They've always had to identify themselves, but managed it without the little logo well enough in the past.
Personally, I'm OK with the Sci-Fi logo: it's an embossed logo, so there aren't any funky colors, just the symbol itself. Or at least that's how it worked a few months ago when last I got Sci-Fi (grrrrr).
Option: ditch digital cable and ask for an analog cable box back. My wife and I did this after an "upgrade" to digital cable. With digital, we couldn't channel flip very well because each new channel would take a second or so to get stable. The nicer guide wasn't enough to make up for the poor performance, so we went back to analog and now we just wait for the guide to scroll around, or else just look in the newspaper. Hopefully we'll be able to stick with the analog cable box until the digital ones become usable.
It's a lot tougher to fix cases of a first post being incorrectly moderated as "redundant", though, since the posts are no longer numbered from 1 on each article. I've pretty much quit meta-moderating "redundant" moderations because there's no good way to tell without re-reading the whole article.
The software industry doesn't hire anyone. Software companies hire people, and a company that behaves like you
described won't be around for long if software is their main source of revenue.
Many people believe this to have already occurred...
Yeah, that's why I'll never install Mandrake again - the install totally blew away all sorts of customizations that I'd done, essentially doing a reinstall except that it didn't recreate/home. KDE menus, etc. - all gone, and since I happened to be at that installfest by chance, I of course hadn't made adequate backups. So that machine only gets hand-upgraded from source or carefully-selected RPMs now, and any future machines will be Debian.
Actually, it's D, all of the above, but thanks for playing:) I just think it's silly to say that a professional software practicioner should have to know anything about a GUI to be successful; it's about as far from the foundations of computer science as, say, web design. And in fact web design and UI design are slowly becoming one and the same, which will be great as far as I'm concerned - we can get back to doing real work rather than just making it look pretty.
If your servers are being managed by admins who can't figure out where the new controls for the server are, and can't RTFM on their own, then I truly pity you. But not too much, because you're probably the bastards that were propagating Code Red and Nimda:)
Well, it's not a ripoff if they really are faster at that point, is it? The ripoff is that you don't get the source code to Windows so that you can optimize and strip it yourself...
Exactly the point - he should have. There is no need for professional software developers to know how Windows works, but there probably is such a need for professional Windows software developers.
And I think he is absolutely right. If you are so narrow minded that you don't look at what other segments of your
field (keep in mind that 90% of the desktops do use some form of windows) are doing than you are doomed to
become one of the dinosaurs in the field.
I fail to see how 90% desktop market share has anything to do with the kinds of work that professional software developers do. Desktop software is the ice sticking above the water, not the berg lurking below. Don't confuse what the user sees with where the work goes on.
Do you not work on anything UI at all?
Yes, because Windows GUIs are about all there is in the field of professional software development, of course. Perhaps it is you that should open your mind, or maybe just learn a little about the field you think you know.
That's not how it works at all. A business pays you, you tell them which distribution is right, and you both go on your merry ways. Heck, there are practically as many shipping versions of Windows right now as there are Linux distributions; you don't see consultants telling businesses to "just try all the different Windows' and see which is best for you", now do you?
Choice is not bad, as long as there's enough information to make a decision. And there's plenty of information available to help you make that decision with Linux.
How civilized:) Although I imagine if the U.S. had a neighbor that was more like Russia than Canada, we'd have some better small arms stored about the place as well.
I partially agree: a certain amount of loss does not render speech to be not speech. However, as a couple turns with the babelfish will convince you, repeated translations will result in the loss of meaning. There is no reason to protect the freedom of speech that doesn't mean anything - as the Court points out, different kinds of speech are accorded different kinds of protection. So the amount of loss can be a factor in protecting the freedom of translated speech.
I don't feel that object code is equivalently as meaningful as source code. It's true that functionally it works the same (assuming your compiler and assembler work right), but the functionality of the code was never the issue. The object code is, by it's nature, concerned only with manipulating the guts of the processor and its interfaces. Viewing the object code that manipulates a DVD key is not nearly as expressive as viewing the C code which does the same thing, at least to most people, let alone more expressive as you imply. The object code is full of shifts, adds, multplies, etc. such that it is very easy to lose track of what is going on. The source code, by use of variable names and simpler syntax, makes it easier to specify the overall actions that you want rather than focusing on minutia. The source code focuses on the actual items that you would discuss with another programmer, like "DVD key data", etc - you've never described DeCSS to another person as "2108 left shifts, 1500 right shifts, 4328 adds, etc.", have you? The whole in this case is more than the sum of its object code parts.
This isn't just my opinion; it is the opinion of computer programmers the world over. If object code or assembly was so much more expressive at conveying our ideas, don't you think we'd still be writing everything in it? The fact that most programmers use a higher-level language (or a language that mimics one, like VB) shows that the average programmer finds object code to be less expressive of their algorithms, even though it may be functionally just as accurate.
The standard that the courts seem to be using is: how much are the ideas expressed by the code in relationship to the amount of functionality that is included. This ratio of idea/function is higher for source code; or rather for object code you're not really expressing the same ideas - you're talking about copying this or that bit of memory or doing this operation on registers, you're not talking about DVD keys any more.
Probably the best test possible: give the average programmer the source code to DeCSS, and give his peer the object code. The source code guy will have figured out the overall ideas expressed long before the object code guy. Even with the comments stripped out, I think this would be true.
...ethereal, who can't believe he would argue so long about this particular shade of grey:)
Well, you could allow those businesses to run if they were no longer part of Microsoft, Inc. In effect the breakup would become economically imperative to Microsoft shareholders - think of it as evolution in action:)
Plus, if the company were "suspended", then you could revoke their ability to enforce licensing restrictions, so everyone would get all of their licensing costs back for those years. I'm sure that would be quite enough money to resolve any temporary issues that might arise. That right there would be enough money to provide for development so that Linux would be not just a replacement for Windows, but an enhancement far beyond it (not that in many cases is isn't already).
Nope, I don't buy the "but Microsoft is soooo important" argument - for one thing, if you or your company can't survive without Microsoft, then how can you consider yourself a free man or a separate company? There was software before Microsoft, and if there's any justice in the world, someday there will be software after Microsoft.
Sure, there's economic upheaval when a keystone predator is removed. But in the end there will be a richer business ecosystem with multiple strong competitors, rather than one big lion and a lot of jackals snacking on the scraps that Microsoft lets them have.
My only concern is that in some cases we are not going to be able to come up with better alternatives for the things that we've used up/destroyed. After years of storm water problems in south Florida, they're actually restoring the Everglades because guess what: we don't have a better way to do what those swamps do.
Likewise with forests: building things out of solid logs from trees is almost never done, because there are no more large trees left. Sure, this has inspired engineered lumber, etc., but only because the cheaper and better alternative (the real thing) no longer exists. That is one of the cases where we can put a price on the loss. In many cases, like deforestation in South America, we may not know what we're losing until too late.
Sure, there's development for the people that are able to seize the reigns of the environmental change and turn it to their own good. I'm just pointing out that in the long run the effects of these changes are not understood, and we have no good way to determine what the real costs of them will be. In many cases I think we will find the loss to have been greater than the gain. So I'm not as optimistic about plunging into an unknown environmental future as you are, even though I share your faith in our ability to fix most things through technological means.
But you lose something when translating to binary code; if that wasn't a lossy transformation then reverse-engineering wouldn't be so difficult, would it? I think it's reasonable to say that binary code is less "speech" than source code, at least by the standard of "what do experts in the field use to communicate?". When was the last time someone posted object code to a mailing list and wanted help with it, versus posting source code?
It's the Microsoft offense - if you can make someone angry enough about your actions that they lose their cool and start talking about just how bad you are, then you can later use their statements against them to escape punishment.
I could never handle those choose-your-own-boycott books; I'd always read through looking for the good boycott endings, and then backtrack for which story I had to read in order to see that company fail:)
The problem is that it's impossible to prevent industry from creating a tragedy of the commons without some sort of government oversight. Sure, sometimes this oversight is corrupt and non-functional, but I still don't see any other way to do it.
I would also like to point out that vastly altering local ecosystems (a fancy way of saying cutting down all the
trees and filling in the swamps, things done in Europe a thousand years ago, indeed two thousand years ago)
vastly benefits the locals much more than it harms anything, and becoming an ecologic conservative (maintaining
such things) causes development to lag. People end up worse off for not mowing down the trees than they do if
they did.
I don't think it's safe to say this until you know what the real value of those trees are. Sure, you can say that the land is free, the trees are in the way, and we can grow all sorts of cash crops in those places instead, but in the end trees and a well-regulated ecosystem are good for something too. "Development" is not necessarily always a positive experience for the people involved.
Actually, I prefer those insane corporations that actually care about the environment. But you can go live next to the non-environmentally-caring ones, if you like. Just make sure you're all a ways downwind of me, and hopefully in another drainage basin and groundwater area.
The government
should have paid the airlines for the days that they grounded them (understandable) but all airlines should have
been prepared to cut their staff in the event of tragedy. It'll be shortterm anyway.
I couldn't agree more. But, that would be (deep breath) bad for the economy. And as we all know from watching the President, the economy is apparently the only important thing in the country right now. That's why the citizenry is being exhorted to consume, consume, consume!
I'd rather have short-term economic upheaval, and then long-term economic growth as smaller and more agile airlines take up the slack, but then again I haven't lost my job as part of the recession. yet. knock on wood.
Lack of typing and $_ are features, not bugs. I'm sorry if you don't like those features, but it's entirely possible to write readable code while using them. And "features that don't translate over to another language" is exactly why there are separate languages - if every language could do the exact same thing, we wouldn't need more than one (and we would call it fortran;).
I still say that lisp is better at what perl is trying to become, but perl has the advantage that pound-for-pound it's traded some of the '(' for various other punctuation. Nothing is better than perl at being what it already is, though - if you don't like those things, don't use perl.
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They've always had to identify themselves, but managed it without the little logo well enough in the past.
Personally, I'm OK with the Sci-Fi logo: it's an embossed logo, so there aren't any funky colors, just the symbol itself. Or at least that's how it worked a few months ago when last I got Sci-Fi (grrrrr).
Option: ditch digital cable and ask for an analog cable box back. My wife and I did this after an "upgrade" to digital cable. With digital, we couldn't channel flip very well because each new channel would take a second or so to get stable. The nicer guide wasn't enough to make up for the poor performance, so we went back to analog and now we just wait for the guide to scroll around, or else just look in the newspaper. Hopefully we'll be able to stick with the analog cable box until the digital ones become usable.
It's a lot tougher to fix cases of a first post being incorrectly moderated as "redundant", though, since the posts are no longer numbered from 1 on each article. I've pretty much quit meta-moderating "redundant" moderations because there's no good way to tell without re-reading the whole article.
Many people believe this to have already occurred...
Yeah, that's why I'll never install Mandrake again - the install totally blew away all sorts of customizations that I'd done, essentially doing a reinstall except that it didn't recreate /home. KDE menus, etc. - all gone, and since I happened to be at that installfest by chance, I of course hadn't made adequate backups. So that machine only gets hand-upgraded from source or carefully-selected RPMs now, and any future machines will be Debian.
Actually, it's D, all of the above, but thanks for playing :) I just think it's silly to say that a professional software practicioner should have to know anything about a GUI to be successful; it's about as far from the foundations of computer science as, say, web design. And in fact web design and UI design are slowly becoming one and the same, which will be great as far as I'm concerned - we can get back to doing real work rather than just making it look pretty.
If your servers are being managed by admins who can't figure out where the new controls for the server are, and can't RTFM on their own, then I truly pity you. But not too much, because you're probably the bastards that were propagating Code Red and Nimda :)
Well, it's not a ripoff if they really are faster at that point, is it? The ripoff is that you don't get the source code to Windows so that you can optimize and strip it yourself...
Exactly the point - he should have. There is no need for professional software developers to know how Windows works, but there probably is such a need for professional Windows software developers.
I fail to see how 90% desktop market share has anything to do with the kinds of work that professional software developers do. Desktop software is the ice sticking above the water, not the berg lurking below. Don't confuse what the user sees with where the work goes on.
Yes, because Windows GUIs are about all there is in the field of professional software development, of course. Perhaps it is you that should open your mind, or maybe just learn a little about the field you think you know.
That's not flamebait, it's practically from the lips of Alan Cox himself. But don't let that interrupt your rush to mis-moderate...
That's not how it works at all. A business pays you, you tell them which distribution is right, and you both go on your merry ways. Heck, there are practically as many shipping versions of Windows right now as there are Linux distributions; you don't see consultants telling businesses to "just try all the different Windows' and see which is best for you", now do you?
Choice is not bad, as long as there's enough information to make a decision. And there's plenty of information available to help you make that decision with Linux.
Well, Texas was originally part of Mexico, but then became independent, and finally became part of the U.S. Maybe you're thinking of California?
How civilized :) Although I imagine if the U.S. had a neighbor that was more like Russia than Canada, we'd have some better small arms stored about the place as well.
Mistake number one :)
I partially agree: a certain amount of loss does not render speech to be not speech. However, as a couple turns with the babelfish will convince you, repeated translations will result in the loss of meaning. There is no reason to protect the freedom of speech that doesn't mean anything - as the Court points out, different kinds of speech are accorded different kinds of protection. So the amount of loss can be a factor in protecting the freedom of translated speech.
I don't feel that object code is equivalently as meaningful as source code. It's true that functionally it works the same (assuming your compiler and assembler work right), but the functionality of the code was never the issue. The object code is, by it's nature, concerned only with manipulating the guts of the processor and its interfaces. Viewing the object code that manipulates a DVD key is not nearly as expressive as viewing the C code which does the same thing, at least to most people, let alone more expressive as you imply. The object code is full of shifts, adds, multplies, etc. such that it is very easy to lose track of what is going on. The source code, by use of variable names and simpler syntax, makes it easier to specify the overall actions that you want rather than focusing on minutia. The source code focuses on the actual items that you would discuss with another programmer, like "DVD key data", etc - you've never described DeCSS to another person as "2108 left shifts, 1500 right shifts, 4328 adds, etc.", have you? The whole in this case is more than the sum of its object code parts.
This isn't just my opinion; it is the opinion of computer programmers the world over. If object code or assembly was so much more expressive at conveying our ideas, don't you think we'd still be writing everything in it? The fact that most programmers use a higher-level language (or a language that mimics one, like VB) shows that the average programmer finds object code to be less expressive of their algorithms, even though it may be functionally just as accurate.
The standard that the courts seem to be using is: how much are the ideas expressed by the code in relationship to the amount of functionality that is included. This ratio of idea/function is higher for source code; or rather for object code you're not really expressing the same ideas - you're talking about copying this or that bit of memory or doing this operation on registers, you're not talking about DVD keys any more.
Probably the best test possible: give the average programmer the source code to DeCSS, and give his peer the object code. The source code guy will have figured out the overall ideas expressed long before the object code guy. Even with the comments stripped out, I think this would be true.
...ethereal, who can't believe he would argue so long about this particular shade of grey :)
Well, you could allow those businesses to run if they were no longer part of Microsoft, Inc. In effect the breakup would become economically imperative to Microsoft shareholders - think of it as evolution in action :)
Plus, if the company were "suspended", then you could revoke their ability to enforce licensing restrictions, so everyone would get all of their licensing costs back for those years. I'm sure that would be quite enough money to resolve any temporary issues that might arise. That right there would be enough money to provide for development so that Linux would be not just a replacement for Windows, but an enhancement far beyond it (not that in many cases is isn't already).
Nope, I don't buy the "but Microsoft is soooo important" argument - for one thing, if you or your company can't survive without Microsoft, then how can you consider yourself a free man or a separate company? There was software before Microsoft, and if there's any justice in the world, someday there will be software after Microsoft.
Sure, there's economic upheaval when a keystone predator is removed. But in the end there will be a richer business ecosystem with multiple strong competitors, rather than one big lion and a lot of jackals snacking on the scraps that Microsoft lets them have.
My only concern is that in some cases we are not going to be able to come up with better alternatives for the things that we've used up/destroyed. After years of storm water problems in south Florida, they're actually restoring the Everglades because guess what: we don't have a better way to do what those swamps do.
Likewise with forests: building things out of solid logs from trees is almost never done, because there are no more large trees left. Sure, this has inspired engineered lumber, etc., but only because the cheaper and better alternative (the real thing) no longer exists. That is one of the cases where we can put a price on the loss. In many cases, like deforestation in South America, we may not know what we're losing until too late.
Sure, there's development for the people that are able to seize the reigns of the environmental change and turn it to their own good. I'm just pointing out that in the long run the effects of these changes are not understood, and we have no good way to determine what the real costs of them will be. In many cases I think we will find the loss to have been greater than the gain. So I'm not as optimistic about plunging into an unknown environmental future as you are, even though I share your faith in our ability to fix most things through technological means.
But you lose something when translating to binary code; if that wasn't a lossy transformation then reverse-engineering wouldn't be so difficult, would it? I think it's reasonable to say that binary code is less "speech" than source code, at least by the standard of "what do experts in the field use to communicate?". When was the last time someone posted object code to a mailing list and wanted help with it, versus posting source code?
It's the Microsoft offense - if you can make someone angry enough about your actions that they lose their cool and start talking about just how bad you are, then you can later use their statements against them to escape punishment.
Now don't you wish you still had your guns? :)
I could never handle those choose-your-own-boycott books; I'd always read through looking for the good boycott endings, and then backtrack for which story I had to read in order to see that company fail :)
The problem is that it's impossible to prevent industry from creating a tragedy of the commons without some sort of government oversight. Sure, sometimes this oversight is corrupt and non-functional, but I still don't see any other way to do it.
I don't think it's safe to say this until you know what the real value of those trees are. Sure, you can say that the land is free, the trees are in the way, and we can grow all sorts of cash crops in those places instead, but in the end trees and a well-regulated ecosystem are good for something too. "Development" is not necessarily always a positive experience for the people involved.
Actually, I prefer those insane corporations that actually care about the environment. But you can go live next to the non-environmentally-caring ones, if you like. Just make sure you're all a ways downwind of me, and hopefully in another drainage basin and groundwater area.
I couldn't agree more. But, that would be (deep breath) bad for the economy. And as we all know from watching the President, the economy is apparently the only important thing in the country right now. That's why the citizenry is being exhorted to consume, consume, consume!
I'd rather have short-term economic upheaval, and then long-term economic growth as smaller and more agile airlines take up the slack, but then again I haven't lost my job as part of the recession. yet. knock on wood.
Lack of typing and $_ are features, not bugs. I'm sorry if you don't like those features, but it's entirely possible to write readable code while using them. And "features that don't translate over to another language" is exactly why there are separate languages - if every language could do the exact same thing, we wouldn't need more than one (and we would call it fortran ;).
I still say that lisp is better at what perl is trying to become, but perl has the advantage that pound-for-pound it's traded some of the '(' for various other punctuation. Nothing is better than perl at being what it already is, though - if you don't like those things, don't use perl.