LOL I got to love the replies on this, it's so common in open source land.
User: I want to do X. OSS community: You shouldn't do X. You don't need X. You're doing it all wrong.
Let me translate what filters through to 99% of the rest of the world: OSS software can't do what I want and is serving me all kinds of bullshit reasons.
If the customer insists on wearing both belt and suspenders by locking it down on the client and securing the perimeter, let them. If they want to trust the Windows cert store, let them. If shit hits the fan, it's still their fault. There's a middle ground between doing ActiveX and being a best(?) practice nazi. That middle ground is called being flexible and supporting your customer's demands, even if it's not exactly how you'd do it. All the way back to Sun Tzu have they said you should choose your battles wisely, so should Firefox. Not just that this is the right way and the only way, that you can already get from Microsoft and Apple.
OLED got some very nice properties over LCD and plasma screens, but I think the LED backlight was the killer. For the prices we're talking here, you can have a bunch of them selectively backlighting or not backlighting the screen. There's some trickery to this true, but if you look at some of the new LCDs out like this it says "a 240-block local dimming LED backlight". At that point you're starting to fake it rather well, with a dynamic contrast in the millions rather than in the thousands.
I never got why anyone would work as a contractor for only one client anyway. Isnt the whole point of being a contractor, that you have more than one client, and that if one of them is a dick, you can say fuck you, and still work for your other clients? (= fire one of your bosses)
Speaking as someone that works in a consulting company that does a lot of individual CV sales, many companies prefer to hire a full time resource when they first hire someone. Typical example are project managers or project teams. You come in, work 100% on this project for two years and go bye-bye. Put together a bunch of 50% resources and you'll never get the team together on one day, people need information or clarification from someone that's not present, scheduling meetings becomes a hassle, something like the daily stand-up for those doing agile will always have people missing and so on. 1 FTE is not a big unit when you're staffing up a big project. Many lone contractors are going after the same kind of jobs, except they run their own risk of downtime but also higher payout when they are hired out.
But then again this is Norway where it's easier to get rid of a contractor than an employee, and health insurance isn't an issue (though contractors don't get same sick leave benefits). In the US with two weeks notice, I don't see that you got job security either way. Perhaps even less as an employee if there's early termination fees in that contract position. I see why health insurance is a big perk. I don't understand why people want that system though, it's like a sprinkler system that works great except in case of fire. The greatest need I could see for a health insurance is if I develop some sort of chronic condition, which looks like when it will be least useful.
Not to beat you over the head with the WORKS4ME sign, but you must have some seriously bad luck. I've installed Linux now on 5 desktops and 3 laptops dating from about 2002 to present, and while I've struggled wtih wifi and suspend and sound and external firewire disks, I've always managed to get the basic desktop running. Or well the one laptop used to be impossible once some years ago, but a later kernel fixed that. I would recommend using a Live CD to boot with, if that works then the install should almost certainly work. If not, perhaps it's just not meant to be.
If there's many things wrong with wikipedia, being centralized is not one of them. How would you for example link in this P2P jungle, to what version of anything? Just let people end up at completely different articles depending on which path they took to get there? Yes, people battle for the "one truth" over the same wikipedia page, but they will always battle for the one truth. They'd fight over which page should come up first or redirecting links to the "right" page as long as there is anything to edit. And if there isn't, you're basically back to the World Wide Web where every page is run by their own webmaster.
To the question "Which Linux for Non-Techie Windows Users?", let's go with what Linus would use. That he uses a Linux distro that could work at all is coincidence.
Because there are very good examples that Wikipedia is, quite frankly, full of bullshit. I know people that have tried to correct some things they had very factual but relatively little verifiable sources of and got reverted because they referenced a forum of people that had pulled it out of their ass. I'm sure other people have their stories about pages that are full of crap.
However when you zoom out there's tons of pages that are just fine, it's easy to get hung up on a few broken pages. I just checked the wikipedia page of my hometown in Norway on the English wikipedia. There's about 8 screenfuls of content, It's somewhat of a mixed bag but it's much longer than Encyclopedia Britannica and has as far as I can tell no factual errors. What good is that? Well it's *good enough* if I just want to point people to a brief summary of where I come from. And unlike any other article on the topic which I could easily find elsewhere on the Internet, it's linked up to everything else. That's what makes wikipedia good, it's the sheer mass of inter-linking. The page itself is just so-so.
If it works at all... my HDTV only works when plugged in directly via a source, when going through the reciever which has HDMI inputs and outputs it doesn't work. It works with my monitor and I found on the net it's a known HDCP handshake timing issue. Screw them.
"We Lose Money On Each Unit, But Make It Up Through Volume"
Take a look at memory sticks and memory cards - they're just one of the dumbest chips possible wrapped in a few cents of plastic. Multiply it up to desired SSD size. It actually comes out to quite a bit in parts before you start trying to build an SSD out of it. Now I haven't looked at FusionIO's products in a while but their early products at least were basically banks of RAM with a battery powered backup. Neat, but didn't really help unless you could afford to buy tons and tons of RAM.
Just a quick check from a price guide here in Norway: Memory sticks: 32GB/489 NOK = 15.28 NOK/GB Memory card: 32GB/529 NOK = 16.53 NOK/GB Kingston SSDNow V-Series 40GB: 40GB/693 NOK = 17.33 NOK/GB
I didn't include one of every SSD size but they pretty much scale linearly, a 256 GB SSDs still works out to about 17 NOK/GB for the cheapest. So they all work out to about the same, you pay a premium on top of that for faster/more intelligent stuff from Intel/OCZ etc. but the floor doesn't go down until the flash gets cheaper. And memory sticks and memory cards are sold at volume pricing already, which means SSDs are too despite being in low volume because they use much the same chips.
netux writes to mention that Opera has released Dragonfly, their answer to Firebug, as an open source project under the BSD license. The release features a complete architectural overhaul using a modern version of the Scope Protocol (STP-1), a Mercurial repository on BitBucket, and a Wiki to get the ball rolling.
But would it be too much to ask that the summary contains at least once sentence about WTF the Scope Protocol is and what it can be used for?
You are welcome to take the first two and provide your own interpretation.
Sure I can be an armchair quarterback lawyer as well as anybody, But if my interpretations are more in line with the court than the guy who can say IAAL - despite following up with "but this is not legal advice" - then usually something is not right. Not that I expect a lawyer to be an oracle of how it'll turn out, but sometimes strong personal opinion can cloud your professional judgment, that is hardly limited to lawyers.
I think NYCL is a bit too fond of telling slashdot of how the law should be and how it should work, not so much practical reality. The practical reality is that a great number of people, be it in the legal system, in Congress or on the jury is sold on the idea of pirates like some kind of economic terrorist and about as popular. When people see a nail they'd like to strike down, they try very hard interpreting the law to be the hammer they need. Sometimes they take the absurdity too far like DVD-Jon that was charged with breaking into his own property and the OINK operator charged with conspiracy to defraud, but it bends quite far by design. This is to avoid people finding say some way to kill someone without being found guilty of murder, it doesn't really matter if they die at your hand or by a hit man or by some implicit act like cutting their brakes or by trapping them in a pit and the inaction of letting them starve to death.
The downside is that they'll also go very far in nailing you for something you think you did. Face it, when you're sitting there on the defense bench and trying to point at wifi stealers and trojans and errors in logging and aliens from outer space, you don't have any other suspect to point at. They aren't going to route themselves into a corner where the standards of evidence are so high no one will get convicted. They're not going to set damages of 35c/pop that are so low as to not discourage anyone at all. They're going lash out at you and viciously, because you're the one sitting in front of them right now. The judges have to in some fashion stay within the constitutional limits and the letter of the law, but they aren't a second guessing of Congress. For example, in this case the Supreme Court found that life with possibility of parole for three counts of fraud totalling 230$ was not "cruel and unusual".
They have made very many similar remarks that fines are largely a matter for the legislature, from United States v. Bajakajian:
The first, which we have emphasized in our cases interpreting the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, is that judgments about the appropriate punishment for an offense belong in the first instance to the legislature. See, e.g., Solem v. Helm, 463 U.S. 277, 290 (1983) (Reviewing courts should grant substantial deference to the broad authority that legislatures necessarily possess in determining the types and limits of punishments for crimes); see also Gore v. United States, 357 U.S. 386, 393 (1958) (Whatever views may be entertained regarding severity of punishment, these are peculiarly questions of legislative policy).
So one judge said 54,000$ is maximum, but when all is said and done that might not stand because it overrides an explicit limit set in copyright law. To be honest, I find life in prison for 230$ worth of fraud to be more disproportionate than 1.92M$ for sharing 24 songs. And that one is legal, so if the greater absurdity can stand so can the lesser. That is the IANAL interpretation at least...
I'd love to hear if this was really true. It's like building a car that'll tear itself apart in a few years and be a terrible second hand car. The lack of resale value will of course have no impact on the price people are willing to pay for a new one, right?...right?
I think it's just a slashdot hype, as Linux runs on ARM and Windows doesn't so... I use Linux but honestly the competition is moving at about the same pace as Linux, the gap isn't closing much.
People like to draw the comparison with civil engineering, where an engineer may be liable (even criminally) if, say, a bridge collapsed. But this isn't really the same thing. We're not talking about software that simply fails and causes damage. We're talking about software that fails when people deliberately attack it. This would be like holding a civil engineer responsible when a terrorist blows up a bridge -- he should have planned for a bomb being placed in just such-and-such location and made the bridge more resistant to attack.
Since you started this analogy, I'm fairly sure a civil engineer designing a bunker would be liable. But there's a cost of designing all buildings to be bunkers, and I doubt most companies would pay it.
Actually, school teaches you that. If it didn't, you were not paying attention in class.
You make a common mistake. Teaching is not the same thing as learning. Learning is what sticks and it includes knowledge that didn't come from the "teaching" end.
I still fail to see how this is bad English. "I sent him off to boot camp because I thought it would teach him discipline. Well, it didn't." sounds perfectly natural to me. Whether that was because they no longer teach discipline or they teach it too poorly or because the person didn't have the ability to learn discipline or because the person was unwilling to learn is left ambiguous, but it establishes that the skill was not learned at that time. The grandparent goes one further and claims that if the school didn't teach you, it was because you didn't pay attention in class. This excludes a few other possibilities too like that you already knew it before going to school and thus the school didn't teach you or that you never did go to school, but the formulation is normative - you should have learned this in school, not on the job. I think the grandparent is perfectly correct and your attempts at correction mistaken.
But one thing I can guarantee: no employer wants employees that resign simply because they are concerned with the attractiveness of their CV above everything else (or any other things that are far beyond the employer's sphere of influence).
Actually, I implicitly said so in an interview I was hired in recently. I've been working with a specific product for over four years, and I have gained certain general skills in reporting, databases and management information systems but those skills are topping out and by staying longer I'd become a product guru which would severely limit my work opportunities to that product. The CFO of the new company actually commented that he could understand after "being with a company for so long" because in the business I'm going the median turnaround is 2-3 years.
Besides, it's well known that you should not badmouth your employer in any way - I don't consider the above as doing so - and despite everyone asking they know that "I'm seeking new opportunities" it can mean everything from "I'm seeking new opportunities" to "I want to get paid more" or "My old job was a hellhole" or "You're a step in my career ladder". It's one of those questions where I doubt you can earn anything at all, you can just disqualify yourself.
Personally, I'm starting to see more and more why employers do other kinds of testing than the interview. The interview is extremely predictable, for example in almost every interview you get asked "What are your weak sides?" which can be slightly hidden as "Where do you see improvement potential in yourself?" or whatever. If you immediately have a canned answer, it's bogus. If you pretend to don't have any, you're arrogant and lying. And you don't want to come across as lacking confidence or important work skills.
I usually pick some of my character traits that are dualistic, like say "too much focus on detail" which of course implies that I might miss the big picture but also that I'm very thorough and reliable in what I do. "By nature a little introvert" while doing my best to be confident, volunteer information and show that I'm handling it well, at the same time building their confidence in that I can the things I say I can. You can't at the same time say that and have them pull answers out of you with a plier, then it won't work.
Interviews are a sales pitch from both sides. I know, I've been asked to perform a few interviews now this week and been getting a little interviewer coaching from the other sides of the table and it's also about setting our company in the most positive light possible. I think a lot of slashdotters would do better if they thought of it that way, it's not the "let's give a perfectly honest picture of each other and see how we match up". It's the glossed picture and only afterwards do you find out how you both look without the makeup.
learning a new language is easy. Learning to program is hard. c, java, c#, php, perl, are all very much alike. Once you know one learning the rest are easy.
Personally I find trying to learn multiple languages annoying because my brain doesn't do namespaces well. Let's take something as basic as opening a windows, yes it's the same but different. Then there's five thoughts in my head not one, usually I manage to pick the right one and for the more obscure I might have to look it up because I mix them up. Now don't get me wrong I'm hardly incapacitated but I find it eats of the total pool of program flow, state and logic that I can keep in mind and try to hammer out, the less I have to backtrack and check docs or function call parameters the better. Oddly enough it's different than languages, I speak three and they don't get mixed up but programming languages just lack that natural grouping.
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable; so what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
Global figures. We here in Norway are on the same latitude as Siberia and it's not remotely as cold. Sahara is a desert and yet it's on the same latitude as India where there's rain enough for a billion people. Weather patterns can change, local climate can change, wind patterns can change to flip all of that around. And the climate isn't static, for example >a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_nino">El nino is quite well studied and shows you cant expect a year over year steady trend. The global trend if you look at decades or centuries is still quite clear, with or without cherry picking data it is on the rise.
I'm guessing we should remove SAMBA and FAT support while we're at it. Hope you don't like to access those USB drives. Oh yeah, you shouldn't be using h.264, mpeg (of any kind) or a number of other container formats other than Ogg + Vorbis/Theora.
You're not honestly comparing apples to apples here. There are protocols and formats and codecs that aren't native to Linux true, but they are either relatively simple and feature complete or the standard is open though non-free. For example let's take H.264, both ffmpeg and x264 should be able to decode any valid H.264 stream. WINE and Mono on the other hand are trying to implement some of the core features in a vast platform, they're like constant hackjobs to bugfix and update in a neverending stream of things that don't work and each new thing comes as a "surprise".
Don't get me wrong, I've fiddled with WINE quite a lot and done git bisects to find regressions and it's extremely useful in doing things on Linux that otherwise plain wouldn't work, but I also see how much of it is stubs and hacks and unknowns that they duct tape together to make it mostly work. It's never going to get done, it'll always be a crutch to lean on never a real leg to stand on. I don't in any way think they should be removed, but I see them as very much less ideal than most of the things you mention.
A lot of the time, they're hyped well beyond reality. Like how the Norwegian government was to use ODF. Yes, all public forms will be available in HTML, PDF or ODF but the many thousands of MS Office licences used internally did not change. Microsoft marketing would sometimes be proud to learn from the OSS community.
However, given that even many diehard GTK developers seem to have serious issues with GTK, and there is some dissent over how to proceed with GTK 3 in the future, why not at least consider a future Gnome built upon Qt?
The problem is C vs C++. It pretty effectively rules out any real sharing of code bases and means that to write Gnome/Qt, you are pretty much starting from scratch. I think KDE just tried that and it was a long and nasty road. I don't think that many enough would embrace Qt/C++ to see it through and it'd never work quite the same, the danger is that you'd only get a bleak shadow of what Gnome should be and get all kinds of flamewars going.
So ultimately my question is, does Ubuntu have as one of its goals to enable someone like me to finally make the switch to Linux?
Yes. The trouble is, if you frame it that way then Linux has to dislodge every incumbent market dominating piece of software which is well beyond the capability of Shuttleworth. I think it's actually beyond the capability of the whole open source community. Even things like Firefox which is one of the grand champions of open source only got 25% market share, the old ways sit hard.
Microsoft won't budge but the other companies, they're just looking for a business case and you'll have Adobe CS - the real thing - on Ubuntu. Of course, this is the old chicken and egg problem. Well, I think the only way out of that is not trying to win every niche. There's many, many people that need only basic software, but they're also the kind of user you can't require a degree in CS to administrate their box - those groups are almost mutually exclusive.
I don't think Shuttlworth has so many other ways to go than the one he's going, trying to polish it up so new users can use it and trying to create one big target that hopefully some commmercial companies will start to pick up on. Don't think they'll support ten different distros, it'll be like server software. If you want support, you're running our configuration. If it runs anyway, great for you but not our problem when it breaks. If you think all people will ever need is OSS, then we'll be at 1% another ten years.
So... If you go to hospital, you might be safer with a stoned surgeon, than one who's been up for 36 hours?
Trouble is, you'd probably end up with a surgeon that's stoned and has been up 36 hours. Yeah, it's proven time and time again that lack of sleep seriously impacts your performance, you should never be operated on by someone that's gone 36 hours without sleep unless it's an emergency. But practical matters dictate there won't be operating rooms and doctors everywhere and not enough so in a major accident they just do what they got to do. If it wasn't for that, they should certainly be no less restricted than truck drivers with mandatory rest stops and such. Seriously, would you let someone unfit to drive a road vechicle cut you open with a scalpel? I wouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL I got to love the replies on this, it's so common in open source land.
User: I want to do X.
OSS community: You shouldn't do X. You don't need X. You're doing it all wrong.
Let me translate what filters through to 99% of the rest of the world:
OSS software can't do what I want and is serving me all kinds of bullshit reasons.
If the customer insists on wearing both belt and suspenders by locking it down on the client and securing the perimeter, let them. If they want to trust the Windows cert store, let them. If shit hits the fan, it's still their fault. There's a middle ground between doing ActiveX and being a best(?) practice nazi. That middle ground is called being flexible and supporting your customer's demands, even if it's not exactly how you'd do it. All the way back to Sun Tzu have they said you should choose your battles wisely, so should Firefox. Not just that this is the right way and the only way, that you can already get from Microsoft and Apple.
OLED got some very nice properties over LCD and plasma screens, but I think the LED backlight was the killer. For the prices we're talking here, you can have a bunch of them selectively backlighting or not backlighting the screen. There's some trickery to this true, but if you look at some of the new LCDs out like this it says "a 240-block local dimming LED backlight". At that point you're starting to fake it rather well, with a dynamic contrast in the millions rather than in the thousands.
I never got why anyone would work as a contractor for only one client anyway. Isnt the whole point of being a contractor, that you have more than one client, and that if one of them is a dick, you can say fuck you, and still work for your other clients? (= fire one of your bosses)
Speaking as someone that works in a consulting company that does a lot of individual CV sales, many companies prefer to hire a full time resource when they first hire someone. Typical example are project managers or project teams. You come in, work 100% on this project for two years and go bye-bye. Put together a bunch of 50% resources and you'll never get the team together on one day, people need information or clarification from someone that's not present, scheduling meetings becomes a hassle, something like the daily stand-up for those doing agile will always have people missing and so on. 1 FTE is not a big unit when you're staffing up a big project. Many lone contractors are going after the same kind of jobs, except they run their own risk of downtime but also higher payout when they are hired out.
But then again this is Norway where it's easier to get rid of a contractor than an employee, and health insurance isn't an issue (though contractors don't get same sick leave benefits). In the US with two weeks notice, I don't see that you got job security either way. Perhaps even less as an employee if there's early termination fees in that contract position. I see why health insurance is a big perk. I don't understand why people want that system though, it's like a sprinkler system that works great except in case of fire. The greatest need I could see for a health insurance is if I develop some sort of chronic condition, which looks like when it will be least useful.
Not to beat you over the head with the WORKS4ME sign, but you must have some seriously bad luck. I've installed Linux now on 5 desktops and 3 laptops dating from about 2002 to present, and while I've struggled wtih wifi and suspend and sound and external firewire disks, I've always managed to get the basic desktop running. Or well the one laptop used to be impossible once some years ago, but a later kernel fixed that. I would recommend using a Live CD to boot with, if that works then the install should almost certainly work. If not, perhaps it's just not meant to be.
If there's many things wrong with wikipedia, being centralized is not one of them. How would you for example link in this P2P jungle, to what version of anything? Just let people end up at completely different articles depending on which path they took to get there? Yes, people battle for the "one truth" over the same wikipedia page, but they will always battle for the one truth. They'd fight over which page should come up first or redirecting links to the "right" page as long as there is anything to edit. And if there isn't, you're basically back to the World Wide Web where every page is run by their own webmaster.
To the question "Which Linux for Non-Techie Windows Users?", let's go with what Linus would use. That he uses a Linux distro that could work at all is coincidence.
Because there are very good examples that Wikipedia is, quite frankly, full of bullshit. I know people that have tried to correct some things they had very factual but relatively little verifiable sources of and got reverted because they referenced a forum of people that had pulled it out of their ass. I'm sure other people have their stories about pages that are full of crap.
However when you zoom out there's tons of pages that are just fine, it's easy to get hung up on a few broken pages. I just checked the wikipedia page of my hometown in Norway on the English wikipedia. There's about 8 screenfuls of content, It's somewhat of a mixed bag but it's much longer than Encyclopedia Britannica and has as far as I can tell no factual errors. What good is that? Well it's *good enough* if I just want to point people to a brief summary of where I come from. And unlike any other article on the topic which I could easily find elsewhere on the Internet, it's linked up to everything else. That's what makes wikipedia good, it's the sheer mass of inter-linking. The page itself is just so-so.
If it works at all... my HDTV only works when plugged in directly via a source, when going through the reciever which has HDMI inputs and outputs it doesn't work. It works with my monitor and I found on the net it's a known HDCP handshake timing issue. Screw them.
"We Lose Money On Each Unit, But Make It Up Through Volume"
Take a look at memory sticks and memory cards - they're just one of the dumbest chips possible wrapped in a few cents of plastic. Multiply it up to desired SSD size. It actually comes out to quite a bit in parts before you start trying to build an SSD out of it. Now I haven't looked at FusionIO's products in a while but their early products at least were basically banks of RAM with a battery powered backup. Neat, but didn't really help unless you could afford to buy tons and tons of RAM.
Just a quick check from a price guide here in Norway:
Memory sticks: 32GB/489 NOK = 15.28 NOK/GB
Memory card: 32GB/529 NOK = 16.53 NOK/GB
Kingston SSDNow V-Series 40GB: 40GB/693 NOK = 17.33 NOK/GB
I didn't include one of every SSD size but they pretty much scale linearly, a 256 GB SSDs still works out to about 17 NOK/GB for the cheapest. So they all work out to about the same, you pay a premium on top of that for faster/more intelligent stuff from Intel/OCZ etc. but the floor doesn't go down until the flash gets cheaper. And memory sticks and memory cards are sold at volume pricing already, which means SSDs are too despite being in low volume because they use much the same chips.
Comment above was written in C++ instead of C and thus contains a C too many. Please do a C-- before mentally compiling.
netux writes to mention that Opera has released Dragonfly, their answer to Firebug, as an open source project under the BSD license. The release features a complete architectural overhaul using a modern version of the Scope Protocol (STP-1), a Mercurial repository on BitBucket, and a Wiki to get the ball rolling.
But would it be too much to ask that the summary contains at least once sentence about WTF the Scope Protocol is and what it can be used for?
You are welcome to take the first two and provide your own interpretation.
Sure I can be an armchair quarterback lawyer as well as anybody, But if my interpretations are more in line with the court than the guy who can say IAAL - despite following up with "but this is not legal advice" - then usually something is not right. Not that I expect a lawyer to be an oracle of how it'll turn out, but sometimes strong personal opinion can cloud your professional judgment, that is hardly limited to lawyers.
I think NYCL is a bit too fond of telling slashdot of how the law should be and how it should work, not so much practical reality. The practical reality is that a great number of people, be it in the legal system, in Congress or on the jury is sold on the idea of pirates like some kind of economic terrorist and about as popular. When people see a nail they'd like to strike down, they try very hard interpreting the law to be the hammer they need. Sometimes they take the absurdity too far like DVD-Jon that was charged with breaking into his own property and the OINK operator charged with conspiracy to defraud, but it bends quite far by design. This is to avoid people finding say some way to kill someone without being found guilty of murder, it doesn't really matter if they die at your hand or by a hit man or by some implicit act like cutting their brakes or by trapping them in a pit and the inaction of letting them starve to death.
The downside is that they'll also go very far in nailing you for something you think you did. Face it, when you're sitting there on the defense bench and trying to point at wifi stealers and trojans and errors in logging and aliens from outer space, you don't have any other suspect to point at. They aren't going to route themselves into a corner where the standards of evidence are so high no one will get convicted. They're not going to set damages of 35c/pop that are so low as to not discourage anyone at all. They're going lash out at you and viciously, because you're the one sitting in front of them right now. The judges have to in some fashion stay within the constitutional limits and the letter of the law, but they aren't a second guessing of Congress. For example, in this case the Supreme Court found that life with possibility of parole for three counts of fraud totalling 230$ was not "cruel and unusual".
They have made very many similar remarks that fines are largely a matter for the legislature, from United States v. Bajakajian:
The first, which we have emphasized in our cases interpreting the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, is that judgments about the appropriate punishment for an offense belong in the first instance to the legislature. See, e.g., Solem v. Helm, 463 U.S. 277, 290 (1983) (Reviewing courts should grant substantial deference to the broad authority that legislatures necessarily possess in determining the types and limits of punishments for crimes); see also Gore v. United States, 357 U.S. 386, 393 (1958) (Whatever views may be entertained regarding severity of punishment, these are peculiarly questions of legislative policy).
So one judge said 54,000$ is maximum, but when all is said and done that might not stand because it overrides an explicit limit set in copyright law. To be honest, I find life in prison for 230$ worth of fraud to be more disproportionate than 1.92M$ for sharing 24 songs. And that one is legal, so if the greater absurdity can stand so can the lesser. That is the IANAL interpretation at least...
I'd love to hear if this was really true. It's like building a car that'll tear itself apart in a few years and be a terrible second hand car. The lack of resale value will of course have no impact on the price people are willing to pay for a new one, right? ...right?
Maybe they're making some kind of 'level of DRM annoyingness' versus 'copies purchased' graph.
Wish there was, but the only thing you'd measure was whether the game itself was a hit or a flop.
Really? Honestly? Or is it just media hype?
I think it's just a slashdot hype, as Linux runs on ARM and Windows doesn't so... I use Linux but honestly the competition is moving at about the same pace as Linux, the gap isn't closing much.
People like to draw the comparison with civil engineering, where an engineer may be liable (even criminally) if, say, a bridge collapsed. But this isn't really the same thing. We're not talking about software that simply fails and causes damage. We're talking about software that fails when people deliberately attack it. This would be like holding a civil engineer responsible when a terrorist blows up a bridge -- he should have planned for a bomb being placed in just such-and-such location and made the bridge more resistant to attack.
Since you started this analogy, I'm fairly sure a civil engineer designing a bunker would be liable. But there's a cost of designing all buildings to be bunkers, and I doubt most companies would pay it.
Actually, school teaches you that. If it didn't, you were not paying attention in class.
You make a common mistake. Teaching is not the same thing as learning. Learning is what sticks and it includes knowledge that didn't come from the "teaching" end.
I still fail to see how this is bad English. "I sent him off to boot camp because I thought it would teach him discipline. Well, it didn't." sounds perfectly natural to me. Whether that was because they no longer teach discipline or they teach it too poorly or because the person didn't have the ability to learn discipline or because the person was unwilling to learn is left ambiguous, but it establishes that the skill was not learned at that time. The grandparent goes one further and claims that if the school didn't teach you, it was because you didn't pay attention in class. This excludes a few other possibilities too like that you already knew it before going to school and thus the school didn't teach you or that you never did go to school, but the formulation is normative - you should have learned this in school, not on the job. I think the grandparent is perfectly correct and your attempts at correction mistaken.
But one thing I can guarantee: no employer wants employees that resign simply because they are concerned with the attractiveness of their CV above everything else (or any other things that are far beyond the employer's sphere of influence).
Actually, I implicitly said so in an interview I was hired in recently. I've been working with a specific product for over four years, and I have gained certain general skills in reporting, databases and management information systems but those skills are topping out and by staying longer I'd become a product guru which would severely limit my work opportunities to that product. The CFO of the new company actually commented that he could understand after "being with a company for so long" because in the business I'm going the median turnaround is 2-3 years.
Besides, it's well known that you should not badmouth your employer in any way - I don't consider the above as doing so - and despite everyone asking they know that "I'm seeking new opportunities" it can mean everything from "I'm seeking new opportunities" to "I want to get paid more" or "My old job was a hellhole" or "You're a step in my career ladder". It's one of those questions where I doubt you can earn anything at all, you can just disqualify yourself.
Personally, I'm starting to see more and more why employers do other kinds of testing than the interview. The interview is extremely predictable, for example in almost every interview you get asked "What are your weak sides?" which can be slightly hidden as "Where do you see improvement potential in yourself?" or whatever. If you immediately have a canned answer, it's bogus. If you pretend to don't have any, you're arrogant and lying. And you don't want to come across as lacking confidence or important work skills.
I usually pick some of my character traits that are dualistic, like say "too much focus on detail" which of course implies that I might miss the big picture but also that I'm very thorough and reliable in what I do. "By nature a little introvert" while doing my best to be confident, volunteer information and show that I'm handling it well, at the same time building their confidence in that I can the things I say I can. You can't at the same time say that and have them pull answers out of you with a plier, then it won't work.
Interviews are a sales pitch from both sides. I know, I've been asked to perform a few interviews now this week and been getting a little interviewer coaching from the other sides of the table and it's also about setting our company in the most positive light possible. I think a lot of slashdotters would do better if they thought of it that way, it's not the "let's give a perfectly honest picture of each other and see how we match up". It's the glossed picture and only afterwards do you find out how you both look without the makeup.
learning a new language is easy. Learning to program is hard.
c, java, c#, php, perl, are all very much alike. Once you know one learning the rest are easy.
Personally I find trying to learn multiple languages annoying because my brain doesn't do namespaces well. Let's take something as basic as opening a windows, yes it's the same but different. Then there's five thoughts in my head not one, usually I manage to pick the right one and for the more obscure I might have to look it up because I mix them up. Now don't get me wrong I'm hardly incapacitated but I find it eats of the total pool of program flow, state and logic that I can keep in mind and try to hammer out, the less I have to backtrack and check docs or function call parameters the better. Oddly enough it's different than languages, I speak three and they don't get mixed up but programming languages just lack that natural grouping.
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable; so what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
Global figures. We here in Norway are on the same latitude as Siberia and it's not remotely as cold. Sahara is a desert and yet it's on the same latitude as India where there's rain enough for a billion people. Weather patterns can change, local climate can change, wind patterns can change to flip all of that around. And the climate isn't static, for example >a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_nino">El nino is quite well studied and shows you cant expect a year over year steady trend. The global trend if you look at decades or centuries is still quite clear, with or without cherry picking data it is on the rise.
I'm guessing we should remove SAMBA and FAT support while we're at it. Hope you don't like to access those USB drives. Oh yeah, you shouldn't be using h.264, mpeg (of any kind) or a number of other container formats other than Ogg + Vorbis/Theora.
You're not honestly comparing apples to apples here. There are protocols and formats and codecs that aren't native to Linux true, but they are either relatively simple and feature complete or the standard is open though non-free. For example let's take H.264, both ffmpeg and x264 should be able to decode any valid H.264 stream. WINE and Mono on the other hand are trying to implement some of the core features in a vast platform, they're like constant hackjobs to bugfix and update in a neverending stream of things that don't work and each new thing comes as a "surprise".
Don't get me wrong, I've fiddled with WINE quite a lot and done git bisects to find regressions and it's extremely useful in doing things on Linux that otherwise plain wouldn't work, but I also see how much of it is stubs and hacks and unknowns that they duct tape together to make it mostly work. It's never going to get done, it'll always be a crutch to lean on never a real leg to stand on. I don't in any way think they should be removed, but I see them as very much less ideal than most of the things you mention.
A lot of the time, they're hyped well beyond reality. Like how the Norwegian government was to use ODF. Yes, all public forms will be available in HTML, PDF or ODF but the many thousands of MS Office licences used internally did not change. Microsoft marketing would sometimes be proud to learn from the OSS community.
However, given that even many diehard GTK developers seem to have serious issues with GTK, and there is some dissent over how to proceed with GTK 3 in the future, why not at least consider a future Gnome built upon Qt?
The problem is C vs C++. It pretty effectively rules out any real sharing of code bases and means that to write Gnome/Qt, you are pretty much starting from scratch. I think KDE just tried that and it was a long and nasty road. I don't think that many enough would embrace Qt/C++ to see it through and it'd never work quite the same, the danger is that you'd only get a bleak shadow of what Gnome should be and get all kinds of flamewars going.
Unfortunately,
So ultimately my question is, does Ubuntu have as one of its goals to enable someone like me to finally make the switch to Linux?
Yes. The trouble is, if you frame it that way then Linux has to dislodge every incumbent market dominating piece of software which is well beyond the capability of Shuttleworth. I think it's actually beyond the capability of the whole open source community. Even things like Firefox which is one of the grand champions of open source only got 25% market share, the old ways sit hard.
Microsoft won't budge but the other companies, they're just looking for a business case and you'll have Adobe CS - the real thing - on Ubuntu. Of course, this is the old chicken and egg problem. Well, I think the only way out of that is not trying to win every niche. There's many, many people that need only basic software, but they're also the kind of user you can't require a degree in CS to administrate their box - those groups are almost mutually exclusive.
I don't think Shuttlworth has so many other ways to go than the one he's going, trying to polish it up so new users can use it and trying to create one big target that hopefully some commmercial companies will start to pick up on. Don't think they'll support ten different distros, it'll be like server software. If you want support, you're running our configuration. If it runs anyway, great for you but not our problem when it breaks. If you think all people will ever need is OSS, then we'll be at 1% another ten years.
So... If you go to hospital, you might be safer with a stoned surgeon, than one who's been up for 36 hours?
Trouble is, you'd probably end up with a surgeon that's stoned and has been up 36 hours. Yeah, it's proven time and time again that lack of sleep seriously impacts your performance, you should never be operated on by someone that's gone 36 hours without sleep unless it's an emergency. But practical matters dictate there won't be operating rooms and doctors everywhere and not enough so in a major accident they just do what they got to do. If it wasn't for that, they should certainly be no less restricted than truck drivers with mandatory rest stops and such. Seriously, would you let someone unfit to drive a road vechicle cut you open with a scalpel? I wouldn't.