people poo-poo him because he hasn't gone there? :P (Okay, this one is stretching it...)
I'm not saying your attitude is wrong. I'm wondering, and I hope some of you smart slashdotters can help me figure it out, why computer science researchers get met with the "You haven't turned it into a prototype (or product!) yet, come back when you have."
I think it's because what CS research creates is very close to what Software Engineers (/programmers) create: algorithms. Moreover, the algorithms created by research always solve a particular problem, because that's what algorithms do. In some sense, all CS research is applied, but since it's still research it's not applied enough---it's not a product.
Contrast that with what most scientific fields do: "prove" declarative claims about how the world works (quantum mechanics, planetary motion, natural selection, thermoelectric effect, ...). An algorithm relates to a declarative claim (about its correctness), but it has an imperative "(you can) Do this: ... (and only this)" bit attached to it that most other fields don't have.
I think I can find an exception in the field of medicine---much medical research is into the safety and effectiveness of "algorithms" for treating particular diseases (input chemical X). But they test finished "implementations"---you can't really figure out what chemical X does without inputting it and seeing what happens. Not yet, anyways---humans are big and complex, and to the best of my knowledge there isn't a good, complete model of how they work; that's unlike CS, where we can read a program and reason about what it does without running it.
I think it's the similarity between research output and engineering output that makes many people want researchers to do the engineers' job.
Would it really be a good thing if they did?
(That's not to say we should have a low bar for evidence for "truth", such as correctness or (for more fuzzy domains) effectiveness and usefulness.)
Ah, I see you're a sensible person :)
It sounded from your original post like you thought we shouldn't venture out into space at all. I see that's not really your opinion. I think we can agree on some things then :)