The author is obviously confused. The ultra-rich plutocrats started the foundations to promote economic leftism. Capitalism promotes competition and a dynamic economy. As someone who has made it to the top of the hill, it is in your interest to have a socialist anti-competitive static economy.
So what? Doing the same benchmark with faster CPUs will make ReiserFS look faster, but doing the same benchmark with a faster IO system will make all the others catch up again.
It's bad enough when video games call you and idiot because you don't have last week's video card, but it's crossing the line with file system authors call you an idiot because you don't have last week's CPU.
Windows XP had 72% of the market in December. Up 1% from November 2005.
That's because they're upgrading from older unsupported versions of Windows. People are using Windows (all varieties) not because they think is isn't crap, but mainly because they think crap is a normal and unavoidable attribute of operating systems.
You are still talking about a shitload of work. I don't know how Praxis manages their low rate, and haven't read that article, but Praxis is a lone exception. Even OpenBSD, which audits its code almost continuously, has bugs.
Software has bugs. It's a fact of life. It is hard to find them and even harder not to write them in the first place. Start writing software for the real world and you will see what I mean. The larger the code base, the more bugs you will get. The more complex the code base the more bugs you will get. A system (such as a Unix) is incredibly complex because you have an immeasurable number of component interactions.
Very few bugs are typos, syntax errors, or or coding mistakes. The vast majority of bugs are instead misbehaviors. There is nothing wrong with the code, it just doesn't perform exactly in the manner expected in every circumstance. Often these bugs don't arise from the coding, but from the specifications or requirements.
Expecting bug-free software is like expecting dirt-free children.
What if... What if the "local laws" mandated the use of slave labor? Would Microsoft then engage in slave labor? What if local laws forbade the hiring of Falun Gong workers, would Microsoft seek out and fire those employees? No matter how onerous and immoral the local law, would Microsoft seek to enforce it?
It is taxing the poor, those who do not benefit at all, or who least benefit from our society that is immoral.
Which is why I said to lower the tax on the poor! You could even eliminate the tax on the poor completely (by increasing the standard deduction, something else I said to do).
Let me state it again, in case I wasn't clear: Lower, or even eliminate if you wish, the taxes on the poor!...it may be difficult to understand just how close to slavery the current condition of the poor is.
Maybe in some countries, but not in the country I live in. I spent two years of my life officially below the poverty line so I know slightly of that which I speak. I spent far longer than that wondering where my next month's rent would come from. Yet the standard of living for the poor in the US is far higher than it is for the poor most everywhere else in the world. If you want to see true poverty, and a true disparity between the rich and the poor, go a few miles south to Tijuana.
You might claim that having to work for a living makes the poor "slaves", yet why does the same not apply to the middle class, who also have to work for a living? Simply having less money does not make one a slave. Poverty is bad, but it is not slavery. Saying it is insults all those who ever were real slaves.
But ultimately, a tax on wealth would be more moral and ethical
Why? What is immoral and unethical about wealth? Please explain.
Taxation is for the purpose of funding government, not restructuring society. If you want to punish the rich, there are more efficient means of doing so than using the tax system.
You've completely misread my post. The solution is to LOWER THE TAXES ON THE POOR! This isn't about "fairness", that's an imaginary attribute invented by weepy people to make other people weepy as well. If you want to help the poor, then start by helping the poor, because punishing the rich will not do it!
And I certainly was not advocating taxing wealth. That's a monstrously stupid idea. A person's wealth is invariably tied up in investments, so that taxing wealth is to tax investments. That's a huge monkey wrench in the economy! We're not talking capital gains when you recoup your investment, we're talking a direct tax on investments themselves! You're replacing a capital gains tax with a capital tax! Aaargh!
Real estate is an investment. Imagine being taxed 10% on the value of your home. Every year. You would pay $30,000, every year, for your $300,000 house (which is a low value in my area). Even if you bought it thirty years ago for $30,000. If you thought property tax was high, wait until the new wealth tax kicks in! And the poor will love you do death with their new 10% increase in rents!
Even if you make exceptions for houses, retirement accounts, pensions, and other "legitimate" wealth, you're still taxing investment. That's where the wealthy's wealth is! They're wealth isn't their income, or their yacht, or their home, or their wine cellar. Their wealth is in the stocks, bonds, real estate and other investments. To translate, their wealth is in the busiensses that employ the poor, the businesses where the poor shop, and the apartments where the poor live. Taxing actual wealth would seriously harm the poor, as they would find themselves out of work, facing high consumer prices, and coping with a rent increase.
Please, please, please, read a basic text on economics before you start advocating a tax on wealth. Wealth is not the problem, poverty is the problem.
He meant the software industry as a whole. He is a smart guy, and an former NASA software developer. But he has been brainwashed by Microsoft, and is not questioning the order to use C# for our realtime embedded system.
As my vice president told me, when I asked him about providing C# training for the project, "As professional software developers, it is your responsibility to know the industry standard."
You know, if we had a true flat tax, it would all work out. Do the math. A 10% tax on highest 80% of the income will collect four times the revenue as a 10% tax on the lowest 20% of income. Of course, that's income. The wealthiest people don't have incomes, they have investments. Which is why people keep imagining these disparities.
We need to stop trying to make things "fair". Instead of punishing the rich for being rich, maybe we should think about helping the poor. Instead of raising the taxes on the high end, why not lower the taxes on the low end? Increase the standard deduction?
I completely agree. The only people bitching about the "delay" are the government and a few people who bought their HDTVs early. The poor certainly aren't complaining about this issue. The market is supplying HDTV in proportion to the demand, so what's the problem?
The reason people are bitching about the this subsidy is that while everyone has a different idea on the proper role of government, very few people have "supplying entertainment to the poor" in their list of legitimate government functions.
Siemens AG. I'm safe enough telling you that, because it's such a freaking huge company, but I won't tell you what division I work in. Siemens is an official partner of Microsoft. What Microsoft tells Siemens to do, it will do, no questions asked.
I never said it wasn't! But still, I can't use Lisp to write a device driver on any system I own. C/C++ is like the English language. It's far from perfect, as the Esperanto advocates will tell you in length, and somewhat awkward. But I'm still going to write my documentation in English rather than Esperanto.
The investments are huge, and to change course would be extremely expensive...
Actually, this happened a few years ago during a transition from Unix to Windows. The Unix line is still selling like hotcakes, and is what is putting bread on the table, but has officially been declared "obsolete" by the management in favor the Windows based product.
Yet the question being asked is why businesses DO NOT change relationships with Microsoft when it delivers crap. My company dumped a major supplier, and at great expense, over quality issues, but when a Windows virus infected a quarter billion dollars worth of product, no one even blinked.
It's a combination of ignorance and complacency. People just don't know any better, and it doesn't annoy the decision makers enough to demand a change. If all you've ever known is Windows, then it's all too easy to think that everything else must be just the same. If you're a decision maker you're never going to get your hands dirty with the issue anyway, so who cares? You've got grunts to take care of that.
Add to that the major hurdle of switching away from Windows, and you end up with the current business climate.
It's possible to write applications, device drivers and operating systems in it, as well as databases, compilers, GUIs, web applications and lots of other stuff in it.
The examples in your first link requires a special Lisp machine to run on. I'm sure you could write Tcl drivers for a Tcl machine as well. Try writing a driver for the Linux kernel in Lisp. Heck, try writing a userland driver for X.org!
I am not claiming that C++ is better than Lisp. Go read my post again. Repeat, I am not claiming that C++ is better than Lisp. Every language has its strong and weak points. C++'s strong point is its generality. It may not do any one thing the best, but it will do a very many number of things well.
If there were two pieces of software which I would say actively ward off more people from installing Linux, it is the boot loader...
This isn't the fault of Linux, or of the boot loader. The fault lies instead with the concept of dual booting. Running multiple operating systems on the same computer is complicated, regardless of whether any of the operating systems starts with 'l' or not.
The problem will be there even if you're dual booting between two different Windows installs. Really!
Don't judge C++ based on Boost. As near as I can tell, Boost is merely the practice grounds for the STL Obfuscation Contest.:-) I can always tell when a software build is sucking in Boost headers because the compilation slows down to a crawl.
C++ is a general purpose object oriented language. As such it's going to be suboptimal compared to more specialized languages. But the generalness of the language far in away makes up for that. I can use it for writing device drivers, real time control code, databases, applications, CGI backends, GUIs, etc, etc. It's the world's best general purpose language, followed very closely by C.
I am NOT arguing that Lisp is a bad language or that you should abandon it. But if you're going to learn one language in depth to last you a lifetime, C++ should be very near the top of your list.
Don't bother debating the trolls. They're only bitching about C++ because they have a deep psychological flaw that requires justifying their own language choice. It's like Mac users who bitch about Windows, or GNOME users who bitch about KDE. They're just doing it because they're confident in their own dick size.
No true message passing
Actually, I would like that one. Using a library to do it is suboptimal. Some user weird ass macros that are hard to understand (MFC, wxWidgets), some use code bloating templates (boost), and others create subclasses and pass around strings (Qt). Native message passing has would remove much of the messaging overhead and facilitate cross-toolkit components.
The party expresses no opinion on other subjects... The party's goal is to get into to the parliament
I dislike single issue parties. These candidates will be elected based on one single domain (IP), yet they will be helping to set policy in dozens of domains.
Slashdot Mirror
The author is obviously confused. The ultra-rich plutocrats started the foundations to promote economic leftism. Capitalism promotes competition and a dynamic economy. As someone who has made it to the top of the hill, it is in your interest to have a socialist anti-competitive static economy.
So? Who the hell modded this insightful? "Redundant" maybe, "whiny" most likely, but not "insightful".
So what? Doing the same benchmark with faster CPUs will make ReiserFS look faster, but doing the same benchmark with a faster IO system will make all the others catch up again.
It's bad enough when video games call you and idiot because you don't have last week's video card, but it's crossing the line with file system authors call you an idiot because you don't have last week's CPU.
If the CPU ain't broke, don't throw it away!
Windows XP had 72% of the market in December. Up 1% from November 2005.
That's because they're upgrading from older unsupported versions of Windows. People are using Windows (all varieties) not because they think is isn't crap, but mainly because they think crap is a normal and unavoidable attribute of operating systems.
You are still talking about a shitload of work. I don't know how Praxis manages their low rate, and haven't read that article, but Praxis is a lone exception. Even OpenBSD, which audits its code almost continuously, has bugs.
Software has bugs. It's a fact of life. It is hard to find them and even harder not to write them in the first place. Start writing software for the real world and you will see what I mean. The larger the code base, the more bugs you will get. The more complex the code base the more bugs you will get. A system (such as a Unix) is incredibly complex because you have an immeasurable number of component interactions.
Very few bugs are typos, syntax errors, or or coding mistakes. The vast majority of bugs are instead misbehaviors. There is nothing wrong with the code, it just doesn't perform exactly in the manner expected in every circumstance. Often these bugs don't arise from the coding, but from the specifications or requirements.
Expecting bug-free software is like expecting dirt-free children.
What if... What if the "local laws" mandated the use of slave labor? Would Microsoft then engage in slave labor? What if local laws forbade the hiring of Falun Gong workers, would Microsoft seek out and fire those employees? No matter how onerous and immoral the local law, would Microsoft seek to enforce it?
It is taxing the poor, those who do not benefit at all, or who least benefit from our society that is immoral.
...it may be difficult to understand just how close to slavery the current condition of the poor is.
Which is why I said to lower the tax on the poor! You could even eliminate the tax on the poor completely (by increasing the standard deduction, something else I said to do).
Let me state it again, in case I wasn't clear: Lower, or even eliminate if you wish, the taxes on the poor!
Maybe in some countries, but not in the country I live in. I spent two years of my life officially below the poverty line so I know slightly of that which I speak. I spent far longer than that wondering where my next month's rent would come from. Yet the standard of living for the poor in the US is far higher than it is for the poor most everywhere else in the world. If you want to see true poverty, and a true disparity between the rich and the poor, go a few miles south to Tijuana.
You might claim that having to work for a living makes the poor "slaves", yet why does the same not apply to the middle class, who also have to work for a living? Simply having less money does not make one a slave. Poverty is bad, but it is not slavery. Saying it is insults all those who ever were real slaves.
But ultimately, a tax on wealth would be more moral and ethical
Why? What is immoral and unethical about wealth? Please explain.
Taxation is for the purpose of funding government, not restructuring society. If you want to punish the rich, there are more efficient means of doing so than using the tax system.
You've completely misread my post. The solution is to LOWER THE TAXES ON THE POOR! This isn't about "fairness", that's an imaginary attribute invented by weepy people to make other people weepy as well. If you want to help the poor, then start by helping the poor, because punishing the rich will not do it!
And I certainly was not advocating taxing wealth. That's a monstrously stupid idea. A person's wealth is invariably tied up in investments, so that taxing wealth is to tax investments. That's a huge monkey wrench in the economy! We're not talking capital gains when you recoup your investment, we're talking a direct tax on investments themselves! You're replacing a capital gains tax with a capital tax! Aaargh!
Real estate is an investment. Imagine being taxed 10% on the value of your home. Every year. You would pay $30,000, every year, for your $300,000 house (which is a low value in my area). Even if you bought it thirty years ago for $30,000. If you thought property tax was high, wait until the new wealth tax kicks in! And the poor will love you do death with their new 10% increase in rents!
Even if you make exceptions for houses, retirement accounts, pensions, and other "legitimate" wealth, you're still taxing investment. That's where the wealthy's wealth is! They're wealth isn't their income, or their yacht, or their home, or their wine cellar. Their wealth is in the stocks, bonds, real estate and other investments. To translate, their wealth is in the busiensses that employ the poor, the businesses where the poor shop, and the apartments where the poor live. Taxing actual wealth would seriously harm the poor, as they would find themselves out of work, facing high consumer prices, and coping with a rent increase.
Please, please, please, read a basic text on economics before you start advocating a tax on wealth. Wealth is not the problem, poverty is the problem.
He meant the software industry as a whole. He is a smart guy, and an former NASA software developer. But he has been brainwashed by Microsoft, and is not questioning the order to use C# for our realtime embedded system.
As my vice president told me, when I asked him about providing C# training for the project, "As professional software developers, it is your responsibility to know the industry standard."
You know, if we had a true flat tax, it would all work out. Do the math. A 10% tax on highest 80% of the income will collect four times the revenue as a 10% tax on the lowest 20% of income. Of course, that's income. The wealthiest people don't have incomes, they have investments. Which is why people keep imagining these disparities.
We need to stop trying to make things "fair". Instead of punishing the rich for being rich, maybe we should think about helping the poor. Instead of raising the taxes on the high end, why not lower the taxes on the low end? Increase the standard deduction?
I completely agree. The only people bitching about the "delay" are the government and a few people who bought their HDTVs early. The poor certainly aren't complaining about this issue. The market is supplying HDTV in proportion to the demand, so what's the problem?
The reason people are bitching about the this subsidy is that while everyone has a different idea on the proper role of government, very few people have "supplying entertainment to the poor" in their list of legitimate government functions.
Since you've got some sort of partisan chip on your shoulder
Partisan chip? How so? Reading those quotes, it's apparent that he really is an economic idiot.
Siemens AG. I'm safe enough telling you that, because it's such a freaking huge company, but I won't tell you what division I work in. Siemens is an official partner of Microsoft. What Microsoft tells Siemens to do, it will do, no questions asked.
The problem was discovered a couple of days before first customer shipment, and was fixed in time so that no shareholder or customer discovered it.
But nevertheless Lisp is worth learning...
I never said it wasn't! But still, I can't use Lisp to write a device driver on any system I own. C/C++ is like the English language. It's far from perfect, as the Esperanto advocates will tell you in length, and somewhat awkward. But I'm still going to write my documentation in English rather than Esperanto.
The investments are huge, and to change course would be extremely expensive...
Actually, this happened a few years ago during a transition from Unix to Windows. The Unix line is still selling like hotcakes, and is what is putting bread on the table, but has officially been declared "obsolete" by the management in favor the Windows based product.
...they change relationships because of it
Yet the question being asked is why businesses DO NOT change relationships with Microsoft when it delivers crap. My company dumped a major supplier, and at great expense, over quality issues, but when a Windows virus infected a quarter billion dollars worth of product, no one even blinked.
It's a combination of ignorance and complacency. People just don't know any better, and it doesn't annoy the decision makers enough to demand a change. If all you've ever known is Windows, then it's all too easy to think that everything else must be just the same. If you're a decision maker you're never going to get your hands dirty with the issue anyway, so who cares? You've got grunts to take care of that.
Add to that the major hurdle of switching away from Windows, and you end up with the current business climate.
It's possible to write applications, device drivers and operating systems in it, as well as databases, compilers, GUIs, web applications and lots of other stuff in it.
The examples in your first link requires a special Lisp machine to run on. I'm sure you could write Tcl drivers for a Tcl machine as well. Try writing a driver for the Linux kernel in Lisp. Heck, try writing a userland driver for X.org!
I am not claiming that C++ is better than Lisp. Go read my post again. Repeat, I am not claiming that C++ is better than Lisp. Every language has its strong and weak points. C++'s strong point is its generality. It may not do any one thing the best, but it will do a very many number of things well.
If there were two pieces of software which I would say actively ward off more people from installing Linux, it is the boot loader...
This isn't the fault of Linux, or of the boot loader. The fault lies instead with the concept of dual booting. Running multiple operating systems on the same computer is complicated, regardless of whether any of the operating systems starts with 'l' or not.
The problem will be there even if you're dual booting between two different Windows installs. Really!
Don't judge C++ based on Boost. As near as I can tell, Boost is merely the practice grounds for the STL Obfuscation Contest. :-) I can always tell when a software build is sucking in Boost headers because the compilation slows down to a crawl.
C++ is a general purpose object oriented language. As such it's going to be suboptimal compared to more specialized languages. But the generalness of the language far in away makes up for that. I can use it for writing device drivers, real time control code, databases, applications, CGI backends, GUIs, etc, etc. It's the world's best general purpose language, followed very closely by C.
I am NOT arguing that Lisp is a bad language or that you should abandon it. But if you're going to learn one language in depth to last you a lifetime, C++ should be very near the top of your list.
Some of your points debated:
Don't bother debating the trolls. They're only bitching about C++ because they have a deep psychological flaw that requires justifying their own language choice. It's like Mac users who bitch about Windows, or GNOME users who bitch about KDE. They're just doing it because they're confident in their own dick size.
No true message passing
Actually, I would like that one. Using a library to do it is suboptimal. Some user weird ass macros that are hard to understand (MFC, wxWidgets), some use code bloating templates (boost), and others create subclasses and pass around strings (Qt). Native message passing has would remove much of the messaging overhead and facilitate cross-toolkit components.
The party expresses no opinion on other subjects... The party's goal is to get into to the parliament
I dislike single issue parties. These candidates will be elected based on one single domain (IP), yet they will be helping to set policy in dozens of domains.