I cannot hardly believe I am saying it, but EMACS indeed. There was a time, not too long ago, that I would kill any process that was taking more memory than EMACS because there had to be something terribly wrong with any process taking that much memory. Now, EMACS takes seemingly no memory and runs really fast. Beside, there was a new release, after 6 short years. What's not to like?
EMACS - The first Portable OS / virtual machine
ELISP - The first run-anywhere computer language. Runs anywhere there is EMACS.
Both are non-stop. The action continues from beginning to end. Of course, there are yellow flags in racing, but they cannot be predicted and so don't work for advertisers. Soccer stops as well, for yellow cards and injuries, but also unpredictably.
Fans are stereotyped. All we see on the news is about "soccer hooligans". We certainly wouldn't want those kind of people in our towns. Of course, all NASCAR fans are rednecks.
The playing field is too big. Because the action is non-stop and the playing field or race track is so large, its too hard to cover it properly for television viewing. With basesball all the action happens between the pitcher and the catcher, with some in-field shots. Easy to cover with cameras. Basketball has a small court. Football has a large field but play is in short bursts. There is plenty of time to reset camera angles.
NASCAR has fixed this a little bit with car mounted cameras. When watching a soccer game on TV it like watching it from the worst seats in the house.
Lack of understanding of the rules and strategy. In the USA people didn't grow up playing soccer therefore they don't know the rules. It would be the same as watching a chess match if you didn't know the rules. NASCAR has its own set of rules that people don't understand.
Fortunately, soccer is popular among the younger crowd. In a few years, the USA men may be ready to play at the world-class level of the women.
Just because its unlikely that doesn't mean it won't happen. The chances of winning a lottery are millions to one against, yet someone does win. Also, its highly impropable that life exists on any given planet. Yet, here we are reading slash dot (notice lack of reference to intelligent). And it dangerous to generalize from a specific instance.
Again its all relative. To the average slash dot reader, two stars headed your way at high speed would look like a stampede. Of course, to the stars, it would appear they were being attacked by a very small bug and they would spend the rest of eternity trying to figure out what they had done to deserve such treatment. The relative speed of a stampede is computed based on the overall relative speeds of the stampedee and the stampeders. Someone with more free time than I could work out the math.
How do we know that the star is being ejected from the solar system? According to relativity, to an observer in the galaxy, a star being ejected from the galaxy looks the exactly the same as using the star as the frame of reference and the whole of the milky way galaxy is moving away from it. Since we didn't actually see where this star was coming from, the star could have been holding still for a long time while the galaxy far,far away came stampeding past like the wildebeast stampede in Lion King. To us stuck here on earth it would look exactly the same either way. So its not so much tht the star is being ejected, but that it survived the stampede.
I must rant. Those adverse to ranting, and you know who you are, can move along.
Still here? Ok, here it goes.
[rant]
Today we are inundated with all sorts of increasing complex technology. Take Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for an example. A hughly complex bit of technology for sovling the problen of getting data from here to there, or there to here. Of course, there must be filters, authentication, etc. etc etc.
But, haven't we been doing that for years? Why do we need to introduce a level of complexity to the problem when the solution is right before us.
A web server is a web service. It accepts formatted commands and returns a response. It can add authentication and encryption. On the server side there can be all sorts of filters, code, add-ons and none of it is GUI, NONE.
rexec, ssh, rcp and also "web services". They accept a command and return data. They can perform any complex function you want on the server and return some data.
So what happened. GUIs happened. Instead of capturing the data via pipes and applying any other filtering or whatever, we use a GUI. We get back the result and depend upon some GUI to display it. But we have different standards, things are incompatible and you are limited to only what the browser designer intended. Of course there are plugins. Yet that just bloats out the GUI even worse.
[/rant]
[rave]
So, what is the answer. Simplicity is the answer. Instead of building ever increasingly complex GUIs and web services, go back to what made unix great: small but useful parts that can easily be joined via pipes.
Ok, bad example. But the idea is that you have a piece that can fetch the HTML from a web server, some other piece that massages it, filters, etc, then pipes to a display. Small pieces that can be pieced together to do a task.
Spammers are parasites. Like parasites, they live off the host, eventually killing the host and themselves.
So, here is what happens if someone successfully sues a company for allowing spam. All companies do a ROI on email and decide:
email costs the company X dollars per year in servers, spam filters, network, etc.
email now presents a risk of Y dollars in terms of possible lawsuits
the cost of doing business without internet email is Z dollars
Do the math: Is X + Y > Z? Then get rid of internet email access. They my keep the inhouse email, but no internet gateway. Other technologies for allowing cooperation among employees will be used.
You might complain its not fair or believe it could never happen. Haven't you seen things that are perceived to be mostly "employee benefits" get dropped? I sure have.
So, the spammer-parasites are coming very close to killing the host upon which they depend. Its on life-support now and it won't take much of a shock to push it over the edge. In 5 years, you will see posting on Slash dot like, "Hey, remember in the bad-old-days when you had an email address? Can you believe people actually got spam? ha ha ha".
Cygwin is to a Windows box what a steering wheel is to a car. You could do without out, but it might crash a lot. (whoa, that was clever, a nice but lame similie wrapped around a rehashed "windows always crashes" joke. Of course, cygwin won't keep it from crashing, but work with me here people).
Then followed closely by emacs.
Is she willing to do things I like or do we spend all our time together doing what she wants?
There are a couple of problems with this. First, you start the question to the relationship, even on slashdot. Second, there is no chance to develop "us" things. You both need to try what the other is interested in.
Is it her fault? Probably not entirely. If you suggest "Let's go for a hike" then all she has to do is say, "not today" and no hike. Rather, plan a hike and invite her to go along. Then go whether she goes or not. If this happens too often, the relationship will come to its natural conclusion. More likely, a couple of time and she sees you really do have interests that are important too you, she will be willing to come along.
A female who is interested in you will start to take an interest in your pursuits just as you naturally take an interest in her pursuits. Think about it, how much stuff do you now enjoy not because of the thing itself but because of the person who you liked that enjoyed it.
Besides, getting all the muscles involved in a relationship will also make it more enjoyable. Physical activity is good for both the heart in your chest as well as the one the peots write about.
Wel, now let's think about it. If 50-50 means you do all the giving and she does all the getting, is it really worth the effort? Eventually, you will lose all self-respect and she will get bored. not good.
In reality, most females are glad to participate more in "your life". They may whine about it at the time, but afterwards they are glad they did. Its like seeing an animal in the zoo versus its natural habitat. The zoo is more convient/confortable but the natural habitat is more awesome.
If she's not willing, then she might just be controlling and its better to get out of that situation early.
You don't or set a timer. "Hey, we suffered through 2 hours of chick-flicks, now we have to play 2 hours of StarCraft". Sounds cheesy even typing it. No, PLAN SOMETHING and invite her to participate in your activity. Something like "Hey, me and some friends are going to being playing StarCraft at 7:00, wanna join us?" Be positive and unaplologetic. If she balks, then just make it clear that those are the plans and you wish she could join you. It is still your life and you need to take time to do the things you like, every now and again.
Even better, like I said before, turn off the computer and the TV and go do stuff really together. The best way for a relationahip to grow is to include your whole self. That means that you need to not only think about and talk about it, but actually do physical (no, not that kind of physical) things as well. That will give you new things that are shared.
Our minds, bodies and emotions are inextricably connected. If I go do something exciting, like ride a roller coaster, with someone, I will remember that I was excited and I was with this person so therefore I was excited to be with this person. By doing things that make our body feel good with someone, we train ourselves to feel good about that person. Likewise, if we sit bored with a person, we soon feel bored about the person. By increasing he type and the variety of experiences we have with a person, the more connected we feel to them. This variety should include mental, emotional and physical. And no I am not talking about the bedroom, so get your mind out of the gutter.
I used to agree with the "at least its something we do together", but not anymore. Watching TV is NOT a group activity. Just try starting a conversation with someone watching the "brain sucker". Watching TV is at best a number of individuals watching something, but there is certainly no togetherness involved. Just like when you come on a wreck on the freeway, everyone is watching, but they are not "bonding" in any way.
So why would the girlfriend want to watch TV with you? A couple of reasons. First, she knows she is wasting time, but if she is doing it "with" ( in the same room ) you, then she is not wasting time, but spending it with you. Its kind of romantic in a completely lame way. But if you aren't wasting time with her, but are wasting time on games, then you are both just wasting time because there is no togetherness. See how much sense it makes? What you need to do is remeber that relationships are 50-50. So, if you are going to waste time in a together sort of way watching the boob tube, then she should waste an equal amount of time doing something you enjoy, be it games, slashdot, whatever. It will strengthen the relationship, plus non-TV time wasting often allows the couple to communicate (about the game, slashdot postings like this one, etc).
Second, there is the female need to remake her man. If you are watching tv she likes, then you will be influenced to come in closer contact with your feminine side. So the guys on Friends and Will and Grace can be your role models for a newer better you. If she is not helping, you might get some strange, guy-like ideas that she is trying to shield you from. The solution is to again work out 50-50 time wasting, allowing her to get in touch with her masculine side, especially by reading excellent slash dot posting like this one.
Lastly, there is the need for companionship. See how women travel in flocks to the restroom, or how they like having a dog? You, as the boyfriend, fill the role of the dog. Someone to sit by her side or at her feet, lavishing her with constant attention and being there for the moment, usually during the commercial, when she needs to pay attention to something other than the TV. The best way not to be her lapdog, insist that she spend as much time being your lapdog as you do for her. I think you get it by now. Let her sit idly by while you play games online. Be sure to acknoldge her presence every 22 minutes by asking her to do something for you. Get something to eat or take the trash out.
Wait, I had a thought. Check it out. Turn off the TV and the computer and go out into the real world. No, no, no, don't go to a movie. Go swimming, dancing, racquetball, anything that actually causes you heart to pump and for you two to experience a common experience, one in which you are both active participants and not just idle observers.
Yeah, I know its too crazy to work. Yeah, me too. I need to get back to the next slash dot article. I wonder what's on Friends tonight?
People are still pusing COBOL and all its glory. I saw an article today that said:
I kept telling everybody, "There ain't nobody going to change over to Java." It's a crazy language. It's more like C++. It's difficult to program, difficult to maintain; who's going to do it? Now, programmers, when they go to school, what do they learn? They learn C++. Where are they going to get a job? They can't get a job until they can boast some Cobol experience.
From Top 100 April Fools pranks you may get some good ideas. For instance, #10 - Planetary Alignment Dcreases Gravity could well be worth recycling this year, due to the planet alignment of recent days. #15 might have possibilities for the more prurient among you.
Conincidently a co-worker/cow-irker of mine just borrowed my copy. The nice thing about it is it gives some names to ideas a lot of us already use, making it easier to talk about them.
"We're really, really happy that SB 186 will not see the light of day," said Al DiGuido, chief executive of e-mail service provider Bigfoot Interactive, New York.
Ok, is this really the name of a spammer or is this a hoax?
In 1997, when IBM terminated the Deep Blue project, the computer-chess field was left to talented enthusiasts. In the past 5 1/2 years, new programming techniques have combined with superior chess knowledge to create a quality of machine chess that is far superior to that of Deep Blue. In game five of my match with Deep Junior it played an imaginative sacrifice of the type generally considered impossible for a computer player. It was a landmark moment for computer chess and the science and programmers behind it.
Unfortunately, because Deep Blue's records were never made public, it is quite useless to discuss the strength of Deep Blue vis-a-vis the strength of Deep Junior. IBM said Deep Blue crushed other programs, but what value are these statements without records?
Physicists from the university's Centre for Explosion Studies found that the amount of gunpowder Guy...
Centre for Explosion Studies!! Now there is a cool major.
Bob: Hi, what's your major?
Jane: Theater. How about you?
Bob: Explosion Studies.
Jane: Wow, that is soooo cool. Wanna go out tonight?
Doesn't work that way with CS I can tell you. Seriously, was there ever a cooler thing to major in? I would have even dropped out of CS to be able to blow things up. They also get to study all the great explosions of all time.
I wonder what kind of job Explosive majors get? Cool stuff like special effects, building demolition, pyrotechniques, rodent control. I think I missed my true calling in life.
It has been determined that people standing, walking and running on floors have fallen for unexplained reasons. Until these reasons can be determined, all floors in the US are being recalled. It is recommended that you do not walk, run or stand on any floor until the cause of this public health hazard can be determined and all floors repaired. Using a floor in this way can cause injury or death.
Caution is advised whenever you must make contact with any floor. The recomended uses of a floor now include laying and sitting. The safety of crawling on a floor is being studied at this time.
All the current evils of our lives like spam and virii are both technology and act as sources of new technology. Before I start, I hate both spam and worms, so don't spam me.
But consider the worm. There is some fairly cool technology in there to get them to work right. Right now that technology is being used mostly for evil. In the future the technology may mature to the point where we will wonder how we lived without it. As an example, instead of a slashdot web site, there could be slashdot worms that find you and deliver your content you want in real time to a computer or handheld device instead of you needing to query for it. It would simply be there on your computer. No more world-wide-wait. Don't laugh it could happen (or maybe not).
Similarly spam is using technologies in creative ways for evil. Yet the same techology is being used here on slash dot to notify me when one of you wonderful people comments on my comments. As the technology matures we may see new and wonderful things grow out of what we call spam; again maybe not.
However, both of these evils are responsible for a whole new set of technologies the thwart them. As the spam filters get better, the spam improves to overcome the latest improvements. The spam filters react and create new technologies which the spammers respond to and so forth. Worm and virus protection works the same way.
Each iteration requires using some existing techology in a new way or creating an altogether new techology. These technologies start to be applicable in other domains, thereby increasing and improving the general level of technology in the world at large.
As I gaze into the crytal ball, I see that the current war of spam and virus, like all other wars, will create new techology that was not considered and would not have been conceived had it not for the necessity of the times.
See James Burke "Connections" for a similar view of history, only much better.
Is it just me or are there others who think that if a movie is rated R that its not fit for anyone? If the same industry that uses phrases like "pushing the envelope" to explain how they are changing movies from art to smut signals that a movie is not fit for "family" viewing, compared to such prime time family classics like the upcoming "Coupling", is it really good for anyone, including adults? The Lord of the Rings movies are doing quite well without the R rating. Most of the most profitable movies don't have an R rating.
A while back there was an article about a gloucose power cell and I predicted the "GloucoseBoy". See it here
I can just see the next generation of GameBoy... Introducing the Nintendo "GlucoseBoy". Never worry about changing batteries again. There is a "leech" attachment included in the controls that painlessly extracts the needed glucose from the person playing the game. There is even an indicator showing if you have enough glucose or if you need to eat some more. Of course, it could be the beginnings of the Matrix: automated machines living off the heat/energy produced by there human power sources.
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot hardly believe I am saying it, but EMACS indeed. There was a time, not too long ago, that I would kill any process that was taking more memory than EMACS because there had to be something terribly wrong with any process taking that much memory. Now, EMACS takes seemingly no memory and runs really fast. Beside, there was a new release, after 6 short years. What's not to like? EMACS - The first Portable OS / virtual machine ELISP - The first run-anywhere computer language. Runs anywhere there is EMACS.
Both are non-stop. The action continues from beginning to end. Of course, there are yellow flags in racing, but they cannot be predicted and so don't work for advertisers. Soccer stops as well, for yellow cards and injuries, but also unpredictably.
Fans are stereotyped. All we see on the news is about "soccer hooligans". We certainly wouldn't want those kind of people in our towns. Of course, all NASCAR fans are rednecks.
The playing field is too big. Because the action is non-stop and the playing field or race track is so large, its too hard to cover it properly for television viewing. With basesball all the action happens between the pitcher and the catcher, with some in-field shots. Easy to cover with cameras. Basketball has a small court. Football has a large field but play is in short bursts. There is plenty of time to reset camera angles.
NASCAR has fixed this a little bit with car mounted cameras. When watching a soccer game on TV it like watching it from the worst seats in the house.
Lack of understanding of the rules and strategy. In the USA people didn't grow up playing soccer therefore they don't know the rules. It would be the same as watching a chess match if you didn't know the rules. NASCAR has its own set of rules that people don't understand.
Fortunately, soccer is popular among the younger crowd. In a few years, the USA men may be ready to play at the world-class level of the women.
Go Team USA.
I wonder if she will be moving as fast when she hits the exit.
Just because its unlikely that doesn't mean it won't happen. The chances of winning a lottery are millions to one against, yet someone does win. Also, its highly impropable that life exists on any given planet. Yet, here we are reading slash dot (notice lack of reference to intelligent). And it dangerous to generalize from a specific instance.
Again its all relative. To the average slash dot reader, two stars headed your way at high speed would look like a stampede. Of course, to the stars, it would appear they were being attacked by a very small bug and they would spend the rest of eternity trying to figure out what they had done to deserve such treatment. The relative speed of a stampede is computed based on the overall relative speeds of the stampedee and the stampeders. Someone with more free time than I could work out the math.
How do we know that the star is being ejected from the solar system? According to relativity, to an observer in the galaxy, a star being ejected from the galaxy looks the exactly the same as using the star as the frame of reference and the whole of the milky way galaxy is moving away from it. Since we didn't actually see where this star was coming from, the star could have been holding still for a long time while the galaxy far,far away came stampeding past like the wildebeast stampede in Lion King. To us stuck here on earth it would look exactly the same either way. So its not so much tht the star is being ejected, but that it survived the stampede.
Who would of thought? I stopped watching a long long time ago.
Still here? Ok, here it goes.
[rant]
Today we are inundated with all sorts of increasing complex technology. Take Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for an example. A hughly complex bit of technology for sovling the problen of getting data from here to there, or there to here. Of course, there must be filters, authentication, etc. etc etc.
But, haven't we been doing that for years? Why do we need to introduce a level of complexity to the problem when the solution is right before us.
A web server is a web service. It accepts formatted commands and returns a response. It can add authentication and encryption. On the server side there can be all sorts of filters, code, add-ons and none of it is GUI, NONE.
rexec, ssh, rcp and also "web services". They accept a command and return data. They can perform any complex function you want on the server and return some data.
So what happened. GUIs happened. Instead of capturing the data via pipes and applying any other filtering or whatever, we use a GUI. We get back the result and depend upon some GUI to display it. But we have different standards, things are incompatible and you are limited to only what the browser designer intended. Of course there are plugins. Yet that just bloats out the GUI even worse.
[/rant]
[rave]
So, what is the answer. Simplicity is the answer. Instead of building ever increasingly complex GUIs and web services, go back to what made unix great: small but useful parts that can easily be joined via pipes.
So instead of a bloated browser consider:
Ok, bad example. But the idea is that you have a piece that can fetch the HTML from a web server, some other piece that massages it, filters, etc, then pipes to a display. Small pieces that can be pieced together to do a task.[/rave]
I have started a project to investigate this notion at http://sewer.sf.net
- email costs the company X dollars per year in servers, spam filters, network, etc.
- email now presents a risk of Y dollars in terms of possible lawsuits
- the cost of doing business without internet email is Z dollars
Do the math: Is X + Y > Z? Then get rid of internet email access. They my keep the inhouse email, but no internet gateway. Other technologies for allowing cooperation among employees will be used.You might complain its not fair or believe it could never happen. Haven't you seen things that are perceived to be mostly "employee benefits" get dropped? I sure have.
So, the spammer-parasites are coming very close to killing the host upon which they depend. Its on life-support now and it won't take much of a shock to push it over the edge. In 5 years, you will see posting on Slash dot like, "Hey, remember in the bad-old-days when you had an email address? Can you believe people actually got spam? ha ha ha".
Cygwin is to a Windows box what a steering wheel is to a car. You could do without out, but it might crash a lot. (whoa, that was clever, a nice but lame similie wrapped around a rehashed "windows always crashes" joke. Of course, cygwin won't keep it from crashing, but work with me here people). Then followed closely by emacs.
Ask youself:
- Is she willing to do things I like or do we spend all our time together doing what she wants?
There are a couple of problems with this. First, you start the question to the relationship, even on slashdot. Second, there is no chance to develop "us" things. You both need to try what the other is interested in.Is it her fault? Probably not entirely. If you suggest "Let's go for a hike" then all she has to do is say, "not today" and no hike. Rather, plan a hike and invite her to go along. Then go whether she goes or not. If this happens too often, the relationship will come to its natural conclusion. More likely, a couple of time and she sees you really do have interests that are important too you, she will be willing to come along.
A female who is interested in you will start to take an interest in your pursuits just as you naturally take an interest in her pursuits. Think about it, how much stuff do you now enjoy not because of the thing itself but because of the person who you liked that enjoyed it.
Besides, getting all the muscles involved in a relationship will also make it more enjoyable. Physical activity is good for both the heart in your chest as well as the one the peots write about.
Wel, now let's think about it. If 50-50 means you do all the giving and she does all the getting, is it really worth the effort? Eventually, you will lose all self-respect and she will get bored. not good.
In reality, most females are glad to participate more in "your life". They may whine about it at the time, but afterwards they are glad they did. Its like seeing an animal in the zoo versus its natural habitat. The zoo is more convient/confortable but the natural habitat is more awesome.
If she's not willing, then she might just be controlling and its better to get out of that situation early.
You don't or set a timer. "Hey, we suffered through 2 hours of chick-flicks, now we have to play 2 hours of StarCraft". Sounds cheesy even typing it. No, PLAN SOMETHING and invite her to participate in your activity. Something like "Hey, me and some friends are going to being playing StarCraft at 7:00, wanna join us?" Be positive and unaplologetic. If she balks, then just make it clear that those are the plans and you wish she could join you. It is still your life and you need to take time to do the things you like, every now and again.
Even better, like I said before, turn off the computer and the TV and go do stuff really together. The best way for a relationahip to grow is to include your whole self. That means that you need to not only think about and talk about it, but actually do physical (no, not that kind of physical) things as well. That will give you new things that are shared.
Our minds, bodies and emotions are inextricably connected. If I go do something exciting, like ride a roller coaster, with someone, I will remember that I was excited and I was with this person so therefore I was excited to be with this person. By doing things that make our body feel good with someone, we train ourselves to feel good about that person. Likewise, if we sit bored with a person, we soon feel bored about the person. By increasing he type and the variety of experiences we have with a person, the more connected we feel to them. This variety should include mental, emotional and physical. And no I am not talking about the bedroom, so get your mind out of the gutter.
I have been married 15+ years and going strong.
I used to agree with the "at least its something we do together", but not anymore. Watching TV is NOT a group activity. Just try starting a conversation with someone watching the "brain sucker". Watching TV is at best a number of individuals watching something, but there is certainly no togetherness involved. Just like when you come on a wreck on the freeway, everyone is watching, but they are not "bonding" in any way.
So why would the girlfriend want to watch TV with you? A couple of reasons. First, she knows she is wasting time, but if she is doing it "with" ( in the same room ) you, then she is not wasting time, but spending it with you. Its kind of romantic in a completely lame way. But if you aren't wasting time with her, but are wasting time on games, then you are both just wasting time because there is no togetherness. See how much sense it makes? What you need to do is remeber that relationships are 50-50. So, if you are going to waste time in a together sort of way watching the boob tube, then she should waste an equal amount of time doing something you enjoy, be it games, slashdot, whatever. It will strengthen the relationship, plus non-TV time wasting often allows the couple to communicate (about the game, slashdot postings like this one, etc).
Second, there is the female need to remake her man. If you are watching tv she likes, then you will be influenced to come in closer contact with your feminine side. So the guys on Friends and Will and Grace can be your role models for a newer better you. If she is not helping, you might get some strange, guy-like ideas that she is trying to shield you from. The solution is to again work out 50-50 time wasting, allowing her to get in touch with her masculine side, especially by reading excellent slash dot posting like this one.
Lastly, there is the need for companionship. See how women travel in flocks to the restroom, or how they like having a dog? You, as the boyfriend, fill the role of the dog. Someone to sit by her side or at her feet, lavishing her with constant attention and being there for the moment, usually during the commercial, when she needs to pay attention to something other than the TV. The best way not to be her lapdog, insist that she spend as much time being your lapdog as you do for her. I think you get it by now. Let her sit idly by while you play games online. Be sure to acknoldge her presence every 22 minutes by asking her to do something for you. Get something to eat or take the trash out.
Wait, I had a thought. Check it out. Turn off the TV and the computer and go out into the real world. No, no, no, don't go to a movie. Go swimming, dancing, racquetball, anything that actually causes you heart to pump and for you two to experience a common experience, one in which you are both active participants and not just idle observers.
Yeah, I know its too crazy to work. Yeah, me too. I need to get back to the next slash dot article. I wonder what's on Friends tonight?
Or maybe here
From Top 100 April Fools pranks you may get some good ideas. For instance, #10 - Planetary Alignment Dcreases Gravity could well be worth recycling this year, due to the planet alignment of recent days. #15 might have possibilities for the more prurient among you.
Conincidently a co-worker/cow-irker of mine just borrowed my copy. The nice thing about it is it gives some names to ideas a lot of us already use, making it easier to talk about them.
Ok, is this really the name of a spammer or is this a hoax?
Some guy have all the luck. Maybe a career change is in order.
Centre for Explosion Studies!! Now there is a cool major.
Bob: Hi, what's your major?
Jane: Theater. How about you?
Bob: Explosion Studies.
Jane: Wow, that is soooo cool. Wanna go out tonight?
Doesn't work that way with CS I can tell you. Seriously, was there ever a cooler thing to major in? I would have even dropped out of CS to be able to blow things up. They also get to study all the great explosions of all time.
I wonder what kind of job Explosive majors get? Cool stuff like special effects, building demolition, pyrotechniques, rodent control. I think I missed my true calling in life.
Caution is advised whenever you must make contact with any floor. The recomended uses of a floor now include laying and sitting. The safety of crawling on a floor is being studied at this time.
In other news the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division is recommending that the government Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide.
But consider the worm. There is some fairly cool technology in there to get them to work right. Right now that technology is being used mostly for evil. In the future the technology may mature to the point where we will wonder how we lived without it. As an example, instead of a slashdot web site, there could be slashdot worms that find you and deliver your content you want in real time to a computer or handheld device instead of you needing to query for it. It would simply be there on your computer. No more world-wide-wait. Don't laugh it could happen (or maybe not).
Similarly spam is using technologies in creative ways for evil. Yet the same techology is being used here on slash dot to notify me when one of you wonderful people comments on my comments. As the technology matures we may see new and wonderful things grow out of what we call spam; again maybe not.
However, both of these evils are responsible for a whole new set of technologies the thwart them. As the spam filters get better, the spam improves to overcome the latest improvements. The spam filters react and create new technologies which the spammers respond to and so forth. Worm and virus protection works the same way.
Each iteration requires using some existing techology in a new way or creating an altogether new techology. These technologies start to be applicable in other domains, thereby increasing and improving the general level of technology in the world at large.
As I gaze into the crytal ball, I see that the current war of spam and virus, like all other wars, will create new techology that was not considered and would not have been conceived had it not for the necessity of the times.
See James Burke "Connections" for a similar view of history, only much better.
Oh well, thanks for the rant space.