Gave some bug fixes back to a GNU project that we used on VMS. It lasted one release and then Stallman changed it seemingly to match the GNU style better but without actually knowing how it worked on VMS it was broken again. So at that point I just patched it without sharing the bug fix back again.
Use of open source covers a lot of cases. I have known startups that just copy and paste open source code, not even bothering to retain copyright notices, or even bothering to find out which open source solution would be best. The company often does not even know this is happening if development is done by a lot of mediocre devs that don't even communicate with each other much less to management. I see a lot of FreeBSD stuff littered about in products, and while this is generally very corporate friendly they still want the copyrights to be retained.
Having to "give back" to open source on the other hand is extremely difficult. Everyone is under time pressure. Even if a company hires a couple of people to help out with open source those guys are not down in the trenches seeing what everyone else is doing. So we make bug fixes to some open source library, but there's no fast and convenient way to send those bug fixes back to the original product. The people fixing the bugs may not even know where the code originally came from, the code may be a decade old and no longer match the current open source code base, etc. Most developers will just fix the bug and then move on. The only exceptions I've seen on this are with very large corporations like IBM who seem to only be contributing as a part of public relations.
For open source developers with burn out, maybe the solution is to realize that you're writing code as your hobby and not because you get some credit or thumbs-up, as if this were social media. Everyone is getting burn out anyway, whether open source or proprietary or volunteer or for pay.
The number of jobs that companies promise in exchange for tax breaks has always been a lie. The actual jobs are always a small fraction of what was originally claimed, and the promised increase in revenue to the cities never actually shows up.
If a municipality or state makes an agreement here to get new business relocated, then they should be putting in hard requirements into the deals. Ie, reduce the taxes only if the promises are kept, increasing them proportionate to how far apart the promises and reality actually are.
Politicians weasel out of this though. When the jobs don't show up the politicians never takes the blame, but just passes it along to the company ("how was I to know they didn't consider a handshake to be binding?") or to an opposing party ("they undermined me at every turn!").
"Should" not is wrong here. Corporations make great use of government services. We don't have a system that directly applies fees to infrastructure (such as dollars per mile spent shipping products on roads) then they should be paying their fair share of the load that creates infrastructures and services that they make use of.
When they make tons of profits and the workers are barely making ends meet with diminishing salaries, why is it more appropriate for citizens to pay taxes rather than corporations?
The part where the profits are increased because government taxes went and paid for infrastructure that they depend upon. Ie, water and sewage for their workers, roads so that workers can arrive at the plants, railroads and bridges so that their goods can be shipped out, a court system so that they can make use of a legal system when they have disputes, police and military to protect their real estate and workers, etc.
Companies do not make money in a vacuum, governments are a vital part of doing business. When a large corporation pays 0% in taxes then they are essentially free-loading off of everyone who does pay tax. Even the most staunch capital-L Libertarian will agree that this is unfair.
And don't say "comrade" as if paying taxes were synonymous with communism, that just makes any argument you had look stupid.
This isn't GOP garbage, this is cold hard facts that most large businesses do not pay their fair share of taxes on their profits. Any loophole or shelter they can find is used. This is not looked down upon or even hidden, this is considered normal business procedure. The more money you make, including corporations, the easier it is to find ways to avoid paying taxes. This isn't even a matter of flat-rate tax or similar suggestions, the problem is that there are so many ways to just avoid tax.
Municipalities try to find ways to get some tax just to cover the costs of making an infrastructure for these large corporations, which in turn causes these corporations to become offended and try to find a second headquarters or even move overseas because they have an attitude that any tax is an unfair tax. They do play a nasty game though of claiming to bring in jobs and that hypnotizes so many municipal lawmakers into making bad deals that cost more revenue overall. Corporations will *always* lie about the expected number of workers. Some of these companies even manage to fool the feds or the president.
so the problem is the price? That's not the same thing as "obsolete". The reason people push the "internet" for this is because they mistakenly assume it's free.
Textbooks are a great reference. As long as kids remember how to read and turn pages, so another half decade at least. The internet may be good for supplementary information, the textbook is generally laid out in a straightforward manner, it's compact, and it's all there.
People have been claiming that computers will replace traditional education methods since the late 1970s. And yet it hasn't come to pass. Every "breakthrough" here has been a flop. Online videos really are nothing more than the old films they used to show in class, except that they beg you to subscribe and like.
I made the date of birth comment... But for some products it doesn't matter. I'm working on one where time means "right now", and unsigned long works great for most of that. Some security layers are using 64-bit time. If I had designed the thing, I'd probably make sure that any external view of time was done in signed 64-bit; internally signed time would get rid of some pesky typecasts but otherwise there's no need for 64-bits there.
You sound as if you just want one format for all time uses. Except that it doesn't work, it doesn't take into account microsecond resolution that many applications need or even smaller in some domains. Different domains have different uses for time and trying to cram it all into a single standardized format doesn't always work.
Already we have to work with multiple time formats. I run across stuff I have to interface with that uses 2010 as the time base, stuff that uses 16-bits for the time-of-day (with the silly 2-second resolution that MSDOS had), stuff with no concept of daylight saving's time, and so forth. So having to deal with time is a part of job in some segments of embedded devices.
These companies come in and do a razzle-dazzle show and manage to get subsidies that they don't need. This is not just Amazon, it happens all over the place. Businesses get promised tax breaks and the cities realize after the fact that they got screwed. Ie, Walmart is very good at convincing small towns to give them a huge tax break, otherwise they threaten to build the store just across the border (the upshot of the tax breaks is that some stores such as groceries start to go out of business due to unfair competition). It's common for sports teams to try and get tax breaks if they move their stadiums to the new locale.
He was forbidden to "possess" weapons because of an earlier crime which led to a court order. He seemingly confused this with "purchasing" a weapon and decided it would be ok to just build his own. Possessing the weapon, and possessing ammo, in violation of the court order was what he was convicted of. Even in Texas they don't take kindly to violating court orders. The bit about a list of names of targets was a side issue.
I don't think the time formats had a lack of foresight. They were used for particular uses where it made sense. What broke was when people took the original signed 32-bit file time format to use for other purposes. Ie, purposes other than the file time on a specific PDP filesystem implementation. But it slowly got standardized in many file systems, the function calls dealing with time got standardized, and the file timestamp format started being used for things other than file timestamps. The original Unix system is no longer in use, their assumption was entirely correct and it isn't around still after 40 years later except as simulations.
They originally used this format for file timestamps, so it was unlikely to ever have file's created or modified before 1970... It was after this point that people started wanting to use this format for all sorts of uses for which it was not suitable. Ie, I worked on a medical device that initially used this signed 32-bit time format for medical records; but that was a problem since you couldn't express some patient's date of birth, whoops.
Much of the problems come from blind reliance on third party libraries, or naivete about domain knowledge. They expect that they don't have to worry about such issues if they only call the appropriate library. It's only later that they discover that the library wasn't intended for what it was being used for. I am seriously amazed at how many experienced programmers don't know much about time and yet seem to think that it's simple and that anyone can do it.
32 bits works even longer if you make it unsigned. For uses where you don't have to worry about things in the distant past, this is fine and trivial to implement. This is really helpful for the hordes of 16-and 32-bit embedded systems out there. Certainly 64-bits would be better for newer products, or anything between 33 and 64 bits (say you're on an 8bit cpu and would prefer 5 bytes instead of 8). You can also tweak the epoch start time to not be 1/1/1970 as well, if you know your time format will only stay local to the device, then converting between the device time and Unix time is a simple addition.
For something like GPS where you have data transmitting over the air then going to 64-bit is a waste of bandwidth. If you're talking to a Mars rover, then the extra bits are a serious disadvantage. So instead you rely on having good documentation of the format and that you can convert to other time formats as needed. Since we've known that GPS times will rollover in a relatively short period of time (ten years is shorter than many expected product lifetimes) you would assume that the receivers know how to deal with this. The problem is not that everyone needs to update firmware, but that you need to check if you have a halfway decent GPS receiver versus a piece of junk designed by noobs.
Slashdot Mirror
The new porn filters will no longer let you say "SCOTUS".
Are they just lazy and haven't taken them down in 40 years, or they put up new ones?
"Vote for me, at least I tried to stamp out porn unlike my competitor is is in big-porn's pocket!"
Gave some bug fixes back to a GNU project that we used on VMS. It lasted one release and then Stallman changed it seemingly to match the GNU style better but without actually knowing how it worked on VMS it was broken again. So at that point I just patched it without sharing the bug fix back again.
Use of open source covers a lot of cases. I have known startups that just copy and paste open source code, not even bothering to retain copyright notices, or even bothering to find out which open source solution would be best. The company often does not even know this is happening if development is done by a lot of mediocre devs that don't even communicate with each other much less to management. I see a lot of FreeBSD stuff littered about in products, and while this is generally very corporate friendly they still want the copyrights to be retained.
Having to "give back" to open source on the other hand is extremely difficult. Everyone is under time pressure. Even if a company hires a couple of people to help out with open source those guys are not down in the trenches seeing what everyone else is doing. So we make bug fixes to some open source library, but there's no fast and convenient way to send those bug fixes back to the original product. The people fixing the bugs may not even know where the code originally came from, the code may be a decade old and no longer match the current open source code base, etc. Most developers will just fix the bug and then move on. The only exceptions I've seen on this are with very large corporations like IBM who seem to only be contributing as a part of public relations.
For open source developers with burn out, maybe the solution is to realize that you're writing code as your hobby and not because you get some credit or thumbs-up, as if this were social media. Everyone is getting burn out anyway, whether open source or proprietary or volunteer or for pay.
The number of jobs that companies promise in exchange for tax breaks has always been a lie. The actual jobs are always a small fraction of what was originally claimed, and the promised increase in revenue to the cities never actually shows up.
If a municipality or state makes an agreement here to get new business relocated, then they should be putting in hard requirements into the deals. Ie, reduce the taxes only if the promises are kept, increasing them proportionate to how far apart the promises and reality actually are.
Politicians weasel out of this though. When the jobs don't show up the politicians never takes the blame, but just passes it along to the company ("how was I to know they didn't consider a handshake to be binding?") or to an opposing party ("they undermined me at every turn!").
"Should" not is wrong here. Corporations make great use of government services. We don't have a system that directly applies fees to infrastructure (such as dollars per mile spent shipping products on roads) then they should be paying their fair share of the load that creates infrastructures and services that they make use of.
When they make tons of profits and the workers are barely making ends meet with diminishing salaries, why is it more appropriate for citizens to pay taxes rather than corporations?
The part where the profits are increased because government taxes went and paid for infrastructure that they depend upon. Ie, water and sewage for their workers, roads so that workers can arrive at the plants, railroads and bridges so that their goods can be shipped out, a court system so that they can make use of a legal system when they have disputes, police and military to protect their real estate and workers, etc.
Companies do not make money in a vacuum, governments are a vital part of doing business. When a large corporation pays 0% in taxes then they are essentially free-loading off of everyone who does pay tax. Even the most staunch capital-L Libertarian will agree that this is unfair.
And don't say "comrade" as if paying taxes were synonymous with communism, that just makes any argument you had look stupid.
This isn't GOP garbage, this is cold hard facts that most large businesses do not pay their fair share of taxes on their profits. Any loophole or shelter they can find is used. This is not looked down upon or even hidden, this is considered normal business procedure. The more money you make, including corporations, the easier it is to find ways to avoid paying taxes. This isn't even a matter of flat-rate tax or similar suggestions, the problem is that there are so many ways to just avoid tax.
Municipalities try to find ways to get some tax just to cover the costs of making an infrastructure for these large corporations, which in turn causes these corporations to become offended and try to find a second headquarters or even move overseas because they have an attitude that any tax is an unfair tax. They do play a nasty game though of claiming to bring in jobs and that hypnotizes so many municipal lawmakers into making bad deals that cost more revenue overall. Corporations will *always* lie about the expected number of workers. Some of these companies even manage to fool the feds or the president.
Or two Indian companies dominating world wide...
so the problem is the price? That's not the same thing as "obsolete". The reason people push the "internet" for this is because they mistakenly assume it's free.
Get a used textbook. The textbook will also last you for decades.
Textbooks are a great reference. As long as kids remember how to read and turn pages, so another half decade at least. The internet may be good for supplementary information, the textbook is generally laid out in a straightforward manner, it's compact, and it's all there.
People have been claiming that computers will replace traditional education methods since the late 1970s. And yet it hasn't come to pass. Every "breakthrough" here has been a flop. Online videos really are nothing more than the old films they used to show in class, except that they beg you to subscribe and like.
Where are the stats to back this up? You can't just claim an incendiary partisan point like that without citing sources.
I made the date of birth comment... But for some products it doesn't matter. I'm working on one where time means "right now", and unsigned long works great for most of that. Some security layers are using 64-bit time. If I had designed the thing, I'd probably make sure that any external view of time was done in signed 64-bit; internally signed time would get rid of some pesky typecasts but otherwise there's no need for 64-bits there.
You sound as if you just want one format for all time uses. Except that it doesn't work, it doesn't take into account microsecond resolution that many applications need or even smaller in some domains. Different domains have different uses for time and trying to cram it all into a single standardized format doesn't always work.
Already we have to work with multiple time formats. I run across stuff I have to interface with that uses 2010 as the time base, stuff that uses 16-bits for the time-of-day (with the silly 2-second resolution that MSDOS had), stuff with no concept of daylight saving's time, and so forth. So having to deal with time is a part of job in some segments of embedded devices.
Except that this happens again and again. I think municipal politicians are as dumb as any other politician.
These companies come in and do a razzle-dazzle show and manage to get subsidies that they don't need. This is not just Amazon, it happens all over the place. Businesses get promised tax breaks and the cities realize after the fact that they got screwed. Ie, Walmart is very good at convincing small towns to give them a huge tax break, otherwise they threaten to build the store just across the border (the upshot of the tax breaks is that some stores such as groceries start to go out of business due to unfair competition). It's common for sports teams to try and get tax breaks if they move their stadiums to the new locale.
He was forbidden to "possess" weapons because of an earlier crime which led to a court order. He seemingly confused this with "purchasing" a weapon and decided it would be ok to just build his own. Possessing the weapon, and possessing ammo, in violation of the court order was what he was convicted of. Even in Texas they don't take kindly to violating court orders. The bit about a list of names of targets was a side issue.
I don't think the time formats had a lack of foresight. They were used for particular uses where it made sense. What broke was when people took the original signed 32-bit file time format to use for other purposes. Ie, purposes other than the file time on a specific PDP filesystem implementation. But it slowly got standardized in many file systems, the function calls dealing with time got standardized, and the file timestamp format started being used for things other than file timestamps. The original Unix system is no longer in use, their assumption was entirely correct and it isn't around still after 40 years later except as simulations.
They originally used this format for file timestamps, so it was unlikely to ever have file's created or modified before 1970... It was after this point that people started wanting to use this format for all sorts of uses for which it was not suitable. Ie, I worked on a medical device that initially used this signed 32-bit time format for medical records; but that was a problem since you couldn't express some patient's date of birth, whoops.
Much of the problems come from blind reliance on third party libraries, or naivete about domain knowledge. They expect that they don't have to worry about such issues if they only call the appropriate library. It's only later that they discover that the library wasn't intended for what it was being used for. I am seriously amazed at how many experienced programmers don't know much about time and yet seem to think that it's simple and that anyone can do it.
32 bits works even longer if you make it unsigned. For uses where you don't have to worry about things in the distant past, this is fine and trivial to implement. This is really helpful for the hordes of 16-and 32-bit embedded systems out there. Certainly 64-bits would be better for newer products, or anything between 33 and 64 bits (say you're on an 8bit cpu and would prefer 5 bytes instead of 8). You can also tweak the epoch start time to not be 1/1/1970 as well, if you know your time format will only stay local to the device, then converting between the device time and Unix time is a simple addition.
For something like GPS where you have data transmitting over the air then going to 64-bit is a waste of bandwidth. If you're talking to a Mars rover, then the extra bits are a serious disadvantage. So instead you rely on having good documentation of the format and that you can convert to other time formats as needed. Since we've known that GPS times will rollover in a relatively short period of time (ten years is shorter than many expected product lifetimes) you would assume that the receivers know how to deal with this. The problem is not that everyone needs to update firmware, but that you need to check if you have a halfway decent GPS receiver versus a piece of junk designed by noobs.
You mean the Project Manager of the West?
Alexa, preach a sermon about the evils of relying on Amazon for all your daily needs.
I don't understand it, I'm just trying to help them with their English when suddenly I get this pounding headache...
Ministration, then religion.