Assuming it's the same Bill Kendrick, he wrote the awesome game Gem Drop X, a Tetris-like game in which you line up similar objects to make them explode. It's one of those deceptively simple games that can be really adictive. Once you master the basic skills, you can get into a kind of zen state playing it for hours.
My personal guess is that bad tranlations are involved.
I think so. Or at least, that connotations attached to words shift. Petitio is a petition, perhaps also a prayer, an appeal, a begging. A petitio principii is a petition of the principium, which word appears in the genitive case to indicate possession. So we might say "principium's appeal" using the English possessive.
Principium means beginning. So the petitio principii emerges as the "beginning's appeal" or as we might say "an appeal to the beginning". I can see how principium was rendered as "question" - the question is the "beginning" of the logical argument.
Many logical fallacies are called argumentum ad X, where X is the thing being appealed to. Perhaps the petitio principii should have been called the argumentum ad principium (yes, principium is the same in nominative or accusative).
Maybe this adds some context to the peculiar phrase "begging the question". Begging should be seen as a synonym for "appealing" and question should be seen, not as a query, but as the issue being debated.
That was a really good post. I think that the original tld's somehow had a good aesthetic character..biz,.info and.museum make my stomach turn for some reason. It does seem logical to separate tld's in a way that minimizes trademark confusion and conflict. I think any such allocation should be based on the distribution of existing domains - essentially Huffman coding to insure that all tld's of equal length are roughly equally full. In other words, no.museum because there aren't nearly enough museums to matter. Instead, maybe domains like 'csf' - Company, Service Sector, Food or 'cta' - Company, Transportation, Air.
Then american.cta and american.csf obviously have no reason to sue each other. It's no cure-all, but it seems smarter than creating these narrow, ridiculous and ugly names.
A person is guilty of computer tampering in the fourth degree when he uses or causes to be used a computer or computer service and having no right to do so he intentionally alters in any manner or destroys computer data or a computer program of another person. Computer tampering in the fourth degree is a class A misdemeanor.
It does require the computer owner to somehow notify the intruder that unauthorized access is prohibited. But one type of notification allowed is:
(b) prominently posting written notice adjacent to the computer being utilized by the user
So print out a big sign and tape it to the side of your monitor. Meanwhile, Wyoming has this to say:
6-3-502. Crimes against intellectual property; penalties.
(a) A person commits a crime against intellectual property if he knowingly and without authorization:
(i) Modifies data, programs or supporting documentation residing or existing internal or external to a computer, computer system or computer network;...
(b) A crime against intellectual property is: (i) A felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than three (3) years, a fine of not more than three thousand dollars ($3,000.00), or both, except as provided in paragraph (ii) of this subsection;
Sounds like this technique, if it really exists, violates both laws.
You can hardly want to get the whole truth from a single article in a web site while its authors have written several other articles in that web site, and indeed several books about the issue.
A valid point, and I may read some more of the articles on the site. But I'm not likely to buy books merely to understand an argument which appears dubious and impractical.
It seems that the core issue is the authors' demand to define 'relational database' in a sense that predates SQL and ignores all recent evolution. Karl Marx wrote about 'communism', and communists insist that true communism never existed. Ayn Rand wrote about 'capitalism' and objectivists insist that true capitalism never existed. It's pointless to compare these platonic ideals to real-world political systems practiced in the US and USSR. Naturally the real world is inferior to the dream world. But the real world does take on labels 'communism' and 'captitalism' that originate in the dream world.
If current databases were relational they would require neither such a beefy hardware to start with, nor such costly programming and conversion procedures.
Has anyone written a true relational database? If not, what are they waiting for? Is such a database vastly harder to write than the pseudo-relational databases being used today?
If there are `different data models' in a company, that means already a failure either in the DBMS, or in the data modelling, or both.
Sounds like another collision between reality and ideal. In an ideal world, the structure and business model of a company would be known in advance and someone would create a unified data model for the company. In practice, large companies purchase many different software packages that come with their own database schema. The packages are purchased over decades and represent different trends in programming. A company could have Siebel defect tracking, Clarify CRM, Oracle ERP, and some smaller packages specific to the industry. Add to this a few in-house projects - remember that the designers of these projects do not have time to learn the data model of any of the existing systems, which are large. Now we have a collection of independent systems that work pretty well in their own domains, but no way to aggregate the data. That's where data warehousing comes in. Data warehousing adapts the fragmented world of corporate IT to a unified reporting architecture.
Here is a discussion of different definitions of terrorism. Whatever definition you accept, it is a highly charged and ambiguous word. This page goes deeper into the subject and contains a fascinating interview snippet with a State Department official. While seeming to have a clear definition of terrorism, the official evades questions and ultimately states, "I do not think it will be productive to get into a description of the various terms and conditions under which we are going to define an act by the PLO as terrorism."
In other words, the US reserves the right to define terrorism as it goes. I can't blame Reuters for steering clear of this word.
Interesting. At my current job we just dodged the ClearCase bullet by implementing CVS. Although there is companywide pressure to use ClearCaes, we met management's objectives with CVS. We sensed a bit of 'empire building' on the part of the ClearCase team, and were worried about adding a dependency and possible bottleneck to our small and self-contained team.
However, I still think that ClearCase is the leading source control system. Every big place where I've worked or contracted uses ClearCase for their primary software product. Leading product != lowest TCO. Windows and Oracle are examples. In fact it seems as if the more resource-intensive and troublesome an application is, the higher its visibility and prestige within the enterprise.
I disagree. Look at the current situation with game consoles. Nobody has a usable distro for any game console. The manufacturers have put up too many obstacles. Similarly, in a world of fragmented proprietary computing, the effects of business and marketing decisions could be very harmful. Companies might sell their computers below cost (as game consoler makers do) and make it up on licensing software. In that case they would fight aggressively against any attempt to reverse engineer the platform or write an alternate OS. Instead of accepting the internet, each computer company would probably have tried to create their own. Some would work out OK, some would die, and lots of hobbyists would build bridges. Of course a guy bridging the Commodore network to the Apple network would probably get sued by both companies.
Remember, Linux was not initially a cross-platform OS. It gained momentum because it ran on the most popular and generic platform. The first real port of Linux was a major traumatic experience. If a large pool of generic hardware had not existed, I don't think Linux would have acquired momentum.
Proprietary computing tends to be integrated and seamless and therefore unfriendly to modification and reverse engineering. The Wintel world, however, has lots of public interfaces like the disk booting capability that allows any OS to boot.
Interesting site. However Mr. Pascal seems to be floating on his own clowd, high above the real world. He writes that relational databases do not exist. I looked (in the first article) for some support for this startling idea and found only:
Date, a relational database pioneer, has written a manifesto saying that SQL databases are not relational. I think it's a bit late for even such an influential writer to kick all the players off the field and repaint the lines.
Today's databases link a conceptual entity-instance to a physical row in a table. This violates set theory because members of a set have no "order" while rows in a table do. I totally fail to see why this matters. Any good database appication programmer knows not to rely on the natural order of rows. If you're selecting more than one row, use an ORDER BY clause.
However I do agree with the author that the current buzz around "xml databases" is an attempt to revive a failed technology (hierarchical db) under a new coat of paint. I don't mean to condemn such things completely - I recently implemented such a database at work as a very minor adjunct to our relational databases - but they can only be used within their niche, which assumes that a record is always retrieved by its key. Such structures lack the reporting flexibility of the relational database.
Anyhow, Mr. Pascal goes on to criticize data warehousing:
By ignoring sound logical design principles such as normalization, data warehouses take us back to application-biased files and incorporate analytical presentation functions, which belong at the application level, into the DBMS.
He seems to ignore the real-world considerations that drive data warehousing. If you're going to run tons of queries on a static set of data (no more inserts or updates) it's faster to denormalize the data first. Why should companies have to buy beefier hardware to keep their data warehouse "truly relational"? Second, the reporting programmers might not feel like wrapping their minds around a four-table outer join on unfamiliar tables just to get the most basic report. Letting the data model be the king is great when there's only one data model. Since the data warehouse works with every data model in the enterprise, it's more logical to flatten the data on intake.
It really pisses me off that IBM didn't take UNIX back then. We could have had UNIX everywhere now. None of that painful command.com stuff. Course, it'd probably be csh instead of bash, but nothing's perfect. Of course, from what I've heard of SCO, we might be using a pretty awful UNIX..
I disagree, just as I disagree with the people who wish IBM had pushed OS/2 better. I'm really glad to have Linux, and there's no way a corporation would have created something like that. By fumbling so badly, the corporations created a vacuum into which Linux stepped. Corporations have an incredible gift for ruining software - even something like Unix that's good at the core was being ruined by the commercial Unix vendors.
Likewise, I am incredibly grateful to Bill Gates for helping to create a world of standardized cheap hardware which made Linux possible. Can you imagine how it would suck if there were 25 popular computer architectures, all proprietary, closed, shitty, with their own proprietary OS's that were bastardized versions of DOS or SCO? And I'm grateful to him for making his software so unattractive to smart people that we swarmed to Linux.
When I look at the modern history of computing I almost believe in God. It's as if everything were arranged perfectly to create the wonderful situation we have today.
Yes, you need to know vi if you're going to work on a lot of different machines. That's aside from the fact that it's a good editor.
However, once I learned the bare minimum I needed I quit learning about it because its simply not productive to use such a rudimentary editor when there are so many better tools available.
Why exactly do you call vi rudimentary? By your account you have learned only the bare minimum about vi - the functionality it shares with DOS EDIT.COM or Pico. Your grasp of vi is rudimentary, but if you increase your understanding you may come to understand that vi is very productive. I wonder what you consider 'non-rudimentary'. If it's EMACS, I won't try to argue because that's a religion. But if it's some GUI thing, you're probably fooling yourself. I've watched a lot of people using a lot of tools, and nobody using a GUI is as fast as a fast vi user. Crawling is easier than walking but once you learn to walk you generally don't go back.
Vi isn't 'rudimentary' - it is possibly sailing right over your head. It encourages more abstract commands like 'delete 3 words' or 'go to line 2511' or 'change everything up to the period to "this year"' rather than the too-low-level commands of a GUI editor: "move down one line. again. again...". Vi assumes that the human will specify the work and the computer will do the work. What's really rudimentary is a shiny expensive interface that forces a human to do a machine's work.
On a more positive note, I hope you continue to learn vi. Perhaps your 'Eureka' experience is still in the future.
Where are you getting the idea that Tilly's modules are GPL'd? I would be very surprised to see core Perl modules GPL'd. Every time I've paid attention to the license of such a module, it's "same terms as perl" which means Artistic License OR GPL at user's discretion. The AL allows nearly anything, including proprietary code-swallowing.
In California, at least, that arbitration clause should not impede you in recovering your wages. I wish more people knew about the labor board. If you are owed wages, you do not have to go to court. Just go to the labor board and file a complaint. They have offices basically wherever the state government has buildings. Failure to pay wages can be a misdemeanor, resulting in jail time. Any agreement you signed with your employer is completely irrelevant. California law dictates exactly how, when and where your wages are to be paid, including provisions for termination. Failure to pay wages is the bread and butter offense of the labor board. These people see 100 cases like yours each day, and have heard every single possible excuse for not paying your employees. But legally there is no excuse.
The proceedings start with an informal conference where employer and employee can present their stories. If the employer pays the amount owed in full at the time of the conference, they avoid further penalties. Once the complaint is filed, unless the labor board finds for the employer the check must be paid to the labor board. This enables them to determine the lateness of the payment and assess appropriate penalties.
I had to go to the labor board to get my final paycheck from an employer. He talked a very hard line and threatened to fight to the end. The day of the conference he did not show up - instead he sent a messenger with a check.
Try to identify the company's customers. Call the customers, try to get through to senior management, and ask them for a public statement on their vendor's actions.
Call every major functional unit in the company and discuss the situation with whoever answers. Ask to be transferred to someone who can solve the problem. If we get voicemail, leave a detailed message and move on to find a live person. Adapt to the size of company. Try to ensure that within three days every employee in the company is aware of the situation.
Search for the company's name on the web, and find every journalist who has written a story about them. Call these journalists and see if we can get them to write about the current situation.
Note upcoming events like product launches that are important to the company. A few weeks before the launch, try to identify and contact journalists who would cover these launches to see if they will cover the community backlash against the company's actions. With luck, such coverage will overshadow the product launch. But don't stop there. Call the company's PR people and suggest that it would be a big PR win to amicably resolve the situation before their launch or announcement.
Find businesses that depend on Perl and would be harmed by the company's actions. Put together a little contact list for journalists so they can add some meat to a story.
Of course this is all totally unrealistic pie-in-the-sky stuff, because we computer folk are in our infancy politically. However I think that as the vice tightens (SSSCA, etc.) we will be forced to get real about political action. That's another rant, but briefly it means:
No more whining about how the media is dumb, shallow, biased. Instead, we learn to work with the media to get our point across.
No more whining about how politicians are dumb, corrupt, biased. Instead, we give heavily to strategically chosen candidates, mobilize ourselves as a visible voting bloc worth pursuing, and prove that our aggressive campaigning can affect the outcome in a swing state.
Lastly, to those who worry about the effect of such measures on Tilly: I feel bad for Tilly, but I'd happily accept the loss of one coder and some modules in exchange for a high-visibility smack to these corporate abusers. I would like this company to end up as a cautionary tale on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. If we could accomplish that, it would be worth lots of short term pain.I would like to set such an example that corporate decision-makers in the future shy away from such actions as they would from flying a Nazi flag over headquarters. It's not illegal (in the US) but with sufficient effort on our part it could be made very expensive and unattractive.
Re:Where do you draw the line ??
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
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· Score: 2
I think that as more people come to understand how computers and networks work, we will eventually accept that anyone has the right to send any kind of data anywhere, except for DOS attacks. The computer receiving a packet makes the sole, total, and unappealable decision about what to do with that packet. Any actions taken on the basis of the packet are not the fault of the sender.
Our current road is headed for more and more complexity, legislation and litigation as we try to legally define what kinds of data can be sent. And all the metaphors comparing computers to buildings ("breaking in to") are muddying the waters. You cannot break into a computer unless you have physical access to it. You can communicate with the computer. The computer's responses to your messages are determined by the programs and configuration supplied by the owner, and therefore reflect the will of the owner.
In general I agree that more government intervention will not help. However I disagree with your assumption that a court would somehow destroy or eliminate a mail server or its vendor. More likely, recognizing the mutable nature of software, the court would order the vendor to fix the relaying problem and make a reasonable effort to distribute the fix to registered customers.
If your query crashes my server, I agree, I should fix my server. But if I ask you to stop sending the query until I get it fixed, I think that's a reasonable request.
Are you aware of some incident where ORBZ continued to send unwanted queries to a mailserver over the protests of its admins? As far as I know, ORBZ did not do this.
That's odd. Perhaps HDSL runs differently, but the references say that a T1 should run at 2.7-3.3v, from AT&T publication 43801.
I suspect that you are talking about two different things. The voltage you cite is probably the magnitude of the data signals, either peak-to-peak or RMS. The -130V previously cited is a DC voltage superimposed on the line.
130VDC is also used to operate the coin relay on 1A pay phones. I don't know what initially got this voltage into central offices, but it has several roles.
Again, don't say "don't use it!", because the simple fact is that I don't use GPLd code (I like retaining the right to do what I'd like with my own creations)
You like that? So do the authors of gnucompress. In your example, let A=gnucompress, B=your additional code, and C=the final product. A + B = C. Given that, which of the following sounds fair?
The authors of A and B are both free to extend and reuse C, providing they don't take that right away from others.
The author of B is free to extend and reuse C, but the author of A is not.
At one time my manager was an old mechanical engineer named Roy. Roy had been a fighter pilot, then an engineer at several defense contractors. Roy's account of the creation of the trackball is similar to this story, but he did not mention Canada. I always assumed it took place in the US.
Anyway, Roy told me that an electrical engineer came up with the idea. The problem was to find an input device that would enable an operator to rapidly point at a blip on the radar screen and 'aquire' it as a target. The EE implementation of the idea did not work very well, however, because if the operator shoved the ball in the direction of the target, the cursor would follow an elliptical or parabolic path (can't remember which). Roy invented the mechanical ball suspension that enables the ball to spin in a straight line. This enabled a very fast and ergonomic mode of operation - the operator would push the ball towards the target with a force proportional to the distance, then 'catch' the ball with the outstretched fingers to decelerate it onto the target.
Apparently, the tendency of the trackball to follow a curved path is a variant of a problem well known to mechanical engineers. Therefore Roy's invention was simply the application of a well known mechanical engineering technique. Maybe the people cited in this article are the EE's who originated the idea.
Everything turns into 'the linux solution' vs. 'the Microsoft solution' even if one or more of those is inapplicable.
I wouldn't, however, recommend working with anything from Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft has any offerings in the serious source control space. They do have a toy called "Visual SourceSafe (?)" but I don't think even they take it seriously. The leader in source control is ClearCase. The ClearCase VOB server is normally run on SPARC/Solaris. The client runs on everything common, including of course NT, Linux and Solaris.
So I'd leave Microsoft out of this discussion and ask whether Sourceforge.* can compete with ClearCase. Or what Sourceforge.* offers beyond ordinary CVS.
As the spokesperson pointed out, this has nothing to do with the airline. The first step in addressing this is identifying the parties involved - probably the airport, and maybe a private security firm.
There's an excellent article about that problem in (I think) this month's Fortune magazine. People like Lay are almost never punished because, among other things, prosecutors shy away from the lengthy, laborious trials involved. A typical crime that is prosecuted occurs within one day. Corporate crimes can occur over a span of years and tens of thousands of pages of documents.
(The end user) != (The end user). Because one is the end user of the entertainment industry's products, and another is the end user of blank media. The entertainment industry is accomplishing a cost transfer, forcing producers/consumers in a different industry to pay for their profits.
By using a Mac, you have demonstrated your willingness to spend more for less. The vendor would be foolish not to take advantage of this.
Oh, excuse me. I meant to say: there is no comparison between the Mac version and the Windows version. The Mac version is humane, intuitive and artistic, incorporates the latest advances in human interface design, and is the choice of creative professionals everywhere. In fact, I believe Ghandi sketched out his "passive resistance" strategy on a Mac-Mimio. The Windows version, on the other hand, is a crude, buggy archaic kludge hastily thrown together to make money. It requires the user to write on the board the Windows registration code, the IRQ of the disk controller and a secret activation code printed under the pen cap. It comes with an electric vial of blue paint, to be mounted at the top of the board. At random intervals, a valve opens and the whiteboard goes blue. Aren't you glad you can pay $90 more for quality?
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming it's the same Bill Kendrick, he wrote the awesome game Gem Drop X, a Tetris-like game in which you line up similar objects to make them explode. It's one of those deceptively simple games that can be really adictive. Once you master the basic skills, you can get into a kind of zen state playing it for hours.
I think so. Or at least, that connotations attached to words shift. Petitio is a petition, perhaps also a prayer, an appeal, a begging. A petitio principii is a petition of the principium, which word appears in the genitive case to indicate possession. So we might say "principium's appeal" using the English possessive.
Principium means beginning. So the petitio principii emerges as the "beginning's appeal" or as we might say "an appeal to the beginning". I can see how principium was rendered as "question" - the question is the "beginning" of the logical argument.
Many logical fallacies are called argumentum ad X, where X is the thing being appealed to. Perhaps the petitio principii should have been called the argumentum ad principium (yes, principium is the same in nominative or accusative).
Maybe this adds some context to the peculiar phrase "begging the question". Begging should be seen as a synonym for "appealing" and question should be seen, not as a query, but as the issue being debated.
That was a really good post. I think that the original tld's somehow had a good aesthetic character. .biz, .info and .museum make my stomach turn for some reason. It does seem logical to separate tld's in a way that minimizes trademark confusion and conflict. I think any such allocation should be based on the distribution of existing domains - essentially Huffman coding to insure that all tld's of equal length are roughly equally full. In other words, no .museum because there aren't nearly enough museums to matter. Instead, maybe domains like 'csf' - Company, Service Sector, Food or 'cta' - Company, Transportation, Air.
Then american.cta and american.csf obviously have no reason to sue each other. It's no cure-all, but it seems smarter than creating these narrow, ridiculous and ugly names.
New York's Computer Crime statute says:
It does require the computer owner to somehow notify the intruder that unauthorized access is prohibited. But one type of notification allowed is:
So print out a big sign and tape it to the side of your monitor. Meanwhile, Wyoming has this to say:
Sounds like this technique, if it really exists, violates both laws.
A valid point, and I may read some more of the articles on the site. But I'm not likely to buy books merely to understand an argument which appears dubious and impractical.
It seems that the core issue is the authors' demand to define 'relational database' in a sense that predates SQL and ignores all recent evolution.
Karl Marx wrote about 'communism', and communists insist that true communism never existed. Ayn Rand wrote about 'capitalism' and objectivists insist that true capitalism never existed. It's pointless to compare these platonic ideals to real-world political systems practiced in the US and USSR. Naturally the real world is inferior to the dream world. But the real world does take on labels 'communism' and 'captitalism' that originate in the dream world.
Has anyone written a true relational database? If not, what are they waiting for? Is such a database vastly harder to write than the pseudo-relational databases being used today?
Sounds like another collision between reality and ideal. In an ideal world, the structure and business model of a company would be known in advance and someone would create a unified data model for the company. In practice, large companies purchase many different software packages that come with their own database schema. The packages are purchased over decades and represent different trends in programming. A company could have Siebel defect tracking, Clarify CRM, Oracle ERP, and some smaller packages specific to the industry. Add to this a few in-house projects - remember that the designers of these projects do not have time to learn the data model of any of the existing systems, which are large. Now we have a collection of independent systems that work pretty well in their own domains, but no way to aggregate the data. That's where data warehousing comes in. Data warehousing adapts the fragmented world of corporate IT to a unified reporting architecture.
Here is a discussion of different definitions of terrorism. Whatever definition you accept, it is a highly charged and ambiguous word. This page goes deeper into the subject and contains a fascinating interview snippet with a State Department official. While seeming to have a clear definition of terrorism, the official evades questions and ultimately states, "I do not think it will be productive to get into a description of the various terms and conditions under which we are going to define an act by the PLO as terrorism."
In other words, the US reserves the right to define terrorism as it goes. I can't blame Reuters for steering clear of this word.
Interesting. At my current job we just dodged the ClearCase bullet by implementing CVS. Although there is companywide pressure to use ClearCaes, we met management's objectives with CVS. We sensed a bit of 'empire building' on the part of the ClearCase team, and were worried about adding a dependency and possible bottleneck to our small and self-contained team.
However, I still think that ClearCase is the leading source control system. Every big place where I've worked or contracted uses ClearCase for their primary software product. Leading product != lowest TCO. Windows and Oracle are examples. In fact it seems as if the more resource-intensive and troublesome an application is, the higher its visibility and prestige within the enterprise.
I disagree. Look at the current situation with game consoles. Nobody has a usable distro for any game console. The manufacturers have put up too many obstacles. Similarly, in a world of fragmented proprietary computing, the effects of business and marketing decisions could be very harmful. Companies might sell their computers below cost (as game consoler makers do) and make it up on licensing software. In that case they would fight aggressively against any attempt to reverse engineer the platform or write an alternate OS. Instead of accepting the internet, each computer company would probably have tried to create their own. Some would work out OK, some would die, and lots of hobbyists would build bridges. Of course a guy bridging the Commodore network to the Apple network would probably get sued by both companies.
Remember, Linux was not initially a cross-platform OS. It gained momentum because it ran on the most popular and generic platform. The first real port of Linux was a major traumatic experience. If a large pool of generic hardware had not existed, I don't think Linux would have acquired momentum.
Proprietary computing tends to be integrated and seamless and therefore unfriendly to modification and reverse engineering. The Wintel world, however, has lots of public interfaces like the disk booting capability that allows any OS to boot.
However I do agree with the author that the current buzz around "xml databases" is an attempt to revive a failed technology (hierarchical db) under a new coat of paint. I don't mean to condemn such things completely - I recently implemented such a database at work as a very minor adjunct to our relational databases - but they can only be used within their niche, which assumes that a record is always retrieved by its key. Such structures lack the reporting flexibility of the relational database.
Anyhow, Mr. Pascal goes on to criticize data warehousing:He seems to ignore the real-world considerations that drive data warehousing. If you're going to run tons of queries on a static set of data (no more inserts or updates) it's faster to denormalize the data first. Why should companies have to buy beefier hardware to keep their data warehouse "truly relational"? Second, the reporting programmers might not feel like wrapping their minds around a four-table outer join on unfamiliar tables just to get the most basic report. Letting the data model be the king is great when there's only one data model. Since the data warehouse works with every data model in the enterprise, it's more logical to flatten the data on intake.
I disagree, just as I disagree with the people who wish IBM had pushed OS/2 better. I'm really glad to have Linux, and there's no way a corporation would have created something like that. By fumbling so badly, the corporations created a vacuum into which Linux stepped. Corporations have an incredible gift for ruining software - even something like Unix that's good at the core was being ruined by the commercial Unix vendors.
Likewise, I am incredibly grateful to Bill Gates for helping to create a world of standardized cheap hardware which made Linux possible. Can you imagine how it would suck if there were 25 popular computer architectures, all proprietary, closed, shitty, with their own proprietary OS's that were bastardized versions of DOS or SCO? And I'm grateful to him for making his software so unattractive to smart people that we swarmed to Linux.
When I look at the modern history of computing I almost believe in God. It's as if everything were arranged perfectly to create the wonderful situation we have today.
Why exactly do you call vi rudimentary? By your account you have learned only the bare minimum about vi - the functionality it shares with DOS EDIT.COM or Pico. Your grasp of vi is rudimentary, but if you increase your understanding you may come to understand that vi is very productive. I wonder what you consider 'non-rudimentary'. If it's EMACS, I won't try to argue because that's a religion. But if it's some GUI thing, you're probably fooling yourself. I've watched a lot of people using a lot of tools, and nobody using a GUI is as fast as a fast vi user. Crawling is easier than walking but once you learn to walk you generally don't go back.
Vi isn't 'rudimentary' - it is possibly sailing right over your head. It encourages more abstract commands like 'delete 3 words' or 'go to line 2511' or 'change everything up to the period to "this year"' rather than the too-low-level commands of a GUI editor: "move down one line. again. again
On a more positive note, I hope you continue to learn vi. Perhaps your 'Eureka' experience is still in the future.
Where are you getting the idea that Tilly's modules are GPL'd? I would be very surprised to see core Perl modules GPL'd. Every time I've paid attention to the license of such a module, it's "same terms as perl" which means Artistic License OR GPL at user's discretion. The AL allows nearly anything, including proprietary code-swallowing.
In California, at least, that arbitration clause should not impede you in recovering your wages. I wish more people knew about the labor board. If you are owed wages, you do not have to go to court. Just go to the labor board and file a complaint. They have offices basically wherever the state government has buildings. Failure to pay wages can be a misdemeanor, resulting in jail time. Any agreement you signed with your employer is completely irrelevant. California law dictates exactly how, when and where your wages are to be paid, including provisions for termination. Failure to pay wages is the bread and butter offense of the labor board. These people see 100 cases like yours each day, and have heard every single possible excuse for not paying your employees. But legally there is no excuse.
The proceedings start with an informal conference where employer and employee can present their stories. If the employer pays the amount owed in full at the time of the conference, they avoid further penalties. Once the complaint is filed, unless the labor board finds for the employer the check must be paid to the labor board. This enables them to determine the lateness of the payment and assess appropriate penalties.
I had to go to the labor board to get my final paycheck from an employer. He talked a very hard line and threatened to fight to the end. The day of the conference he did not show up - instead he sent a messenger with a check.
I hope your state has a similar mechanism.
Of course this is all totally unrealistic pie-in-the-sky stuff, because we computer folk are in our infancy politically. However I think that as the vice tightens (SSSCA, etc.) we will be forced to get real about political action. That's another rant, but briefly it means:
Lastly, to those who worry about the effect of such measures on Tilly: I feel bad for Tilly, but I'd happily accept the loss of one coder and some modules in exchange for a high-visibility smack to these corporate abusers. I would like this company to end up as a cautionary tale on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. If we could accomplish that, it would be worth lots of short term pain.I would like to set such an example that corporate decision-makers in the future shy away from such actions as they would from flying a Nazi flag over headquarters. It's not illegal (in the US) but with sufficient effort on our part it could be made very expensive and unattractive.
I think that as more people come to understand how computers and networks work, we will eventually accept that anyone has the right to send any kind of data anywhere, except for DOS attacks. The computer receiving a packet makes the sole, total, and unappealable decision about what to do with that packet. Any actions taken on the basis of the packet are not the fault of the sender.
Our current road is headed for more and more complexity, legislation and litigation as we try to legally define what kinds of data can be sent. And all the metaphors comparing computers to buildings ("breaking in to") are muddying the waters. You cannot break into a computer unless you have physical access to it. You can communicate with the computer. The computer's responses to your messages are determined by the programs and configuration supplied by the owner, and therefore reflect the will of the owner.
In general I agree that more government intervention will not help. However I disagree with your assumption that a court would somehow destroy or eliminate a mail server or its vendor. More likely, recognizing the mutable nature of software, the court would order the vendor to fix the relaying problem and make a reasonable effort to distribute the fix to registered customers.
Are you aware of some incident where ORBZ continued to send unwanted queries to a mailserver over the protests of its admins? As far as I know, ORBZ did not do this.
I suspect that you are talking about two different things. The voltage you cite is probably the magnitude of the data signals, either peak-to-peak or RMS. The -130V previously cited is a DC voltage superimposed on the line.
130VDC is also used to operate the coin relay on 1A pay phones. I don't know what initially got this voltage into central offices, but it has several roles.
You like that? So do the authors of gnucompress.
In your example, let A=gnucompress, B=your additional code, and C=the final product. A + B = C. Given that, which of the following sounds fair?
At one time my manager was an old mechanical engineer named Roy. Roy had been a fighter pilot, then an engineer at several defense contractors. Roy's account of the creation of the trackball is similar to this story, but he did not mention Canada. I always assumed it took place in the US.
Anyway, Roy told me that an electrical engineer came up with the idea. The problem was to find an input device that would enable an operator to rapidly point at a blip on the radar screen and 'aquire' it as a target. The EE implementation of the idea did not work very well, however, because if the operator shoved the ball in the direction of the target, the cursor would follow an elliptical or parabolic path (can't remember which). Roy invented the mechanical ball suspension that enables the ball to spin in a straight line. This enabled a very fast and ergonomic mode of operation - the operator would push the ball towards the target with a force proportional to the distance, then 'catch' the ball with the outstretched fingers to decelerate it onto the target.
Apparently, the tendency of the trackball to follow a curved path is a variant of a problem well known to mechanical engineers. Therefore Roy's invention was simply the application of a well known mechanical engineering technique. Maybe the people cited in this article are the EE's who originated the idea.
I don't think Microsoft has any offerings in the serious source control space. They do have a toy called "Visual SourceSafe (?)" but I don't think even they take it seriously. The leader in source control is ClearCase. The ClearCase VOB server is normally run on SPARC/Solaris. The client runs on everything common, including of course NT, Linux and Solaris.
So I'd leave Microsoft out of this discussion and ask whether Sourceforge.* can compete with ClearCase. Or what Sourceforge.* offers beyond ordinary CVS.
As the spokesperson pointed out, this has nothing to do with the airline. The first step in addressing this is identifying the parties involved - probably the airport, and maybe a private security firm.
There's an excellent article about that problem in (I think) this month's Fortune magazine. People like Lay are almost never punished because, among other things, prosecutors shy away from the lengthy, laborious trials involved. A typical crime that is prosecuted occurs within one day. Corporate crimes can occur over a span of years and tens of thousands of pages of documents.
(The end user) != (The end user). Because one is the end user of the entertainment industry's products, and another is the end user of blank media. The entertainment industry is accomplishing a cost transfer, forcing producers/consumers in a different industry to pay for their profits.
By using a Mac, you have demonstrated your willingness to spend more for less. The vendor would be foolish not to take advantage of this.
Oh, excuse me. I meant to say: there is no comparison between the Mac version and the Windows version. The Mac version is humane, intuitive and artistic, incorporates the latest advances in human interface design, and is the choice of creative professionals everywhere. In fact, I believe Ghandi sketched out his "passive resistance" strategy on a Mac-Mimio. The Windows version, on the other hand, is a crude, buggy archaic kludge hastily thrown together to make money. It requires the user to write on the board the Windows registration code, the IRQ of the disk controller and a secret activation code printed under the pen cap. It comes with an electric vial of blue paint, to be mounted at the top of the board. At random intervals, a valve opens and the whiteboard goes blue. Aren't you glad you can pay $90 more for quality?