Personally, I have no capacity to do anything about the fighting in Darfur. I am neither a combatant nor does it have an effect on me. What bothers me, more than anything, is how the actions of white people being murdered in Bosnia-Herzegovina was deserving of moral outrage but when (what is probably) a hundred times more negroes are murdered in Africa the response from the world community is virtually nil. It happened back in Rwanda, and other situations there (Uganda, etc.), and nobody cares. I comment about this on my Blog, about why nobody cares about it. To quote Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, "They darker than us!" The moral outrage among nations that occurred when white people were slaughtered in Bosnia is conspicuously absent.
That said, I still don't think what is happening, is right. It's labeled "genocide" mostly because the majority of deaths are on civilian tribes, in REALLY aweful ways. Unlike the "American" civil war, where people faught against slavery, unity and other issues.. these people are killing because they just don't like the other half. It's not just with guns, or one army against the other. We're talking militias going in with machetes, chopping people up, killing by blunt force trauma, killing children and women with NO sense of mercy whatsoever.
Except that these militias that are killing people are operating with Sudanese government support. That makes the actions which are occurring in Darfur the equivalent of many repetitions of the same thing, from what happened in Rwanda in the 1980s, or to what happened to Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in Germany in the 1930s, to what Stalin did around the same time and Mao did in the 1950s-'70s: ordering millions starved to death due to Marxist central-planning-based farming schemes, or what the U.S. Government did to the American Aborigines ("Indians") back in the 1800s, (Veil of Tears, etc.), to what Slobodan Milovich did in Bosnia-Herzegovia in the 1980s, etc. It's targeting a specific population based on its characteristics. It's a crime against humanity same as genocide; arguing it isn't is essentially making a distiction without a difference.
I also discuss the article on my Blog, about why nobody cares about it. To quote Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, "They darker than us!" The moral outrage among nations that occurred when white people were slaughtered in Bosnia is conspicuously absent.
Note: An expanded version of this reply appears as an article on my blog and you can also read more there. Because Slashdot only allows shorter titles, the title of the article there is "The Rumors of Microsoft's death are clearly exaggerated."
First, on the issue of Linux vs Windows (for the title of this article): Windows sells more because Microsoft got there first, there is tremendous inertia, plus, until recently, there wasn't that much available that wasn't an application running on Microsoft software. And while using Open Source is almost as good as proprietary it ain't there yet; the usability of X Windows over Microsoft Windows still has some cracks that need to be filled. Also, Visicalc was the "killer app" for the Apple II; Lotus 1-2-3 was for the IBM-PC; where's the Linux "killer app"? (I'll give an example of one that could have happened on my blog.)
I think I agree with a comment someone (or more than one person) said in the various comments linked around this whole comment churn, in which I'll paraphrase, "Anyone who thinks Microsoft is dead or that Web Applications are better than desktop ones has been sucking down way too much of the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid."
My own opinions are that the tools for implementing Web-based applications are far too primitive. Like with pushing Linux over Windows: it (they) aren't there yet. As has been noted, prior to PHP you had to design a CGI application (usually in C++) in which you wrote a regular program and then stuck on "a bag on the side" to make it run as a web service.
Having done both, I am fully aware that a web-based application is harder to develop than a desktop one. A Linux desktop application is harder to develop than a Windows desktop application. A text-based application is about equal on either platform, but it's a hell of a lot easier to develop even a simple non-gui desktop application than anything running as a served application through a browser. The tools for web development are different, are not as powerful, and more expensive, both in terms of operational requirements and development requirements (e.g. it's a lot more work to secure a web app than a desktop app.)
There are more details, (hint, hint, you can read them on the expanded version of this comment on my blog) but I'll stop here, and just say that the claims of Microsoft's death are premature.
I sent the following comment in to the Washington, Post:
Mr. Fricklas' comnents are, for lack of a better term, a whiner who doesn't like the law as written and wants to sue to get something from the courts that the legislature has clearly denied him. His point that You Tube has knowledge of copyrighted content is not relevant. As his own statement has made, Congress gave sites immunity under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act for sites that quickly take down infringing material. He has not said that Youtube is not removing material when requested; indeed, my understanding is Youtube removes tens or hundreds of thousands of reported clips all of the time. Here, also, he is in effect saying that because Youtube has the capacity to remove material either because it is unlawful or in some way undesirable, Youtube is infringing because of the very controls it is required by law to have to remove infringing material! If Youtube didn't have controls to remove the material, I'm sure that then he'd be claiming that it was not properly designed to comply with the law!
He also writes, "Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others' copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning number of sites. That's hardly a workable or equitable solution."
The only problem with his argument is that that has been the exact requirement for the past 200 or so years that copyright has existed; the copyright owner is required - and has always been required - to police his copyrights - and no amount of whining about how a requirement - in existence for hundreds of years - to be changed because he doesn't like it is valid. I'd like to remind this lawyer of a comment by the U.S Supreme court regarding how one obtains one's rights over something:
"The privilege... is neither accorded to the passive resistant, not to the person who is ignorant of his rights, nor to one who is indifferent thereto... It is valid only when insisted upon..." McAlister v. Henkle, 201 U.S. 90.
My guess is that this whole lawsuit is nothing more than a bargaining chip so that Viacom can make more money off their content. Since, like so many other whiney losers, he can't figure a way to negotiate in the marketplace, he goes running to the courts to try and get what he can't win at the bargaining table.
Paul Robinson
General Manager
Viridian Development Corporation
Arlington, Virginia
what cathedral ? what bazaar ? what relation does any cathedral and bazaar have, what kind of metaphor is this, and just what the heck does that mean ?
This is an (indirect) reference to Eric S. Raymond's seminal paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (actual essay is here), in which he talks about software development being done in one of two ways, by huge development companies in commercial environments, being similar to the way medieval cathedrals were constructed, versus open-source development in which just about anyone can get involved if they want, and that development is closer to the typical bazaars where anyone can walk up and put up a booth to sell rugs. It is this paper that was basically the cause of Netscape deciding to open-source its browser.
I have some problems with Open Office(.org) ("OOO") that appear to be the same problems that I have had with Microsoft Word. (Word 97 versus Word Perfect Version 7 and Word Perfect 8; I've never upgraded because WP8 works fine for everything I'm doing). I've gotten full (non-upgrade) copies of Word Perfect 8 - at retail, off the shelf - for as low as $15.00, and in one case I purchased a second copy for $39.00 because it was the Professional version and included the Paradox database, so it was worth trying. I think when I first bought Word Perfect 8 it was around $100; I forget what I paid for WP7. I've been a heavy user of Word Perfect for over 20 years, going back to DOS version 4.1, simply because I have yet to have a formatting feature in Word Perfect I wanted that I couldn't get it to do.
I have often had problems with both Microsoft Word and OOO to do formatting that I want to work the way I want to. I have sometimes exported files from Word Perfect using RTF (Rich Text Format) and found that Word will damage the formatting when trying to import the file. (I think I did that because it wouldn't import.WPD files correctly or something, so I think that's when I tried RTF.)
I'm not a word processing bigot, I'd use Microsoft Word - or possibly something else - if it worked as good or better than Word Perfect. In fact, one time when Word imported one of the books I'm writing, it mangled the format of the header, and I liked the way it changed it better. I could not figure out how it had done it or how to duplicate it, but I went into Word Perfect, clicked on help, and looked it up, and in about 30 seconds I duplicated the functionality that Microsoft Word gave me by accident, which if I hadn't liked it, would have been an error.
I'll give you an example of one thing I can do in Word Perfect that I can't do in Microsoft Word. Changing headers on new chapters. I have a book (actually it's the second one I'm writing), it's over 500 pages, and one of the features of the formatting is that the left (even page) header has my name and the name of the book, and the right (odd page) header has the name of the chapter. The left header stays the same, the right one changes at the beginning of the chapter.
Now, in some rare cases there is a chapter that is only one page long, and is on a left page, so that's not an issue. It's when a chapter is at least two pages, the chapter header should change to the name of the new chapter. When I view the file after it's been converted to Microsoft Word / RTF format, sometimes the chapter header doesn't change or it changes in strange ways. And this misbehavior seems to resurface in OOO, too.
Come to think of it, I have a resume I do in Word Perfect that also gets mangled because of header or footer problems in Word/OOO
Also, I don't see - or I'm not sure - how to 'view codes' in Microsoft Word (or OOO) which I can see the internal formatting of a document and know what the program is doing (and even delete some codes, such as if I have an area that is incorrectly italic or bold).
Maybe I'll try copying the file over again and see how it looks, or I could try examining OOO's XML output and see what I get. One thing I do like with OOO is the PDF output feature, I'd like to be able to use it. Plus OOO's scripting is in Basic rather than the relatively esoteric Perfect Script, which the only other program I've seen that uses it is Novell's Groupwise e-mail program.
Another poster here mentioned submitting a bug report, and I think I'll do that (I hadn't thought of it). Of course, it might be that the behavior is wrong in Word, in which case it might not be considered a bug!
I would say that in probably 90% or more of all applications, Assembly is unnecessary. In the last fifteen years I don't think I've had to use Assembly to solve a problem at work even once. Then again, typical business applications don't (now) need Assembly language. Over twenty years ago I worked for a bulk-mail company in Long Beach, California that did mainframe applications almost exclusively in IBM 360 mainframe assembler, we probably could have used COBOL but BAL was the shop's language.
Now, if your shop's language isn't Assembly then you aren't going to use it in normal circumstances. Typically you do not want to use Assembly unless unavoidable, simply because you don't want to have to support multiple languages in the code base. Also, because the level of abstractions is lower in Assembly, it takes more time and effort to do things in Assembly than it does in higher level langauages, unless you use it consistently and use all the tricks available (such as structured macros and such), in which case you'd probably get most of the performance in C with fewer hassles.
Now, there are two places where Assembly is important, if not critical. First is when you have a bottleneck in which performance is inadequate, and after the code has been optimized, you still can't get adequate performance, then you need to move to Assembly language. It's often said that when you have a performance problem and speed is an issue, you'll get 80% of the improvement from changes in only 20% of the code, thus you might need to simply rewrite a small piece of the code (in the high-level language) to get an improvement - maybe significant improvement - in performance.
I say that because you might get the code to provide satisfactory performance - without needing Assembly - after refactoring or changing it to alter how it performs. Then you don't have to support two source language bases and you get the performance boost you needed without resorting to Assembly. This option may not be available in the case of, say, programming a video card, you may have to use assembler (or data in the application which is passed to the card as a program in its native machine code, which is essentially the same thing) to be able to get the necessary performance or special features.
Also, you need to know what needs to be optimized depending on what the application does. For example, if you have a data entry program, optimizing the startup to take one minute instead of two will get less benefit than dropping the time needed to enter a transaction by one second, because (1) over the course of the day on entry of, say, 600 transactions, the time saved will be ten minutes, which would allow the operators to enter additional transactions and (2) the operators will find the application more "snappy" and have more job satisfaction. On the other hand, if the application is being used once in a while for a single use at a time, cutting the amount of time for it to startup over allowing the transaction to take longer might be a better choice, since reducing the extra minute waiting for it to start up might be more critical than reducing the time for the transaction to finish.
Second is when a particular feature or functionality is unavailable except in Assembly. If you need to implement a type of internal functionality such as a task switch, specialized error trapping, or to read or write certain machine registers, or where you need access to do I/O to a specialized device, you may have no choice but to use Assembly. This is indirectly related to the last sentence of the previous paragraph, in which the extra performance is unavailable except in Assembly. Az much as I dislike C, it has eliminated a lot of need for the use of Assembly because so many of the constructs in C are either direct representations of machine language or almost exactly implemented as the most efficient machine instructions available to perform the task.
Compilers have gotten considerably better over the years, to the poin
The following hyperlink shows a program source code that was part of the Decsysten-20 Pascal compiler suite which was distributed by the Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society as Decus 20-0003.
That program is a Pascal debugger, written in Pascal, written in 1975, and uses both single and double-linked lists. Linked lists are also used in the source code listing shown in the following link of the Decus Decsystem 20/PDP 10 Pascal Compiler, written in December, 1974, and part of the same distribution.
I knew this technique was old, I didn't realize it's more than 32 years old! And that's just what can be proved; it might be even older.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, as a result of FBI abuses including targeting of dissident groups, new laws were passed and court decisions occurred putting restrictions on the FBI and on state and local police because of agency misconduct. Consider Bull Connor and his thugs at the Birmingham (Alabama) Police, who felt the appropriate response for peaceful protests was attack dogs and firehosing. We did not 'hobble' them because we wanted to let criminals get away with things, we put restrictions on police because they could not be trusted not to abuse their authority.
You didn't get decisions like Miranda, Escobedo, Mapp, and others because it was thought that it would be a good idea to make the job of law enforcement more difficult, but because law enforcement was acting in an improper and often illegal fashion. Depriving police of the ability to use illegally obtained evidence, of suppressing forced confessions and other such things would, it was claimed, destroy law enforcement. And you know what happened? Police officers learned, generally, to act within the rules, to be professional and to work on finding evidence in a proper manner. But it still wasn't enough.
The Govenor of Illinois had to commute the death sentences of over 150 because of police and prosecutorial misconduct, including cases where prosecutors sought death sentences and sent people they knew were innocent to death row. The incident was so bad that some prosecutors were arrested for misconduct.
There is an old saying in Latin, Quos custodes ipsos custodes?, i.e. Who will watch the watchers? When the police don't have serious restrictions, they will do anything they can get away with. Sometimes the police act properly and in a professinal manner. Sometimes the police can be almost as bad as the people they are supposed to catch.
In the next to the last paragraph, the last line should read "there ain't that much room available." Now, if you don't like use of the word "ain't," then substitute "isn't."
The right to speak includes - outside of some very narrow exceptions - the right not to carry someone else's opinions as well. Some cases have ruled that even public transit agencies have the right to choose not to carry certain ads. Further cases have refined that such that, for example, corporations have the right to have public opinions and to make them public. But it's also important to note that a private organization that publishes material has a right (within certain limits) to decide what it will or won't carry. You can't carry ads which are themselves illegal, and conversely, many cases have held that a newspaper has the right to choose not to carry certain materials if they don't want to.
A state law in Florida attempted to do for newspapers what the Fairness Doctrine did for television stations: require when a newspaper supported a political candidate or provided space to one, that they had to also give space to others, or when they expressed an opinion they had to give time to the other side, or something like that, I'm not exactly certain which it was. Courts found that requirement unconstitutional and struck it down.
Now, the only time that a particular place can be required to carry someone's message is when they are considered a common carrier (such as a telephone, telegraph or cable tv system). They generally were required to provide service to anyone who could pay the same rates as anyone else, because they were granted an exclusive license to operate, or, today, they have the use of a limited resource - the public right of way - to provide service to customers, since the customers can't build their own phone lines across the roads (the way, say, anyone can buy a car and drive it on the highway), they have to provide service to anyone who can pay.
The ostensible reason the Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine with respect to broadcast stations is that they have a license to use extremely limited airwaves and should not be permitted to monopolize something which is a public resource. Of course, this is a hard argument to make today because the television stations tend to presume that they own the airspace they have and any dispute of their exclusive rights should be resisted vigorously, hence the usual fights over even small and marhginal organizations operating low power television. But the argument still can be applied; not everyone can run a television station because "their ain't that much room available" in the airspace.
Now, it's arguable that none of these search engine companies that accept ads are in any way a user or licensee of a limited or public resource or have some special condition that requires them to in some way be declared to be common carriers.
I know you're trying to be funny, but I see this all the time about how, "duh, how can a corporation have rights"?
Uh, for your information, Corporations do have rights. Ever since the 19th century when the courts ruled that a corporation is entitled to the same rights as a person.
Let's consider these numbers. It is 420 years of data for one machine, spread out over a number of machines.
Spread out over five machines, that's 84 years.
Spread out over ten machines, that's 42 years.
Spread out over 50 machines, that's 8.4 years (100 months, or 8 years, and just under five months).
Spread out over 500 machines, that's 0.84 years (306 days, or about ten months.).
Spread out over 5000 machines, that's 31 days or about one month.
Since the work took 4 months, it implies that each machine was used for about 25% of capacity. Now, the big point would be that they got the work done for free other than overhead costs (creating the grid software and networking, etc.). Which ain't bad.
I believe our biggest problem is the lack of adequate abstractions to be able to describe software in such a way as to reduce the amount of grunt work needed in the development of applications. We have not-very good tools and poor languages to describe what we want to accomplish. Plus, the people developing software are often not well trained, and the concepts are difficult, and often the customer doesn't even know what he wants, and may not even know how to articulate what he wants. And even if he knows, and knows how to tell what he wants, he may not know how to get the developers on-line to understand his vision. (Every writer who has ever sold a book to Hollywood and saw the resulting movie, complains about how the screenwriter and director "botched" the translation and "bastardized" his or her story, so the idea of "concept" not equaling "implementation" isn't new.)
The point which can be made as far as software is concerned is that the higher the level of abstraction the greater the productivity the person is capable of producing. A programmer in a language like Cobol is going to be two to three times as productive as one in assembly language. A software designer using a system like, say, Ruby on Rails might be able to do ten times as much work as someone writing an application using, say, C or C++, presuming the target task is the same. I am using this as an example, I do not know if something like Ruby on Rails actually can give a full order of magnitude increase in productivity. But I wouldn't be surprised.
The only problem is that if you take abstraction to its ultimate conclusion, you get a language like APL which, except for some niche applications, failed dismally because it became too difficult to work with. But you could do some amazing things with it. The "big thing" in APL was to write a "one liner," an attempt to write a complete working application in one line of code. And I have seen some unbelievable stuff done with it. Things that conceivably might take dozens or hundreds of lines of code in a lesser programming language really could be done in *one line* of APL. I've seen it done. It kind of convinced me I'd never be able to do that kind of work, I don't have the background.
But to have that kind of capability requires a really powerful programming language, and/or excellent subroutine libraries to support it. As well as good people to write code using that language. It is often said of APL that it is a "write only" language in that some people would develop cute tricks but if you ever had to do maintenance it would be simpler and easier to start over.
But if you are even just competent in APL, the level of abstraction of the language is so high that your productivity will easily be at least an order of magnitude - maybe even two orders - higher than someone of the same capability working in any other programming language. And a real "superstar" could do things that might not even be possible even in a considerably longer period of time in anything else.
Our minds determine the tools we have. And the tools we have, which basically consist, as I have stated, of not-very-good code editors, poor programming languages, and inadequate run-time support, don't make it surprising that we have such problems in the development of software. But people are thinking about ways of improving it.
There is a guy named Louis Savain who has been doing some work from time-to-time on his idea: the creation of software modules using the concept of a hardware abstraction, limiting the number of interactions and cross-actions by limiting how side effects can occur. He was of the opinion that he had a great system for reducing error, increasing productivity and reliability of software. I pointed out to him that what he has is an *idea*. Unless and until he actually has something implemented all he has is a promise which may be useful but is at this time unproven.
Basically he wants to create for software what the transistor and the printed circuit did for
Is the VFAT 32-Bit MS-DOS file system made available in Windows 95. On CD-ROM/DVD-ROM it's essentially the same as the "Joliet" format. It supports file names up to 63 characters, subdirectories, and blanks in file names. Now, I could be wrong but I think journaling is only important where you have transactional-based file systems, where you are doing update writes and want faster performance with the ability to recover in the event of failure of a transaction to finish, i.e. the computer is rebooted before all of the I/O is done to the file but after the journal was written. (You recover the data by replaying the journal.) For the purpose of creating archival backup I don't believe journaling buys you much of anything since typically you write a whole file as a single transaction (several blocks one after the other in a copy operation) and you restore the specific file the same way (as one copy of the whole file).
Whether we like it or not, while NTFS and ext2/ext3 and a bunch of other file systems might provide better reliability, whenever you look at any system, anywhere, one thing they all have in common, on virtually all media: hard drives, floppy drives, usb thumb drives, removable media cards such as Smartmedia, CF, Memory Stick, cell phones, is the Windows VFAT file system. And everyone: Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, BSD, Linux, OS-9, you name it, every operating system can read MS-DOS VFAT format file systems.
There was a company which had extreme requirements for having non-stop computing and as such, had dual mainframes, each with redundant separate power with dual generators, and everything duplicated. Now, these were real Big Iron, the kind that generated so much heat they had to be water cooled. Well, the company wanted to even be secure in the event municipal water supplies failed. But the city would not grant them a permit to install a water tank on top of their building to store the approximately 40,000 gallons of water they would have to ensure operations. However, there was no problem with the company installing a swimming pool on the roof...
In the case of U.S. v. Miller, the Supreme Court during 1939 had to decide whether a sawed-off shotgun was a legitimate military weapon, which Jack Miller had been convicted in violation of Federal Law prohibiting posession of sawed-off shotguns. The issue raised was whether the federal prohibition on individual possession of sawed-off shotguns violated the 2nd Amendment. Miller died between the time his case was granted certiorari and oral argument was held, thus his side did not present any argument on the issue.
If the Second Amendment is not a protection against government suppressing the rights of individuals, then why would the Supreme Court hear a case of an Individual arguing a Second Amendment right? Miller was not a state; if the Second Amendment is not a protection against the abridgement of the individual rights, then Miller had no standing and the Supreme Court would never have granted certiorari in the first place.
If you're going to get management to understand the reasons for better treatment of programmers, you have to make a business case argument. The simple matter is to argue (in the sense of making a proposal, not in the sense of expressing anger) that it is more cost effective to do it this way.
Software developers are skilled professionals - or they should be, anyway - and professionals need proper tools and resources to be at their highest productivity levels. Higher productivity means more value for every peso spent. No one would expect even a moderately competent surgeon to work in a dark and cramped operating room with dull tools, doing every job in the operating room with no support staff, and expect anything but sub-par, low grade work with a very high mortality rate. And you wouldn't expect it of a world-class surgeon either.
And this is exactly the state of software development today in the places that don't make it possible for their software development staff to do anything but sub-par, low grade work with a high probability of failure and an strong likelihood of cancellation of projects as unfinished and a waste of valuable resources.
The purpose in having a programming staff is to deveop the software tools that allow your organization to obtain the one thing that no other organization in the world has: a competitive advantage and a reason for the customer to select your company over all of your competitors.
Every piece of hardware you can purchase commercially, and every piece of shrink-wrapped software you buy does nothing but give you the same tools as your competitors have, because you all can (and do) buy from the same suppliers. Software either makes your company more efficient - that it can get more done with less resources than your competitors - or it gives you the capacity to offer products or services that are markedly better than anyone else, or potentially unavailable from anyone else.
If software isn't there to give you a competitive edge relative to your customers, then what do you have software developers for? Why even bother to have them if you aren't getting something more than every other company with a checkbook? Fire them all and use off-the-shelf applications. If you have software developers, the whole idea is that what they are capable of doing, that no other people can do, is supply you with something different that no other company has, that you can use that difference as a competitive edge that makes your company more valuable to your customers than any of your competitors.
An advertising company can purchase office supplies from anyone else, they can hire - or freelance - artists to do drawings, photographers and models for ad campaigns, announcers for voice overs, but none of these things can give them a competitive edge because everyone else can buy from the same suppliers, and none of these things will make a difference other than in the technical quality of the ads they produce. The competitive edge is in the people who can think up a great idea for an ad campaign that works to sell the customer's product or service. That competitive edge is something you can't buy, you need high-quality people who can think to get it.
If you're in the business of selling a commodity product or service that they can buy from anyone else, your sales people are the stars that allow you to make a difference because your salespeople can give your customers new ideas on how to use your product or service more effectively, or show your customers reasons to use your product or service over anyone else. And for that, sales people are paid high salaries, or they get special compensation packages. Because the extra resources that they get provide the company with a competitive advantage.
The same thing applies to any company that uses software developers to create software used in their business. If your business is the development of software, this is an even more imperative issue, because the software you sell is the only thing t
Unfortunately I've been getting unsolicited phone calls via machine on my cell phone recently and they're all in Spanish, which I neither speak nor understand. Other than improving my skill of shouting vile curses and heinous threats into the phone, is there anything I can do?
I get those on occasion on my cell phone too. Now, with that (or with a home phone, if you have caller id and there is a return number), see if you can look up the number (if it is valid; sometimes I get calls from places where the return number is "800-000-0000"). Once you have the number you file a "John Doe" lawsuit (as explained below), subpoena the local telephone company serving the area where that number originates, then substitute the owner of that number for John Doe Corporation.
If you can't find the number, it's a little more complicated, but here's how you can go about it.
File a lawsuit in state court, with the defendant being "John Doe" (in case it is a person such as an unincorporated business) and "John Doe Corporation" and get a subpoena for your local telephone company to identify the name and telephone number of the calling party who placed a call to your number on the date and time in question. You have that subpoena served on the phone company, and either it came in locally or it came in from a long distance company. If it came in from a long distance company, the local phone company can tell you which one. You now do the same thing over, subpoena that long distance company to find out where the call at that time originated from. And if you have to, you subpoena the originating telephone company.
Once you get the actual name of the party, you substitute that for "John Doe Corporation." This is how the RIAA gets the names of file sharers to sue them; first they file a "John Doe" lawsuit, use the suit to get a subpoena, then once they get the identity they substitute the actual name. The only thing dishonorable with the RIAA is that they are trying to file one lawsuit and bulk-sue hundreds or thousands of people in a single lawsuit as opposed to filing each separate lawsuit.
Now, maybe it isn't worth it if the company isn't local but you could conceivably ask the court for an order for them not to call you, and that can then be enforced with the potential for jail time. But if they're calling you it's probably likely that they are trying to sell something to you or are trying to get money from you, or something else of value (like your vote) and thus it is very likely that they have some local assets to attach if they don't pay.
If the judge throws your case out despite proper preparation you usually can appeal.
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
The ad showed a clear and obvious example of the incompetence of the people posting the ad.
Two words "batchelor's degree."
As soon as an ad demands a degree it's a clear sign the people running the place do not know what they are doing. It means that all they know how to do is look at paperwork or credentials. Capability, ability and knowledge mean very little. All that matters is the paperwork.
I have something over 25 years of experience programming. I've been far too busy scratching out a living to be able to take several years and get a degree. And I've seen too many people with technical degrees who were not all that good. From what I have seen, all that a technical degree means is you have been able to sit in a class and take tests; they do not prove one is capable of doing the work involved as a programmer (or that you're even of mediocre ability). Not that I am denegrating education, what I object to is the lazy dependence on paperwork by incompetents who are inadequate to understand what is necessary to be able to do the work in question.
Places I have interviewed for that showed me they did know what they were doing never once specified level of education; instead they had people take a skills test. They had found that having someone write an answer to a skill question told a whole lot more about the ability of the person doing the work as would any paper background. And they weren't even that concerned that the person have a really correct answer as much as they were able to give a reasonable answer relative to the question being asked, e.g. to show how you would solve the problem, even if the solution was wrong as long as it was an intelligent attempt to solve the problem. But to do that requires your technical people who do interviews know what they are doing and how to ask the questions.
Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't such a system keep a master table of every vote that was recorded, at what time, on what electronic ballot, what location, and by whom? Therefore, in truth, they could in some manner confirm every voters vote with the voter themself? I know they're not going to do it, but wouldn't that data be available, therefore recounts are possible by confirming each voters vote with the actual voter?
Okay, you're wrong.:) They do not do this, and it would probably be illegal if they did. Such a log would violate some state laws and state constitutions requiring that voters be able to vote in secret (which would include being anonymous as a result of what they voted). A log that showed who voted for whom would provide way too much loss of privacy and make it too likely that how a person voted could be tracked and discovered.
There is a very simple, much more inexpensive and reliable method of providing secret ballots with anonymous voting. It's called using a printed ballot. Most precincts have a few hundred people voting, it can't take that long to count X's on a page. And having been a polling officer at a local election - twice - I know of what I speak. And yeah, we use electronic machines at our polling place. I'm not sure if they are accurate or not, but we do.
The simplest answer would be for the machine to issue a slip with each ballot that is dropped into a hopper after the vote. The slip would only display the vote, not who did. And to make sure it was anonymous, the hopper could be rotated regularly to mix the slips.
And jchernia notes, "As an aside, the California Highway Patrol is running the investigation -- maybe the Internet is a truck after all."
In California, the State Police - which is a division of the Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that issues drivers' licenses - are called the "California Highway Patrol" because primarily most of their work deals with, well, patrolling the highways. But they also investigate crimes which occur in the state, usually in places where the local police or sheriff do not have the equipment or the personnel to investigate adequately. In Texas, the agency that mostly patrols the highways, investigates crime statewide (including operating the famous Texas Rangers), and issues driver's licenses is called the "Department of Public Safety". In Virginia and Maryland the agency that mostly patrols the highways and investigates crime statewide is called the State Police. The fact that the name of the state police in California isn't "State Police" does not change their function.
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Personally, I have no capacity to do anything about the fighting in Darfur. I am neither a combatant nor does it have an effect on me. What bothers me, more than anything, is how the actions of white people being murdered in Bosnia-Herzegovina was deserving of moral outrage but when (what is probably) a hundred times more negroes are murdered in Africa the response from the world community is virtually nil. It happened back in Rwanda, and other situations there (Uganda, etc.), and nobody cares. I comment about this on my Blog, about why nobody cares about it. To quote Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, "They darker than us!" The moral outrage among nations that occurred when white people were slaughtered in Bosnia is conspicuously absent.
I also discuss the article on my Blog, about why nobody cares about it. To quote Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, "They darker than us!" The moral outrage among nations that occurred when white people were slaughtered in Bosnia is conspicuously absent.
Note: An expanded version of this reply appears as an article on my blog and you can also read more there. Because Slashdot only allows shorter titles, the title of the article there is "The Rumors of Microsoft's death are clearly exaggerated."
First, on the issue of Linux vs Windows (for the title of this article): Windows sells more because Microsoft got there first, there is tremendous inertia, plus, until recently, there wasn't that much available that wasn't an application running on Microsoft software. And while using Open Source is almost as good as proprietary it ain't there yet; the usability of X Windows over Microsoft Windows still has some cracks that need to be filled. Also, Visicalc was the "killer app" for the Apple II; Lotus 1-2-3 was for the IBM-PC; where's the Linux "killer app"? (I'll give an example of one that could have happened on my blog.)
I think I agree with a comment someone (or more than one person) said in the various comments linked around this whole comment churn, in which I'll paraphrase, "Anyone who thinks Microsoft is dead or that Web Applications are better than desktop ones has been sucking down way too much of the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid."
My own opinions are that the tools for implementing Web-based applications are far too primitive. Like with pushing Linux over Windows: it (they) aren't there yet. As has been noted, prior to PHP you had to design a CGI application (usually in C++) in which you wrote a regular program and then stuck on "a bag on the side" to make it run as a web service.
Having done both, I am fully aware that a web-based application is harder to develop than a desktop one. A Linux desktop application is harder to develop than a Windows desktop application. A text-based application is about equal on either platform, but it's a hell of a lot easier to develop even a simple non-gui desktop application than anything running as a served application through a browser. The tools for web development are different, are not as powerful, and more expensive, both in terms of operational requirements and development requirements (e.g. it's a lot more work to secure a web app than a desktop app.)
There are more details, (hint, hint, you can read them on the expanded version of this comment on my blog) but I'll stop here, and just say that the claims of Microsoft's death are premature.
After I wrote a prior piece here, I realized a great (bad pun) quote that sums up Viacom's lawsuit.
Viacom's lawyer, in effect is saying, "All YouTube are belong to us!"
I sent the following comment in to the Washington, Post:
Mr. Fricklas' comnents are, for lack of a better term, a whiner who doesn't like the law as written and wants to sue to get something from the courts that the legislature has clearly denied him. His point that You Tube has knowledge of copyrighted content is not relevant. As his own statement has made, Congress gave sites immunity under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act for sites that quickly take down infringing material. He has not said that Youtube is not removing material when requested; indeed, my understanding is Youtube removes tens or hundreds of thousands of reported clips all of the time. Here, also, he is in effect saying that because Youtube has the capacity to remove material either because it is unlawful or in some way undesirable, Youtube is infringing because of the very controls it is required by law to have to remove infringing material! If Youtube didn't have controls to remove the material, I'm sure that then he'd be claiming that it was not properly designed to comply with the law!
He also writes, "Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others' copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning number of sites. That's hardly a workable or equitable solution."
The only problem with his argument is that that has been the exact requirement for the past 200 or so years that copyright has existed; the copyright owner is required - and has always been required - to police his copyrights - and no amount of whining about how a requirement - in existence for hundreds of years - to be changed because he doesn't like it is valid. I'd like to remind this lawyer of a comment by the U.S Supreme court regarding how one obtains one's rights over something:
My guess is that this whole lawsuit is nothing more than a bargaining chip so that Viacom can make more money off their content. Since, like so many other whiney losers, he can't figure a way to negotiate in the marketplace, he goes running to the courts to try and get what he can't win at the bargaining table.
Paul RobinsonGeneral Manager
Viridian Development Corporation
Arlington, Virginia
This is an (indirect) reference to Eric S. Raymond's seminal paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (actual essay is here), in which he talks about software development being done in one of two ways, by huge development companies in commercial environments, being similar to the way medieval cathedrals were constructed, versus open-source development in which just about anyone can get involved if they want, and that development is closer to the typical bazaars where anyone can walk up and put up a booth to sell rugs. It is this paper that was basically the cause of Netscape deciding to open-source its browser.
I have some problems with Open Office(.org) ("OOO") that appear to be the same problems that I have had with Microsoft Word. (Word 97 versus Word Perfect Version 7 and Word Perfect 8; I've never upgraded because WP8 works fine for everything I'm doing). I've gotten full (non-upgrade) copies of Word Perfect 8 - at retail, off the shelf - for as low as $15.00, and in one case I purchased a second copy for $39.00 because it was the Professional version and included the Paradox database, so it was worth trying. I think when I first bought Word Perfect 8 it was around $100; I forget what I paid for WP7. I've been a heavy user of Word Perfect for over 20 years, going back to DOS version 4.1, simply because I have yet to have a formatting feature in Word Perfect I wanted that I couldn't get it to do.
I have often had problems with both Microsoft Word and OOO to do formatting that I want to work the way I want to. I have sometimes exported files from Word Perfect using RTF (Rich Text Format) and found that Word will damage the formatting when trying to import the file. (I think I did that because it wouldn't import .WPD files correctly or something, so I think that's when I tried RTF.)
I'm not a word processing bigot, I'd use Microsoft Word - or possibly something else - if it worked as good or better than Word Perfect. In fact, one time when Word imported one of the books I'm writing, it mangled the format of the header, and I liked the way it changed it better. I could not figure out how it had done it or how to duplicate it, but I went into Word Perfect, clicked on help, and looked it up, and in about 30 seconds I duplicated the functionality that Microsoft Word gave me by accident, which if I hadn't liked it, would have been an error.
I'll give you an example of one thing I can do in Word Perfect that I can't do in Microsoft Word. Changing headers on new chapters. I have a book (actually it's the second one I'm writing), it's over 500 pages, and one of the features of the formatting is that the left (even page) header has my name and the name of the book, and the right (odd page) header has the name of the chapter. The left header stays the same, the right one changes at the beginning of the chapter.
Now, in some rare cases there is a chapter that is only one page long, and is on a left page, so that's not an issue. It's when a chapter is at least two pages, the chapter header should change to the name of the new chapter. When I view the file after it's been converted to Microsoft Word / RTF format, sometimes the chapter header doesn't change or it changes in strange ways. And this misbehavior seems to resurface in OOO, too.
Come to think of it, I have a resume I do in Word Perfect that also gets mangled because of header or footer problems in Word/OOO
Also, I don't see - or I'm not sure - how to 'view codes' in Microsoft Word (or OOO) which I can see the internal formatting of a document and know what the program is doing (and even delete some codes, such as if I have an area that is incorrectly italic or bold).
Maybe I'll try copying the file over again and see how it looks, or I could try examining OOO's XML output and see what I get. One thing I do like with OOO is the PDF output feature, I'd like to be able to use it. Plus OOO's scripting is in Basic rather than the relatively esoteric Perfect Script, which the only other program I've seen that uses it is Novell's Groupwise e-mail program.
Another poster here mentioned submitting a bug report, and I think I'll do that (I hadn't thought of it). Of course, it might be that the behavior is wrong in Word, in which case it might not be considered a bug!
My BlogI would say that in probably 90% or more of all applications, Assembly is unnecessary. In the last fifteen years I don't think I've had to use Assembly to solve a problem at work even once. Then again, typical business applications don't (now) need Assembly language. Over twenty years ago I worked for a bulk-mail company in Long Beach, California that did mainframe applications almost exclusively in IBM 360 mainframe assembler, we probably could have used COBOL but BAL was the shop's language.
Now, if your shop's language isn't Assembly then you aren't going to use it in normal circumstances. Typically you do not want to use Assembly unless unavoidable, simply because you don't want to have to support multiple languages in the code base. Also, because the level of abstractions is lower in Assembly, it takes more time and effort to do things in Assembly than it does in higher level langauages, unless you use it consistently and use all the tricks available (such as structured macros and such), in which case you'd probably get most of the performance in C with fewer hassles.
Now, there are two places where Assembly is important, if not critical. First is when you have a bottleneck in which performance is inadequate, and after the code has been optimized, you still can't get adequate performance, then you need to move to Assembly language. It's often said that when you have a performance problem and speed is an issue, you'll get 80% of the improvement from changes in only 20% of the code, thus you might need to simply rewrite a small piece of the code (in the high-level language) to get an improvement - maybe significant improvement - in performance.
I say that because you might get the code to provide satisfactory performance - without needing Assembly - after refactoring or changing it to alter how it performs. Then you don't have to support two source language bases and you get the performance boost you needed without resorting to Assembly. This option may not be available in the case of, say, programming a video card, you may have to use assembler (or data in the application which is passed to the card as a program in its native machine code, which is essentially the same thing) to be able to get the necessary performance or special features.
Also, you need to know what needs to be optimized depending on what the application does. For example, if you have a data entry program, optimizing the startup to take one minute instead of two will get less benefit than dropping the time needed to enter a transaction by one second, because (1) over the course of the day on entry of, say, 600 transactions, the time saved will be ten minutes, which would allow the operators to enter additional transactions and (2) the operators will find the application more "snappy" and have more job satisfaction. On the other hand, if the application is being used once in a while for a single use at a time, cutting the amount of time for it to startup over allowing the transaction to take longer might be a better choice, since reducing the extra minute waiting for it to start up might be more critical than reducing the time for the transaction to finish.
Second is when a particular feature or functionality is unavailable except in Assembly. If you need to implement a type of internal functionality such as a task switch, specialized error trapping, or to read or write certain machine registers, or where you need access to do I/O to a specialized device, you may have no choice but to use Assembly. This is indirectly related to the last sentence of the previous paragraph, in which the extra performance is unavailable except in Assembly. Az much as I dislike C, it has eliminated a lot of need for the use of Assembly because so many of the constructs in C are either direct representations of machine language or almost exactly implemented as the most efficient machine instructions available to perform the task.
Compilers have gotten considerably better over the years, to the poin
The following hyperlink shows a program source code that was part of the Decsysten-20 Pascal compiler suite which was distributed by the Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society as Decus 20-0003. That program is a Pascal debugger, written in Pascal, written in 1975, and uses both single and double-linked lists. Linked lists are also used in the source code listing shown in the following link of the Decus Decsystem 20/PDP 10 Pascal Compiler, written in December, 1974, and part of the same distribution.
I knew this technique was old, I didn't realize it's more than 32 years old! And that's just what can be proved; it might be even older.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, as a result of FBI abuses including targeting of dissident groups, new laws were passed and court decisions occurred putting restrictions on the FBI and on state and local police because of agency misconduct. Consider Bull Connor and his thugs at the Birmingham (Alabama) Police, who felt the appropriate response for peaceful protests was attack dogs and firehosing. We did not 'hobble' them because we wanted to let criminals get away with things, we put restrictions on police because they could not be trusted not to abuse their authority.
You didn't get decisions like Miranda , Escobedo , Mapp , and others because it was thought that it would be a good idea to make the job of law enforcement more difficult, but because law enforcement was acting in an improper and often illegal fashion. Depriving police of the ability to use illegally obtained evidence, of suppressing forced confessions and other such things would, it was claimed, destroy law enforcement. And you know what happened? Police officers learned, generally, to act within the rules, to be professional and to work on finding evidence in a proper manner. But it still wasn't enough.
The Govenor of Illinois had to commute the death sentences of over 150 because of police and prosecutorial misconduct, including cases where prosecutors sought death sentences and sent people they knew were innocent to death row. The incident was so bad that some prosecutors were arrested for misconduct.
There is an old saying in Latin, Quos custodes ipsos custodes?, i.e. Who will watch the watchers? When the police don't have serious restrictions, they will do anything they can get away with. Sometimes the police act properly and in a professinal manner. Sometimes the police can be almost as bad as the people they are supposed to catch.
In the next to the last paragraph, the last line should read "there ain't that much room available." Now, if you don't like use of the word "ain't," then substitute "isn't."
The right to speak includes - outside of some very narrow exceptions - the right not to carry someone else's opinions as well. Some cases have ruled that even public transit agencies have the right to choose not to carry certain ads. Further cases have refined that such that, for example, corporations have the right to have public opinions and to make them public. But it's also important to note that a private organization that publishes material has a right (within certain limits) to decide what it will or won't carry. You can't carry ads which are themselves illegal, and conversely, many cases have held that a newspaper has the right to choose not to carry certain materials if they don't want to.
A state law in Florida attempted to do for newspapers what the Fairness Doctrine did for television stations: require when a newspaper supported a political candidate or provided space to one, that they had to also give space to others, or when they expressed an opinion they had to give time to the other side, or something like that, I'm not exactly certain which it was. Courts found that requirement unconstitutional and struck it down.
Now, the only time that a particular place can be required to carry someone's message is when they are considered a common carrier (such as a telephone, telegraph or cable tv system). They generally were required to provide service to anyone who could pay the same rates as anyone else, because they were granted an exclusive license to operate, or, today, they have the use of a limited resource - the public right of way - to provide service to customers, since the customers can't build their own phone lines across the roads (the way, say, anyone can buy a car and drive it on the highway), they have to provide service to anyone who can pay.
The ostensible reason the Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine with respect to broadcast stations is that they have a license to use extremely limited airwaves and should not be permitted to monopolize something which is a public resource. Of course, this is a hard argument to make today because the television stations tend to presume that they own the airspace they have and any dispute of their exclusive rights should be resisted vigorously, hence the usual fights over even small and marhginal organizations operating low power television. But the argument still can be applied; not everyone can run a television station because "their ain't that much room available" in the airspace.
Now, it's arguable that none of these search engine companies that accept ads are in any way a user or licensee of a limited or public resource or have some special condition that requires them to in some way be declared to be common carriers.
Uh, for your information, Corporations do have rights. Ever since the 19th century when the courts ruled that a corporation is entitled to the same rights as a person.
Since the work took 4 months, it implies that each machine was used for about 25% of capacity. Now, the big point would be that they got the work done for free other than overhead costs (creating the grid software and networking, etc.). Which ain't bad.
The point which can be made as far as software is concerned is that the higher the level of abstraction the greater the productivity the person is capable of producing. A programmer in a language like Cobol is going to be two to three times as productive as one in assembly language. A software designer using a system like, say, Ruby on Rails might be able to do ten times as much work as someone writing an application using, say, C or C++, presuming the target task is the same. I am using this as an example, I do not know if something like Ruby on Rails actually can give a full order of magnitude increase in productivity. But I wouldn't be surprised.
The only problem is that if you take abstraction to its ultimate conclusion, you get a language like APL which, except for some niche applications, failed dismally because it became too difficult to work with. But you could do some amazing things with it. The "big thing" in APL was to write a "one liner," an attempt to write a complete working application in one line of code. And I have seen some unbelievable stuff done with it. Things that conceivably might take dozens or hundreds of lines of code in a lesser programming language really could be done in *one line* of APL. I've seen it done. It kind of convinced me I'd never be able to do that kind of work, I don't have the background.
But to have that kind of capability requires a really powerful programming language, and/or excellent subroutine libraries to support it. As well as good people to write code using that language. It is often said of APL that it is a "write only" language in that some people would develop cute tricks but if you ever had to do maintenance it would be simpler and easier to start over.
But if you are even just competent in APL, the level of abstraction of the language is so high that your productivity will easily be at least an order of magnitude - maybe even two orders - higher than someone of the same capability working in any other programming language. And a real "superstar" could do things that might not even be possible even in a considerably longer period of time in anything else.
Our minds determine the tools we have. And the tools we have, which basically consist, as I have stated, of not-very-good code editors, poor programming languages, and inadequate run-time support, don't make it surprising that we have such problems in the development of software. But people are thinking about ways of improving it.
There is a guy named Louis Savain who has been doing some work from time-to-time on his idea: the creation of software modules using the concept of a hardware abstraction, limiting the number of interactions and cross-actions by limiting how side effects can occur. He was of the opinion that he had a great system for reducing error, increasing productivity and reliability of software. I pointed out to him that what he has is an *idea*. Unless and until he actually has something implemented all he has is a promise which may be useful but is at this time unproven.
Basically he wants to create for software what the transistor and the printed circuit did for
Is the VFAT 32-Bit MS-DOS file system made available in Windows 95. On CD-ROM/DVD-ROM it's essentially the same as the "Joliet" format. It supports file names up to 63 characters, subdirectories, and blanks in file names. Now, I could be wrong but I think journaling is only important where you have transactional-based file systems, where you are doing update writes and want faster performance with the ability to recover in the event of failure of a transaction to finish, i.e. the computer is rebooted before all of the I/O is done to the file but after the journal was written. (You recover the data by replaying the journal.) For the purpose of creating archival backup I don't believe journaling buys you much of anything since typically you write a whole file as a single transaction (several blocks one after the other in a copy operation) and you restore the specific file the same way (as one copy of the whole file).
Whether we like it or not, while NTFS and ext2/ext3 and a bunch of other file systems might provide better reliability, whenever you look at any system, anywhere, one thing they all have in common, on virtually all media: hard drives, floppy drives, usb thumb drives, removable media cards such as Smartmedia, CF, Memory Stick, cell phones, is the Windows VFAT file system. And everyone: Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, BSD, Linux, OS-9, you name it, every operating system can read MS-DOS VFAT format file systems.
There was a company which had extreme requirements for having non-stop computing and as such, had dual mainframes, each with redundant separate power with dual generators, and everything duplicated. Now, these were real Big Iron, the kind that generated so much heat they had to be water cooled. Well, the company wanted to even be secure in the event municipal water supplies failed. But the city would not grant them a permit to install a water tank on top of their building to store the approximately 40,000 gallons of water they would have to ensure operations. However, there was no problem with the company installing a swimming pool on the roof...
In the case of U.S. v. Miller, the Supreme Court during 1939 had to decide whether a sawed-off shotgun was a legitimate military weapon, which Jack Miller had been convicted in violation of Federal Law prohibiting posession of sawed-off shotguns. The issue raised was whether the federal prohibition on individual possession of sawed-off shotguns violated the 2nd Amendment. Miller died between the time his case was granted certiorari and oral argument was held, thus his side did not present any argument on the issue.
If the Second Amendment is not a protection against government suppressing the rights of individuals, then why would the Supreme Court hear a case of an Individual arguing a Second Amendment right? Miller was not a state; if the Second Amendment is not a protection against the abridgement of the individual rights, then Miller had no standing and the Supreme Court would never have granted certiorari in the first place.
Everyone knows that an asteroid wasn't what killed the dinosaurs. It was high insurance rates!
If you're going to get management to understand the reasons for better treatment of programmers, you have to make a business case argument. The simple matter is to argue (in the sense of making a proposal, not in the sense of expressing anger) that it is more cost effective to do it this way.
Software developers are skilled professionals - or they should be, anyway - and professionals need proper tools and resources to be at their highest productivity levels. Higher productivity means more value for every peso spent. No one would expect even a moderately competent surgeon to work in a dark and cramped operating room with dull tools, doing every job in the operating room with no support staff, and expect anything but sub-par, low grade work with a very high mortality rate. And you wouldn't expect it of a world-class surgeon either.
And this is exactly the state of software development today in the places that don't make it possible for their software development staff to do anything but sub-par, low grade work with a high probability of failure and an strong likelihood of cancellation of projects as unfinished and a waste of valuable resources.
The purpose in having a programming staff is to deveop the software tools that allow your organization to obtain the one thing that no other organization in the world has: a competitive advantage and a reason for the customer to select your company over all of your competitors.
Every piece of hardware you can purchase commercially, and every piece of shrink-wrapped software you buy does nothing but give you the same tools as your competitors have, because you all can (and do) buy from the same suppliers. Software either makes your company more efficient - that it can get more done with less resources than your competitors - or it gives you the capacity to offer products or services that are markedly better than anyone else, or potentially unavailable from anyone else.
If software isn't there to give you a competitive edge relative to your customers, then what do you have software developers for? Why even bother to have them if you aren't getting something more than every other company with a checkbook? Fire them all and use off-the-shelf applications. If you have software developers, the whole idea is that what they are capable of doing, that no other people can do, is supply you with something different that no other company has, that you can use that difference as a competitive edge that makes your company more valuable to your customers than any of your competitors.
An advertising company can purchase office supplies from anyone else, they can hire - or freelance - artists to do drawings, photographers and models for ad campaigns, announcers for voice overs, but none of these things can give them a competitive edge because everyone else can buy from the same suppliers, and none of these things will make a difference other than in the technical quality of the ads they produce. The competitive edge is in the people who can think up a great idea for an ad campaign that works to sell the customer's product or service. That competitive edge is something you can't buy, you need high-quality people who can think to get it.
If you're in the business of selling a commodity product or service that they can buy from anyone else, your sales people are the stars that allow you to make a difference because your salespeople can give your customers new ideas on how to use your product or service more effectively, or show your customers reasons to use your product or service over anyone else. And for that, sales people are paid high salaries, or they get special compensation packages. Because the extra resources that they get provide the company with a competitive advantage.
The same thing applies to any company that uses software developers to create software used in their business. If your business is the development of software, this is an even more imperative issue, because the software you sell is the only thing t
I get those on occasion on my cell phone too. Now, with that (or with a home phone, if you have caller id and there is a return number), see if you can look up the number (if it is valid; sometimes I get calls from places where the return number is "800-000-0000"). Once you have the number you file a "John Doe" lawsuit (as explained below), subpoena the local telephone company serving the area where that number originates, then substitute the owner of that number for John Doe Corporation.
If you can't find the number, it's a little more complicated, but here's how you can go about it.
File a lawsuit in state court, with the defendant being "John Doe" (in case it is a person such as an unincorporated business) and "John Doe Corporation" and get a subpoena for your local telephone company to identify the name and telephone number of the calling party who placed a call to your number on the date and time in question. You have that subpoena served on the phone company, and either it came in locally or it came in from a long distance company. If it came in from a long distance company, the local phone company can tell you which one. You now do the same thing over, subpoena that long distance company to find out where the call at that time originated from. And if you have to, you subpoena the originating telephone company.
Once you get the actual name of the party, you substitute that for "John Doe Corporation." This is how the RIAA gets the names of file sharers to sue them; first they file a "John Doe" lawsuit, use the suit to get a subpoena, then once they get the identity they substitute the actual name. The only thing dishonorable with the RIAA is that they are trying to file one lawsuit and bulk-sue hundreds or thousands of people in a single lawsuit as opposed to filing each separate lawsuit.
Now, maybe it isn't worth it if the company isn't local but you could conceivably ask the court for an order for them not to call you, and that can then be enforced with the potential for jail time. But if they're calling you it's probably likely that they are trying to sell something to you or are trying to get money from you, or something else of value (like your vote) and thus it is very likely that they have some local assets to attach if they don't pay.
If the judge throws your case out despite proper preparation you usually can appeal.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
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Previous usage of this article
Two words "batchelor's degree."
As soon as an ad demands a degree it's a clear sign the people running the place do not know what they are doing. It means that all they know how to do is look at paperwork or credentials. Capability, ability and knowledge mean very little. All that matters is the paperwork.
I have something over 25 years of experience programming. I've been far too busy scratching out a living to be able to take several years and get a degree. And I've seen too many people with technical degrees who were not all that good. From what I have seen, all that a technical degree means is you have been able to sit in a class and take tests; they do not prove one is capable of doing the work involved as a programmer (or that you're even of mediocre ability). Not that I am denegrating education, what I object to is the lazy dependence on paperwork by incompetents who are inadequate to understand what is necessary to be able to do the work in question.
Places I have interviewed for that showed me they did know what they were doing never once specified level of education; instead they had people take a skills test. They had found that having someone write an answer to a skill question told a whole lot more about the ability of the person doing the work as would any paper background. And they weren't even that concerned that the person have a really correct answer as much as they were able to give a reasonable answer relative to the question being asked, e.g. to show how you would solve the problem, even if the solution was wrong as long as it was an intelligent attempt to solve the problem. But to do that requires your technical people who do interviews know what they are doing and how to ask the questions.
There is a very simple, much more inexpensive and reliable method of providing secret ballots with anonymous voting. It's called using a printed ballot. Most precincts have a few hundred people voting, it can't take that long to count X's on a page. And having been a polling officer at a local election - twice - I know of what I speak. And yeah, we use electronic machines at our polling place. I'm not sure if they are accurate or not, but we do.
The simplest answer would be for the machine to issue a slip with each ballot that is dropped into a hopper after the vote. The slip would only display the vote, not who did. And to make sure it was anonymous, the hopper could be rotated regularly to mix the slips.
In California, the State Police - which is a division of the Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that issues drivers' licenses - are called the "California Highway Patrol" because primarily most of their work deals with, well, patrolling the highways. But they also investigate crimes which occur in the state, usually in places where the local police or sheriff do not have the equipment or the personnel to investigate adequately. In Texas, the agency that mostly patrols the highways, investigates crime statewide (including operating the famous Texas Rangers), and issues driver's licenses is called the "Department of Public Safety". In Virginia and Maryland the agency that mostly patrols the highways and investigates crime statewide is called the State Police. The fact that the name of the state police in California isn't "State Police" does not change their function.