I think it means that some important office-holder at Microsoft is riding a bicycle around the corporate campus while trying to program. I guess he must be using a laptop.
Leastways, that/would/ explain the quality of the software coming out of Microsoft...
So... English speaking countries that get second class treatment from the media companies take the matter into their own hands by downloading behind the bloated backs of those media companies.
To borrow a phrase: the market treats restrictions as damage and routes around them. I call "market failure" - or rather, the failure of government intervention in the form of artificial monopolies and de-facto cartels. Britain and Australia download, because the market isn't serving them - it expects consumers to serve the corporations' own fantasies of total control.
The state should let the media companies adapt or perish. THAT is capitalism. Not the fascist state of play in which the government props up corporate monopolies and acts as the corporate policeman. Imagine if carriage builders had been able to block the use of any vehicle that didn't use a horse... why does a free nation ALLOW stupid things like region encoding: it is a complete restraint on free and fair trade, a profit maintenance scheme. Why should $1 of taxpayers' money going into upholding or policing such a anti-consumer scheme?
I have been part of several government projects that worked, and have seen several that didn't.
The projects that worked were started BY techies, sometimes even behind management's back. In one case, it produced a system that rivals commercial products costing tens of millions of dollars. All started by one person, and finished off by two or three others, straight out of university. These systems worked. They are deployed today in production, and are gaining international recognition. They were creative, done by talented staff who understood the agency's business, and who understood computers and programming.
The projects that didn't work began with corrupt sweetheart deals, or with non-techies asking external consultants to do their thinking for them. The consultants simply built what they were asked to do, without any real creativity, without any real understanding of the business (unlike us staff programmers). Sometimes they just pushed something through, so that they could be seen to do something. They would retire before the project was recognised to be an expensive, time-consuming failure.
So many government IT managers are simply contract administrators, not computer professionals. They cannot do anything creative, and (worse still) they cannot even/recognise/ anything creative. All they recognise are big names ("You never get fired for buying Microsoft, IBM, Novell,..."). All they talk about is which big company they signed a contract with to take over their agency's IT administration.
Not all managers in the government sector are mediocre, uncreative types. But way too many are.
Actually, it is nothing to do with suing. When did you ever sue Microsoft... and when did you ever win?
But it does have to do with CYA. If your project fails and you ran Linux, you did something Adventurous. It must be YOUR fault - you're fired.
If you ran Microsoft, you say "But I ran the industry standard! They're supposed to be the best. Every management magazine says so!"
Then they can't blame you for making Courageous, Adventurous decisions. It's just one of those things that can go wrong, like hurricanes, or blue screens.
If you can prove you did nothing Unusual, Daring, Different, then all your base are covered. Failures can happen to anybody. But if you used Linux, then... that must have been the problem, and since you chose it...
This status as the "normal" is the real myth - that Microsoft is a "safe" option but Linux is a "daring", "adventurous"... "risky" one.
He doesn't mean that developers sit at their keyboards striking random keys, hoping some great systems programming will result.
He means that a lot of self-opinionated coders, some of them very good, a lot of them ordinary, and a few quite awful, keep submitting patches - and Linus's lieutenants weed out the garbage and select the sensible stuff - and sometimes even discover another coder worthy of lieutenant status.
And slowly, without Linus setting out a top-down plan ("X will code Y, Z will code A..."), it all happens.
Sort of intelligent chaos. Bazaar, rather than cathedral (great image - someone should write a book).
My 11-year old daughter took to using Debian with WindowMaker, without needing any training. She knows how to boot the PC and log in, how to look up the Games menu for fun stuff, and her other apps are iconised in the dock. She can surf the web in Firefox, send and receive email in Thunderbird, and write stories in AbiWord. She's got TuxPaint, and heaps of games. I also set up some old Windows games under WINE for her. This is all she needs. I wouldn't expect her to install or configure/any/ OS, or do systems administration on Windows or Linux. As a simple PC user, she's happy.
"You should never depend on a single point of failure."
You're right - I always prefer multiple points of failure myself. They are just so much more likely to break down. That is something you/can/ depend on.
So, don't just leave your car door unlocked, also leave a window open - and your cash in full view (in case they can't find it in the glove box)... and a sign saying you'll be away for several hours. I know people/can/ break into locked cars, but you shouldn't leave these things to chance. See: multiple points of failure are much more dependable.
... When is someone responsible for a machine that functions independently, but that they configured?
When they get caught.
What resources will be affected by robotic production. Do we really NEED these robots?
If we can make them, we need them. Resources? When did that ever stop us...? We'll start mining in outer space if we have to.
Look, we didn't really "need" the Neolithic Age. We were already surviving on Paleolithic technology (the Australian Aborigines managed to survive maybe 60,000 years that way).
You don't "need" automobiles, gasoline, steel ships... but you probably wouldn't give them up without a fight. How are robots any different?
The question isn't "Do you need them?", the question is, "How are they useful?" The answer is to make them and try them out all sorts of different ways.
When a human and a robot work together on something, who gets the blame for failure?
The robot, of course! Until they become smart enough to blame us first. Then they won't "need" us any more. Except as slaves and amusements.
Both undersleeping and overeating (or eating excessive amounts of high calory foods, such as sweets/candy) may both be symptoms (effects) of other conditions, e.g. depression, anxiety. I.e. they may have a common cause.
One shouldn't restrict the causality in this result to undersleeping causing weight gain... or even weight gain causing under-sleeping. Though both of these are possible too.
"Earth calling America! Earth calling America! Come in planet America...."
Just to let you know.
There are other countries besides America. Their parties are usually not called "Republicans" and "Democrats" - and don't even necessarily correspond to those American parties. The non-American countries also hold views about Iraq. Many also write in English (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, also India, the largest democracy in the world...)
Google, and any alternative search engine, would spider through and index all these non-American sites. There are a lot of them - more than you might think.
It is possible (gasp) that you might get answers that *don't reflect American perceptions of the world, or America's internal politics*. Remember, most of the world wanted the other guy to win, whatsy's face. The US has an unusual political make-up because of its enormous affluence and wealth compared to the rest of the world.
Also remember: the US accounts for just 5% of the world's population. The rest of us are 95%. You are outnumbered. Even the Internet is becoming less American day by day. And as for the web, it wasn't even invented by Americans or in America (it is a European invention).
Try to keep a perspective: you are one country among many, not the sole occupants of the planet. It would create such a nice impression on the rest of us if you would remember this.
"sometimes the interests of society to enable inter-operating software, weighs heavier than the patent/copyright interests of a company"
In theory, the interests of society ALWAYS weigh heavier than the copyright/patent interests of a company. Patents and copyrights only exist (in theory and law, if not in practice) because (and to the extent that) they benefit society. They are NOT an inherent right.
The law allows patents and copyright in order to increase the number of inventions and works of creative writing. If it can be shown ineffective at reaching that goal - or even worse, counter-productive - then patents and/or copyright should be abolished.
That is why software patents are bad news - they correlate with a decline in innovation.
"I'm not sure that 95% of OSS is a waste of time and energy."
I would think that 95% of all software, including commercial, shareware, and freeware, is "a waste of time and energy" - meaning it is useless junk for most people.
Look at all the crap that is available - and commercial stuff too. But at least OSS doesn't charge you for software that turns out to be crap - and you may even be able to fix it up, if it has some halfway decent ideas in it. Or use the ideaas elsewhere.
If they can fiddle with your DNA and RNA to get you to live to 1000, they should be able to fiddle with it so that - come your 900th birthday - you die suddenly of a heart attack.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it means that some important office-holder at Microsoft is riding a bicycle around the corporate campus while trying to program. I guess he must be using a laptop.
/would/ explain the quality of the software coming out of Microsoft ...
Leastways, that
So ... English speaking countries that get second class treatment from the media companies take the matter into their own hands by downloading behind the bloated backs of those media companies.
... why does a free nation ALLOW stupid things like region encoding: it is a complete restraint on free and fair trade, a profit maintenance scheme. Why should $1 of taxpayers' money going into upholding or policing such a anti-consumer scheme?
To borrow a phrase: the market treats restrictions as damage and routes around them. I call "market failure" - or rather, the failure of government intervention in the form of artificial monopolies and de-facto cartels. Britain and Australia download, because the market isn't serving them - it expects consumers to serve the corporations' own fantasies of total control.
The state should let the media companies adapt or perish. THAT is capitalism. Not the fascist state of play in which the government props up corporate monopolies and acts as the corporate policeman. Imagine if carriage builders had been able to block the use of any vehicle that didn't use a horse
... Bill wrote this part himself." ... followed by a heap of convoluted Basic code:
....
100 if browser$ = 'Netscape' then call SlowDown
200 if OS$ = 'DRDOS' then SendMsg IncompatibleOS$
300 if
Perhaps, just perhaps, they have concentrated on getting the fundamentals right, rather than the Aqua-like eye-candy.
Give them time. It's version 0.something. Not even 1.0.
Gnome and KDE looked pretty awful at version 1.0. Still do, in my opinion. (Ah, WindowMaker, how I love thee).
No, I think he is alluding to the revolutionary spirit that actually got your nation going.
... applying force and violence is silly"?
What if Washington had said: "what you're implying is mob rule, majority or not
I'm not sure why you included the word "else".
"People won't switch because the games aren't there"
Yes, this is particularly important to business people. They'll never switch to a platform without games.
I have been part of several government projects that worked, and have seen several that didn't.
/recognise/ anything creative. All they recognise are big names ("You never get fired for buying Microsoft, IBM, Novell,..."). All they talk about is which big company they signed a contract with to take over their agency's IT administration.
The projects that worked were started BY techies, sometimes even behind management's back. In one case, it produced a system that rivals commercial products costing tens of millions of dollars. All started by one person, and finished off by two or three others, straight out of university. These systems worked. They are deployed today in production, and are gaining international recognition. They were creative, done by talented staff who understood the agency's business, and who understood computers and programming.
The projects that didn't work began with corrupt sweetheart deals, or with non-techies asking external consultants to do their thinking for them. The consultants simply built what they were asked to do, without any real creativity, without any real understanding of the business (unlike us staff programmers). Sometimes they just pushed something through, so that they could be seen to do something. They would retire before the project was recognised to be an expensive, time-consuming failure.
So many government IT managers are simply contract administrators, not computer professionals. They cannot do anything creative, and (worse still) they cannot even
Not all managers in the government sector are mediocre, uncreative types. But way too many are.
"I can't see why I shouldn't support Microsoft,"
In Soviet Russia, Microsoft supports you!
Oh wait.... that's what they SUPPOSED to do!
Actually, it is nothing to do with suing. When did you ever sue Microsoft ... and when did you ever win?
... that must have been the problem, and since you chose it ...
... "risky" one.
But it does have to do with CYA. If your project fails and you ran Linux, you did something Adventurous. It must be YOUR fault - you're fired.
If you ran Microsoft, you say "But I ran the industry standard! They're supposed to be the best. Every management magazine says so!"
Then they can't blame you for making Courageous, Adventurous decisions. It's just one of those things that can go wrong, like hurricanes, or blue screens.
If you can prove you did nothing Unusual, Daring, Different, then all your base are covered. Failures can happen to anybody. But if you used Linux, then
This status as the "normal" is the real myth - that Microsoft is a "safe" option but Linux is a "daring", "adventurous"
Managers are superstitious.
And it is rampant in government circles, too.
Whoa!
He doesn't mean that developers sit at their keyboards striking random keys, hoping some great systems programming will result.
He means that a lot of self-opinionated coders, some of them very good, a lot of them ordinary, and a few quite awful, keep submitting patches - and Linus's lieutenants weed out the garbage and select the sensible stuff - and sometimes even discover another coder worthy of lieutenant status.
And slowly, without Linus setting out a top-down plan ("X will code Y, Z will code A..."), it all happens.
Sort of intelligent chaos. Bazaar, rather than cathedral (great image - someone should write a book).
"A Windows computer is probably as secure as a Linux machine if adequate measures are taken"
You mean, like switching it off?
My 11-year old daughter took to using Debian with WindowMaker, without needing any training. She knows how to boot the PC and log in, how to look up the Games menu for fun stuff, and her other apps are iconised in the dock. She can surf the web in Firefox, send and receive email in Thunderbird, and write stories in AbiWord. She's got TuxPaint, and heaps of games. I also set up some old Windows games under WINE for her. This is all she needs. I wouldn't expect her to install or configure /any/ OS, or do systems administration on Windows or Linux. As a simple PC user, she's happy.
So yeah. What's so hard?
Or: If Iraqi fighters against American military targets are terrorists, what then were the American revolutionaries?
At Harvard they also teach you about other punctuation marks besides the '.'
"You should never depend on a single point of failure."
/can/ depend on.
/can/ break into locked cars, but you shouldn't leave these things to chance. See: multiple points of failure are much more dependable.
You're right - I always prefer multiple points of failure myself. They are just so much more likely to break down. That is something you
So, don't just leave your car door unlocked, also leave a window open - and your cash in full view (in case they can't find it in the glove box)... and a sign saying you'll be away for several hours. I know people
Why not sue Monsanto for contaminating your crop with their proprietary seed?
... When is someone responsible for a machine that functions independently, but that they configured?
When they get caught.
What resources will be affected by robotic production. Do we really NEED these robots?
If we can make them, we need them. Resources? When did that ever stop us...? We'll start mining in outer space if we have to.
Look, we didn't really "need" the Neolithic Age. We were already surviving on Paleolithic technology (the Australian Aborigines managed to survive maybe 60,000 years that way).
You don't "need" automobiles, gasoline, steel ships ... but you probably wouldn't give them up without a fight. How are robots any different?
The question isn't "Do you need them?", the question is, "How are they useful?" The answer is to make them and try them out all sorts of different ways.
When a human and a robot work together on something, who gets the blame for failure?
The robot, of course! Until they become smart enough to blame us first. Then they won't "need" us any more. Except as slaves and amusements.
Both undersleeping and overeating (or eating excessive amounts of high calory foods, such as sweets/candy) may both be symptoms (effects) of other conditions, e.g. depression, anxiety. I.e. they may have a common cause.
... or even weight gain causing under-sleeping. Though both of these are possible too.
One shouldn't restrict the causality in this result to undersleeping causing weight gain
"Earth calling America! Earth calling America! Come in planet America...."
...)
Just to let you know.
There are other countries besides America. Their parties are usually not called "Republicans" and "Democrats" - and don't even necessarily correspond to those American parties. The non-American countries also hold views about Iraq. Many also write in English (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, also India, the largest democracy in the world
Google, and any alternative search engine, would spider through and index all these non-American sites. There are a lot of them - more than you might think.
It is possible (gasp) that you might get answers that *don't reflect American perceptions of the world, or America's internal politics*. Remember, most of the world wanted the other guy to win, whatsy's face. The US has an unusual political make-up because of its enormous affluence and wealth compared to the rest of the world.
Also remember: the US accounts for just 5% of the world's population. The rest of us are 95%. You are outnumbered. Even the Internet is becoming less American day by day. And as for the web, it wasn't even invented by Americans or in America (it is a European invention).
Try to keep a perspective: you are one country among many, not the sole occupants of the planet. It would create such a nice impression on the rest of us if you would remember this.
"sometimes the interests of society to enable inter-operating software, weighs heavier than the patent/copyright interests of a company"
In theory, the interests of society ALWAYS weigh heavier than the copyright/patent interests of a company. Patents and copyrights only exist (in theory and law, if not in practice) because (and to the extent that) they benefit society. They are NOT an inherent right.
The law allows patents and copyright in order to increase the number of inventions and works of creative writing. If it can be shown ineffective at reaching that goal - or even worse, counter-productive - then patents and/or copyright should be abolished.
That is why software patents are bad news - they correlate with a decline in innovation.
"I'm not sure that 95% of OSS is a waste of time and energy."
I would think that 95% of all software, including commercial, shareware, and freeware, is "a waste of time and energy" - meaning it is useless junk for most people.
Look at all the crap that is available - and commercial stuff too. But at least OSS doesn't charge you for software that turns out to be crap - and you may even be able to fix it up, if it has some halfway decent ideas in it. Or use the ideaas elsewhere.
"or that house of a bicamel parliament that is directly elected."
That would be a Parliament made up of two camels, both directly elected.
OK. Now we know where "everywhere" is, and "somewhere".
But what about "nowhere" and "anywhere" - are they north and south? Or what? I don't get it.
If they can fiddle with your DNA and RNA to get you to live to 1000, they should be able to fiddle with it so that - come your 900th birthday - you die suddenly of a heart attack.
Voila! No more 100 years of sucky old age.
Next problem, please.