You would have a hard time describing how to do simple things like reconciling your checkbook using only the concepts behind roman numerals.
Why, is II + II = IV different in roman numerals? Yes, the calculation would get seriously much more annoying, but the concepts should be just as easy or hard to explain.
Long story short, would you be equally concerned if Apple chose to discontinue their business relationship for any other reason? Apple will still need the products so those jobs will reappear other places that follow the rules. The only ones that really will be out of a job are those who are so young they shouldn't be working in the first place.
Yes, besides who says business users aren't mobile or home users don't need the traditional desktop. I know many "on the go" users in sales, management etc. who might like a touch/laptop combo, Microsoft just needs to clue in to the fact that people what different things on the go and docked into/stationary at the office.
The crazy thing is who easily that passes, with that logic start thinking about how much of your "belongings" really aren't. You don't own your car, TV, stove, refrigerator, freezer, dish washer, washing machine and so on as I can guarantee they have micro-controllers with copyrighted software on them. The US has become the world leaders in hollowing out private ownership, not because it's really owned by the state like in communism but because it's really owned by the corporations, you just have a limited use license. Don't you dare tamper with that washing machine or the DMCA will come get you.
The downgrade rights are only valid for as long as Win7 is still being sold, which is "up to" 2 years after the release of Win8 so October next year at the latest and after that you need volume licenses.
Sorry, but this smells badly of strategic vision and the others are being asked "How?" not "To do, or not to do?"
Engineering: "Can we make touch-enabled laptops?" "Yes, but..." "Just figure out how." Design: "Can we put a touch-friendly UI design on Windows?" "Yes, but..." "Just figure out how." Marketing: "Can we market hybrids and detachables?" "Yes, but..." "Just figure out how."
And as usual when it sells like crap, blame the implementation. I think Microsoft has it backwards, by forcing everyone to use a tablet interface people will go "Well, if my laptop is going to act like a tablet, why don't I use a real tablet?" rather than "Ooh, my laptop looks like a tablet now so I don't need to get a tablet." but again, these are typical executive decision made up on high.
Henry Ford famously did the same thing with his factory (the largest in the world at the time). He dramatically cut workers hours at the same time as handing out massive pay increases, and then made a big noise about it in the newspapers. Workers flocked to the Ford factory looking for a job, (somewhat counter-intuitively) productivity also went through the roof. A direct result of Ford's policy was that it pushed the US into a 40hr week much faster than the unions could have done so alone, it was a glaring example to all that such a move would not destroy the economy..
Well I'd argue much of the reason they saw so much productivity increase is that he got the cream of the crop. When everybody else is scraping the bottom of the barrel, do the opposite. For a good but not excessive pay increase he got lots of skill and talent, highly motivated and loyal workers. It doesn't really follow that the same would happen if everyone got shorter hours and pay increases. Besides he realized the unique situation that workers would often save up this money to buy a Ford, essentially getting up his production volume, market share and putting the profit back in his own pocket. I say unique because it's both a huge capital expense - it's not the same if you work at the toothbrush factory and buy the "right" brand of toothbrush - and it's visible to everyone if you drive around town or to the Ford factory with any other brand.
Well if you're rendering some cutscenes for a game and want a codec that is free to use and better than MPEG1 - MPEG2 and all newer ones are still patented - then WebM might fit the bill. I'll agree it doesn't take much to win that category though.
If you don't want to take cash in store, don't cry when a card company stops payments and your cash flow freezes up. Litigate for the money? After your business has collapsed? Cashless will never happen, although it's many governments wet dream as it will be able to track everything you spend your money on, and that's what they want.
Here in Norway I'd say that if you won't accept cards you're dead as a business because so many use it for everything and simply won't have cash. Between electronic transfers, debit and credit cards they estimate 94% of all money transactions now go cashless. Personally I know the only time I tend to use cash is when I'm out drinking as you get rather sloppy with both card and PIN when you get drunk and even that's less of a hard rule these days if I'm just having a few beers.
The main reason it's not 100% has everything to with reliability and pretty much nothing to do with what VISA and MasterCard and American Express and Paypal might or might not do, if the government really wanted to make "cashless cash" they'd make their own payment card that'd be a forced means of payment and be an issuer of last resort. Something similar actually already exists, our version of food coupons is actually an electronic payment card that'll only accept charges from a subset of goods at participating grocery stores - you can't buy beer or use them in any other shop.
The problem is if the system is down or it's a private transaction and nobody has a card reader, then nothing will work no matter what card you have. Cash is the backup to the electronic system when that system doesn't work, any of it.
Financially the median person is better off becoming a truck driver at 19 than pursuing a law degree (and racking up the associated debt), but being a trucker is really socially limiting.
Long-haul trucking is socially limiting no matter the status because you spend so much time on the road sleeping in a cot at whatever truck stop was nearby when you had to take your mandatory resting period. I have a relative that lives that life and honestly you could not pay me enough to do it. I'd much rather be a night watchman working by night, sleeping by day, having evenings off as normal people than a trucker. The other thing I'd never consider is a restaurant/bar job, one of the 24x7 jobs that have shifts I could possibly deal with but that your regular work hours are evenings and weekends? No way. Fortunately there seems to be plenty people willing to do it for far less than I would need.
Then whose patents have now become gold mines and/or roadblocks?
The H.264 patent pool has 30 licencors and the list of patents is 59 pages long, so the short answer is: Most of the industry. Apart from Google with WebM and previously Microsoft with VC-1, there is surprising unity. My predictions are as follows: HEVC is as dominant in hardware as H.264, there will be an open source encoder like xvid/x264 and those who can't or won't use that will use WebM despite the somewhat larger size because Google will probably fight to back it as a free codec. Anything else will be never go anywhere outside geek circles like Vorbis or Theora.
Why bother re-encoding a complete music library from mp3 even if vorbis/aac is clearly the superior codec?
You're asking the wrong question, the right question is how many have FLAC copies of all their MP3s? Because I hope you weren't seriously suggesting they should re-encode from the MP3 files. I think you will find that many people have never even heard of FLAC and even if they did few tools have made it easy to create dual FLAC/MP3 rips of a CD, least not any the average person would have heard about. Assuming he didn't just download those MP3s in the first place and isn't about to chase down different copies for a microscopic space savings - maybe percentage-wise it's great but even thousands of songs will fit in a tiny corner of a modern HDD.
Video on the other hand is still huge. 60 BluRays to a 3TB HDD is not much, 4K is coming and for YouTube, Netflix etc. bandwidth costs are still a huge cost - far more than say Spotify. If people are maxing their cap on the Internet connection it's likely to be because of a lot of streaming video. Of course there's a huge broadband roll-out to give people more bandwidth as well, but this is not an either-or situation. For broadcasters as well this is a huge upgrade, more compression means being able to send more TV channels in a limited frequency band. As far as I know, all US channels still broadcast in MPEG2 and H.264 wasn't enough to make them change, maybe HEVC will be? At least any country looking for a new system would seriously consider it.
This is the Slashdot QC and calibration department. Your yearly sarcasm and humor detector calibrations are due. Please leave the detectors in the tray by the door at the end of your shift.
My advice would be to pursue the degree while working full-time, either as an intern or other full-time position. The degree, sadly, will be more valuable than the experience.
It's not an either-or, companies want people with a degree and real world experience so if you got one, work on the other. It can be really tough to land a good first/early job no matter how good your degree is if they got other applications also with good degrees and a bit more experience and the less prestigious jobs will often see that you're looking to get a bit of experience and leave for greener pastures. I have a Master's degree and I felt in years of education/experience that 5/0 and 5/1 was tough, but then I worked a few years and the coin totally flipped and at 5/5 or 5/10 I'm very attractive on the work market. I guess it also depends on your resume, if you've made a career without a degree it looks good but if you just look employed without resume-visible advancement then it looks like your skills and ambitions have peaked, regardless of what reality is.
Which may be the biggest fuckup of all. Destiny is just another way of saying absence of choice. Everything is predestined. They are all just puppets of destiny. Kirk WILL be captain of the Enterprise whether he likes it or not. Future is fucking set in stone! That is, disregarding all the little differences caused by FUCKING TIME TRAVEL!
Of all the crappy models of time travel, it's actually not the worst one because otherwise the butterfly effect would make any form of restoring the time line impossible. Time is already laid out as a rubber band and you can pinch it but the natural reaction is to snap back but it might be twisted in the process. Which can also sort of explain why time travel doesn't just rip apart everything as you go infinitely long back and change infinitely much, because doing so would be too hard. You have free will to avoid your destiny - just blow your head off like in Devil's Advocate - but it will just stretch the rubber band some more. And perhaps it's not quite as fixed, with enough changes time can take a new path permanently, like a river finding a new path. The Star Trek reboot is more an implementation issue than a basic plot issue.
Companies with a lot of solid technology that aren't particularly trendy taking a big slump in the market and thus can be had for a fairly cheap? Sure. The value at Wall Street is pretty well measuring customer appeal, but China isn't interested in buying customers they're interested in buying technology which makes their valuation quite different.
AMD also isn't Asia focused for CPUs. They have them manufactured at Global Foundries which has a fab in the US, Germany, and Singapore. Discrete GPUs are all fabbed in Asia these days, specifically in Taiwan by TSMC. Now that may change as TSMC has been badly fucking up they may switch to someone else but for now, all TSMC.
AMD has been paying big bucks to get out of wafer agreements with GloFo, they canceled Krishna and Wichita and started over at TSMC so it's both GPUs and APUs. If TSMC run into trouble the two biggest winners will be Intel and Samsung that have foundries of their own because there's really no good replacement right now.
People like you don't seem to get it. Symbian HAS failed. If it hadn't it would be here today.
That's like saying a man's heart failed - because it had a knife stabbed through it. It's dead but not by natural causes and the CEO holding the knife is Elop.
This is the part where you should have read what you've written, considered the meaning, and then terminated your entire comment. You have successfully included the very reason why OSS is superior to closed-source, and then gone on to come to precisely the wrong conclusion based on the available facts.
Oh please, like constant fracturing and duplication of effort is always a benefit. Branching is one thing but full blown forks start with one issue and the rest of the code start drifting apart too leading to situations where you can have feature X in fork A and feature Y in fork B but not both and it has no connection to issue Z that caused the fork. Or your fork doesn't have the bugfix that other fork fixed and it doesn't even apply cleanly if you can cherry-pick it in git. Most forks don't fail because their solution shows itself to be so superior or inferior, but by who can attract the other developers and keep up the maintenance of everything else. It is far more a game of attrition than most would admit.
Analogy time, say you're 10 people who want to move a big rock. In the cathedral version, the leader supplies a rope and tell everyone to pull in the same direction and the rock moves. In the bazaar version they could all work out their differences and submit to a benevolent dictator in the same way, but 99% of the time they don't so they each fork off and try their own one and two-men solution except for the people who people who decided it wasn't their itch to scratch so they went home and those who didn't want to move the stone because they now assumed the stone was there and so absolutely nothing happens. Or for that matter, OSS developers are like herding cats so what would you rather have, a dog sleigh or a cat sleigh? Of course the downside of the cathedral model is that one person can lead everyone into the abyss.
Like most other nukes, it's a deterrent. If the US should decide to invade/liberate North Korea like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea would like the US to know they have nukes and are bat shit crazy enough to use them. Threatening to launch a nuclear missile is a little more immediate than threatening to smuggle it into the US covertly, which would also give away the "covert" part. They want to bluster about their ability to nuke San Francisco, if they actually did it I wouldn't expect two bricks to be standing in Pyongyang an hour later. The only reason they'd use it is because they're about to get deposed anyway.
Well, Finland is only 5.4 million people so if they can hit the 50k mark it already means 1% of the population cares. That said it looks like the site has just recently opened and the highest vote is slightly over 1k now, so a long way to go.
True, you keep a slither of positive control in that you can still release it under the licenses you want, but you can't stop your code being used anywhere under any circumstances in any form since the license grant is pretty much limitless. Not exclusively so, but limitless all the same. I'll give you one Hermes Conrad point for being technically correct, though.
Ironically, a lot of the manufacturing jobs of "today" that I've been exposed to are very sophisticated, requiring high level computer skills in addition to a lot of knowledge on operating complex machinery as well as knowledge about what the machinery does (ie, welding, or metallurgy, etc).
Production is one thing, where jobs have really been lost is in maintenance and repair. When there's a million units a day shipping off an assembly line in China, it doesn't pay off to have the skills, parts and equipment or use the time to repair one and one unit that's usually failed in its own unique way. All the competence goes into the production, the rest is just distribution and retail. The need for skilled labor "in the field" has gone dramatically down, or the level of skill has just skyrocketed. I remember my mom used to have a Volkswagen Beetle - this was in the 80s, the car was probably from the 70s and the design even older - and I can understand how you could be a home mechanic on it. Today I wouldn't touch much of any new car except for designated service points like oil and windshield wiper fluid, the bar to entry is just too high.
I don't know any farmer who'd like to go back to hand and horse power, as long as the automation is considered an extension of yourself that means you can do things bigger or better or faster I think people are mostly happy with it. The trouble first sets in when automation starts making people redundant to the whole process and you're now really in a support role to the machines and with each generation of advances they need you less. Actually, this demotivator pretty much says it all. Imagine for example the talk of the automated car, it'd wipe out most of the transport sector. They can't all go flip burgers at McDonald's, besides how long until the cash register is directly tied to a burger-flipping robot with a bar code on the receipt to pick it up when it's done with zero human interaction? We've only seen the beginning.
Ummm... this isn't correct. KDE developers never had a problem with the licensing of any of Qt classes.
Not the Qt licensing per se, but a lot of KDE developers have problems with the Qt contribution agreement. In order to support Qt Commercial etc. you essentially have to sign away all rights to the code, here's perhaps the most relevant part:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Licensor hereby grants, in exchange for good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged, to Digia a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to reproduce, adapt, translate, modify, and prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of Digiaâ(TM)s choosing including any Open Source Software license.
As a result, a lot of code in the KDE libraries that could ideally could have been enhancements to Qt instead (both being LGPL) have remained outside Qt and will most likely remain so. Reducing the duplication has been a stated goal for ages but in reality not much happens since any non-trivial piece of code most likely has some contributor who won't sign.
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You would have a hard time describing how to do simple things like reconciling your checkbook using only the concepts behind roman numerals.
Why, is II + II = IV different in roman numerals? Yes, the calculation would get seriously much more annoying, but the concepts should be just as easy or hard to explain.
Long story short, would you be equally concerned if Apple chose to discontinue their business relationship for any other reason? Apple will still need the products so those jobs will reappear other places that follow the rules. The only ones that really will be out of a job are those who are so young they shouldn't be working in the first place.
Yes, besides who says business users aren't mobile or home users don't need the traditional desktop. I know many "on the go" users in sales, management etc. who might like a touch/laptop combo, Microsoft just needs to clue in to the fact that people what different things on the go and docked into/stationary at the office.
The crazy thing is who easily that passes, with that logic start thinking about how much of your "belongings" really aren't. You don't own your car, TV, stove, refrigerator, freezer, dish washer, washing machine and so on as I can guarantee they have micro-controllers with copyrighted software on them. The US has become the world leaders in hollowing out private ownership, not because it's really owned by the state like in communism but because it's really owned by the corporations, you just have a limited use license. Don't you dare tamper with that washing machine or the DMCA will come get you.
The downgrade rights are only valid for as long as Win7 is still being sold, which is "up to" 2 years after the release of Win8 so October next year at the latest and after that you need volume licenses.
Sorry, but this smells badly of strategic vision and the others are being asked "How?" not "To do, or not to do?"
Engineering: "Can we make touch-enabled laptops?" "Yes, but..." "Just figure out how."
Design: "Can we put a touch-friendly UI design on Windows?" "Yes, but..." "Just figure out how."
Marketing: "Can we market hybrids and detachables?" "Yes, but..." "Just figure out how."
And as usual when it sells like crap, blame the implementation. I think Microsoft has it backwards, by forcing everyone to use a tablet interface people will go "Well, if my laptop is going to act like a tablet, why don't I use a real tablet?" rather than "Ooh, my laptop looks like a tablet now so I don't need to get a tablet." but again, these are typical executive decision made up on high.
Henry Ford famously did the same thing with his factory (the largest in the world at the time). He dramatically cut workers hours at the same time as handing out massive pay increases, and then made a big noise about it in the newspapers. Workers flocked to the Ford factory looking for a job, (somewhat counter-intuitively) productivity also went through the roof. A direct result of Ford's policy was that it pushed the US into a 40hr week much faster than the unions could have done so alone, it was a glaring example to all that such a move would not destroy the economy..
Well I'd argue much of the reason they saw so much productivity increase is that he got the cream of the crop. When everybody else is scraping the bottom of the barrel, do the opposite. For a good but not excessive pay increase he got lots of skill and talent, highly motivated and loyal workers. It doesn't really follow that the same would happen if everyone got shorter hours and pay increases. Besides he realized the unique situation that workers would often save up this money to buy a Ford, essentially getting up his production volume, market share and putting the profit back in his own pocket. I say unique because it's both a huge capital expense - it's not the same if you work at the toothbrush factory and buy the "right" brand of toothbrush - and it's visible to everyone if you drive around town or to the Ford factory with any other brand.
Well if you're rendering some cutscenes for a game and want a codec that is free to use and better than MPEG1 - MPEG2 and all newer ones are still patented - then WebM might fit the bill. I'll agree it doesn't take much to win that category though.
If you don't want to take cash in store, don't cry when a card company stops payments and your cash flow freezes up. Litigate for the money? After your business has collapsed? Cashless will never happen, although it's many governments wet dream as it will be able to track everything you spend your money on, and that's what they want.
Here in Norway I'd say that if you won't accept cards you're dead as a business because so many use it for everything and simply won't have cash. Between electronic transfers, debit and credit cards they estimate 94% of all money transactions now go cashless. Personally I know the only time I tend to use cash is when I'm out drinking as you get rather sloppy with both card and PIN when you get drunk and even that's less of a hard rule these days if I'm just having a few beers.
The main reason it's not 100% has everything to with reliability and pretty much nothing to do with what VISA and MasterCard and American Express and Paypal might or might not do, if the government really wanted to make "cashless cash" they'd make their own payment card that'd be a forced means of payment and be an issuer of last resort. Something similar actually already exists, our version of food coupons is actually an electronic payment card that'll only accept charges from a subset of goods at participating grocery stores - you can't buy beer or use them in any other shop.
The problem is if the system is down or it's a private transaction and nobody has a card reader, then nothing will work no matter what card you have. Cash is the backup to the electronic system when that system doesn't work, any of it.
Financially the median person is better off becoming a truck driver at 19 than pursuing a law degree (and racking up the associated debt), but being a trucker is really socially limiting.
Long-haul trucking is socially limiting no matter the status because you spend so much time on the road sleeping in a cot at whatever truck stop was nearby when you had to take your mandatory resting period. I have a relative that lives that life and honestly you could not pay me enough to do it. I'd much rather be a night watchman working by night, sleeping by day, having evenings off as normal people than a trucker. The other thing I'd never consider is a restaurant/bar job, one of the 24x7 jobs that have shifts I could possibly deal with but that your regular work hours are evenings and weekends? No way. Fortunately there seems to be plenty people willing to do it for far less than I would need.
Then whose patents have now become gold mines and/or roadblocks?
The H.264 patent pool has 30 licencors and the list of patents is 59 pages long, so the short answer is: Most of the industry. Apart from Google with WebM and previously Microsoft with VC-1, there is surprising unity. My predictions are as follows: HEVC is as dominant in hardware as H.264, there will be an open source encoder like xvid/x264 and those who can't or won't use that will use WebM despite the somewhat larger size because Google will probably fight to back it as a free codec. Anything else will be never go anywhere outside geek circles like Vorbis or Theora.
Why bother re-encoding a complete music library from mp3 even if vorbis/aac is clearly the superior codec?
You're asking the wrong question, the right question is how many have FLAC copies of all their MP3s? Because I hope you weren't seriously suggesting they should re-encode from the MP3 files. I think you will find that many people have never even heard of FLAC and even if they did few tools have made it easy to create dual FLAC/MP3 rips of a CD, least not any the average person would have heard about. Assuming he didn't just download those MP3s in the first place and isn't about to chase down different copies for a microscopic space savings - maybe percentage-wise it's great but even thousands of songs will fit in a tiny corner of a modern HDD.
Video on the other hand is still huge. 60 BluRays to a 3TB HDD is not much, 4K is coming and for YouTube, Netflix etc. bandwidth costs are still a huge cost - far more than say Spotify. If people are maxing their cap on the Internet connection it's likely to be because of a lot of streaming video. Of course there's a huge broadband roll-out to give people more bandwidth as well, but this is not an either-or situation. For broadcasters as well this is a huge upgrade, more compression means being able to send more TV channels in a limited frequency band. As far as I know, all US channels still broadcast in MPEG2 and H.264 wasn't enough to make them change, maybe HEVC will be? At least any country looking for a new system would seriously consider it.
This is the Slashdot QC and calibration department. Your yearly sarcasm and humor detector calibrations are due. Please leave the detectors in the tray by the door at the end of your shift.
FYI, I think he already did.
My advice would be to pursue the degree while working full-time, either as an intern or other full-time position. The degree, sadly, will be more valuable than the experience.
It's not an either-or, companies want people with a degree and real world experience so if you got one, work on the other. It can be really tough to land a good first/early job no matter how good your degree is if they got other applications also with good degrees and a bit more experience and the less prestigious jobs will often see that you're looking to get a bit of experience and leave for greener pastures. I have a Master's degree and I felt in years of education/experience that 5/0 and 5/1 was tough, but then I worked a few years and the coin totally flipped and at 5/5 or 5/10 I'm very attractive on the work market. I guess it also depends on your resume, if you've made a career without a degree it looks good but if you just look employed without resume-visible advancement then it looks like your skills and ambitions have peaked, regardless of what reality is.
Which may be the biggest fuckup of all.
Destiny is just another way of saying absence of choice. Everything is predestined. They are all just puppets of destiny. Kirk WILL be captain of the Enterprise whether he likes it or not. Future is fucking set in stone!
That is, disregarding all the little differences caused by FUCKING TIME TRAVEL!
Of all the crappy models of time travel, it's actually not the worst one because otherwise the butterfly effect would make any form of restoring the time line impossible. Time is already laid out as a rubber band and you can pinch it but the natural reaction is to snap back but it might be twisted in the process. Which can also sort of explain why time travel doesn't just rip apart everything as you go infinitely long back and change infinitely much, because doing so would be too hard. You have free will to avoid your destiny - just blow your head off like in Devil's Advocate - but it will just stretch the rubber band some more. And perhaps it's not quite as fixed, with enough changes time can take a new path permanently, like a river finding a new path. The Star Trek reboot is more an implementation issue than a basic plot issue.
Companies with a lot of solid technology that aren't particularly trendy taking a big slump in the market and thus can be had for a fairly cheap? Sure. The value at Wall Street is pretty well measuring customer appeal, but China isn't interested in buying customers they're interested in buying technology which makes their valuation quite different.
AMD also isn't Asia focused for CPUs. They have them manufactured at Global Foundries which has a fab in the US, Germany, and Singapore. Discrete GPUs are all fabbed in Asia these days, specifically in Taiwan by TSMC. Now that may change as TSMC has been badly fucking up they may switch to someone else but for now, all TSMC.
AMD has been paying big bucks to get out of wafer agreements with GloFo, they canceled Krishna and Wichita and started over at TSMC so it's both GPUs and APUs. If TSMC run into trouble the two biggest winners will be Intel and Samsung that have foundries of their own because there's really no good replacement right now.
People like you don't seem to get it. Symbian HAS failed. If it hadn't it would be here today.
That's like saying a man's heart failed - because it had a knife stabbed through it. It's dead but not by natural causes and the CEO holding the knife is Elop.
This is the part where you should have read what you've written, considered the meaning, and then terminated your entire comment. You have successfully included the very reason why OSS is superior to closed-source, and then gone on to come to precisely the wrong conclusion based on the available facts.
Oh please, like constant fracturing and duplication of effort is always a benefit. Branching is one thing but full blown forks start with one issue and the rest of the code start drifting apart too leading to situations where you can have feature X in fork A and feature Y in fork B but not both and it has no connection to issue Z that caused the fork. Or your fork doesn't have the bugfix that other fork fixed and it doesn't even apply cleanly if you can cherry-pick it in git. Most forks don't fail because their solution shows itself to be so superior or inferior, but by who can attract the other developers and keep up the maintenance of everything else. It is far more a game of attrition than most would admit.
Analogy time, say you're 10 people who want to move a big rock. In the cathedral version, the leader supplies a rope and tell everyone to pull in the same direction and the rock moves. In the bazaar version they could all work out their differences and submit to a benevolent dictator in the same way, but 99% of the time they don't so they each fork off and try their own one and two-men solution except for the people who people who decided it wasn't their itch to scratch so they went home and those who didn't want to move the stone because they now assumed the stone was there and so absolutely nothing happens. Or for that matter, OSS developers are like herding cats so what would you rather have, a dog sleigh or a cat sleigh? Of course the downside of the cathedral model is that one person can lead everyone into the abyss.
Like most other nukes, it's a deterrent. If the US should decide to invade/liberate North Korea like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea would like the US to know they have nukes and are bat shit crazy enough to use them. Threatening to launch a nuclear missile is a little more immediate than threatening to smuggle it into the US covertly, which would also give away the "covert" part. They want to bluster about their ability to nuke San Francisco, if they actually did it I wouldn't expect two bricks to be standing in Pyongyang an hour later. The only reason they'd use it is because they're about to get deposed anyway.
Well, Finland is only 5.4 million people so if they can hit the 50k mark it already means 1% of the population cares. That said it looks like the site has just recently opened and the highest vote is slightly over 1k now, so a long way to go.
True, you keep a slither of positive control in that you can still release it under the licenses you want, but you can't stop your code being used anywhere under any circumstances in any form since the license grant is pretty much limitless. Not exclusively so, but limitless all the same. I'll give you one Hermes Conrad point for being technically correct, though.
Ironically, a lot of the manufacturing jobs of "today" that I've been exposed to are very sophisticated, requiring high level computer skills in addition to a lot of knowledge on operating complex machinery as well as knowledge about what the machinery does (ie, welding, or metallurgy, etc).
Production is one thing, where jobs have really been lost is in maintenance and repair. When there's a million units a day shipping off an assembly line in China, it doesn't pay off to have the skills, parts and equipment or use the time to repair one and one unit that's usually failed in its own unique way. All the competence goes into the production, the rest is just distribution and retail. The need for skilled labor "in the field" has gone dramatically down, or the level of skill has just skyrocketed. I remember my mom used to have a Volkswagen Beetle - this was in the 80s, the car was probably from the 70s and the design even older - and I can understand how you could be a home mechanic on it. Today I wouldn't touch much of any new car except for designated service points like oil and windshield wiper fluid, the bar to entry is just too high.
I'm currently reading Critique of Economic Reason by André Gorz. Despite being almost 30 years old, it describes this situation well. Rises in productivity due to automation are incompatible with a culture that values 'work' on a moral basis, and associates it with a persons identity.
I don't know any farmer who'd like to go back to hand and horse power, as long as the automation is considered an extension of yourself that means you can do things bigger or better or faster I think people are mostly happy with it. The trouble first sets in when automation starts making people redundant to the whole process and you're now really in a support role to the machines and with each generation of advances they need you less. Actually, this demotivator pretty much says it all. Imagine for example the talk of the automated car, it'd wipe out most of the transport sector. They can't all go flip burgers at McDonald's, besides how long until the cash register is directly tied to a burger-flipping robot with a bar code on the receipt to pick it up when it's done with zero human interaction? We've only seen the beginning.
Ummm... this isn't correct. KDE developers never had a problem with the licensing of any of Qt classes.
Not the Qt licensing per se, but a lot of KDE developers have problems with the Qt contribution agreement. In order to support Qt Commercial etc. you essentially have to sign away all rights to the code, here's perhaps the most relevant part:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Licensor hereby grants, in exchange for good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged, to Digia a sublicensable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid-up copyright and trade secret license to reproduce, adapt, translate, modify, and prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, make available and distribute Licensor Contribution(s) and any derivative works thereof under license terms of Digiaâ(TM)s choosing including any Open Source Software license.
As a result, a lot of code in the KDE libraries that could ideally could have been enhancements to Qt instead (both being LGPL) have remained outside Qt and will most likely remain so. Reducing the duplication has been a stated goal for ages but in reality not much happens since any non-trivial piece of code most likely has some contributor who won't sign.