Interesting point, but be that as it may, our southern border is completely wide-open so it'd be trivial for them to sneak across with all the guns they want.
Yes, but a relevant fix on a kernel driver doesn't make you any money at all, whereas some shitty iOS fleshlight app can make you rich and famous. Just ask the guys at Rovio. This is one of the fundamental problems. Programmers have to make ends meet too, and there's apparently no shortage of fools willing to spend money on some stupid iOS/Android app.
I wonder if, "a few years ago" as you put it, the smart people working on some product in Linux distros were still young, in college, and didn't have many bills to worry about. Nowadays, they've gotten older, are married, have more expenses, etc., so they've had to concentrate on jobs which earn them money. Also, it does seem to me that the cost of living has risen greatly in the US in the last 15 years, largely thanks to the housing bubble. Back when I was in college in the 90s, it was easy to find a nice apartment for $400, or share an apartment for $200, and gas was $1/gallon. Now gas is $4/gallon and you're looking at a minimum of $1200/month to rent anything decent; you might get something for $600 if you rent a room in someone's basement and get a PO box because your landlord refuses to let you have your name associated with the address and receive mail there.
If the terrorists really wanted to change things in America, they should blow up Congress. The American people wouldn't mind much since everyone here hates Congress, and there wouldn't be any collateral damage (except maybe aides, but they're really minions of the Congresscritters anyway).
Unfortunately, the security there is probably pretty good actually; it's a lot easier to go after civilian targets.
How many people still use Rios/Zunes/old CD players/etc.? Old iPods (unless they're reeeaalllly old) use the standard Apple connector that was only recently superceded for the iPhone5.
Those numbers are somewhat misleading. The big problem is that they don't show the number of passenger-miles traveled per year; this number has risen greatly over the decades. Everyone (in the US) flies these days; back in 1970, only richer people took planes anywhere, or when others did, it was a rare event because it was so expensive.
Also, since this is about American airport security, these numbers are misleading since they show ALL accidents worldwide. There's a lot more air travel internationally than there used to be, as the standards of living rise in developing nations (and everywhere really). Accidents in Malaysia or Brazil by airlines which don't even operate within the US don't really worry Americans much, it's accidents on our own planes in our own country that are concerning.
You don't need hundreds of wall-warts and cables. Lots of hotels have all-in-one cellphone charging stations (and so do lots of airports, just not near TSA lines). There aren't that many cellphone cables, especially now that everyone except stupid Apple has standardized on the microUSB plug. MiniUSB, MicroUSB, and a couple of Apple connectors would work for probably every phone made in the last 8 years that anyone still uses. For laptops, all you need to do is provide electrical outlets, since everyone carries around their charger. One of the $10 universal international power adapters will allow international travelers to use their chargers if they didn't bring a US power cord (every charger operates on 110V-240V, the only problem is the physical plug).
So all the TSA would have to do is provide about $30 worth of extension cords and adapters. Of course, knowing how inept Obama is with everything, that won't happen.
Nope, it is really, REALLY important to run TSA badly and punish innocent people - so they will NOT be providing an electrical plug to allow you to save your $700 phone or $1,500 laptop.
Terrorists already go for softer targets, namely shopping malls. It's happened in Mumbai and in Kenya. It just hasn't happened in the US. That means that either our security is so good that the terrorists are prevented from coming here and shooting up malls (extremely unlikely since our southern border is wide-open and guns are easy to obtain here), OR the terrorists just aren't interested in messing with us that much.
I think you're completely overblowing things. Regressions are rare; once a driver is working properly, what reason is there to go back and muck with the driver? Personally I've never seen any regressions at all on my hardware (or any HW I've worked with); once something's working, it stays working on newer versions. It's not like they need constant maintenance; the only time they need any maintenance is when the kernel interfaces change.
For your bluetooth and backlight drivers, it sounds like you made some fixes, and didn't get those pushed upstream; is that the case? If you push your changes upstream and get them included in the kernel, then you don't need to reapply them.
We're not talking about resistance to change, we're talking about inertia. Who wants to use a language where you can't run a program on a different system, because it has a different version of the interpreter installed? Or where doing an update can break lots of important programs that your company has been running for years? It's a hindrance to adoption. Not wanting to modify all your in-house programs because of some gratuitous language change is not "resistance to change", it's simple pragmatism. This kind of thing wasn't generally a problem in the past, such as with Perl =5. Now, for some odd reason, these language developers seem to think that everyone wants to spend time modifying all their programs to keep up with changes to the languages.
There is no time wasted rewriting drivers, and there is no problem. The drivers are part of the kernel; when the interfaces are changed, the drivers are changed accordingly. This doesn't take any time because the changes are fairly trivial (usually adding an argument to a function call). You have no idea what you're talking about, and are obviously not involved in kernel development.
As someone who worked in C and C++ pre-standardization, I recall (perhaps erroneously) that the new standards broke a fair bit of existing code, albeit in minor ways. And of course Microsoft's broken C++ compiler in Visual Studio 6 resulted in a vast amount of borken code when they finally caught up to the rest of the world.
Yes, but there's a big difference: C and C++ are compiled languages. So if your application was built with some older compiler, and now C++ has been standardized and your application doesn't compile with the new compilers, that's only a problem for you, the developer. Your users won't see it, because they're using the compiled form, which still runs just fine (unless the OS has changed to break it of course).
When an interpreted language breaks backwards compatibility, everyone is affected. Users suddenly can't run the program when their interpreter is updated.
Yes, but people don't want to dig up all their older programs and modify them just because the language has changed and is no longer backwards compatible. Inertia is a very powerful thing, and these language developers have really screwed up by forgetting this.
Wrong. Linux doesn't need a static ABI, because the device drivers are all distributed as part of the kernel. Only makers of proprietary modules, and sycophants and nay-sayers complain about the Linux kernel not having a static API and ABI for kernel modules.
If you're talking about application code, the kernel is static on that. You can take binaries from 15 years ago and run them on a modern Linux kernel. The problem you'll usually run into is that the libraries that binary links to are not fully backwards-compatible, including glibc. That's not a kernel issue. In practice, it's rarely an issue at all; even glibc is very stable. The other libraries, OTOH, are a different matter (things like gtk, Qt, and myriad other small libraries). Even here, though, there's a pretty good effort to maintain some backwards compatibility. Most distros have qt3 compatibility packages, for instance, if you need to run applications built with Qt3. But if you've wrote an application 15 years ago that only uses kernel system calls, it should work just fine now.
The problems with Perl6 and Python are real, though, and I think do hurt their adoption a lot. It's a real PITA if you can't run an older program because the newer versions of its interpreter aren't backwards-compatible.
That's certainly not the case. Look at all the horrible things the European nations did back during their colonial days. Most nations, when sufficiently powerful, do pretty awful things to other nations just because they can and because it benefits them (or certain members of their population).
>instead, he decides to lay a steaming coil on the democratic platform on which he was elected.
Seems to me that most of the rest of the Democrats are going right along with Obama and his policies. Somehow I got on the Democrat party's mailing list and I get bombarded with all these fearmongering hysterical ads about how they need more money or Republicans will take over, and how it's so important that we "support Obama's agenda!!!!" Obama's agenda is giveaways to big corporations like Comcast and the health insurance companies; why would I want to support that?
>It seemed odd that only posts I see on this subject ("Classic Obama", "Obama... What is it with this guy", and "Why does Obama keep doing this") all seem to suggest this hypocrisy is somehow unique to the current president.
It is somewhat unique.
Bush wasn't hypocritical. He was blatant in his advocacy for non-progressive policies and for being corrupt. You think Bush would have ever pushed for patent reform? Or net neutrality? Not on your life. So when he did bad things, it was entirely expected. No hypocrisy there.
Obama is different, because he said all kinds of great-sounding, progressive things such as that he wouldn't appoint any lobbyists to policy-making positions. Then he promptly did exactly the opposite when in office. That makes him a hypocrite and a liar.
It's not really that bad these days; a lot of the Obama fans have given up on him (remember the Reddit picture a while back where someone had a huge Obama "HOPE" poster and had put it in a dumpster, and someone took a photo of this and posted it?), however there's still a contingent of Obamabots who still push the "if you don't like Obama, you're a racist!!!" canard which got started during his first campaign.
Wrong. The continental plates move around over time, and just as the land the US sits on used to straddle the equator, it's entirely conceivable that Canada could eventually move so that it's in the tropics.
>Environmentalism is about saving humans not the earth.
No, it's not. Environmentalism is basically about preserving the status quo, environmentally. It's just like social conservatism, except that instead of trying to preserve society at a certain point in time, more or less (like the 50s for American conservatives), environmentalsts want to preserve the environmental status quo at some halcyon age (probably the 1700s or 1800s sometime). So there's multiple components here: they want the temperatures and sea levels to remain the same, because any big changes there will grossly affect human civilization, since we've built so many cities at sea level and because we need a mild climate for agriculture. Environmentalists also want to preserve plant and animal species, for various reasons, but of course only current ones; they don't usually talk that much about going back and trying to revive dinosaurs since they really wouldn't fit into today's world too well.
>Quick: name a country which doesn't think its ways are the obviously correct ways, and that the world wouldn't better if only everyone else would adopt their standards.
>Europeans are convinced that we should maintain a bit of aloof isolationism. The Middle East is convinced that a Muslim theocracy would benefit everyone. Much of Asia wishes we could get over the recent notion of individual rights instead of duties to country.
These aren't all the same. A worldwide Muslim theocracy would affect everyone, including people who don't want it. Whereas Europeans being isolationist doesn't affect anyone except Europeans. Similarly, Asians pushing duties to country really only affects Asians in the concerned countries.
Yes, everyone (nations and individuals alike) think that their ways are the correct ways, and everyone else should be more like them. However, if you're not actively pushing yourself and your ways on other people, there's no ethical problem. If a bunch of European nations say "we want to keep to ourselves except maybe for some trade", that isn't hurting anyone else. Other places are free to run their nations as they please; they can establish theocracies if they want, or not. However, nations that have foreign policies which emphasize interventionism and pushing their ways on others are in a different boat. Some Muslim nations do try to push their ways, but they don't really have much power to back up those desires (if they ever got that power, that would be rather scary). However the US and Russia (moreso the US these days) and also China not only have the power to be bullies, but they actively engage in bullying behavior on the international level.
Point #2 is kind of right. Jessup isn't a great place, but you don't have to live there...just work there. You can easily work at Jessup but live in, say, Takoma Park or Columbia or any of the other really nice neighborhoods that are within 30 minutes. Where you work != where you live.
Not really. You can only realistically commute so far; most people don't want to spend more than 1 hour in each direction, and that's kinda pushing it. So yeah, you don't have to live right in Jessup, but you're still stuck in Maryland or maybe northern Virginia (if you can stomach driving on the beltway every day--that's a pretty hellish thought). Not everyone is OK with living there; it's a totally different local culture than, say, NYC or Boston or the Bay Area or Seattle or San Diego. Someone who wants to be able to go surfing on the weekends, for instance, will not want to live there. Someone who likes West Coast city culture will not want to live there. Heck, someone who doesn't want to live in a place totally dominated by government workers won't want to live there.
This is one of the problems with some PhDs. It's probably not much of a problem with Bachelor's degree holders; with a BS, you learn enough to learn how to learn more later on, and you learn how little you really know, but you don't get so specialized that you think you're an expert.
What level of autodidactism are we talking about here anyway? High school dropouts, or people with slightly different degrees to what they're currently working in?
Remember, a university education is not a training course. It's supposed to give you the fundamentals so you have a broad education and a starting point to learn more on your own later. It doesn't replace specialized knowledge gained through experience, and never will. Ruby and JavaScript are not languages normally taught at the university level; those are things you're supposed to learn on your own, after learning more general concepts in a university program. Same goes for web apps; someone who earned a CS degree in 1992 is not going to have any formal training on such a thing, but they'll have learned all the general concepts behind how computers work and behind programming, algorithms, data structures, etc. which they need to learn how to program web apps on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point, but be that as it may, our southern border is completely wide-open so it'd be trivial for them to sneak across with all the guns they want.
Yes, but a relevant fix on a kernel driver doesn't make you any money at all, whereas some shitty iOS fleshlight app can make you rich and famous. Just ask the guys at Rovio. This is one of the fundamental problems. Programmers have to make ends meet too, and there's apparently no shortage of fools willing to spend money on some stupid iOS/Android app.
I wonder if, "a few years ago" as you put it, the smart people working on some product in Linux distros were still young, in college, and didn't have many bills to worry about. Nowadays, they've gotten older, are married, have more expenses, etc., so they've had to concentrate on jobs which earn them money. Also, it does seem to me that the cost of living has risen greatly in the US in the last 15 years, largely thanks to the housing bubble. Back when I was in college in the 90s, it was easy to find a nice apartment for $400, or share an apartment for $200, and gas was $1/gallon. Now gas is $4/gallon and you're looking at a minimum of $1200/month to rent anything decent; you might get something for $600 if you rent a room in someone's basement and get a PO box because your landlord refuses to let you have your name associated with the address and receive mail there.
If the terrorists really wanted to change things in America, they should blow up Congress. The American people wouldn't mind much since everyone here hates Congress, and there wouldn't be any collateral damage (except maybe aides, but they're really minions of the Congresscritters anyway).
Unfortunately, the security there is probably pretty good actually; it's a lot easier to go after civilian targets.
How many people still use Rios/Zunes/old CD players/etc.? Old iPods (unless they're reeeaalllly old) use the standard Apple connector that was only recently superceded for the iPhone5.
How many people actually have dead devices at the TSA line? Definitely not 100%.
Those numbers are somewhat misleading. The big problem is that they don't show the number of passenger-miles traveled per year; this number has risen greatly over the decades. Everyone (in the US) flies these days; back in 1970, only richer people took planes anywhere, or when others did, it was a rare event because it was so expensive.
Also, since this is about American airport security, these numbers are misleading since they show ALL accidents worldwide. There's a lot more air travel internationally than there used to be, as the standards of living rise in developing nations (and everywhere really). Accidents in Malaysia or Brazil by airlines which don't even operate within the US don't really worry Americans much, it's accidents on our own planes in our own country that are concerning.
You don't need hundreds of wall-warts and cables. Lots of hotels have all-in-one cellphone charging stations (and so do lots of airports, just not near TSA lines). There aren't that many cellphone cables, especially now that everyone except stupid Apple has standardized on the microUSB plug. MiniUSB, MicroUSB, and a couple of Apple connectors would work for probably every phone made in the last 8 years that anyone still uses. For laptops, all you need to do is provide electrical outlets, since everyone carries around their charger. One of the $10 universal international power adapters will allow international travelers to use their chargers if they didn't bring a US power cord (every charger operates on 110V-240V, the only problem is the physical plug).
So all the TSA would have to do is provide about $30 worth of extension cords and adapters. Of course, knowing how inept Obama is with everything, that won't happen.
Nope, it is really, REALLY important to run TSA badly and punish innocent people - so they will NOT be providing an electrical plug to allow you to save your $700 phone or $1,500 laptop.
Thanks, Obama!!
Terrorists already go for softer targets, namely shopping malls. It's happened in Mumbai and in Kenya. It just hasn't happened in the US. That means that either our security is so good that the terrorists are prevented from coming here and shooting up malls (extremely unlikely since our southern border is wide-open and guns are easy to obtain here), OR the terrorists just aren't interested in messing with us that much.
I think you're completely overblowing things. Regressions are rare; once a driver is working properly, what reason is there to go back and muck with the driver? Personally I've never seen any regressions at all on my hardware (or any HW I've worked with); once something's working, it stays working on newer versions. It's not like they need constant maintenance; the only time they need any maintenance is when the kernel interfaces change.
For your bluetooth and backlight drivers, it sounds like you made some fixes, and didn't get those pushed upstream; is that the case? If you push your changes upstream and get them included in the kernel, then you don't need to reapply them.
We're not talking about resistance to change, we're talking about inertia. Who wants to use a language where you can't run a program on a different system, because it has a different version of the interpreter installed? Or where doing an update can break lots of important programs that your company has been running for years? It's a hindrance to adoption. Not wanting to modify all your in-house programs because of some gratuitous language change is not "resistance to change", it's simple pragmatism. This kind of thing wasn't generally a problem in the past, such as with Perl =5. Now, for some odd reason, these language developers seem to think that everyone wants to spend time modifying all their programs to keep up with changes to the languages.
There is no time wasted rewriting drivers, and there is no problem. The drivers are part of the kernel; when the interfaces are changed, the drivers are changed accordingly. This doesn't take any time because the changes are fairly trivial (usually adding an argument to a function call). You have no idea what you're talking about, and are obviously not involved in kernel development.
As someone who worked in C and C++ pre-standardization, I recall (perhaps erroneously) that the new standards broke a fair bit of existing code, albeit in minor ways. And of course Microsoft's broken C++ compiler in Visual Studio 6 resulted in a vast amount of borken code when they finally caught up to the rest of the world.
Yes, but there's a big difference: C and C++ are compiled languages. So if your application was built with some older compiler, and now C++ has been standardized and your application doesn't compile with the new compilers, that's only a problem for you, the developer. Your users won't see it, because they're using the compiled form, which still runs just fine (unless the OS has changed to break it of course).
When an interpreted language breaks backwards compatibility, everyone is affected. Users suddenly can't run the program when their interpreter is updated.
Yes, but people don't want to dig up all their older programs and modify them just because the language has changed and is no longer backwards compatible. Inertia is a very powerful thing, and these language developers have really screwed up by forgetting this.
Wrong. Linux doesn't need a static ABI, because the device drivers are all distributed as part of the kernel. Only makers of proprietary modules, and sycophants and nay-sayers complain about the Linux kernel not having a static API and ABI for kernel modules.
If you're talking about application code, the kernel is static on that. You can take binaries from 15 years ago and run them on a modern Linux kernel. The problem you'll usually run into is that the libraries that binary links to are not fully backwards-compatible, including glibc. That's not a kernel issue. In practice, it's rarely an issue at all; even glibc is very stable. The other libraries, OTOH, are a different matter (things like gtk, Qt, and myriad other small libraries). Even here, though, there's a pretty good effort to maintain some backwards compatibility. Most distros have qt3 compatibility packages, for instance, if you need to run applications built with Qt3. But if you've wrote an application 15 years ago that only uses kernel system calls, it should work just fine now.
The problems with Perl6 and Python are real, though, and I think do hurt their adoption a lot. It's a real PITA if you can't run an older program because the newer versions of its interpreter aren't backwards-compatible.
That's certainly not the case. Look at all the horrible things the European nations did back during their colonial days. Most nations, when sufficiently powerful, do pretty awful things to other nations just because they can and because it benefits them (or certain members of their population).
>instead, he decides to lay a steaming coil on the democratic platform on which he was elected.
Seems to me that most of the rest of the Democrats are going right along with Obama and his policies. Somehow I got on the Democrat party's mailing list and I get bombarded with all these fearmongering hysterical ads about how they need more money or Republicans will take over, and how it's so important that we "support Obama's agenda!!!!" Obama's agenda is giveaways to big corporations like Comcast and the health insurance companies; why would I want to support that?
>It seemed odd that only posts I see on this subject ("Classic Obama", "Obama ... What is it with this guy", and "Why does Obama keep doing this") all seem to suggest this hypocrisy is somehow unique to the current president.
It is somewhat unique.
Bush wasn't hypocritical. He was blatant in his advocacy for non-progressive policies and for being corrupt. You think Bush would have ever pushed for patent reform? Or net neutrality? Not on your life. So when he did bad things, it was entirely expected. No hypocrisy there.
Obama is different, because he said all kinds of great-sounding, progressive things such as that he wouldn't appoint any lobbyists to policy-making positions. Then he promptly did exactly the opposite when in office. That makes him a hypocrite and a liar.
Have you been asleep in a cave since 2006?
It's not really that bad these days; a lot of the Obama fans have given up on him (remember the Reddit picture a while back where someone had a huge Obama "HOPE" poster and had put it in a dumpster, and someone took a photo of this and posted it?), however there's still a contingent of Obamabots who still push the "if you don't like Obama, you're a racist!!!" canard which got started during his first campaign.
>Canadian coastline will never be "tropical".
Wrong. The continental plates move around over time, and just as the land the US sits on used to straddle the equator, it's entirely conceivable that Canada could eventually move so that it's in the tropics.
It may take a while, though.
>Environmentalism is about saving humans not the earth.
No, it's not. Environmentalism is basically about preserving the status quo, environmentally. It's just like social conservatism, except that instead of trying to preserve society at a certain point in time, more or less (like the 50s for American conservatives), environmentalsts want to preserve the environmental status quo at some halcyon age (probably the 1700s or 1800s sometime). So there's multiple components here: they want the temperatures and sea levels to remain the same, because any big changes there will grossly affect human civilization, since we've built so many cities at sea level and because we need a mild climate for agriculture. Environmentalists also want to preserve plant and animal species, for various reasons, but of course only current ones; they don't usually talk that much about going back and trying to revive dinosaurs since they really wouldn't fit into today's world too well.
>Quick: name a country which doesn't think its ways are the obviously correct ways, and that the world wouldn't better if only everyone else would adopt their standards.
>Europeans are convinced that we should maintain a bit of aloof isolationism. The Middle East is convinced that a Muslim theocracy would benefit everyone. Much of Asia wishes we could get over the recent notion of individual rights instead of duties to country.
These aren't all the same. A worldwide Muslim theocracy would affect everyone, including people who don't want it. Whereas Europeans being isolationist doesn't affect anyone except Europeans. Similarly, Asians pushing duties to country really only affects Asians in the concerned countries.
Yes, everyone (nations and individuals alike) think that their ways are the correct ways, and everyone else should be more like them. However, if you're not actively pushing yourself and your ways on other people, there's no ethical problem. If a bunch of European nations say "we want to keep to ourselves except maybe for some trade", that isn't hurting anyone else. Other places are free to run their nations as they please; they can establish theocracies if they want, or not. However, nations that have foreign policies which emphasize interventionism and pushing their ways on others are in a different boat. Some Muslim nations do try to push their ways, but they don't really have much power to back up those desires (if they ever got that power, that would be rather scary). However the US and Russia (moreso the US these days) and also China not only have the power to be bullies, but they actively engage in bullying behavior on the international level.
Point #2 is kind of right. Jessup isn't a great place, but you don't have to live there...just work there. You can easily work at Jessup but live in, say, Takoma Park or Columbia or any of the other really nice neighborhoods that are within 30 minutes. Where you work != where you live.
Not really. You can only realistically commute so far; most people don't want to spend more than 1 hour in each direction, and that's kinda pushing it. So yeah, you don't have to live right in Jessup, but you're still stuck in Maryland or maybe northern Virginia (if you can stomach driving on the beltway every day--that's a pretty hellish thought). Not everyone is OK with living there; it's a totally different local culture than, say, NYC or Boston or the Bay Area or Seattle or San Diego. Someone who wants to be able to go surfing on the weekends, for instance, will not want to live there. Someone who likes West Coast city culture will not want to live there. Heck, someone who doesn't want to live in a place totally dominated by government workers won't want to live there.
This is one of the problems with some PhDs. It's probably not much of a problem with Bachelor's degree holders; with a BS, you learn enough to learn how to learn more later on, and you learn how little you really know, but you don't get so specialized that you think you're an expert.
What level of autodidactism are we talking about here anyway? High school dropouts, or people with slightly different degrees to what they're currently working in?
Remember, a university education is not a training course. It's supposed to give you the fundamentals so you have a broad education and a starting point to learn more on your own later. It doesn't replace specialized knowledge gained through experience, and never will. Ruby and JavaScript are not languages normally taught at the university level; those are things you're supposed to learn on your own, after learning more general concepts in a university program. Same goes for web apps; someone who earned a CS degree in 1992 is not going to have any formal training on such a thing, but they'll have learned all the general concepts behind how computers work and behind programming, algorithms, data structures, etc. which they need to learn how to program web apps on their own.