The problem is proving that the missing parts can be put in place. If this missing part is trivial, or is evidently possible, then I'll accept your testing as a reasonable predictor of success. But if you can't, then your testing proves nothing about the final behaviour of the system.
In the case of the missile tests, if you're sending up targets fitted with tracking devices and saying "well, targetting a ballistic missile is just an engineering problem", then I (and everyone else) will laugh in your face. This is a problem which has *never* yet been solved effectively. The best current systems are Patriots, which are *not* a for-sure bet. (The only other alternative is the gatling cannons on ships, which won't have the range for this kind of work.)
It's pretty scientific, yes. Think of sailing technology at the time. Columbus and his pals just about had the technology needed to get directly from Africa to America. No West African nation had the same technology. Most coastal areas had sailors (the Meditterranean had some particularly good ones), but they didn't have ocean-going ability. Even the Vikings couldn't do that - the most they managed was island-hopping. And to get from Africa to Central America in any realistic time requires the direct route, otherwise we have to postulate an African expedition (in open boats) that went from Africa to Mexico via Spain/Portugal, France, Britain/Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada and the entire eastern US seaboard. It's not unreasonable to assume that an expedition like that would have been noticed by someone in Europe who would have written it down.
Anyway, we're talking an African found in a graveyard in an area known to have been a centre of slaving, at a time when slaving was at a peak. He might not have been a slave, in the same way as the guy you find sat in your car fiddling with the ignition might be the superhero Captain Car-Rescue instead of a car thief. But don't bet on it...;-)
I'll second wxWidgets - it's a great choice and much better than MFC. And if you use py2exe to get yourself an executable, you don't need everyone to install Python to use your program - just run as usual.
Sorry, it sounded to me like you were talking about generally storing personal data on a company server, when the problem was actually the specific kind of personal data you were storing on there. If you didn't mean it that way, my apologies.
Sorry, no sympathy. Would you forward emails with "erotic drawings" (of any orientation) around your colleagues? So why should the company have them on its system?
Frankly, you got off lightly by them letting you resign. Back in '95, most companies (and colleges) didn't have policies on "offensive content". These days they all do, without exception. What you did back then would today be grounds for formal disciplinary action at best, and on-the-spot dismissal for gross misconduct at worst. Whether it's gay or straight "erotic art" is immaterial.
There was a *very* long period where IE was the *only* browsing experience worth using. IE4 vs. Netscape 4, you could still just about justify using Netscape. As soon as IE5 came out, there was no comparison. And a working, stable, non-processor-hogging version of Mozilla was still 2-3 years in the future.
Grab.
Re:Oh, no hot air, I see...
on
The New Boom
·
· Score: 1
PS. I have. Depends what I'm searching for, of course, but when I've been searching for guitar stuff or gardening stuff (two recent types of search I've done), then I clicked on every Google ad to get comparative prices.
How is that a misrepresentation? If RMS says that only people who don't care about freedom use closed-source software, he's explicitly painting it as a moral choice, because "caring about freedom" absolutely *is* a moral choice. His way is (in his opinion) the only morally justifiable option. What does that make the alternative?
As a user, you won't care. It *only* relates to software authors. A quick and dirty summary:-
- Public domain allows people to do anything they like with your code, including making minor mods and claiming it as all their own work, or making minor mods and selling the result as closed-source code.
- BSD allows reuse of your code or a modified version of your code, in anything (including commercial software), without releasing source, so long as they credit you. In other words you can't claim it as your own work.
- LGPL allows reuse of your code as a component part of a commercial software system - hence its alternative name of "library GPL". You don't need to release the code for anything that uses this code/library. However if you make changes to the LGPL code/library then you must release the changes. Again, credits are required.
- GPL goes a step further. If you use a GPL code/library component as part of your software, then you must also release *all* your software as GPL as well, otherwise you may not use that code/library component. Again, there's the requirement for releasing code and credits.
There's many other licenses, but you get the idea.
There's two different philosophies here that drive this.
The first is the Open Source philosophy (Linus and ESR are the drivers here). This says that if everyone works together, we can build something better than closed source software. But it doesn't invalidate the existence of closed source software - it acknowledges that this only works for mass-market software, so there will always be niches where closed-source is a better choice. Basically their drive is to help people do their jobs more efficiently.
The second is the Free Software philosophy (driven by RMS and the FSF group). This says that the very *existence* of closed-source software is immoral, and anyone using closed-source software (even in niches where no free equivalent exists) is guilty of immorality (RMS says that if no free software exists to do a job, then you should refuse to do that job). Software is therefore created as a moral imperative, rather than as a means to an end of carrying out some task (such as web browsing or word processing).
ID is only falsifiable by proving that no "designer" exists. Current knowledge makes it clear that any "designer" was incompetent, due to the number of bugs in the system, but it doesn't prove there was no "designer". It just proves that if they existed, they did a crap job of designing life on Earth.
If there was a possibility of a "designer" being a physical entity, proof of the existence of a designer might still be possible somehow - it may be possible to find evidence of this entity (eg. Arthur C Clarke's black monoliths). Falsification is not possible though - if no evidence has been found, the "pro-design" lobby could just argue that the evidence must be somewhere else.
To add a further spanner in the works, ID is entirely driven by Christian dogma. It has no other basis in existence (and this *is* provable from every person who originated the term "intelligent design"). So "designer" is synonymous with "Christian God". Unless you can prove there is no God, you cannot disprove ID by this standard, and existence or otherwise of God has been proven to be unprovable (see any Jesuit for details).
Sure. But have they extended your job to cover this, without giving you the training? If so, that's their problem. That's the way to play it - "I've been asked to do task X, which I'm not trained to do, and which manager Y knows I don't have the skills for. It took me 5 hours to do it, whereas an admin trained in those skills could do it in 5 minutes. I could try learning from experience, but I estimate the next time might take 4 hours, the time after that will take 3 hours, etc."
They could hire a new person who does have the skills, but it's illegal to fire you for not knowing how to do the job if they're the ones who've changed the terms of the job in the first place. They *could* make you redundant on the grounds that the job you're doing will no longer exist, but again that's their choice. Any reasonable employer will work out the cost of a redundancy package and hiring a new person against the cost of training.
Sure, but that's the company's choice. They can hire someone with the skills, and that'll cost them an extra $5k pay step, plus all the setup costs of a new hire (advertising, interviewing, contracts, getting them into company procedures, etc). Or they can train someone themselves, and pay the cost of the training but have the employee on a lower salary during that time (and usually afterwards until you've proved yourself able to do the job and fought for the pay rise).
It's up to them to ensure they have resources to do the job. Whether those resources benefit you or not is immaterial, but they're being negligent in not putting resources in place.
but now that I look back at it, the commies weren't nearly as abusive in the work place
Just outside the workplace...
but at LEAST one could actually get ahead based on their skills, if those skills were formidable
Could you get ahead of someone who was best mates with the local Party boss? Really?
Capitalism has its downsides, but cronyism at least has some possible come-back from the directors and shareholders, and if your company is shite then you can jack it in and go work somewhere else. Can you really tell me that the USSR offered the same opportunities?
Also on the work side, the USSR made work for people. If there were two people needing a job and only one job, they'd both get the job and only have to do 50% of the work. Basically, working was devalued because of that, so it's no wonder people were so relaxed at the end of the day!
As far as limiting the power of CEOs, I suspect what you mean is limiting the *salary*. And as far as that goes, it's up to the company and its shareholders. If a CEO demands a huge wage and screws the company, the shareholders will demand his (or her) head. If a CEO demands a huge wage and turns the company around, they deserve their pay. Also consider that CEOs who built their companies up the hard way (I'm thinking Gates, Bezos, Jobs, the Google boys, etc) have usually staked everything on their company succeeding, and it's not unreasonable for them to look for a return on that.
Power-wise, the guys who screw over the "workers" are usually the lower/middle managers. Their one goal is to please the upper management, and bad lower/middle managers don't care how they do it. If their department turns over 10x the personnel of other departments then they may eventually get found out, but otherwise their overworked employees are covering up the problem.
But Moglen is saying, and I quote from the article:
Hollywood studios that use open source software, namely Linux, to create animated movies yet deny users' freedoms are "flat unfair".
But the movies are data, not source. And as far as the GPL V2 goes, it was 100% crystal clear that you could take GPL code and modify it for in-house use as much as you wanted. It was only if you released it to the outside world that you'd need to release your changes per the GPL.
Basically, RMS and Moglen are pulling a bait-and-switch. Having established a wide user base of F/OSS, they're now changing the terms under which it can be used. How much do you think anyone will stand for this? And not just business, but your average users - if you're not *allowed* under the GPL to add a DeCSS plugin in your DVD player, for example, that DVD player software (and likely the entire Linux platform, if this hits everyone) will fizzle out.
I suspect RMS and Moglen have just dynamited the FSF as any kind of force for free software. After this debacle, no-one will ever again take them seriously. Either the FSF needs to lose them (and this abortion of a license), or the FSF will wither and die through utter lack of credibility.
Personally, I'm going back to my code tonight and modifying every file to reference a specific license version. I don't trust these wankers an inch.
No, you can use the *code* the way you want. But you can only use data supplied by me under the rules *I* make. That's the purpose of DRM (which usually can be traced to a desire to make money).
Is this offensive? If so, consider RMS distributing source code files under the GPL, which says in essence, "you may only use these code files under the rules *I* make"? Is he not applying exactly the same standard to reuse of his code as you'd like to apply to your data?
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, sure I would.
The problem is proving that the missing parts can be put in place. If this missing part is trivial, or is evidently possible, then I'll accept your testing as a reasonable predictor of success. But if you can't, then your testing proves nothing about the final behaviour of the system.
In the case of the missile tests, if you're sending up targets fitted with tracking devices and saying "well, targetting a ballistic missile is just an engineering problem", then I (and everyone else) will laugh in your face. This is a problem which has *never* yet been solved effectively. The best current systems are Patriots, which are *not* a for-sure bet. (The only other alternative is the gatling cannons on ships, which won't have the range for this kind of work.)
Grab.
Intelligent design? In the military? Isn't that pushing your faith a bit *too* far?
It's pretty scientific, yes. Think of sailing technology at the time. Columbus and his pals just about had the technology needed to get directly from Africa to America. No West African nation had the same technology. Most coastal areas had sailors (the Meditterranean had some particularly good ones), but they didn't have ocean-going ability. Even the Vikings couldn't do that - the most they managed was island-hopping. And to get from Africa to Central America in any realistic time requires the direct route, otherwise we have to postulate an African expedition (in open boats) that went from Africa to Mexico via Spain/Portugal, France, Britain/Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada and the entire eastern US seaboard. It's not unreasonable to assume that an expedition like that would have been noticed by someone in Europe who would have written it down.
;-)
Anyway, we're talking an African found in a graveyard in an area known to have been a centre of slaving, at a time when slaving was at a peak. He might not have been a slave, in the same way as the guy you find sat in your car fiddling with the ignition might be the superhero Captain Car-Rescue instead of a car thief. But don't bet on it...
Grab.
And if you've ever driven on the M25, you'll know why 100 miles is a long way in Britain... ;-)
The UK is really short on some of the classics. I think we can't take ourselves seriously as a country until they'll sell Mountain Dew over here!
As a second-best, Dr Pepper does fine. Either that or proper coffee (perc/espresso).
For the specialist "energy drink" stuff though, it's all overpriced, and it all tastes like crap. Forget it.
Grab.
OK, we've covered the gays. Now about Martians playing WoW...
I'll second wxWidgets - it's a great choice and much better than MFC. And if you use py2exe to get yourself an executable, you don't need everyone to install Python to use your program - just run as usual.
Grab.
Sorry, it sounded to me like you were talking about generally storing personal data on a company server, when the problem was actually the specific kind of personal data you were storing on there. If you didn't mean it that way, my apologies.
Grab.
Sorry, no sympathy. Would you forward emails with "erotic drawings" (of any orientation) around your colleagues? So why should the company have them on its system?
Frankly, you got off lightly by them letting you resign. Back in '95, most companies (and colleges) didn't have policies on "offensive content". These days they all do, without exception. What you did back then would today be grounds for formal disciplinary action at best, and on-the-spot dismissal for gross misconduct at worst. Whether it's gay or straight "erotic art" is immaterial.
Grab.
There was a *very* long period where IE was the *only* browsing experience worth using. IE4 vs. Netscape 4, you could still just about justify using Netscape. As soon as IE5 came out, there was no comparison. And a working, stable, non-processor-hogging version of Mozilla was still 2-3 years in the future.
Grab.
PS. I have. Depends what I'm searching for, of course, but when I've been searching for guitar stuff or gardening stuff (two recent types of search I've done), then I clicked on every Google ad to get comparative prices.
Grab.
You can't claim it's your own work unmodified. But there's nothing stopping you making some mods and saying the whole thing is "copyright Jack Orff".
Grab.
How is that a misrepresentation? If RMS says that only people who don't care about freedom use closed-source software, he's explicitly painting it as a moral choice, because "caring about freedom" absolutely *is* a moral choice. His way is (in his opinion) the only morally justifiable option. What does that make the alternative?
Grab.
As a user, you won't care. It *only* relates to software authors. A quick and dirty summary:-
- Public domain allows people to do anything they like with your code, including making minor mods and claiming it as all their own work, or making minor mods and selling the result as closed-source code.
- BSD allows reuse of your code or a modified version of your code, in anything (including commercial software), without releasing source, so long as they credit you. In other words you can't claim it as your own work.
- LGPL allows reuse of your code as a component part of a commercial software system - hence its alternative name of "library GPL". You don't need to release the code for anything that uses this code/library. However if you make changes to the LGPL code/library then you must release the changes. Again, credits are required.
- GPL goes a step further. If you use a GPL code/library component as part of your software, then you must also release *all* your software as GPL as well, otherwise you may not use that code/library component. Again, there's the requirement for releasing code and credits.
There's many other licenses, but you get the idea.
There's two different philosophies here that drive this.
The first is the Open Source philosophy (Linus and ESR are the drivers here). This says that if everyone works together, we can build something better than closed source software. But it doesn't invalidate the existence of closed source software - it acknowledges that this only works for mass-market software, so there will always be niches where closed-source is a better choice. Basically their drive is to help people do their jobs more efficiently.
The second is the Free Software philosophy (driven by RMS and the FSF group). This says that the very *existence* of closed-source software is immoral, and anyone using closed-source software (even in niches where no free equivalent exists) is guilty of immorality (RMS says that if no free software exists to do a job, then you should refuse to do that job). Software is therefore created as a moral imperative, rather than as a means to an end of carrying out some task (such as web browsing or word processing).
Grab.
They'll need to get it working first. They've had 15 years so far, with nothing to show for it...
Grab.
ID is only falsifiable by proving that no "designer" exists. Current knowledge makes it clear that any "designer" was incompetent, due to the number of bugs in the system, but it doesn't prove there was no "designer". It just proves that if they existed, they did a crap job of designing life on Earth.
If there was a possibility of a "designer" being a physical entity, proof of the existence of a designer might still be possible somehow - it may be possible to find evidence of this entity (eg. Arthur C Clarke's black monoliths). Falsification is not possible though - if no evidence has been found, the "pro-design" lobby could just argue that the evidence must be somewhere else.
To add a further spanner in the works, ID is entirely driven by Christian dogma. It has no other basis in existence (and this *is* provable from every person who originated the term "intelligent design"). So "designer" is synonymous with "Christian God". Unless you can prove there is no God, you cannot disprove ID by this standard, and existence or otherwise of God has been proven to be unprovable (see any Jesuit for details).
If you know different, please enlighten us...
Grab.
Sure. But have they extended your job to cover this, without giving you the training? If so, that's their problem. That's the way to play it - "I've been asked to do task X, which I'm not trained to do, and which manager Y knows I don't have the skills for. It took me 5 hours to do it, whereas an admin trained in those skills could do it in 5 minutes. I could try learning from experience, but I estimate the next time might take 4 hours, the time after that will take 3 hours, etc."
They could hire a new person who does have the skills, but it's illegal to fire you for not knowing how to do the job if they're the ones who've changed the terms of the job in the first place. They *could* make you redundant on the grounds that the job you're doing will no longer exist, but again that's their choice. Any reasonable employer will work out the cost of a redundancy package and hiring a new person against the cost of training.
Grab.
Sure, but that's the company's choice. They can hire someone with the skills, and that'll cost them an extra $5k pay step, plus all the setup costs of a new hire (advertising, interviewing, contracts, getting them into company procedures, etc). Or they can train someone themselves, and pay the cost of the training but have the employee on a lower salary during that time (and usually afterwards until you've proved yourself able to do the job and fought for the pay rise).
It's up to them to ensure they have resources to do the job. Whether those resources benefit you or not is immaterial, but they're being negligent in not putting resources in place.
Grab.
but now that I look back at it, the commies weren't nearly as abusive in the work place
Just outside the workplace...
but at LEAST one could actually get ahead based on their skills, if those skills were formidable
Could you get ahead of someone who was best mates with the local Party boss? Really?
Capitalism has its downsides, but cronyism at least has some possible come-back from the directors and shareholders, and if your company is shite then you can jack it in and go work somewhere else. Can you really tell me that the USSR offered the same opportunities?
Also on the work side, the USSR made work for people. If there were two people needing a job and only one job, they'd both get the job and only have to do 50% of the work. Basically, working was devalued because of that, so it's no wonder people were so relaxed at the end of the day!
As far as limiting the power of CEOs, I suspect what you mean is limiting the *salary*. And as far as that goes, it's up to the company and its shareholders. If a CEO demands a huge wage and screws the company, the shareholders will demand his (or her) head. If a CEO demands a huge wage and turns the company around, they deserve their pay. Also consider that CEOs who built their companies up the hard way (I'm thinking Gates, Bezos, Jobs, the Google boys, etc) have usually staked everything on their company succeeding, and it's not unreasonable for them to look for a return on that.
Power-wise, the guys who screw over the "workers" are usually the lower/middle managers. Their one goal is to please the upper management, and bad lower/middle managers don't care how they do it. If their department turns over 10x the personnel of other departments then they may eventually get found out, but otherwise their overworked employees are covering up the problem.
Grab.
Ave you ad enough, English kerniggits, or shall we taunt you one more time?
But you got better, right?
In other words, you're worried about religious discrimination, not racial.
Now *there's* a surname you want if you're a kernel developer...
Grab.
But Moglen is saying, and I quote from the article:
Hollywood studios that use open source software, namely Linux, to create animated movies yet deny users' freedoms are "flat unfair".
But the movies are data, not source. And as far as the GPL V2 goes, it was 100% crystal clear that you could take GPL code and modify it for in-house use as much as you wanted. It was only if you released it to the outside world that you'd need to release your changes per the GPL.
Basically, RMS and Moglen are pulling a bait-and-switch. Having established a wide user base of F/OSS, they're now changing the terms under which it can be used. How much do you think anyone will stand for this? And not just business, but your average users - if you're not *allowed* under the GPL to add a DeCSS plugin in your DVD player, for example, that DVD player software (and likely the entire Linux platform, if this hits everyone) will fizzle out.
I suspect RMS and Moglen have just dynamited the FSF as any kind of force for free software. After this debacle, no-one will ever again take them seriously. Either the FSF needs to lose them (and this abortion of a license), or the FSF will wither and die through utter lack of credibility.
Personally, I'm going back to my code tonight and modifying every file to reference a specific license version. I don't trust these wankers an inch.
Grab.
No, you can use the *code* the way you want. But you can only use data supplied by me under the rules *I* make. That's the purpose of DRM (which usually can be traced to a desire to make money).
Is this offensive? If so, consider RMS distributing source code files under the GPL, which says in essence, "you may only use these code files under the rules *I* make"? Is he not applying exactly the same standard to reuse of his code as you'd like to apply to your data?
Grab.