The C version is easy to understand when you are in total control and total understanding of the program flow. However, it's a nightmare for people trying to enhance or restructure the code because they can so easily cause the free() to not get called, get double called or to simply not realize all the places cleanup code is required. This is particularly true for all kinds of exception-like flows, that everything is cleared up in all varieties.
If you strictly adhere to RAII in C++ then things are fairly ok, but I honestly think that in this case C++ is too C-ish and not object oriented enough. Personally if I was designing a new language from scratch I would not do it like Java, but rather a resource tree where every object has a list of children and explicit keywords to pass and share ownership, where the latter would cause automatic ref-counting pointers. For those of you who have worked with C++/Qt, something like QObject but much deeper integrated into the language itself and with safeguards to not lose pointers so every bit of memory used can be explored from one root node and will be deterministically deleted when its owner goes out of scope or is deleted.
It's also why I absolutely refuse to hand out a resume. I am *not* my resume, and my resume is not me. If you have a problem, either I can fix it, or I'll tell you that I can't. The main concern really isn't that anyway (studies show that the leading cause of project failure is bad communications, not lack of technical skills).
Well that only works for employers if everyone has (1) good self-assessment skills and (2) sell them conservatively. The problem for employers, and particularly prospective employers, is that most people don't. I think everyone promotes their strengths and cover their weaknesses in an interview, and some people exaggerate far more than that. Not only the psychopaths but also people that are unemployed and desperately in need of a paycheck. In some cases, it's plain out lies and fraud. Sometimes they simply have vastly delusional ideas of their own skills and capabilities. What you are facing is the lemon problem, you know your true skills but the employer don't.
For the employer, it's about streamlining the process to find suitable candidates. As much as everyone hates HR keyword bingo, I would say the first step is if the candidate even claims to have the skills we're looking for. Consider it a bit like a technical dismissal in a court of law "Even if everything the plaintiff claims is correct, there is no crime here. Case dismissed." and so "Even if everything the candidate claims is correct, he is not qualified. Application rejected." The rest of it, the interviews, the degrees, the references, the tests - everything else is to verify that you are who you say you are and can do what you claim you can do. Sadly some very good programmers take offense at this, like it's an assault on their integrity.
The last job I got, they had two one hour interviews including a very thorough walk-through of my education and work history, checked two references, had me do a 2 hour logic/communication/personality test and spent another 1.5 hours discussing it compared to the impressions they had gotten through interviews and references. I felt quite well poked and prodded after that, anything more intrusive and I think they'd have to dissect me. But I knew they wanted to be sure they hired the right person, and that means verifying my skills not just taking my word for it. Part of that is of course showing you have a good learning ability, but extraordinary claims in that direction also need proof. Otherwise you simply seem under-qualified and bluffing to get the job.
This is both Open and Free, just not quite as free as Stallman would like.
No, the problem is that both licenses have the same kind of copyleft clause:
CDDL: "You may not offer or impose any terms on any Covered Software in Source Code form that alters or restricts the applicable version of this License or the recipients rights hereunder." GPLv2: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
Anything that is a requirement in one would be seen as a restriction in the other, the only way it would work was if one license was a strict superset of the other like the GPL and LGPL. The smallest of differences and it's incompatible because either the CDDL imposes restrictions on the GPL code or the GPL imposes restrictions on the CDDL code.
Two copyleft clauses go together about as well as matter and anti-matter. Sun knew that and there's nothing radically different in the CDDL to suggest they couldn't have used the GPL. They simply chose to pick their own license and try creating their own CDDL ecosystem instead.
It was honestly another example that as far as I can tell, Sun doesn't really "get" open source. Oh, they know how to open up the source of OpenOffice and OpenJDK and OpenSolaris, but they sucked at community building. If you make it a one-way street where only you push releases out, no wonder you don't get value back.
It's a bit arguable whether 'w' is a unique letter in the Scandinavian alphabets though; it's essentially a fancy variant of 'v', seldom used in actual words. (And they occupy the same place in alphabetical ordering)
You're wrong about the ordering, 'w' is normally considered its own letter so all v's are listed before w's. I don't know of any suggestion to formally drop it, and I doubt there's any reason to but it is only used in a few loanwords like walkie-talkie or walkover and names like Wales and Wagner. So is the watt (after James Watt) but there we have a Norwegian word "vatt" = batting material so there is actually one word that differ only by v/w, pretty sure it's the only one though.
Because their are no servers running linux using non-x86_64 CPUs? You had better tell IBM that.
If it's important enough for IBM, let them supply the patches for POWER chips. I'd think the x86_64 requirement is mostly for 64 bit addressing, which as far as I know th POWER chips do as well so it shouldn't be that hard given enough interest. Personally I'll wait and see how well this GPL/CDDL module business will work out...
I also note that you labor under the misinformation that German has 27 characters when it actually has umlaut-a, umlaut-o, and umlaut-o
I assume you mean u? That would be ä, ö and ü - slashdot doesn't strip all the non-US characters. I guess the counting depends on whether they're considered accented vowels or separate letters.
To take an example from Norway, we have 29 letters including æøå. The last looks like a+circle but it's a separate letter, while say à is considered simply a variant of a.
But to use it, you would have to argue that their reversal has harmed you; saying "my company spent a million dollars creating and distributing free videos describing our product" would be a way to win, but "I have 10 GB of videos of my cat on my home page" would not.
That should be fairly easy to show. You have material already in H.264, you have software tools to edit and encode H.264 - if you quote full retail rates of having a professional convert your video or even a reasonable billing of your own time and/or the cost to replace said tools. Also you can claim future costs in converting all future video taking with any H.264 licensed camera you own to incur further costs. I'm not exactly sure how the court would see it but I figure buying a H.264 video camera under the assumption that their promise was good would be "consideration", and reneging on that promise has lowered the value of the camera and is thus to your disadvantage. Individually it doesn't amount to much but this sounds like a class action slam dunk and/or a perfectly reasonable defense if they try to sue you for violating the H.264 license. It's a shield not a sword so you won't get money from them, but I'm fairly sure this is enough to bind them to the promise and let you use it freely. I know some people try to make H.264 the scary bad codec, but no companies do NOT get away with making such promises and not delivering.
On the other hand, if they don't like you, and really suspect you are up to no good, they will probably shoot you anyway, evidence or not.
Yes, and one of those reasons would be that you keep running into images with embedded steganography at an abnormal rate. Maybe you're just a victim of coincidence, but regimes like that don't care. They just evaluate if the risk of you being a threat to them is bigger than the negative effects of having you disappear.
But none of the countries he's writing about have a common law system, they have a civil law system. And one of the important differences between those two forms of law is the presumption of innocence. In that, it doesn't exist in civil law systems.
What have you smoked? Do you honestly think that Europe, South America, most of Africa and Asia don't have a presumption of innocence?
Obviously, the easiest way to prove that in a case where you're arrested for spreading damnable lies through hidden messages is to provide the key to read those messages. But, whoops!, you've just proven the state's case, off to the gallows with you! Or if you don't turn over the keys then you didn't prove yourself innocent, off to the gallows with you!
Funny, the only country I know with laws like that is the UK - a common law system - with their Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Physical cost of performing a test? Does your QA department charge $1000 per keystroke?
Hint: Computers run more than run-of-the-mill office desktops. Like for example they control big and expensive machinery, that could halt or damage production lines and create huge issues for your entire supply chain. It all depends on what you're developing and for who.
Well, I assume they'd be smart enough to have a season pass the way $0.99 songs have albums, and the price of the album is not $0.99 * number of songs. I'm guessing the $0.99 is exactly for those one episode customers. Alas, I expect this won't be available here as no TV, movies or anything of the sort is available over iTunes here. Just music...
Well, that requires them to have obnoxious disruptive ads. Some of us would be willing to pay to get rid of those ads, today you don't really get that option. Or you do on torrents but no ads and no pay means no income for those who made it. I welcome the possibility to pay my way out of ads, it's a choice I think I like. If it really turns out that I'm wrong, that I value it less than the advertisers so be it. Then it's my choice to watch the ad edition, which I'm quite sure will remain available...
Nice, but quite probably illegal as making permanent copies of a rental goes far outside normal fair use and is a direct replacement for a dvd sale. You may call it timeshifting but I doubt the courts would look on it the same way they did with the VHS, after all you can keep your DVD longer or return it and get it later to timeshift. And if you're in the US you're breaking the DMCA etc. too, fair use or not.
Now, it's almost impossible to discover and thus ever prosecute but legally it's pretty much the same as torrents and torrents you can get for free. Of course they're not legal, but again so I doubt is yours. So if you don't care about that you can get them cheaper and if you do care then no, I doubt you get that for $0.99/season anywhere.
Before I would have said "at least read access", since in my experience the bug reports are usually very inadequate and you need to know exactly what the user was seeing and any settings/configuration made in production. Write access was already rather iffy before, and now with most servers being virtualized the best way would be a fast track to create a new clone of production for the ugly cases. We used virtualization heavily at a client I was at, they originally had two environments, test and production. We did a major upgrade, and at most we had 5 environments:
1) The old production, ready to be resurrected in case of OMG problems 2) The old test, used to verify upgrade results (not old prod as we didn't want people making changes there by accident) 3) The new production, obviously 4) The new QA, where the customer was doing regression testing 5) The new test, where we kept working on the next delivery
Being able to suddenly scale up to five environments - eventually down to two again - was brilliant. The cloned it, changed a few IPs and away it went...
The problem is that they are so out of touch with reality they think these are good ideas.
I think the correct diagnosis is "How much bullshit would you spout if your paycheck depended on it?" and for most people it's a lot. Just listen to what people here want, they want to kill the gravy train the RIAA is on so no wonder they think it's a bad idea. About 99% of the suggestions aren't the RIAA changing their business model, it's the artists changing their business model and the RIAA going away forever. Don't expect people who'll be fired when the project is done to help you much with it, nor the RIAA to assist in their own demise.
They are right in that copyright law is broken and so is the DMCA. But that's not the reason they're failing, it's because most people don't respect the law. Most laws only function because most people don't want to break them, particularly those that don't require an unwilling participant. All it takes to share copyrighted materials is two willing peers. They're so not going to get rid of that.
Somehow I doubt you can put mid-range cards that still draw 50-100W together with the CPU without creating a very complicated heating solution. Integrating everything is more a cost saving for the low end not to mention a way to sell a graphic chip with every machine keeping the competition out. I'd say the threat here is actually much greater the other way around, after all Intel is not hurt much directly if all AMD chips are sold with AMD graphics - that is nVidia. But if Intel can improve their integrated designs or squeeze nVidia into licensing them some then AMD would lose a huge market. In short it boils down to that you can add a discrete graphics card if you're unhappy with Intel's GPU performance, but you can't add a discrete CPU if you're unhappy with AMD's CPU performance.
Well, I can't speak much for the US but here in Norway almost all school teachers are public and you get very little reward for being good at it. So every year like clockwork there's an article about how low the intake requirements for teachers are, because most the bright people want to do something else. Personally I did end up taking one year together with people who would be math teachers before I got into the study I wanted and saw it first hand. And math is still one of the better subjects. Sure, you can get one of the idealists but the presumption is hanging over you before you first enter the classroom and they're just looking for confirmation.
I did have one of those for example in IT. Our surprise was big when the tax info (public in Norway) got around, he was making good money on software he'd written earlier and was teaching now because he wanted to. Of course that didn't stop us from being annoying teens and all, but it put him in a completely different light. Particularly the game we kept copying onto the network, he never caught who it was... For some reason though they introduced named accounts during my time there;)
No, they could not be 13 as the age of criminal responsibility is 15. The school they went to (I found a Swedish article) had grades 1-9 = 7-16, so 15-16 year olds.
The purpose of free software projects is to produce quality free software, and as long as we continue to do that we could care less whether more people are using it than the proprietary alternative.
Evil tounges would say the proof is in the pudding and that the lack of people using it proves it's not good quality compared to the alternatives, no matter how brilliant the few who us it think it is. Outside of server apps like Apache none of the OSS poster childs like Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP etc. are dominant in their area. It's certainly not because of the price. It's not because of the obnoxious EULA and use restrictions. It's not because of the forced upgrades and lock-in. I suppose you can tell yourself that it's all because of the marketing and dirty tricks Microsoft and Adobe pull, but I strongly doubt that's the only explaination. In some areas OSS has a very long way to go before they can deliver anything called quality software, I use it daily and it ranges from extremely good to extremely crappy. And unlike in the Windows world often that crappy project is the best and possibly only there is, while on Windows you can usually pay your way to quality...
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
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Windows 95 was cheap. That was it's only real benefit.
And cheap on resources. I did try running OS/2, it could not run as lightweight as Win95. It felt like it was designed for a different machine than the one you were running. It was either designed too much with powerful servers in mind or it was ahead of its time, there and then it didn't fit well.
And today -- 15 years later -- it's still "almost ready" for the desktop.
In all fairness that is because the finish line keeps moving. Just because they're still behind does not imply that they haven't been close in the past. Personally, my first real experience was around 2000. At the time, the OS presented to consumers was Windows ME and Windows 2000 was overpriced and poorly supported by non-business applications. At the time I really thought Linux had a bright future, I'd say they were way past ME. Then in 2001 Windows XP came and was a lackluster for those of us used to win2k, but compared to win98/ME it was a dream. It fixed pretty much all the fundamental problems of the win95/98/ME line, games started supporting both 2k and xp so I stayed on 2k but it was xp that made it usable. My thoughts about switching to Linux faded away.
Fast forward about six years, to 2007. The current Microsoft offering is Windows Vista, and the early impressions of that were definitively not good. In fact, so bad that I figured it's time to look around again and see what was happening. I'd had a linux server going most of the time but never seriously considered it as a desktop. I was looking at a quite mature KDE 3.x desktop which I felt was pretty much on par with Vista and after a while of going back and forth I switched. I suppose you can argue back and forth how "ready" it was, but I found it worked well for me.
For a while there, the gap widened again with KDE 4.0, Microsoft fixing the most issues with Vista and released Win7, which is actually a very nice OS as far as I've used it. I don't know why you'd think now would be good timing, compared to the XP-Vista gap or Vista period it'd probably be the worst timing of the decade. I'm hoping Microsoft will stumble a little again and KDE4/Gnome3 go well enough to take another swing in 2-3 years, which by my counting would be the third close encounter. Consider it more of a marathon, just because we're behind doesn't mean we're not running or that we might eventually catch up as those in front tire.
The computers would have no problems at all counting seconds since epoch, no leap anything not even minutes, hours, days or years. But it'd be a helluva problem trying to convert it into human time, since the answer you get will depend on how many leap seconds the system think has passed. If a system hasn't been upgraded in a year "gets" a new leap second, all the human timestamps it's given in the last months will be off. Any calculation it's made may be a second off in human time.
Unfortunately true, and after Sun has been eaten by Oracle I very much fear the future of OpenOffice too. Already before the takeover there was a Go-oo build to include all the patches Sun for various reasons didn't like, and I'm not sure what exactly Oracle is thinking of doing. If they won't carry on then either the others have to take over, or join ranks with KOffice or something. Either way, MS can rest easy a while longer.
I'd say slim at this point. It doesn't help that all CDDL code is incompatiable with all GPL code so they got plenty wheels that need reinventing unless there's a BSD library for it. Yes, I know you can say the same about the GPL but there's not nearly as much that Linux would want. ZFS and DTrace would be two big ones though, but hopefully the concepts can be incorporated in Linux even if the code can not. Then again, if it'd been GPL then Linux would probably have scavenged all of it already, I guess that was the point of making it GPL-incompatible...
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The C version is easy to understand when you are in total control and total understanding of the program flow. However, it's a nightmare for people trying to enhance or restructure the code because they can so easily cause the free() to not get called, get double called or to simply not realize all the places cleanup code is required. This is particularly true for all kinds of exception-like flows, that everything is cleared up in all varieties.
If you strictly adhere to RAII in C++ then things are fairly ok, but I honestly think that in this case C++ is too C-ish and not object oriented enough. Personally if I was designing a new language from scratch I would not do it like Java, but rather a resource tree where every object has a list of children and explicit keywords to pass and share ownership, where the latter would cause automatic ref-counting pointers. For those of you who have worked with C++/Qt, something like QObject but much deeper integrated into the language itself and with safeguards to not lose pointers so every bit of memory used can be explored from one root node and will be deterministically deleted when its owner goes out of scope or is deleted.
It's also why I absolutely refuse to hand out a resume. I am *not* my resume, and my resume is not me. If you have a problem, either I can fix it, or I'll tell you that I can't. The main concern really isn't that anyway (studies show that the leading cause of project failure is bad communications, not lack of technical skills).
Well that only works for employers if everyone has (1) good self-assessment skills and (2) sell them conservatively. The problem for employers, and particularly prospective employers, is that most people don't. I think everyone promotes their strengths and cover their weaknesses in an interview, and some people exaggerate far more than that. Not only the psychopaths but also people that are unemployed and desperately in need of a paycheck. In some cases, it's plain out lies and fraud. Sometimes they simply have vastly delusional ideas of their own skills and capabilities. What you are facing is the lemon problem, you know your true skills but the employer don't.
For the employer, it's about streamlining the process to find suitable candidates. As much as everyone hates HR keyword bingo, I would say the first step is if the candidate even claims to have the skills we're looking for. Consider it a bit like a technical dismissal in a court of law "Even if everything the plaintiff claims is correct, there is no crime here. Case dismissed." and so "Even if everything the candidate claims is correct, he is not qualified. Application rejected." The rest of it, the interviews, the degrees, the references, the tests - everything else is to verify that you are who you say you are and can do what you claim you can do. Sadly some very good programmers take offense at this, like it's an assault on their integrity.
The last job I got, they had two one hour interviews including a very thorough walk-through of my education and work history, checked two references, had me do a 2 hour logic/communication/personality test and spent another 1.5 hours discussing it compared to the impressions they had gotten through interviews and references. I felt quite well poked and prodded after that, anything more intrusive and I think they'd have to dissect me. But I knew they wanted to be sure they hired the right person, and that means verifying my skills not just taking my word for it. Part of that is of course showing you have a good learning ability, but extraordinary claims in that direction also need proof. Otherwise you simply seem under-qualified and bluffing to get the job.
This is both Open and Free, just not quite as free as Stallman would like.
No, the problem is that both licenses have the same kind of copyleft clause:
CDDL: "You may not offer or impose any terms on any Covered Software in Source Code form that alters or restricts the applicable version of this License or the recipients rights hereunder."
GPLv2: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
Anything that is a requirement in one would be seen as a restriction in the other, the only way it would work was if one license was a strict superset of the other like the GPL and LGPL. The smallest of differences and it's incompatible because either the CDDL imposes restrictions on the GPL code or the GPL imposes restrictions on the CDDL code.
Two copyleft clauses go together about as well as matter and anti-matter. Sun knew that and there's nothing radically different in the CDDL to suggest they couldn't have used the GPL. They simply chose to pick their own license and try creating their own CDDL ecosystem instead.
It was honestly another example that as far as I can tell, Sun doesn't really "get" open source. Oh, they know how to open up the source of OpenOffice and OpenJDK and OpenSolaris, but they sucked at community building. If you make it a one-way street where only you push releases out, no wonder you don't get value back.
It's a bit arguable whether 'w' is a unique letter in the Scandinavian alphabets though; it's essentially a fancy variant of 'v', seldom used in actual words. (And they occupy the same place in alphabetical ordering)
You're wrong about the ordering, 'w' is normally considered its own letter so all v's are listed before w's. I don't know of any suggestion to formally drop it, and I doubt there's any reason to but it is only used in a few loanwords like walkie-talkie or walkover and names like Wales and Wagner. So is the watt (after James Watt) but there we have a Norwegian word "vatt" = batting material so there is actually one word that differ only by v/w, pretty sure it's the only one though.
Because their are no servers running linux using non-x86_64 CPUs? You had better tell IBM that.
If it's important enough for IBM, let them supply the patches for POWER chips. I'd think the x86_64 requirement is mostly for 64 bit addressing, which as far as I know th POWER chips do as well so it shouldn't be that hard given enough interest. Personally I'll wait and see how well this GPL/CDDL module business will work out...
I also note that you labor under the misinformation that German has 27 characters when it actually has umlaut-a, umlaut-o, and umlaut-o
I assume you mean u? That would be ä, ö and ü - slashdot doesn't strip all the non-US characters. I guess the counting depends on whether they're considered accented vowels or separate letters.
To take an example from Norway, we have 29 letters including æøå. The last looks like a+circle but it's a separate letter, while say à is considered simply a variant of a.
But to use it, you would have to argue that their reversal has harmed you; saying "my company spent a million dollars creating and distributing free videos describing our product" would be a way to win, but "I have 10 GB of videos of my cat on my home page" would not.
That should be fairly easy to show. You have material already in H.264, you have software tools to edit and encode H.264 - if you quote full retail rates of having a professional convert your video or even a reasonable billing of your own time and/or the cost to replace said tools. Also you can claim future costs in converting all future video taking with any H.264 licensed camera you own to incur further costs. I'm not exactly sure how the court would see it but I figure buying a H.264 video camera under the assumption that their promise was good would be "consideration", and reneging on that promise has lowered the value of the camera and is thus to your disadvantage. Individually it doesn't amount to much but this sounds like a class action slam dunk and/or a perfectly reasonable defense if they try to sue you for violating the H.264 license. It's a shield not a sword so you won't get money from them, but I'm fairly sure this is enough to bind them to the promise and let you use it freely. I know some people try to make H.264 the scary bad codec, but no companies do NOT get away with making such promises and not delivering.
On the other hand, if they don't like you, and really suspect you are up to no good, they will probably shoot you anyway, evidence or not.
Yes, and one of those reasons would be that you keep running into images with embedded steganography at an abnormal rate. Maybe you're just a victim of coincidence, but regimes like that don't care. They just evaluate if the risk of you being a threat to them is bigger than the negative effects of having you disappear.
But none of the countries he's writing about have a common law system, they have a civil law system. And one of the important differences between those two forms of law is the presumption of innocence. In that, it doesn't exist in civil law systems.
What have you smoked? Do you honestly think that Europe, South America, most of Africa and Asia don't have a presumption of innocence?
Obviously, the easiest way to prove that in a case where you're arrested for spreading damnable lies through hidden messages is to provide the key to read those messages. But, whoops!, you've just proven the state's case, off to the gallows with you! Or if you don't turn over the keys then you didn't prove yourself innocent, off to the gallows with you!
Funny, the only country I know with laws like that is the UK - a common law system - with their Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Physical cost of performing a test? Does your QA department charge $1000 per keystroke?
Hint: Computers run more than run-of-the-mill office desktops. Like for example they control big and expensive machinery, that could halt or damage production lines and create huge issues for your entire supply chain. It all depends on what you're developing and for who.
Well, I assume they'd be smart enough to have a season pass the way $0.99 songs have albums, and the price of the album is not $0.99 * number of songs. I'm guessing the $0.99 is exactly for those one episode customers. Alas, I expect this won't be available here as no TV, movies or anything of the sort is available over iTunes here. Just music...
Well, that requires them to have obnoxious disruptive ads. Some of us would be willing to pay to get rid of those ads, today you don't really get that option. Or you do on torrents but no ads and no pay means no income for those who made it. I welcome the possibility to pay my way out of ads, it's a choice I think I like. If it really turns out that I'm wrong, that I value it less than the advertisers so be it. Then it's my choice to watch the ad edition, which I'm quite sure will remain available...
Nice, but quite probably illegal as making permanent copies of a rental goes far outside normal fair use and is a direct replacement for a dvd sale. You may call it timeshifting but I doubt the courts would look on it the same way they did with the VHS, after all you can keep your DVD longer or return it and get it later to timeshift. And if you're in the US you're breaking the DMCA etc. too, fair use or not.
Now, it's almost impossible to discover and thus ever prosecute but legally it's pretty much the same as torrents and torrents you can get for free. Of course they're not legal, but again so I doubt is yours. So if you don't care about that you can get them cheaper and if you do care then no, I doubt you get that for $0.99/season anywhere.
Before I would have said "at least read access", since in my experience the bug reports are usually very inadequate and you need to know exactly what the user was seeing and any settings/configuration made in production. Write access was already rather iffy before, and now with most servers being virtualized the best way would be a fast track to create a new clone of production for the ugly cases. We used virtualization heavily at a client I was at, they originally had two environments, test and production. We did a major upgrade, and at most we had 5 environments:
1) The old production, ready to be resurrected in case of OMG problems
2) The old test, used to verify upgrade results (not old prod as we didn't want people making changes there by accident)
3) The new production, obviously
4) The new QA, where the customer was doing regression testing
5) The new test, where we kept working on the next delivery
Being able to suddenly scale up to five environments - eventually down to two again - was brilliant. The cloned it, changed a few IPs and away it went...
The problem is that they are so out of touch with reality they think these are good ideas.
I think the correct diagnosis is "How much bullshit would you spout if your paycheck depended on it?" and for most people it's a lot. Just listen to what people here want, they want to kill the gravy train the RIAA is on so no wonder they think it's a bad idea. About 99% of the suggestions aren't the RIAA changing their business model, it's the artists changing their business model and the RIAA going away forever. Don't expect people who'll be fired when the project is done to help you much with it, nor the RIAA to assist in their own demise.
They are right in that copyright law is broken and so is the DMCA. But that's not the reason they're failing, it's because most people don't respect the law. Most laws only function because most people don't want to break them, particularly those that don't require an unwilling participant. All it takes to share copyrighted materials is two willing peers. They're so not going to get rid of that.
Somehow I doubt you can put mid-range cards that still draw 50-100W together with the CPU without creating a very complicated heating solution. Integrating everything is more a cost saving for the low end not to mention a way to sell a graphic chip with every machine keeping the competition out. I'd say the threat here is actually much greater the other way around, after all Intel is not hurt much directly if all AMD chips are sold with AMD graphics - that is nVidia. But if Intel can improve their integrated designs or squeeze nVidia into licensing them some then AMD would lose a huge market. In short it boils down to that you can add a discrete graphics card if you're unhappy with Intel's GPU performance, but you can't add a discrete CPU if you're unhappy with AMD's CPU performance.
Well, I can't speak much for the US but here in Norway almost all school teachers are public and you get very little reward for being good at it. So every year like clockwork there's an article about how low the intake requirements for teachers are, because most the bright people want to do something else. Personally I did end up taking one year together with people who would be math teachers before I got into the study I wanted and saw it first hand. And math is still one of the better subjects. Sure, you can get one of the idealists but the presumption is hanging over you before you first enter the classroom and they're just looking for confirmation.
I did have one of those for example in IT. Our surprise was big when the tax info (public in Norway) got around, he was making good money on software he'd written earlier and was teaching now because he wanted to. Of course that didn't stop us from being annoying teens and all, but it put him in a completely different light. Particularly the game we kept copying onto the network, he never caught who it was... For some reason though they introduced named accounts during my time there ;)
No, they could not be 13 as the age of criminal responsibility is 15. The school they went to (I found a Swedish article) had grades 1-9 = 7-16, so 15-16 year olds.
The purpose of free software projects is to produce quality free software, and as long as we continue to do that we could care less whether more people are using it than the proprietary alternative.
Evil tounges would say the proof is in the pudding and that the lack of people using it proves it's not good quality compared to the alternatives, no matter how brilliant the few who us it think it is. Outside of server apps like Apache none of the OSS poster childs like Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP etc. are dominant in their area. It's certainly not because of the price. It's not because of the obnoxious EULA and use restrictions. It's not because of the forced upgrades and lock-in. I suppose you can tell yourself that it's all because of the marketing and dirty tricks Microsoft and Adobe pull, but I strongly doubt that's the only explaination. In some areas OSS has a very long way to go before they can deliver anything called quality software, I use it daily and it ranges from extremely good to extremely crappy. And unlike in the Windows world often that crappy project is the best and possibly only there is, while on Windows you can usually pay your way to quality...
Windows 95 was cheap. That was it's only real benefit.
And cheap on resources. I did try running OS/2, it could not run as lightweight as Win95. It felt like it was designed for a different machine than the one you were running. It was either designed too much with powerful servers in mind or it was ahead of its time, there and then it didn't fit well.
And today -- 15 years later -- it's still "almost ready" for the desktop.
In all fairness that is because the finish line keeps moving. Just because they're still behind does not imply that they haven't been close in the past. Personally, my first real experience was around 2000. At the time, the OS presented to consumers was Windows ME and Windows 2000 was overpriced and poorly supported by non-business applications. At the time I really thought Linux had a bright future, I'd say they were way past ME. Then in 2001 Windows XP came and was a lackluster for those of us used to win2k, but compared to win98/ME it was a dream. It fixed pretty much all the fundamental problems of the win95/98/ME line, games started supporting both 2k and xp so I stayed on 2k but it was xp that made it usable. My thoughts about switching to Linux faded away.
Fast forward about six years, to 2007. The current Microsoft offering is Windows Vista, and the early impressions of that were definitively not good. In fact, so bad that I figured it's time to look around again and see what was happening. I'd had a linux server going most of the time but never seriously considered it as a desktop. I was looking at a quite mature KDE 3.x desktop which I felt was pretty much on par with Vista and after a while of going back and forth I switched. I suppose you can argue back and forth how "ready" it was, but I found it worked well for me.
For a while there, the gap widened again with KDE 4.0, Microsoft fixing the most issues with Vista and released Win7, which is actually a very nice OS as far as I've used it. I don't know why you'd think now would be good timing, compared to the XP-Vista gap or Vista period it'd probably be the worst timing of the decade. I'm hoping Microsoft will stumble a little again and KDE4/Gnome3 go well enough to take another swing in 2-3 years, which by my counting would be the third close encounter. Consider it more of a marathon, just because we're behind doesn't mean we're not running or that we might eventually catch up as those in front tire.
The computers would have no problems at all counting seconds since epoch, no leap anything not even minutes, hours, days or years. But it'd be a helluva problem trying to convert it into human time, since the answer you get will depend on how many leap seconds the system think has passed. If a system hasn't been upgraded in a year "gets" a new leap second, all the human timestamps it's given in the last months will be off. Any calculation it's made may be a second off in human time.
Daylight Savings has had numerous studies showing reduced electricity consumption.
Yes, the question is more if there's more or less hassle to have summer and winter opening hours than to change "time" itself.
Unfortunately true, and after Sun has been eaten by Oracle I very much fear the future of OpenOffice too. Already before the takeover there was a Go-oo build to include all the patches Sun for various reasons didn't like, and I'm not sure what exactly Oracle is thinking of doing. If they won't carry on then either the others have to take over, or join ranks with KOffice or something. Either way, MS can rest easy a while longer.
I'd say slim at this point. It doesn't help that all CDDL code is incompatiable with all GPL code so they got plenty wheels that need reinventing unless there's a BSD library for it. Yes, I know you can say the same about the GPL but there's not nearly as much that Linux would want. ZFS and DTrace would be two big ones though, but hopefully the concepts can be incorporated in Linux even if the code can not. Then again, if it'd been GPL then Linux would probably have scavenged all of it already, I guess that was the point of making it GPL-incompatible...