"Yes there was a link to savannah.gnu.org, but there is not a lot of information about it on the front page, except that the services provided by savannah.gnu.org are now online (except not all, or something)"
There was also a link to the forums, stating that the system had been cracked. Try reading the/. frontpage to start with, next time you don't want to look like a stupid troll.
Whatever. The point, which you seem to have missed, is that this is the Laziest Slashdot Article Ever. Not only was there no information in the blurb, but there was not even a linked article for crying out loud! I mean granted no one reads them anymore, but jiminey crikers!
You were given a site at gnu.org (if you don't know what GNU is, why are you reading/.?), told what had happened, and what the current status of the site was. What part of that didn't you understand?
First off, there wasn't a Fucking Aricle. Yes there was a link to savannah.gnu.org, but there is not a lot of information about it on the front page, except that the services provided by savannah.gnu.org are now online (except not all, or something).
Now, there was an earlier slashdot article that said it was going offline. That article IIRC told more about what the hell savannah was, and why it went down, etc. That was an adctual informative article, and, surprisingly, is linked to an article.
Savannah is more than just a website, so obviously you did not know what it was either but you want to look like a smartass. Congratulations, you have succeeded in looking like a smartass.
There are CeeDees with the old kernels on them...I'm sure someone has one of them somewhere (Walnut Creek used to include the ancient sources in their box sets)...even if they did, they wouldn't have changed them until after the whole SCO thing...so one of the box sets from a few years ago should be sufficient...
There are also posters available with the original Linux kernel source. There are probably a lot of different places to get this from.
No. They claim copyright violation so they have to prove it. Imagine if what you said was true then SCO simply would have to file lots of (bogus) complaints every year and the kernel-hackers would be tied up for the rest of their lives trying to counter the claims. The burden of proof is on SCOs side.
Besides, since the header files contain only facts, there is no copyright value to them.
Hey smartass, give it a try. My mailreader can't access port 80 so their trash can't load. Plus Outlook 2003 doesn't download HTML content by default and you can set it so that it will display all e-mail as plain text. Better yet, since you don't recieve any legit HTML e-mail, have your mailserver send anything with DOCTYPE HTML to the void. Or if that's too hard, keep bitching, I bet soon they'll change every mailreader on earth just for you.
Nah, I'll just keep using a mailreader that only shows mail in plain text and keeps that mail in plain text as well. Besides, by your own admission your suggestion was a bad approach to the problem. You said we should ask people to only send us text. That is stupid IMHO. I simply only read mail in plain text. Problem solved.
Start sending a reply to those USERS who installed the shit. Ask them to stop wasting resources and annoying you, don't ask the rest of the world to remove the capability.
Good idea! I'll reply to all those spammers Right Away and ask them to please send me mail only in plain text! Oh, I guess I shoudl give them your email address and say that you said it is okay to send you HTML with JavaScript.
/. ran a story about this very thing from IBM's R&D who also came to the same conclusion.
Honestly, it's hard to believe that it took PHD "rocket scientists" to come to the conclusion that email is probably better interfaced as a forum. We've all known that for years. It's also hard to understand why there aren't "big name" email clients that already support that kind of interface.
Thinking of Microsoft's offering in this area, it would be nice if they automatically emailed the author of the worm that ravaged your system so you could conduct a forum-interfaced conversation with the person. Kinda like an auto-Friendster between worm-authors and worm-targets.;-)
Actually, older mail clients have had this functionality. It seems like Eudora and Pine did, but it has been a long time since I used them. Sylpheed also has a threaded view as do many other Free Software email clients. Microsoft is just too behind the times. Instead of enhancing email functionality, they have been enhancing virus passing capabilities:P.
"Chick" is slang for girl/woman - "flick" slang for movie.
"Chickflick" is a semi-disparaging termm used to refer to movies that appeal mainly to females.
More than that, they are stupid sensless fodder supposedly marketed to females. But apparently females do watch them. Personally, I think the whole industry of making chickflicks is sexist in the extreme because it implies that women can only understand stupid movies with no real plot. A review I read for "Love, Actually" even came right out and said it was a stupid senseless movie with no plot, no character development, and pretty much no substance, but since it was a chickflick that was all to be expected so he gave it a high rating.
I also dislike the fact that everything in the west (or at least the US) that is "for children" is of the absolutely lowest quality possible and dumbed down. Like the chickflicks, it panders to the idea that children are stupid. I do not believe this is true and I think children would be better served by media which do not treat them as though they were. I believe this is true for women and chickflicks as well.
Ironically, I had a girlfriend when Office Space came out and did not see it (I forget what we watched instead, but I try not to date women who watch crappy chickflicks.) I saw it later, when I was between girlfriends, with a geek friend who had the DVD.
This article really shows why it is time for the DMCA to go. Anyone who happens to create any sort of device that someone figures out a way to use it to circumvent anything can be sued under the DMCA. (See also the Sklyarov incident.) Remember when someone discovered that you could use a Sharpie to circumvent the copy protection on a CD? Manufacturers/programmers/whatever should never be responsible for what anyone does outside the intended uses.
No, the article shows what ridiculous legal advice SCO has. You cannot copyright facts, and that is all that is kept in these header files. Aren't these signals and errors dictated by POSIX standards anyway? Even if they weren't, making my OS use the same error codes as yours for the purpose of compatability is not a violation of copyright, because, again, the error codes are facts and not covered by copyright. If it is not covered by copyright, it is not covered by the DMCA.
"But in most shops employing RDBMS, you have one team that maintains the OS, one team that maintains the database, one team that maintains the network, and finally a team that writes and maintains the actual applications. What the poster is probably worried about is being a DBA when some application programmer uses Java badly and then his boss leans on him, as the DBA, to make the process work faster."
I work in such a company, as an application programmer. Where I work, it's not up to the DBA to make things run faster - if an application is too slow, it's our problem. True, we can call on the various other people to help us in tracking down the cause of the problem, working out what needs to be done to improve the situation, etc, but ultimately it's our responsibility. It may be that the solution is to increase the spec of the machine(s), or upgrade the network, but we'd still be very much involved in coming to that decision.
So, as a counter example - from my position as a programmer, I'd be rather upset if my otherwise well-performing code is crippled by an underspecced machine or poorly-configured database. I trust the people responsible to do their jobs properly, though.
And you would be right. I wish that you worked at my company. However, I have run into far too many clueless database application programmers to believe that your attitude is representative of the group as a whole. One thing I have noted is that there is a prevailing attitude among developers and those who hire them that understanding networking, OS, hardware, etc is unneccessary and indeed undesirable. This seems to be worse in database application development than anywhere else.
What this leads to is a situation where a programmer who not only is clueless in all those areas, but also does incredibly stupid things in their application runs into performance problems they do indeed attack the DBA, the network team, the OS/hardware team, etc and have them spin their wheels over problems that are really application problems. And when they are told what is going on at those levels they do not understand or believe it.
By contrast, you are correct that underspecced machines or poorly configured databases will screw over the best code in the world. But I think that the poster was complaining of the former situation.:)
"Sounds like a job for stored procedures ala Oracle. If MySQL does not have them it should."
That's the issue -- the poster's complaint actually has nothing to do with MySQL embedding Java in particular -- he's worried that if he allows users to execute stored procedures they can bog down his database.
Actually, I think that is exactly what the poster is worried about. Correct me if I am wrong, but I had the understanding that Oracle stored procedures were compiled C code. In this case, we are talking about Java which is interpreted. For that and various other reasons, we are dealing with far more impact on the database's performance.
I've been reading/. for 5 years, and I haven't seen Office Space. Then again, I have a girlfriend too.
That's funny because I was going to suggest that the reason for correllation was indeed causation. In other words the slashdotters who did not see Office Space had girlfriends, and therefore were watching some chickflick instead.:)
Everybody I know wants a Ferrari in my garage and a supermodel girlfriend, but none are willing to pay $250,000 for either - that doesn't mean that there is a shortage of Ferraris or supermodels, nor does it imply that the government needs to take action and make damn sure that everybody gets a Ferrari (destroying the value of the Ferrari and cars in general in the process.)
I'm reasonably certain the supermodel girlfriend will cost you more than $250k. The ferrari might be had for that sum, but..:)
There's a difference between steelwork and programming. The tools get more advanced or better at a faster rate than steelwork.
I don't think that's what the poster was getting at. What the poster was pointing out was that whereas it is possible to become skilled in your art and work to do a good job, if management keeps lowering the bar and demanding less and less skillful work, not only is this frustrating to the skilled labourer but it makes their argument of hiring less skilled cheaper labour more compelling, which adds insult to injury.
Lately I have noticed a trend toward management going more and more for yesmen and drones, and less toward allowing people who understand technology to plan and implement solutions. If all you want is drones, you commoditize the labour force and then they become widgets rather than people. If you give them power to advise on or make decisions, the quality of the ideas your people have becomes incredibly important and it is more difficult to simply choose another to fill the slot.
I think there is a dangerous antilabour backlash going on right now in management. There are managers today who basically do not care about the worker and would ratehr not care about the worker. These guys have always existed, but right now the idea that we don't have to care about workers, how they feel, how they are treated, etc, is being pushed as though it were a revolutionary idea and hyped to the max in the trade rags.
I also think that the entrepreneurial spirit is going to have to be our saviour here. Just as in the 90's boom years, disgruntled workers will get together and rather than give their ideas away to corporations whose managers clearly hate them and think of them as slaves or widgets will form their own firms so they can build it right in the first place. It will be hard because the VCs are licking their wounds and the privately held money among such people was eaten into during the crash. But it will happen. If it does not the US will lose its technical edge altogether.
As many posters have pointed out the assumption of high US tax rates is a canard. India has even higher tax rates, see http://www.krislon.net/India/Finance/tax_rate_Inco me.htm for example.
Annual income between $1200 to $3000 (roughly) gets taxed at a 30% rate. Annual income above $3000 gets taxed at a 45% rate. And from my experience, there is little chance of tax evasion in salaried, white collar jobs, as taxes are withheld at source as in the USA.
b.
Like everyone else in this thread and most Americans (or USians as some would have it) you have completely missed an important fact in the post and in the tax system. Income tax is not the only tax we pay, and while it is fairly low compared to many nations, there are a number of other taxes which, when put together, make one wonder where all the money goes. There are a lot of hidden taxes and not-so-hidden taxes which go together to help increase the cost of living overall.
Not that everyone already hasn't roundly discredited this theory, but it's not taxes (whatever this "4 layers of 93% = 1200% mumbo jumbo is, I have no idea) that make US labor so expensive. While taxes play some part in it, the major difference is cost of living. This is why US companies outsource to countries such as India with a roughly comparable income tax to ours - 20 to 40 percent, depending on tax bracket. US companies still have to pay corporate taxes on any profits earned, so those taxes do not figure into the equation.
It is clear that this was mumbo jumbo to you, as was the argument itself. The poster is not saying that cost of living is not the problem. The poster is stating one reason for the increased cost of living in the US. The multilayers to which the poster is referring are likely the myriad taxes that the labourer pays in addition to the taxes paid by his empoloyer and the companies from which s/he buys goods and services. For instance, consider the following:
In the Northeast US, a worker will typically pay income tax not only to the federal government, but also to the city, county and state in which they live. Once they have received their paycheck, they will go and try to buy various things. However everything they buy has a sales tax levied by the city, county, and state. Over and above sales tax, there are special taxes for given goods like gasoline, tobacco products, vehicles, etc.
Now consider that the company which produces these goods for sale in the US also pays taxes, nbot only on income, but also in various other ways. Then both the buyer and the seller may be paying property tax. If you add it all up there is a lot more tax than you might think.
US labor is more expensive due to the cost of living. I would hardly take a job at the same wage Indian programmers are getting paid because I can't buy groceries as cheap as they can, or live in a house for as cheap.
But you must consider why this is. Granted there are some basic economic factors involved, but the poster is asking us to consider the impact of the aforementioned myriad taxes on these costs.
You are correct in a change in economics in the world; 20 years ago outsourcing technical jobs would have been almost impossible because of the capital requirements to test and build products, the high cost of communication and goods transportation, lack of an educated workforce, and trade barriers. However, this might be bad for individuals (sadly, including me) but not for the country as a whole. Society is better off as a whole due to the basic economic theory of competitive advantage.
This depends, really. It is entirely possible to localize the advantages so that only a few get the benefits. There are some people in power right now in the US who seem to be aiming for this goal.
While "Free Trade" agreements do have serious problems - for example, labor is cheaper in India in part because US corporations don't have to worry about pesky things such as unemployment insurance, safety, environmental restrictsion,and a host of other workers' rights there - in principle they do benefit rather than harm to this country. Your complaint about the tax system is misplaced; the government's main culpability in this is helping guide the country to such a high standard of living that we have priced ourselves out of many labor markets.
I don't join the people who say we should give up air conditioning and flush toilets and starve in order to compete with India. Rather I say give India these things and when we are all driving SUVs the world will be a better place. Why go backwards?
You are an idiot. It isn't taxes that's the problem, it's the relative standard of living. Living in the USA on US $10k / yr is extremely difficult - living in India on the same you live like a king.
BUt what the poster is pointing out is that the guy who makes $10k a year in the US will be crushed by taxes. Yes, they will get most of their income tax back, but it will be witheld. Then the money they take home will go to a large extent to the hidden taxes. Tax on gasoline, food, and everything else you can think of. The goods and services this person purchases will be more expensive not only because they are taxed when you buy them, but the seller is taxed when s/he sells them and is taxed while producing them. Then you are taxed for possessing them, and taxed again if you still had them when you die.
So the poster's point was that the cost of living is indeed the problem, but a part of the reason for the cost of living increase in the US is the tax system and the way it works.
"The US programmers must mark their wages up 150% or more to pay the US taxes on their wages."
U.S. taxes are the lowest in the industrialized world.
And the services we receive for those taxes are less than what people get in developing countries. Besides the argument is US vs India. Not US vs Germany. And yes in Europe people get more for their tax money than we do.
Of course taxes are lower in developing nations
Oh, so you agree with the poster? I thought you were arguing with them...
- so is the quality and quantity of government service.
I'm not so sure about that, but I will admit my own research is somewhat spotty here. Indians have told me that their utilities, being government owned, are paid by their taxes. They also have a pretty good (and cheap) public transportation system. School is paid for, period, unless you elect to go to an expensive private school on your own. Yes, school is paid for means college through graduate degree. It's far from a utopia, but we were comparing what they get from the government to what we get.
The difference has little to do with taxes, and more with total cost-of-living.
You may have something there. ultimately the real answer is "Economics is complicated and pretty much no one understands it." But I think the poster's tax burden position is an interesting data point in the equation.
VaLinux is doing its best to keep offshoring viable. Check out their recent press releases:
They are also doing their best to mangle links posted by people who do not post in html. In the interest of sacrificing some karma for the good of humanity and the information of slashdot users, here are the first and second press releases. For the WTF crowd and the vast majority of slashdot that do not read links or articles, the links are to press releases from slashdot's parent company crowing about SourceForge Enterprise Edition and its ability to make offshoring more viable.
Did you not think about that post? Sounds like you just dislike Java so much that hearing it in the same sentance as MySQL makes you cringe.
I think the answer to both questions is yes.
1) Java isn't going to slow down any queries unless you use Java functions.
Which is exactly what the poster fears they will do.
2) What do you care that someone else isn't smart enough to write good software?
I think this is the heart of your disconnect with the poster. True, if you are using MySQL as most do, in a small shop, the dba and the application programmer are probably the same person. But in most shops employing RDBMS, you have one team that maintains the OS, one team that maintains the database, one team that maintains the network, and finally a team that writes and maintains the actual applications. What the poster is probably worried about is being a DBA when some application programmer uses Java badly and then his boss leans on him, as the DBA, to make the process work faster. In such a case you would deeply, deeply care.
3) MySQL as it stands has no other way to really embed functions easily, and it's actually more effecient to run code on the server and transfer data back afterwords.
Sounds like a job for stored procedures ala Oracle. If MySQL does not have them it should.
"But what I am getting at is the fact that the Constitution, rather than simply telling the government what it cannot do, tells the government exactly what it can do."
By that argument, there was no need for any Bill of Rights. Since the Bill of Rights was apparently needed, that argument is wrong.
Actually both arguments were made. Some of the founding fathers worried that by enumerating rights we would de facto restrict what rights a citizen had, and lead people to believe as you and many others do now. You are proving them right. Shay's rebellion lead to the Bill of Rights. The proponents of the Bill of Rights said that unless certain rights were explicitly acknowleged they would be ignored by the government. They were proven right as well.
If you actually read the Declaration of Independance, the Constitution, and the various writings both of the founding fathers and of the philosophers who influenced them, you would get a better idea of where they were coming from. Even within the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence explicit language states that they do not enumerate all of the rights held by the people. The reason the Bill of Rights was needed was not that governments grant rights, but that governments must be reminded of them.
"stuck with the idea that governments grant rights to people, which is horrbly wrong."
Most people agree with that statement for rhetorical reasons, although it is factually incorrect. Did Virginia residents have in 1770 have the right to be secure in their effects, or to vote for their head of state? No, they did not. Only when the government granted those rights did they start to exist. 50 years later, did women living there have the right to vote? Again, they did not, until the government explicitly created it.
Actually you are factually incorrect. At birth a human being is endowed by their Creator (whatever that may be to you) with infinite inalienable rights. We choose to submit to the laws of society because it is necessary to have common rules in order for multiple humans to live together in the same space. To enforce those rules we choose governments, and give them certain powers to change rules and enforce them. You have it completely backwards, and so do the elitists who tend to take over any government whatever the form.
Women always had the right to vote, and to choose their government. Men however tended to prevent them from exercising such rights. Within the context of North American democracy, the movement to women's suffrage predates the United States, as did the movement to abolish slavery. The revolution was supposed to end slavery and give women back their rights; it is a matter of history that this did not happen. However this does not change the fact that as human beings with free will, women can choose their fate. It is the oppression of other humans which makes this difficult, not some natural state.
Actually these ideas are not new. For instance, in Appian's Civil War there is an account of Octavian attempting to tax a group of widows. The Roman Republic was an extremely patriarical society such that women and children were property and were not accorded any rights. However, in the widows' speech to Octavian they acknowlege the fact they have chosen their lot, and say that they have no representation and therefore are not taxed, and whereas they have given up some rights to self-determination they are cared for by men. Granted, this speech smacks of patriarichal values and therefore may not be factual within its context, but even if Appian made it up the idea that people choose their government and give it power over them even in such an extreme case as the Imperial period of Rome is not new.
"Governments are given rights and powers by the people, not the other way round."
Hello, and welcome to the amazing world of "democracy", where "the people" are "the government
and encryption isn't, to coin the phrase, like a hand grenade; close doesn't count.
Erm, in order to coin a phrase, you have to make it up yourself. Instead you are paraphrasing. The rest of your post is quite correct and insightful:).
But how much would we be paying per kilo-watt of energy produced? Simply stated - this is not yet economically feasible. If it is, then start doing this and you'll become a billionaire!
Actually you'd have to be a billionaire to do it. Maybe more. But there are new solar panel technologies which use cheaper materials, albeit at lower efficiency, to achieve per-kilowatt costs far below those we are paying now.
Personally, I think the real answer is to implement what we have now. Current power plants are created with huge government subsidies and loans, anyhow, so it would not be a new thing to spend money on and we need more power plants. I say we start building new alternative energy plants now and as we continue to do so the costs will in fact naturally decrease. I forget the economic term at the moment as my brain has fried from work, but basically when there is a larger market for something you can afford to sell it at a lower margin, and when producing mass quantities of a thing the per-unit cost is lower. I would suspect the main reason that solar panels are expensive as hell is that very few people buy them.
There are already individuals who are off the grid and use solar and/or wind power as their sole source of electricity. It makes perfect sense to increase that use, except it cannot be mandated in a free society. In that case, what we do is create power plants and charge for the electricity as normal, so as not to offend anyone's sensibilities, but use alternative forms of power instead. In fact there are already power companies which do this. They create all their electric power through alternative means and through the magic of deregulation you now have the choice to buy electricity from them. More plants like these are the answer both to our pollution woes and our trouble with lack of power which will only get worse.
An example of a reporter trying to make it understandable to the masses. I think the worse performance occurs when you are doing heavy swapping, so not related to file systems at all, and not really related to the amount of cpu time you are using. I saw a post on one of the mailing lists about someone who was getting worse performance when he was trying to actively use 10x the amount of memory as was installed on his system. This never goes well, but in 2.4 work was getting done very slowly and in 2.6 it just wasn't getting done
Which means back to the drawing board on the VM! [erg].
Prehaps rather than the standardization on VM and Scheduler which occurred for 2.6 they shoudl have a standard default vm and scheduler but let you choose between others which might be better for your environment. I know you can do this anyway since the kernel is GPL, but they could include the code with the vanilla kernel and in the configure files so it is easier... then again lazy people like me will likely just use the Linus-blessed one.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes there was a link to savannah.gnu.org, but there is not a lot of information about it on the front page, except that the services provided by savannah.gnu.org are now online (except not all, or something)"
There was also a link to the forums, stating that the system had been cracked. Try reading the /. frontpage to start with, next time you don't want to look like a stupid troll.
Whatever. The point, which you seem to have missed, is that this is the Laziest Slashdot Article Ever. Not only was there no information in the blurb, but there was not even a linked article for crying out loud! I mean granted no one reads them anymore, but jiminey crikers!
"Point is TFA should be properly introduced"
You were given a site at gnu.org (if you don't know what GNU is, why are you reading /.?), told what had happened, and what the current status of the site was. What part of that didn't you understand?
First off, there wasn't a Fucking Aricle. Yes there was a link to savannah.gnu.org, but there is not a lot of information about it on the front page, except that the services provided by savannah.gnu.org are now online (except not all, or something).
Now, there was an earlier slashdot article that said it was going offline. That article IIRC told more about what the hell savannah was, and why it went down, etc. That was an adctual informative article, and, surprisingly, is linked to an article.
Savannah is more than just a website, so obviously you did not know what it was either but you want to look like a smartass. Congratulations, you have succeeded in looking like a smartass.
There are CeeDees with the old kernels on them...I'm sure someone has one of them somewhere (Walnut Creek used to include the ancient sources in their box sets)...even if they did, they wouldn't have changed them until after the whole SCO thing...so one of the box sets from a few years ago should be sufficient...
There are also posters available with the original Linux kernel source. There are probably a lot of different places to get this from.
No. They claim copyright violation so they have to prove it. Imagine if what you said was true then SCO simply would have to file lots of (bogus) complaints every year and the kernel-hackers would be tied up for the rest of their lives trying to counter the claims. The burden of proof is on SCOs side.
Besides, since the header files contain only facts, there is no copyright value to them.
Hey smartass, give it a try. My mailreader can't access port 80 so their trash can't load. Plus Outlook 2003 doesn't download HTML content by default and you can set it so that it will display all e-mail as plain text.
Better yet, since you don't recieve any legit HTML e-mail, have your mailserver send anything with DOCTYPE HTML to the void.
Or if that's too hard, keep bitching, I bet soon they'll change every mailreader on earth just for you.
Nah, I'll just keep using a mailreader that only shows mail in plain text and keeps that mail in plain text as well. Besides, by your own admission your suggestion was a bad approach to the problem. You said we should ask people to only send us text. That is stupid IMHO. I simply only read mail in plain text. Problem solved.
Start sending a reply to those USERS who installed the shit. Ask them to stop wasting resources and annoying you, don't ask the rest of the world to remove the capability.
Good idea! I'll reply to all those spammers Right Away and ask them to please send me mail only in plain text! Oh, I guess I shoudl give them your email address and say that you said it is okay to send you HTML with JavaScript.
Honestly, it's hard to believe that it took PHD "rocket scientists" to come to the conclusion that email is probably better interfaced as a forum. We've all known that for years. It's also hard to understand why there aren't "big name" email clients that already support that kind of interface.
Thinking of Microsoft's offering in this area, it would be nice if they automatically emailed the author of the worm that ravaged your system so you could conduct a forum-interfaced conversation with the person. Kinda like an auto-Friendster between worm-authors and worm-targets. ;-)
Actually, older mail clients have had this functionality. It seems like Eudora and Pine did, but it has been a long time since I used them. Sylpheed also has a threaded view as do many other Free Software email clients. Microsoft is just too behind the times. Instead of enhancing email functionality, they have been enhancing virus passing capabilities :P.
"Chick" is slang for girl/woman - "flick" slang for movie.
"Chickflick" is a semi-disparaging termm used to refer to movies that appeal mainly to females.
More than that, they are stupid sensless fodder supposedly marketed to females. But apparently females do watch them. Personally, I think the whole industry of making chickflicks is sexist in the extreme because it implies that women can only understand stupid movies with no real plot. A review I read for "Love, Actually" even came right out and said it was a stupid senseless movie with no plot, no character development, and pretty much no substance, but since it was a chickflick that was all to be expected so he gave it a high rating.
I also dislike the fact that everything in the west (or at least the US) that is "for children" is of the absolutely lowest quality possible and dumbed down. Like the chickflicks, it panders to the idea that children are stupid. I do not believe this is true and I think children would be better served by media which do not treat them as though they were. I believe this is true for women and chickflicks as well.
Ironically, I had a girlfriend when Office Space came out and did not see it (I forget what we watched instead, but I try not to date women who watch crappy chickflicks.) I saw it later, when I was between girlfriends, with a geek friend who had the DVD.
This article really shows why it is time for the DMCA to go. Anyone who happens to create any sort of device that someone figures out a way to use it to circumvent anything can be sued under the DMCA. (See also the Sklyarov incident.) Remember when someone discovered that you could use a Sharpie to circumvent the copy protection on a CD?
Manufacturers/programmers/whatever should never be responsible for what anyone does outside the intended uses.
No, the article shows what ridiculous legal advice SCO has. You cannot copyright facts, and that is all that is kept in these header files. Aren't these signals and errors dictated by POSIX standards anyway? Even if they weren't, making my OS use the same error codes as yours for the purpose of compatability is not a violation of copyright, because, again, the error codes are facts and not covered by copyright. If it is not covered by copyright, it is not covered by the DMCA.
"But in most shops employing RDBMS, you have one team that maintains the OS, one team that maintains the database, one team that maintains the network, and finally a team that writes and maintains the actual applications. What the poster is probably worried about is being a DBA when some application programmer uses Java badly and then his boss leans on him, as the DBA, to make the process work faster."
I work in such a company, as an application programmer. Where I work, it's not up to the DBA to make things run faster - if an application is too slow, it's our problem. True, we can call on the various other people to help us in tracking down the cause of the problem, working out what needs to be done to improve the situation, etc, but ultimately it's our responsibility. It may be that the solution is to increase the spec of the machine(s), or upgrade the network, but we'd still be very much involved in coming to that decision.
So, as a counter example - from my position as a programmer, I'd be rather upset if my otherwise well-performing code is crippled by an underspecced machine or poorly-configured database. I trust the people responsible to do their jobs properly, though.
And you would be right. I wish that you worked at my company. However, I have run into far too many clueless database application programmers to believe that your attitude is representative of the group as a whole. One thing I have noted is that there is a prevailing attitude among developers and those who hire them that understanding networking, OS, hardware, etc is unneccessary and indeed undesirable. This seems to be worse in database application development than anywhere else.
What this leads to is a situation where a programmer who not only is clueless in all those areas, but also does incredibly stupid things in their application runs into performance problems they do indeed attack the DBA, the network team, the OS/hardware team, etc and have them spin their wheels over problems that are really application problems. And when they are told what is going on at those levels they do not understand or believe it.
By contrast, you are correct that underspecced machines or poorly configured databases will screw over the best code in the world. But I think that the poster was complaining of the former situation. :)
"Sounds like a job for stored procedures ala Oracle. If MySQL does not have them it should."
That's the issue -- the poster's complaint actually has nothing to do with MySQL embedding Java in particular -- he's worried that if he allows users to execute stored procedures they can bog down his database.
Actually, I think that is exactly what the poster is worried about. Correct me if I am wrong, but I had the understanding that Oracle stored procedures were compiled C code. In this case, we are talking about Java which is interpreted. For that and various other reasons, we are dealing with far more impact on the database's performance.
I've been reading /. for 5 years, and I haven't seen Office Space. Then again, I have a girlfriend too.
That's funny because I was going to suggest that the reason for correllation was indeed causation. In other words the slashdotters who did not see Office Space had girlfriends, and therefore were watching some chickflick instead. :)
Everybody I know wants a Ferrari in my garage and a supermodel girlfriend, but none are willing to pay $250,000 for either - that doesn't mean that there is a shortage of Ferraris or supermodels, nor does it imply that the government needs to take action and make damn sure that everybody gets a Ferrari (destroying the value of the Ferrari and cars in general in the process.)
I'm reasonably certain the supermodel girlfriend will cost you more than $250k. The ferrari might be had for that sum, but .. :)
There's a difference between steelwork and programming. The tools get more advanced or better at a faster rate than steelwork.
I don't think that's what the poster was getting at. What the poster was pointing out was that whereas it is possible to become skilled in your art and work to do a good job, if management keeps lowering the bar and demanding less and less skillful work, not only is this frustrating to the skilled labourer but it makes their argument of hiring less skilled cheaper labour more compelling, which adds insult to injury.
Lately I have noticed a trend toward management going more and more for yesmen and drones, and less toward allowing people who understand technology to plan and implement solutions. If all you want is drones, you commoditize the labour force and then they become widgets rather than people. If you give them power to advise on or make decisions, the quality of the ideas your people have becomes incredibly important and it is more difficult to simply choose another to fill the slot.
I think there is a dangerous antilabour backlash going on right now in management. There are managers today who basically do not care about the worker and would ratehr not care about the worker. These guys have always existed, but right now the idea that we don't have to care about workers, how they feel, how they are treated, etc, is being pushed as though it were a revolutionary idea and hyped to the max in the trade rags.
I also think that the entrepreneurial spirit is going to have to be our saviour here. Just as in the 90's boom years, disgruntled workers will get together and rather than give their ideas away to corporations whose managers clearly hate them and think of them as slaves or widgets will form their own firms so they can build it right in the first place. It will be hard because the VCs are licking their wounds and the privately held money among such people was eaten into during the crash. But it will happen. If it does not the US will lose its technical edge altogether.
As many posters have pointed out the assumption of high US tax rates is a canard. India has even higher tax rates, see http://www.krislon.net/India/Finance/tax_rate_Inco me.htm for example.
Annual income between $1200 to $3000 (roughly) gets taxed at a 30% rate. Annual income above $3000 gets taxed at a 45% rate. And from my experience, there is little chance of tax evasion in salaried, white collar jobs, as taxes are withheld at source as in the USA.
b.
Like everyone else in this thread and most Americans (or USians as some would have it) you have completely missed an important fact in the post and in the tax system. Income tax is not the only tax we pay, and while it is fairly low compared to many nations, there are a number of other taxes which, when put together, make one wonder where all the money goes. There are a lot of hidden taxes and not-so-hidden taxes which go together to help increase the cost of living overall.
Not that everyone already hasn't roundly discredited this theory, but it's not taxes (whatever this "4 layers of 93% = 1200% mumbo jumbo is, I have no idea) that make US labor so expensive. While taxes play some part in it, the major difference is cost of living. This is why US companies outsource to countries such as India with a roughly comparable income tax to ours - 20 to 40 percent, depending on tax bracket. US companies still have to pay corporate taxes on any profits earned, so those taxes do not figure into the equation.
It is clear that this was mumbo jumbo to you, as was the argument itself. The poster is not saying that cost of living is not the problem. The poster is stating one reason for the increased cost of living in the US. The multilayers to which the poster is referring are likely the myriad taxes that the labourer pays in addition to the taxes paid by his empoloyer and the companies from which s/he buys goods and services. For instance, consider the following:
In the Northeast US, a worker will typically pay income tax not only to the federal government, but also to the city, county and state in which they live. Once they have received their paycheck, they will go and try to buy various things. However everything they buy has a sales tax levied by the city, county, and state. Over and above sales tax, there are special taxes for given goods like gasoline, tobacco products, vehicles, etc.
Now consider that the company which produces these goods for sale in the US also pays taxes, nbot only on income, but also in various other ways. Then both the buyer and the seller may be paying property tax. If you add it all up there is a lot more tax than you might think.
US labor is more expensive due to the cost of living. I would hardly take a job at the same wage Indian programmers are getting paid because I can't buy groceries as cheap as they can, or live in a house for as cheap.
But you must consider why this is. Granted there are some basic economic factors involved, but the poster is asking us to consider the impact of the aforementioned myriad taxes on these costs.
You are correct in a change in economics in the world; 20 years ago outsourcing technical jobs would have been almost impossible because of the capital requirements to test and build products, the high cost of communication and goods transportation, lack of an educated workforce, and trade barriers. However, this might be bad for individuals (sadly, including me) but not for the country as a whole. Society is better off as a whole due to the basic economic theory of competitive advantage.
This depends, really. It is entirely possible to localize the advantages so that only a few get the benefits. There are some people in power right now in the US who seem to be aiming for this goal.
While "Free Trade" agreements do have serious problems - for example, labor is cheaper in India in part because US corporations don't have to worry about pesky things such as unemployment insurance, safety, environmental restrictsion,and a host of other workers' rights there - in principle they do benefit rather than harm to this country. Your complaint about the tax system is misplaced; the government's main culpability in this is helping guide the country to such a high standard of living that we have priced ourselves out of many labor markets.
I don't join the people who say we should give up air conditioning and flush toilets and starve in order to compete with India. Rather I say give India these things and when we are all driving SUVs the world will be a better place. Why go backwards?
You are an idiot. It isn't taxes that's the problem, it's the relative standard of living. Living in the USA on US $10k / yr is extremely difficult - living in India on the same you live like a king.
BUt what the poster is pointing out is that the guy who makes $10k a year in the US will be crushed by taxes. Yes, they will get most of their income tax back, but it will be witheld. Then the money they take home will go to a large extent to the hidden taxes. Tax on gasoline, food, and everything else you can think of. The goods and services this person purchases will be more expensive not only because they are taxed when you buy them, but the seller is taxed when s/he sells them and is taxed while producing them. Then you are taxed for possessing them, and taxed again if you still had them when you die.
So the poster's point was that the cost of living is indeed the problem, but a part of the reason for the cost of living increase in the US is the tax system and the way it works.
"The US programmers must mark their wages up 150% or more to pay the US taxes on their wages."
U.S. taxes are the lowest in the industrialized world.
And the services we receive for those taxes are less than what people get in developing countries. Besides the argument is US vs India. Not US vs Germany. And yes in Europe people get more for their tax money than we do.
Of course taxes are lower in developing nations
Oh, so you agree with the poster? I thought you were arguing with them...
- so is the quality and quantity of government service.
I'm not so sure about that, but I will admit my own research is somewhat spotty here. Indians have told me that their utilities, being government owned, are paid by their taxes. They also have a pretty good (and cheap) public transportation system. School is paid for, period, unless you elect to go to an expensive private school on your own. Yes, school is paid for means college through graduate degree. It's far from a utopia, but we were comparing what they get from the government to what we get.
The difference has little to do with taxes, and more with total cost-of-living.
You may have something there. ultimately the real answer is "Economics is complicated and pretty much no one understands it." But I think the poster's tax burden position is an interesting data point in the equation.
VaLinux is doing its best to keep offshoring viable. Check out their recent press releases:
They are also doing their best to mangle links posted by people who do not post in html. In the interest of sacrificing some karma for the good of humanity and the information of slashdot users, here are the first and second press releases. For the WTF crowd and the vast majority of slashdot that do not read links or articles, the links are to press releases from slashdot's parent company crowing about SourceForge Enterprise Edition and its ability to make offshoring more viable.
Did you not think about that post? Sounds like you just dislike Java so much that hearing it in the same sentance as MySQL makes you cringe.
I think the answer to both questions is yes.
1) Java isn't going to slow down any queries unless you use Java functions.
Which is exactly what the poster fears they will do.
2) What do you care that someone else isn't smart enough to write good software?
I think this is the heart of your disconnect with the poster. True, if you are using MySQL as most do, in a small shop, the dba and the application programmer are probably the same person. But in most shops employing RDBMS, you have one team that maintains the OS, one team that maintains the database, one team that maintains the network, and finally a team that writes and maintains the actual applications. What the poster is probably worried about is being a DBA when some application programmer uses Java badly and then his boss leans on him, as the DBA, to make the process work faster. In such a case you would deeply, deeply care.
3) MySQL as it stands has no other way to really embed functions easily, and it's actually more effecient to run code on the server and transfer data back afterwords.
Sounds like a job for stored procedures ala Oracle. If MySQL does not have them it should.
"But what I am getting at is the fact that the Constitution, rather than simply telling the government what it cannot do, tells the government exactly what it can do."
By that argument, there was no need for any Bill of Rights. Since the Bill of Rights was apparently needed, that argument is wrong.
Actually both arguments were made. Some of the founding fathers worried that by enumerating rights we would de facto restrict what rights a citizen had, and lead people to believe as you and many others do now. You are proving them right. Shay's rebellion lead to the Bill of Rights. The proponents of the Bill of Rights said that unless certain rights were explicitly acknowleged they would be ignored by the government. They were proven right as well.
If you actually read the Declaration of Independance, the Constitution, and the various writings both of the founding fathers and of the philosophers who influenced them, you would get a better idea of where they were coming from. Even within the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence explicit language states that they do not enumerate all of the rights held by the people. The reason the Bill of Rights was needed was not that governments grant rights, but that governments must be reminded of them.
"stuck with the idea that governments grant rights to people, which is horrbly wrong."
Most people agree with that statement for rhetorical reasons, although it is factually incorrect. Did Virginia residents have in 1770 have the right to be secure in their effects, or to vote for their head of state? No, they did not. Only when the government granted those rights did they start to exist. 50 years later, did women living there have the right to vote? Again, they did not, until the government explicitly created it.
Actually you are factually incorrect. At birth a human being is endowed by their Creator (whatever that may be to you) with infinite inalienable rights. We choose to submit to the laws of society because it is necessary to have common rules in order for multiple humans to live together in the same space. To enforce those rules we choose governments, and give them certain powers to change rules and enforce them. You have it completely backwards, and so do the elitists who tend to take over any government whatever the form.
Women always had the right to vote, and to choose their government. Men however tended to prevent them from exercising such rights. Within the context of North American democracy, the movement to women's suffrage predates the United States, as did the movement to abolish slavery. The revolution was supposed to end slavery and give women back their rights; it is a matter of history that this did not happen. However this does not change the fact that as human beings with free will, women can choose their fate. It is the oppression of other humans which makes this difficult, not some natural state.
Actually these ideas are not new. For instance, in Appian's Civil War there is an account of Octavian attempting to tax a group of widows. The Roman Republic was an extremely patriarical society such that women and children were property and were not accorded any rights. However, in the widows' speech to Octavian they acknowlege the fact they have chosen their lot, and say that they have no representation and therefore are not taxed, and whereas they have given up some rights to self-determination they are cared for by men. Granted, this speech smacks of patriarichal values and therefore may not be factual within its context, but even if Appian made it up the idea that people choose their government and give it power over them even in such an extreme case as the Imperial period of Rome is not new.
"Governments are given rights and powers by the people, not the other way round."
Hello, and welcome to the amazing world of "democracy", where "the people" are "the government
The idiom "to coin a phrase" is also used in an alternative sense, "to bring out a hackneyed saying yet again".
No it is not. Or was never the last I checked. Do you have a source?
and encryption isn't, to coin the phrase, like a hand grenade; close doesn't count.
Erm, in order to coin a phrase, you have to make it up yourself. Instead you are paraphrasing. The rest of your post is quite correct and insightful :).
But how much would we be paying per kilo-watt of energy produced? Simply stated - this is not yet economically feasible. If it is, then start doing this and you'll become a billionaire!
Actually you'd have to be a billionaire to do it. Maybe more. But there are new solar panel technologies which use cheaper materials, albeit at lower efficiency, to achieve per-kilowatt costs far below those we are paying now.
Personally, I think the real answer is to implement what we have now. Current power plants are created with huge government subsidies and loans, anyhow, so it would not be a new thing to spend money on and we need more power plants. I say we start building new alternative energy plants now and as we continue to do so the costs will in fact naturally decrease. I forget the economic term at the moment as my brain has fried from work, but basically when there is a larger market for something you can afford to sell it at a lower margin, and when producing mass quantities of a thing the per-unit cost is lower. I would suspect the main reason that solar panels are expensive as hell is that very few people buy them.
There are already individuals who are off the grid and use solar and/or wind power as their sole source of electricity. It makes perfect sense to increase that use, except it cannot be mandated in a free society. In that case, what we do is create power plants and charge for the electricity as normal, so as not to offend anyone's sensibilities, but use alternative forms of power instead. In fact there are already power companies which do this. They create all their electric power through alternative means and through the magic of deregulation you now have the choice to buy electricity from them. More plants like these are the answer both to our pollution woes and our trouble with lack of power which will only get worse.
An example of a reporter trying to make it understandable to the masses. I think the worse performance occurs when you are doing heavy swapping, so not related to file systems at all, and not really related to the amount of cpu time you are using. I saw a post on one of the mailing lists about someone who was getting worse performance when he was trying to actively use 10x the amount of memory as was installed on his system. This never goes well, but in 2.4 work was getting done very slowly and in 2.6 it just wasn't getting done
Which means back to the drawing board on the VM! [erg].
Prehaps rather than the standardization on VM and Scheduler which occurred for 2.6 they shoudl have a standard default vm and scheduler but let you choose between others which might be better for your environment. I know you can do this anyway since the kernel is GPL, but they could include the code with the vanilla kernel and in the configure files so it is easier... then again lazy people like me will likely just use the Linus-blessed one.