Did you work during the term, too, in the field in which you hope to be employed?
I don't know what university you went to. If you worked during the term at the one I attended, you would fail. Guaranteed. You cannot pass that course without spending the majority of your term-time studying.
Do you have at least 9 to 15 month-equivalents of real experience, and if not -- why not?
Probably because nobody will hire anybody who doesn't have 9 to 15 month-equivalents of paid experience, so there's no way to get that experience.
There are two ways that most people get their early jobs in this field:
- nepotism
- lying in interviews
If the first is not an option and you aren't willing to do the second, you will typically finish your degree having attempted to get several summer jobs and been turned down for all of them, and find that nobody's interested in hiring you now either. You're not necessarily a bad person because you weren't willing to be a lying conniving bastard, but the industry is too screwed up to bother hiring you, regardless of whether you're any good at your job. This is largely because interviews for IT-related jobs are usually testing your skills at sales and management, rather than your ability to do the job. Quite why this happens is unclear, but it is the reason why most of the people in IT-related jobs are pretty useless at them.
Here's a better question: where did you get training and good support for Windows?
No, seriously, there's a severe lack of either. I can't remember the last time I saw somebody provide worthwhile (as opposed to "anything you do is not our problem") support for Windows without simply taking over the entire IT operation and doing everything themselves (which isn't support, it's contract sysadmin work - nothing wrong with that, but it's completely different). The MCP and CompTIA training programs are largely worthless as training; their only value is as a qualification to make it easier for people to sift unreasonably large piles of CVs. Somebody who has completed any of those courses isn't really any better equipped to do their job than they were before they started.
It would be nice if all you needed to get a capable IT crew was to send them off on a training course, but that just doesn't work. It's not that sort of job.
Most of the problems with C stem from the "pointer equals array" model, the basic source of buffer overflow bugs.
Most of the reasons for using C also stem from this model. If C/C++ did not exist, we would have to invent (at least one of) them.
People keep using C because nothing else really gets the job done as well. No amount of complaining about this is going to change it. Whoever you are, whatever your ideas are, they are not a viable solution in the real world - the proof of this is that we're still using C for a wide range of tasks. If your idea actually worked, we'd be using that instead. Plenty of people would like to be able to replace C.
I almost stopped reading at that point because I've never read anything so idiotic in my entire life that wasn't a political comment. No, water is not perishable, and no, it does not go stale.
Okay, obviously a troll, but just in case anybody else was reading and thought to emulate the poster... you should not drink stale water, any more than you should eat meat which has been left out in the sun for a few hours. Water goes stale because of the growth of bacteria (and sometimes mould), which propagates through the air and begins to grow in any cold, wet place, like a water jug.
If you drink significant amounts of water that is not fresh, you will probably get sick, and you may die if you don't get medical attention. Drinking bad water is the single largest cause of human death, ever. If you have no choice, boil the water thoroughly - that'll kill most of the dangerous stuff, but it's still not a good idea.
What are the tolerances on an audio fingerprint? Will a few passes through the analog hole mess it up enough?
Wrong approach. To beat an audio fingerprint, encrypt the content. A little trivial engineering will produce software that generates an encrypted mp3 file that looks sufficiently like a real mp3 file to fool the fingerprinting software, but which is just noise unless played with the same software package. The site's filters will let it past. Shove the key in the description when you upload it, other users just have to paste the key into the software to play it. The entire process is lossless. It's not secure, but it doesn't have to be - it's just obfuscating the data sufficiently that an automated filter can no longer recognise it. Wrap the whole thing up in a greasemonkey script so users don't even have to think about it.
But there's no reason to bother when you could just move to a different site without tiresome filtering. Maybe if society loses the copyright battle it might become necessary, but that's not really likely - prohibition never works.
But, who is then responsible for testing the security of our critical systems?
The point is, not some random hacker from the UK or Romania who calls themselves a "security researcher". Honestly, this guys story is lame.
Who, then? A company who calls itself a "security researcher" will simply keep any issues secret so that the government bureaucrats can continue to do nothing about them - their customers are the people who have a vested in interest in secrecy, and no real interest in security. This sort of thing happens all the time (most recently, with the voting machine stuff).
Ignoring this guy completely for the moment, who do you think is going to uncover this kind of idiocy and let the public know where their money is being spent? Fox News?
Of course, I'm always astonished at the people who go out and buy bottled water and other non-perishables when snow storms threaten. I mean, I understand stocking up on some food, but are there honestly people out there who don't have four or five gallon jugs of water stored somewhere?
People do not ordinarily purchase large jugs and regularly fill them with water. Aside from the fact that it goes stale after a week or two (water *is* perishable), most houses have a perfectly functional cold water tank which serves the dual purpose of ensuring a constant head of water (regardless of supply pressure, which can vary throughout the day as the load on the system from nearby houses changes) and providing sufficient drinking water for several days, in the event of an outage (if you're not an idiot who takes a shower with it). Since it's part of the regular plumbing, the water in the tank is always fresh, and you don't waste any on refilling jugs that will almost never be used.
Or don't you have plumbing that supplies drinking water in your part of the world yet?
Azureus is an ok client right up until you see that it take an atrocious amount of system resources, even before it actually downloads something. It's very bloated. uTorrent or ANY other client NOT programmed in Java is much easier on the system. I personally prefer uTorrent over any other client for Windows. The exe is a whole 170k, has all the features of Azureus plus some, and takes very little system resources to run.
All the features... except for one crucial feature: Azureus is free software. uTorrent is proprietary. As soon as the MPAA get around to it, uTorrent will be bought up or sued out of existence, and then it won't be around any longer. Or the author will get bored and stop writing it, or get run over by a bus.
It's not like they're even seriously trying to make money out of the thing - uTorrent is proprietary because the authors don't believe free software can work, claiming that if they released the source, people would fork it, take credit for work they didn't do, and create "rogue" versions that wouldn't behave "fairly" (I can only presume that they're in denial about the existence of all the other bittorrent clients, none of which have suffered such a fate, not to mention all the free software in the world - these people just don't "get it").
Azureus isn't ideal, but it's pretty much the best available if you want to actually fix some of the bugs you find (rather than waiting around for the author to maybe decide that your bug is worth his time), or if you want to run something other than Windows. Those two points are far more important than a moderate degree of memory waste (it's not like the thing won't run in 256Mb, you just can't run it at the same time as firefox).
Maybe MS is somehow is benefiting from the endless cycles of MSIE-based spyware, viruses, and general security problems. If not, then it (and we) would be much better off if MS should drop MSIE completely. Where does MS come out ahead financially?
Microsoft's often-stated goal is not to make money. Their goal is to make everybody run Microsoft software for everything they do (they justify this by thinking "because nobody else can do it right"). Regardless of how bad IE might be, it's Microsoft software, so they want to make people run it rather than anything else.
Good IT people are practical, and won't want to upgrade to the newest thing just because it's new.
A more precise statement is: good IT people are busy enough already getting real work done, so won't want to spend a huge amount of effort on upgrading where there's no good reason why they should. It would just be a waste of time and money.
Users are used to Windows. They are used to the programs that they use in Windows. Why should they change? they don't buy Windows, they buy a computer...with Windows.
That's a popular theory, but it smells dubious. So I tested it at one site - all the desktops had OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and Firefox on them when they were first installed, and not Outlook or MS Office, and IE was carefully disabled (if it had been a problem, we could have had Office installed later without any trouble).
That site has now been running for over a year.
Several of the users never even noticed that they weren't using MS-ware. None of them cared. There has been no need to install any other applications on any of the desktops.
(We're now planning to deploy Linux desktops at the next new site, and not waste any more money on Windows licenses)
On reflection, the flaw in the theory becomes obvious. Every version of Windows and Office behaves differently. Every Windows box behaves differently after it's been running for 12 months and is starting to get clogged up with worms and spyware. Users are used to computers that don't behave consistently. Why should they care about a version that's slightly different again? They really don't. Most users don't pay any attention to details.
I speculate that the people who moan about how free software "isn't ready" are just trying to justify a political position. My message to them: shut up and get on with your job. Windows and Office aren't ready either, but that's never stopped you before.
Did allofmp3 pay a cent to artists getting downloaded? No RIAA , no DRM argument please. Lets say I downloaded David Gilmour album, did Mr. Gilmour get a cent?
Did the RIAA pay Mr Gilmour a cent when you bought his album in a record store? The answer is probably "no", so your point lacks relevance. Artists don't really get paid for albums (with the exception of a very small number of high-profile artists, who are used for PR purposes) - everybody in the industry knows that. Albums are what artists have to produce to satisfy their contract, for which they get paid a (small) flat fee, a bonus if sales go over certain limits, and a cut of the concert takings. If you want to get money to the artists, go to concerts. Album sales go directly into the pockets of the RIAA.
(While a lot of people have contracts which look like they pay album royalties, they only pay a cut of the profits, not the revenue, and the RIAA members use some creative accounting to ensure that albums almost never show a profit, so they never have to pay any royalties)
For business users, I think the lack of an integrated way to share calendars is a real shame. I realize that such things probably aren't that glamorous -- but I'd love to be able to edit my calendar and have my secretary edit my calendar.
Virtually nobody is the least bit interested in such functionality, because everybody just tells their secretary their password and has them edit their calendar directly.
Only geeks (== not business users) keep their passwords secret. Sad but true.
I think there's a growing sense that OLPC is a boondoggle
A boondoggle is a specific form of wasteful spending, where money is poured into a project that the people involved already know is going to fail. This is different - it's a project that people think would probably work, but there's a growing sense that there are better things to be spending money on. It's not even a *bad* investment, it's just not the best thing to be spending money on right now.
All those who lambasted RMS for the explicitness of GPLv3 may now have to reconsider their opposition. This includes organizations like Red Hat and OSDL, who called the FSF approach "extremist."
Not likely. The problem with GPLv3 is that RMS refuses to consider proposals from people who don't agree with him. Most of the problems with the GPLv3 could be solved while still accomplishing what he wants, but he sees no reason why he should bother solving them. RMS apparently does not care about making a license that other people want (previous versions of the GPL have coincided with what other people want, but that was not intentional).
Absolutely nothing to do with a them-vs-us scenario. RMS's position isn't really "extremist", it's just "entirely uncooperative". Everybody else isn't really "opposition", they're just "going to use a different license".
... the state could spend several times the amount of money that the pharmaceutical companies spend on research, and our society would still save money because the price gouging is so brutal on patent encumbered drugs.
Are you serious? Remove the profit motive? State funding?
The US is abnormal in that it doesn't do this (instead, leaving it to the medical insurance companies to finance research - the insurance companies pay for any research that looks likely to reduce costs of treatment, they don't care about patents). In most of the world, roughly all medical research is paid for by the government, from tax money, as part of the welfare state system (through a combination of direct grants, and artificially inflated drug prices when the welfare state is paying for the drugs).
The research is still done by the medical companies, it's just paid for by governments. No profit motive. The company then patents the results of that research.
He's serious. This is how everybody else does it (only the patent price-gouging bit remains a problem, so nobody's saving money).
Regardless of how realistic or non-realistic the thing is, am I the only one boggled down by the fact that the US are using a *SHOOTING GAME* to motivate people to join the army?
Since when was war supposed to be fun and desirable?
How else could they possibly motivate Americans to join the army? When you've got a nation of couch potatoes, it's pretty difficult to get them to exercise regularly and then go overseas to be shot at. "Patriotism" is a luxury for the rich (who don't join the army) and an excuse for the political, it's not a viable source of large numbers of recruits. And people certainly don't sign up because the pay is good.
But, in all honesty, there really isn't a peer military any where in the world.
Only after carefully arranging the term "military" to exclude all their peers and superiors. They may be the best of the national armies - but one of those basic facts of life is that anything run by a government will be just about the worst it can possibly be and still function (although it still may be better than the alternatives, depending on your goals). There are numerous non-government military organisations in the world these days (including both free-market mercenaries and private armies in the employ of crime lords), several of which are better trained and equipped than the US military, and a few who have larger numbers of experienced personnel (most members of the US military have never seen action against a real enemy). Almost none of them are based in the US - not enough fighting over there - while Africa and Asia have them in large numbers (corrupt governments like mercenaries), which you never hear about in the Western media (a low level of fighting that persists for decades is not news, it's history).
About the only advantage the US has over them is their ability to field a large number of rookies - and the Chinese can field far more than the US can ever hope to. Although their equipment isn't as good, they make up for it by putting ten times as many men in the field and not really caring if half of them don't come back.
American army technical superiority is great when they need to go somewhere, do the job and get away quickly or simply sterilize an area from the stratosphere, but when they have to stay somewhere, they suffer from their low headcount.
And also from the low ability of their head to count.
This is something that we've known for over 20 years now. Entirely not news. In any field (considering the productivity of a worker performing a task and assuming they are working with the best technology available at any point in time), once you've eliminated most of the accidental complexity that you created, there are no more silver bullets. You can still make things better, but you'll never achieve "a 10-fold improvement in productivity over 10 years".
The author of this editorial doesn't appear to get it, and could use a few history lessons.
``There are two basically free operating systems: GNU/Linux and BSD. Unfortunately, nearly all the versions that people use include non-free software, but basically they are free systems.''
Is that actually true?
RMS is a little perverse about this, because to be otherwise would be to contradict his historical statements, and he's nothing if not stubbornly self-consistent (regardless of how appropriate that may be in any particular case).
His position is that you're using a system that "includes non-free software" if your system has the *possibility* of including non-free software. It doesn't matter whether you use it or even have it installed - if it's on the install CD, or the vendor's website, he considers it as part of your system.
This actually has nothing to do with you, as a user. This is about RMS not wanting people to 'support' the development of non-free software. His beef's with your vendor, who doesn't spurn all non-free software - he wants them to do this, because then the development of the tiny amount of non-free software on Linux-based platforms would pretty much stop. (When he first came up with this one, all the vendors went "meh" and paid no attention, and have continued to do so to this day, so it's not really important. Just smile and nod and wait for him to move on to something else)
Actually, it probably has a lot more to do with how it is pretty much impossible to distribute binaries on Linux.
Common misconception, but badly wrong. Linux is probably the easiest platform of all to distribute binaries for, because the vendors pay particular attention to getting ABI compatibility right, and the system was designed to solve this problem. On Windows, distributing binaries gets you the affectionately named "DLL hell". People "solve" this by assuming that Windows will be used to run only one program at once so they can just take over the system in the installer and arrange it the way they want it, to be uninstalled before attempting to run any other programs - and if you do anything else, nobody will support it and it's down to you to play with it and try to get things working. In the Windows server world, you run one application per host because nobody will support anything else, due to these compatibility issues.
This is irrelevant. The problem that you're trying to describe has got nothing to do with distributing binaries. If everybody shipped their software as source, on Windows and Linux, we'd still see the exact same behaviour.
The real problem here is far more subtle: bug compatibility. Windows doesn't change, except for a handful of security patches. Every version of WinXP out there has exactly the same set of bugs in it, which will never be fixed. Linux platforms fix bugs in the libraries every day. Complicated proprietary applications with dubious QA practices, like most games, tend to break when library bugs get fixed - the application was broken from the start, but the buggy library just happened to do things in a way that didn't trigger the bug, or the application contained a workaround for the bug which assumed the bug was always present (because it was written by somebody with heavy time pressure and limited understanding).
Essentially, the fact that Microsoft doesn't fix bugs in Windows allows vendors to get away with not fixing bugs in their code. Writing applications for Linux is "harder" because you can't get away with hidden bugs like these - your code has to be far more stable. This is good for users (and free software), but the Windows developers who produce code like this (which includes the majority of game studios) find it hard to adjust and are unwilling to admit that the problem lies with their development practices.
Who's really to blame for all this? Personally, I'd say it's the publishing houses (EA) who drive the game developers to ship games early and as cheaply as possible, rather than taking a little more time and money to do a better job. A triumph of the bottom line over productivity - sales discarded to make more money faster.
How does Amazon think that a promotion like that would increase overall sales anyway?
Marketdroids, by and large, act like spoiled children. Attention-grabbing stunts are all they do. It works to a limited extent - insofar as it keeps people talking about Amazon. It may not be particularly effective, but nobody ever accused marketdroids of being very smart.
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I don't know what university you went to. If you worked during the term at the one I attended, you would fail. Guaranteed. You cannot pass that course without spending the majority of your term-time studying.
Probably because nobody will hire anybody who doesn't have 9 to 15 month-equivalents of paid experience, so there's no way to get that experience.
There are two ways that most people get their early jobs in this field:
- nepotism
- lying in interviews
If the first is not an option and you aren't willing to do the second, you will typically finish your degree having attempted to get several summer jobs and been turned down for all of them, and find that nobody's interested in hiring you now either. You're not necessarily a bad person because you weren't willing to be a lying conniving bastard, but the industry is too screwed up to bother hiring you, regardless of whether you're any good at your job. This is largely because interviews for IT-related jobs are usually testing your skills at sales and management, rather than your ability to do the job. Quite why this happens is unclear, but it is the reason why most of the people in IT-related jobs are pretty useless at them.
Here's a better question: where did you get training and good support for Windows?
No, seriously, there's a severe lack of either. I can't remember the last time I saw somebody provide worthwhile (as opposed to "anything you do is not our problem") support for Windows without simply taking over the entire IT operation and doing everything themselves (which isn't support, it's contract sysadmin work - nothing wrong with that, but it's completely different). The MCP and CompTIA training programs are largely worthless as training; their only value is as a qualification to make it easier for people to sift unreasonably large piles of CVs. Somebody who has completed any of those courses isn't really any better equipped to do their job than they were before they started.
It would be nice if all you needed to get a capable IT crew was to send them off on a training course, but that just doesn't work. It's not that sort of job.
Most of the reasons for using C also stem from this model. If C/C++ did not exist, we would have to invent (at least one of) them.
People keep using C because nothing else really gets the job done as well. No amount of complaining about this is going to change it. Whoever you are, whatever your ideas are, they are not a viable solution in the real world - the proof of this is that we're still using C for a wide range of tasks. If your idea actually worked, we'd be using that instead. Plenty of people would like to be able to replace C.
Go think of a better idea.
Okay, obviously a troll, but just in case anybody else was reading and thought to emulate the poster... you should not drink stale water, any more than you should eat meat which has been left out in the sun for a few hours. Water goes stale because of the growth of bacteria (and sometimes mould), which propagates through the air and begins to grow in any cold, wet place, like a water jug.
If you drink significant amounts of water that is not fresh, you will probably get sick, and you may die if you don't get medical attention. Drinking bad water is the single largest cause of human death, ever. If you have no choice, boil the water thoroughly - that'll kill most of the dangerous stuff, but it's still not a good idea.
Wrong approach. To beat an audio fingerprint, encrypt the content. A little trivial engineering will produce software that generates an encrypted mp3 file that looks sufficiently like a real mp3 file to fool the fingerprinting software, but which is just noise unless played with the same software package. The site's filters will let it past. Shove the key in the description when you upload it, other users just have to paste the key into the software to play it. The entire process is lossless. It's not secure, but it doesn't have to be - it's just obfuscating the data sufficiently that an automated filter can no longer recognise it. Wrap the whole thing up in a greasemonkey script so users don't even have to think about it.
But there's no reason to bother when you could just move to a different site without tiresome filtering. Maybe if society loses the copyright battle it might become necessary, but that's not really likely - prohibition never works.
Who, then? A company who calls itself a "security researcher" will simply keep any issues secret so that the government bureaucrats can continue to do nothing about them - their customers are the people who have a vested in interest in secrecy, and no real interest in security. This sort of thing happens all the time (most recently, with the voting machine stuff).
Ignoring this guy completely for the moment, who do you think is going to uncover this kind of idiocy and let the public know where their money is being spent? Fox News?
People do not ordinarily purchase large jugs and regularly fill them with water. Aside from the fact that it goes stale after a week or two (water *is* perishable), most houses have a perfectly functional cold water tank which serves the dual purpose of ensuring a constant head of water (regardless of supply pressure, which can vary throughout the day as the load on the system from nearby houses changes) and providing sufficient drinking water for several days, in the event of an outage (if you're not an idiot who takes a shower with it). Since it's part of the regular plumbing, the water in the tank is always fresh, and you don't waste any on refilling jugs that will almost never be used.
Or don't you have plumbing that supplies drinking water in your part of the world yet?
All the features... except for one crucial feature: Azureus is free software. uTorrent is proprietary. As soon as the MPAA get around to it, uTorrent will be bought up or sued out of existence, and then it won't be around any longer. Or the author will get bored and stop writing it, or get run over by a bus.
It's not like they're even seriously trying to make money out of the thing - uTorrent is proprietary because the authors don't believe free software can work, claiming that if they released the source, people would fork it, take credit for work they didn't do, and create "rogue" versions that wouldn't behave "fairly" (I can only presume that they're in denial about the existence of all the other bittorrent clients, none of which have suffered such a fate, not to mention all the free software in the world - these people just don't "get it").
Azureus isn't ideal, but it's pretty much the best available if you want to actually fix some of the bugs you find (rather than waiting around for the author to maybe decide that your bug is worth his time), or if you want to run something other than Windows. Those two points are far more important than a moderate degree of memory waste (it's not like the thing won't run in 256Mb, you just can't run it at the same time as firefox).
Microsoft's often-stated goal is not to make money. Their goal is to make everybody run Microsoft software for everything they do (they justify this by thinking "because nobody else can do it right"). Regardless of how bad IE might be, it's Microsoft software, so they want to make people run it rather than anything else.
I, think you, are confused, about the purpose, of commas. Please do, not use, them in random, places.
A more precise statement is: good IT people are busy enough already getting real work done, so won't want to spend a huge amount of effort on upgrading where there's no good reason why they should. It would just be a waste of time and money.
That's a popular theory, but it smells dubious. So I tested it at one site - all the desktops had OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and Firefox on them when they were first installed, and not Outlook or MS Office, and IE was carefully disabled (if it had been a problem, we could have had Office installed later without any trouble).
That site has now been running for over a year.
Several of the users never even noticed that they weren't using MS-ware. None of them cared. There has been no need to install any other applications on any of the desktops.
(We're now planning to deploy Linux desktops at the next new site, and not waste any more money on Windows licenses)
On reflection, the flaw in the theory becomes obvious. Every version of Windows and Office behaves differently. Every Windows box behaves differently after it's been running for 12 months and is starting to get clogged up with worms and spyware. Users are used to computers that don't behave consistently. Why should they care about a version that's slightly different again? They really don't. Most users don't pay any attention to details.
I speculate that the people who moan about how free software "isn't ready" are just trying to justify a political position. My message to them: shut up and get on with your job. Windows and Office aren't ready either, but that's never stopped you before.
For home users, who cares? I don't.
Did the RIAA pay Mr Gilmour a cent when you bought his album in a record store? The answer is probably "no", so your point lacks relevance. Artists don't really get paid for albums (with the exception of a very small number of high-profile artists, who are used for PR purposes) - everybody in the industry knows that. Albums are what artists have to produce to satisfy their contract, for which they get paid a (small) flat fee, a bonus if sales go over certain limits, and a cut of the concert takings. If you want to get money to the artists, go to concerts. Album sales go directly into the pockets of the RIAA.
(While a lot of people have contracts which look like they pay album royalties, they only pay a cut of the profits, not the revenue, and the RIAA members use some creative accounting to ensure that albums almost never show a profit, so they never have to pay any royalties)
Virtually nobody is the least bit interested in such functionality, because everybody just tells their secretary their password and has them edit their calendar directly.
Only geeks (== not business users) keep their passwords secret. Sad but true.
A boondoggle is a specific form of wasteful spending, where money is poured into a project that the people involved already know is going to fail. This is different - it's a project that people think would probably work, but there's a growing sense that there are better things to be spending money on. It's not even a *bad* investment, it's just not the best thing to be spending money on right now.
Not likely. The problem with GPLv3 is that RMS refuses to consider proposals from people who don't agree with him. Most of the problems with the GPLv3 could be solved while still accomplishing what he wants, but he sees no reason why he should bother solving them. RMS apparently does not care about making a license that other people want (previous versions of the GPL have coincided with what other people want, but that was not intentional).
Absolutely nothing to do with a them-vs-us scenario. RMS's position isn't really "extremist", it's just "entirely uncooperative". Everybody else isn't really "opposition", they're just "going to use a different license".
The US is abnormal in that it doesn't do this (instead, leaving it to the medical insurance companies to finance research - the insurance companies pay for any research that looks likely to reduce costs of treatment, they don't care about patents). In most of the world, roughly all medical research is paid for by the government, from tax money, as part of the welfare state system (through a combination of direct grants, and artificially inflated drug prices when the welfare state is paying for the drugs).
The research is still done by the medical companies, it's just paid for by governments. No profit motive. The company then patents the results of that research.
He's serious. This is how everybody else does it (only the patent price-gouging bit remains a problem, so nobody's saving money).
How else could they possibly motivate Americans to join the army? When you've got a nation of couch potatoes, it's pretty difficult to get them to exercise regularly and then go overseas to be shot at. "Patriotism" is a luxury for the rich (who don't join the army) and an excuse for the political, it's not a viable source of large numbers of recruits. And people certainly don't sign up because the pay is good.
Only after carefully arranging the term "military" to exclude all their peers and superiors. They may be the best of the national armies - but one of those basic facts of life is that anything run by a government will be just about the worst it can possibly be and still function (although it still may be better than the alternatives, depending on your goals). There are numerous non-government military organisations in the world these days (including both free-market mercenaries and private armies in the employ of crime lords), several of which are better trained and equipped than the US military, and a few who have larger numbers of experienced personnel (most members of the US military have never seen action against a real enemy). Almost none of them are based in the US - not enough fighting over there - while Africa and Asia have them in large numbers (corrupt governments like mercenaries), which you never hear about in the Western media (a low level of fighting that persists for decades is not news, it's history).
About the only advantage the US has over them is their ability to field a large number of rookies - and the Chinese can field far more than the US can ever hope to. Although their equipment isn't as good, they make up for it by putting ten times as many men in the field and not really caring if half of them don't come back.
And also from the low ability of their head to count.
...by Fred Brooks. Wikipedia has links.
This is something that we've known for over 20 years now. Entirely not news. In any field (considering the productivity of a worker performing a task and assuming they are working with the best technology available at any point in time), once you've eliminated most of the accidental complexity that you created, there are no more silver bullets. You can still make things better, but you'll never achieve "a 10-fold improvement in productivity over 10 years".
The author of this editorial doesn't appear to get it, and could use a few history lessons.
RMS is a little perverse about this, because to be otherwise would be to contradict his historical statements, and he's nothing if not stubbornly self-consistent (regardless of how appropriate that may be in any particular case).
His position is that you're using a system that "includes non-free software" if your system has the *possibility* of including non-free software. It doesn't matter whether you use it or even have it installed - if it's on the install CD, or the vendor's website, he considers it as part of your system.
This actually has nothing to do with you, as a user. This is about RMS not wanting people to 'support' the development of non-free software. His beef's with your vendor, who doesn't spurn all non-free software - he wants them to do this, because then the development of the tiny amount of non-free software on Linux-based platforms would pretty much stop. (When he first came up with this one, all the vendors went "meh" and paid no attention, and have continued to do so to this day, so it's not really important. Just smile and nod and wait for him to move on to something else)
Common misconception, but badly wrong. Linux is probably the easiest platform of all to distribute binaries for, because the vendors pay particular attention to getting ABI compatibility right, and the system was designed to solve this problem. On Windows, distributing binaries gets you the affectionately named "DLL hell". People "solve" this by assuming that Windows will be used to run only one program at once so they can just take over the system in the installer and arrange it the way they want it, to be uninstalled before attempting to run any other programs - and if you do anything else, nobody will support it and it's down to you to play with it and try to get things working. In the Windows server world, you run one application per host because nobody will support anything else, due to these compatibility issues.
This is irrelevant. The problem that you're trying to describe has got nothing to do with distributing binaries. If everybody shipped their software as source, on Windows and Linux, we'd still see the exact same behaviour.
The real problem here is far more subtle: bug compatibility. Windows doesn't change, except for a handful of security patches. Every version of WinXP out there has exactly the same set of bugs in it, which will never be fixed. Linux platforms fix bugs in the libraries every day. Complicated proprietary applications with dubious QA practices, like most games, tend to break when library bugs get fixed - the application was broken from the start, but the buggy library just happened to do things in a way that didn't trigger the bug, or the application contained a workaround for the bug which assumed the bug was always present (because it was written by somebody with heavy time pressure and limited understanding).
Essentially, the fact that Microsoft doesn't fix bugs in Windows allows vendors to get away with not fixing bugs in their code. Writing applications for Linux is "harder" because you can't get away with hidden bugs like these - your code has to be far more stable. This is good for users (and free software), but the Windows developers who produce code like this (which includes the majority of game studios) find it hard to adjust and are unwilling to admit that the problem lies with their development practices.
Who's really to blame for all this? Personally, I'd say it's the publishing houses (EA) who drive the game developers to ship games early and as cheaply as possible, rather than taking a little more time and money to do a better job. A triumph of the bottom line over productivity - sales discarded to make more money faster.
Marketdroids, by and large, act like spoiled children. Attention-grabbing stunts are all they do. It works to a limited extent - insofar as it keeps people talking about Amazon. It may not be particularly effective, but nobody ever accused marketdroids of being very smart.
We live in the post-Sonny Bono world. Copyright does not expire.