It's nonsense anyway. If these where common, rapists would know about them and remove them prior to rape.
If they where easily overlookable, and not noticeable to the woman, as is claimed on the site, then by far most victims would be lovers of the women in question, because women generally voluntarily have sex several orders of magnitude more often than they are raped.
So, in the end, the result would be some innocent men hurt. Some forgetful women sued. And no difference either way to rape-statistics.
That's even how it ended up in Snow Crash, no ? Y.T. doesn't think about the fact that she's wearing one when having sex with the wussname-guy that carries a nuke around and ends up having the Dentata inject some sorta tranquilizer into him.
That's because people are horribly confused about even blindingly obvious simple cases of law. They are likely confused by the fact that the FSF has a history of saying, "We offer you forgiveness if you release the code" and people somehow think that it says somewhere (it doesn't) that "if you break copyright you have to release the code".
Possibly the source of the confusion is that if you -did- release the code originally, you wouldn't have been in violation of the GPL, and thus not of copyright.
Indeed, unless you're made a spesific offer of forgiveness in exchange for releasing the code by the copyright-holder, releasing the code after being in violation doens't even HELP. You still broke copyright-law, you're still responsible for the damages arising therefrom.
The point is, there is nothing in copyright-law that will force anyone, under any circumstances, to release code.
If you do not comply with the GPL, it is revoked, which means you have no right to distribute the work. Which makes you guilty of violating copyright.
You would be punished like any other copyright-violator: By fines, by being forced to stop distribution, by paying compensation to the copyrigth-holders.
It may be that you are able to -avoid- these other punishments by reaching an *agreement* with the copyright-holder. Such an agreement is a private matter, it can contain backrubs, money, source-releases or the delivery of albino chimpanzes. But its up to you what agreement you enter into, if any.
The FSF has a history of saying: "We will forgive your past transgressions if you release the code", that is an OFFER by them, not a property of copyright-law or the GPL. You're free to take the offer, or decide -not- to take the offer.
Doesn't matter in the least. You don't need to agree to the licence-agreement to aquire a copy of the game.
If I sell you a shrinkwrapped book - no conditions attached - and then print, on the inside of the front cover, a "licence" prohibiting you from, say, reading the book aloud for your kids. Do you reckon you're bound by that "licence" ? At what point did you enter into the agreement ? Does any random text that you're exposed to subject you to the conditions spelled out -- even if you never AGREE to the text ? Can I hold a contract under your nose that says "by reading this, you agree to give me all your money", and thereafter actually collect from you ?
I wish people would quit the nonsense.
An -agreement- is only an -agreement- when both sides actually -agree- to enter into it.
Furthermore, in many jurisdictions contracts require an actual exchange. A one-sided "licence-agreement" that doesn't give you ANYTHING you didn't already have, but requires you to give up something (such as the rigth to study the work) is not valid in such jurisdictions.
Sure it does. Because it makes the pirate-copy not -equal- to the original, which is mostly the case, but instead -superior- to the original.
Also, whichever small pain exists in bypassing the DRM -- that pain is never experienced for casual downloaders, when all you do is download music that someone -else- has ripped (and perhaps spreading it on) you won't even -notice- if ripping it originally took 10 minutes and zero skill or 30 minutes and moderate skill.
I don't think dreams are any smaller or larger than they used to be, most likely you're just older than you used to be -- 15-year olds have "larger" dreams than 30 year olds, because they're less likely to reject dreams on the basis of unlikeliness and/or hard-to-reach goals.
How about "Provide the sum total of human knowledge for free to every human being, in every human language" for an ambitious dream ?
How about a network and a laptop for every child ?
How about reducing by half the proportion of humans suffering from hunger, by 2015 ?
How about reducing child-mortality by two thirds, in the same timeframe ? And reducing maternal mortality by 3/4.
It's not hard to find people dreaming large dreams if you give it a try. We're actually well underway on -achieving- many of the goals I mention above too -- despite them all being very ambitious.
They're in the position of monks making a living from hand-writing bibles, a year -after- the printing-press has been invented. Sure, neither ignoring the problem, nor trying to sue every user of a printing-press is likely to solve the problem.
There is however potential -- if they want to adapt. And there's signs they're -slowly- getting it. All major record-companies in Norway experimented with various DRMy non-cds, and had massive problems. They've stopped. All of them. Today, unlike 2 years ago, when you buy a CD you actually get a CD.
Online music is also changing to plain unencumbered formats, away from DRMy ones. The DRM -doesn't- stop piracy, and it prevents a lot of otherwise honest customers from shopping. Me for example, I'm happy paying say 2/3rds of the price of a physical-cd for a downloaded-cd (I reckon it's fair the reduced distribution-costs should benefit me to some degree too), but I absolutely refuse to pay even a -single- cent for DRM-encumbered music.
So, in short. The old-fashioned music-industry is doomed. They've got a choice though: do they want to figth the future tooth and nail until it arrives anyway and they're extinct. Or do they want to evolve and adapt and be relevant -- allthough in a different form than today -- also in the future.
Yes. So the question is: why go with the obsolete model ?
When the machines become more and more powerful, and ram grows in leaps and bounds, it makes less and less sence to go for a design with X levels where each of the "levels" use more or less all of the available ram.
It makes much more sense to go with a model where stuff is loaded by viscinity to player. So -everything- will be loaded for the nearest few meters, only the outline and base-color for stuff further away, this also allows adjusting by available RAM for PC-games. (if there's more ram, load more detail for a larger radius)
Such schemes can be improved by estimating player direction and speed and loading more data in the direction the player appears to be heading.
Yeah, sometime you'll miss out the player will for example make an unexpected high-speed turn, worst-case the player manages to get into an area where you ain't got the textures, before you can manage to load them, in which case the player is surrounded by solid-color buildings (or whatever objects) until the textures are loaded.
This ain't rocket-science, there's been games designed like this for atleast a decade.
I agree. Allthough I'd add that the clever professors nevertheless recognize that despite them having a higher general knowledge than any of the students, there'll nevertheless probably for any given topic be atleast one student who knows more than the professor.
That is only natural, because you can't be an absolute expert on -everything- afterall. Clever professors use this to everyones advantage, the less clever ones however, sometimes feel threathened by this.
Good professors are aware of what they -don't- know, and have no problem accepting input from any source.
Weak professors are afraid of displaying their incompetence, and so sometimes feel threathened if corrected by a student. In my university-career the good professors outnumbered the bad 4:1 though.
In the US, standing up for oneself is "unprofessional" and "acting like a burgerflipper", you see it in this thread.
Professionals, it appears, accept bullshit behaviour.
Here's an idea: You do good work. You stick to agreements. You show up at time. You deliver when stuff is due. But you -also- expect your boss to treat you professionally. This includes respecting borders. This includes -compensating- people apropriately for the work that they do. This includes actually having a brain, not -grudgingly- accepting, aslong as you have to, that dialing up an employee at 9pm on a friday evening is -intrusive- but actually agreeing and understanding it.
Here's another idea: A boss acting professionally like that may over time attract better employees, and keep more of them for longer. This benefit may outweigh the extra cost associated with not treating people like trash.
Here's a third idea: The current US politically *wanted* situation where the job-market is constantly balanced in favour of employers isn't a natural law. It's just so in the US. It shows in the assumptions. In actual fact, my boss needs me more than I need him. And we're both very aware of it. (as is anyone with above room-temperature IQ, unoccupied jobs outnumber unemployed people 5:1 in my business, and many of the unemployed are undesirable for some reason or other.
Here is another idea: Quite frankly, if a boss is unable or unwilling to accept that my time is VALUABLE to me, then quite frankly; I don't *WANT* that boss. So my loss where I ever to be let go because of insisting on this simple respect would be near zero. (being let go from a job you don't want isn't much of a loss)
Furthermore, the last mile is basically the entire cost.
Doubling the bandwith between say USA and Europe is an expensive undertaking. But the cost is completely dwarfed if you compare it to the cost of doubling the bandwith available to all subscriber IN the USA. (or IN Europe)
Same at other scales. Doubling bandwith for Bergen-Oslo-Trondheim would be an expensive undertaking, but -COMPLETELY- dwarfed by the cost of doubling the bandwith available to everyone -IN- Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim.
Or even smaller scale: What do you imagine cost more money -- rewiring two large office-buildings internally so that they have an order of magnitude more internal bandwith (let's say upgrading from 100Mbit to Gigabit ethernet, including needing new cabling) or, upgrading the physical link *between* the two buildings to be an order of magnitude faster.
Actually, if the physical link is fibre, which is likely, you're quite likely to be able to do the latter by simply swapping the equipment at both ends of the fibre. Quite possibly you could do it in an afternoon for $2000.
Rewiring two large office-buildings will cost just -sligthly- more than that, in both time and money.
Sure. And that tends to be the best deal anyway. In Norway, lots of phones are sold at a discount, with the catch being, they're locked-up so they only work with a single provider, and you have to contractually agree to use that provider for atleast a year.
The thing is though, the plan they offer you is so much worse than other plans available, even other plans from the same provider, that the "free phone" is anything but. It's not a good deal to get a "free phone" pay $20/month and $0.10/minute rather than buying a similar phone yourself for $300, pay $0/month and $0/minute for the first 150 minutes, $0.07/minute thereafter. To take a random (but real) example.
If you use 200 minutes/month (fairly average here) the first plan would, including phone, cost you $480/year.
The second plan would cost you $142/year if you switch phones every 3 years. Even if you switch phones every single year, that'll still be $342/year, so aprox $150/year cheaper than the "free" phone.
Once you include SMS, the picture is even more bleak for the "free" phone.
I think it's perfectly OK for the boss to call me on my cellphone. IF it really is very important. My boss agreed. So, we agreed upon it this way:
He has my number. He can call me whenever he wants. When he does, he pays for a minimum of 3 hours, at overtime rates, even if it's something as simple as for me to answer a question. The rationale ? If it isn't worth 3 hours of overtime pay to him, then it obviously isn't -important-, in that case he should just wait until I arrive at work and discuss it with me then.
Works fine. I guess your mileage will depend on your boss. Some bosses will surely be the opinion that just because they get to disturb you, shouldn't mean they need to actually -compensate- you for it. (and no: 15 minutes of extra pay is -NOT- adequate compensation for having -private- time invaded by work, even if the intrusion lasts only 15 minutes)
"funding" ? I don't know what you read, but it certainly wasn't what I wrote.
I'll rephrase it for you.
As a business, you want to be able to buy all the stuff you need from multiple sources. This helps you get a better price, better performance, better quality trough a mechanism known as "competition".
If you are dependent on a widget from a single vendor then, for this widget, there is zero competition.
Over time, the lack of competition will tend to rise prices, and the quality will suffer.
Thus, you want to -avoid- the latter kind of situation in favor of the first, whenever you have the chance. This has very little to do with funding. It doesn't cost more to buy nuts and bolts with -standard- threading rather than single-vendor proprietary ones. Indeed outside of a few very specialised areas, nobody would even consider doing anything else.
If doesn't cost more to install Apache -- where any company with the right skills can offer any level of support you care to pay for, over IIS where a -SINGLE- company gets to dictate everything from support-options over future features to bugfix-turnaround.
Some companies prefer keeping the chains, because they're so used to them they can hardly feel the restraints anymore. That won't save them from being screwed by the company owning the chains though, nor from being underbid by more efficient companies that are free of artificial restraints.
It's not hard to understand. And it's not spesific to operating-systems.
Sometimes a business ties itself so closely to the product of a certain other company that it literally cannot do its business without them.
This is however, regardless of field, a -VERY- bad idea. It means that that company, in reality, own your business. They can do anything they want, and you have no choice but to bend over and take it. That isn't a situation you deliberatedly put yourself into unless you're an idiot.
Sometimes companies ended up in such a situation trough accident, in that case, the only sensible thing to do is to work to extract oneself from the dependency. Sometimes that ain't easy, and you have to settle for staying dependant short-term. Even then, your long-time goal should be to break free. Meanwhile you have to hope that your master doesn't decide to do anything -too- abusive before you can manage to break free.
USA ain't all capitalist, not even close. Look at the extensions to patents and copyright over the last few years for an example.
If there's anything anti-capitalist and anti-free-market then it is government-granted monopolies.
USA is, however, very strongly capitalist in *words*. In the USA *calling* something "socialist" is almost on par with calling it "communist" or "fascist".
This also explains why Lwn, which at Johns last status-update had like 90% of its income directly from subscribers and 10% from other sources (including advertising) is as stellar as it is.
Apart from the fact that the staff is on the level, it can't hurt that the subscribers are the actual customers, the ones whose opinion matters. There's something to be said for that.
If Advertisers and Readers have different interests on Lwn -- the advertisers yield. Which is very different from most sites these days.
Extrapolating 11 years from 3-4 years of data is a risky undertaking though, and I notice that if you used your entire dataset as a baseline, then the conclusion doesn't hold.
I still think that for many uses, 11 years is -overestimating- the survival of hard-discs. The reason is that for many uses, frankly, there's a "good enough" level, and improvements above and beyond that have little practical value.
Today flashs costs like $25/GB at the sweet-spot (give or take), you estimate a doubling every year of performance/price. Which means that in 4-5 years you'll be at less than $1/GB. Which mean that practically all people can carry their entire music-collection around for less than $100 in storage. Sure, you could carry 30 times your entire music-collection around for $100 in mechanical storage, but the practical advantage is nil. Actually it's negative, because physical-size, battery-drain and shock-resistance is likely to outweigh a factor of 30 storage.
Laptops are pretty much the same. Give me a choice between equally priced laptops one with 100GB of flash-storage and the other with 1TB of hard-disc storage, and frankly, I'd go for the flash-based one.
Witness how despite stationary PCs are outsold 4:1 by laptops, despite the fact that they offer more bang-for-the-buck. The same thing will happen to mechanical hard-discs. They'll survive for a while in specialised apps, but even there they don't need price/storage parity to win. Less need of cooling. Less powerconsumption. Less physical size matters in big-ass storage-servers too afterall.
I give hard-discs 5 years at home. 7-8 years in serverspace.
It depends, doesn't it always ? A fix can be urgent, but still utterly trivial to implement. Say a spelling mistake in a highly visible spot. If it's really a question of changing a single character in a string and rebuilding, I don't see why 48 hours is unrealistic at all.
If the fix is substantial, so it really requires new code, plus testing, quality-assurance etc, then 48 hours is unrealistic.
Bandwith is becoming less of an issue, though installation-costs still are. The reason is that a single single-mode fibre can carry literally hundreds of Gbps the current state of the art is around 40 Gbps for a single wavelength, and then there's wavelength-multiplexing.
In short, a single fibre will provide all the bandwith many datacentres need. Offcourse they'll want 3 independent ones for redundancy, but that's a different issue.
In short, installing a single low-latency 1megabit link somewhere far from civilization probably costs 90% of the cost of installing 100Gbps to the same location.
It's hard to predict the future, particularily on a longer timescale. On a short timescale, extending current trends will likely be correct more often than wrong. (allthough it'll certainly be wrong too in some cases)
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It's nonsense anyway. If these where common, rapists would know about them and remove them prior to rape.
If they where easily overlookable, and not noticeable to the woman, as is claimed on the site, then by far most victims would be lovers of the women in question, because women generally voluntarily have sex several orders of magnitude more often than they are raped.
So, in the end, the result would be some innocent men hurt. Some forgetful women sued. And no difference either way to rape-statistics.
That's even how it ended up in Snow Crash, no ? Y.T. doesn't think about the fact that she's wearing one when having sex with the wussname-guy that carries a nuke around and ends up having the Dentata inject some sorta tranquilizer into him.
That's because people are horribly confused about even blindingly obvious simple cases of law. They are likely confused by the fact that the FSF has a history of saying, "We offer you forgiveness if you release the code" and people somehow think that it says somewhere (it doesn't) that "if you break copyright you have to release the code".
Possibly the source of the confusion is that if you -did- release the code originally, you wouldn't have been in violation of the GPL, and thus not of copyright.
ReleaseCode, no_violation = true
violation, mustReleaseCode = false
Indeed, unless you're made a spesific offer of forgiveness in exchange for releasing the code by the copyright-holder, releasing the code after being in violation doens't even HELP. You still broke copyright-law, you're still responsible for the damages arising therefrom.
The point is, there is nothing in copyright-law that will force anyone, under any circumstances, to release code.
If you do not comply with the GPL, it is revoked, which means you have no right to distribute the work. Which makes you guilty of violating copyright.
You would be punished like any other copyright-violator: By fines, by being forced to stop distribution, by paying compensation to the copyrigth-holders.
It may be that you are able to -avoid- these other punishments by reaching an *agreement* with the copyright-holder. Such an agreement is a private matter, it can contain backrubs, money, source-releases or the delivery of albino chimpanzes. But its up to you what agreement you enter into, if any.
The FSF has a history of saying: "We will forgive your past transgressions if you release the code", that is an OFFER by them, not a property of copyright-law or the GPL. You're free to take the offer, or decide -not- to take the offer.
Doesn't matter in the least. You don't need to agree to the licence-agreement to aquire a copy of the game.
If I sell you a shrinkwrapped book - no conditions attached - and then print, on the inside of the front cover, a "licence" prohibiting you from, say, reading the book aloud for your kids. Do you reckon you're bound by that "licence" ? At what point did you enter into the agreement ? Does any random text that you're exposed to subject you to the conditions spelled out -- even if you never AGREE to the text ? Can I hold a contract under your nose that says "by reading this, you agree to give me all your money", and thereafter actually collect from you ?
I wish people would quit the nonsense.
An -agreement- is only an -agreement- when both sides actually -agree- to enter into it.
Furthermore, in many jurisdictions contracts require an actual exchange. A one-sided "licence-agreement" that doesn't give you ANYTHING you didn't already have, but requires you to give up something (such as the rigth to study the work) is not valid in such jurisdictions.
Sure it does. Because it makes the pirate-copy not -equal- to the original, which is mostly the case, but instead -superior- to the original.
Also, whichever small pain exists in bypassing the DRM -- that pain is never experienced for casual downloaders, when all you do is download music that someone -else- has ripped (and perhaps spreading it on) you won't even -notice- if ripping it originally took 10 minutes and zero skill or 30 minutes and moderate skill.
I don't think dreams are any smaller or larger than they used to be, most likely you're just older than you used to be -- 15-year olds have "larger" dreams than 30 year olds, because they're less likely to reject dreams on the basis of unlikeliness and/or hard-to-reach goals.
How about "Provide the sum total of human knowledge for free to every human being, in every human language" for an ambitious dream ?
How about a network and a laptop for every child ?
How about reducing by half the proportion of humans suffering from hunger, by 2015 ?
How about reducing child-mortality by two thirds, in the same timeframe ? And reducing maternal mortality by 3/4.
It's not hard to find people dreaming large dreams if you give it a try. We're actually well underway on -achieving- many of the goals I mention above too -- despite them all being very ambitious.
They're in the position of monks making a living from hand-writing bibles, a year -after- the printing-press has been invented. Sure, neither ignoring the problem, nor trying to sue every user of a printing-press is likely to solve the problem.
There is however potential -- if they want to adapt. And there's signs they're -slowly- getting it. All major record-companies in Norway experimented with various DRMy non-cds, and had massive problems. They've stopped. All of them. Today, unlike 2 years ago, when you buy a CD you actually get a CD.
Online music is also changing to plain unencumbered formats, away from DRMy ones. The DRM -doesn't- stop piracy, and it prevents a lot of otherwise honest customers from shopping. Me for example, I'm happy paying say 2/3rds of the price of a physical-cd for a downloaded-cd (I reckon it's fair the reduced distribution-costs should benefit me to some degree too), but I absolutely refuse to pay even a -single- cent for DRM-encumbered music.
So, in short. The old-fashioned music-industry is doomed. They've got a choice though: do they want to figth the future tooth and nail until it arrives anyway and they're extinct. Or do they want to evolve and adapt and be relevant -- allthough in a different form than today -- also in the future.
Yes. So the question is: why go with the obsolete model ?
When the machines become more and more powerful, and ram grows in leaps and bounds, it makes less and less sence to go for a design with X levels where each of the "levels" use more or less all of the available ram.
It makes much more sense to go with a model where stuff is loaded by viscinity to player. So -everything- will be loaded for the nearest few meters, only the outline and base-color for stuff further away, this also allows adjusting by available RAM for PC-games. (if there's more ram, load more detail for a larger radius)
Such schemes can be improved by estimating player direction and speed and loading more data in the direction the player appears to be heading.
Yeah, sometime you'll miss out the player will for example make an unexpected high-speed turn, worst-case the player manages to get into an area where you ain't got the textures, before you can manage to load them, in which case the player is surrounded by solid-color buildings (or whatever objects) until the textures are loaded.
This ain't rocket-science, there's been games designed like this for atleast a decade.
I agree. Allthough I'd add that the clever professors nevertheless recognize that despite them having a higher general knowledge than any of the students, there'll nevertheless probably for any given topic be atleast one student who knows more than the professor.
That is only natural, because you can't be an absolute expert on -everything- afterall. Clever professors use this to everyones advantage, the less clever ones however, sometimes feel threathened by this.
Good professors are aware of what they -don't- know, and have no problem accepting input from any source.
Weak professors are afraid of displaying their incompetence, and so sometimes feel threathened if corrected by a student. In my university-career the good professors outnumbered the bad 4:1 though.
In the US, standing up for oneself is "unprofessional" and "acting like a burgerflipper", you see it in this thread.
Professionals, it appears, accept bullshit behaviour.
Here's an idea: You do good work. You stick to agreements. You show up at time. You deliver when stuff is due. But you -also- expect your boss to treat you professionally. This includes respecting borders. This includes -compensating- people apropriately for the work that they do. This includes actually having a brain, not -grudgingly- accepting, aslong as you have to, that dialing up an employee at 9pm on a friday evening is -intrusive- but actually agreeing and understanding it.
Here's another idea: A boss acting professionally like that may over time attract better employees, and keep more of them for longer. This benefit may outweigh the extra cost associated with not treating people like trash.
Here's a third idea: The current US politically *wanted* situation where the job-market is constantly balanced in favour of employers isn't a natural law. It's just so in the US. It shows in the assumptions. In actual fact, my boss needs me more than I need him. And we're both very aware of it. (as is anyone with above room-temperature IQ, unoccupied jobs outnumber unemployed people 5:1 in my business, and many of the unemployed are undesirable for some reason or other.
Here is another idea: Quite frankly, if a boss is unable or unwilling to accept that my time is VALUABLE to me, then quite frankly; I don't *WANT* that boss. So my loss where I ever to be let go because of insisting on this simple respect would be near zero. (being let go from a job you don't want isn't much of a loss)
It's interesting how you're so cock-sure that you can diagnose a situation that you know nothing about whatsoever.
It depends. Certainly, a large part of the industry has yet to learn this lesson. They will though, either the soft way or the hard way.
Furthermore, the last mile is basically the entire cost.
Doubling the bandwith between say USA and Europe is an expensive undertaking. But the cost is completely dwarfed if you compare it to the cost of doubling the bandwith available to all subscriber IN the USA. (or IN Europe)
Same at other scales. Doubling bandwith for Bergen-Oslo-Trondheim would be an expensive undertaking, but -COMPLETELY- dwarfed by the cost of doubling the bandwith available to everyone -IN- Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim.
Or even smaller scale: What do you imagine cost more money -- rewiring two large office-buildings internally so that they have an order of magnitude more internal bandwith (let's say upgrading from 100Mbit to Gigabit ethernet, including needing new cabling) or, upgrading the physical link *between* the two buildings to be an order of magnitude faster.
Actually, if the physical link is fibre, which is likely, you're quite likely to be able to do the latter by simply swapping the equipment at both ends of the fibre. Quite possibly you could do it in an afternoon for $2000.
Rewiring two large office-buildings will cost just -sligthly- more than that, in both time and money.
In short: it's all about the last mile.
Sure. And that tends to be the best deal anyway. In Norway, lots of phones are sold at a discount, with the catch being, they're locked-up so they only work with a single provider, and you have to contractually agree to use that provider for atleast a year.
The thing is though, the plan they offer you is so much worse than other plans available, even other plans from the same provider, that the "free phone" is anything but. It's not a good deal to get a "free phone" pay $20/month and $0.10/minute rather than buying a similar phone yourself for $300, pay $0/month and $0/minute for the first 150 minutes, $0.07/minute thereafter. To take a random (but real) example.
If you use 200 minutes/month (fairly average here) the first plan would, including phone, cost you $480/year.
The second plan would cost you $142/year if you switch phones every 3 years. Even if you switch phones every single year, that'll still be $342/year, so aprox $150/year cheaper than the "free" phone.
Once you include SMS, the picture is even more bleak for the "free" phone.
I think it's perfectly OK for the boss to call me on my cellphone. IF it really is very important. My boss agreed. So, we agreed upon it this way:
He has my number. He can call me whenever he wants. When he does, he pays for a minimum of 3 hours, at overtime rates, even if it's something as simple as for me to answer a question. The rationale ? If it isn't worth 3 hours of overtime pay to him, then it obviously isn't -important-, in that case he should just wait until I arrive at work and discuss it with me then.
Works fine. I guess your mileage will depend on your boss. Some bosses will surely be the opinion that just because they get to disturb you, shouldn't mean they need to actually -compensate- you for it. (and no: 15 minutes of extra pay is -NOT- adequate compensation for having -private- time invaded by work, even if the intrusion lasts only 15 minutes)
Did anyone suggest that arguing-techniques have any relation to political orientation whatsoever ? I dunno what, precisely, you're answering....
"funding" ? I don't know what you read, but it certainly wasn't what I wrote.
I'll rephrase it for you.
As a business, you want to be able to buy all the stuff you need from multiple sources. This helps you get a better price, better performance, better quality trough a mechanism known as "competition".
If you are dependent on a widget from a single vendor then, for this widget, there is zero competition.
Over time, the lack of competition will tend to rise prices, and the quality will suffer.
Thus, you want to -avoid- the latter kind of situation in favor of the first, whenever you have the chance. This has very little to do with funding. It doesn't cost more to buy nuts and bolts with -standard- threading rather than single-vendor proprietary ones. Indeed outside of a few very specialised areas, nobody would even consider doing anything else.
If doesn't cost more to install Apache -- where any company with the right skills can offer any level of support you care to pay for, over IIS where a -SINGLE- company gets to dictate everything from support-options over future features to bugfix-turnaround.
Some companies prefer keeping the chains, because they're so used to them they can hardly feel the restraints anymore. That won't save them from being screwed by the company owning the chains though, nor from being underbid by more efficient companies that are free of artificial restraints.
It's not hard to understand. And it's not spesific to operating-systems.
Sometimes a business ties itself so closely to the product of a certain other company that it literally cannot do its business without them.
This is however, regardless of field, a -VERY- bad idea. It means that that company, in reality, own your business. They can do anything they want, and you have no choice but to bend over and take it. That isn't a situation you deliberatedly put yourself into unless you're an idiot.
Sometimes companies ended up in such a situation trough accident, in that case, the only sensible thing to do is to work to extract oneself from the dependency. Sometimes that ain't easy, and you have to settle for staying dependant short-term. Even then, your long-time goal should be to break free. Meanwhile you have to hope that your master doesn't decide to do anything -too- abusive before you can manage to break free.
It's a transparent dishonest and insulting debating-technique.
"Offcourse you say that, you're a child. All children believe that. Once you grow up and get a little wiser, you will stop believing that."
This is attacking the messenger rather than the message.
It's also insulting. It states flat-out that "Anyone who disagrees with me, has no brain."
USA ain't all capitalist, not even close. Look at the extensions to patents and copyright over the last few years for an example.
If there's anything anti-capitalist and anti-free-market then it is government-granted monopolies.
USA is, however, very strongly capitalist in *words*. In the USA *calling* something "socialist" is almost on par with calling it "communist" or "fascist".
Got that part a long time ago.
This also explains why Lwn, which at Johns last status-update had like 90% of its income directly from subscribers and 10% from other sources (including advertising) is as stellar as it is.
Apart from the fact that the staff is on the level, it can't hurt that the subscribers are the actual customers, the ones whose opinion matters. There's something to be said for that.
If Advertisers and Readers have different interests on Lwn -- the advertisers yield. Which is very different from most sites these days.
Extrapolating 11 years from 3-4 years of data is a risky undertaking though, and I notice that if you used your entire dataset as a baseline, then the conclusion doesn't hold.
I still think that for many uses, 11 years is -overestimating- the survival of hard-discs. The reason is that for many uses, frankly, there's a "good enough" level, and improvements above and beyond that have little practical value.
Today flashs costs like $25/GB at the sweet-spot (give or take), you estimate a doubling every year of performance/price. Which means that in 4-5 years you'll be at less than $1/GB. Which mean that practically all people can carry their entire music-collection around for less than $100 in storage. Sure, you could carry 30 times your entire music-collection around for $100 in mechanical storage, but the practical advantage is nil. Actually it's negative, because physical-size, battery-drain and shock-resistance is likely to outweigh a factor of 30 storage.
Laptops are pretty much the same. Give me a choice between equally priced laptops one with 100GB of flash-storage and the other with 1TB of hard-disc storage, and frankly, I'd go for the flash-based one.
Witness how despite stationary PCs are outsold 4:1 by laptops, despite the fact that they offer more bang-for-the-buck. The same thing will happen to mechanical hard-discs. They'll survive for a while in specialised apps, but even there they don't need price/storage parity to win. Less need of cooling. Less powerconsumption. Less physical size matters in big-ass storage-servers too afterall.
I give hard-discs 5 years at home. 7-8 years in serverspace.
It depends, doesn't it always ? A fix can be urgent, but still utterly trivial to implement. Say a spelling mistake in a highly visible spot. If it's really a question of changing a single character in a string and rebuilding, I don't see why 48 hours is unrealistic at all.
If the fix is substantial, so it really requires new code, plus testing, quality-assurance etc, then 48 hours is unrealistic.
Bandwith is becoming less of an issue, though installation-costs still are. The reason is that a single single-mode fibre can carry literally hundreds of Gbps the current state of the art is around 40 Gbps for a single wavelength, and then there's wavelength-multiplexing.
In short, a single fibre will provide all the bandwith many datacentres need. Offcourse they'll want 3 independent ones for redundancy, but that's a different issue.
In short, installing a single low-latency 1megabit link somewhere far from civilization probably costs 90% of the cost of installing 100Gbps to the same location.
It's hard to predict the future, particularily on a longer timescale. On a short timescale, extending current trends will likely be correct more often than wrong. (allthough it'll certainly be wrong too in some cases)