Touche. Some people say CO2 is pollution, some say it's not. Kyoto has been blamed for missing the point by focussing on CO2 (instead of ie. nitrogen-based emmisions and heavy metals).
Most people, however, agree that CO2 is at least a side effect of fossil fuel overconsumption and is hence related pretty much directly to "economic groth" and thus pollution, given the way most energy is still being produced.
But sure, even in the area of greenhouse gasses, cow farts are probably a worse threat than all the rest combined;-)
Wasn't the whole point of the Kyoto protocol to pay large sums for pollution? Be it $500 million or 1 billion - that's just the short-term effect on economy, the idea is that by taxing polution NOW (and making reduced emission alternatives more attractive) we can alleviate some of the long-term effects (on economy).
If the assumptions of the Kyoto protocol are correct (or at least model some of the environmental costs of our current economies) the mispredicted budgets should worry us about what's to come (long term), rather than the "devestating effect on [] economies" induced by red figures in current annual budgets.
It sounds cynical, but the best way to reduce pollution is slowing economy; increasing corporate taxes. We're not going to help future generations by keeping our current economy "healthy" through pollution.
Making a movie isn't all that expensive by itself. The real cost is in marketing it. There are countless examples of movies that were produced relatively cheap, and still mass marketed (eg. Blair Witch Project).
But producing lots of movies on a small budget is very risky and laborious for large media companies. They'd rather spend 80% of their annual budget on one or two blockbusters. Sure it's a much bigger gamble, but at least the marketing costs (and revenues on merchandise) can be estimated with some accuracy.
The crackdown on copyright infringers, the lame titles and scenarios, the ever boring superstar casts... are all due to the ultra large studios and their unimaginative cowardly management. And since noone there seems to know a way out, they've been consolidating for years instead of diversifying.
>I was under the assumption that most homemade PCs were AMD systems. Is that statistic including those?
Unfortunately, and as much as I'd like to believe the opposite, most computers are not homemade. In fact, it's wasn't even more than a margin in the early micro's glory days (1975-1980).
Nice link! This tech definitely isn't there yet, but still it's quite impressive. Wonder if in a couple of year's I'll be able to run applets like that on my cell phone...
> Bush needs to be criticized. But you should criticize him for war, torture, > the economy --- NOT for something he hasn't done yet, and may never do.
IMHO, the criticism is not so much directed at Bush as it is against the US general public/voters.
>It makes you sound like a nutcase, and besides, most people find it hard to >get angry about something that is obviously not happening (i.e., US internet censorship).
You just mentioned it's incorrect to pass judgement on something that hasn't happened. This statement equally renders you a nutcase for passing judgment on something that hasn't not happened (unless you're that Anonymous Coward guy on his way Back to the Future).
>And at the same time, you end up minimizing the wrongness of what Iran's >government is doing.
Hey, it's just someone's opinion. Some people would rather live in the US than Iran, and vice versa. From one perspective, Iran isn't the one currently occupying other countries. But that's just one perspective, man.
-- The right to speak does not entail the right to be taken seriously
... After a user buys a song from Peer Impact, future buyers get it from that member -- or others who have gotten it in the meantime -- instead of from a central server. Users have to pay for each track they download, but sharing songs they've purchased from Peer Impact earns them credits they can spend on the service.'"
You have no idea about the world outside your schoolyard.
Afghanistan has never been a "country" as you describe it. Even before the Russian invasion it was best described as an anarchy; the it was governed by war-lords. Even under the US-backed taliban rule one could hardly consider the taliban as a government representing (the majority of) the country.
Of course, a country that poor and that unorganized is a great place to settle terrorist training camps. And yeah, the taliban weren't more friendly to our imperialistic ambitions as we would have been to them if they'd suggested they'd bring us under their enlightend dictatorship!
But you are suggesting we had some sort of a moral right to kick "their" asses because "they" -- the majority of Afghan citizens -- elected the harbour terrorist training camps for Al Qaeda, the same way the US harbours Fort Knox.
All the same, I'd say Afghanistan is slightly better off under their new dictator. But IMHO the invasion was not justified by 9/11 and it most definitely did not guarantee something like that would never happen again.
>One slight problem: how do you distinguish between those who've done nothing illegal and those who have, if you've no idea who anyone is.
Ultimately you can't. You can't protect a country (govenrment and civilians) against all evils, but you could protect civilians against their government. To me the latter is just common sense, while your intend to trade liberty is a just step closer to state-driven violence and barbarism.
Notice that both view fit into laws and that neither can rule out armed opposition and terrorism. Extremely powerfull authorities just dont' work, even though they cause lots of grief. Mideval inquisition did not stop murderers, WWII gestapo's did not stop the resistance and McCarthy's anti-communism posses did not stop the soviets from stealing H-bomb technology. But lots of innocent people were hurt in the process.
Just to clarify: since in fact no Afghan soldiers were involved, no "act of war" was in fact committed. The taliban "government" came to power with aid of the US and were later removed by US force. A souvereign state with innocent civilians was raped over an issue that is primarily US internal.
Surely, Afghan training camps weren't there out of American pattriotism. But neither were the Saudi families on US soil that paid for the camps. They were NOT hunted, caught, killed, or tortured without trial in Guantanamo. Far from that. They were put on planes and allowed to escape to Saudi Arabia even when the post-9/11 no-fly measure was still in effect.
Fingers could equally point at agencies, airport security, North-American, European and Asian countries. That's what I mean by Afghanistan being related only peripherally and Iraq not begin related at all.
OK. I'm ranting, so I'll stop.
-- Ps. Thanks for spelling corrections, but please have another go;-)
So what your are saying is that we should give up important civil rights to catch some frauds? I'm sure europe would have been a better place if you were caught for voting twice. I'm sure real criminals will better their life if they realize can only do monetary transactions through cash. I'm sure biometric data at ATMs will finally put a halt to all those banks & card sevices going bankrupt.
Get the picture? Civil rights are traded for pennies. Near-unbreakable IDs have less to do with terrorism than with control, efficiency, direct marketing and (mis)use by greyhats.
Indeed. To police-state-lovers, 9/11 never meant more than a publicity stunt. The powers that be instinctively pointed away. Away from their failing intelligence and away from their internal problems. Afganistan was only periferally related, Iraq wasn't related at all. Neither were biometric data, RFID tags in passports, snipers at airports or SDI programmes related.
Fact of the matter is that although a lot of damage is being done to our civil rights (and world peace) terrorist scenarios in western countries are still as real as ever.
The 9/11 hijackers did not carry forged IDs and neither did Timothy McVeigh. They never needed to. It may be conforting to think of terrorists as bearded Bin-Laden lookalikes, but in reality a terrorist may as well be a model citizen, a patriot with no record right until the moment he blows something up.
And since we haven't found a descent answer to terrorism in the last couple of years, maybe we should cool down and stop panicing.
> Looks to me like a borked drivermodel, unstable hardware-abstraction and a general nonpredictability of the os'
Inferior design of Windows is indeed a major part of the problems. However, only a utopian operating systems will make automatic configuration trivial. Anyone who's ever written installers knows about the headaches of damaged directories, garbage due to bugs in previous releases and the general ability of monkeys to misuse even idiot-proof software!
To test if an internet browser will crash when unconnected, you NEED to test with internet down. And every option you allow a user to set (such as choosing the install location) will involve extra complexity on integration with other programs. Although this extra complexity may seems simple at first, it will inevitibly have its own consistency issues that will need to be tested. In the end, complexity never turns out to be simple (hence the word).
Summarizing:
some issues can be avoided by good design;
some can be solved by descent testing and
some will never be solved.
So, restating your grumbling - if I may be so bold: why did M$ put so many issues from the first catagory into the second?
Also, a single binary doesn't imply a single test. Ie, an install may work when connected to a LAN but may fail when off-line. Testing involves numerous configurations. Think laptops, slow hardware, custom OS installs, partitioning, auto-upgrade vs manual upgrade...
Thanks for mentioning the pros of Open Source. I agree, but that's not the point.
Even OSS developers do some testing before they release their code. At least for the larger (multi-developer) code bases. Quality is essential if you don't want to scare your users/co-developers away. And quality is only partially a result of programming skills.
Now you may point at the difference in emphasis between informal release-testing and formal QA in the legal sense. But it's just rediculous to assume that OSS solves everithing to the point where you just merge & release everthing you type and/or every patch submitted to you without even looking at it.
-- It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Either you have no idea about how (software) project management works or you have seen some worst-in-class examples at your company. Testing and reproducing a bug is *very* important. Bypassing that step is a guarantee to waste valuable programmer's time on non-issues. In a healthy organization with averagely skilled testers, this part of testing takes a couple of hours at most.
Next is bug fixing. This is by far the most variable and unpredictible part, requiring the best of any programmer. It may take minutes or it may take weeks. Besides good programmers, good process can be of great help here.
Finally comes the release testing, which is what the article is talking about. This phase is essential: *never* trust a programmer if he says its "fixed and I tested it". Generally, programmers are simply incapable of testing their own stuff. I know as a programmer. Release-testing takes a considerable, but predictable amount of time, assuming the programmer did a good job. Skipping this phase will sooner or later lead to disasters like the recent Netscape 8 release.
Now I agree with your complaint on workload and lack of tech-savvy managers, but it's nonsense to say that the process as a whole sucks.
Not really. Microsoft has no serious business at all in Europe. Mostly sales, marketing and some training. By firing these people, they'll hurt their own sales figures more than they'll hurt a bunch of politicians: is Kamikaze.
The "IBM trick" works best for jobs that you were planning to move anyway, like R&D outsourcing. And I'm not sure IBM is doing this just to piss of the EU.
> In short, the better solution would be to have the most popular media players > all available in a default install - IE, install Windows, and it gives you a > menu of which player you want installed. Same with Linux.
Hmm OK. If that's exactly what Microsoft would have done from the start -- include only the most popular players in a default install -- everyone would still be using Netscape and RealPlayer.
Afterall, those were the most popular applications before microsoft started pushing them out of the market. At the time, IE & MediaPlayer were hardly better, so they would only have gained a marginal momentum if they'd had to compete on equal terms.
So yes, your suggestion sounds great, and yes, it would have made Windows a much weaker product (from a marketing perspective).
Indeed. In terms of game theory it's also important to notice the inbalance of power between players. That is: a large company, like HP, can afford to divide the world market into different economic regions, while smaller companies may not.
In that light, it is not just the consumers who pay for HP's corporate wealth, but smaller companies will be forced to pay their share as well through unfair competition. Still, *they*'re supposed to be the only way out of the situation in a free economy. That is: free trade, and companies adhering to the principles of free trade are supposed to (somehow) conquer totalitarian regimes and companies and bring universal freedom, democracy, wealth and happiness to everyone eventually......It's so easy to show that free trade without corporate governance, international legislation, anti-trust and other regulation isn't helping anyone except those that don't need it.
Slashdot Mirror
Touche.
;-)
Some people say CO2 is pollution, some say it's not. Kyoto has been blamed for missing the point by focussing on CO2 (instead of ie. nitrogen-based emmisions and heavy metals).
Most people, however, agree that CO2 is at least a side effect of fossil fuel overconsumption and is hence related pretty much directly to "economic groth" and thus pollution, given the way most energy is still being produced.
But sure, even in the area of greenhouse gasses, cow farts are probably a worse threat than all the rest combined
Wasn't the whole point of the Kyoto protocol to pay large sums for pollution? Be it $500 million or 1 billion - that's just the short-term effect on economy, the idea is that by taxing polution NOW (and making reduced emission alternatives more attractive) we can alleviate some of the long-term effects (on economy).
If the assumptions of the Kyoto protocol are correct (or at least model some of the environmental costs of our current economies) the mispredicted budgets should worry us about what's to come (long term), rather than the "devestating effect on [] economies" induced by red figures in current annual budgets.
It sounds cynical, but the best way to reduce pollution is slowing economy; increasing corporate taxes. We're not going to help future generations by keeping our current economy "healthy" through pollution.
Making a movie isn't all that expensive by itself. The real cost is in marketing it. There are countless examples of movies that were produced relatively cheap, and still mass marketed (eg. Blair Witch Project).
But producing lots of movies on a small budget is very risky and laborious for large media companies. They'd rather spend 80% of their annual budget on one or two blockbusters. Sure it's a much bigger gamble, but at least the marketing costs (and revenues on merchandise) can be estimated with some accuracy.
The crackdown on copyright infringers, the lame titles and scenarios, the ever boring superstar casts... are all due to the ultra large studios and their unimaginative cowardly management. And since noone there seems to know a way out, they've been consolidating for years instead of diversifying.
OK. I'm ranting so I'll stop.
>I was under the assumption that most homemade PCs were AMD systems. Is that statistic including those?
Unfortunately, and as much as I'd like to believe the opposite, most computers are not homemade. In fact, it's wasn't even more than a margin in the early micro's glory days (1975-1980).
Nice link!
This tech definitely isn't there yet, but still it's quite impressive.
Wonder if in a couple of year's I'll be able to run applets like that on my cell phone...
> Bush needs to be criticized. But you should criticize him for war, torture,
> the economy --- NOT for something he hasn't done yet, and may never do.
IMHO, the criticism is not so much directed at Bush as it is against the US general public/voters.
>It makes you sound like a nutcase, and besides, most people find it hard to
>get angry about something that is obviously not happening (i.e., US internet censorship).
You just mentioned it's incorrect to pass judgement on something that hasn't happened. This statement equally renders you a nutcase for passing judgment on something that hasn't not happened (unless you're that Anonymous Coward guy on his way Back to the Future).
>And at the same time, you end up minimizing the wrongness of what Iran's
>government is doing.
Hey, it's just someone's opinion. Some people would rather live in the US than Iran, and vice versa.
From one perspective, Iran isn't the one currently occupying other countries. But that's just one perspective, man.
--
The right to speak does not entail the right to be taken seriously
OK.
... After a user buys a song from Peer Impact, future buyers get it from that member -- or others who have gotten it in the meantime -- instead of from a central server. Users have to pay for each track they download, but sharing songs they've purchased from Peer Impact earns them credits they can spend on the service.'"
Now read on, you're almost there:
Get it?
Hmm.
Like that goatse guy?!?
You have no idea about the world outside your schoolyard.
Afghanistan has never been a "country" as you describe it. Even before the Russian invasion it was best described as an anarchy; the it was governed by war-lords. Even under the US-backed taliban rule one could hardly consider the taliban as a government representing (the majority of) the country.
Of course, a country that poor and that unorganized is a great place to settle terrorist training camps. And yeah, the taliban weren't more friendly to our imperialistic ambitions as we would have been to them if they'd suggested they'd bring us under their enlightend dictatorship!
But you are suggesting we had some sort of a moral right to kick "their" asses because "they" -- the majority of Afghan citizens -- elected the harbour terrorist training camps for Al Qaeda, the same way the US harbours Fort Knox.
All the same, I'd say Afghanistan is slightly better off under their new dictator. But IMHO the invasion was not justified by 9/11 and it most definitely did not guarantee something like that would never happen again.
>One slight problem: how do you distinguish between those who've done nothing illegal and those who have, if you've no idea who anyone is.
Ultimately you can't. You can't protect a country (govenrment and civilians) against all evils, but you could protect civilians against their government. To me the latter is just common sense, while your intend to trade liberty is a just step closer to state-driven violence and barbarism.
Notice that both view fit into laws and that neither can rule out armed opposition and terrorism. Extremely powerfull authorities just dont' work, even though they cause lots of grief. Mideval inquisition did not stop murderers, WWII gestapo's did not stop the resistance and McCarthy's anti-communism posses did not stop the soviets from stealing H-bomb technology. But lots of innocent people were hurt in the process.
Just to clarify: since in fact no Afghan soldiers were involved, no "act of war" was in fact committed. The taliban "government" came to power with aid of the US and were later removed by US force. A souvereign state with innocent civilians was raped over an issue that is primarily US internal.
Surely, Afghan training camps weren't there out of American pattriotism. But neither were the Saudi families on US soil that paid for the camps. They were NOT hunted, caught, killed, or tortured without trial in Guantanamo. Far from that. They were put on planes and allowed to escape to Saudi Arabia even when the post-9/11 no-fly measure was still in effect.
Fingers could equally point at agencies, airport security, North-American, European and Asian countries. That's what I mean by Afghanistan being related only peripherally and Iraq not begin related at all.
OK. I'm ranting, so I'll stop.
--
Ps. Thanks for spelling corrections, but please have another go
> Just out of interest, which important civil right is that?
Being able to move around freely and anonymously if you've done nothing illegal. (Vs. being treated like a suspect/potential criminal by default.)
--
"We really don't have any enemies. It's just that some of our best friends are tr ying to kill us."
So what your are saying is that we should give up important civil rights to catch some frauds? I'm sure europe would have been a better place if you were caught for voting twice. I'm sure real criminals will better their life if they realize can only do monetary transactions through cash. I'm sure biometric data at ATMs will finally put a halt to all those banks & card sevices going bankrupt.
Get the picture? Civil rights are traded for pennies. Near-unbreakable IDs have less to do with terrorism than with control, efficiency, direct marketing and (mis)use by greyhats.
Indeed. To police-state-lovers, 9/11 never meant more than a publicity stunt. The powers that be instinctively pointed away. Away from their failing intelligence and away from their internal problems. Afganistan was only periferally related, Iraq wasn't related at all. Neither were biometric data, RFID tags in passports, snipers at airports or SDI programmes related.
Fact of the matter is that although a lot of damage is being done to our civil rights (and world peace) terrorist scenarios in western countries are still as real as ever.
The 9/11 hijackers did not carry forged IDs and neither did Timothy McVeigh. They never needed to. It may be conforting to think of terrorists as bearded Bin-Laden lookalikes, but in reality a terrorist may as well be a model citizen, a patriot with no record right until the moment he blows something up.
And since we haven't found a descent answer to terrorism in the last couple of years, maybe we should cool down and stop panicing.
> So those who do NOT want a national ID are going to register their ID's in a centralized database...
Sell your soul to safe your biometric data. Why not? (-:
Inferior design of Windows is indeed a major part of the problems. However, only a utopian operating systems will make automatic configuration trivial. Anyone who's ever written installers knows about the headaches of damaged directories, garbage due to bugs in previous releases and the general ability of monkeys to misuse even idiot-proof software!
To test if an internet browser will crash when unconnected, you NEED to test with internet down. And every option you allow a user to set (such as choosing the install location) will involve extra complexity on integration with other programs. Although this extra complexity may seems simple at first, it will inevitibly have its own consistency issues that will need to be tested. In the end, complexity never turns out to be simple (hence the word).
Summarizing:
So, restating your grumbling - if I may be so bold: why did M$ put so many issues from the first catagory into the second?
So you're suggesting calling XBox 360 something like XBox 2000, or XBox ME?
360 sounds cooler, but you may have a point...
"Luis Cypher"
Hmm Weren't you in this one?
Also, a single binary doesn't imply a single test.
Ie, an install may work when connected to a LAN but may fail when off-line. Testing involves numerous configurations. Think laptops, slow hardware, custom OS installs, partitioning, auto-upgrade vs manual upgrade...
Thanks for mentioning the pros of Open Source. I agree, but that's not the point.
Even OSS developers do some testing before they release their code. At least for the larger (multi-developer) code bases. Quality is essential if you don't want to scare your users/co-developers away. And quality is only partially a result of programming skills.
Now you may point at the difference in emphasis between informal release-testing and formal QA in the legal sense. But it's just rediculous to assume that OSS solves everithing to the point where you just merge & release everthing you type and/or every patch submitted to you without even looking at it.
--
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so
ingenious.
Either you have no idea about how (software) project management works or you have seen some worst-in-class examples at your company. Testing and reproducing a bug is *very* important. Bypassing that step is a guarantee to waste valuable programmer's time on non-issues. In a healthy organization with averagely skilled testers, this part of testing takes a couple of hours at most.
Next is bug fixing. This is by far the most variable and unpredictible part, requiring the best of any programmer. It may take minutes or it may take weeks. Besides good programmers, good process can be of great help here.
Finally comes the release testing, which is what the article is talking about. This phase is essential: *never* trust a programmer if he says its "fixed and I tested it". Generally, programmers are simply incapable of testing their own stuff. I know as a programmer. Release-testing takes a considerable, but predictable amount of time, assuming the programmer did a good job. Skipping this phase will sooner or later lead to disasters like the recent Netscape 8 release.
Now I agree with your complaint on workload and lack of tech-savvy managers, but it's nonsense to say that the process as a whole sucks.
Not really. Microsoft has no serious business at all in Europe. Mostly sales, marketing and some training. By firing these people, they'll hurt their own sales figures more than they'll hurt a bunch of politicians: is Kamikaze.
The "IBM trick" works best for jobs that you were planning to move anyway, like R&D outsourcing. And I'm not sure IBM is doing this just to piss of the EU.
> In short, the better solution would be to have the most popular media players
> all available in a default install - IE, install Windows, and it gives you a
> menu of which player you want installed. Same with Linux.
Hmm OK. If that's exactly what Microsoft would have done from the start -- include only the most popular players in a default install -- everyone would still be using Netscape and RealPlayer.
Afterall, those were the most popular applications before microsoft started pushing them out of the market. At the time, IE & MediaPlayer were hardly better, so they would only have gained a marginal momentum if they'd had to compete on equal terms.
So yes, your suggestion sounds great, and yes, it would have made Windows a much weaker product (from a marketing perspective).
Indeed. In terms of game theory it's also important to notice the inbalance of power between players. That is: a large company, like HP, can afford to divide the world market into different economic regions, while smaller companies may not.
...It's so easy to show that free trade without corporate governance, international legislation, anti-trust and other regulation isn't helping anyone except those that don't need it.
In that light, it is not just the consumers who pay for HP's corporate wealth, but smaller companies will be forced to pay their share as well through unfair competition. Still, *they*'re supposed to be the only way out of the situation in a free economy. That is: free trade, and companies adhering to the principles of free trade are supposed to (somehow) conquer totalitarian regimes and companies and bring universal freedom, democracy, wealth and happiness to everyone eventually...
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it -- Andrew Young