Do you *really* think that there's a significant chance the DHS would enforce the law next time? Really? Against a wealthy company?
Companies have directly plotted to murder a percentage of the population in some towns and gotten away with paying less in fines than it would have cost them to avoid killing the people in the first place. Even after it was revealed that this had been the prediction of estimates given to management before it made the decision. (The case was in Georgia, and I believe [with imperfect certainty] that the company was Dow Corning]. It involved the intentional poisoning of a town's water supply by illegally disposing of chemicals. It was a federal court.)
There are nice IDE's. They can be very useful, especially if they know about the language's build-in libraries.
That said, Python, the language I'm more familiar with, I would say should be taught with an editor and a web-browser. (You can have the documentation pages local on your disk, but you need to be able to have several of them open at once, while you are looking up methods, techniques, etc. It's also useful to have a screen for grepping through the docs, to tell you which web page to pull up next. Of course you start simple, but that's the system you should be working towards.
Java...if you can find a GOOD IDE, one that doesn't add non-standard extensions to the language, then perhaps that's a good way to go. Do consider the expense. Many people swear by Eclipse, but that tends to promote SWT, which is not a standard library. Some people line IDEA, but that's expensive. Etc. I don't know of a good answer.
Of course, it also depends on just what level of course you are teaching. At the very basic level it makes more sense to go with a bare editor and a RESTRICTED number of libraries. A large part of learning any language is learning how to use the language libraries, but that's not where the emphasis should be at the start.
One final choice that you might consider: Dr Python. This is a Python IDE, and thus not what I'm recommending, but it's interesting anyway. I have it installed on my system even though I never use it (probably in homage to PLT, who did the Dr Scheme series). This IDE is based around wxPython, so it's also not exactly a standard library, and thus even more "not what I'm recommending". But it's available if you want an IDE for Python. It's license if GPL.
Then there's KDevelop, but to use that you pretty much need to be running KDE, and it wants your Python to be developed with the Qt toolkit. Definitely not my choice, even though I *am* running KDE. (I tend to develop with Kate + browsers. And I also use NEdit so that I can open additional windows for code or text files that I want to be able to see while I'm working on the programs that use them.)
I'm probably more opinionated than many, without any more reasons, but those are my opinions. I'm not claiming them as facts.
I was a bit vague about specifying that, because I'm not certain of the procedure. At one point it was done by anealing proteins, but I don't thing that's the technique any longer. I'm not supposing that we're talking about single nucleotides, but rather about alleles. Even with this, there won't be many variations at any one spot, as lots of the changes are likely to be lethal.
I would presume that they aren't counting repetitions of sequences in variable areas, because the current techniques are subject to lots of error in those places. Counting the number of CAG repetitions is quite error prone.
If you pick a selection of 10 spots that each have four (yes, I originally said four because of the nucleotides...but that was also a WAG at the number of alleles any particular "gene" was likely to have) variations, you get 1 in 10^4, which is 10 thousand, not 10 million. If you want to get 1 in 100 million, i.e. 1 in 10^8, you are assuming that the average number of variations at each point are 8. This feels much on the high side to me, but ok, as we haven't defined exactly what they are measuring. We also haven't specified whether "silent differences" are counted as identical, which they will be if the dna is transcribed before it's sequence is examined. And we haven't discussed whether exons have been snipped out before the comparison either. I'm using a simple model where what's being compared is the nucleotides...and I agree that this is probably not what they're doing. But I don't KNOW what they're doing, so I'm using your estimate for the duration of the examination.
Now, given that for any particular comparison the odds of matching by chance are 1 in 10^8 (an estimate I don't believe) how large does your database need to be before you should start expecting there to be a chance match? I'd start expecting a chance match at sqrt(10^8) == 10,000 samples, and wouldn't be surprised if it came much earlier. And with each sample they add, the odds of a match occuring purely by chance increase.
You might want to think about how accurate such comparisons are...your intuition is quite likely to mislead you.
I'm not sure about current practice, but awhile back the protocol only called for a comparison at 10 point. each of those 10 points could have only a very few choices. Call it four, but I'm not certain. So after there are 10^4 samples in the databse you can expect to start getting LOTS of false matches.
There are a lot of guess numbers in that paragraph, but try it again with a different number of options. The actual fact is that DNA is only a "very good" identifier if you compare at a much larger number of placed. And it's never perfect, as identical twins have the same DNA.
If DNA is used as auxillary evidence, which is what this system was designed for, then it's quite reasonable. When you scale the database, you need to revamp the rest of the system or the quality of the answers deteriorate markedly. These people are scaling the database, but I've seen nothing that indicates they are changing any of the other procedures.
You are presuming that all those in jail have comitted crimes. The evidence I have seen leads me to doubt that.
To me it appears that frequently being in jail is the result of annoying someone with power, and not having sufficient power to escape the consequences. This can be as simple as a black or brown person driving a car.
OTOH, even when you are rich, justice may be difficult to get. It's not criminal law, exactly, at least not yet, but consider SCOX vs. IBM. IBM has been trying for three years to find out what they are being accused of, and hasn't yet gotten a straight answer. *Someone* is funneling money to SCOX, but just who is doing it is still a matter of speculation.
Given the rediculous state of our "justice" system, I wouldn't be too quick to presume that someone labelled a felon has done anything reprehensible. Look up plea-bargaining and study a few of the examples. If you aren't powerful, they can threaten you with next to no evidence, and usually get a conviction if they want one...if only by coercing you to agree to plead guilty to a lesser charge so that they don't, e.g., formally accuse you of reping poodles. They don't need to prove you guilty to ruin your life permanently.
OTOH, communication has sped the transmission of information. Now we hear about news from distant cities as if it were local. Things probably actually aren't any worse than they ever were. Probably. But the also don't appear to be any better.
Sorry. The S-80 systems predated MSWind, and were already being pushed out by cheaper machines based around CP/M. All MSWind did was occur during the transition from 8-bit systems to 16-bit systems... that, and a somewhaat murky contract with IBM.
I don't give MSWind, or anything associated with it, ANY credit for developing computers OR for making them cheaper. Those trends were both solidly in place before MS was even a company.
You can't use it, modify it, and redistirbute it. It's not open source. It's also not Open Source, but it not even open source.
I'll agree that it's source. (Well, at least it's a large part of the source. As others have pointed out there are large chunks of underlying code that were not written in Java, and they aren't available.)
But it's not open. You need to agree to a restrictive convenant in order to look at it. This isn't just protecting their trademark, which I would consider legitimate, but this is treating the language as their personal property. This would be fair also if they were honest about it, but this comment, calling it "Open Source" (or rather "nearly" Open Source) is either a blatant lie, or so close to one that I can't tell the difference.
Now some have pointed to links where they say the source can be accessed. Perhaps it is no longer a requirement that you agree to a restrictive covenant to access the source. Were I to care any longer, I would investigate. A decade ago I cared a great deal, but after reading the licenses and thinking about it for a long time I decided that I didn't want to accept the language on the proffered terms. If they want to convince me not they will need to show not only that the terms are better, but also that the language is sufficiently good that I should discard a decade's worth of learning and work to adopt it. This will be quite difficult, and they haven't made a decent attempt.
To me this appears to be slimey PR tactics, and it decreases my respect for both Sun and Gossling.
Yah. I've picked my license, which is why when I *DO* use java, it dialect I use is gcj. That's a license I can live with.
That said, the gcj libraries are so incomplete that I normally don't use Java at all, but use something else instead. (Just what depends on the project.)
Actually, you're right. I checked the web site of the company, and the web site where I made the purchase. That should have been enough. I'm no longer a fan, so the Club seemed non-sensical.
Actually, I haven't really been a fan since, I think it was 9.0, when they left slocate off of the developer distribution...which I had bought. I've bought it a few times because 1) it USED to be a really great distribution and 2) I was looking desperately for something to over newbies. If they'd had decent Q/C then Mandrake would have been *IT*, but about then their business guy overextended the company. I've kept hoping it would recover, but with this last thing I've pretty much lost any confidence that they'll EVER get it right.
It's also true that I was quite shocked to be informed after visiting their site in an attempt to complain that I'd ordered ANOTHER copy. With no obvious way to cancel the order. (Or even to cancel the first one, since that was what I was attempting to do, after finding out that they had decided that I had ordered DVDs.) I did once get through (via e-mail) to someone at the company who blandly told me that I was mistaken, and didn't leave a reply address.
After that my feeling was the sooner this company dropped dead the better...well, I've cooled off a bit since then, but not enough that I'll EVER either buy anything they offer ever again or say anything about them without mentioning how they ripped me off. But this MAY be unintentional on their part. They've merely set things up so there's no channel for feedback...this means that they only get feedback indirectly and after a long time delay. And THIS means that they don't find out about thier problems in a timely manner. If you feel kindly towards them, you might mention to them why I do not. They do need to know this, but I wouldn't walk across the street to help them...or, admittedly, to hurt them. Once upon a time they were a good company.
Disk surfaces are measured in area, not volume...so if you were to plate that out in a thin layer...how much area/petabyte?
This doesn't address the problem of access, but mere layout. How many cc's of whatever the storage material is does a current high capacity disk contain? I'd wager not many. The desire is generally for as thin a layer as possible to reduce the size of the magnetic domains. Disks used to be metal, but now they're glass (lagely) because of this.
Each bug you remove is one less entry point. If bugs are rapidly removed, then it becomes less worth the effort to exploit any particular one, as it's likely to be removed by the time you finish.
Perfection is not to be found, but one can head in the right direction.
What Mandriva meant to me was that when I ordered CDRoms I got DVDs. This was something unuseable. When I tried to contact them, I ended up with another order of DVDs...still unuseable, but now I'm paying twice. When I tried a different way, I couldn't get any further than their contracted out shipping department. And they couldn't authorize an RMA.
No thank you. Mandriva does NOT deserve any more support. They used to be good guys, but this is foul. I *STILL* haven't been able to contact them, but it no longer matters, as I will never do business with them or recommend them again.
(They may not be intentionally evil. I can well imagine that this is just somebody clueless setting things up to be more efficient. The effect is the same.)
It's not just simplistic, it's stupid. It ignores the method by which FOSS software is developed.
FOSS software is generally first released in an alpha state. Few people can use it at this poiint, but some people are sufficiently interested to pay attention. Of those, some help the design, and some fix bugs and post solutions. After awhile quality improves and more people get interested. It becomes a bit easier to use. It becomes a bit more useful. Features are added and dropped. Somebody writes some documentation. After awhile it approaches beta.
Eventually, if the project is successful, it becomes easy to use **FOR IT'S TARGET AUDIENCE**. Call this the 1.0 version. Now development shifts over to polishing the user interface. At this point file formats have been stabilized, and functionality is pretty much set. (It can be expanded, but not easily shrunk.) This polishing will go on for a LONG time. During all this time it's still not easy for the general user, though it's getting easier. Release 2.0 attempts to broaden the user base for the project. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
N.B.: version numbers specified here are arbitrary. There is no consistency between projects. This can be a real hassel if you're just looking for a tool, but there's not standard agreed upon meaning for the terms. I've attempted to use what I think of as the "most common meaning", but every project does it differently.
Try. It might improve youre posting's acceptability.
He came across as a young geek who didn't know the business practices, but was trying to be friendly and honest. You came across as an even younger, perhaps geek. You didn't fit the criteria for the rest...except, perhaps, honest. And that was questionable.
The reason that it was questionable is that honest people generally know that "error bars" and other expressions of ignorance is a necessary part of being honest. So when you disparage such statements by another, you call into question your own status.
I might be wrong, but think about it. An abrasive personality is not a character trait that most would chose to cultivate. YMMV. IMHO. etc.
What you are describing is the very reason that CS is failing in the US.
Why should one spend the time and effort to get a degree in CS only to end up in that kind of situation? That's not a reason. If you are sufficiently driven, you may do it anyway, but there aren't a large numbe of people who are like that. I had choices (with my inherent skill-set) among studying for engineering, CS, and the sciences. I went first to math and then to CS, but if I'd seen CS as a dead-end job, I would have gone elsewhere. My timing was good, and I was fortunate. If I were starting in college today I don't think that CS would have gotten a second thought. Chemistry, perhaps, or Biology. Even some kind of engineering, though I tend to be more of a theorist.
You are analyzing the situation on too short a time scale. If you look at things from the perspective of one company over the next year or two, no doubt you are correct, but if you look from the perspective of the country over the next decade, it looks disasterous.
There is probably still time to recover, but the US has a long history of cultural bias against intellectuals, so I don't expect it to happen. The country's lunch is already being eaten but foreign competition, and it's not paying attention, because it doesn't like the message. Expect increasing bluster and corruption, and few substantive improvements. The place that this will REALLY show up is "Where do the new gadgets originate? Where do the new technologies proliferate?" The answer to the first question appears to be Japan. The answer to the second is less clear...but Japan isn't at the bottom of the list of plausible answers. (OTOH, Japan has it's own problems, with an aging population, limited resources, and a hostile attitude towards foreigners...but these are also some of the reasons that are driving it towards new technologies.)
That's a deliciously ambiguous post. I can't tell wether it's sarcastic or not, and I can't tell whether it's a troll or serious.
I'm fairly certain that it wasn't intentionally ambiguous, but only because few have that as a goal. Delicious.
FWIW, and to clarify *this* post, I'm appreciating it as a poet. In such a role I find ambiguous lines to frequently be the most powerful. (It's not a hat I wear often, but it's been an occasional mode of expression since grade school. I've produced some monumentally bad poems, and a few small ones I've thought rather good. As a friend said "Time and the moth are the only true critics", and by their standards my works will be evanescent, as I've never published widely.)
Well, if you are going to postulate some creator, or group of creators...why assume ANY of the guesses are correct? There's a much larger number of possibilities that NOBODY has ever taken seriously and which aren't any more absurd.
Personally, I tend toward the view that gods ARE actual, and that they are the descriptions of the anthropormorphizeable archtypes. Thus they exist in, and are a part of, the material world. What they create is the consciousness which perceives it, and the form in which the consicousness perceives it. They are largely genetically specified (partially epigenetic?), and thus identical in essence across a wide spectrum of people, though the manifestation may be quite different. (It gets more complex, but don't bother. I think the theory is consistent, but I don't even have any evidence for THAT. I adopted it to explain a few personal experiences while following a hermetic path.)
It would be nice if it were easy to install proprietary drivers (as it is!), but Linux itself should NOT include such drivers. I would go further and say that it is legally forbidden to include such drivers. It's quite probable that nobody would sue them for the inclusion, but it COULD happen, and such a suit would probably prevail. (IANAL...so this is a Wild Ass Guess [WAG].)
Also, if we dig back into the history of the founding of GNU, we find that the whole thing was started because of some company's proprietary drivers...and Richard Stallman wanting to use some code that wasn't made available. Turning your back on this is about as fundamental a turning your back on your roots as is possible. This is why he designed the license he did. (Well, the specs. I think Lessig did the actual writing.)
No. I'm not saying the investors should be liable, unless they hold seats on the board, or over 10% of the stock I don't consider investors to be to blame. I'm saying the executives, the people who have control over what the corporation does, should be liable.
McAfee certainly doesn't want to take the blame when the computers that it is paid money to protect are infected...so it looks for a soft target. (And now you know what I think of McAfee. I didn't even bother to check that this was the same one...so believe at your own risk.)
I think the problem it you have your time scales confused. Yes, we should expect global cooling. Yes, we are experiencing global warming.
The confusion is because it isn't quite clear yet when we should start experiencing global cooling. And Ice ages can be preceded by periods of extreme warmth.
That said, it *is* important to get the reasons correct. This helps one to avoid the confusion in which you find yourself. That we ARE experiencing global warming is not in contradiction to that we should expect (soon, for some definition of soon) an Ice Age.
Actually, I would expect the ice age to occur soon after the end of the melting of the glaciers. At this point the oceans will be warmer and the surface area of the oceans will be larger. This will result in more water evaporating per year. There will be "eventually" a year with an inclement winter. Lots of clouds, lots of snow, etc. which lasts late into the spring. This will mean that more snow falls than melts. If this repeats a few years in a row (each time is more likely than the previous time...it's not a drunkard's walk) then the AIR of the globe will become cooler while the water remains warm. This will rapidly lead to a glaciation.
You will notice that I was vague about the time scale. I don't think anyone can be very precise, but the onset is expected to be rather rapid. A few decades wouldn't be surprisingly quickly. Once the glaciers start walking, they won't stop until the ocean has lost it's excess heat.
May I recommend a combination orbital sun-shade/heater? It's an orbital mirror, and by adjusting it's parameters you can either warm or cool your world slightly, as necessary to stabilize your perferred position in the cycle of glaciation. Without it, you can expect to experience an inclement climate over a period of epochs.
Actually nukes need a whole bunch of justification. They may *actually* be the best solution, but this isn't clear. Even so,... care will definitely be needed. (Pebble bed reactors may be an answer to most of the problems. MAY.)
Before I can seriously consider nuclear reactors, the governmental limitation on damages would need to be lifted. If companies think reactors are too dangerous to build without a limitation on damages, then I think that they are too dangerous to build. Also, if the company goes bankrupt in a liability suit, then the executives personal fortunes should also be at stake. (Not just the director, but everyone above supervisory level.) I don't see any reason why the people who live near one of the things should bear all of the risk, when they only get a small fraction of the benefits.
That said...can I talk to you about the risks of having a coal mine under your town...
Sometimes there are no really good answers. I don't trust nukes because the industry has been too shielded from damages by the government. They may still be the correct answer, but I won't believe it until they start operating with a few fewer protections.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you *really* think that there's a significant chance the DHS would enforce the law next time? Really? Against a wealthy company?
Companies have directly plotted to murder a percentage of the population in some towns and gotten away with paying less in fines than it would have cost them to avoid killing the people in the first place. Even after it was revealed that this had been the prediction of estimates given to management before it made the decision. (The case was in Georgia, and I believe [with imperfect certainty] that the company was Dow Corning]. It involved the intentional poisoning of a town's water supply by illegally disposing of chemicals. It was a federal court.)
There are nice IDE's. They can be very useful, especially if they know about the language's build-in libraries.
That said, Python, the language I'm more familiar with, I would say should be taught with an editor and a web-browser. (You can have the documentation pages local on your disk, but you need to be able to have several of them open at once, while you are looking up methods, techniques, etc. It's also useful to have a screen for grepping through the docs, to tell you which web page to pull up next. Of course you start simple, but that's the system you should be working towards.
Java...if you can find a GOOD IDE, one that doesn't add non-standard extensions to the language, then perhaps that's a good way to go. Do consider the expense. Many people swear by Eclipse, but that tends to promote SWT, which is not a standard library. Some people line IDEA, but that's expensive. Etc. I don't know of a good answer.
Of course, it also depends on just what level of course you are teaching. At the very basic level it makes more sense to go with a bare editor and a RESTRICTED number of libraries. A large part of learning any language is learning how to use the language libraries, but that's not where the emphasis should be at the start.
One final choice that you might consider: Dr Python. This is a Python IDE, and thus not what I'm recommending, but it's interesting anyway. I have it installed on my system even though I never use it (probably in homage to PLT, who did the Dr Scheme series). This IDE is based around wxPython, so it's also not exactly a standard library, and thus even more "not what I'm recommending". But it's available if you want an IDE for Python. It's license if GPL.
Then there's KDevelop, but to use that you pretty much need to be running KDE, and it wants your Python to be developed with the Qt toolkit. Definitely not my choice, even though I *am* running KDE. (I tend to develop with Kate + browsers. And I also use NEdit so that I can open additional windows for code or text files that I want to be able to see while I'm working on the programs that use them.)
I'm probably more opinionated than many, without any more reasons, but those are my opinions. I'm not claiming them as facts.
I was a bit vague about specifying that, because I'm not certain of the procedure. At one point it was done by anealing proteins, but I don't thing that's the technique any longer. I'm not supposing that we're talking about single nucleotides, but rather about alleles. Even with this, there won't be many variations at any one spot, as lots of the changes are likely to be lethal.
I would presume that they aren't counting repetitions of sequences in variable areas, because the current techniques are subject to lots of error in those places. Counting the number of CAG repetitions is quite error prone.
If you pick a selection of 10 spots that each have four (yes, I originally said four because of the nucleotides...but that was also a WAG at the number of alleles any particular "gene" was likely to have) variations, you get 1 in 10^4, which is 10 thousand, not 10 million. If you want to get 1 in 100 million, i.e. 1 in 10^8, you are assuming that the average number of variations at each point are 8. This feels much on the high side to me, but ok, as we haven't defined exactly what they are measuring. We also haven't specified whether "silent differences" are counted as identical, which they will be if the dna is transcribed before it's sequence is examined. And we haven't discussed whether exons have been snipped out before the comparison either. I'm using a simple model where what's being compared is the nucleotides...and I agree that this is probably not what they're doing. But I don't KNOW what they're doing, so I'm using your estimate for the duration of the examination.
Now, given that for any particular comparison the odds of matching by chance are 1 in 10^8 (an estimate I don't believe) how large does your database need to be before you should start expecting there to be a chance match? I'd start expecting a chance match at sqrt(10^8) == 10,000 samples, and wouldn't be surprised if it came much earlier. And with each sample they add, the odds of a match occuring purely by chance increase.
You might want to think about how accurate such comparisons are...your intuition is quite likely to mislead you.
I'm not sure about current practice, but awhile back the protocol only called for a comparison at 10 point. each of those 10 points could have only a very few choices. Call it four, but I'm not certain. So after there are 10^4 samples in the databse you can expect to start getting LOTS of false matches.
There are a lot of guess numbers in that paragraph, but try it again with a different number of options. The actual fact is that DNA is only a "very good" identifier if you compare at a much larger number of placed. And it's never perfect, as identical twins have the same DNA.
If DNA is used as auxillary evidence, which is what this system was designed for, then it's quite reasonable. When you scale the database, you need to revamp the rest of the system or the quality of the answers deteriorate markedly. These people are scaling the database, but I've seen nothing that indicates they are changing any of the other procedures.
You are presuming that all those in jail have comitted crimes. The evidence I have seen leads me to doubt that.
To me it appears that frequently being in jail is the result of annoying someone with power, and not having sufficient power to escape the consequences. This can be as simple as a black or brown person driving a car.
OTOH, even when you are rich, justice may be difficult to get. It's not criminal law, exactly, at least not yet, but consider SCOX vs. IBM. IBM has been trying for three years to find out what they are being accused of, and hasn't yet gotten a straight answer. *Someone* is funneling money to SCOX, but just who is doing it is still a matter of speculation.
Given the rediculous state of our "justice" system, I wouldn't be too quick to presume that someone labelled a felon has done anything reprehensible. Look up plea-bargaining and study a few of the examples. If you aren't powerful, they can threaten you with next to no evidence, and usually get a conviction if they want one...if only by coercing you to agree to plead guilty to a lesser charge so that they don't, e.g., formally accuse you of reping poodles. They don't need to prove you guilty to ruin your life permanently.
OTOH, communication has sped the transmission of information. Now we hear about news from distant cities as if it were local. Things probably actually aren't any worse than they ever were. Probably. But the also don't appear to be any better.
Sorry. The S-80 systems predated MSWind, and were already being pushed out by cheaper machines based around CP/M. All MSWind did was occur during the transition from 8-bit systems to 16-bit systems ... that, and a somewhaat murky contract with IBM.
I don't give MSWind, or anything associated with it, ANY credit for developing computers OR for making them cheaper. Those trends were both solidly in place before MS was even a company.
You can't use it, modify it, and redistirbute it. It's not open source. It's also not Open Source, but it not even open source.
I'll agree that it's source. (Well, at least it's a large part of the source. As others have pointed out there are large chunks of underlying code that were not written in Java, and they aren't available.)
But it's not open. You need to agree to a restrictive convenant in order to look at it. This isn't just protecting their trademark, which I would consider legitimate, but this is treating the language as their personal property. This would be fair also if they were honest about it, but this comment, calling it "Open Source" (or rather "nearly" Open Source) is either a blatant lie, or so close to one that I can't tell the difference.
Now some have pointed to links where they say the source can be accessed. Perhaps it is no longer a requirement that you agree to a restrictive covenant to access the source. Were I to care any longer, I would investigate. A decade ago I cared a great deal, but after reading the licenses and thinking about it for a long time I decided that I didn't want to accept the language on the proffered terms. If they want to convince me not they will need to show not only that the terms are better, but also that the language is sufficiently good that I should discard a decade's worth of learning and work to adopt it. This will be quite difficult, and they haven't made a decent attempt.
To me this appears to be slimey PR tactics, and it decreases my respect for both Sun and Gossling.
Yah. I've picked my license, which is why when I *DO* use java, it dialect I use is gcj. That's a license I can live with.
That said, the gcj libraries are so incomplete that I normally don't use Java at all, but use something else instead. (Just what depends on the project.)
And people wonder why laws don't get any respect. Or, worse, say that you ought to respect something just because it's the law.
Of course, if they said "fear" rather than "respect" they might have a decent point...
Actually, you're right. I checked the web site of the company, and the web site where I made the purchase. That should have been enough. I'm no longer a fan, so the Club seemed non-sensical.
Actually, I haven't really been a fan since, I think it was 9.0, when they left slocate off of the developer distribution...which I had bought. I've bought it a few times because 1) it USED to be a really great distribution and 2) I was looking desperately for something to over newbies. If they'd had decent Q/C then Mandrake would have been *IT*, but about then their business guy overextended the company. I've kept hoping it would recover, but with this last thing I've pretty much lost any confidence that they'll EVER get it right.
It's also true that I was quite shocked to be informed after visiting their site in an attempt to complain that I'd ordered ANOTHER copy. With no obvious way to cancel the order. (Or even to cancel the first one, since that was what I was attempting to do, after finding out that they had decided that I had ordered DVDs.) I did once get through (via e-mail) to someone at the company who blandly told me that I was mistaken, and didn't leave a reply address.
After that my feeling was the sooner this company dropped dead the better...well, I've cooled off a bit since then, but not enough that I'll EVER either buy anything they offer ever again or say anything about them without mentioning how they ripped me off. But this MAY be unintentional on their part. They've merely set things up so there's no channel for feedback...this means that they only get feedback indirectly and after a long time delay. And THIS means that they don't find out about thier problems in a timely manner. If you feel kindly towards them, you might mention to them why I do not. They do need to know this, but I wouldn't walk across the street to help them...or, admittedly, to hurt them. Once upon a time they were a good company.
Disk surfaces are measured in area, not volume...so if you were to plate that out in a thin layer...how much area/petabyte?
This doesn't address the problem of access, but mere layout. How many cc's of whatever the storage material is does a current high capacity disk contain? I'd wager not many. The desire is generally for as thin a layer as possible to reduce the size of the magnetic domains. Disks used to be metal, but now they're glass (lagely) because of this.
Yes, enough faster that it matters.
Each bug you remove is one less entry point. If bugs are rapidly removed, then it becomes less worth the effort to exploit any particular one, as it's likely to be removed by the time you finish.
Perfection is not to be found, but one can head in the right direction.
Pay them again to join the club? No, thank you. Enough is enough.
What Mandriva meant to me was that when I ordered CDRoms I got DVDs. This was something unuseable. When I tried to contact them, I ended up with another order of DVDs...still unuseable, but now I'm paying twice. When I tried a different way, I couldn't get any further than their contracted out shipping department. And they couldn't authorize an RMA.
No thank you. Mandriva does NOT deserve any more support. They used to be good guys, but this is foul. I *STILL* haven't been able to contact them, but it no longer matters, as I will never do business with them or recommend them again.
(They may not be intentionally evil. I can well imagine that this is just somebody clueless setting things up to be more efficient. The effect is the same.)
It's not just simplistic, it's stupid. It ignores the method by which FOSS software is developed.
FOSS software is generally first released in an alpha state. Few people can use it at this poiint, but some people are sufficiently interested to pay attention. Of those, some help the design, and some fix bugs and post solutions. After awhile quality improves and more people get interested. It becomes a bit easier to use. It becomes a bit more useful. Features are added and dropped. Somebody writes some documentation. After awhile it approaches beta.
Eventually, if the project is successful, it becomes easy to use **FOR IT'S TARGET AUDIENCE**. Call this the 1.0 version. Now development shifts over to polishing the user interface. At this point file formats have been stabilized, and functionality is pretty much set. (It can be expanded, but not easily shrunk.) This polishing will go on for a LONG time. During all this time it's still not easy for the general user, though it's getting easier. Release 2.0 attempts to broaden the user base for the project. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
N.B.: version numbers specified here are arbitrary. There is no consistency between projects. This can be a real hassel if you're just looking for a tool, but there's not standard agreed upon meaning for the terms. I've attempted to use what I think of as the "most common meaning", but every project does it differently.
Try. It might improve youre posting's acceptability.
He came across as a young geek who didn't know the business practices, but was trying to be friendly and honest. You came across as an even younger, perhaps geek. You didn't fit the criteria for the rest...except, perhaps, honest. And that was questionable.
The reason that it was questionable is that honest people generally know that "error bars" and other expressions of ignorance is a necessary part of being honest. So when you disparage such statements by another, you call into question your own status.
I might be wrong, but think about it. An abrasive personality is not a character trait that most would chose to cultivate. YMMV. IMHO. etc.
What you are describing is the very reason that CS is failing in the US.
Why should one spend the time and effort to get a degree in CS only to end up in that kind of situation? That's not a reason. If you are sufficiently driven, you may do it anyway, but there aren't a large numbe of people who are like that. I had choices (with my inherent skill-set) among studying for engineering, CS, and the sciences. I went first to math and then to CS, but if I'd seen CS as a dead-end job, I would have gone elsewhere. My timing was good, and I was fortunate. If I were starting in college today I don't think that CS would have gotten a second thought. Chemistry, perhaps, or Biology. Even some kind of engineering, though I tend to be more of a theorist.
You are analyzing the situation on too short a time scale. If you look at things from the perspective of one company over the next year or two, no doubt you are correct, but if you look from the perspective of the country over the next decade, it looks disasterous.
There is probably still time to recover, but the US has a long history of cultural bias against intellectuals, so I don't expect it to happen. The country's lunch is already being eaten but foreign competition, and it's not paying attention, because it doesn't like the message. Expect increasing bluster and corruption, and few substantive improvements. The place that this will REALLY show up is "Where do the new gadgets originate? Where do the new technologies proliferate?" The answer to the first question appears to be Japan. The answer to the second is less clear...but Japan isn't at the bottom of the list of plausible answers. (OTOH, Japan has it's own problems, with an aging population, limited resources, and a hostile attitude towards foreigners...but these are also some of the reasons that are driving it towards new technologies.)
That's a deliciously ambiguous post. I can't tell wether it's sarcastic or not, and I can't tell whether it's a troll or serious.
I'm fairly certain that it wasn't intentionally ambiguous, but only because few have that as a goal. Delicious.
FWIW, and to clarify *this* post, I'm appreciating it as a poet. In such a role I find ambiguous lines to frequently be the most powerful. (It's not a hat I wear often, but it's been an occasional mode of expression since grade school. I've produced some monumentally bad poems, and a few small ones I've thought rather good. As a friend said "Time and the moth are the only true critics", and by their standards my works will be evanescent, as I've never published widely.)
Well, if you are going to postulate some creator, or group of creators...why assume ANY of the guesses are correct? There's a much larger number of possibilities that NOBODY has ever taken seriously and which aren't any more absurd.
Personally, I tend toward the view that gods ARE actual, and that they are the descriptions of the anthropormorphizeable archtypes. Thus they exist in, and are a part of, the material world. What they create is the consciousness which perceives it, and the form in which the consicousness perceives it. They are largely genetically specified (partially epigenetic?), and thus identical in essence across a wide spectrum of people, though the manifestation may be quite different. (It gets more complex, but don't bother. I think the theory is consistent, but I don't even have any evidence for THAT. I adopted it to explain a few personal experiences while following a hermetic path.)
So if a livejournal page is open as a member of a group of tabs, it must always be on top?
Guess I'll never go there.
It would be nice if it were easy to install proprietary drivers (as it is!), but Linux itself should NOT include such drivers. I would go further and say that it is legally forbidden to include such drivers. It's quite probable that nobody would sue them for the inclusion, but it COULD happen, and such a suit would probably prevail. (IANAL...so this is a Wild Ass Guess [WAG].)
Also, if we dig back into the history of the founding of GNU, we find that the whole thing was started because of some company's proprietary drivers...and Richard Stallman wanting to use some code that wasn't made available. Turning your back on this is about as fundamental a turning your back on your roots as is possible. This is why he designed the license he did. (Well, the specs. I think Lessig did the actual writing.)
No. I'm not saying the investors should be liable, unless they hold seats on the board, or over 10% of the stock I don't consider investors to be to blame. I'm saying the executives, the people who have control over what the corporation does, should be liable.
Please understand the distinction.
Consider the source.
McAfee certainly doesn't want to take the blame when the computers that it is paid money to protect are infected...so it looks for a soft target. (And now you know what I think of McAfee. I didn't even bother to check that this was the same one...so believe at your own risk.)
I think the problem it you have your time scales confused. Yes, we should expect global cooling. Yes, we are experiencing global warming.
The confusion is because it isn't quite clear yet when we should start experiencing global cooling. And Ice ages can be preceded by periods of extreme warmth.
That said, it *is* important to get the reasons correct. This helps one to avoid the confusion in which you find yourself. That we ARE experiencing global warming is not in contradiction to that we should expect (soon, for some definition of soon) an Ice Age.
Actually, I would expect the ice age to occur soon after the end of the melting of the glaciers. At this point the oceans will be warmer and the surface area of the oceans will be larger. This will result in more water evaporating per year. There will be "eventually" a year with an inclement winter. Lots of clouds, lots of snow, etc. which lasts late into the spring. This will mean that more snow falls than melts. If this repeats a few years in a row (each time is more likely than the previous time...it's not a drunkard's walk) then the AIR of the globe will become cooler while the water remains warm. This will rapidly lead to a glaciation.
You will notice that I was vague about the time scale. I don't think anyone can be very precise, but the onset is expected to be rather rapid. A few decades wouldn't be surprisingly quickly. Once the glaciers start walking, they won't stop until the ocean has lost it's excess heat.
May I recommend a combination orbital sun-shade/heater? It's an orbital mirror, and by adjusting it's parameters you can either warm or cool your world slightly, as necessary to stabilize your perferred position in the cycle of glaciation. Without it, you can expect to experience an inclement climate over a period of epochs.
Actually nukes need a whole bunch of justification. They may *actually* be the best solution, but this isn't clear. Even so, ... care will definitely be needed. (Pebble bed reactors may be an answer to most of the problems. MAY.)
Before I can seriously consider nuclear reactors, the governmental limitation on damages would need to be lifted. If companies think reactors are too dangerous to build without a limitation on damages, then I think that they are too dangerous to build. Also, if the company goes bankrupt in a liability suit, then the executives personal fortunes should also be at stake. (Not just the director, but everyone above supervisory level.) I don't see any reason why the people who live near one of the things should bear all of the risk, when they only get a small fraction of the benefits.
That said...can I talk to you about the risks of having a coal mine under your town...
Sometimes there are no really good answers. I don't trust nukes because the industry has been too shielded from damages by the government. They may still be the correct answer, but I won't believe it until they start operating with a few fewer protections.