I could renew my WoW WotLK account and pay $15/month to play WoW or I could pay nothing and play TF2. I clearly can't make your decisions for you, but for me it was easy.
Well, assuming you have no interest in TF2 (which you obviously do) then would it really make sense to choose "save money" over "have fun" when what you want is "have fun" and you (presumably) have disposable income?
While I agree that using unused RAM for disk caching is good I'm not a fan of how many operating systems seem to do this. It seems a lot of times the disk cache is given a bit too much priority, I'm not going to single out Windows here because I've seen it on other systems as well. Basically what seems to happen is if I have (as an example) two active GUI applications each using 400 megs of RAM each out of a total of say, 1500 available after the OS gets its share then without making any tweaks to the system the OS will happily swap out the apps if they're inactive for more than a minute or so. What this means in practice is that if I'm working with something and switching between the two application windows every 10-20 minutes then I'll end up having to wait for the applications to be read back into RAM from the swap partition/file just about every time. And when I've checked what the RAM ended up being used for instead of keeping app in RAM it was always disk cache, because being able to quickly access some non-running program is apparently more important than the apps I'm using now not being slow as shit.
So yeah, if I have to choose between stupid disk caching and memory management or the operating system simply not doing disk caching I'll probably choose no disk caching at all. I'm just glad that swappiness can be controlled on most operating systems so I don't have to make that choice...
I have no doubt that that for the average user the default win7 UI is an improvement over the default winxp and winvista UIs. Or that the customization options for the UI in win7 beat winxp and winvista.
However, I have noticed that those of my friends and acquaintances who complain the most about the win7 UI are actually those who are used to lots of different user interfaces and have a lot of experience with different GUI environments. From what I can tell it boils down to the differences between the various "computing worlds" and how defaults are handled.
In the "mac world" a lot of focus is put on making the default settings good enough that you won't feel the need to make a lot of customizations.
In the *nix/free software world you'll most likely get no defaults at all or completely alien defaults that 90% of users will want to make major changes to.
And finally in the Windows world you've got "wonky" defaults, they're "good enough" but every power user wants to change them, there's also this weird habit of changing the names and behavior of things just as everyone has gotten used the previous strange MS-world way.
I still remember trying to set up a PPP connection with the swedish version of Windows 95, took me forever since I was going through the help files and the control panel looking for some reference to "PPP", finally I had to enlist the help of a Windows-using friend who looked at me like an idiot and told me to create a new "Fjärranslutning" ("Remote connection") and after picking the exact right option in the little wizard I had apparently created a PPP connection. The problem? This was the first time anyone in Sweden had called a PPP connection a "Fjärranslutning" which meant that my knowing what a PPP connection was suddenly became completely useless info until I had applied a Microsoft-To-Reality translation to everything on-screen. Anyway, my point is that they still pull stuff like this all over the place, and when you know the "standard" way to do and name stuff it really gets annoying to have no idea what's going on because they tried to be "user friendly" by renaming or outright hiding things they consider to be "scary" for the average user (seriously, even Apple doesn't do that, they may limit the in-your-face options but if you go to the Apple menu, enter the system preferences and click "Network" they're a lot less confusing for someone who has a bit of a grasp of networking standards).
Uh, it's not dealing with "a couple" of NAT-related issues, the more widespread NAT becomes the more issues pop up. Sure, you can generalize it to "a few design issues" but these design issues affect every program that wants to be able to receive inbound connections.
Also, for most modern applications IPv6 shouldn't be a major issue as long as they don't have thousands of places where IP addresses are defined as being four bytes in size. The main issue is support further down in the stack and on the endpoints that's pretty much done (with the exception of the nutjobs still running some old G3 iMac with Mac OS 9 and IE 5.x or the guy who swears there has been no better operating system than Windows 95 and that no one could ever need a faster computer than a 166 MHz Pentium with 32 MiB of RAM. And yes, I've encountered both examples in real life, they're generally luddites or cranks).
I'd gladly have the IPv4 address exhaustion thing not be an issue, it means lots of extra work and issues, especially with legacy systems. But it is an issue and it needs to be dealt with properly, you can't keep putting bandaid after bandaid on something that's bleeding to cover up the blood...
No, the idea of democracy is to have society's rules and administration according to the will of the people, there is no need for a leader in order for it to be democracy.
... And every home user doesn't need a public IP. And every desktop in your enterprise doesn't need a public IP. Q1 2010, Verizon reported 3.6 million FiOS Internet customers. [vzw.com] Comcast reports 14.4 million high speed (not dialup) Internet customers. The majority of those customers don't need public IP's, nor do they even know what to do with them.
The way the internet is meant to work pretty much requires their addresses to be globally routable but these days we have a bunch of hacks in various layers to deal with the lack of available globally routable addresses. And it's not going to get better five or ten years from now.
I believe the routers that they're already transiting to reach the Internet at large is also capable of NAT. Assuming full utilization of their address space, that's greater than a single/8. More than likely they are operating at 50% to 80% of their address space.
Who are "they"? The end user? The ISPs?
There are lots of ways to manage IPv4. The drive to IPv6 isn't a drive. It's a haphazard stumble towards a new standard. The problem is, it isn't a standard. Most providers haven't purchased their IPv6 blocks. Even if I, Joe Provider, bought myself a nice fat IPv6 block, my upstream providers aren't routing IPv6 yet. Common web sites are not advertising their IPv6 address, because it will cause non-IPv6 users to hang until the invalid address times out. google.com does not have an AAAA record. ipv6.l.google.com does. slashdot.org doesn't have an AAAA record, nor do they appear to have any subdomains for it. Why? Probably because their upstream provider doesn't support it yet.
Plenty of medium to large ISPs use IPv6 in their networks, they just don't offer it to residential or basic business customers, sometimes you have to pay extra, sometimes you have to sign a piece of paper stating that you understand that your SLA doesn't cover the IPv6 part of the connection...
As for google.com, that's something Google did on purpose since there are so many machines out there stuck on misconfigured networks that would otherwise try to reach the IPv6 address even though they don't actually have IPv6 access (I've worked for an ISP like this, they announced IPv6 on the network but didn't actually route traffic, completely retarded but they were happy just telling tech support to inform customers that they needed to "disable IPv6 since it's incompatible with the regular internet").
The Internet works, because all parties from Point A to Point B agree on how the network is suppose to work. They've invested countless billions of dollars in their hardware. Sure, there's been a lot of IPv6 capable hardware out there for a while, but that doesn't mean that any of them have done anything at all with it. There's been some spot testing, but nothing wide spread, like on the entire Internet.
There are actually lots of IPv6 users, but we're still the minority. The main problem is that people have been pointing out that we need to migrate to IPv6 for 15 years or so now but managers and incompetent sysadmins without foresight have stubbornly refused with arguments along the lines of "Oh, we don't need IPv6 support now, and we'll write this hardware off in three years, then we'll see what the situation is like". And five years later they're complaining about how they don't want to replace said hardware...
As others have stated, that's an ancient article by DJB who has a tendency to be very vocal about things he probably should read up on again before expressing his misconceptions.
There's a whole bunch of things wrong with that article, I'm sure it's been refuted in a thousand/. comments on articles about IPv6 before though, so I suggest you use Google...
You do realize that the very same page is also compressed when using DSL, right? Or do you mean you use some kind of proxy service which does lossy compression on all images? Well, then it's still not gonna give you the same user experience as a DSL connection which is ten times faster.
There is no way a 56k or slower modem "looks as fast as 500k DSL".
Actually, there are fewer available blocks than are seen in that one, they're being assigned a lot faster than it's possible to reclaim the few that are possible to reclaim.
OS X includes Apache and Python. I can't remember if gcc and emacs are in the default install or if you have to install XCode (free and included on the install DVD that comes with new macs, also available from Apple's website) to get it. As for TeX/LaTeX and PostgreSQL, those can be installed with little effort. And if you want to be able to install and upgrade *nix software easily you can use MacPorts which is basically the FreeBSD ports system but for OS X.
A firewall/packet filter is not the same thing as NAT, you don't need the latter to have the former. In fact, it used to be that the internet was pretty much free of NAT but there were still firewalls (although they tended to be a lot less restrictive in what services were blocked).
No, the predictions for when the last/8 blocks will be gone have been adjusted a little over the years but no, no one's been saying we'd be completely out of addresses by now (no one with a clue anyway). Every time the issue comes up there does seem to be a whole bunch of people who either say "YOU SAID THEY'D ALL BE GONE NOW!", "WE DON'T NEED IPv6! IT'S A SCAM!" and of course "WITHOUT NAT BOTNETS WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD BECAUSE I DON'T UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PACKET FILTERING AND ADDRESS TRANSLATION!!11".
Sorry about the caps but I keep seeing these three "arguments" repeated over and over and over and over and over again. And they always get refuted but at some point I just expect people to actually pay attention and learn something...
Actually, Apple builds systems that consist of both hardware and software. A bit like the UNIX workstation manufacturers that used to be all over the place. In fact, I seem to recall their operating system being a UNIX. Hey, maybe that's why I have a 27" iMac? Yeah, it is, it's a capable UNIX workstation that doesn't require me to edit xorg.conf, putz around with kernel modules, spend hours trying to make the network configuration stick or curse over audio subsystem incompatibilities just to get a usable system (yes, that pretty much describes when I setup Ubuntu 10.04 on my netbook a while back and that's as someone who's been a Linux/UNIX user since the mid-90s with experience working as a Linux sysadmin managing a cluster of machines that each cost more than a decent used car). Really, if you're a *nix user who wants a desktop *nix system that works out of the box these days it's Apple that offers the best solution.
You're lucky, if I want to obey the law I have to use proxies to pretend I'm in the US. Of course, I suppose that might technically be breaking some US laws (from what I've gathered it's perfectly legal here in.se). Now, if the content providers would stop being dicks we might actually be able to get some video on the iTunes store which isn't the "iTunes University".
Well, there are swedish TV shows on various channels' websites but if I am willing to pay to watch US shows I can't since the content providers won't let me. And when I then choose to pirate the shows rather than wait several months that's somehow because I'm the evil pirate who can only be stopped by harsher copyright laws...
The Soviets also never said "we will hit the US with nukes". Instead, they were all about "world peace" and "progress". Read Churchill's Fulton speech to understand how these things work in reality.
And after the fall of the USSR it has been shown that they weren't planning to attack the US any more than the US was planning to attack them, if anything they poured a lot of resources into being able to strike back, they were terrified of the thought that the US would attack them.
But I suspect in the history books available in american schools this isn't really mentioned too much, there seems to still be a lot of fear in the US when it comes to "the red menace", "pinkos", "commies" and other bogeymen...
The only speculation on is who wrote it. Not how easy it is. Those of us who write this sort of software know how easy it is.
This. Really, while I haven't worked with these particular systems I have taken courses on how to program similar systems (in an environment where real hardware and software was used and the problems given to us to solve were all "real" problems that those arranging the course had encountered themselves) and I don't really remember it being all that hard. There was documentation for pretty much everything available (and if the manufacturers of the equipment didn't want to hand out docs and hardware practically for free there were apparently plenty of companies using said gear that would happily hand over docs and gear for free just so they'd have an easier time finding new employees).
Now, after PLCs and industrial robot programming we went over to microprocessor programming (68HC11 asm to be more specific) and that's when a lot of the students seemed to start having problems, even those who had no problems with the previous parts of the course. That should give anyone who understands HC11 asm an idea of how hard it really is.
Most "self-made men" aren't nearly as self-made as people like to believe. Most of them got lucky more than once in their lives in order to get where they are. That's not to say luck in itself is all it's about, just that skill, perseverance and having an idea with potential isn't enough. Luck plays in, if you have an idea a little too soon the world may not be ready for it, and if you're a little too late then it might not be different enough from something else to grab everyone's attention.
Actually, the electrician can be outsourced, just not offshored.
This is happening in more and more fields, as a worker you and a whole bunch of others are employed by Company A which only pays you for the hours you work, the customer uses Company B which in turn has a contract with Company A for n man-hours of work available per week. The customer pays less, Company B doesn't pay as much per hour worked and Company A has a reason to exist. Of course, you as a worker for Company A are living without any job security, bottom of the barrel wages and the customer may have to deal with a disgruntled worker who doesn't give a shit. But hey, cheaper is better, right?
It already works like this for a lot of tech support and customer service jobs, everyone saves money and no one but "Company A" is really happy with it (but Company B wouldn't be able to compete if they didn't join the race to the bottom like everyone else and the customer has been brainwashed into thinking that cheaper is always better).
Actually, the grandparent (or rather, the people described in the post) missed the point. The point isn't "we can't afford stuff! stuff should be free! WAAAH!", it's about rights, personal integrity and in extension safeguarding a free and democratic society. However, most people would rather get a $50/year tax cut and not think so much...
And it really helps them when people from established political parties describe the pirate party as thieves, slackers and people who just want something for nothing. Makes it a lot easier to just think "I can afford stuff, I don't need stuff for free." while you vote for whoever promises you the biggest tax cut.
He's arguing that Adobe's proprietary solution is good and that lack of openness is not a good argument against it and at the same time arguing that Apple is bad for not being open enough. The common element being "Apple is the bad one here, mmmkay.". Also,
Also, it could be argued that h.264 is quite open (although there are various licensing requirements the standard is "open" in the sense that it's not a locked-up format like.doc or flash where a single company changes the format as they feel like and everyone else has to constantly reverse engineer it since there is either no documentation or the documentation omits information necessary to build a working implementation).
So you're pro-Flash in some posts (Yay for super-closed standards controlled by Adobe!) and in others you're bashing Apple for claiming to be more pro-openness since they're not open enough (Boo! I want my technically inferior format that may or may not be patent-encumbered!)?
Slashdot Mirror
Or possibly make it even easier to gank "noobs" in lvl30-40 zones, death from above...
I could renew my WoW WotLK account and pay $15/month to play WoW or I could pay nothing and play TF2. I clearly can't make your decisions for you, but for me it was easy.
Well, assuming you have no interest in TF2 (which you obviously do) then would it really make sense to choose "save money" over "have fun" when what you want is "have fun" and you (presumably) have disposable income?
While I agree that using unused RAM for disk caching is good I'm not a fan of how many operating systems seem to do this. It seems a lot of times the disk cache is given a bit too much priority, I'm not going to single out Windows here because I've seen it on other systems as well. Basically what seems to happen is if I have (as an example) two active GUI applications each using 400 megs of RAM each out of a total of say, 1500 available after the OS gets its share then without making any tweaks to the system the OS will happily swap out the apps if they're inactive for more than a minute or so. What this means in practice is that if I'm working with something and switching between the two application windows every 10-20 minutes then I'll end up having to wait for the applications to be read back into RAM from the swap partition/file just about every time. And when I've checked what the RAM ended up being used for instead of keeping app in RAM it was always disk cache, because being able to quickly access some non-running program is apparently more important than the apps I'm using now not being slow as shit.
So yeah, if I have to choose between stupid disk caching and memory management or the operating system simply not doing disk caching I'll probably choose no disk caching at all. I'm just glad that swappiness can be controlled on most operating systems so I don't have to make that choice...
I have no doubt that that for the average user the default win7 UI is an improvement over the default winxp and winvista UIs. Or that the customization options for the UI in win7 beat winxp and winvista.
However, I have noticed that those of my friends and acquaintances who complain the most about the win7 UI are actually those who are used to lots of different user interfaces and have a lot of experience with different GUI environments. From what I can tell it boils down to the differences between the various "computing worlds" and how defaults are handled.
In the "mac world" a lot of focus is put on making the default settings good enough that you won't feel the need to make a lot of customizations.
In the *nix/free software world you'll most likely get no defaults at all or completely alien defaults that 90% of users will want to make major changes to.
And finally in the Windows world you've got "wonky" defaults, they're "good enough" but every power user wants to change them, there's also this weird habit of changing the names and behavior of things just as everyone has gotten used the previous strange MS-world way.
I still remember trying to set up a PPP connection with the swedish version of Windows 95, took me forever since I was going through the help files and the control panel looking for some reference to "PPP", finally I had to enlist the help of a Windows-using friend who looked at me like an idiot and told me to create a new "Fjärranslutning" ("Remote connection") and after picking the exact right option in the little wizard I had apparently created a PPP connection. The problem? This was the first time anyone in Sweden had called a PPP connection a "Fjärranslutning" which meant that my knowing what a PPP connection was suddenly became completely useless info until I had applied a Microsoft-To-Reality translation to everything on-screen. Anyway, my point is that they still pull stuff like this all over the place, and when you know the "standard" way to do and name stuff it really gets annoying to have no idea what's going on because they tried to be "user friendly" by renaming or outright hiding things they consider to be "scary" for the average user (seriously, even Apple doesn't do that, they may limit the in-your-face options but if you go to the Apple menu, enter the system preferences and click "Network" they're a lot less confusing for someone who has a bit of a grasp of networking standards).
Wow, double troll points for you.
How about you try actually reading beyond the first sentence?
Uh, it's not dealing with "a couple" of NAT-related issues, the more widespread NAT becomes the more issues pop up. Sure, you can generalize it to "a few design issues" but these design issues affect every program that wants to be able to receive inbound connections.
Also, for most modern applications IPv6 shouldn't be a major issue as long as they don't have thousands of places where IP addresses are defined as being four bytes in size. The main issue is support further down in the stack and on the endpoints that's pretty much done (with the exception of the nutjobs still running some old G3 iMac with Mac OS 9 and IE 5.x or the guy who swears there has been no better operating system than Windows 95 and that no one could ever need a faster computer than a 166 MHz Pentium with 32 MiB of RAM. And yes, I've encountered both examples in real life, they're generally luddites or cranks).
I'd gladly have the IPv4 address exhaustion thing not be an issue, it means lots of extra work and issues, especially with legacy systems. But it is an issue and it needs to be dealt with properly, you can't keep putting bandaid after bandaid on something that's bleeding to cover up the blood...
No, the idea of democracy is to have society's rules and administration according to the will of the people, there is no need for a leader in order for it to be democracy.
... And every home user doesn't need a public IP. And every desktop in your enterprise doesn't need a public IP. Q1 2010, Verizon reported 3.6 million FiOS Internet customers. [vzw.com] Comcast reports 14.4 million high speed (not dialup) Internet customers. The majority of those customers don't need public IP's, nor do they even know what to do with them.
The way the internet is meant to work pretty much requires their addresses to be globally routable but these days we have a bunch of hacks in various layers to deal with the lack of available globally routable addresses. And it's not going to get better five or ten years from now.
I believe the routers that they're already transiting to reach the Internet at large is also capable of NAT. Assuming full utilization of their address space, that's greater than a single /8. More than likely they are operating at 50% to 80% of their address space.
Who are "they"? The end user? The ISPs?
There are lots of ways to manage IPv4. The drive to IPv6 isn't a drive. It's a haphazard stumble towards a new standard. The problem is, it isn't a standard. Most providers haven't purchased their IPv6 blocks. Even if I, Joe Provider, bought myself a nice fat IPv6 block, my upstream providers aren't routing IPv6 yet. Common web sites are not advertising their IPv6 address, because it will cause non-IPv6 users to hang until the invalid address times out. google.com does not have an AAAA record. ipv6.l.google.com does. slashdot.org doesn't have an AAAA record, nor do they appear to have any subdomains for it. Why? Probably because their upstream provider doesn't support it yet.
Plenty of medium to large ISPs use IPv6 in their networks, they just don't offer it to residential or basic business customers, sometimes you have to pay extra, sometimes you have to sign a piece of paper stating that you understand that your SLA doesn't cover the IPv6 part of the connection...
As for google.com, that's something Google did on purpose since there are so many machines out there stuck on misconfigured networks that would otherwise try to reach the IPv6 address even though they don't actually have IPv6 access (I've worked for an ISP like this, they announced IPv6 on the network but didn't actually route traffic, completely retarded but they were happy just telling tech support to inform customers that they needed to "disable IPv6 since it's incompatible with the regular internet").
The Internet works, because all parties from Point A to Point B agree on how the network is suppose to work. They've invested countless billions of dollars in their hardware. Sure, there's been a lot of IPv6 capable hardware out there for a while, but that doesn't mean that any of them have done anything at all with it. There's been some spot testing, but nothing wide spread, like on the entire Internet.
There are actually lots of IPv6 users, but we're still the minority. The main problem is that people have been pointing out that we need to migrate to IPv6 for 15 years or so now but managers and incompetent sysadmins without foresight have stubbornly refused with arguments along the lines of "Oh, we don't need IPv6 support now, and we'll write this hardware off in three years, then we'll see what the situation is like". And five years later they're complaining about how they don't want to replace said hardware...
As others have stated, that's an ancient article by DJB who has a tendency to be very vocal about things he probably should read up on again before expressing his misconceptions.
There's a whole bunch of things wrong with that article, I'm sure it's been refuted in a thousand /. comments on articles about IPv6 before though, so I suggest you use Google...
Please, this is the start of a wonderfully annoying argument that pops up every time the anti-IPv6 crowd decides that it's new and scary.
NAT is not the solution to this problem, it is an ugly stopgap hack.
You do realize that the very same page is also compressed when using DSL, right? Or do you mean you use some kind of proxy service which does lossy compression on all images? Well, then it's still not gonna give you the same user experience as a DSL connection which is ten times faster.
There is no way a 56k or slower modem "looks as fast as 500k DSL".
Actually, there are fewer available blocks than are seen in that one, they're being assigned a lot faster than it's possible to reclaim the few that are possible to reclaim.
OS X includes Apache and Python. I can't remember if gcc and emacs are in the default install or if you have to install XCode (free and included on the install DVD that comes with new macs, also available from Apple's website) to get it. As for TeX/LaTeX and PostgreSQL, those can be installed with little effort. And if you want to be able to install and upgrade *nix software easily you can use MacPorts which is basically the FreeBSD ports system but for OS X.
A firewall/packet filter is not the same thing as NAT, you don't need the latter to have the former. In fact, it used to be that the internet was pretty much free of NAT but there were still firewalls (although they tended to be a lot less restrictive in what services were blocked).
No, the predictions for when the last /8 blocks will be gone have been adjusted a little over the years but no, no one's been saying we'd be completely out of addresses by now (no one with a clue anyway). Every time the issue comes up there does seem to be a whole bunch of people who either say "YOU SAID THEY'D ALL BE GONE NOW!", "WE DON'T NEED IPv6! IT'S A SCAM!" and of course "WITHOUT NAT BOTNETS WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD BECAUSE I DON'T UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PACKET FILTERING AND ADDRESS TRANSLATION!!11".
Sorry about the caps but I keep seeing these three "arguments" repeated over and over and over and over and over again. And they always get refuted but at some point I just expect people to actually pay attention and learn something...
Actually, Apple builds systems that consist of both hardware and software. A bit like the UNIX workstation manufacturers that used to be all over the place. In fact, I seem to recall their operating system being a UNIX. Hey, maybe that's why I have a 27" iMac? Yeah, it is, it's a capable UNIX workstation that doesn't require me to edit xorg.conf, putz around with kernel modules, spend hours trying to make the network configuration stick or curse over audio subsystem incompatibilities just to get a usable system (yes, that pretty much describes when I setup Ubuntu 10.04 on my netbook a while back and that's as someone who's been a Linux/UNIX user since the mid-90s with experience working as a Linux sysadmin managing a cluster of machines that each cost more than a decent used car). Really, if you're a *nix user who wants a desktop *nix system that works out of the box these days it's Apple that offers the best solution.
-PAY for iTune$/Netflick$/etc
You're lucky, if I want to obey the law I have to use proxies to pretend I'm in the US. Of course, I suppose that might technically be breaking some US laws (from what I've gathered it's perfectly legal here in .se). Now, if the content providers would stop being dicks we might actually be able to get some video on the iTunes store which isn't the "iTunes University".
Well, there are swedish TV shows on various channels' websites but if I am willing to pay to watch US shows I can't since the content providers won't let me. And when I then choose to pirate the shows rather than wait several months that's somehow because I'm the evil pirate who can only be stopped by harsher copyright laws...
The Soviets also never said "we will hit the US with nukes". Instead, they were all about "world peace" and "progress". Read Churchill's Fulton speech to understand how these things work in reality.
And after the fall of the USSR it has been shown that they weren't planning to attack the US any more than the US was planning to attack them, if anything they poured a lot of resources into being able to strike back, they were terrified of the thought that the US would attack them.
But I suspect in the history books available in american schools this isn't really mentioned too much, there seems to still be a lot of fear in the US when it comes to "the red menace", "pinkos", "commies" and other bogeymen...
The only speculation on is who wrote it. Not how easy it is. Those of us who write this sort of software know how easy it is.
This. Really, while I haven't worked with these particular systems I have taken courses on how to program similar systems (in an environment where real hardware and software was used and the problems given to us to solve were all "real" problems that those arranging the course had encountered themselves) and I don't really remember it being all that hard. There was documentation for pretty much everything available (and if the manufacturers of the equipment didn't want to hand out docs and hardware practically for free there were apparently plenty of companies using said gear that would happily hand over docs and gear for free just so they'd have an easier time finding new employees).
Now, after PLCs and industrial robot programming we went over to microprocessor programming (68HC11 asm to be more specific) and that's when a lot of the students seemed to start having problems, even those who had no problems with the previous parts of the course. That should give anyone who understands HC11 asm an idea of how hard it really is.
Then there was the sheer luck with DOS.
And here is the real kicker.
Most "self-made men" aren't nearly as self-made as people like to believe. Most of them got lucky more than once in their lives in order to get where they are. That's not to say luck in itself is all it's about, just that skill, perseverance and having an idea with potential isn't enough. Luck plays in, if you have an idea a little too soon the world may not be ready for it, and if you're a little too late then it might not be different enough from something else to grab everyone's attention.
Actually, the electrician can be outsourced, just not offshored.
This is happening in more and more fields, as a worker you and a whole bunch of others are employed by Company A which only pays you for the hours you work, the customer uses Company B which in turn has a contract with Company A for n man-hours of work available per week. The customer pays less, Company B doesn't pay as much per hour worked and Company A has a reason to exist. Of course, you as a worker for Company A are living without any job security, bottom of the barrel wages and the customer may have to deal with a disgruntled worker who doesn't give a shit. But hey, cheaper is better, right?
It already works like this for a lot of tech support and customer service jobs, everyone saves money and no one but "Company A" is really happy with it (but Company B wouldn't be able to compete if they didn't join the race to the bottom like everyone else and the customer has been brainwashed into thinking that cheaper is always better).
You probably shouldn't tell any finns that they "may as well be Russians", that's the kind of thing that will earn you a swift stabbing in Finland...
Actually, the grandparent (or rather, the people described in the post) missed the point. The point isn't "we can't afford stuff! stuff should be free! WAAAH!", it's about rights, personal integrity and in extension safeguarding a free and democratic society. However, most people would rather get a $50/year tax cut and not think so much...
And it really helps them when people from established political parties describe the pirate party as thieves, slackers and people who just want something for nothing. Makes it a lot easier to just think "I can afford stuff, I don't need stuff for free." while you vote for whoever promises you the biggest tax cut.
He's arguing that Adobe's proprietary solution is good and that lack of openness is not a good argument against it and at the same time arguing that Apple is bad for not being open enough. The common element being "Apple is the bad one here, mmmkay.". Also,
Also, it could be argued that h.264 is quite open (although there are various licensing requirements the standard is "open" in the sense that it's not a locked-up format like .doc or flash where a single company changes the format as they feel like and everyone else has to constantly reverse engineer it since there is either no documentation or the documentation omits information necessary to build a working implementation).
So you're pro-Flash in some posts (Yay for super-closed standards controlled by Adobe!) and in others you're bashing Apple for claiming to be more pro-openness since they're not open enough (Boo! I want my technically inferior format that may or may not be patent-encumbered!)?
Can you please make up your mind?