Wouldn't OSS authors be liable under the law as well?
If you design a bridge for free and there's a defect so it collapses and kills somebody, would you be held liable?
I don't see how things will become cheaper. Things might become more reliable, but cheaper?
People might stop designing crappy bridges for free (bridges that "sorta work" most of the time). Take PHP and MySQL as examples, they're pretty crap, but lots of people seem to think they work well enough.
We don't sue suse/redhat if there's a problem, but if the law changes, Microsoft and friends might be able to bribe someone to sue Red Hat out of existence.
"What a load of crap. FORTH is as primitive and unsafe as they come and they don't have to deal with over/under flows the way incompetent C++ programmers have to."
One reason is because people hardly ever bother to exploit FORTH programs or if they do they don't usually make so much noise about it. I crashed a forth webserver on my first try. But guess what, who cares. If you could crash Apache or IIS now at your first try, it's worth $$$.
But yeah, C++ is overused. Crappy programmers like me should stay away from dangerous languages like C++. I personally choose to use stuff like perl instead.
1) Too many people think they can write in C++ when probably < 100 people in the world can:). 2) Sometimes there really is no choice - even if you know you're not good enough, there aren't high level languages that are fast AND can do what you want as easily (despite also doing what the hacker wants easily - but the bosses and customers generally don't care about that).
Say you want to talk to the Linux kernel, good luck doing it in Java. If you do it in Lisp, if you ever want to stop supporting the program and do other things you'll have to resign - nobody to replace you.
"If users knew that there was a corrolation between competence and bug-free and problem-free code"
Most users don't appear to care _enough_.
Good luck getting a 100% competent dev team for a price users will pay for.
"Stop letting idiots near a compiler and the bugs will go away"
If you stop letting idiots near a compiler sure the bugs will go away, but there'll be a lot less software out there - PHP or MySQL wouldn't have been made. And look at the vast amount of PHP and MySQL based stuff out there (Slashdot is on MySQL I think).
In my experience many people can't even drive when being distracted by other vehicles;).
Examples: If a car approaches them from behind rapidly, they panic and do really stupid stuff. Or they just finally notice that there's a slow truck in front of them, and proceed to do something stupid.
Anyway, I think many people can drive safely while talking on the phone or doing stuff. It's a matter of practice. Cops drive while talking with other people, F1 drivers do too.
It's just like some people can learn how to juggle or some other skill of coordination.
HOWEVER, when you learn how to juggle if you make a mistake, usually people don't get killed or maimed, and they practice with safe stuff first (e.g. balls and not knives). I bet most people don't practice talking on a phone or texting while driving under controlled and safe conditions. And most people (including myself) aren't that good at driving in the first place.
If people are going to insist on doing such stuff, perhaps there should be a driving test which requires that people be able to drive while talking with someone on the phone (e.g. being made to solve simple math questions in a certain amount of time and answer basic trivia stuff). It might involve driving simulators etc.
Lastly, talking on a phone should be a lot easier than sending a text message (which involves a lot more buttons and remembering T9 or whatever). I find it quite easy to just stop talking to other people when the driving situation starts to require more concentration ( and why not just chuck the phone if you suddenly really need both hands on the wheel - having a cheap phone helps:) ).
I am not a geneticist etc, but I think it's going to be pretty hard, AFAIK the DNA of your cells will accumulate errors/mutations as time goes along.
So when the doctors are "restoring" you, how do they know what is good and what is bad? Is it patina to be kept or crap to be thrown away?
I bet by the time you're 50 if something killed all the cells that weren't 100% correct, you'd be dead - because you'd have lost a significant part of your body that though faulty still "kinda works". If they replaced the cells with "original copies", you'd probably have a "civil war" in your body - say if your immune system goes, and they built you a new pristine one from your backup cells 20 years ago, how sure are you that your new immune system won't say "Hey 20% of the cells are abnormal and should be killed"? So you could keep fixing those who are still relatively young, but the already old ones would be a big challenge.
The way the DNA degradation problem is currently solved is where you have millions of sperm and a good enough sperm cell successfully combines with a good enough egg cell, then they build on that "hopefully good enough DNA" (if it's not good enough, it doesn't get to live long enough to reproduce).
Bacteria (and other single celled creatures) are fine because they don't have to cooperate as much - they can keep splitting and drift genetically for millions of years, and if 50% die it's not a big deal to the other 50%.
Assuming.xxx gets allowed, initially what would happen is people who have.xxx tld are would more likely to be serving porn, so this makes it easier for their customers or users to find or recognize them.
So say if you're some person who goes for XYZ porn, you google for XYZ porn and there's a higher chance for the site to have that porn if it's a.xxx site rather than have something else.
However I suspect what would actually happen later is that the.xxx sites would also start to have a significant proportion of phishing, malware, captcha cracking and other similar sites.
Yeah I believe an xxx TLD will make it easier for people to search for xxx stuff.
Of course some strange/funny people will probably register xxx sites and put non xxx stuff on it.
Then again it'll be pretty hard to tell what some even stranger people regard as xxx.:).
Anyway, I'd like.here (or at least something similar) to be specially reserved (and made free for private use) so that it can be the DNS equivalent of RFC1918 addresses.
Now there's Phoenix BIOS, Award BIOS, AMI BIOS, coreboot (aka Linux BIOS) etc.
There now is Windows XP.
Perhaps there will be more non-Microsoft operating systems that are Windows XP and DirectX10 compatible.
Why do you think Microsoft _must_ keep releasing slightly incompatible versions of Windows every few years? So that nobody will come up with a legal compatible.
Does the WINE team think they will ever catch up with Microsoft's goal post moving? Microsoft seem to have stalled a bit with Vista.
What do you think Microsoft will do though if WINE becomes such a threat? Is the WINE team prepared?
"Laws don't come from "gods", from "above" but from the people"
So, what's your problem with those laws? That people claim they come from God? Or that they aren't from the people and actually come from God?
I've heard politicians claim the laws they pass come from the people. That the people demand those laws. Are those laws from the people or not?
The survival of the fittest meme. I'm not placing bets on your meme doing as well - some of the competitors have endured thousands of years. Like it or not their adherents aren't still stuck in a jungle killing and eating each other. Who knows, some of the God memes might be from God:).
Maybe the smarter ones do know enough to know if the coursework is good enough to hand in.
And maybe they're intending to move to management ASAP. Then all they need to do is identify who can do the job well enough, and figure out how to convince their superiors it was good.
The only difference is with outsourcing coursework they're being dishonest in pretending that they did the work.
Anyone who reads the Bible with an open mind understands that the societal norms, and behaviours it reports are not necessary what God wants people to do.
After all the Bible reports that David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and tried to cover it up, and eventually got Bathsheba's husband (Uriah) killed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_the_Hittite
So you get it warts and all. Thus even as just a historical document the Bible is fairly interesting. The records of kings of other countries in that time tend to be a lot more censored or more propaganda (e.g. they never lose any battles etc).
There are some constraints when you are making laws for _people_ to follow, and even when people don't follow them, God often figures out a way to have some good come from it.
FWIW, Jesus was from Bathsheba's line, not the other wives of David.
If everyone has 45Mbps I think overselling would be fine.
Even at 150GB/month I've heard that some people run out of things they want to download and start downloading junk instead till they hit their cap (not sure why but that's what some people do).
So I think most people will get tired of downloading junk in the background, and only download on demand - at 45Mbps it's not such a long wait (except maybe for HD stuff which may take an hour or two ). Thus the overselling ratios can go up.
If 90% of your code is math, how about Lisp or Fortran?
Of course that might depend on what the 10% is.
Re:The explanation is obvious
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
I am not in the airline industry, but I think one reason for the two hours rule is so that they have time to pick/break the locks on your "checked-in" luggage and look inside if the scanners show something suspicious.
If your bag has something strange and they don't have enough time, your luggage isn't getting on the plane.
The next time you or someone has their luggage "miss the flight", if it ever arrives, check it and see if it's been opened and "looked through".
They don't do this "two hour" stuff for trains yet.
My proposal has programs claiming what class of access they want (e.g. I need screen saver access), the user approving it and the O/S enforcing it (and optionally remembering the user's choice).
Screensavers don't normally need network access or access to your personal documents or access to your webcam or microphone.
So even if a "screensaver" is lying about being a screensaver, the damage it can do is limited to what a normal screensaver can do.
Vista has sandboxing but it fails because it prompts so much that most people either turn off the controls or turn off their brains (get a habit of clicking through).
Having users figure out whether a program is safe is similar to requiring them to solve the halting problem.
It is easier to train users to recognize that something is wrong when a "screen saver" requires "Full System Privileges" (and the O/S starts showing scary warnings and disclaimers).
Yeah what the OPs don't get is since XP is now fairly stable, most people don't need a new O/S. I'm still on Win2K and I haven't had a BSOD in years.
So who needs a new O/S? Microsoft needs a new O/S. If they don't move the goal posts every few years, someone will come up with a compatible and cheaper Windows.
A 64 bit O/S might come in handy, but it's going to be tricky for Microsoft to get everyone on board. Got to have a good enough excuse.
What would improve my desktop experience? Not a new O/S. Better hardware will do it.
That said, Vista's per app sound volume control would be nice to have:). But I think I can wait.
The market for vanilla ice cream is a lot bigger than the market for "pistachio almond fudge", and MS has a good grip on the "vanilla ice cream" market.
So why should they grow a pair and stop using their brains?
What MS needs to do is make a significantly better Windows and keep doing so. Vista is not that good, so their grip is slipping a bit.
If they don't keep making new "slightly incompatible, but compatible enough" versions of Windows, the OSS bunch might come up with a good Windows XP substitute that's XP compatible, and then MS is in trouble.
I bet that MS does not want their market to end up like the BIOS market.
Ironically you can easily get IE6 to start browser windows in a separate process (more a unix style thing than windows;)), so if browser instance starts to leak memory, you can close it, and the other browser instances will still be OK. Similarly when one browser instance crashes, the others stay up.
You could not do that with Firefox 2 (too hard - have to run with different directory/user etc), and it's "all or nothing" so if something goes wrong and it starts to use up 1GB of RAM, you have to close the entire browser to free up memory. Just because of one problem window, you have to close ALL of them (which is very annoying). When there's a crash - with FF2 all browser windows go away.
Is FF3 like that as well? Seems like it does free up some memory when you close tabs, that's good. But I bet there'll be some poorly written popular extension and you'd have the same problem all over again.
I prefer the browser windows to be in a separate process. I doubt FF3 will be that good that this sort of thing won't come in handy.
Slashdot Mirror
Laden or unladen?
So when are we going to have breakfast at Milliways?
Wouldn't OSS authors be liable under the law as well?
If you design a bridge for free and there's a defect so it collapses and kills somebody, would you be held liable?
I don't see how things will become cheaper. Things might become more reliable, but cheaper?
People might stop designing crappy bridges for free (bridges that "sorta work" most of the time). Take PHP and MySQL as examples, they're pretty crap, but lots of people seem to think they work well enough.
We don't sue suse/redhat if there's a problem, but if the law changes, Microsoft and friends might be able to bribe someone to sue Red Hat out of existence.
"What a load of crap. FORTH is as primitive and unsafe as they come and they don't have to deal with over/under flows the way incompetent C++ programmers have to."
:).
:).
One reason is because people hardly ever bother to exploit FORTH programs or if they do they don't usually make so much noise about it. I crashed a forth webserver on my first try. But guess what, who cares. If you could crash Apache or IIS now at your first try, it's worth $$$.
But yeah, C++ is overused. Crappy programmers like me should stay away from dangerous languages like C++. I personally choose to use stuff like perl instead.
1) Too many people think they can write in C++ when probably < 100 people in the world can
2) Sometimes there really is no choice - even if you know you're not good enough, there aren't high level languages that are fast AND can do what you want as easily (despite also doing what the hacker wants easily - but the bosses and customers generally don't care about that).
Say you want to talk to the Linux kernel, good luck doing it in Java. If you do it in Lisp, if you ever want to stop supporting the program and do other things you'll have to resign - nobody to replace you.
"If users knew that there was a corrolation between competence and bug-free and problem-free code"
Most users don't appear to care _enough_.
Good luck getting a 100% competent dev team for a price users will pay for.
"Stop letting idiots near a compiler and the bugs will go away"
If you stop letting idiots near a compiler sure the bugs will go away, but there'll be a lot less software out there - PHP or MySQL wouldn't have been made. And look at the vast amount of PHP and MySQL based stuff out there (Slashdot is on MySQL I think).
That stuff "kind of" works, most of the time
In my experience many people can't even drive when being distracted by other vehicles ;).
:) ).
Examples:
If a car approaches them from behind rapidly, they panic and do really stupid stuff.
Or they just finally notice that there's a slow truck in front of them, and proceed to do something stupid.
Anyway, I think many people can drive safely while talking on the phone or doing stuff. It's a matter of practice. Cops drive while talking with other people, F1 drivers do too.
It's just like some people can learn how to juggle or some other skill of coordination.
HOWEVER, when you learn how to juggle if you make a mistake, usually people don't get killed or maimed, and they practice with safe stuff first (e.g. balls and not knives). I bet most people don't practice talking on a phone or texting while driving under controlled and safe conditions. And most people (including myself) aren't that good at driving in the first place.
If people are going to insist on doing such stuff, perhaps there should be a driving test which requires that people be able to drive while talking with someone on the phone (e.g. being made to solve simple math questions in a certain amount of time and answer basic trivia stuff). It might involve driving simulators etc.
Lastly, talking on a phone should be a lot easier than sending a text message (which involves a lot more buttons and remembering T9 or whatever). I find it quite easy to just stop talking to other people when the driving situation starts to require more concentration ( and why not just chuck the phone if you suddenly really need both hands on the wheel - having a cheap phone helps
I am not a geneticist etc, but I think it's going to be pretty hard, AFAIK the DNA of your cells will accumulate errors/mutations as time goes along.
So when the doctors are "restoring" you, how do they know what is good and what is bad? Is it patina to be kept or crap to be thrown away?
I bet by the time you're 50 if something killed all the cells that weren't 100% correct, you'd be dead - because you'd have lost a significant part of your body that though faulty still "kinda works". If they replaced the cells with "original copies", you'd probably have a "civil war" in your body - say if your immune system goes, and they built you a new pristine one from your backup cells 20 years ago, how sure are you that your new immune system won't say "Hey 20% of the cells are abnormal and should be killed"? So you could keep fixing those who are still relatively young, but the already old ones would be a big challenge.
The way the DNA degradation problem is currently solved is where you have millions of sperm and a good enough sperm cell successfully combines with a good enough egg cell, then they build on that "hopefully good enough DNA" (if it's not good enough, it doesn't get to live long enough to reproduce).
Bacteria (and other single celled creatures) are fine because they don't have to cooperate as much - they can keep splitting and drift genetically for millions of years, and if 50% die it's not a big deal to the other 50%.
I think the censorship by TLD idea is stupid.
.xxx gets allowed, initially what would happen is people who have .xxx tld are would more likely to be serving porn, so this makes it easier for their customers or users to find or recognize them.
.xxx site rather than have something else.
.xxx sites would also start to have a significant proportion of phishing, malware, captcha cracking and other similar sites.
Assuming
So say if you're some person who goes for XYZ porn, you google for XYZ porn and there's a higher chance for the site to have that porn if it's a
However I suspect what would actually happen later is that the
Yeah I believe an xxx TLD will make it easier for people to search for xxx stuff.
Of course some strange/funny people will probably register xxx sites and put non xxx stuff on it.
Then again it'll be pretty hard to tell what some even stranger people regard as xxx. :).
Anyway, I'd like .here (or at least something similar) to be specially reserved (and made free for private use) so that it can be the DNS equivalent of RFC1918 addresses.
See: http://www.circleid.com/posts/top_level_domains_for_addressing_by_physical_context
Of course. There used to be just IBM BIOS.
Now there's Phoenix BIOS, Award BIOS, AMI BIOS, coreboot (aka Linux BIOS) etc.
There now is Windows XP.
Perhaps there will be more non-Microsoft operating systems that are Windows XP and DirectX10 compatible.
Why do you think Microsoft _must_ keep releasing slightly incompatible versions of Windows every few years? So that nobody will come up with a legal compatible.
Does the WINE team think they will ever catch up with Microsoft's goal post moving? Microsoft seem to have stalled a bit with Vista.
What do you think Microsoft will do though if WINE becomes such a threat? Is the WINE team prepared?
"Can I see the birth certificates implied?"
:).
Why would birth certificates be implied?
"Laws don't come from "gods", from "above" but from the people"
So, what's your problem with those laws? That people claim they come from God? Or that they aren't from the people and actually come from God?
I've heard politicians claim the laws they pass come from the people. That the people demand those laws. Are those laws from the people or not?
The survival of the fittest meme. I'm not placing bets on your meme doing as well - some of the competitors have endured thousands of years. Like it or not their adherents aren't still stuck in a jungle killing and eating each other. Who knows, some of the God memes might be from God
Maybe the smarter ones do know enough to know if the coursework is good enough to hand in.
;)
And maybe they're intending to move to management ASAP. Then all they need to do is identify who can do the job well enough, and figure out how to convince their superiors it was good.
The only difference is with outsourcing coursework they're being dishonest in pretending that they did the work.
Then again...
They might not want to manage the outsourcee, etc.
Anyone who reads the Bible with an open mind understands that the societal norms, and behaviours it reports are not necessary what God wants people to do.
After all the Bible reports that David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and tried to cover it up, and eventually got Bathsheba's husband (Uriah) killed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_the_Hittite
So you get it warts and all. Thus even as just a historical document the Bible is fairly interesting. The records of kings of other countries in that time tend to be a lot more censored or more propaganda (e.g. they never lose any battles etc).
There are some constraints when you are making laws for _people_ to follow, and even when people don't follow them, God often figures out a way to have some good come from it.
FWIW, Jesus was from Bathsheba's line, not the other wives of David.
Heh sure sounds like those parents were abusing their children :).
I guess their children can't watch Sesame Street either.
Cookie Monster- "Mmmmm, cookie..."
Orange juice futures aren't orange juice, but they are still real in a way.
:).
;).
Money is often just some bits in a computer.
Our minds make it real
But when you have "surprisingly few people" on your side of "reality", you better be really sure what you are doing is right, and "not meritless"
If everyone has 45Mbps I think overselling would be fine.
Even at 150GB/month I've heard that some people run out of things they want to download and start downloading junk instead till they hit their cap (not sure why but that's what some people do).
So I think most people will get tired of downloading junk in the background, and only download on demand - at 45Mbps it's not such a long wait (except maybe for HD stuff which may take an hour or two ). Thus the overselling ratios can go up.
If 90% of your code is math, how about Lisp or Fortran?
Of course that might depend on what the 10% is.
I am not in the airline industry, but I think one reason for the two hours rule is so that they have time to pick/break the locks on your "checked-in" luggage and look inside if the scanners show something suspicious.
If your bag has something strange and they don't have enough time, your luggage isn't getting on the plane.
The next time you or someone has their luggage "miss the flight", if it ever arrives, check it and see if it's been opened and "looked through".
They don't do this "two hour" stuff for trains yet.
The Microsoft reality distortion field doesn't extend very much further than "thrown chair" range from Ballmer.
My proposal has programs claiming what class of access they want (e.g. I need screen saver access), the user approving it and the O/S enforcing it (and optionally remembering the user's choice).
Screensavers don't normally need network access or access to your personal documents or access to your webcam or microphone.
So even if a "screensaver" is lying about being a screensaver, the damage it can do is limited to what a normal screensaver can do.
Vista has sandboxing but it fails because it prompts so much that most people either turn off the controls or turn off their brains (get a habit of clicking through).
Having users figure out whether a program is safe is similar to requiring them to solve the halting problem.
It is easier to train users to recognize that something is wrong when a "screen saver" requires "Full System Privileges" (and the O/S starts showing scary warnings and disclaimers).
Sandboxing could help.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693
Yeah what the OPs don't get is since XP is now fairly stable, most people don't need a new O/S. I'm still on Win2K and I haven't had a BSOD in years.
:). But I think I can wait.
So who needs a new O/S? Microsoft needs a new O/S. If they don't move the goal posts every few years, someone will come up with a compatible and cheaper Windows.
A 64 bit O/S might come in handy, but it's going to be tricky for Microsoft to get everyone on board. Got to have a good enough excuse.
What would improve my desktop experience? Not a new O/S. Better hardware will do it.
That said, Vista's per app sound volume control would be nice to have
The market for vanilla ice cream is a lot bigger than the market for "pistachio almond fudge", and MS has a good grip on the "vanilla ice cream" market.
So why should they grow a pair and stop using their brains?
What MS needs to do is make a significantly better Windows and keep doing so. Vista is not that good, so their grip is slipping a bit.
If they don't keep making new "slightly incompatible, but compatible enough" versions of Windows, the OSS bunch might come up with a good Windows XP substitute that's XP compatible, and then MS is in trouble.
I bet that MS does not want their market to end up like the BIOS market.
Yeah, but for Wikipedia it really is no big deal - the users will be remaking and reverting those changes anyway.
Ironically you can easily get IE6 to start browser windows in a separate process (more a unix style thing than windows ;)), so if browser instance starts to leak memory, you can close it, and the other browser instances will still be OK. Similarly when one browser instance crashes, the others stay up.
You could not do that with Firefox 2 (too hard - have to run with different directory/user etc), and it's "all or nothing" so if something goes wrong and it starts to use up 1GB of RAM, you have to close the entire browser to free up memory. Just because of one problem window, you have to close ALL of them (which is very annoying). When there's a crash - with FF2 all browser windows go away.
Is FF3 like that as well? Seems like it does free up some memory when you close tabs, that's good. But I bet there'll be some poorly written popular extension and you'd have the same problem all over again.
I prefer the browser windows to be in a separate process. I doubt FF3 will be that good that this sort of thing won't come in handy.