Why is no organization better than one organization? Especially when that one organization is authoritative for some legitimate purpose? It's like (bad analogy time!) saying that because you can create different views over a table depending on your needs, you might as well just eliminate the primary key on the actual table. (Indexing and all that crap notwithstanding, the point is why prefer anarchy to order.)
Huh? I don't understand your argument at all. How is flattening a hierarchy adding more structure, compared with separating out its contents into categories based on their nature? Doesn't your example actually serve as an exact counterexample? How is it more structured to have "sponges", "worms", "trees", "grass", etc., as single-level names, as opposed to "sponges.animals", "worms.animals", "trees.plants", "grass.plants"?
Ontological organization has been voted off the Internet, for better or worse./blockquote> That may be so, but I wish people didn't go ahead and help it on its way, just to artificially create virtual real estate.
What would be so horrible about registering entities under a path to the root that indicated something meaningful about that site's purpose and charter?
- Companies registering domain names based on their existing trademarked names in the jurisdictions where they're represented. Think.co.uk, but with an actual restriction on who can register what. - Reserving a name (again under the appropriate jurisdiction) for non-profit organizations, instead of allowing any Tom, Dick, and Harry to have a.org. - Giving banks a suffix of their own, to help protect their customers from phishing, and without extorting ridiculous sums from them to do so. Just create a damned.bank.us. - Not polluting a global namespace with registrations that are irrelevant to most of the world. Why the hell should.gov be under the control of the United States? Are we the only nation with a government that has an internet presence?
What common interest is served by flattening the hierarchy and allowing registrars to cash in on a virtual land grab? I know it's not realistic to expect any better, but I'm speaking idealistically: why couldn't we have imposed better, more sensible standards for naming?
It is a disgusting thing to do to the Internet, to remove the last semblance of hierarchy and structure in the naming system. It's crap like this that makes me wonder how long it will be before entire contenents are on separate competing DNS roots, fracturing the net as we know it.
My school newspaper, in an introductory article to the campus-wide rollout of Ruckus to all students, actually mentioned TuneByte (or whatever the DRM circumvention software was called) as a viable alternative to using their player. It's unclear to me whether the writer and editor knew that they were advocating EULA violation in an official publication, but was hilarious nonetheless.
Thanks for the guide and info. I'm not likely to go to that extreme at the moment, especially because my current residence has an atrocious network (my university believes 300ms ping between the dorms and academic departments is perfectly reasonable). But it's good to know that I can get a server for just a few bucks a month to play with friends.
I do that sometimes when I repeatedly get stuck on laggy servers, but I almost exclusively play versus mode and there are only a dozen or so servers configured for it.
Left 4 Dead is an amazingly fun game to play but Valve really screwed us over on the details. It's clear from their history of handling this game in the beta and afterwards that they focused on sales with a perpetual we'll-fix-it-later attitude. We were already supposed to have DLC and the SDK.
More importantly, the network system for the game is lousy and they don't seem to want to improve it. Instead of the tried and true simplicity of seeing a list of available game servers and choosing one to play on, they tried to get all fancy and game console-y and remove even this basic feature (unless you go through the command console, but even then it's clunky). We're slaves to their matchmaking system, unable to choose who we play with unless we do so through their social networking system. Often times there are not enough servers available (how can they possibly fail to provide enough resources for their customers? Is it really that expensive, incrementally, to run a few more servers?), and poorly configured servers pollute everyone's game experience by adding a lot to the overhead of finding a playable match.
Sometimes you'll have to go back and forth between game lobby and gameplay because you keep getting assigned to a crap server. Sometimes you'll be having the match of your life, then everyone gets disconnected and scattered to different corners of the system because the server shut down.
I'll say it again, L4D is fun as hell, but that's only when you're actually playing. In-between campaigns it's just thousands of collective manhours of overhead.
Stores are afraid to stock NC-17 titles, because they're usually associated with porn. The problem with Australia's method is that the board that makes the rating decision could, someday soon, decide that a game is sending the message that the Aussie government is evil, and refuse it classification.
Which will be very quickly reported on and general public outrage will fix the problem.
My naivety meter just went through the roof. The past decade should be proof to anyone living in America that it's very easy to gradually introduce such outrageous ideas into the public's mindset, by starting with propaganda claims and studies linking material to crimincal activity, or crafting horrible laws that claim to fight terrorism.
Look to the UK for an example of the prototypical police state in progress.
> "Watch the movie "This film is not yet rated." It shows how the MPAA is censoring films that it doesn't agree with"
I watched that documentary, and the entire time I kept thinking, the problem isn't that there's a rating system, it's that there's only one rating system. There's nothing wrong with having someone warn southern Christian parents that they might not find a movie appropriate for their kids because it contains content they'd object to, such as homosexuality. The problem is the stranglehold they have on movie producers to censor content from the marketplace for people who wouldn't necessarily find it offensive.
We need at least several different rating boards and many distributors who will carry the various movies and games, so that no one small set of people gets to control what everyone else is exposed to.
So you're saying that, like a EULA, the GPL does place legal restrictions on end users in the form of ALL CAPS WARRANTY WAIVERS (I never understood why in legalese it's considered polite to shout). But this clause only applies to those who exercise their right to redistribute the software, and not to ordinary non-redistributing end-users (see section 5)? How asymmetric.
Interestingly enough the wrapper dialog displaying the GPL often directly conflicts with the text of the license in claiming the user need accept it to run or install the program.
That's the kind of comment that feels like it's a propagandish troll, yet is completely accurate in its substance.
And even ignoring the fact that Free Software gives you total control over the programs you use, at least Linux is modular enough that you can put together a distribution that leaves out any misbehaving components.
To be fair, we'd only be criticizing them slightly less had they done both of those points. They just made our rationalization a heck of a lot easier by discarding any sense of caution or respect.
Of course and as always, the word "trust" is used in its technical capacity to indicate a relationship characterized by uneasy vulnerability, rather than an actual commitment of faith.
I wish people would stop ripping on that one scene in Jurassic Park. Movies that predated widespread personal computing should be excused from criticism unless they commit a cardinal sin, like merging cyberspace and reality in a non-futuristic-cyberpunk genre. For example, Hacker's representation of a monolithic kernel as an actual monolith was a bit over the top.
Jurrasic Park by contrast used:
1) Real software - the GUI browser was made by SGI; 2) Real computing principles - in UNIX *everything* is a file, including door lock devices; and 3) This is truly admirable and almost never done - they used the real meaning of the word "hacker" to describe someone with an interest in computers!
Any geek that can't appreciate that Jurassic Park did a service to the technical community should be forced to watch Die Hard 4 over and over again.
> Doesn't handwritten assembly have the potential to be much faster than assembly compiled from C?
Meh, that's overstated. My boss, an engineer who knows assembly whereas I do not, once commented to me how impressed he was that gcc was able to compile C code into something that was almost as good as hand crafted assembly.
Of course low level operations like initializing the DRAM controller should probably be done manually, but that kind of code is minimal. In fact, they have a special compiler that only puts variables in CPU registers instead of memory so even that part can be in C.
As far as efficiency goes, the CPU is way faster than any other component of the computer, so optimizing the number of cycles you take is pointless until you demonstrate a need to do so.
I can't say the same from my experience. I've gotten the crap kicked out of me by fewer bullies at a time. But what the GP totally misses in that sentence (without my bothering to read his full post) is that some of us have a much better chance of winning in an online fight than a physical fight. Then again, being just a few years too old to have experienced this cyber bullying craze personally in middle school or high school, perhaps I'm just not aware of how one "wins" an online battle of harrassment.
You probably aren't joking, but for people who think you are, I'd like to say that that's the age at which I was on my Dad's IBM, learning the alphabet. Rock on.
I'll pass on the obvious caps lock troll opportunity.
A buckling spring keyboard is a beautiful thing. I don't know that I can claim I type any faster on one, but it sure as hell is a lot more fun. There's that feeling of finality every time you pound the enter key; and it's great for keeping your roommate awake and annoyed. And of course, there aren't any media keys between you and your machine to hold you back.
It's like everyone else's keyboard is a subcompact made of tinfoil, and your keyboard is a recklessly ill-engineered gas-guzzling super behemoth vehicle, crushing the opposition with an excess of American spirit. While you're on a cellphone.
I'm sick of everyone claiming the Model M is the best. I mean, yes, it's a damn good board and beats the hell out of the countless cheap (or criminally overpriced) boards that followed it. But what about the IBM keyboard that preceded the Model M? The one used on the XT, the portable PC, etc.? I've got one at home and the keyswitches are - if such a word can be applied to an input device - heavenly. The layout's ancient, with the function keys to the left of the control key which is where the modern caps lock key is, and the connector's AT instead of PS/2, but I'd give anything for those keyswitches in a modern board. Not to mention the thing is built like a tank. Lexmark/Unicomp's design is a close second.
These days I'm on a Das Keyboard because it seems like a reasonable alternative, but if that didn't exist I'd probably order a Unicomp model with penguin super keys.
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Why is no organization better than one organization? Especially when that one organization is authoritative for some legitimate purpose? It's like (bad analogy time!) saying that because you can create different views over a table depending on your needs, you might as well just eliminate the primary key on the actual table. (Indexing and all that crap notwithstanding, the point is why prefer anarchy to order.)
Whoops, as you can see, I screwed up the blockquote. Lot of good that preview function does; it just conditioned me to be even less attentive.
Huh? I don't understand your argument at all. How is flattening a hierarchy adding more structure, compared with separating out its contents into categories based on their nature? Doesn't your example actually serve as an exact counterexample? How is it more structured to have "sponges", "worms", "trees", "grass", etc., as single-level names, as opposed to "sponges.animals", "worms.animals", "trees.plants", "grass.plants"?
What would be so horrible about registering entities under a path to the root that indicated something meaningful about that site's purpose and charter?
- Companies registering domain names based on their existing trademarked names in the jurisdictions where they're represented. Think .co.uk, but with an actual restriction on who can register what. .org. .bank.us. .gov be under the control of the United States? Are we the only nation with a government that has an internet presence?
- Reserving a name (again under the appropriate jurisdiction) for non-profit organizations, instead of allowing any Tom, Dick, and Harry to have a
- Giving banks a suffix of their own, to help protect their customers from phishing, and without extorting ridiculous sums from them to do so. Just create a damned
- Not polluting a global namespace with registrations that are irrelevant to most of the world. Why the hell should
What common interest is served by flattening the hierarchy and allowing registrars to cash in on a virtual land grab? I know it's not realistic to expect any better, but I'm speaking idealistically: why couldn't we have imposed better, more sensible standards for naming?
It is a disgusting thing to do to the Internet, to remove the last semblance of hierarchy and structure in the naming system. It's crap like this that makes me wonder how long it will be before entire contenents are on separate competing DNS roots, fracturing the net as we know it.
My school newspaper, in an introductory article to the campus-wide rollout of Ruckus to all students, actually mentioned TuneByte (or whatever the DRM circumvention software was called) as a viable alternative to using their player. It's unclear to me whether the writer and editor knew that they were advocating EULA violation in an official publication, but was hilarious nonetheless.
Thanks for the guide and info. I'm not likely to go to that extreme at the moment, especially because my current residence has an atrocious network (my university believes 300ms ping between the dorms and academic departments is perfectly reasonable). But it's good to know that I can get a server for just a few bucks a month to play with friends.
I do that sometimes when I repeatedly get stuck on laggy servers, but I almost exclusively play versus mode and there are only a dozen or so servers configured for it.
Left 4 Dead is an amazingly fun game to play but Valve really screwed us over on the details. It's clear from their history of handling this game in the beta and afterwards that they focused on sales with a perpetual we'll-fix-it-later attitude. We were already supposed to have DLC and the SDK.
More importantly, the network system for the game is lousy and they don't seem to want to improve it. Instead of the tried and true simplicity of seeing a list of available game servers and choosing one to play on, they tried to get all fancy and game console-y and remove even this basic feature (unless you go through the command console, but even then it's clunky). We're slaves to their matchmaking system, unable to choose who we play with unless we do so through their social networking system. Often times there are not enough servers available (how can they possibly fail to provide enough resources for their customers? Is it really that expensive, incrementally, to run a few more servers?), and poorly configured servers pollute everyone's game experience by adding a lot to the overhead of finding a playable match.
Sometimes you'll have to go back and forth between game lobby and gameplay because you keep getting assigned to a crap server. Sometimes you'll be having the match of your life, then everyone gets disconnected and scattered to different corners of the system because the server shut down.
I'll say it again, L4D is fun as hell, but that's only when you're actually playing. In-between campaigns it's just thousands of collective manhours of overhead.
My naivety meter just went through the roof. The past decade should be proof to anyone living in America that it's very easy to gradually introduce such outrageous ideas into the public's mindset, by starting with propaganda claims and studies linking material to crimincal activity, or crafting horrible laws that claim to fight terrorism.
Look to the UK for an example of the prototypical police state in progress.
> "Watch the movie "This film is not yet rated." It shows how the MPAA is censoring films that it doesn't agree with"
I watched that documentary, and the entire time I kept thinking, the problem isn't that there's a rating system, it's that there's only one rating system. There's nothing wrong with having someone warn southern Christian parents that they might not find a movie appropriate for their kids because it contains content they'd object to, such as homosexuality. The problem is the stranglehold they have on movie producers to censor content from the marketplace for people who wouldn't necessarily find it offensive.
We need at least several different rating boards and many distributors who will carry the various movies and games, so that no one small set of people gets to control what everyone else is exposed to.
I think you're abusing the legal term "consideration". To my knowledge that's only applicable in contract law, not in licensing.
So you're saying that, like a EULA, the GPL does place legal restrictions on end users in the form of ALL CAPS WARRANTY WAIVERS (I never understood why in legalese it's considered polite to shout). But this clause only applies to those who exercise their right to redistribute the software, and not to ordinary non-redistributing end-users (see section 5)? How asymmetric.
Interestingly enough the wrapper dialog displaying the GPL often directly conflicts with the text of the license in claiming the user need accept it to run or install the program.
That's the kind of comment that feels like it's a propagandish troll, yet is completely accurate in its substance.
And even ignoring the fact that Free Software gives you total control over the programs you use, at least Linux is modular enough that you can put together a distribution that leaves out any misbehaving components.
To be fair, we'd only be criticizing them slightly less had they done both of those points. They just made our rationalization a heck of a lot easier by discarding any sense of caution or respect.
Of course and as always, the word "trust" is used in its technical capacity to indicate a relationship characterized by uneasy vulnerability, rather than an actual commitment of faith.
Firefox likes to be retarded that way. Certain configuration keys can be changed via the about:config GUI but only reverted by text editing.
I wish people would stop ripping on that one scene in Jurassic Park. Movies that predated widespread personal computing should be excused from criticism unless they commit a cardinal sin, like merging cyberspace and reality in a non-futuristic-cyberpunk genre. For example, Hacker's representation of a monolithic kernel as an actual monolith was a bit over the top.
Jurrasic Park by contrast used:
1) Real software - the GUI browser was made by SGI;
2) Real computing principles - in UNIX *everything* is a file, including door lock devices; and
3) This is truly admirable and almost never done - they used the real meaning of the word "hacker" to describe someone with an interest in computers!
Any geek that can't appreciate that Jurassic Park did a service to the technical community should be forced to watch Die Hard 4 over and over again.
You should try NCIS. It's got all the horrors you just described, but it adds:
1) "Gut" decisions that are immensely preferable to following any kind of established protocol
2) Scripts that openly validate movie plots as legitimate threats (the pilot was based on Air Force One)
3) A hacker goth chick who balks when her superior tells her to crack the NSA ("Even their encryptions have encryptions")
4) Half the antagonists are called terrorists and are of a minority race
Enjoy!
> Doesn't handwritten assembly have the potential to be much faster than assembly compiled from C?
Meh, that's overstated. My boss, an engineer who knows assembly whereas I do not, once commented to me how impressed he was that gcc was able to compile C code into something that was almost as good as hand crafted assembly.
Of course low level operations like initializing the DRAM controller should probably be done manually, but that kind of code is minimal. In fact, they have a special compiler that only puts variables in CPU registers instead of memory so even that part can be in C.
As far as efficiency goes, the CPU is way faster than any other component of the computer, so optimizing the number of cycles you take is pointless until you demonstrate a need to do so.
I can't say the same from my experience. I've gotten the crap kicked out of me by fewer bullies at a time. But what the GP totally misses in that sentence (without my bothering to read his full post) is that some of us have a much better chance of winning in an online fight than a physical fight. Then again, being just a few years too old to have experienced this cyber bullying craze personally in middle school or high school, perhaps I'm just not aware of how one "wins" an online battle of harrassment.
You probably aren't joking, but for people who think you are, I'd like to say that that's the age at which I was on my Dad's IBM, learning the alphabet. Rock on.
I'll pass on the obvious caps lock troll opportunity.
A buckling spring keyboard is a beautiful thing. I don't know that I can claim I type any faster on one, but it sure as hell is a lot more fun. There's that feeling of finality every time you pound the enter key; and it's great for keeping your roommate awake and annoyed. And of course, there aren't any media keys between you and your machine to hold you back.
It's like everyone else's keyboard is a subcompact made of tinfoil, and your keyboard is a recklessly ill-engineered gas-guzzling super behemoth vehicle, crushing the opposition with an excess of American spirit. While you're on a cellphone.
I'm sick of everyone claiming the Model M is the best. I mean, yes, it's a damn good board and beats the hell out of the countless cheap (or criminally overpriced) boards that followed it. But what about the IBM keyboard that preceded the Model M? The one used on the XT, the portable PC, etc.? I've got one at home and the keyswitches are - if such a word can be applied to an input device - heavenly. The layout's ancient, with the function keys to the left of the control key which is where the modern caps lock key is, and the connector's AT instead of PS/2, but I'd give anything for those keyswitches in a modern board. Not to mention the thing is built like a tank. Lexmark/Unicomp's design is a close second.
These days I'm on a Das Keyboard because it seems like a reasonable alternative, but if that didn't exist I'd probably order a Unicomp model with penguin super keys.