If there were public unwillingness to buy software that didn't have a signature on it from a qualified engineer, then people wouldn't buy software that didn't have a signature on it from a qualified engineer.
Most of the worm/virus issues exist b/c of code written in c rather than in a safer high level oop language where you don't get buffer overflows, sloppy use of pointers, etc.
Most of the problems with worms/viruses, etc, are due to sloppy sysadmin practices. Of course, with better code sysadmins could be lazy, but that isn't necessarily the goal.
Government regulation will only lead to a marketplace where new technologies are more expensive to produce. Do you know how much a seat in a passenger aircraft costs? Thousands of dollars. Governments are not good at making software, and nearly every piece of government regulation harms markets and makes people worse off.
I personally do not need 100% reliable software. So why should the government make me pay for it? Don't worry, I will pay for it through taxes needed to support the regulatory burocracy and through higher costs of software apps for which there is not enough of a market to support two versions, one certified along with a cheaper uncertified version.
At minimum, the government should offer certification for software that can be received when a company voluntarily submits it to the certification body. There are already some secuirty certifications such as this in the US. Anything more would make the public much worse off.
I think you are exaggerating. Most of the holes that have received a lot of publicity have been patched for months in advance. The real problem here is lazy sysadmins.
I think that it's really a testament to the general and broad acceptability of the EULAs that people haven't made more of a stink about the fact that they are typically presented after the software has been purchased.
Don't forget about the sealed CD-ROM cases that have a EULA warning on them, though.
Perhaps if people end up attempting to return a lot of copies of EULA'd software to OfficeMax, OfficeMax will post the EULA in the display case near the boxes or hand it out along with their modified return policy.
Of course, you are correct when you say that overly draconian licensing terms will result in fewer sales. Thus, there is a fair bit of market pressure currently on companies to write reasonable and broadly acceptable EULAs.
Every windows user has a choice about whether to use any of those applications. You could use Eudora, Mozilla, Quicktime or Real Player, HTML Help, or OpenOFfice.
Those are not the fault of the platform... they are simply one drawback of software that is distributed in compiled form. The situation is not any different when running executable code on Linux or *BSD.
Lately (since NT4) all Microsoft patches have been freely available, to the extent that it is reasonable (now NT4 and win95 are not supported). After all, Microsoft is a profit-seeking company, and it is reasonable for them to want to dedicate their resources to software platforms and operating systems that are generally in-demand rather than ones that were in demand a decade ago.
As for the EULAs, that's something that every individual can choose to agree to (or not). Part of capitalism is the existence of contracts that people are free to engage in or not. If you don't like it, use some other software.
You are correct. Higher level languages are the answer. Moore's law has enabled us to be able to utilize a higher level of programming which opens up much more design creativity to the user experience rather than to elegant c constructs that only another programmer would appreciate.
Apple has issued a new release of the "Fastest Personal Computer" advertisement. The ad now reads "#1 Personal Computer Alphabetically". In a statement to the press, Apple CEO Steve Jobbs said, "Our engineers are considering alternative spellings such as Aaple in order to insure that we maintain this exciting edge in the Personal Computer marketplace."
Isn't this because the distortion characteristics of transistors make them noisier when the amplifier is designed as a Class B amplifier? Wouldn't transistors and vacuum tubes be equivalent in terms of efficiency if both amps were class A?
Just to clarify on the use of a commodity to back currency. In order for this to work there has to be some demand for the commodity, since exchanging currency notes is equivalent to exchanging quantities of the commodity. The definition of a commodity is that it is a product for which there is a lot of demand, and a variety of different suppliers. Frequently, commodities are important raw materials for industry.
You claim that socialism bears an important role in democracy. Let's dissect that and see if it holds up: Socialism is a system under which individuals give up their individuality in favor of the greater good. Socialism is a system in which no individual has private ownership over anything, and everything is owned by the state.
Democracy, on the other hand, is a system under which each individual has one vote (his/her own). That is the only right specifically guaranteed by Democracy.
Capitalism, is a system designed to maximize the amount of freedom enjoyed by everyone. Capitalism allows people to hold whatever belief they want, and to associate with whoever they want. The nice thing about it is that people are likely to get over any hangups that they have: Muslim and Jew may not like each other, but they may still transact business together if the alternative is paying more for less.
Further, Capitalism is at the core of a productive society. Consider attributes like hard work, trustworthiness, discipline, the respect of one's peers, etc. These attributes have come to exist in our society largely because they represent a recipe for getting ahead in a capitalist society.
The welfare state has created a system under which these attributes are unlikely to be discovered by an individual seeking his/her own success.
California did not deregulate. It deregulated power on the wholesale side, but kept it strictly regulated on the consumer side. Thus, there was absolutely no price signal to tell consumers to stop using so much power.
Price signals are a key element of capitalism. When prices rise, demand is likely to fall, and entrepreneurs take notice and create new approaches that lower prices.
Gray Davis' utter failure as a governor is mostly due to his enormous mishandling of the Power crisis.
You may ask yourself why the Internet stayed up when the Grid went down... the answer is because the Internet is not and has never been regulated by politics and politicians to the extent that electricity has.
It is you, my friend, who is wrong about the Gold Standard. You write:
Is it? What makes gold of value where fiat money has none? Gold is just a mineral, paper money is just paper, most money is nothing but numbers on a computer. Gold hasn't backed anything or had any "value" for a large number of years now (except as a commodity), sorry to burst your bubble my friend.
In fact, any commodity would be suitable as a backing for currency. Gold was used in the past becuase it held high value and so carrying valuable amounts of it was practical: Compare carrying around $1M in Gold to carrying $1M of peanuts, corn, or cotton. Gold's value is precisely its value as a commodity.
Incidentally, in the past when the US used a gold standard that fixed the price of gold (in other words, the price at which the US would buy and sell gold) that harmed legitimate commodity markets for gold significantly.
You also mention what you claim is the legitimate role of Government in a Democracy. You describe a socialistic system. You are right in that if the majority favors socialism, then a Democracy will have socialism as an economic system. Contrary to your point, however, the only thing that has kept the US (and to some extent Canada) competetive over the past 50 years is the ingrained ethos that people deserve to reap rewards in accordance with their productivity, unless they are so unfit as to become wards of the state.
Creating a welfare state is a major break from the ethos described in the last paragraph, and though it may be within the scope of what may be voted into law by a Democracy, it is counter to the ethic of meritocracy that has guided our continent for the past 227 years.
Microsoft may not respect GPL'ed software as a business competetor, but I think you're wrong in asserting that Microsoft would steal GPL'ed code, or anything along those lines.
My guess is that you've installed some RPMs that were not created for the specific distro & version that you are using. If someone rolls their own RPM and they had other self-compiled software on their machine, then the RPM may have a dependency for a package that is slightly different from the one that came standard with the install.
This is mostly due to a lack of testing and quality control on the part of people rolling their own RMPs (or at least bad info on what distros/versions are supported).
As some of the other posters point out, using one of the automatic updaters for your distro will help with this problem (it will download the officially supported RPMs) as long as the problem isn't in the obscure RPM that isn't part of the standard distro.
One hint I would offer is that if you realize that one package you are using is non-standard, try to find a standard version.
If all else fails, then download, compile, and install the source for the packages that aren't 100% compatible with your standard distro.
Also, I don't recommend it, but you could type rpm -Uhv --force packagename.rpm
I'm not sure why your comment was modded down. I don't consider it a troll. You're absolutely right about communism. I hope that one day the Chinese realize how much better off they'd be under capitalism (at least the motivated ones).
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Microsoft email clients (when patched) do not exhibit behavior that automatically spreads script viruses.
Quite true....
If there were public unwillingness to buy software that didn't have a signature on it from a qualified engineer, then people wouldn't buy software that didn't have a signature on it from a qualified engineer.
Most of the worm/virus issues exist b/c of code written in c rather than in a safer high level oop language where you don't get buffer overflows, sloppy use of pointers, etc.
Most of the problems with worms/viruses, etc, are due to sloppy sysadmin practices. Of course, with better code sysadmins could be lazy, but that isn't necessarily the goal.
Government regulation will only lead to a marketplace where new technologies are more expensive to produce. Do you know how much a seat in a passenger aircraft costs? Thousands of dollars. Governments are not good at making software, and nearly every piece of government regulation harms markets and makes people worse off.
I personally do not need 100% reliable software. So why should the government make me pay for it? Don't worry, I will pay for it through taxes needed to support the regulatory burocracy and through higher costs of software apps for which there is not enough of a market to support two versions, one certified along with a cheaper uncertified version.
At minimum, the government should offer certification for software that can be received when a company voluntarily submits it to the certification body. There are already some secuirty certifications such as this in the US. Anything more would make the public much worse off.
I think you are exaggerating. Most of the holes that have received a lot of publicity have been patched for months in advance. The real problem here is lazy sysadmins.
I think that it's really a testament to the general and broad acceptability of the EULAs that people haven't made more of a stink about the fact that they are typically presented after the software has been purchased.
Don't forget about the sealed CD-ROM cases that have a EULA warning on them, though.
Perhaps if people end up attempting to return a lot of copies of EULA'd software to OfficeMax, OfficeMax will post the EULA in the display case near the boxes or hand it out along with their modified return policy.
Of course, you are correct when you say that overly draconian licensing terms will result in fewer sales. Thus, there is a fair bit of market pressure currently on companies to write reasonable and broadly acceptable EULAs.
Every windows user has a choice about whether to use any of those applications. You could use Eudora, Mozilla, Quicktime or Real Player, HTML Help, or OpenOFfice.
Those are not the fault of the platform... they are simply one drawback of software that is distributed in compiled form. The situation is not any different when running executable code on Linux or *BSD.
Lately (since NT4) all Microsoft patches have been freely available, to the extent that it is reasonable (now NT4 and win95 are not supported). After all, Microsoft is a profit-seeking company, and it is reasonable for them to want to dedicate their resources to software platforms and operating systems that are generally in-demand rather than ones that were in demand a decade ago.
As for the EULAs, that's something that every individual can choose to agree to (or not). Part of capitalism is the existence of contracts that people are free to engage in or not. If you don't like it, use some other software.
someone mod the parent's igorant comment down, please.
Hello... these problems don't exist if you use the software patches that are freely available. Get a clue please.
You are correct. Higher level languages are the answer. Moore's law has enabled us to be able to utilize a higher level of programming which opens up much more design creativity to the user experience rather than to elegant c constructs that only another programmer would appreciate.
I think this sums it up!
Apple has issued a new release of the "Fastest Personal Computer" advertisement. The ad now reads "#1 Personal Computer Alphabetically". In a statement to the press, Apple CEO Steve Jobbs said, "Our engineers are considering alternative spellings such as Aaple in order to insure that we maintain this exciting edge in the Personal Computer marketplace."
Isn't this because the distortion characteristics of transistors make them noisier when the amplifier is designed as a Class B amplifier? Wouldn't transistors and vacuum tubes be equivalent in terms of efficiency if both amps were class A?
You are absolutely right. It's a symptom of a heavily regulated industry (electricity, railroads) that they end up with a dumbass sysadmin.
Full and total deregulation would have likely prevented this from happening.
Just to clarify on the use of a commodity to back currency. In order for this to work there has to be some demand for the commodity, since exchanging currency notes is equivalent to exchanging quantities of the commodity. The definition of a commodity is that it is a product for which there is a lot of demand, and a variety of different suppliers. Frequently, commodities are important raw materials for industry.
You claim that socialism bears an important role in democracy. Let's dissect that and see if it holds up: Socialism is a system under which individuals give up their individuality in favor of the greater good. Socialism is a system in which no individual has private ownership over anything, and everything is owned by the state.
Democracy, on the other hand, is a system under which each individual has one vote (his/her own). That is the only right specifically guaranteed by Democracy.
Capitalism, is a system designed to maximize the amount of freedom enjoyed by everyone. Capitalism allows people to hold whatever belief they want, and to associate with whoever they want. The nice thing about it is that people are likely to get over any hangups that they have: Muslim and Jew may not like each other, but they may still transact business together if the alternative is paying more for less.
Further, Capitalism is at the core of a productive society. Consider attributes like hard work, trustworthiness, discipline, the respect of one's peers, etc. These attributes have come to exist in our society largely because they represent a recipe for getting ahead in a capitalist society.
The welfare state has created a system under which these attributes are unlikely to be discovered by an individual seeking his/her own success.
California did not deregulate. It deregulated power on the wholesale side, but kept it strictly regulated on the consumer side. Thus, there was absolutely no price signal to tell consumers to stop using so much power.
Price signals are a key element of capitalism. When prices rise, demand is likely to fall, and entrepreneurs take notice and create new approaches that lower prices.
Gray Davis' utter failure as a governor is mostly due to his enormous mishandling of the Power crisis.
You may ask yourself why the Internet stayed up when the Grid went down... the answer is because the Internet is not and has never been regulated by politics and politicians to the extent that electricity has.
It is you, my friend, who is wrong about the Gold Standard. You write:
Is it? What makes gold of value where fiat money has none? Gold is just a mineral, paper money is just paper, most money is nothing but numbers on a computer. Gold hasn't backed anything or had any "value" for a large number of years now (except as a commodity), sorry to burst your bubble my friend.
In fact, any commodity would be suitable as a backing for currency. Gold was used in the past becuase it held high value and so carrying valuable amounts of it was practical: Compare carrying around $1M in Gold to carrying $1M of peanuts, corn, or cotton. Gold's value is precisely its value as a commodity.
Incidentally, in the past when the US used a gold standard that fixed the price of gold (in other words, the price at which the US would buy and sell gold) that harmed legitimate commodity markets for gold significantly.
You also mention what you claim is the legitimate role of Government in a Democracy. You describe a socialistic system. You are right in that if the majority favors socialism, then a Democracy will have socialism as an economic system. Contrary to your point, however, the only thing that has kept the US (and to some extent Canada) competetive over the past 50 years is the ingrained ethos that people deserve to reap rewards in accordance with their productivity, unless they are so unfit as to become wards of the state.
Creating a welfare state is a major break from the ethos described in the last paragraph, and though it may be within the scope of what may be voted into law by a Democracy, it is counter to the ethic of meritocracy that has guided our continent for the past 227 years.
Why? So the writer and publisher can make money!
I see. I like Microsoft software and Open Source software.
Microsoft may not respect GPL'ed software as a business competetor, but I think you're wrong in asserting that Microsoft would steal GPL'ed code, or anything along those lines.
My guess is that you've installed some RPMs that were not created for the specific distro & version that you are using. If someone rolls their own RPM and they had other self-compiled software on their machine, then the RPM may have a dependency for a package that is slightly different from the one that came standard with the install.
This is mostly due to a lack of testing and quality control on the part of people rolling their own RMPs (or at least bad info on what distros/versions are supported).
As some of the other posters point out, using one of the automatic updaters for your distro will help with this problem (it will download the officially supported RPMs) as long as the problem isn't in the obscure RPM that isn't part of the standard distro.
One hint I would offer is that if you realize that one package you are using is non-standard, try to find a standard version.
If all else fails, then download, compile, and install the source for the packages that aren't 100% compatible with your standard distro.
Also, I don't recommend it, but you could type rpm -Uhv --force packagename.rpm
I have a friend who switched (a few years ago) to Oracle on Solaris from Oracale on Linux. His company recently spent US $400K on new Sun hardware...
What applications exist where you'd want to go with Sun hardware? Are there any left? My friend's experience was a few years ago. Have things changed?
You sound like you just read Marx while eating a really bad Pork Sandwich.
amazing... i had my suspicions b/c of the strong collectivist and anti-business opinions of may posters... but you seem to have removed all doubt.
I'm not sure why your comment was modded down. I don't consider it a troll. You're absolutely right about communism. I hope that one day the Chinese realize how much better off they'd be under capitalism (at least the motivated ones).