FWIW, you'll probably get a glimpse of the palantir of Minas Tirith in the third movie, since it would be all-but-impossible to explain Denethor's madness without introducing it, unless Jackson completely cuts anchor to the book. So you'll get a taste of it, at least.:)
The first attempt to make it into a movie was a disaster, it was a disney style cartoon...
(snip...) Remember also that this was at the time when the cult film Wizards was popular, an innovative and impressive film at the time, and with a similar theme. The animated take on LoTR might have been a hit, if done better and completed
If, by "the first attempt", you're speaking of the 1978 animated movie, it was directed by Ralph Bakshi, who also had done Wizards. Others more knowledgeable than I claim that Wizards was Bakshi's training wheels for LOTR. Don't know if it helped too much.
Also, Bakshi's take on LOTR you saw in 1978 was not supposed to be complete ; the first film ends, IIRC, right after Helm's Deep. A promised second-part never appeared, at least not by Bakshi's hand. A made-for-TV-something called "The Return of the King" did appear,a few years later (1980?/81?), done by Rankin and Bass (the folks behind the original animation of the Hobbit). I remember being just amazingly disappointed with it, especially considering the two had done a great adaptation of the Hobbit a few years earlier.
As a card-carrying member of the Tolkien lunatic fringe, I'm not thrilled by a few of the editorial liberties taken by Jackson, but overall it's a much more satisfying experience than the earlier attempts were. I do urge people I've talked to who have seen the movie to read the books, as they are much richer in experience than a 3-hour adaptation of each part could ever be. But Jackson' films definitely present the same aura of wonder, power and, for lack of a better phrase, the bigness of things the books projected as well. And that's nice to see visualized.
No need for it now. IIRC, the plot device it served in the books was to (inadvertently) misdirect Sauron into believing the ring was headed to Minas Tirith. A happy accident for the Fellowship's sake.
In any event, the whole Osgiliath distraction in the second movie seems to serve the same point--Nazgul spots Frodo with ring in Osgiliath, Sauron gets mistaken assumption that ring is going to Minas Tirith, etc., etc. Which is probably why Jackson made the "addition" in the first place--accomplishes the same plot device without having to return to Isengard in the third movie. Time economy, I guess.
Can you imagine the average smuck not smart enough to escape jury duty trying to make sense of all this? Worse trying to make sense of it while getting the info from two different camps?
The consequences of this for the technical community serve as an excellent argument for why smart people maybe shouldn't try to escape jury duty...
Just in case anyone is getting wrongheaded expectations of RMS and/or Linus appearing in a courtroom anytime soon, these subpoenas most likely are asking for either: a) depositions relative to discovery or b) specific documents, answers or background information relative to one of the issues being considered at trial. Nothing terribly exciting here, although it does make for a catchy headline.
I mention this because a number of posts speculate on "the GPL finally going to trial" or some such as a consequence of this. That may very well happen, but not as an immediate result of this. So those of you awaiting the "GPL Final Combat" should probably sheathe the swords for a little while longer...
I'm sure the posting got enough word-of-mouth that one of the MS management types took a look. I'm sure they've got some kind of function for monitoring their perceived presence in web-world, among other places. It wouldn't be too hard, I'd imagine--might even have been scuttlebutt from amongst the guy's co-workers. It's amazing how little credit people are willing to give a company for being aware of the gossip of it's employees...:)
RE: concerns about being bothered that your employer might be checking up on you. Well...don't post your boss hatred/hormonal urgings in a public place.
"Those are things you might want to share with the internet" and "you don't want your co-workers finding out" are mutually-exclusive objectives. Pick one or the other.
Certainly possible. A possible side effect of that would be that ICANN would be viewed in a negative light by the court for "taking the law into their own hands" rather than going through precedented channels for resolution. A soft concern, but something I'd think about if I were their counsel.
If I'm them, unless there's some timeline constraint I don't know about, I'd stick to the high road.
Good clarification. Should things progress to the Supreme Court, I'd see a similar reluctance to intervene as well--this just doesn't seem to have the cataclysmic overtones they look for to agree to a hearing, let alone an expedited one. Although I'm sure more of./ would disagree with that assessment.:)
IANAL, but this would most likely be the scenario:
ICANN presents a tort complaint to the Federal bench after the deadline, claiming breach of contract, per the language in their letter. They could start with a local one, but there would be immediate issues regarding diversity of jursidiction, so they'd probably best just start with the Feds
They also request an expedited decision on the issue (unlikely) and/or an immediate injunction granting relief of the breach, pending delayed decision.
If the judge is so inclined, requested injunction is granted, with Verisign enjoined to restore the pre 9/15 operational environment "with all due speed".
Verisign hopefully complies, but I'd expect lots of legal wrangling, covering every base from "claim lacks merit on it's face" through "court does not have appropriate jurisdiction", probably an appeal or two, although I think the only level up from Federal would be the Supreme Court. Whether they'd grant the appropriate writ of certiorari to hear the appeal would be questionable, but that's my opinion, not a legal one.
Assuming Verisign's legal tactics fail them, they're under legal requirement to comply. Failure to comply, in the court's view, would be a serious mistake with potentially significant consequences for the Verisign officers. Operational question here would be what constitutes "all due speed" in applying a remedy.
Stay tuned folks, some interesting viewing coming up regarding this.
As the article and an earlier poster mentioned, you still have to have the talent and experience necessary to transform all that sound into a coherent experience conveying a desired effect.
That's still an expensive skill. You could completely remove the record labels from the equation and the Steve Albini's/Brian Eno's/Butch Vig's of the world ain't gonna get any cheaper.
And as the article mentioned, you still need a performance space with certain very specific characteristics to do the recording in, if you're doing anything involving acoustic instruments (that means drums as well, unless you go completely to a drum pad). Try doing a professional quality recording in your living room sometime and see what you can do with the resulting raw material. Those spaces are expensive to build and pretty high-maintenance.
Yep, CD's are overpriced for sure. Yep, studios are still clinging to a management model whose underlying market assumptions are pretty shaky. But please don't try to offer this as "more evidence of price fixing and extortion". It still costs quite a bit to get "that sound", even if the studio overhead collectively threw itself off a cliff and out of the process.
Bemoaning the lack of XML-based magic goodness in corporate document processing assumes that a corporate document base exists which a) follows predictable content and structural patterns to allow automated processing, and b) is structured and rigorous enough to do meaningful processing against, an assumption which frankly doesn't hold water in too many places.
For most of the office document world (at least the world I work with regularly), most documents are unique in both structure and content and I as a programmer can make only the most basic of assumptions regarding what a program can expect to find within the content bundle. Sure the XML gives me a nice set of rules to rely on for breaking the document into parts and reading it in. But it doesn't do a whole lot to ensure that, say, two spreadsheets follow similar content assignment conventions. Most places can't get two managers to agree on the form and structure of a basic memo, or even get the same individual to repeatedly use a consistent structure in all his/her business communications.
Most organizations need to work on a few things before this type of processing will be useful in the large. Two particular areas would be: a) consistent use of metadata within document definitions to facilitate querying and filtering, and b) more sophisticated use of template functionality beyond just ensuring every page has the same graphic in it's header.
I would be interested to know exactly how much $$$ Sprint put into developing their PCS network. I have a feeling that, while it's a large amount of money in terms you and I would understand, that it's pretty modest compared to the amount of money (inflation-adjusted to be sure) that was necessary to get the space program from nothing to the moon over a 10-odd year period. If Sprint had to put a similar volume of money into building their PCS network Sprint never would have entered that business, IMO.
I don't know if I'm aruging specifically in favor of "projects with no conceivable return". But I am arguing in favor of basic science. You do those sorts of research to identify what benefits could derive from your discoveries, not because you have a specific objective. If "maybe... X" doesn't do it for you, fine. But that ignores quite a few serendipitous discoveries which were identified and developed in the wake of space program-inspired research.
You want to better qualify the projects NASA works on, sounds good to me. I don't know if I'd give them a blank check without some rationale as to why basic research {A} needs investigation before basic research {B} does. But you seem to be arguing that government has no role doing this stuff in the first place. My argument is if not the government, who? I just don't see private industry taking this stuff on. And for it not to be done at all would be, in my opinion, a mistake. And waiting for things to become more "economically feasible" becomes a self-defeating argument, because if nobody jumps into the pool to do the work to make it more economically feasible, it never becomes feasible.
One more thing. Absolutely, projects like these lead to resume padding and political grandstanding. Sucks and stinks, no question. Doesn't mean people don't benefit anyway. Disparaging them because of individual acts of pettiness obscures the real good that results from the research being done in the first place.
And how is that unforseen technology going to be conceived of, implemented, tested and proven without lots and lots of expensive, basic research? To be funded by....who?, since there's no reasonable ROI for private industry to latch onto and the government can't do it efficiently?
It'll never be found...so the said Mars program (or any other similar endeavor) would never, ever happen.
Your logic has the end-effect of shutting down big-ticket, long-range research programs completely.
Point being this: there are motives other than economic return for doing things and deep-pocketed governments, being amenable to non-economic motivators for doing those things, may well be the only entities capable of doing those things.
Should NASA be run better? Absolutely. Could they use much better management and decision-making strategies? Of course.
Since they have these problems, should the government get out of the research business? No, because it does provide longer-term benefits that wouldn't exist otherwise, since no entity besides government can support and fund these types of research.
So such a program shouldn't be done at all, given that it makes no sense for a business to do it financially and the government apparently can't do it efficiently?
1. As pointed out by others in this thread, basic space research has had a bunch of other benefits in other industries. From a body politic perspective, I'd say we've benefitted overall from it, so it seems a net-beneficial exercise, at least to me.
2. NASA does a horrible job qualifying the "why" of these programs. I think they need to point out benefits other than space just being a Cool Place To Explore.
3. If you're saying that NASA needs a little more oversight and thought in deciding which programs to fund and how to manage them, I absolutely agree with you.
Given the (no pun intended) astronomical expenses involved in putting forward such a program:
1. only the largest, most deep pocketed companies would be able to even consider this, which drops the beneficial effects of competition down. Who would have the resources to single-source this? GE, maybe, for one. I'm sure some European and maybe Asian companies. Not too many, though.
2. The return-on-investment would have to be through the roof. What incentive do you offer the GE's of the world to write a check for this? Exclusive rights to mine the moon? Don't think the rest of the world political community would sign off on that.
3. Given the quarter-to-quarter mindset of most corporations, how do you sell a research program costing hundreds of millions of dollars and taking multiple years to return anything. Pharma is the only industry I can think of with similar return horizons and I don't think typical drug dev. costs would even show up as rounding error compared to a typical space exploration mission
Tough, tough sell you're talking about here, sending it over to private industry. The gov. may be one of the few institutions able/willing to live with the cost and return horizon. Not very efficient, but certainly more patient and deep-pocketed than the private sector--at least for the type of basic research you're talking about.
I do believe that capitalism works, but you underestimate the ol' "barrier to entry" issue here. Just because an opportunity exists doesn't mean an enterprise is ready/able to service it.
When you start considering Walmart's ability to throw it's collective weight around in the supply chain, said barriers to entry become even more formidable. You want to service a niche in the DVD rental market. Hard to do it if the various distributors will only supply you if you buy thousands of copies of a broad part of their catalog, only 5% of which may make sense to your business model...
Again, I'm all for capitalism--but don't sugar-coat the difficulty of carving a niche out, even one ignored by the big players.
Uh, no actually, I don't think you're right at all...
1) By your logic, closed-source solutions are inherently more secure, simply because an attacker needs to go a-searching for exploits on the call level, rather than having access to the source? Please. Doesn't seem to have slowed down the steady stream of MS-specific exploits, does it?
If anything, I'd rather said code have as wide a review base as possible to determine these exploits and fix them before the shenanigans begin. Possible with open source. Not happening with closed source. I'd say closing the source serves as a security de-stabilizer.
2) A proposition you clearly haven't considered: perhaps the government could find some more broadly meaningful use for monies earmarked for software licenses as opposed to a de-facto subsidy of our software development sector? General business development? Social support programs? Or, (as I put my Libertarian hat on), even return it to Joe and Jane Taxpayer and let them determine some useful purpose for it?
From the just the above, I think I could make a good case for open source that has nothing to do w/ "religion" and has a lot to do with pragmatic concerns about security and effective use of tax dollars.
Get off the soapbox. There are a number of sound reasons for supporting open source use by ouf government agencies that have nothing to do with hatred (blind or otherwise) of closed-source vendors.
Sorry your day got so bent by this...looks like you have some excess inventory in the "attitude" bin.
Why isn't "Please turn off your cellphones" a fix? It would seem to deal with the problem--crudely, yes, but effectively. So what's the disqualifier? It's inconvenient? If so, your point would be...?
Your stated corollary doesn't necessarily apply here--the issue in question isn't software based; it's the spectrum in which the transmissions/receptions are taking place. I suppose the TX/RX could be moved to another non-contentious part of the spectrum...but isn't that a bit extreme just to allow cellphone chatter on an airplane?
An "exploit"? I guess gravity would be an exploit as well in this case.
"Fix the bug and quit boring us with the details"? You do realize that most effective problem solving flows from understanding the details, right?
Christ, if you're going to rant, at least provide something meaty to chew on at the end of it.
and of course Microsoft shops comprise the majority of "shops" out there.
OK, I'll bite, primarily because I can't believe this has gotten a +5 moderation....
I challenge you to demonstrate the truth of the above statement, in regarding MS being the primary application development target/toolset of choice for said "shops".
User desktops, most definitely. Application development, I'm not buying at all. And one does most definitely not imply the other.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, you'll probably get a glimpse of the palantir of Minas Tirith in the third movie, since it would be all-but-impossible to explain Denethor's madness without introducing it, unless Jackson completely cuts anchor to the book. So you'll get a taste of it, at least. :)
The first attempt to make it into a movie was a disaster, it was a disney style cartoon...
(snip...)
Remember also that this was at the time when the cult film Wizards was popular, an innovative and impressive film at the time, and with a similar theme. The animated take on LoTR might have been a hit, if done better and completed
If, by "the first attempt", you're speaking of the 1978 animated movie, it was directed by Ralph Bakshi, who also had done Wizards. Others more knowledgeable than I claim that Wizards was Bakshi's training wheels for LOTR. Don't know if it helped too much.
Also, Bakshi's take on LOTR you saw in 1978 was not supposed to be complete ; the first film ends, IIRC, right after Helm's Deep. A promised second-part never appeared, at least not by Bakshi's hand. A made-for-TV-something called "The Return of the King" did appear,a few years later (1980?/81?), done by Rankin and Bass (the folks behind the original animation of the Hobbit). I remember being just amazingly disappointed with it, especially considering the two had done a great adaptation of the Hobbit a few years earlier.
As a card-carrying member of the Tolkien lunatic fringe, I'm not thrilled by a few of the editorial liberties taken by Jackson, but overall it's a much more satisfying experience than the earlier attempts were. I do urge people I've talked to who have seen the movie to read the books, as they are much richer in experience than a 3-hour adaptation of each part could ever be. But Jackson' films definitely present the same aura of wonder, power and, for lack of a better phrase, the bigness of things the books projected as well. And that's nice to see visualized.
No need for it now. IIRC, the plot device it served in the books was to (inadvertently) misdirect Sauron into believing the ring was headed to Minas Tirith. A happy accident for the Fellowship's sake.
In any event, the whole Osgiliath distraction in the second movie seems to serve the same point--Nazgul spots Frodo with ring in Osgiliath, Sauron gets mistaken assumption that ring is going to Minas Tirith, etc., etc. Which is probably why Jackson made the "addition" in the first place--accomplishes the same plot device without having to return to Isengard in the third movie. Time economy, I guess.
So no need for the palantir at this point. Sorry.
Actually, it would be the following...
1. Admin LAN for the Mafia
2. ???
3. Profit!!
4. Get whacked and dropped in the Hudson with a new pair cement overshoes.
Where shall we meet to plan the complete and utter extermination of SCO?
Userspace, of course....
Can you imagine the average smuck not smart enough to escape jury duty trying to make sense of all this? Worse trying to make sense of it while getting the info from two different camps?
The consequences of this for the technical community serve as an excellent argument for why smart people maybe shouldn't try to escape jury duty...
Just in case anyone is getting wrongheaded expectations of RMS and/or Linus appearing in a courtroom anytime soon, these subpoenas most likely are asking for either: a) depositions relative to discovery or b) specific documents, answers or background information relative to one of the issues being considered at trial. Nothing terribly exciting here, although it does make for a catchy headline.
I mention this because a number of posts speculate on "the GPL finally going to trial" or some such as a consequence of this. That may very well happen, but not as an immediate result of this. So those of you awaiting the "GPL Final Combat" should probably sheathe the swords for a little while longer...
I'm sure the posting got enough word-of-mouth that one of the MS management types took a look. I'm sure they've got some kind of function for monitoring their perceived presence in web-world, among other places. It wouldn't be too hard, I'd imagine--might even have been scuttlebutt from amongst the guy's co-workers. It's amazing how little credit people are willing to give a company for being aware of the gossip of it's employees... :)
RE: concerns about being bothered that your employer might be checking up on you. Well...don't post your boss hatred/hormonal urgings in a public place.
"Those are things you might want to share with the internet" and "you don't want your co-workers finding out" are mutually-exclusive objectives. Pick one or the other.
Certainly possible. A possible side effect of that would be that ICANN would be viewed in a negative light by the court for "taking the law into their own hands" rather than going through precedented channels for resolution. A soft concern, but something I'd think about if I were their counsel.
If I'm them, unless there's some timeline constraint I don't know about, I'd stick to the high road.
The issue here is contractual--a tort (always heard in civil court), not a felony or misdemeanor (held in criminal court).
Good clarification. Should things progress to the Supreme Court, I'd see a similar reluctance to intervene as well--this just doesn't seem to have the cataclysmic overtones they look for to agree to a hearing, let alone an expedited one. Although I'm sure more of ./ would disagree with that assessment. :)
Stay tuned folks, some interesting viewing coming up regarding this.
Bollocks!
As the article and an earlier poster mentioned, you still have to have the talent and experience necessary to transform all that sound into a coherent experience conveying a desired effect.
That's still an expensive skill. You could completely remove the record labels from the equation and the Steve Albini's/Brian Eno's/Butch Vig's of the world ain't gonna get any cheaper.
And as the article mentioned, you still need a performance space with certain very specific characteristics to do the recording in, if you're doing anything involving acoustic instruments (that means drums as well, unless you go completely to a drum pad). Try doing a professional quality recording in your living room sometime and see what you can do with the resulting raw material. Those spaces are expensive to build and pretty high-maintenance.
Yep, CD's are overpriced for sure. Yep, studios are still clinging to a management model whose underlying market assumptions are pretty shaky. But please don't try to offer this as "more evidence of price fixing and extortion". It still costs quite a bit to get "that sound", even if the studio overhead collectively threw itself off a cliff and out of the process.
Bemoaning the lack of XML-based magic goodness in corporate document processing assumes that a corporate document base exists which a) follows predictable content and structural patterns to allow automated processing, and b) is structured and rigorous enough to do meaningful processing against, an assumption which frankly doesn't hold water in too many places.
For most of the office document world (at least the world I work with regularly), most documents are unique in both structure and content and I as a programmer can make only the most basic of assumptions regarding what a program can expect to find within the content bundle. Sure the XML gives me a nice set of rules to rely on for breaking the document into parts and reading it in. But it doesn't do a whole lot to ensure that, say, two spreadsheets follow similar content assignment conventions. Most places can't get two managers to agree on the form and structure of a basic memo, or even get the same individual to repeatedly use a consistent structure in all his/her business communications.
Most organizations need to work on a few things before this type of processing will be useful in the large. Two particular areas would be: a) consistent use of metadata within document definitions to facilitate querying and filtering, and b) more sophisticated use of template functionality beyond just ensuring every page has the same graphic in it's header.
I would be interested to know exactly how much $$$ Sprint put into developing their PCS network. I have a feeling that, while it's a large amount of money in terms you and I would understand, that it's pretty modest compared to the amount of money (inflation-adjusted to be sure) that was necessary to get the space program from nothing to the moon over a 10-odd year period. If Sprint had to put a similar volume of money into building their PCS network Sprint never would have entered that business, IMO.
... X" doesn't do it for you, fine. But that ignores quite a few serendipitous discoveries which were identified and developed in the wake of space program-inspired research.
I don't know if I'm aruging specifically in favor of "projects with no conceivable return". But I am arguing in favor of basic science. You do those sorts of research to identify what benefits could derive from your discoveries, not because you have a specific objective. If "maybe
You want to better qualify the projects NASA works on, sounds good to me. I don't know if I'd give them a blank check without some rationale as to why basic research {A} needs investigation before basic research {B} does. But you seem to be arguing that government has no role doing this stuff in the first place. My argument is if not the government, who? I just don't see private industry taking this stuff on. And for it not to be done at all would be, in my opinion, a mistake. And waiting for things to become more "economically feasible" becomes a self-defeating argument, because if nobody jumps into the pool to do the work to make it more economically feasible, it never becomes feasible.
One more thing. Absolutely, projects like these lead to resume padding and political grandstanding. Sucks and stinks, no question. Doesn't mean people don't benefit anyway. Disparaging them because of individual acts of pettiness obscures the real good that results from the research being done in the first place.
And how is that unforseen technology going to be conceived of, implemented, tested and proven without lots and lots of expensive, basic research? To be funded by....who?, since there's no reasonable ROI for private industry to latch onto and the government can't do it efficiently?
It'll never be found...so the said Mars program (or any other similar endeavor) would never, ever happen.
Your logic has the end-effect of shutting down big-ticket, long-range research programs completely.
Point being this: there are motives other than economic return for doing things and deep-pocketed governments, being amenable to non-economic motivators for doing those things, may well be the only entities capable of doing those things.
Should NASA be run better? Absolutely. Could they use much better management and decision-making strategies? Of course.
Since they have these problems, should the government get out of the research business? No, because it does provide longer-term benefits that wouldn't exist otherwise, since no entity besides government can support and fund these types of research.
So such a program shouldn't be done at all, given that it makes no sense for a business to do it financially and the government apparently can't do it efficiently?
Can we? Good question...
A couple maybe-relevant personal opinions:
1. As pointed out by others in this thread, basic space research has had a bunch of other benefits in other industries. From a body politic perspective, I'd say we've benefitted overall from it, so it seems a net-beneficial exercise, at least to me.
2. NASA does a horrible job qualifying the "why" of these programs. I think they need to point out benefits other than space just being a Cool Place To Explore.
3. If you're saying that NASA needs a little more oversight and thought in deciding which programs to fund and how to manage them, I absolutely agree with you.
Given the (no pun intended) astronomical expenses involved in putting forward such a program:
1. only the largest, most deep pocketed companies would be able to even consider this, which drops the beneficial effects of competition down. Who would have the resources to single-source this? GE, maybe, for one. I'm sure some European and maybe Asian companies. Not too many, though.
2. The return-on-investment would have to be through the roof. What incentive do you offer the GE's of the world to write a check for this? Exclusive rights to mine the moon? Don't think the rest of the world political community would sign off on that.
3. Given the quarter-to-quarter mindset of most corporations, how do you sell a research program costing hundreds of millions of dollars and taking multiple years to return anything. Pharma is the only industry I can think of with similar return horizons and I don't think typical drug dev. costs would even show up as rounding error compared to a typical space exploration mission
Tough, tough sell you're talking about here, sending it over to private industry. The gov. may be one of the few institutions able/willing to live with the cost and return horizon. Not very efficient, but certainly more patient and deep-pocketed than the private sector--at least for the type of basic research you're talking about.
I do believe that capitalism works, but you underestimate the ol' "barrier to entry" issue here. Just because an opportunity exists doesn't mean an enterprise is ready/able to service it.
When you start considering Walmart's ability to throw it's collective weight around in the supply chain, said barriers to entry become even more formidable. You want to service a niche in the DVD rental market. Hard to do it if the various distributors will only supply you if you buy thousands of copies of a broad part of their catalog, only 5% of which may make sense to your business model...
Again, I'm all for capitalism--but don't sugar-coat the difficulty of carving a niche out, even one ignored by the big players.
Uh, no actually, I don't think you're right at all...
1) By your logic, closed-source solutions are inherently more secure, simply because an attacker needs to go a-searching for exploits on the call level, rather than having access to the source? Please. Doesn't seem to have slowed down the steady stream of MS-specific exploits, does it?
If anything, I'd rather said code have as wide a review base as possible to determine these exploits and fix them before the shenanigans begin. Possible with open source. Not happening with closed source. I'd say closing the source serves as a security de-stabilizer.
2) A proposition you clearly haven't considered: perhaps the government could find some more broadly meaningful use for monies earmarked for software licenses as opposed to a de-facto subsidy of our software development sector? General business development? Social support programs? Or, (as I put my Libertarian hat on), even return it to Joe and Jane Taxpayer and let them determine some useful purpose for it?
From the just the above, I think I could make a good case for open source that has nothing to do w/ "religion" and has a lot to do with pragmatic concerns about security and effective use of tax dollars.
Get off the soapbox. There are a number of sound reasons for supporting open source use by ouf government agencies that have nothing to do with hatred (blind or otherwise) of closed-source vendors.
I'd do it myself, but have posted elsewhere.
Why? To reward someone actually taking the time to propose a solution, rather than just ranting...
Sorry your day got so bent by this...looks like you have some excess inventory in the "attitude" bin.
Why isn't "Please turn off your cellphones" a fix? It would seem to deal with the problem--crudely, yes, but effectively. So what's the disqualifier? It's inconvenient? If so, your point would be...?
Your stated corollary doesn't necessarily apply here--the issue in question isn't software based; it's the spectrum in which the transmissions/receptions are taking place. I suppose the TX/RX could be moved to another non-contentious part of the spectrum...but isn't that a bit extreme just to allow cellphone chatter on an airplane?
An "exploit"? I guess gravity would be an exploit as well in this case.
"Fix the bug and quit boring us with the details"? You do realize that most effective problem solving flows from understanding the details, right?
Christ, if you're going to rant, at least provide something meaty to chew on at the end of it.
and of course Microsoft shops comprise the majority of "shops" out there.
OK, I'll bite, primarily because I can't believe this has gotten a +5 moderation....
I challenge you to demonstrate the truth of the above statement, in regarding MS being the primary application development target/toolset of choice for said "shops".
User desktops, most definitely. Application development, I'm not buying at all. And one does most definitely not imply the other.
Would someone care to post a lucid, fact-supported description of why this matters for any practical purpose?
.Net being tied to Windows, Mono not withstanding.
The lack of a public standard has seemingly not deterred IBM, et al, from JDK development.
The presence of a public standard has done nothing to change the perception of
In neither case has the presence/lack of a public certified specification meant diddly to the functionality and utility of either platform.
This sounds more like fanboy posturing than anything meaningful.