You mean that it is a good thing that there was a berkeley stack for MS to use, otherwise we would all have ended up using some MS/proprietary networking stack. Were that the case, then it is good because we have open standard interoperable TCP/IP networking.
However, you failed to consider the possibility that MS o/sen would have been a little less dominant if they did not have a tcp stack to acquire. Perhaps we would be using other operating systems while microsoft scrambled to come up with an alternative to a hypothetical GPL'd tcp stack. Whole operating systems could be interoperable then... perhaps having less market share would encourage MS to be even more standards compliant yet(to compete). Would that not be an even better? Is it inconceivable to entertain the possibility?
Its seems like the intended audience for his counter rant was pretty much the slashdot crowd itself (the proverbial "choir")
Any version of it to be sent to an "outsider" would probably have to be cleaned up, or in other words boring-erized.
Its very difficult to write a logically strong argument that is both business/professinal as well as interesting/readable. (The recent writings of peruvian congressmen qualify as both)
It would be preferable to me if the rigid business types were a little more forgiving of humor, and accepting of unproven yet obvious anecdotes (such as the fact the ADTI is a blatant shill).
the BSD's have a long way to go for internationalization. This is why they are less popular overseas.
output/layout support, encoding support, localizations, locales, input methods support, etc, are areas where linux still needs alot of work, but its passable with many apps/configurations, especially just recently.
But it isn't! On a normal day you tend to work on dozens of projects. This system lets you move all the people in a specific project together, so you are sitting right next to the people you are working with. Two hours later you move to the next project on your list so you move near the people working on that project.
Whats ironic about that statement is that you are touting a great networking capability for its ability to bring people physically proximate.
Part of the idea of a network was that you could collaborate without being face to face. You can send these things called emails, you can share files over it, etc. Works great for me. I dont particularily want to be next to people who are going to be interupting me alot.
Are you sure people are going to use this roaming ability for work? Maybe theyll just sit next to friends to socialize (apparent primary function of most business-types), which is the typical case for human self organizing systems. (see any school cafeteria) Coding particularily does not require long-protein exchange.
In fact its possible to do a very good programming job without ever having seen the people you are working with in person. This roaming stuff seems all downside to me.
Doesnt anyone remember the recent story about microbe levels on keyboards and mice? This will be a great victory for the common cold.
Personnally I cant stand it when other people use my terminal (I learned dvorak, and popped out all the keys on my keyboard primarily to prevent people from using my terminal)
Somehow, this idea seems stupid, especially wrt their programmers. I certainly wouldnt put up with that environment.
The last thing I need to see on a monday morning is a moniter covered in fingerprints in front of a coke-sticky keyboard next to the mouse with the retarded ball.
The average literate chinese person has to know upwards of 3000 unique characters. Picking up the ~30 ascii glyphs needed to use the current internet is trifling in comparison.
Knowing a sufficient number of english words is much more difficult, but completely unnecessary for using email/DNS.
Also, I imagine if the "internet started in china", they would have included the measly 26 uppercase latin letters, as they are kanji's too. Most of the sites youd be interested in as an english speaker would stick to those anyway...
You work at a surviving startup who is trying to save money by hiring people with a less credentials than many people in the market posess. If you continue to survive you will spend alot of money maintaining your codebase, if you have large programming projects.
This thread is long since dead, but i wanted to point out that that is incorrect: I dont attempt to hire lower-credential people. Its just that ive observed firsthand an inverse correlation between education and skill. Also, from what I can glean the pays are above average (competitive industry sector for employees).
Also, code is art. There is no one right way to do it, there are many disparate ways to solve a problem, and alot of it comes down to personal style. (alot of "engineering" is like this as well). Its art because it is design work, which requires creativity.
You have several upmodded posts on this topic where you droll on about the beauty of mediocrity, the primacy of social climbing over getting work done, the subjugation of individual worth, and the value of college education as if you were some kind of born again commie.
Perhaps you work for some government contractor where mediocrity is mandatory, but in the real world talent is as talent does. I interview for coders at a surviving startup, and I certainly dont favor the degree-laden. In fact, based strictly upon personal experience, Ill hold it against you until you prove that college hasnt made you into an idiot. (generally its to late if youre a phd)
People who really like and want to code, from those i know, find the free-ride, insight bereft, 4 year beer-binging, elementary level "educations" coming out of for-profit ivy league degree mills to be repulsive. Those who wish to learn will do so, going to an institution of formal learning being as harmful as it is helpful.
An there is no coding nirvana where all programmers are interchangeable. And if you cannot understand someone's code, that doesnt automatically mean its incorrect. (it may mean you are an idiot, keep an open mind and youll be less of one)
The best code is created fastest when you give your programmers some leeway to craft their own vision, and provide them with analysis/critiques.
Your duff beer name invokes an image of homer at work pushing the button as your ideal programming workplace: one where the programmer is completely interchangeable if not irrelevant.
Its pretty standard practice to keep ownership of the code you produce on contract. Typically, its so you can reuse bits for different jobs.
You almost always give the client an Unlimited Non-Exclusive license to the stuff, but you certainly dont give away what you can sell.
If a client adamantly wants exclusive rights to whatever you produce, then you certainly raise the rates. And if you bring any preexisting code in an the product, which you will always do, you have to be clear that they dont get exclusive rights to that as well.
you have a good point: contracts can be in other languages: what i was getting at is the weight of precedence behind contracts in english is what prevents spurious legal challenges.
If the GPL were in another language, it could possibly be ignored in certain contexts (primarily english content lets say) because it was obscure. what legal wrangling of this type would accomplish im not sure since ianal, however the primary function of the legal system seems to be outspending your opponent to deny him the ability to reach any legal conclusion; so anything that can get by the "dismissed with prejudice by the original judge" is dangerous.
It help if you think of the GPL not as human-readable text, but instead as machine code to be executed by the US legal system.
The structure, the case, the layout, etc, are all important, and you cant just change them. Comprehendability doesnt even come into the equation.
And translation is out of the question. (You cant translate machine code from one architecture to another. So to make a chinese GPL, you'd have to "recompile" it for chinese law. And it makes no sense to have a US-law GPL in chinese- because US legal documents must be in English)
If you want a layman to understand the GPL, you are better off pointing them at a FAQ.
C'mon, a doctorate in comp sci from MIT, with just one management degree compared to the 3 EE/comp sci degrees. He must know something about the subject, if not to the specific degree slashdot would like, but maybe we're not getting the whole story.
Why does everyone assume that a degree in something makes you competent? I admit, at first, I myself was intimidated when I had to interview a PH.D for a software position. I was expecting to be amazed, or at least impressed. Sadly that was not the case. The man was functionally illiterate in the skills listed on his resume.
Now I know one cant judge society from first person perspective, but in my experience skill is inversely proportional to education. For the record Ive never met a PHd who was not an idiot.
How about a law that explicity affirms fair use, legalizes non-commercial sharing, legalizes reverse engineering, legalizes bypassing of "effective access controls", rolls back the DCMA completely, and denounces any such legislation such as SSSCA or CDBPTA as unconstitutional.
This will do wonders for the "content industry", even if they dont like the taste of the medicine. It will also do wonders for the quality of content.
Disclaimer, this may not be what your congresscritter wants to hear...
The scum-wad(s) who wrote the virus are responsible for its actions. Microsoft should do a better job of writing secure software, but the primary responsibility lies with the virus writer. Any responsibility born by Microsoft is equalled by the responsibility born by those users who don't apply security updates and don't run up-to-date firewall and virus checking software.
Actalluy the responsibility should be with the virus recievers. They should take responsibility for their own systems, if they set them up using software known to be faulty and compromisable, its not a surprise when they fail due to compromise.
Calling what virus senders do illegal is treading a very fine line. They are only sending messages, and standards compliant ones at that. What a reciever does with them is their own prerogative.
The teacher is paying you, with good grades as a method of compensation.
(people sometimes forget that you can trade without money being involved)
So a continuation of the analogy would be: Would you mind if the teacher (buyer of content) allowed all the other students to read your paper (the content) for free (without permission/new compensation)
Books are not searchable by nature so making it easier to find information about a book still leaves the issue of how do we get access to it.
Did I read that right? You mean that title, author, subject, date, and category are not searchable fields? Its impossible to search the contents of a book for patterns? Its not easy to store/index a book's content in the database itself?
Perhaps you typed that wrong, or im misunderstanding you, but that statement sounds profoundly false.
You might want to look into project gutenberg. Because they do that. (If copy restrictions were shorter, they would have tons more stuff too)
Its simply true; there is no other language that even comes close to filling all the roles of C++. Most of the languages people advocate for taking a certain niche from C++ are implemented in C++.
Its a very difficult language to learn, and hard to use properly. It has lots of syntax, and many idiosyncrasies. Yet it yields you control of the machine in the manner of C, adding in alot of the niceties of high level languages for those who know how to use them.
You might argue that its less error prone for certian programmers to use a more specialized and high level language for certain tasks. You might make a good case that C++ should not be someones first learned language (I say learn assembly, then C, then C++, then some high level lang).
What you cannot say is that C++ should be ditched. It is filling a vast role in real-world programming, where nothing else can compete.
--- haiku.orig Fri Apr 5 13:24:00 2002 +++ haiku.new Fri Apr 5 13:23:20 2002 @@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
Using GPL
Will encroach upon our rights -To control the world +To encroach on yours
The reason they dont do this is quite simple: The part of recoding to a lossy format that is actually lossy is the psychoacoustic model: where you filter out bits of the signal in such a way as to make it unnoticeable.
The whole point of doing that is to reduce the amount if information in the music, and hence make it easier to compress.
When you recode, then you are taking that irreversible step twice, and lossy(A) != lossy(lossy(a)), so you get a further degraded signal. (the models are not really designed to deal with already modified music).
If the psychoacoustic model has been preapplied to the music for you hovever, you can simply switch to a lossless format. A properly designed one could be taught to do this well, and for pre-trimmed wave files, its compression would be just as good as ogg or mp3.
Who in their right mind would want their very serious issue/product/idea/news to be posted an April 1?
Be it so plain as "this statement is true", noone will ever believe it in any context, bar idiots.
The FIRST THING many people do when faced with a dubious, or controvesial story is CHECK THE DATE. Anything Apr1 is tagged <Disinformation type="Humourous">
-RELAXED MAN smiles and leans forward: "No. We use Linux". +RELAXED MAN smiles and leans forward: "No. They don't".
A little less pretensious, and more likely to be taken as a real conversation. Attention is focuses in at that last line, which is exactly when the tagline comes in, giving the trademark all the prominence it needs without getting gushy.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean that it is a good thing that there was a berkeley stack for MS to use, otherwise we would all have ended up using some MS/proprietary networking stack. Were that the case, then it is good because we have open standard interoperable TCP/IP networking.
However, you failed to consider the possibility that MS o/sen would have been a little less dominant if they did not have a tcp stack to acquire. Perhaps we would be using other operating systems while microsoft scrambled to come up with an alternative to a hypothetical GPL'd tcp stack.
Whole operating systems could be interoperable then... perhaps having less market share would encourage MS to be even more standards compliant yet(to compete). Would that not be an even better? Is it inconceivable to entertain the possibility?
Its seems like the intended audience for his counter rant was pretty much the slashdot crowd itself (the proverbial "choir")
Any version of it to be sent to an "outsider" would probably have to be cleaned up, or in other words boring-erized.
Its very difficult to write a logically strong argument that is both business/professinal as well as interesting/readable. (The recent writings of peruvian congressmen qualify as both)
It would be preferable to me if the rigid business types were a little more forgiving of humor, and accepting of unproven yet obvious anecdotes (such as the fact the ADTI is a blatant shill).
the BSD's have a long way to go for internationalization. This is why they are less popular overseas.
output/layout support, encoding support, localizations, locales, input methods support, etc, are areas where linux still needs alot of work,
but its passable with many apps/configurations, especially just recently.
But it isn't! On a normal day you tend to work on dozens of projects. This system lets you move all the people in a specific project together, so you are sitting right next to the people you are working with. Two hours later you move to the next project on your list so you move near the people working on that project.
Whats ironic about that statement is that you are touting a great networking capability for its ability to bring people physically proximate.
Part of the idea of a network was that you could collaborate without being face to face. You can send these things called emails, you can share files over it, etc. Works great for me. I dont particularily want to be next to people who are going to be interupting me alot.
Are you sure people are going to use this roaming ability for work? Maybe theyll just sit next to friends to socialize (apparent primary function of most business-types), which is the typical case for human self organizing systems. (see any school cafeteria) Coding particularily does not require long-protein exchange.
In fact its possible to do a very good programming job without ever having seen the people you are working with in person. This roaming stuff seems all downside to me.
Doesnt anyone remember the recent story about microbe levels on keyboards and mice? This will be a great victory for the common cold.
Personnally I cant stand it when other people use my terminal (I learned dvorak, and popped out all the keys on my keyboard primarily to prevent people from using my terminal)
Somehow, this idea seems stupid, especially wrt their programmers. I certainly wouldnt put up with that environment.
The last thing I need to see on a monday morning is a moniter covered in fingerprints in front of a coke-sticky keyboard next to the mouse with the retarded ball.
This is like the maiden voyage of the titanic.
No, its worse. You know its going to sink to the bottom.
Not really, we dont know if it's going to sink.
The main difference I see is that the titanic actually had passengers
The average literate chinese person has to know upwards of 3000 unique characters. Picking up the ~30 ascii glyphs needed to use the current internet is trifling in comparison.
Knowing a sufficient number of english words is much more difficult, but completely unnecessary for using email/DNS.
Also, I imagine if the "internet started in china", they would have included the measly 26 uppercase latin letters, as they are kanji's too. Most of the sites youd be interested in as an english speaker would stick to those anyway...
You work at a surviving startup who is trying to save money by hiring people with a less credentials than many people in the market posess. If you continue to survive you will spend alot of money maintaining your codebase, if you have large programming projects.
This thread is long since dead, but i wanted to point out that that is incorrect: I dont attempt to hire lower-credential people. Its just that ive observed firsthand an inverse correlation between education and skill. Also, from what I can glean the pays are above average (competitive industry sector for employees).
Also, code is art. There is no one right way to do it, there are many disparate ways to solve a problem, and alot of it comes down to personal style. (alot of "engineering" is like this as well). Its art because it is design work, which requires creativity.
You have several upmodded posts on this topic where you droll on about the beauty of mediocrity, the primacy of social climbing over getting work done, the subjugation of individual worth, and the value of college education as if you were some kind of born again commie.
Perhaps you work for some government contractor where mediocrity is mandatory, but in the real world talent is as talent does. I interview for coders at a surviving startup, and I certainly dont favor the degree-laden. In fact, based strictly upon personal experience, Ill hold it against you until you prove that college hasnt made you into an idiot. (generally its to late if youre a phd)
People who really like and want to code, from those i know, find the free-ride, insight bereft, 4 year beer-binging, elementary level "educations" coming out of for-profit ivy league degree mills to be repulsive. Those who wish to learn will do so, going to an institution of formal learning being as harmful as it is helpful.
An there is no coding nirvana where all programmers are interchangeable. And if you cannot understand someone's code, that doesnt automatically mean its incorrect. (it may mean you are an idiot, keep an open mind and youll be less of one)
The best code is created fastest when you give your programmers some leeway to craft their own vision, and provide them with analysis/critiques.
Your duff beer name invokes an image of homer at work pushing the button as your ideal programming workplace: one where the programmer is completely interchangeable if not irrelevant.
You almost always give the client an Unlimited Non-Exclusive license to the stuff, but you certainly dont give away what you can sell.
If a client adamantly wants exclusive rights to whatever you produce, then you certainly raise the rates. And if you bring any preexisting code in an the product, which you will always do, you have to be clear that they dont get exclusive rights to that as well.
you have a good point: contracts can be in other languages: what i was getting at is the weight of precedence behind contracts in english is what prevents spurious legal challenges.
If the GPL were in another language, it could possibly be ignored in certain contexts (primarily english content lets say) because it was obscure.
what legal wrangling of this type would accomplish im not sure since ianal, however the primary function of the legal system seems to be outspending your opponent to deny him the ability to reach any legal conclusion; so anything that can get by the "dismissed with prejudice by the original judge" is dangerous.
It help if you think of the GPL not as human-readable text, but instead as machine code to be executed by the US legal system.
The structure, the case, the layout, etc, are all important, and you cant just change them. Comprehendability doesnt even come into the equation. And translation is out of the question. (You cant translate machine code from one architecture to another. So to make a chinese GPL, you'd have to "recompile" it for chinese law. And it makes no sense to have a US-law GPL in chinese- because US legal documents must be in English)
If you want a layman to understand the GPL, you are better off pointing them at a FAQ.
They are one of the few I know of who provide a linux router with a tcp acceleration layer. (IP/SkyX they call it)
C'mon, a doctorate in comp sci from MIT, with just one management degree compared to the 3 EE/comp sci degrees. He must know something about the subject, if not to the specific degree slashdot would like, but maybe we're not getting the whole story.
Why does everyone assume that a degree in something makes you competent? I admit, at first, I myself was intimidated when I had to interview a PH.D for a software position. I was expecting to be amazed, or at least impressed. Sadly that was not the case. The man was functionally illiterate in the skills listed on his resume.
Now I know one cant judge society from first person perspective, but in my experience skill is inversely proportional to education. For the record Ive never met a PHd who was not an idiot.
How about a law that explicity affirms fair use, legalizes non-commercial sharing, legalizes reverse engineering, legalizes bypassing of "effective access controls", rolls back the DCMA completely, and denounces any such legislation such as SSSCA or CDBPTA as unconstitutional.
This will do wonders for the "content industry", even if they dont like the taste of the medicine. It will also do wonders for the quality of content.
Disclaimer, this may not be what your congresscritter wants to hear...
The scum-wad(s) who wrote the virus are responsible for its actions. Microsoft should do a better job of writing secure software, but the primary responsibility lies with the virus writer. Any responsibility born by Microsoft is equalled by the responsibility born by those users who don't apply security updates and don't run up-to-date firewall and virus checking software.
Actalluy the responsibility should be with the virus recievers. They should take responsibility for their own systems, if they set them up using software known to be faulty and compromisable, its not a surprise when they fail due to compromise.
Calling what virus senders do illegal is treading a very fine line. They are only sending messages, and standards compliant ones at that. What a reciever does with them is their own prerogative.
The teacher is paying you, with good grades as a method of compensation.
(people sometimes forget that you can trade without money being involved)
So a continuation of the analogy would be: Would you mind if the teacher (buyer of content) allowed all the other students to read your paper (the content) for free (without permission/new compensation)
Did I read that right? You mean that title, author, subject, date, and category are not searchable fields? Its impossible to search the contents of a book for patterns? Its not easy to store/index a book's content in the database itself?
Perhaps you typed that wrong, or im misunderstanding you, but that statement sounds profoundly false.
You might want to look into project gutenberg. Because they do that. (If copy restrictions were shorter, they would have tons more stuff too)
Its simply true; there is no other language that even comes close to filling all the roles of C++. Most of the languages people advocate for taking a certain niche from C++ are implemented in C++.
Its a very difficult language to learn, and hard to use properly. It has lots of syntax, and many idiosyncrasies. Yet it yields you control of the machine in the manner of C, adding in alot of the niceties of high level languages for those who know how to use them.
You might argue that its less error prone for certian programmers to use a more specialized and high level language for certain tasks. You might make a good case that C++ should not be someones first learned language (I say learn assembly, then C, then C++, then some high level lang).
What you cannot say is that C++ should be ditched. It is filling a vast role in real-world programming, where nothing else can compete.
None of this makes him a good person, Edison was still an evil, helpless-animal murdering, bastard.
But ideas are clean of their promulagators, inherently.
The reason they dont do this is quite simple:
The part of recoding to a lossy format that is actually lossy is the psychoacoustic model: where you filter out bits of the signal in such a way as to make it unnoticeable.
The whole point of doing that is to reduce the amount if information in the music, and hence make it easier to compress.
When you recode, then you are taking that irreversible step twice, and lossy(A) != lossy(lossy(a)), so you get a further degraded signal. (the models are not really designed to deal with already modified music).
If the psychoacoustic model has been preapplied to the music for you hovever, you can simply switch to a lossless format. A properly designed one could be taught to do this well, and for pre-trimmed wave files, its compression would be just as good as ogg or mp3.
Who in their right mind would want their very serious issue/product/idea/news to be posted an April 1?
Be it so plain as "this statement is true", noone will ever believe it in any context, bar idiots.
The FIRST THING many people do when faced with a dubious, or controvesial story is CHECK THE DATE.
Anything Apr1 is tagged <Disinformation type="Humourous">
So stop whining, and go away
Do you take patches?
A little less pretensious, and more likely to be taken as a real conversation. Attention is focuses in at that last line, which is exactly when the tagline comes in, giving the trademark all the prominence it needs without getting gushy.
Because as the system fails, the repulsive force gets stronger, whereas the attractive force gets weaker.
So instead it is preferable to attach a buttered peice of toast to the belly of the cat, butter side facing upwards.