I've been trying to develop an application where the Java applet on the page communicates with the Javascript on the page i.e. basically *Netscape's* Liveconnect technology.
The ironical thing is, IE 5 actually works much better with this technology than NS -- NS has all sorts of strange, erratic missing objects errors (which sometimes go away after you reload the page several times), or fails when the pages get too complex.
I want my app to work well with both NS and IE, but NS makes this extremely difficult...
Will it really fly? I saw a demonstration of a minature helicopter (about the size of this robofly) at Stanford a few weeks ago. They can create the necessary lift, but the big problem is control. Control not just in the sense of being able to tell it where to go, but at a more basic level -- a matter of system stability (e.g. real helicopters need complex control systems to keep them stable). The reporter may have missed this, and thought that by 'control', the scientists just meant being able to tell the fly where to go.
I know this is taboo, but how about running Linux under VMware for NT? I tried Linux for the first time this way a couple of weeks ago, and it works well, slowly but still entirely usable (my computer is a humble P200 though).
The virtual machine is completely isolated from the rest of the computer, so there's no fear of screwing up your computer as you learn to install and configure Linux. The fact that you can switch back to NT and scour the web for help as you grapple with the installation is a *very* big plus (setting up the network was the thing that took the most time to figure out).
I learned a lot from the experience -- if I do choose to install Linux for real, I'll be able to do so with much more confidence and experience than I did before.
Try to put out statements and/or press releases that explained exactly how the data was used and how the company has had consumer privacy in perfect mind during the entire design process
Let's just say that a company which has customer information covertly transmited back to them (through a Trojan horse software, no less) does not have consumer privacy as a highest priority. Extrapolate from there.
Even if RealNetworks had no evil intentions to begin with, none of you are going to even acknowledge the fact that this might be a possibility.
Everything is possible, but some are highly unlikely. This is one of them. And if you read the follow up articles (in ZDNet for example), RealNetworks has been monitoring each user individually.
And you're still missing the point. The fundamental issue is, whatever the company does with the data, they had no right at all to obtain the data through these means in the first place!
Anyone that writes Perl code that will have to be maintained should have those two lines (or their analog) somewhere in their file. They will eliminate about 90% of your maintainability problems.
The above seems to be an admission that the language syntax does make a big difference as to how maintainable the code turns out to be, which was his original point.
(Sure, you can write easily maintainable code or spaghetti code in any language, but it's easier in some languages than others.)
I can see Gold's point entirely. Peer review does tend to preserve the status quo and suppress out of the box thinking. But I find it hard to think of anything to replace the current system of peer review that would work half as well, because the idea of peer review seems fundamental to the spread of knowledge.
After all, before a theory can have any influence on the world, it must be accepted (or at least deemed worthy of consideraton) by a large enough number of people. The system of peer review used by scientific journals merely formalizes this process. And it does seem to work in practice: peer reviewed journals tend to be of higher quality than non peer reviewed ones.
The problem seems to be a fundamental problem of society: that we tend to shun people who are different, and judge people by their reputations rather than letting each individual work stand alone. Perhaps, sadly, this is necessary to help separate the signal from the noise (even/. uses a reputation system).
"The problem is this system of peer review" wherein established scholars in a field pass judgment on new papers before publication, he says. "That rewards small steps but discourages bold ideas and the very sort of cross-discipline thinking that can provide the greatest breakthroughs. I don't think there's any question that we produced more great ideas in the first half of the 20th century than we have in the second"--when peer review has ruled.
The floor is open. What does Slashdot think? (please don't just limit this to a discussion of open source software)
Further extending the music store analogy, let's say you get one of those FrequentListener discount cards there. You give them your name, address, phone number, etc., and shop there every week or so. Now, the clerks know you by face, but that does NOT mean remotely that they automatically know your name and are linking every purchase in their head with your address and phone number. Yes, they collect the information, but that doesn't mean they're using it together.
I apologize, I missed your point somewhat in my previous reply. However, the analogy you give is not valid. The big difference is that in this case, all the information is sitting on a computer database.
Now, all the CEO (or some other head honcho) has to do, is to sit down in front of the database, and say: "Tell me, how many people listened to xxx type of music", or "Tell me, how many people are listening to pirated CDs, and return a list of names", or "Hey, I wonder what my neighbor Steve Jobs is listening to. Get me a list of the last 10 CDs he played." You get the point.
Do you imagine they would have this big, valuable database, and not exploit it in everyway possible? Companies hire people just to do this kind of analysis.
Of course, all this is besides the point. RealNetworks should never have done this in the first place, regardless of how they use the data.
SEPARATELY, RealNetworks is allegedly collecting information about your listening habits (tied to a userID not necessarily tied to your contact information). I'm not going to try and defend this, since I lack information one way or the other, but it seems like a great many of you are just assuming that RealNetworks uses this information together somehow.
Let's look at this a little more analytically. (Put aside for a moment the fact the RealNetworks has no right at all to do what they did).
1) This is the same company the sends data about your listening habits, secretly, without your consent, to them. You must be pretty naive to believe any assurances that they give you.
2) Let's look at the facts. Let's look at what the company has said:
Richards of RealNetworks said the reason the program tallied the number of songs a user had recorded was to enable the company to determine whether the user was "naïve" or "sophisticated." This better enables the software to steer sophisticated users toward its advanced features, he said.
How can the company determine whether the user is 'naive' or 'sophisicated' if they do not keep track of each user individually (sure, they use GUIDs, but each GUID is tied uniquely to each user)?
But of course, they contradict themselves a paragraph later:
But this seemed at odds with a statement by Steve Banfield, RealNetworks' general manager of consumer products, who said the company was gathering only "aggregate usage" information about users of the software.
Not the most honest company eh?
3)Yes, they collect the information, but that doesn't mean they're using it together.
er.. Sure. We collect all this information, we take up space on our servers, eat up our bandwidth receiving user info, but no, believe us, we're not going use this information at all! No siree!
The funny thing is, despite how we complain about MS software, MS software is often less intrusive than their competitors'.
Take for example the incredibly irritating blue Real icon you mentioned (that keeps blinking until you click on it whenever there's a software update). Or consider Netscape vs IE. Netscape communicator forces you to install the Messenger, Composer, and AOL Instant Messenger even though I absolutely do not want any of that (sure, you can download the standalone Netscape Navigator, but that's an older version).
SatanLilHlpr may have been a little inconsistent, but believe that the spirit of his message was as I described it.
When you say "should reassess what they want", what makes you think that they assessed their wants or needs incorrectly the first time? What additional information will they have that causes their reassessment to be different? It sounds like you're claiming that people are making the wrong purchase decisions, but you're not explaining why or how to correct it.
When I said that people should reassess what they want, I wasn't using this is an economic sense i.e. I didn't mean that they were not buying the right basket of goods to maximise their utility. If you must have it in crude economic terms, it roughly means that, perhaps, they should change the shape of their utility functions.
What should people buy (or not buy) instead of what they're buying now? Who should make the decision, and what gives them the authority to do so?
I maintain that the fact that economics is "morally vacuous" is a good thing, and that the only person qualified to impose any moral values onto someone's purchasing decisions is himself (or herself).
Not at all. According to your view, all discussion of morality or ethics would be pointless -- everyone should just do what he or she wants. Which is clearly untrue.
I don't mean that a set of moral values should be forcibly imposed on anybody, but that through time and public debate, consumers can reassess their wants and hopefully change them for the better.
For example, fur coats were popular a decade ago, but with greater awareness of the consequences of fur coat purchasing, consumers reassesed their wants and bought less fur coats. I can think of the purchasing and hunting of endangered species parts as another example of consumer wants which needs change.
Your argument ignores the fact that cultural and moral norms can change, and someone, maybe you or me, can lead this change.
If people are buying "excessive" things that you don't approve of, there must be some reason for it.
You're assuming that everything that people can want must be good. This is clearly untrue (just think of the number of people who overeat -- 50% of Americans are overweight).
Offensive though the comment may be, the guy does have a point. wm's comment didn't really have anything to do with the parent comment. But I understand, I sometimes do it too:)
Slashdot needs to do something to make it easier for later comments to get read. Maybe randomize the display order. Then people don't have to 'cherry pick', as the AC nicely puts it.
You are suffering from a total misunderstanding of economics. The reason we get paid to do the things we do is that someone wants them enough to pay for them!
Not everything that people want is good. He's arguing against a culture of consumerism. A culture of excess. A culture where people buy and waste.
Economics doesn't tell you anything about what people want, or why they want. Economics is morally vacuous. You need to take your head out of the economic sandpit.
And surely you aren't going to argue that people should be forced to buy what the government (or some other collection of smart people) think they should buy, rather than making their own decisions?
No, he's arguing that people should reassess for themselves what they want. That people themselves should decide for themselves where to go. And not be one who "redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his goal."
I come from a developing country myself (I won't say which:) ), and my country's government has been trying to promote the internet, because they see the internet as crucial to the development of the nation. They have been making good progress, and they've suceeded in getting the internet into most schools.
There're other examples that I can think of, like post-war Japan which embraced technology to become the advanced nation that it is today. Other examples like Taiwan, South Korea come to mind.
My point is, technology has the potential to bring developing countries ahead, but the people of the country must seize the opportunities themselves. Technology has the ability to bring developing countries far ahead, or leave them far behind -- depending on the decisions made by the people of the country.
I think you're right that helping 3rd world countries benefits everyone eventually. American post war democratization did help accelerate development in Japan. But ultimately, a nation's people must make the difference themselves.
Netscape can't do translucencies (but it can do transparencies), and I'm pretty sure IE has some issues with it (It'll load PNGs embedded into a web page but not by themselves, it's odd).
My IE 5 browser seems to pass all the tests on the w3 page, and I've no problem loading standalone pngs with it.
You may be to explain away the ghostly shadows, but try to explain how the camera... ended up pointing in a different direction one day!!!!!! It's inexplicable! I'm starting to believe that there's really something out there!
Sites that require free registration do so for only one reason: they want a mailing list.
I've registered for the NYTs, using my real email address, but I have never received any spam from them. They're a model in this regard as far as I'm concerned. I gave them my real address (and other demographic information) because I think they provide a valuable service -- it's a fair trade for the numerous quality articles.
While I'm at it, is there a reason why so many articles from this site appear here?
Yes, because the New York Times is a great newspaper.
1. For meta moderation, posts for which there's a lot of contention over the moderation score (i.e. posts which are moderated both up and down) should be the target of meta moderation, since this indicates disgreement over the moderation.
2. For anonymous coward posting, do not default to 'HTML Formatted'. First time posters to/. don't understand the effect of this, so we sometimes see AC text without any paragraphing (since explicit paragraph and line break tags are needed in html mode)
An astute reader will notice that apps you list are mostly network apps (I don't agree with you on Mozilla, KDE/Gnome, Gimp or Kaffe), and networking has been traditionally open source's domain; no surprises here.
In all other areas, open source seems to be lacking: desktop productivity apps (MS Word), art design (Photoshop, 3dStudio), games, and even mathematical software (Matlab , Mathematica). Etc. Etc. I think it's an interesting question whether the shortcomings in these areas is a natural weakness of the open source model, or are these merely areas yet to be filled by open source software.
Nobody said it was a measure of the quality of an OS. They're just looking for the NT machine that takes the longest to reboot. Grow up.
You seem very naive for someone so grown up. There's no such thing as "just". All actions have motivations and implications.
The obvious connotation here is that NT is unstable and takes a long time to reboot. Especially since the page (a Linux advocacy page apparently) says sweepingly "Anyone who has ever dealt with Windows NT as a server can attest to the fact that its reboots are numerous and slow".
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to develop an application where the Java applet on the page communicates with the Javascript on the page i.e. basically *Netscape's* Liveconnect technology.
The ironical thing is, IE 5 actually works much better with this technology than NS -- NS has all sorts of strange, erratic missing objects errors (which sometimes go away after you reload the page several times), or fails when the pages get too complex.
I want my app to work well with both NS and IE, but NS makes this extremely difficult...
See, most 3d games (such as Quake 3) focus on speed and texture detail
That's only because the previous generation of hardware couldn't handle high polygon counts. Build the hardware, and the software will follow.
Will it really fly? I saw a demonstration of a minature helicopter (about the size of this robofly) at Stanford a few weeks ago. They can create the necessary lift, but the big problem is control. Control not just in the sense of being able to tell it where to go, but at a more basic level -- a matter of system stability (e.g. real helicopters need complex control systems to keep them stable). The reporter may have missed this, and thought that by 'control', the scientists just meant being able to tell the fly where to go.
Hemos' phone number
1800-DIALBLUE
sexual preference?
blue
Or the password of a few Government mainframes?
password
I know this is taboo, but how about running Linux under VMware for NT? I tried Linux for the first time this way a couple of weeks ago, and it works well, slowly but still entirely usable (my computer is a humble P200 though).
The virtual machine is completely isolated from the rest of the computer, so there's no fear of screwing up your computer as you learn to install and configure Linux. The fact that you can switch back to NT and scour the web for help as you grapple with the installation is a *very* big plus (setting up the network was the thing that took the most time to figure out).
I learned a lot from the experience -- if I do choose to install Linux for real, I'll be able to do so with much more confidence and experience than I did before.
Try to put out statements and/or press releases that explained exactly how the data was used and how the company has had consumer privacy in perfect mind during the entire design process
Let's just say that a company which has customer information covertly transmited back to them (through a Trojan horse software, no less) does not have consumer privacy as a highest priority. Extrapolate from there.
Even if RealNetworks had no evil intentions to begin with, none of you are going to even acknowledge the fact that this might be a possibility.
Everything is possible, but some are highly unlikely. This is one of them. And if you read the follow up articles (in ZDNet for example), RealNetworks has been monitoring each user individually.
And you're still missing the point. The fundamental issue is, whatever the company does with the data, they had no right at all to obtain the data through these means in the first place!
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
Anyone that writes Perl code that will have to be maintained should have those two lines (or their analog) somewhere in their file. They will eliminate about 90% of your maintainability problems.
The above seems to be an admission that the language syntax does make a big difference as to how maintainable the code turns out to be, which was his original point.
(Sure, you can write easily maintainable code or spaghetti code in any language, but it's easier in some languages than others.)
I can see Gold's point entirely. Peer review does tend to preserve the status quo and suppress out of the box thinking. But I find it hard to think of anything to replace the current system of peer review that would work half as well, because the idea of peer review seems fundamental to the spread of knowledge.
/. uses a reputation system).
After all, before a theory can have any influence on the world, it must be accepted (or at least deemed worthy of consideraton) by a large enough number of people. The system of peer review used by scientific journals merely formalizes this process. And it does seem to work in practice: peer reviewed journals tend to be of higher quality than non peer reviewed ones.
The problem seems to be a fundamental problem of society: that we tend to shun people who are different, and judge people by their reputations rather than letting each individual work stand alone. Perhaps, sadly, this is necessary to help separate the signal from the noise (even
"The problem is this system of peer review" wherein established scholars in a field pass judgment on new papers before publication, he says. "That rewards small steps but discourages bold ideas and the very sort of cross-discipline thinking that can provide the greatest breakthroughs. I don't think there's any question that we produced more great ideas in the first half of the 20th century than we have in the second"--when peer review has ruled.
The floor is open. What does Slashdot think? (please don't just limit this to a discussion of open source software)
Further extending the music store analogy, let's say you get one of those FrequentListener discount cards there. You give them your name, address, phone number, etc., and shop there every week or so. Now, the clerks know you by face, but that does NOT mean remotely that they automatically know your name and are linking every purchase in their head with your address and phone number. Yes, they collect the information, but that doesn't mean they're using it together.
I apologize, I missed your point somewhat in my previous reply. However, the analogy you give is not valid. The big difference is that in this case, all the information is sitting on a computer database.
Now, all the CEO (or some other head honcho) has to do, is to sit down in front of the database, and say: "Tell me, how many people listened to xxx type of music", or "Tell me, how many people are listening to pirated CDs, and return a list of names", or "Hey, I wonder what my neighbor Steve Jobs is listening to. Get me a list of the last 10 CDs he played." You get the point.
Do you imagine they would have this big, valuable database, and not exploit it in everyway possible? Companies hire people just to do this kind of analysis.
Of course, all this is besides the point. RealNetworks should never have done this in the first place, regardless of how they use the data.
SEPARATELY, RealNetworks is allegedly collecting information about your listening habits (tied to a userID not necessarily tied to your contact information). I'm not going to try and defend this, since I lack information one way or the other, but it seems like a great many of you are just assuming that RealNetworks uses this information together somehow.
Let's look at this a little more analytically. (Put aside for a moment the fact the RealNetworks has no right at all to do what they did).
1) This is the same company the sends data about your listening habits, secretly, without your consent, to them. You must be pretty naive to believe any assurances that they give you.
2) Let's look at the facts. Let's look at what the company has said:
Richards of RealNetworks said the reason the program tallied the number of songs a user had recorded was to enable the company to determine whether the user was "naïve" or "sophisticated." This better enables the software to steer sophisticated users toward its advanced features, he said.
How can the company determine whether the user is 'naive' or 'sophisicated' if they do not keep track of each user individually (sure, they use GUIDs, but each GUID is tied uniquely to each user)?
But of course, they contradict themselves a paragraph later:
But this seemed at odds with a statement by Steve Banfield, RealNetworks' general manager of consumer products, who said the company was gathering only "aggregate usage" information about users of the software.
Not the most honest company eh?
3) Yes, they collect the information, but that doesn't mean they're using it together.
er.. Sure. We collect all this information, we take up space on our servers, eat up our bandwidth receiving user info, but no, believe us, we're not going use this information at all! No siree!
The funny thing is, despite how we complain about MS software, MS software is often less intrusive than their competitors'.
Take for example the incredibly irritating blue Real icon you mentioned (that keeps blinking until you click on it whenever there's a software update). Or consider Netscape vs IE. Netscape communicator forces you to install the Messenger, Composer, and AOL Instant Messenger even though I absolutely do not want any of that (sure, you can download the standalone Netscape Navigator, but that's an older version).
SatanLilHlpr may have been a little inconsistent, but believe that the spirit of his message was as I described it.
When you say "should reassess what they want", what makes you think that they assessed their wants or needs incorrectly the first time? What additional information will they have that causes their reassessment to be different? It sounds like you're claiming that people are making the wrong purchase decisions, but you're not explaining why or how to correct it.
When I said that people should reassess what they want, I wasn't using this is an economic sense i.e. I didn't mean that they were not buying the right basket of goods to maximise their utility. If you must have it in crude economic terms, it roughly means that, perhaps, they should change the shape of their utility functions.
What should people buy (or not buy) instead of what they're buying now? Who should make the decision, and what gives them the authority to do so?
I maintain that the fact that economics is "morally vacuous" is a good thing, and that the only person qualified to impose any moral values onto someone's purchasing decisions is himself (or herself).
Not at all. According to your view, all discussion of morality or ethics would be pointless -- everyone should just do what he or she wants. Which is clearly untrue.
I don't mean that a set of moral values should be forcibly imposed on anybody, but that through time and public debate, consumers can reassess their wants and hopefully change them for the better.
For example, fur coats were popular a decade ago, but with greater awareness of the consequences of fur coat purchasing, consumers reassesed their wants and bought less fur coats. I can think of the purchasing and hunting of endangered species parts as another example of consumer wants which needs change.
Your argument ignores the fact that cultural and moral norms can change, and someone, maybe you or me, can lead this change.
If people are buying "excessive" things that you don't approve of, there must be some reason for it.
You're assuming that everything that people can want must be good. This is clearly untrue (just think of the number of people who overeat -- 50% of Americans are overweight).
Offensive though the comment may be, the guy does have a point. wm's comment didn't really have anything to do with the parent comment. But I understand, I sometimes do it too :)
Slashdot needs to do something to make it easier for later comments to get read. Maybe randomize the display order. Then people don't have to 'cherry pick', as the AC nicely puts it.
You are suffering from a total misunderstanding of economics. The reason we get paid to do the things we do is that someone wants them enough to pay for them!
Not everything that people want is good. He's arguing against a culture of consumerism. A culture of excess. A culture where people buy and waste.
Economics doesn't tell you anything about what people want, or why they want. Economics is morally vacuous. You need to take your head out of the economic sandpit.
And surely you aren't going to argue that people should be forced to buy what the government (or some other collection of smart people) think they should buy, rather than making their own decisions?
No, he's arguing that people should reassess for themselves what they want. That people themselves should decide for themselves where to go. And not be one who "redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his goal."
I come from a developing country myself (I won't say which :) ), and my country's government has been trying to promote the internet, because they see the internet as crucial to the development of the nation. They have been making good progress, and they've suceeded in getting the internet into most schools.
There're other examples that I can think of, like post-war Japan which embraced technology to become the advanced nation that it is today. Other examples like Taiwan, South Korea come to mind.
My point is, technology has the potential to bring developing countries ahead, but the people of the country must seize the opportunities themselves. Technology has the ability to bring developing countries far ahead, or leave them far behind -- depending on the decisions made by the people of the country.
I think you're right that helping 3rd world countries benefits everyone eventually. American post war democratization did help accelerate development in Japan. But ultimately, a nation's people must make the difference themselves.
Netscape can't do translucencies (but it can do transparencies), and I'm pretty sure IE has some issues with it (It'll load PNGs embedded into a web page but not by themselves, it's odd).
My IE 5 browser seems to pass all the tests on the w3 page, and I've no problem loading standalone pngs with it.
You may be to explain away the ghostly shadows, but try to explain how the camera ... ended up pointing in a different direction one day!!!!!! It's inexplicable! I'm starting to believe that there's really something out there!
Sites that require free registration do so for only one reason: they want a mailing list.
I've registered for the NYTs, using my real email address, but I have never received any spam from them. They're a model in this regard as far as I'm concerned. I gave them my real address (and other demographic information) because I think they provide a valuable service -- it's a fair trade for the numerous quality articles.
While I'm at it, is there a reason why so many articles from this site appear here?
Yes, because the New York Times is a great newspaper.
There should be an option for moderators to randomize the order which the posts are displayed. This will get rid of any chronological bias.
1. For meta moderation, posts for which there's a lot of contention over the moderation score (i.e. posts which are moderated both up and down) should be the target of meta moderation, since this indicates disgreement over the moderation.
/. don't understand the effect of this, so we sometimes see AC text without any paragraphing (since explicit paragraph and line break tags are needed in html mode)
2. For anonymous coward posting, do not default to 'HTML Formatted'. First time posters to
It's a given that no MS operating system could support the greater than 1 terabyte of data transferred in a day at ftp.cdrom.com
Is this really so? MS's ftp and http downloads (for updates, IE downloads,etc) are very snappy, usually much faster than cdrom.com
An astute reader will notice that apps you list are mostly network apps (I don't agree with you on Mozilla, KDE/Gnome, Gimp or Kaffe), and networking has been traditionally open source's domain; no surprises here.
In all other areas, open source seems to be lacking: desktop productivity apps (MS Word), art design (Photoshop, 3dStudio), games, and even mathematical software (Matlab , Mathematica). Etc. Etc. I think it's an interesting question whether the shortcomings in these areas is a natural weakness of the open source model, or are these merely areas yet to be filled by open source software.
Where does the Linux community come into it?
I thought the page was a Linux advocacy page, but you're right, I may have jumped the gun.
Nobody said it was a measure of the quality of an OS. They're just looking for the NT machine that takes the longest to reboot. Grow up.
You seem very naive for someone so grown up. There's no such thing as "just". All actions have motivations and implications.
The obvious connotation here is that NT is unstable and takes a long time to reboot. Especially since the page (a Linux advocacy page apparently) says sweepingly "Anyone who has ever dealt with Windows NT as a server can attest to the fact that its reboots are numerous and slow".