Shhh, don't tell anyone but most people could program if they wanted to. Most people can master any task if they had the time and inclination. People are like that. It's really cool.
The problem is, however, that many of these project managers who offshore their work never cared to begin with. The code they produced here sucked and the code they pull back from India, Russia or China might suck too. This IS why comercial software is of such low quality most of the time. That these companies decide to first cut the people who actually do the work is a good indicator of their priorities. They had people who knew what they were doing but fired them. The very least this would do is diminish the product quality while they trasitioned to new people. The worst it can do mostly happens if they never cared to start with which is to stay the same.
The closed source world compounds this quality problem. Because there is much less work sharing , everyone has to reinvent the wheel everytime. This is why comercial software, regardless of the care exercised, has trouble keeping up with new features and ways of doing things. Comercial software also wastes resources on advertising, marketing and other stupid stuff.
Free software, on the other hand, solves cost and quality problems. Anyone, with the time and inclination, can get things done with it. Where they need to fix things, everyone benefits. The codebase grows, work gets done and everyone who should be is a winner. The project manager is going to change or die.
This drivel isn't helping. Focus on SCO's theft of the work of thousands of people.
It is good for people to think that way because it's true, thank you. SCO's attempted theft is outrageous. Slashdot has been good enough to point to FSF and other people who have done a nice job of destroying SCO's bogus claims.
Having a sense of humor is important too. Linus, has a reasonably good one while also having more of his property at stake than many. It's good that he's laughing off SCO's bullshit. I would not be so witty in his place.
So, what's missing? Slashdot's doing it's job, the lawyers are doing their job and Linus is doing his job. It's good to remember what's important and I doubt this Sunday afternoon's laugh is going to make anyone forget those things. All of this is going to be over when SCO fails to come up with anything in the next 30 days.
They deliberately picked a guy that looks old and obstinate. The implication they are trying to make is that Unix and its sysadmins are obsolete washed up fuddy-duddies, and they need to migrate to Windows now before they get laid off.
That's so backward. Young people are far more likely to know about free software and how to make it work than older "admins". If you are in high school and want to look at computers as a hobby or are remotely curious about how they work, you are going to find free software. It's got all the goods - compilers, editors, cool graphics manipulation, the works that would cost thousands of dollars in the non free world and teach you nothing. Five years ago, with it students were compiling Slackware and running BSD. Today they have more to chose from and it's undoubtably superior to non-free junk. They might say things like, "you can't ignore Microsoft." Today they say that less, and they are more right than they know. Nothing says legacy like Windoze.
Then along comes the electronic voting receipt, which by its very nature *has* to be easily readable/auditable and *has* to have a very good system for ensuring it's authentic. Now, you can buy somebody's vote and be sure they actually vote the way you wanted.
Wow, it's like anonymous balots never existed and can't be duplicated by machines that also tally votes electronically. Why not print out a ballot for voter inspection that's dropped into a lock box for hand counting if needed? Nah, we'd better go back to pottery shards, paper is just too easy to nail people with.
You seem to be confused. He gave that as an example, not as something to "stop at".
That's my point. He gave that as an example everyone would agree on, but he was wrong. I fear the rest of his list of obvious censorship as much as I dispise the things he would censor. Censorship breeds more of the same.
It's amazing how so few people can read and understand something without inserting their own prejudices and fixed ideas...
Maybe my definition of porn is different than yours, but I don't think I agree with this. Could you explain?
The average porn flick as a woman violated by a number of men in humiliating ways. Anal penetration and ejaculation into someone's face provide very few women pleasure. These films pander to rude urges to dominate and humiliate and are mostly enjoyed by losers enbittered by the trouble they have getting along with anyone. They are anything but a portrayal of healthy relationships.
Even more benign porn, such as Playboy, plays on the same themes. The editorial staff will hapily tell you that their business plan it to sell advertising by stoking mastabtorial fantasies of young men. The staff at playboy knows exactly what those young men want and it has nothing to do with anything like what women want. It objectifies women and creates the false impression that casual sex is easy to come by because women and me have few differences in their goals and outlooks. The average young man is willing to be used and disposed of like a wipe in a gas station bathroom, the average woman is not and the average young man probably should not be so willing. In any case, porn in large part is based on taking from others without care or obligation.
As nasty as these things are, they are much less demanded than they are provided. Free media avoids those things as naturally as personal conversation. Porn is mostly provided in places where there is poor competition for media and where people are most repressed and have the fewest freedoms.
Lockheed even provided technical assistance that happens to improve the reliability of chinese ICBM's
Lockheed makes great hardware, but there is no need to fear. China bought into Microsoft's Shared Source nonsense, so their ICBMs will need frequent reboots and will more than likely be disabled by some worm written by a 13 year old Samoan.
What is it? Trade secret. copyright or what? Trade seceret is effectivly torpedoed by the fact that SCO distributed the kernel source under the GPL themselves. That's not much of a way to keep a secret. They have not acted like a company that has a real copyright violation. Real copyright violation cases involve a cease and dissist letter that is specific and has coppies of the passages coppied, "don't use this and pay us for what you got out of it." The few supposed violations SCO did release were from BSD! So they can run in circles all day long, what they are left with is nothing. Most would say they never had anything to begin with and the whole thing is a Microsoft sponsored FUD campaign with pump and dump spifs for the perpetrators.
But it is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight
Oh, that's good. I like most of the rest of what he has to say too, but let's exercise some foresight about this:
There are instances when, in the interests of the majority, some censorship may be used for a period of time. Indeed, there is material which virtually everyone would agree should be kept out. Sadistic pornography, incitement to violence against racial or ethnic minorities are just two examples.
Everyone would not agree about that, Mr. Clark. Such reasoning and mechanisms can be used against anything. What exactly constitutes non-sadistic pornogrpahy? Why stop at incitement against minority populations? It's just as wrong for me to shoot a white boy in Kansas as it is for me to shoot a black girl in Mississippi isn't it? Porn by it's very nature invites us to violate those it portrays as objects. The mechanisms you might use to filter information for me will obviously be used more than eliminate more than violent porn. Electronic media can offer the censor far greater power then any previous media and great caution must be used in any kind of censorship of it. If the poster of violent porn can be tracked down and punished, so can the publisher of unpopular political opinions and media that has no anonymous publishing will never be free. This is far more harmful than burning libraries and smashing printing presses because it can happen transparently.
I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight for your right to say it. The only way to disprove bad ideas is for them to be as freely available as others. It is up to each of us to chose what we will or will not listen too. The crime is not in the saying or the hearing, the crime is in the doing. Words, while they may sting, never broke a bone. The only kind of censorship that's ever justified is the traditional kind, simply saying "that is wrong."
Behaviors not words should be forbiden. It is wrong to asault someone, especially in a sadistic sexual way - that's called rape and it's a crime. A film that gloifies rape is stupid and wrongheaded, but it's not a crime.
As another poster pointed out, the problems we face in media are not the fault of too much freedom, they are the result of too many restrictions. Gargage TV exists not because there are too many networks, but because there are too few that feel no need to compete. Cable TV, though pricy, has brough competition and improved programming and the reagular broadcaseters are falling behind in the ratings sytems. People are attracted to "nitch" programs such as TechTV, the History Channel, the Learning Channel and all that other good stuff that leaves daytime trash talk without an audience. The more repulsive the regular broadcasters cynically make their content, the faster they push away their audience. Further competition among cable and internet providers would only make things better. Censorship is the friend and tool of those who would not compete.
With a good firewall, server-based virus scanning on the mailserver, and patched systems, they can be pretty secure.
Why not just use software that does not need such expensive protection? At least you don't recomend anti-virus software on every machine, like the author complained of, but all such junk fails because they are all bandaids on top of flawed design. How can you say that Winblows can be secure after the last three years of internet destabilizing worms and viruses that mostly targeted big corporate networks?
The point here is that they bypassed corporate policy the admininstrators, and maintained a their own little insecure network.
My point was that such a little network is hard to imagine but is still more secure than the whole big windoze nighmare outside it.
I don't know what planet you or the author of that article live on, but I've seen a steady increase in the quality of software development and maturity in the development models used in the last decade. This may have slowed our development a bit, but you can see the results in our defect find rates.
No code complete = 0 errors, perfect.
The poor dude is from big dumb corporate land. That's a place where developers are forced to run M$ windblows for ALL of their needs. Only have access to M$ "server" machines for code backup, have to use really crapy code management programs such as the two mentioned, continuum and clearcase, can't install programs except when a Lookout virus does it for them, and have to put up with read only databases. It's a sorry planet, but it's the kind of de-skilling big dumb companies think it takes to get the whole shit-ball ready to move to India. Companies like to make their employees miserable before they fire them. Chances are, none of the above is true offshore. No one who actually writes code would do things so poorly.
On the other hand, I've seen developers try this strategy and create a huge security hole in otherwise secure networks
There is little to nothing you can do to lessen security in the average big corporate set up. They all have Windoze on the desktop recieving email with Lookout and brownsing the net with IE. What bigger set of holes do you need? Who's going to bother setting up an atack point in WAP distance when they could send your secretary an email instead?
Now, I have to ask you what kind of developers do you have that can't figure out ssh? I don't think such a beast exists. It might be very hard to get such services working on a Microsoft system, but why bother? Corporate policy mandated by clueless admin?
I could have that one wrong. Gramofile, pointed to by another poster, looks like it. I saw it once in Debian unstable, before I had sound cards working. Under stable, I get the same thing done with krecord and audacity. I'm sorry I got the name wrong, but it's been about a year since I drooled over the package descrition.
The days of slapping things together and getting it out the door are gone, and good thing, we all see what occurred at Microsoft when quality wasn't a top priority. Buggy software with huge security holes.
You must not have read the article. The gripe list was all about red tape that does nothing for quality. All you do is deride a "get it out the door" mentality that has nothing to do with the legitimate problems the author raises.
It's funny that you mention Microsoft, because 80% of the list has grown out from the gross inadequacies of their software. Virus checker, heavy comercial source code CVS, bogus restrictions on installing software, idiotic network administration which loses critical path source code and a whole pack of morons that can point to Gatner articles to justify the whole stupid structure. Of course, the "security" you claim is not provided as continued theft of source code from game developers and Microsoft itself demonstrates. At the same time, people using free software tools with competent administration are busy producing superior code for any platform. Big companies are in love with junk software and they are no longer competitive because of it.
"Just get it done, we'll worry about cleaning it up later." Do you want the software controlling your car or the X-ray machine at the hospital being managed by such a manager? I certainly don't.
Neither do I. I hope that my x-ray machine has got a free software embeded system in it, rather than some stupid WinCE, "fastest way to the COM" crap on it.
What I'd like to see from you is a defense of any of the bogus practices the author mentioned. Give me something technical istead of insulting a strawman.
I'd hate to be on a craft like that. The thing would have to have enough elevation to make the transition and the transition would have to work every time. The worst case is some kind of mechanical jam in the ductwork on take off or landing. It's a great idea for drones, but not so great for moving people. Everyone is going to want to see this proved out and working as well or better than normal aircraft before getting people on them.
Whats this ogg thing?
Some elitest-i-hate-the-matinstream-so-i-use-linux music format or something?
Ogg Vorbis is a free and very high quality encoding tool set. It supports variable bit rate while being very easy to use. Ogg files are generally smaller than mp3 for the same level of quality.
Software freedom confers several key benefits. There are no patents or royalties on the tools so manufactures are free to use them and you don't have to pay for their licensing. You will also always be able to find software players for any platform and don't have to wory about DRM unless the plaform itself has been cripled by it. Copyright and patent problems made players like Lame and Not Lame difficult for an average computer user such as myself. Not being able to encode my own music colection to mp3 was a real bummer. Vorbis tools is a deb package that requires no compiling and just works. Between it, abcde, audacity and gnuphonograph, your sound needs are covered.
Let's go over that again, beter, cheaper, easier, less encumbered, that about covers it.
Zaurus is a good quality player and much more flexible than "normal" players. I use Open Zaurus the ogg tools you can get for it and CF. A 64 meg CF is cheap and loads up an hour's worth of music and a shell script or two for random play. Larger CF cards are getting cheaper all the time and a CF wifi card could eliminate the need for the clumsy transfer step. I'm sure people will make software that does all of this easier than my dinky shell script, but I like the speed of simple tools like sed and urandom. Don't forget to use the -q flag for ogg123 to silence the output and don't forget to change the power and light settings so the screen turns off but the power does not and you have a beautiful and very powerful jam box and rounds out an all free music system.
My next project for it is to get a car power adaptor and a little nicer mounting system than I already have.
Open Zaurus is a little more flexible than the software that comes with it, but you might not want to do that if you need to sync with nasty old Lookout or something. Debian Zaurus with X11 will be massivly cool when it settles down to stable.
I would like to see it finished out for the future of Linux and the GPL.
SCO's goofey case never threatened free software and it's absolute failure would be great. SCO made a lot of noise and generated much FUD for Microsoft, but it was all without merit and would never stand in court. A dismissal would prove that and we can all go back to migrating awsy from closed source junk without having to worry about some PHB who's read the latest SCO press release or some dull echo of it in any of the WinTel trade mags.
With the colapse of this dumb trial, SCO will vanish. Bogus licensing fees are their only remaining business model. Microsoft may make another payment or two, but no one else will, SCO's stock price will colapse and that will be that. No income, no value, no trouble. The sale of assets will begin so that the lawyers can have their promissed 20% of nothing. Bye, bye assholes.
The fun is actually just beginning, as Darl couldn't even convince his multimillion dollar legal team to show up for the judge. I think it was his brother who was making arguments, not Boies or even a Boies representative.
It looks like even the lawyers have left SCO for dead.
They were all out selling stock as fast as they can!
I like earth a lot, and don't want to leave for some stupid dome on Mars. Living on a planet where I can't go outside to sit among the trees because there's no breathable air and no trees
and
The point is that space is a source of material and energy resources that we could harvest without stripping our own planet.
I have to dissagree with what you say and with the attitude.
First, emigrating off plantet is a desirable goal. Sooner or later a big rock is going to sterilize the earth and there's nothing we can do about it. It's happened before and it will happen again. If people do not have self sufficient colonies elsewhere, there will be no more people.
Second, your attitude will breed resentment. I agree that it is a good idea to strip resources from space. There's much more there than there is here. The differnce is that I'm willing to go do it myself and I expect conditions to be good. I further expect future colonists to look down on people who expect resources from the heavens but are unwilling to make any effort to get them. Beware of falling to the wrong side of those who DO and those who SUCK. The US is currently churning out thousands of losers a year from MBA programs who think of themselves as "leaders" but don't know squat about anything but how to manipulate people. They unabashedly think of themselves as "above" details and on a "higher" plane of thought. These are the kind of fools who think of practical tasks as boring details to be farmed out to places like India.
Sooner or later, Earth will need them more than they need Earth. By then, conditions will be better out there than here. They will remember super NIMBY attitudes some people had.
If being outside is not more interesting than crappy novels, you not only bought the wrong book series, you chose the wrong vacation spot.
Not always. Every night it gets dark and sometimes you can't aford anything but a vacation where there's nothing new to do outside and a nice calm night in bed is what you were looking for anyway. You might have boarded a cruise for two weeks with your wife and two year old daughter. You could be taking a tour of industry, visiting car plants, drop towers, observatories or even ship yards, where there's not even a bar to go at night much less something nice to look at. You could go on a two week hike and want something to read at night. These are the kinds of vacations where sci-fi makes sense. On other kinds of vacations, it sometimes rains.
The kinds of trips where a sci-fi novel would not make sense are few and far between. Mardi Gras is one. On trips to Paris and Quebec, I try to soak up as much local culture as possible and local pulp fills the bill, but even then it was nice to have something to do on the plane getting there. A book has been nice on all of my other trips.
I do and that's why reviews like this are great to have. I just keep reading, hoping something will happen to redeam it. Once in a while, I'm rewarded, and I'm usually just reading myself to sleap anyway. I would never have started reading the Weber book I just finished had I read this review first. The review will, however, save me the pain of reading another Weber book or this particular Willson book. His review hit Weber on the head, so I trust the reviewer's opinion of this book by Willson. There's better stuff to read.
I don't know anything about Williams, but the Weber review was right on. His description of Weber rings true for a book I just got through suffering, "In Death Ground", so I can imagine Weber filled an entire serries with the same bad stuff, and I can feel the pain of having nothing but that for a long vacation. Being warned, the Weber serries I have on shelf is destined for the used book store and I won't bother with this book by Williams.
The upside to "In Death Ground" is that the next book I'm reading seems wonderful.
Slashdot Mirror
Shhh, don't tell anyone but most people could program if they wanted to. Most people can master any task if they had the time and inclination. People are like that. It's really cool.
The problem is, however, that many of these project managers who offshore their work never cared to begin with. The code they produced here sucked and the code they pull back from India, Russia or China might suck too. This IS why comercial software is of such low quality most of the time. That these companies decide to first cut the people who actually do the work is a good indicator of their priorities. They had people who knew what they were doing but fired them. The very least this would do is diminish the product quality while they trasitioned to new people. The worst it can do mostly happens if they never cared to start with which is to stay the same.
The closed source world compounds this quality problem. Because there is much less work sharing , everyone has to reinvent the wheel everytime. This is why comercial software, regardless of the care exercised, has trouble keeping up with new features and ways of doing things. Comercial software also wastes resources on advertising, marketing and other stupid stuff.
Free software, on the other hand, solves cost and quality problems. Anyone, with the time and inclination, can get things done with it. Where they need to fix things, everyone benefits. The codebase grows, work gets done and everyone who should be is a winner. The project manager is going to change or die.
It is good for people to think that way because it's true, thank you. SCO's attempted theft is outrageous. Slashdot has been good enough to point to FSF and other people who have done a nice job of destroying SCO's bogus claims.
Having a sense of humor is important too. Linus, has a reasonably good one while also having more of his property at stake than many. It's good that he's laughing off SCO's bullshit. I would not be so witty in his place.
So, what's missing? Slashdot's doing it's job, the lawyers are doing their job and Linus is doing his job. It's good to remember what's important and I doubt this Sunday afternoon's laugh is going to make anyone forget those things. All of this is going to be over when SCO fails to come up with anything in the next 30 days.
That's so backward. Young people are far more likely to know about free software and how to make it work than older "admins". If you are in high school and want to look at computers as a hobby or are remotely curious about how they work, you are going to find free software. It's got all the goods - compilers, editors, cool graphics manipulation, the works that would cost thousands of dollars in the non free world and teach you nothing. Five years ago, with it students were compiling Slackware and running BSD. Today they have more to chose from and it's undoubtably superior to non-free junk. They might say things like, "you can't ignore Microsoft." Today they say that less, and they are more right than they know. Nothing says legacy like Windoze.
Wow, it's like anonymous balots never existed and can't be duplicated by machines that also tally votes electronically. Why not print out a ballot for voter inspection that's dropped into a lock box for hand counting if needed? Nah, we'd better go back to pottery shards, paper is just too easy to nail people with.
You seem to be confused. He gave that as an example, not as something to "stop at".
That's my point. He gave that as an example everyone would agree on, but he was wrong. I fear the rest of his list of obvious censorship as much as I dispise the things he would censor. Censorship breeds more of the same.
It's amazing how so few people can read and understand something without inserting their own prejudices and fixed ideas...
Once again, I agree. Now, piss off.
The average porn flick as a woman violated by a number of men in humiliating ways. Anal penetration and ejaculation into someone's face provide very few women pleasure. These films pander to rude urges to dominate and humiliate and are mostly enjoyed by losers enbittered by the trouble they have getting along with anyone. They are anything but a portrayal of healthy relationships.
Even more benign porn, such as Playboy, plays on the same themes. The editorial staff will hapily tell you that their business plan it to sell advertising by stoking mastabtorial fantasies of young men. The staff at playboy knows exactly what those young men want and it has nothing to do with anything like what women want. It objectifies women and creates the false impression that casual sex is easy to come by because women and me have few differences in their goals and outlooks. The average young man is willing to be used and disposed of like a wipe in a gas station bathroom, the average woman is not and the average young man probably should not be so willing. In any case, porn in large part is based on taking from others without care or obligation.
As nasty as these things are, they are much less demanded than they are provided. Free media avoids those things as naturally as personal conversation. Porn is mostly provided in places where there is poor competition for media and where people are most repressed and have the fewest freedoms.
Lockheed even provided technical assistance that happens to improve the reliability of chinese ICBM's
Lockheed makes great hardware, but there is no need to fear. China bought into Microsoft's Shared Source nonsense, so their ICBMs will need frequent reboots and will more than likely be disabled by some worm written by a 13 year old Samoan.
Speech was not free in either Rwanda nor Hitler's Germany. It can be argued that fewer genocides will happen when speech is free.
Oh, that's good. I like most of the rest of what he has to say too, but let's exercise some foresight about this:
There are instances when, in the interests of the majority, some censorship may be used for a period of time. Indeed, there is material which virtually everyone would agree should be kept out. Sadistic pornography, incitement to violence against racial or ethnic minorities are just two examples.
Everyone would not agree about that, Mr. Clark. Such reasoning and mechanisms can be used against anything. What exactly constitutes non-sadistic pornogrpahy? Why stop at incitement against minority populations? It's just as wrong for me to shoot a white boy in Kansas as it is for me to shoot a black girl in Mississippi isn't it? Porn by it's very nature invites us to violate those it portrays as objects. The mechanisms you might use to filter information for me will obviously be used more than eliminate more than violent porn. Electronic media can offer the censor far greater power then any previous media and great caution must be used in any kind of censorship of it. If the poster of violent porn can be tracked down and punished, so can the publisher of unpopular political opinions and media that has no anonymous publishing will never be free. This is far more harmful than burning libraries and smashing printing presses because it can happen transparently.
I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight for your right to say it. The only way to disprove bad ideas is for them to be as freely available as others. It is up to each of us to chose what we will or will not listen too. The crime is not in the saying or the hearing, the crime is in the doing. Words, while they may sting, never broke a bone. The only kind of censorship that's ever justified is the traditional kind, simply saying "that is wrong."
Behaviors not words should be forbiden. It is wrong to asault someone, especially in a sadistic sexual way - that's called rape and it's a crime. A film that gloifies rape is stupid and wrongheaded, but it's not a crime.
As another poster pointed out, the problems we face in media are not the fault of too much freedom, they are the result of too many restrictions. Gargage TV exists not because there are too many networks, but because there are too few that feel no need to compete. Cable TV, though pricy, has brough competition and improved programming and the reagular broadcaseters are falling behind in the ratings sytems. People are attracted to "nitch" programs such as TechTV, the History Channel, the Learning Channel and all that other good stuff that leaves daytime trash talk without an audience. The more repulsive the regular broadcasters cynically make their content, the faster they push away their audience. Further competition among cable and internet providers would only make things better. Censorship is the friend and tool of those who would not compete.
Why not just use software that does not need such expensive protection? At least you don't recomend anti-virus software on every machine, like the author complained of, but all such junk fails because they are all bandaids on top of flawed design. How can you say that Winblows can be secure after the last three years of internet destabilizing worms and viruses that mostly targeted big corporate networks? The point here is that they bypassed corporate policy the admininstrators, and maintained a their own little insecure network.
My point was that such a little network is hard to imagine but is still more secure than the whole big windoze nighmare outside it.
No code complete = 0 errors, perfect.
The poor dude is from big dumb corporate land. That's a place where developers are forced to run M$ windblows for ALL of their needs. Only have access to M$ "server" machines for code backup, have to use really crapy code management programs such as the two mentioned, continuum and clearcase, can't install programs except when a Lookout virus does it for them, and have to put up with read only databases. It's a sorry planet, but it's the kind of de-skilling big dumb companies think it takes to get the whole shit-ball ready to move to India. Companies like to make their employees miserable before they fire them. Chances are, none of the above is true offshore. No one who actually writes code would do things so poorly.
There is little to nothing you can do to lessen security in the average big corporate set up. They all have Windoze on the desktop recieving email with Lookout and brownsing the net with IE. What bigger set of holes do you need? Who's going to bother setting up an atack point in WAP distance when they could send your secretary an email instead?
Now, I have to ask you what kind of developers do you have that can't figure out ssh? I don't think such a beast exists. It might be very hard to get such services working on a Microsoft system, but why bother? Corporate policy mandated by clueless admin?
I could have that one wrong. Gramofile, pointed to by another poster, looks like it. I saw it once in Debian unstable, before I had sound cards working. Under stable, I get the same thing done with krecord and audacity. I'm sorry I got the name wrong, but it's been about a year since I drooled over the package descrition.
You must not have read the article. The gripe list was all about red tape that does nothing for quality. All you do is deride a "get it out the door" mentality that has nothing to do with the legitimate problems the author raises.
It's funny that you mention Microsoft, because 80% of the list has grown out from the gross inadequacies of their software. Virus checker, heavy comercial source code CVS, bogus restrictions on installing software, idiotic network administration which loses critical path source code and a whole pack of morons that can point to Gatner articles to justify the whole stupid structure. Of course, the "security" you claim is not provided as continued theft of source code from game developers and Microsoft itself demonstrates. At the same time, people using free software tools with competent administration are busy producing superior code for any platform. Big companies are in love with junk software and they are no longer competitive because of it.
"Just get it done, we'll worry about cleaning it up later." Do you want the software controlling your car or the X-ray machine at the hospital being managed by such a manager? I certainly don't.
Neither do I. I hope that my x-ray machine has got a free software embeded system in it, rather than some stupid WinCE, "fastest way to the COM" crap on it.
What I'd like to see from you is a defense of any of the bogus practices the author mentioned. Give me something technical istead of insulting a strawman.
Whats this ogg thing? Some elitest-i-hate-the-matinstream-so-i-use-linux music format or something?
Ogg Vorbis is a free and very high quality encoding tool set. It supports variable bit rate while being very easy to use. Ogg files are generally smaller than mp3 for the same level of quality.
Software freedom confers several key benefits. There are no patents or royalties on the tools so manufactures are free to use them and you don't have to pay for their licensing. You will also always be able to find software players for any platform and don't have to wory about DRM unless the plaform itself has been cripled by it. Copyright and patent problems made players like Lame and Not Lame difficult for an average computer user such as myself. Not being able to encode my own music colection to mp3 was a real bummer. Vorbis tools is a deb package that requires no compiling and just works. Between it, abcde, audacity and gnuphonograph, your sound needs are covered.
Let's go over that again, beter, cheaper, easier, less encumbered, that about covers it.
Zaurus is a good quality player and much more flexible than "normal" players. I use Open Zaurus the ogg tools you can get for it and CF. A 64 meg CF is cheap and loads up an hour's worth of music and a shell script or two for random play. Larger CF cards are getting cheaper all the time and a CF wifi card could eliminate the need for the clumsy transfer step. I'm sure people will make software that does all of this easier than my dinky shell script, but I like the speed of simple tools like sed and urandom. Don't forget to use the -q flag for ogg123 to silence the output and don't forget to change the power and light settings so the screen turns off but the power does not and you have a beautiful and very powerful jam box and rounds out an all free music system.
My next project for it is to get a car power adaptor and a little nicer mounting system than I already have.
Open Zaurus is a little more flexible than the software that comes with it, but you might not want to do that if you need to sync with nasty old Lookout or something. Debian Zaurus with X11 will be massivly cool when it settles down to stable.
SCO's goofey case never threatened free software and it's absolute failure would be great. SCO made a lot of noise and generated much FUD for Microsoft, but it was all without merit and would never stand in court. A dismissal would prove that and we can all go back to migrating awsy from closed source junk without having to worry about some PHB who's read the latest SCO press release or some dull echo of it in any of the WinTel trade mags.
With the colapse of this dumb trial, SCO will vanish. Bogus licensing fees are their only remaining business model. Microsoft may make another payment or two, but no one else will, SCO's stock price will colapse and that will be that. No income, no value, no trouble. The sale of assets will begin so that the lawyers can have their promissed 20% of nothing. Bye, bye assholes.
They were all out selling stock as fast as they can!
I like earth a lot, and don't want to leave for some stupid dome on Mars. Living on a planet where I can't go outside to sit among the trees because there's no breathable air and no trees
and
The point is that space is a source of material and energy resources that we could harvest without stripping our own planet.
I have to dissagree with what you say and with the attitude.
First, emigrating off plantet is a desirable goal. Sooner or later a big rock is going to sterilize the earth and there's nothing we can do about it. It's happened before and it will happen again. If people do not have self sufficient colonies elsewhere, there will be no more people.
Second, your attitude will breed resentment. I agree that it is a good idea to strip resources from space. There's much more there than there is here. The differnce is that I'm willing to go do it myself and I expect conditions to be good. I further expect future colonists to look down on people who expect resources from the heavens but are unwilling to make any effort to get them. Beware of falling to the wrong side of those who DO and those who SUCK. The US is currently churning out thousands of losers a year from MBA programs who think of themselves as "leaders" but don't know squat about anything but how to manipulate people. They unabashedly think of themselves as "above" details and on a "higher" plane of thought. These are the kind of fools who think of practical tasks as boring details to be farmed out to places like India.
Sooner or later, Earth will need them more than they need Earth. By then, conditions will be better out there than here. They will remember super NIMBY attitudes some people had.
Buzz: - smack -
idiot:Did you get that on camera?
I don't know if that's Buzz or not, but it's a nice punch for anyone, especially when surrounded by all the other idiots holding camera equipment.
Not always. Every night it gets dark and sometimes you can't aford anything but a vacation where there's nothing new to do outside and a nice calm night in bed is what you were looking for anyway. You might have boarded a cruise for two weeks with your wife and two year old daughter. You could be taking a tour of industry, visiting car plants, drop towers, observatories or even ship yards, where there's not even a bar to go at night much less something nice to look at. You could go on a two week hike and want something to read at night. These are the kinds of vacations where sci-fi makes sense. On other kinds of vacations, it sometimes rains.
The kinds of trips where a sci-fi novel would not make sense are few and far between. Mardi Gras is one. On trips to Paris and Quebec, I try to soak up as much local culture as possible and local pulp fills the bill, but even then it was nice to have something to do on the plane getting there. A book has been nice on all of my other trips.
I do and that's why reviews like this are great to have. I just keep reading, hoping something will happen to redeam it. Once in a while, I'm rewarded, and I'm usually just reading myself to sleap anyway. I would never have started reading the Weber book I just finished had I read this review first. The review will, however, save me the pain of reading another Weber book or this particular Willson book. His review hit Weber on the head, so I trust the reviewer's opinion of this book by Willson. There's better stuff to read.
The upside to "In Death Ground" is that the next book I'm reading seems wonderful.