Re:Stay calm folks. This is Just a Finding Of Fact..
Agreed. But let's face it: the writing's on the wall. I haven't read the findings myself, but not one reporter (I'm watching CNN) has been able to locate a significant finding that favors Microsoft's position. It's halftime, and the government is up by about ten touchdowns. It's looking very bad for Microsoft.
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Galactic-scale action flavored with AI, Usenet, and gothic intrigue. A bit hard to believe in places, but the grand scale of the story makes suspense of disbelief easy.
Someone else mentioned Hofstadter's Godel, Escher Bach; I'd add his Metamagical Themas as well.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. Several metaphysical journeys woven into a wonderful story/extended essay. Also good background material for anyone having to suffer through Total Quality training.
Don't forget James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. A spiritual ancestor of the cyberpunk style.
One of my first surprises upon going to work in the Space Shuttle program was that it used English units -- throughout. That might be understandable given that the shuttle program began over three decades ago. But I must admit that even in my cynicism about NASA's ways of doing things, I am surprised to find that we are still using English units. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a modern engineering project. And those older systems -- software, telemetry systems, deep space network, etc. -- that must interface with modern systems should be updated. There's really no excuse for us to be using English when the rest of the world, including US engineering schools, have all gone MKS.
It's a way to run the Emacs lisp engine on any host CPU! Directly on bare metal! The good folks at Transmeta have finally realized that what the world needs is a better Emacs, with hardware assist. Sort of a turbo-Emacs. Linus has often said that Emacs is evil... well, now we know how he plans to fix it. Emacs is dead! Long live Emacs!
And there's also David Kahn's The Codebreakers which is a comprehensive survey of cryptology. And I do mean comprehensive: he goes back as far as 1900 BC, describing unusal hieroglyphics on the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotop II in Mene Khufu on the Nile. From there, he works his way forward. I'm hoping to finish this kilopage tome sometime this year so I can move on to Cryptonomicon.
According to Bamford's Puzzle Palace, the NSA employed over 68,000 people back in 1978, making it larger than any other US intelligence agency. With the increase over the last 21 years in telephone traffic, cell phones, the Internet, etc., and in the corresponding US law enforcement reliance on COMINT, that number must surely have grown.
So you're from Down Under. Ever heard of Pine Gap? Bamford describes it as being in the Australian interior some eleven and a half miles from Alice Springs. He described it as being a listening post, receiving information from NSA satellites, and eavesdropping on Australia, New Zealand, and southeast Asia. Another NSA installation Bamford describes is in the Woomera Prohibited Area, 600 miles southeast of Pine Gap. Bamford wrote over 20 years ago, though, so those operatios may not be operating today.
James Bamford, author of Puzzle Palace, never worked for the NSA or any other government agency. He's a professional writer/journalist, according to the short bio inside the book. He works for ABC News and has written for the Washington Post, among others.
The book is excellent, if a bit dry in places. It's about 20 years old, so the technology he describes is way out of date, but the portrait he paints of the agency's activities seems pretty accurate.
I thought the fellow was being sued -- that is, a civil proceeding, not a criminal proceeding. Thus reading that he has been "freed" by the court leaves me a little confused. Perhaps this is a translation error?
I simply can't grasp the concept that you could do cryptography without computers.
Cryptography without computers I can understand. Cryptanalysis without computers is what fascinates me. Many codes have been broken with just pencil and paper. The codebreaking machines like the bombe are fascinating too. This is all covered in Kahn's The Codebreakers, which I'm working my way through and plan to finish before I tackle Cryptonomicon (it's about as long, too -- reading both will take a while).
The xdelta plugin is only a small part of what I need. It's like saying that diff is all I need for text version control. Of course, that's not so; the diff capability needs to be embedded in a framework that knows about versions and history and change comments and locking and yada yada yada. Diff and even patch are not sufficient for doing text version control -- that's why we have RCS.
My point is that a complete image-maintenance environment needs to go beyond the GIMP. It needs to integrate the GIMP, and a good organizer, and a history/version control tool, and probably several other tools that I haven't thought of yet. Trying to cram all this into the GIMP will lead to Emacs-like bloat. Instead, I'd rather try to seek a framework that allows the tools to work well together, but still enables them to work separately.
I've been using the GIMP since about 0.54 and I couldn't live without it. I scan a lot of images for a family history project, and I take lots of photos with my digital camera. I use the GIMP for all sorts of color adjustment, cropping, touch-up, and special effects in my photos, as well as creating the graphics for my web site.
Although I'm not a professional photographer or the like, I still want to organize and manage my images in a professional manner. In my job as a programmer, I use RCS and directory hierarchies to organize and care for my code -- why shouldn't I treat my images with as much care?
I have needs that GIMP doesn't meet by itself. For example, I want to organize my images. Not just into folders, but according to varying criteria, such as date taken, subject, exhibit (whether an image has been used in a web site or document), etc.
Also, I want to track different versions of my images. I typically keep several versions: the raw scan, the first touch-up (after scratch removal, color correction, and other tweaks), a cropped version (because I might crop differently for different uses), and several scalings: the full original, a 640x480 web-site size, and a thumbnail. I want a tool that helps me manage all these versions, track where they've been used, and jump among them (or call them up in GIMP).
Organizing images is an area that's coming along nicely, with the development of gPhoto and Photodex, but these tools only address that one area of concern. And to be truly useful, they need to be well-integrated with the GIMP, so that one can edit an image with a double-click.
I have heard that Photodex will eventually have integration with the GIMP, but that appears to be some way away. Photodex also has the problem that it isn't open source, and probably won't ever be.
GPhoto shows great promise, but it appears to have some overlaps with the GIMP. For example, it has its own color correction dialog. I'd prefer to see gPhoto integrated with the GIMP for image editing, rather than trying to provide its own. GPhoto has great digital camera support so far, its greatest strength. Good digicam management is another need for a complete image management tool suite.
What about version control? No one out there seems to be thinking at all about this. Maybe because it's a wacko idea -- but I for one would find it useful.
Version control of images needn't be difficult. Of course, you couldn't do it the same way RCS does it, with content diffs. Storage requirements would get way out of hand; just saving the individual versions would require less.
A better idea, one that could be accomplished with the help of the GIMP, would be to record all the mousing, keystrokes, and dialog interaction that goes into the editing of an image; these are the "diffs". This data could be stored far more compactly than storing all the image versions. You could play back the edits on the original raw scan to produce any intermediate or final version. If it takes too long to play back from the original, you could store full binary versions of significant intermediate versions.
None of this is intended to slam the GIMP, Photodex or gPhoto. Just some ramblings on where I'd like to see image management go in the open-source world.
--JT
Re:Bob Shaw got there first
on
Smart Dust
·
· Score: 1
As I remember from the story, the "slow" property came from sort of hugely long molecule coiled up in a helix. Photons impinging on one end of the molecule would travel its entire length before being released at the other end. If the molecules making up the glass were n light-years in length, then the glass had a "slowness" of n years.
I don't remember any direct reference to or mention of nanotech, though. Not that that couldn't be worked into a more modern version (how do you build those molecules, after all)?
Wow, what a great memory -- I haven't though about slow glass in ages. I read about it ages ago, in a sci-fi anthology my cousin got in a high-school reading class. I wish I could remember the name of the anthology because I remember it had other mind-warping stories in it. At least knowing the Slow Glass author's name is a start.
--JT
Please get the author's name right
on
Smart Dust
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· Score: 3
It's not Neil. It's not Stevenson. I've seen both used here on Slashdot lately, by "fans" who should know better.
It is Neal Stephenson.
And speaking of smart dust, I just read Diamond Age, and that part where the Judge's assistant's book began accumulating a layer of dust just gave me the creeps!
I agree with the sentiment that meta-moderation is unnecessary, but I disgree with the idea of losing karma just because you don't follow the herd and moderate the same way the others do. Where's the allowance for sincere difference of opinion? I think that losing karma just because you're outvoted is throwing the baby out with the bath.
In fact, I would argue just the opposite: that when some moderators vote against the others, that it shows the system moderating itself. This is why meta-moderation is unnecessary: because it's already built, to some degree, into the system.
Disclaimer: I didn't witness the Stevens debacle first-hand, though I did go back and read the threads. I'm not sure I see how the moderation failed there, unless there just weren't enough people moderating to slap down the insensitive jerks. Or perhaps it's just that even the moderators have some pretty unsavory opinions.
During my practice run at meta-moderation, I saw one moderated comment twice. Trying to check my meta-moderation (meta-meta-moderation) by seeing if I rate the same moderation the same way in both instances? Or just a programming oversight?
First you have to state the obvious: look at how much of the nay-saying in this article comes from Microsoft people: Aubrey Edwards, group product manager for Microsoft's forthcoming Windows NT upgrade Windows 2000 and Charles Fitzgerald, director of business development in Microsoft's software development unit. Do these people have a clue about Linux, or how it's currently being used and deployed? And if they did have a clue, would it make through their marketspeak filters?
Nevertheless, the comparison to Java isn't valid. Java was largely a top-down phenomenon: a reasonably cool technology, but pushed heavily by one large proponent: its inventors at Sun. Linux, on the other hand, has for most if its life had no large, wealthy proponents or advertising budgets. It has survived and prospered because it works and people like it. Its success is a bottom-up phenomenon (or, if you prefer the more radical phrase, a "grass-roots" revolution).
Java is still trying to prove itself, and having to carry the burden of its own hype at the same time. Linux, though, has already paid its dues in thousands of small ISPs, small businesses, department servers, and home systems throughout the world. Microsoft would do well to realize this difference before they yawn away the Linux movement as mere hype.
Yeah, Be and BeOS have been around for some years now, but you have to wonder how much longer they'll have to make a go of their OS. They recently reported revenue growth, but their net earnings are still losing about a dollar per share. Their share price has dropped since their IPO.
I really like BeOS and I hope it succeeds, but it doesn't look too likely that they can give their OS too much longer to find its market.
Ellison may have antipathy towards MS, but I'll wager that has little to do with the decision. Ellison is a businessman and antipathy earns little money by itself. Ellison won't start a linux division unless he knows it will make money. (He might enjoy a linux division more if it succeeds, contributing to the success of linux and hurting Windoze, but that's another matter.)
Thanks for pointing to the "printer-friendly" form of this article, instead of the gaudy ad-crammed regular version. I find the cleaner text much easier to read. I'd love it if more Slashdot posters followed suit and pointed to printer friendly versions of articles where available.
We shouldn't come up with a new term and we shouldn't give up on educating people about the cracker/hacker distinction.
Don't think that public perceptions and language can't be changed. Where we once had "colored" and "black" people, we now have "people of color" and "African-Americans. Where we once had "American Indians", we now have "Native Americans". Why shouldn't hackers be allowed a slice of the PC pie?
I personally resent like hell the fact that journalists in the popular press have misused our term and I don't think we should give up on reclaiming it. Instead of trying to find a new term, we should be trying to map out a new strategy. Maybe I'm being naive, but I'd rather fight than switch!
Slashdot Mirror
Re:Stay calm folks. This is Just a Finding Of Fact..
Agreed. But let's face it: the writing's on the wall. I haven't read the findings myself, but not one reporter (I'm watching CNN) has been able to locate a significant finding that favors Microsoft's position. It's halftime, and the government is up by about ten touchdowns. It's looking very bad for Microsoft.
--JT
...change the name of the forum to "Hitchhiker's Guide to Sendmail". (With the words "Don't Panic" in the subject line in large friendly letters.)
Maybe Douglas Adams isn't such an asshole.
--JT
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Galactic-scale action flavored with AI, Usenet, and gothic intrigue. A bit hard to believe in places, but the grand scale of the story makes suspense of disbelief easy.
Someone else mentioned Hofstadter's Godel, Escher Bach; I'd add his Metamagical Themas as well.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. Several metaphysical journeys woven into a wonderful story/extended essay. Also good background material for anyone having to suffer through Total Quality training.
Don't forget James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. A spiritual ancestor of the cyberpunk style.
--JT
Sounds to me like a feature of Buddux. Now we only need to invent it.
--JT
What are they going to do, sue us all?
--JT
One of my first surprises upon going to work in the Space Shuttle program was that it used English units -- throughout. That might be understandable given that the shuttle program began over three decades ago. But I must admit that even in my cynicism about NASA's ways of doing things, I am surprised to find that we are still using English units. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a modern engineering project. And those older systems -- software, telemetry systems, deep space network, etc. -- that must interface with modern systems should be updated. There's really no excuse for us to be using English when the rest of the world, including US engineering schools, have all gone MKS.
--JT
It's a way to run the Emacs lisp engine on any host CPU! Directly on bare metal! The good folks at Transmeta have finally realized that what the world needs is a better Emacs, with hardware assist. Sort of a turbo-Emacs. Linus has often said that Emacs is evil... well, now we know how he plans to fix it. Emacs is dead! Long live Emacs!
--JT
And there's also David Kahn's The Codebreakers which is a comprehensive survey of cryptology. And I do mean comprehensive: he goes back as far as 1900 BC, describing unusal hieroglyphics on the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotop II in Mene Khufu on the Nile. From there, he works his way forward. I'm hoping to finish this kilopage tome sometime this year so I can move on to Cryptonomicon.
--JT
According to Bamford's Puzzle Palace, the NSA employed over 68,000 people back in 1978, making it larger than any other US intelligence agency. With the increase over the last 21 years in telephone traffic, cell phones, the Internet, etc., and in the corresponding US law enforcement reliance on COMINT, that number must surely have grown.
So you're from Down Under. Ever heard of Pine Gap? Bamford describes it as being in the Australian interior some eleven and a half miles from Alice Springs. He described it as being a listening post, receiving information from NSA satellites, and eavesdropping on Australia, New Zealand, and southeast Asia. Another NSA installation Bamford describes is in the Woomera Prohibited Area, 600 miles southeast of Pine Gap. Bamford wrote over 20 years ago, though, so those operatios may not be operating today.
--JT
James Bamford, author of Puzzle Palace, never worked for the NSA or any other government agency. He's a professional writer/journalist, according to the short bio inside the book. He works for ABC News and has written for the Washington Post, among others.
The book is excellent, if a bit dry in places. It's about 20 years old, so the technology he describes is way out of date, but the portrait he paints of the agency's activities seems pretty accurate.
--JT
I get a javascript error when I bring up google. They have a few (though perhaps minor) bugs to iron out.
--JT
I thought the fellow was being sued -- that is, a civil proceeding, not a criminal proceeding. Thus reading that he has been "freed" by the court leaves me a little confused. Perhaps this is a translation error?
--JT
I simply can't grasp the concept that you could do cryptography without computers.
Cryptography without computers I can understand. Cryptanalysis without computers is what fascinates me. Many codes have been broken with just pencil and paper. The codebreaking machines like the bombe are fascinating too. This is all covered in Kahn's The Codebreakers, which I'm working my way through and plan to finish before I tackle Cryptonomicon (it's about as long, too -- reading both will take a while).
--JT
The xdelta plugin is only a small part of what I need. It's like saying that diff is all I need for text version control. Of course, that's not so; the diff capability needs to be embedded in a framework that knows about versions and history and change comments and locking and yada yada yada. Diff and even patch are not sufficient for doing text version control -- that's why we have RCS.
My point is that a complete image-maintenance environment needs to go beyond the GIMP. It needs to integrate the GIMP, and a good organizer, and a history/version control tool, and probably several other tools that I haven't thought of yet. Trying to cram all this into the GIMP will lead to Emacs-like bloat. Instead, I'd rather try to seek a framework that allows the tools to work well together, but still enables them to work separately.
--JT
I've been using the GIMP since about 0.54 and I couldn't live without it. I scan a lot of images for a family history project, and I take lots of photos with my digital camera. I use the GIMP for all sorts of color adjustment, cropping, touch-up, and special effects in my photos, as well as creating the graphics for my web site.
Although I'm not a professional photographer or the like, I still want to organize and manage my images in a professional manner. In my job as a programmer, I use RCS and directory hierarchies to organize and care for my code -- why shouldn't I treat my images with as much care?
I have needs that GIMP doesn't meet by itself. For example, I want to organize my images. Not just into folders, but according to varying criteria, such as date taken, subject, exhibit (whether an image has been used in a web site or document), etc.
Also, I want to track different versions of my images. I typically keep several versions: the raw scan, the first touch-up (after scratch removal, color correction, and other tweaks), a cropped version (because I might crop differently for different uses), and several scalings: the full original, a 640x480 web-site size, and a thumbnail. I want a tool that helps me manage all these versions, track where they've been used, and jump among them (or call them up in GIMP).
Organizing images is an area that's coming along nicely, with the development of gPhoto and Photodex, but these tools only address that one area of concern. And to be truly useful, they need to be well-integrated with the GIMP, so that one can edit an image with a double-click.
I have heard that Photodex will eventually have integration with the GIMP, but that appears to be some way away. Photodex also has the problem that it isn't open source, and probably won't ever be.
GPhoto shows great promise, but it appears to have some overlaps with the GIMP. For example, it has its own color correction dialog. I'd prefer to see gPhoto integrated with the GIMP for image editing, rather than trying to provide its own. GPhoto has great digital camera support so far, its greatest strength. Good digicam management is another need for a complete image management tool suite.
What about version control? No one out there seems to be thinking at all about this. Maybe because it's a wacko idea -- but I for one would find it useful.
Version control of images needn't be difficult. Of course, you couldn't do it the same way RCS does it, with content diffs. Storage requirements would get way out of hand; just saving the individual versions would require less.
A better idea, one that could be accomplished with the help of the GIMP, would be to record all the mousing, keystrokes, and dialog interaction that goes into the editing of an image; these are the "diffs". This data could be stored far more compactly than storing all the image versions. You could play back the edits on the original raw scan to produce any intermediate or final version. If it takes too long to play back from the original, you could store full binary versions of significant intermediate versions.
None of this is intended to slam the GIMP, Photodex or gPhoto. Just some ramblings on where I'd like to see image management go in the open-source world.
--JT
As I remember from the story, the "slow" property came from sort of hugely long molecule coiled up in a helix. Photons impinging on one end of the molecule would travel its entire length before being released at the other end. If the molecules making up the glass were n light-years in length, then the glass had a "slowness" of n years.
I don't remember any direct reference to or mention of nanotech, though. Not that that couldn't be worked into a more modern version (how do you build those molecules, after all)?
Wow, what a great memory -- I haven't though about slow glass in ages. I read about it ages ago, in a sci-fi anthology my cousin got in a high-school reading class. I wish I could remember the name of the anthology because I remember it had other mind-warping stories in it. At least knowing the Slow Glass author's name is a start.
--JT
It's not Neil. It's not Stevenson. I've seen both used here on Slashdot lately, by "fans" who should know better.
It is Neal Stephenson.
And speaking of smart dust, I just read Diamond Age, and that part where the Judge's assistant's book began accumulating a layer of dust just gave me the creeps!
--JT
I agree with the sentiment that meta-moderation is unnecessary, but I disgree with the idea of losing karma just because you don't follow the herd and moderate the same way the others do. Where's the allowance for sincere difference of opinion? I think that losing karma just because you're outvoted is throwing the baby out with the bath.
In fact, I would argue just the opposite: that when some moderators vote against the others, that it shows the system moderating itself. This is why meta-moderation is unnecessary: because it's already built, to some degree, into the system.
Disclaimer: I didn't witness the Stevens debacle first-hand, though I did go back and read the threads. I'm not sure I see how the moderation failed there, unless there just weren't enough people moderating to slap down the insensitive jerks. Or perhaps it's just that even the moderators have some pretty unsavory opinions.
--JT
During my practice run at meta-moderation, I saw one moderated comment twice. Trying to check my meta-moderation (meta-meta-moderation) by seeing if I rate the same moderation the same way in both instances? Or just a programming oversight?
--JT
First you have to state the obvious: look at how much of the nay-saying in this article comes from Microsoft people: Aubrey Edwards, group product manager for Microsoft's forthcoming Windows NT upgrade Windows 2000 and Charles Fitzgerald, director of business development in Microsoft's software development unit. Do these people have a clue about Linux, or how it's currently being used and deployed? And if they did have a clue, would it make through their marketspeak filters?
Nevertheless, the comparison to Java isn't valid. Java was largely a top-down phenomenon: a reasonably cool technology, but pushed heavily by one large proponent: its inventors at Sun. Linux, on the other hand, has for most if its life had no large, wealthy proponents or advertising budgets. It has survived and prospered because it works and people like it. Its success is a bottom-up phenomenon (or, if you prefer the more radical phrase, a "grass-roots" revolution).
Java is still trying to prove itself, and having to carry the burden of its own hype at the same time. Linux, though, has already paid its dues in thousands of small ISPs, small businesses, department servers, and home systems throughout the world. Microsoft would do well to realize this difference before they yawn away the Linux movement as mere hype.
--JT
Yeah, Be and BeOS have been around for some years now, but you have to wonder how much longer they'll have to make a go of their OS. They recently reported revenue growth, but their net earnings are still losing about a dollar per share. Their share price has dropped since their IPO.
I really like BeOS and I hope it succeeds, but it doesn't look too likely that they can give their OS too much longer to find its market.
--JT
Ellison may have antipathy towards MS, but I'll wager that has little to do with the decision. Ellison is a businessman and antipathy earns little money by itself. Ellison won't start a linux division unless he knows it will make money. (He might enjoy a linux division more if it succeeds, contributing to the success of linux and hurting Windoze, but that's another matter.)
--JT
The cows are it, man. They're going to be running the place before too long. "...and the Beef shall inherit the Earth."
--JT
Thanks for pointing to the "printer-friendly" form of this article, instead of the gaudy ad-crammed regular version. I find the cleaner text much easier to read. I'd love it if more Slashdot posters followed suit and pointed to printer friendly versions of articles where available.
--JT
We shouldn't come up with a new term and we shouldn't give up on educating people about the cracker/hacker distinction.
Don't think that public perceptions and language can't be changed. Where we once had "colored" and "black" people, we now have "people of color" and "African-Americans. Where we once had "American Indians", we now have "Native Americans". Why shouldn't hackers be allowed a slice of the PC pie?
I personally resent like hell the fact that journalists in the popular press have misused our term and I don't think we should give up on reclaiming it. Instead of trying to find a new term, we should be trying to map out a new strategy. Maybe I'm being naive, but I'd rather fight than switch!
--JT