There's a ten year old study that says that just having other citizens carry concealed weapons improves your safety overall. I've never heard a rebuttal that held any water. So, even if you don't want to carry a weapon yourself, you do want to live in a state that allows it.:)
I can't judge the rest of your post, but this isn't quite true. The US federal government can exercise power over local gambling when it chooses. This is why sports betting is banned in 49 states by the federal government, although they allow sports betting in Nevada.
That's not to say, as others have pointed out, that the Federal government can't use its monetary contributions to the states to force laws that they want. And that the Feds haven't abused the Interstate Commerce Commission to include all sorts of things that they shouldn't be involved in.
Still, the law of the land clearly says that the Feds have only limited power. We really get in trouble only when people abuse their power with no expectation of punishment. Bush Jr. & Co. certainly meet that criteria, as did Clinton & Co.
As Edmund Burke observed so long ago, ""All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.":(
Umm, I don't consider myself to be a young buck. I'm pushing 50, after all.:) However, I was brought up to believe that unethical behavior by people should be treated as grounds to actively dislike them. I don't think I'm alone in that. When a company's officers exhibit that kind of behavior, I'm all for hating the company!;)
Seriously, I can remember hoping that IBM would finally get their long deserved punishment and go bankrupt. Now, they're a key ally defending freedom of choice. It just goes to show that there's hope for Microsoft once Bill and Steve leave.:)
Complaint 4: Bad build system
Java cannot do incremental builds if class files have circular references. In a small project of about ten classes I was working on, the only way to build it was "rm *.class ; javac *.java"
emphasis added
I'm very surprised that no one else jumped on this one. I've never seen a well designed app that had circular references of any sort. I'll stipulate that such probably do exist, as there seems to be a case for doing things that would otherwise be dumb for just about any 'exception to the rule' that you could name. However, if you're designing your app correctly, shouldn't you be working hard to isolate your code enough that circular references aren't necessary?
Heck, I'd be happy if I could get a manual tranny, diesel engine 1/2 ton 4x4 truck or SUV! Failing that, give me a hybrid in the same class! I'd buy one right now instead of continuing to drive my 1997 F150 4.6 liter, 5 speed manual transmission, 4x4 truck. Welll, OK, I'd have to wait until I pay off a couple of bills, but really, that's the truck I want.
Nahh. The/real/ absurdity will be when they announce that the Duke Nukem Forever team has decided to start over on the Amiga platform for the nifty programming benefits.:)
OK, if what you say is true, why on Earth did the Southern states insist so strongly on maintaining slavery? Why did they secede when their candidate lost a fair election? Could it possibly be that maybe the South has to share some of the guilt for all those dead on both sides?
I really want to like Lyx, I really do. It does produce some of the best print documentation that I've ever seen. It has fallen down somewhat for online doc creation on several occasions, though. This means using it for documentation meant to be presented in both online and dead tree formats can be problematic.
This isn't my biggest complaint, however. The thing I hate most about Lyx is my inability to figure out how to create chapters as individual files and create a cohesive whole. It's supposed to be possible, but I have yet to figure out how to do it without a lot of hand editing of output files. I've ended up doing 95+% of my writing in OOo, with some in Quanta (for online only stuff).
If it gets easier to use Lyx to create chapter files for inclusion in a master document, I'll take a look at it. Heck, right now I'd settle for a tutorial that documents the steps necessary to do it. At least then I'd know ahead of time where the manual steps would be. Until then I'll just keep using OOo, thanks.
Actually, the free dictionary link was just the first one that popped up that had a legal definition of monopoly as opposed to commonly understood definition of monopoly. The American Heritage definition does not include the legal definition, which is the only one that matters for the purposes of this discussion.
IANAL and I'm paraphrasing here. I can tell you that a monopoly exists when company has the power to exclude or eliminate competitors by raising the barrier of entry high enough to block them from supplying alternatives to a significant portion of the market. Just because alternatives exist does not mean that a legal monopoly is out of the question. The courts only need to determine that one company is maintaining domination of a market in order to find that a monopoly exists. I think that you'd agree that 90+% of all desktops for a period of a couple of decades certainly constitutes domination, wouldn't you?
This is all perfectly legal in the U.S. What's/not/ generally legal, though, is using illegal means to create or maintain that monopoly or leveraging that monopoly to gain control of another market. The courts in several countries have found that Microsoft has done so repeatedly. That's why they lost their court case in the U.S., that's why they are currently on the hook for several hundred million dollars in fines in the EU, and that's why the South Korean government is also taking action.
Do yourself a favor. Find a good law dictionary and look up the word "monopoly". Heck, I'll even google the answer for you. Read this. And this. Go ahead, I'll wait.
...
...
Still believe that the finding of Microsoft as a monopoly was bogus?
???
If you do, what are you smoking, and can I have some?
I've been using OO on Gentoo, Kubuntu, Win2k, and WinXP Pro for years. As far as I can remember, the last time that I saw a crash or freeze on/any/ of these platforms was back around 1.1.3. What are you running OO on? A tinker toy?
Umm, no. Longhorn failed to ship because Allchin convinced Gates that they had to start over from scratch with a brand new codebase based upon (I think) Windows Server 2003. With the exception of of some very small pieces of functionality and code, Vista has/nothing/ to do with the mess that was Longhorn.
I honestly don't remember where I saw the comparison on accident rates as it was a few years ago. I just remember being impressed by the low number of fatalities when compared to the U.S. Sorry.
I've had the opportunity to drive in Germany just once, but I honestly didn't find it all that hard to adapt to driving there. I was driving a 4 cylinder rental with just a couple of kids instead of an old VW bus with several adults, so I may have more acceleration than you did.
However, I can tell you that I quickly found a passing method that worked pretty well. Traffic was light enough that I had time to set up my passes well in advance. I'd wait for a stretch of road where I could see at least a half mile behind me while hanging back about 200 yards behind a slow truck. I kept an eye on the rearview as we topped hills, looking for the flashing headlights of a fast moving Porsche or Mercedes. When I saw a good opportunity, I'd run the speed up to around 100 mph, then move over into the fast lane and stay there. I'd pass slow moving vehicles until I saw someone coming up. As soon as I did, I'd move over and wait for them to go past. Lather, rinse, repeat. Worked pretty well for a 4 or 5 hour drive.:)
That's still a manageable risk, though, with proper training, laws, enforcement, and to a lesser extent better road design. Have you ever driven on the autobahn? Cars zipping along at up to 140+ mph in the inside lane, 70-100 mph in the middle lane or two, while the outside lane lumbers along at 50-60 mph. Accidents are rare, although admittedly when they involve the inner two lanes things can get kinda messy.
The Germans do it by having a longer driving course than the US does, their traffic laws and penalties are designed to enforce common courtesy between drivers, and their traffic cops are very aggressive about enforcing their laws. The autobahns were designed to fit the countryside as opposed to blowing straight lines through it (reduces driver fatigue by giving them a road that requires that they actually look at it instead of get hypnotized), and they have road beds that are designed to last much longer than the US's. Frankly, I think that if people here could see how well the German system works, most of them would vote to adopt the first three practices immediately if it meant that we could actually have sane traffic flows at much higher speeds.
Well, in fairness to the OP, Sun has made some very Microsoftish moves in the past. I forget where I read the post, but someone once described Scott McNealy as Bill Gates with a smaller company. Personally, I thought that was a little harsh. I've always thought of Sun as a schizophrenic company; one that wanted to be Microsoft, and one that wanted to be Red Hat (before Red Hat existed, too).
For example, Sun and Microsoft were the only two companies who spent tens of millions of dollars to buy additional licenses from SCO after SCO initiated the lawsuit against IBM. Sun then trumpeted to the world that made them the only company that had a free and unfettered license to do what they wanted with Unix.
Novell, in their position as the purported rightful copyright holder for Unix (what little there is, anyway), is still trying to; (a) get their money for these questionable deals from SCO, (b) find out what the terms of the deals were so they can determine whether or not SCO was even authorized by the terms of their contract with Novell to make the deal, (c) depending upon what they find out, decide whether or not Microsoft and Sun actually have anything worth the paper that it's printed on.
Think about this for a second: If Novell determines that SCO acted in bad faith, it may turn out that Sun never had the right to release Solaris as FOSS. Further, Sun may have done so knowing this fact. (That's not to say that doing so was necessarily a bad thing, but it should be done by the true copyright holder.) If/that's/ true, then Sun may be guilty of misappropriating Novell's property. I doubt that Novell would bother to go after Sun for this, but you never know.
Another example of Sun's need to abuse their customers was their absolute refusal for years to use or ship the GNU utilities. Worse was when they abruptly decided to no longer ship a C compiler as part of the standard OS installation. Instead, they wanted to charge what I regarded as an exorbitant price for something that was a standard offering in every other Unix of the day.
I remember that there was a lot of speculation at the time that they had done so only because Scott was pissed that so many sysadmins were dumping the use of Sun utilities in favor of the GNU ones. The thinking was rather than admit that the FOSS ones were better, Sun as a company had decided to discourage the use of other people's software by keeping the tools necessary to deploy them as difficult to get as possible. It was a speculation that made a kind of weird sense at the time (early '90s). That was about the time the company I was working for got rid of our last Sun (for reasons that had nothing to do with their support or lack thereof of FOSS), so I lost track of much of they were up to after that.
I'd have to say that from my experience, Sun has donated a lot of software to the FOSS movement over the years and continues to do so. They have also made some moves over the years to maintain or create vendor lock-in that would make Microsoft proud over that same period of time. They definitely look like a schizophrenic company to me.
Then your clients are paying you to do work that violates basic principles and best practices of software design. Hey, as long as they're footing the bill, why not, right?
I'll bet you would win more return business, though, if you could figure out a way to provide a way to separate the code from the data and made it maintainable. If you can't, maybe those aren't clients that you want to keep long term anyhow.
You do realize that in many states it's illegal to tie up the fast lane, right? Why not just move over and let the guy through? You can always move back into the fast lane once he's by.
You're right, there is a problem with macros embedded in documents. They should be taken out and shot at dawn, the corpses thrown to the dogs, and the offal from the dogs buried in the deepest pit in Hell.
Separation of code from content is a key component of sound security. Not to mention that it's just good design practice.
Did it ever occur to you to think that maybe you have zero users running anything but Windows because your coding practices pre-select your audience for you? Let me guess; the total number of Firefox users on your site also approaches zero, doesn't it?
They just don't let you integrate with enterprise grade project management features such as Team System or use 3rd party plugins. For 95% of academic users this is a non-issue.
So, if you want to integrate your IDE with a 3rd party software repository, you're telling me you're out of luck? And this isn't something that 95% of academic users care about? Really?
Wow.
So, does that mean that 95% of academic users do no FOSS development?
I'd argue that there's an organization that has demonstrated how to do 'standards by committee' correctly for decades. You know, the one that defined how computers are supposed to communicate with each other so well that all other competing options (many of them from profit driven companies) have all pretty much dried up and blown away? The organization whose predecessors had as the original design goal of developing a communications network so robust it could survive a nuclear war?
For the young and/or clueless who don't get the reference, I'm talking about the IETF. The IETF isn't even the top level in a chain of committees that have governed how the Internet is designed, just the engineers.
The big problem with standards design by single companies is that almost inevitably they succumb to the desire to create environments where their customers suffer from vendor lock-in. That's why I always treat any standard pushed by a single company with a great deal of suspicion initially. I always wait to see if what might be the hidden agenda.
Cynical? Me? Nahh. I've just worked too long in IT.:)
Slashdot Mirror
There's a ten year old study that says that just having other citizens carry concealed weapons improves your safety overall. I've never heard a rebuttal that held any water. So, even if you don't want to carry a weapon yourself, you do want to live in a state that allows it. :)
Wrong.
That's not to say, as others have pointed out, that the Federal government can't use its monetary contributions to the states to force laws that they want. And that the Feds haven't abused the Interstate Commerce Commission to include all sorts of things that they shouldn't be involved in.
Still, the law of the land clearly says that the Feds have only limited power. We really get in trouble only when people abuse their power with no expectation of punishment. Bush Jr. & Co. certainly meet that criteria, as did Clinton & Co.
As Edmund Burke observed so long ago, ""All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Dwight D. Eisenhower. That's basically how long it's been since we've had a decent conservative president. :(
I wish I had mod points for you. :(
Umm, I don't consider myself to be a young buck. I'm pushing 50, after all. :) However, I was brought up to believe that unethical behavior by people should be treated as grounds to actively dislike them. I don't think I'm alone in that. When a company's officers exhibit that kind of behavior, I'm all for hating the company! ;)
:)
Seriously, I can remember hoping that IBM would finally get their long deserved punishment and go bankrupt. Now, they're a key ally defending freedom of choice. It just goes to show that there's hope for Microsoft once Bill and Steve leave.
emphasis added
I'm very surprised that no one else jumped on this one. I've never seen a well designed app that had circular references of any sort. I'll stipulate that such probably do exist, as there seems to be a case for doing things that would otherwise be dumb for just about any 'exception to the rule' that you could name. However, if you're designing your app correctly, shouldn't you be working hard to isolate your code enough that circular references aren't necessary?
Heck, I'd be happy if I could get a manual tranny, diesel engine 1/2 ton 4x4 truck or SUV! Failing that, give me a hybrid in the same class! I'd buy one right now instead of continuing to drive my 1997 F150 4.6 liter, 5 speed manual transmission, 4x4 truck. Welll, OK, I'd have to wait until I pay off a couple of bills, but really, that's the truck I want.
Nahh. The /real/ absurdity will be when they announce that the Duke Nukem Forever team has decided to start over on the Amiga platform for the nifty programming benefits. :)
OK, if what you say is true, why on Earth did the Southern states insist so strongly on maintaining slavery? Why did they secede when their candidate lost a fair election? Could it possibly be that maybe the South has to share some of the guilt for all those dead on both sides?
I really want to like Lyx, I really do. It does produce some of the best print documentation that I've ever seen. It has fallen down somewhat for online doc creation on several occasions, though. This means using it for documentation meant to be presented in both online and dead tree formats can be problematic.
This isn't my biggest complaint, however. The thing I hate most about Lyx is my inability to figure out how to create chapters as individual files and create a cohesive whole. It's supposed to be possible, but I have yet to figure out how to do it without a lot of hand editing of output files. I've ended up doing 95+% of my writing in OOo, with some in Quanta (for online only stuff).
If it gets easier to use Lyx to create chapter files for inclusion in a master document, I'll take a look at it. Heck, right now I'd settle for a tutorial that documents the steps necessary to do it. At least then I'd know ahead of time where the manual steps would be. Until then I'll just keep using OOo, thanks.
Actually, the free dictionary link was just the first one that popped up that had a legal definition of monopoly as opposed to commonly understood definition of monopoly. The American Heritage definition does not include the legal definition, which is the only one that matters for the purposes of this discussion.
/not/ generally legal, though, is using illegal means to create or maintain that monopoly or leveraging that monopoly to gain control of another market. The courts in several countries have found that Microsoft has done so repeatedly. That's why they lost their court case in the U.S., that's why they are currently on the hook for several hundred million dollars in fines in the EU, and that's why the South Korean government is also taking action.
IANAL and I'm paraphrasing here. I can tell you that a monopoly exists when company has the power to exclude or eliminate competitors by raising the barrier of entry high enough to block them from supplying alternatives to a significant portion of the market. Just because alternatives exist does not mean that a legal monopoly is out of the question. The courts only need to determine that one company is maintaining domination of a market in order to find that a monopoly exists. I think that you'd agree that 90+% of all desktops for a period of a couple of decades certainly constitutes domination, wouldn't you?
This is all perfectly legal in the U.S. What's
Do yourself a favor. Find a good law dictionary and look up the word "monopoly". Heck, I'll even google the answer for you. Read this. And this. Go ahead, I'll wait.
...
...
Still believe that the finding of Microsoft as a monopoly was bogus?
???
If you do, what are you smoking, and can I have some?
Freezing and crashing????
/any/ of these platforms was back around 1.1.3. What are you running OO on? A tinker toy?
I've been using OO on Gentoo, Kubuntu, Win2k, and WinXP Pro for years. As far as I can remember, the last time that I saw a crash or freeze on
Umm, no. Longhorn failed to ship because Allchin convinced Gates that they had to start over from scratch with a brand new codebase based upon (I think) Windows Server 2003. With the exception of of some very small pieces of functionality and code, Vista has /nothing/ to do with the mess that was Longhorn.
I honestly don't remember where I saw the comparison on accident rates as it was a few years ago. I just remember being impressed by the low number of fatalities when compared to the U.S. Sorry.
:)
I've had the opportunity to drive in Germany just once, but I honestly didn't find it all that hard to adapt to driving there. I was driving a 4 cylinder rental with just a couple of kids instead of an old VW bus with several adults, so I may have more acceleration than you did.
However, I can tell you that I quickly found a passing method that worked pretty well. Traffic was light enough that I had time to set up my passes well in advance. I'd wait for a stretch of road where I could see at least a half mile behind me while hanging back about 200 yards behind a slow truck. I kept an eye on the rearview as we topped hills, looking for the flashing headlights of a fast moving Porsche or Mercedes. When I saw a good opportunity, I'd run the speed up to around 100 mph, then move over into the fast lane and stay there. I'd pass slow moving vehicles until I saw someone coming up. As soon as I did, I'd move over and wait for them to go past. Lather, rinse, repeat. Worked pretty well for a 4 or 5 hour drive.
I call bullshit! Or is Switzerland no longer considered to be a Western country?
That's still a manageable risk, though, with proper training, laws, enforcement, and to a lesser extent better road design. Have you ever driven on the autobahn? Cars zipping along at up to 140+ mph in the inside lane, 70-100 mph in the middle lane or two, while the outside lane lumbers along at 50-60 mph. Accidents are rare, although admittedly when they involve the inner two lanes things can get kinda messy.
The Germans do it by having a longer driving course than the US does, their traffic laws and penalties are designed to enforce common courtesy between drivers, and their traffic cops are very aggressive about enforcing their laws. The autobahns were designed to fit the countryside as opposed to blowing straight lines through it (reduces driver fatigue by giving them a road that requires that they actually look at it instead of get hypnotized), and they have road beds that are designed to last much longer than the US's. Frankly, I think that if people here could see how well the German system works, most of them would vote to adopt the first three practices immediately if it meant that we could actually have sane traffic flows at much higher speeds.
Well, in fairness to the OP, Sun has made some very Microsoftish moves in the past. I forget where I read the post, but someone once described Scott McNealy as Bill Gates with a smaller company. Personally, I thought that was a little harsh. I've always thought of Sun as a schizophrenic company; one that wanted to be Microsoft, and one that wanted to be Red Hat (before Red Hat existed, too).
/that's/ true, then Sun may be guilty of misappropriating Novell's property. I doubt that Novell would bother to go after Sun for this, but you never know.
For example, Sun and Microsoft were the only two companies who spent tens of millions of dollars to buy additional licenses from SCO after SCO initiated the lawsuit against IBM. Sun then trumpeted to the world that made them the only company that had a free and unfettered license to do what they wanted with Unix.
Novell, in their position as the purported rightful copyright holder for Unix (what little there is, anyway), is still trying to; (a) get their money for these questionable deals from SCO, (b) find out what the terms of the deals were so they can determine whether or not SCO was even authorized by the terms of their contract with Novell to make the deal, (c) depending upon what they find out, decide whether or not Microsoft and Sun actually have anything worth the paper that it's printed on.
Think about this for a second: If Novell determines that SCO acted in bad faith, it may turn out that Sun never had the right to release Solaris as FOSS. Further, Sun may have done so knowing this fact. (That's not to say that doing so was necessarily a bad thing, but it should be done by the true copyright holder.) If
Another example of Sun's need to abuse their customers was their absolute refusal for years to use or ship the GNU utilities. Worse was when they abruptly decided to no longer ship a C compiler as part of the standard OS installation. Instead, they wanted to charge what I regarded as an exorbitant price for something that was a standard offering in every other Unix of the day.
I remember that there was a lot of speculation at the time that they had done so only because Scott was pissed that so many sysadmins were dumping the use of Sun utilities in favor of the GNU ones. The thinking was rather than admit that the FOSS ones were better, Sun as a company had decided to discourage the use of other people's software by keeping the tools necessary to deploy them as difficult to get as possible. It was a speculation that made a kind of weird sense at the time (early '90s). That was about the time the company I was working for got rid of our last Sun (for reasons that had nothing to do with their support or lack thereof of FOSS), so I lost track of much of they were up to after that.
I'd have to say that from my experience, Sun has donated a lot of software to the FOSS movement over the years and continues to do so. They have also made some moves over the years to maintain or create vendor lock-in that would make Microsoft proud over that same period of time. They definitely look like a schizophrenic company to me.
Fair enough. :)
Then your clients are paying you to do work that violates basic principles and best practices of software design. Hey, as long as they're footing the bill, why not, right?
I'll bet you would win more return business, though, if you could figure out a way to provide a way to separate the code from the data and made it maintainable. If you can't, maybe those aren't clients that you want to keep long term anyhow.
You do realize that in many states it's illegal to tie up the fast lane, right? Why not just move over and let the guy through? You can always move back into the fast lane once he's by.
You're right, there is a problem with macros embedded in documents. They should be taken out and shot at dawn, the corpses thrown to the dogs, and the offal from the dogs buried in the deepest pit in Hell.
Separation of code from content is a key component of sound security. Not to mention that it's just good design practice.
It's not that hard to grasp, is it?
Did it ever occur to you to think that maybe you have zero users running anything but Windows because your coding practices pre-select your audience for you? Let me guess; the total number of Firefox users on your site also approaches zero, doesn't it?
So, if you want to integrate your IDE with a 3rd party software repository, you're telling me you're out of luck? And this isn't something that 95% of academic users care about? Really?
Wow.
So, does that mean that 95% of academic users do no FOSS development?
I'd argue that there's an organization that has demonstrated how to do 'standards by committee' correctly for decades. You know, the one that defined how computers are supposed to communicate with each other so well that all other competing options (many of them from profit driven companies) have all pretty much dried up and blown away? The organization whose predecessors had as the original design goal of developing a communications network so robust it could survive a nuclear war?
:)
For the young and/or clueless who don't get the reference, I'm talking about the IETF. The IETF isn't even the top level in a chain of committees that have governed how the Internet is designed, just the engineers.
The big problem with standards design by single companies is that almost inevitably they succumb to the desire to create environments where their customers suffer from vendor lock-in. That's why I always treat any standard pushed by a single company with a great deal of suspicion initially. I always wait to see if what might be the hidden agenda.
Cynical? Me? Nahh. I've just worked too long in IT.