Thanks for debunking the whole "push-over" politicians angle. Let me just add that those old rascals over in the US are, after all, our allies. I for one, don't think avoiding needlessly killing our allies is the same as bending over to give them better access to our backside.
"What I want to know is how lowering corporate tax helps anyone at all when such a huge percentage of corporations pay 0%"
It would help the small businesses that don't have the resources or know-how to avoid corporation tax. I find all of this rather distasteful, especially in light of the old "do no evil" mantra of Google, but the current system gives big companies an unfair competitive advantage, because they have the resources and know-how to avoid corporation tax.
"Most of the work we do as developers is string manipulation."
Perhaps most of the work YOU do as a developer is String manipulation. But that does not necessarily apply to everyone. As for C-strings being poor, Ritchie and other C-developers made most of their design decisions for a reason. Strings as we know them now, i.e. C++ std::string, MFC CString, QString, etc. were not a realistic alternative when C was developed and the actual realistic alternatives, i.e. Pascal strings, had their own drawbacks (fixed length).
"Or even better: don't give them a phone and let them communicate like normal children do"
This was normal when you were a kid. It isn't normal now. If you want your kid to have a shot in the treacherous changing world of real life social networks, he/she probably needs a mobile phone now.
I routinely get modded down for this, due to the particular fairly blinkered "pro-cracktivist" attitude at Facebook. The old notion that "disagreeing with something is not a valid reason to mod someone down" goes completely out the window on this issue. But the Anonymous/LulzSec "hacktivists" are actually criminals and should be investigated and arrested if found.
Sometimes their intentions have been relatively "noble", other times it has seemed to be mainly for the lulz. In any case, society does not accept vigilantism, whether it is on-line or on the streets.
The "The police must have something better to do"-attitude is also unhelpful and unrealistic. This would imply that the police should always go after the biggest cases and criminals leaving every small crime unsolved, even though you sometimes can't fix the big issues and the small issues sometimes grow into bigger issues later on. Just like in software development, sometimes you have to fix the easy, low-hanging fruit. It is also not like the FBI dropped everything else just to get LulzSec.
Now, I can agree with the notion that they may well get overly shafted from this. But they knew the risks, and some of them have caused millions of pounds of damages (*). At times like this I'd like to quote the Libertines: "they boy kicked out at the world, the world kicked back a lot fucking harder" and the Feds are just about to kick back quite fucking hard.
(*) I'm sure I'll get responses saying someone else would have done worse if LulzSec/Anonymous didn't get there first. Perhaps, but that doesn't excuse them.
"This isn't antitrust. If you are using Google's services, then you have a choice immediately and obviously accessible; direct your browser to a different website."
This isn't about you, me or other users. We are not Google's customers (as lots of others have pointed out). Our attention is their product, and their customers are companies which wish to sell to Google's users.
We, the users, can indeed switch to use other products, although leaving Google Mail is likely to be painful, but their customers may not be able to switch this easily. If Google holds a massively dominant role in internet search (and surely nobody disputes that they do), then companies which wish to sell their products may have little choice but to use Google's advertisement mechanisms.
I have no idea whether Google has actually breached any anti-trust regulations, but they may well fit the profile of a monopoly.
Those two sentences might come back to haunt you in your attempt to qualify for disability. It sounds like you're able to perform some amount of work, just not in your chosen profession."
You are jumping to conclusions. There are lots of types of disabilities, both physical or mental which make it possible for you to clean a house without being able to make a living as a cleaner.
If you're missing an arm you are not going to make a living as a cleaner without some form of government subsidies. You can still clean your own house, just slower than all the cleaners a for-profit cleaning company would hire.
For the record, I have absolutely no idea why Snowgirl can't work for a living, but I wouldn't like to jump to conclusions.
"They have no good financial reason to support 2 seperate database systems. In those 4 years they'll simply migrate all their paying MySQL support customers to the Oracle DB and once thats done the MySQL codebase will no doubt be quietly forgotten about."
I doubt that. MySQL is nowhere near as complete as Oracle, but on the other hand it is considerably simpler to deal with. Oracle will most likely keep MySQL as an "Oracle Light", which doesn't contain all the fancy enterprise features of Oracle, but is quick and easy to set up without donating your second kidney and practising voodoo, sacrificing live chickens and all.
I doubt Oracle will think they have a good financial reason to support an open source database system, however, so MySQL will not remain open source beyond those 4 years (and several of those must have passed by now?).
This is not the answer. With Debian Unstable, the occasional break seems acceptable. This is at least what it was like when I used Debian Unstable regularly a few years ago. If you wanted something more "stable" the answer was always, "use testing/stable".
What we are talking about here are rolling releases where breaks are unacceptable. This requires more than just a change of release timings, instead you basically need a different development culture.
For one thing, the changes you make have to be more carefully chosen and certainly a lot less risky than what Debian will do to Debian Unstable. They ought to be regression tested before you allow them in and you should never/rarely allow more than one major change in at a time.
"In other words, releases are bad for bad developers. Because a developer who doesn't want to fix bugs for an existing release is a bad developer."
What you mean is that releases are bad for bad development managers. The developer will fix the bugs they are tasked to do. The manager makes the decision as to whether to fix bugs in existing releases.
But, you are missing the point. It may be completely sensible to wait until the next release for a bugfix. Unless the problem is urgent, you don't want to risk the possibility of regressions in an existing release just to fix a small problem. This all depends on whether you have to support old versions or not.
Canonical does not have the resources to support EVERY release beyond their 6-month cycle. They support the LTS releases and if you use the 6-monthly ones, you are expected to upgrade if you want non-essential fixes. Seems sensible enough to me.
"They are stable but not enough themes [....] for it to be of mature/professional enough"
Themes and professionalism are mutually exclusive. For an office workstation, the only thing that matters is a good default one. It is very rare that an "average non fanboy user" gives two shits about themes.
"Regulars accept that service is not identical from night to night"
Yes. But most also expect to pay as little as others on the same night. If you release lots of half price vouchers to people but let your regulars eat full price on that same night, you can't expect them to be happy about it if they find out. Deals offered only to new customers often piss their existing customers off and I've certainly changed mobile phone operator before, simply so I could get a "new customer" deal.
If this restaurant wanted to keep their regular customers happy, they should have apologised to the regulars and offered them their meal at a discount.
Of course they could. GroupOn could stagger the expiry dates. I.e. add one day to the expiry date for every week the offer has run, or something similar. They could also provide a randomised offset to the expiry date to avoid everyone getting a voucher with the same expiry date.
"How will they be kept out of all those uninhabited buildings? They may look uninhabitable to people with a place to live, but to the homeless, they might look not too bad."
Hippie communes, perhaps. But regular hobos or homeless need food and alcohol, and they need other inhabitants to get those things. So they tend to gather where there are people.
"I benefit from the Third World consuming fewer resources, and approve when its denizens kill each other."
Assuming you actually mean what you write, I tend to think that you, and people like you are the problem. I won't sink to your level and approve of someone killing you, but it wouldn't make me particularly sad either.
"BTW, the American colonies were split on the whole independence thing. In retrospect, it is easy to say that the revolutionaries did the right thing. But when the colonies rebelled many Americans fought on the British side."
Also, it owed a lot of its success to support from France. Without it, chances are the revolution would have failed and I don't know enough about Brazilian history to know whether they could expect help from a friendly super power.
"So if the rest of the world jumped off a bridge, you think that's a reason for the US and Belize to do the same?"
What a ridiculous hyperbolic straw man argument. We are not talking about the choice between a safe action (remaining on the bridge) or a disastrous one (jumping off it).
That the entire world does something, may in many cases be a valid argument for a choice. It may be due to economy of scale, or benefits in cooperation (the case here). Besides, this is not the only argument for the US switching, and I included one in my original post which you chose to ignore.
... and the following famines and potential warfare.
We already see this with dams on rivers which are vital to the down streams countries and people. If it became realistically possible to control the rain, we would start to see countries affecting each others rain fall, especially due to fairly predictable overall wind patterns.
I'm not saying there aren't positive possibilities, but there is massive scope for negative consequences and if this became viable technology it is something the UN would have to be fully on top of.
"If Wikileaks is going back to just leaking raw data then I don't blame them, they were better off that way not getting fucked by a media"... "I don't believe Wikileaks is anything like perfect, it has many problems, but they were better off just leaking data" [Emphasis mine].
Aside from a slight sympathy with people in general, who cares if Wikileaks gets "fucked" or what Wikileaks are better off doing? Surely the important thing here is the exposure of malfeasance, while doing your best to protect the innocent? If the promotion of Wikileaks becomes more important than the actual leaks, you have just proven the parent post's point. And if the newspapers don't print what Wikileaks want them to print, they can always release the information themselves as well.
As a side note I'd rather see Assange and Wikileaks get fucked than some innocent who just happens to be put in danger due to his identity being revealed by Wikileaks. At least Assange made the concious choice to put themselves in the spotlight for this.
"C is not higher resolution that F. So I don't think that is the argument for changing."
Who said this? The argument for changing is that Celcius is unit compatible with Kelvin, meaning it slots right into a self-consistent, logical, base-10 system of measurements, plus the fact that the entire world, except the US and Belize, uses it. Scientists would use Kelvin in the US as well.
"So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed"
Some. Others believe ideas to be flawed because it is convenient to do so. There is a fair portion of blinkered immorality on both sides. The left have the hippie "do-gooders" who just want to feel good themselves and actually cause harm and the right have the selfish who hide behind misrepresented and misapplied economics so they don't have to give anything up.
They both also have the fascists who want to force their ideology upon others.
Ok... so you may achieve 3x performance improvement in an outer loop and an independent 3x performance in an inner loop to achieve a cumulative effect, but this is rather irrelevant to the discussion.
There is absolutely no way you would get an overall 10-20 times speed boost for a complex bit of software like an OS from improving some code by 3x.
"And yes, asm will usually get you a 3x boost over C - and the performance diff. is cumulative, so having a desktop that's 10-20x faster may be possible."
What?? This is like saying that if you managed to make four relay sprinters three times as fast, the resulting times on 4x100 meter relay would be 1/20 of the original. I'm sorry, but in reality, rather than magic pixie dust land, the maximum theoretical improvement is still only 3x, and unless you improve absolutely EVERYTHING by this amount, your improvement can only go down.
Even if your assembly skills far, far outweighed the skills of the compilers, which is doubtful, you would not be able to a modern desktop OS in assembly where ALL parts of the OS is more efficient than what the C compilers would have created.
Attempting to write a whole desktop OS in assembly sounds to me like the most extreme form of premature optimisation. Unless you have infinite amounts of time and resources to write this OS, you'd be far better off writing it in a higher level language, profiling it, and then potentially going back and rewriting the most critical parts in assembly.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for debunking the whole "push-over" politicians angle. Let me just add that those old rascals over in the US are, after all, our allies. I for one, don't think avoiding needlessly killing our allies is the same as bending over to give them better access to our backside.
"What I want to know is how lowering corporate tax helps anyone at all when such a huge percentage of corporations pay 0%"
It would help the small businesses that don't have the resources or know-how to avoid corporation tax. I find all of this rather distasteful, especially in light of the old "do no evil" mantra of Google, but the current system gives big companies an unfair competitive advantage, because they have the resources and know-how to avoid corporation tax.
"Most of the work we do as developers is string manipulation."
Perhaps most of the work YOU do as a developer is String manipulation. But that does not necessarily apply to everyone. As for C-strings being poor, Ritchie and other C-developers made most of their design decisions for a reason. Strings as we know them now, i.e. C++ std::string, MFC CString, QString, etc. were not a realistic alternative when C was developed and the actual realistic alternatives, i.e. Pascal strings, had their own drawbacks (fixed length).
"Or even better: don't give them a phone and let them communicate like normal children do"
This was normal when you were a kid. It isn't normal now. If you want your kid to have a shot in the treacherous changing world of real life social networks, he/she probably needs a mobile phone now.
I routinely get modded down for this, due to the particular fairly blinkered "pro-cracktivist" attitude at Facebook. The old notion that "disagreeing with something is not a valid reason to mod someone down" goes completely out the window on this issue. But the Anonymous/LulzSec "hacktivists" are actually criminals and should be investigated and arrested if found.
Sometimes their intentions have been relatively "noble", other times it has seemed to be mainly for the lulz. In any case, society does not accept vigilantism, whether it is on-line or on the streets.
The "The police must have something better to do"-attitude is also unhelpful and unrealistic. This would imply that the police should always go after the biggest cases and criminals leaving every small crime unsolved, even though you sometimes can't fix the big issues and the small issues sometimes grow into bigger issues later on. Just like in software development, sometimes you have to fix the easy, low-hanging fruit. It is also not like the FBI dropped everything else just to get LulzSec.
Now, I can agree with the notion that they may well get overly shafted from this. But they knew the risks, and some of them have caused millions of pounds of damages (*). At times like this I'd like to quote the Libertines: "they boy kicked out at the world, the world kicked back a lot fucking harder" and the Feds are just about to kick back quite fucking hard.
(*) I'm sure I'll get responses saying someone else would have done worse if LulzSec/Anonymous didn't get there first. Perhaps, but that doesn't excuse them.
"It's easier to go after the kiddies than to address the real threats, such as the Russian mafia or whoever is doing the stuff from China."
Yes it is. Obviously they should go after both, but sometimes you have to make do with the ones you can get. That's life.
"This isn't antitrust. If you are using Google's services, then you have a choice immediately and obviously accessible; direct your browser to a different website."
This isn't about you, me or other users. We are not Google's customers (as lots of others have pointed out). Our attention is their product, and their customers are companies which wish to sell to Google's users.
We, the users, can indeed switch to use other products, although leaving Google Mail is likely to be painful, but their customers may not be able to switch this easily. If Google holds a massively dominant role in internet search (and surely nobody disputes that they do), then companies which wish to sell their products may have little choice but to use Google's advertisement mechanisms.
I have no idea whether Google has actually breached any anti-trust regulations, but they may well fit the profile of a monopoly.
"Sorry to hear you're out of work and injured.
Those two sentences might come back to haunt you in your attempt to qualify for disability. It sounds like you're able to perform some amount of work, just not in your chosen profession."
You are jumping to conclusions. There are lots of types of disabilities, both physical or mental which make it possible for you to clean a house without being able to make a living as a cleaner.
If you're missing an arm you are not going to make a living as a cleaner without some form of government subsidies. You can still clean your own house, just slower than all the cleaners a for-profit cleaning company would hire.
For the record, I have absolutely no idea why Snowgirl can't work for a living, but I wouldn't like to jump to conclusions.
"They have no good financial reason to support 2 seperate database systems. In those 4 years they'll simply migrate all their paying MySQL support customers to the Oracle DB and once thats done the MySQL codebase will no doubt be quietly forgotten about."
I doubt that. MySQL is nowhere near as complete as Oracle, but on the other hand it is considerably simpler to deal with. Oracle will most likely keep MySQL as an "Oracle Light", which doesn't contain all the fancy enterprise features of Oracle, but is quick and easy to set up without donating your second kidney and practising voodoo, sacrificing live chickens and all.
I doubt Oracle will think they have a good financial reason to support an open source database system, however, so MySQL will not remain open source beyond those 4 years (and several of those must have passed by now?).
This is not the answer. With Debian Unstable, the occasional break seems acceptable. This is at least what it was like when I used Debian Unstable regularly a few years ago. If you wanted something more "stable" the answer was always, "use testing/stable".
What we are talking about here are rolling releases where breaks are unacceptable. This requires more than just a change of release timings, instead you basically need a different development culture.
For one thing, the changes you make have to be more carefully chosen and certainly a lot less risky than what Debian will do to Debian Unstable. They ought to be regression tested before you allow them in and you should never/rarely allow more than one major change in at a time.
"In other words, releases are bad for bad developers. Because a developer who doesn't want to fix bugs for an existing release is a bad developer."
What you mean is that releases are bad for bad development managers. The developer will fix the bugs they are tasked to do. The manager makes the decision as to whether to fix bugs in existing releases.
But, you are missing the point. It may be completely sensible to wait until the next release for a bugfix. Unless the problem is urgent, you don't want to risk the possibility of regressions in an existing release just to fix a small problem. This all depends on whether you have to support old versions or not.
Canonical does not have the resources to support EVERY release beyond their 6-month cycle. They support the LTS releases and if you use the 6-monthly ones, you are expected to upgrade if you want non-essential fixes. Seems sensible enough to me.
"They are stable but not enough themes [....] for it to be of mature/professional enough"
Themes and professionalism are mutually exclusive. For an office workstation, the only thing that matters is a good default one. It is very rare that an "average non fanboy user" gives two shits about themes.
"Regulars accept that service is not identical from night to night"
Yes. But most also expect to pay as little as others on the same night. If you release lots of half price vouchers to people but let your regulars eat full price on that same night, you can't expect them to be happy about it if they find out. Deals offered only to new customers often piss their existing customers off and I've certainly changed mobile phone operator before, simply so I could get a "new customer" deal.
If this restaurant wanted to keep their regular customers happy, they should have apologised to the regulars and offered them their meal at a discount.
"No avoiding that I guess."
Of course they could. GroupOn could stagger the expiry dates. I.e. add one day to the expiry date for every week the offer has run, or something similar. They could also provide a randomised offset to the expiry date to avoid everyone getting a voucher with the same expiry date.
"How will they be kept out of all those uninhabited buildings? They may look uninhabitable to people with a place to live, but to the homeless, they might look not too bad."
Hippie communes, perhaps. But regular hobos or homeless need food and alcohol, and they need other inhabitants to get those things. So they tend to gather where there are people.
"I benefit from the Third World consuming fewer resources, and approve when its denizens kill each other."
Assuming you actually mean what you write, I tend to think that you, and people like you are the problem. I won't sink to your level and approve of someone killing you, but it wouldn't make me particularly sad either.
"BTW, the American colonies were split on the whole independence thing. In retrospect, it is easy to say that the revolutionaries did the right thing. But when the colonies rebelled many Americans fought on the British side."
Also, it owed a lot of its success to support from France. Without it, chances are the revolution would have failed and I don't know enough about Brazilian history to know whether they could expect help from a friendly super power.
"You must be rather young. You obviously don't remember the good old days, back when this site first started and was overrun with spam and trolls."
Says the person with a six-digit slashdot id.
"So if the rest of the world jumped off a bridge, you think that's a reason for the US and Belize to do the same?"
What a ridiculous hyperbolic straw man argument. We are not talking about the choice between a safe action (remaining on the bridge) or a disastrous one (jumping off it).
That the entire world does something, may in many cases be a valid argument for a choice. It may be due to economy of scale, or benefits in cooperation (the case here). Besides, this is not the only argument for the US switching, and I included one in my original post which you chose to ignore.
... and the following famines and potential warfare.
We already see this with dams on rivers which are vital to the down streams countries and people. If it became realistically possible to control the rain, we would start to see countries affecting each others rain fall, especially due to fairly predictable overall wind patterns.
I'm not saying there aren't positive possibilities, but there is massive scope for negative consequences and if this became viable technology it is something the UN would have to be fully on top of.
"If Wikileaks is going back to just leaking raw data then I don't blame them, they were better off that way not getting fucked by a media" ... "I don't believe Wikileaks is anything like perfect, it has many problems, but they were better off just leaking data" [Emphasis mine].
Aside from a slight sympathy with people in general, who cares if Wikileaks gets "fucked" or what Wikileaks are better off doing? Surely the important thing here is the exposure of malfeasance, while doing your best to protect the innocent? If the promotion of Wikileaks becomes more important than the actual leaks, you have just proven the parent post's point. And if the newspapers don't print what Wikileaks want them to print, they can always release the information themselves as well.
As a side note I'd rather see Assange and Wikileaks get fucked than some innocent who just happens to be put in danger due to his identity being revealed by Wikileaks. At least Assange made the concious choice to put themselves in the spotlight for this.
"C is not higher resolution that F. So I don't think that is the argument for changing."
Who said this? The argument for changing is that Celcius is unit compatible with Kelvin, meaning it slots right into a self-consistent, logical, base-10 system of measurements, plus the fact that the entire world, except the US and Belize, uses it. Scientists would use Kelvin in the US as well.
"So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed"
Some. Others believe ideas to be flawed because it is convenient to do so. There is a fair portion of blinkered immorality on both sides. The left have the hippie "do-gooders" who just want to feel good themselves and actually cause harm and the right have the selfish who hide behind misrepresented and misapplied economics so they don't have to give anything up.
They both also have the fascists who want to force their ideology upon others.
The rest of us are flawed in our own ways.
Ok... so you may achieve 3x performance improvement in an outer loop and an independent 3x performance in an inner loop to achieve a cumulative effect, but this is rather irrelevant to the discussion.
There is absolutely no way you would get an overall 10-20 times speed boost for a complex bit of software like an OS from improving some code by 3x.
"And yes, asm will usually get you a 3x boost over C - and the performance diff. is cumulative, so having a desktop that's 10-20x faster may be possible."
What?? This is like saying that if you managed to make four relay sprinters three times as fast, the resulting times on 4x100 meter relay would be 1/20 of the original. I'm sorry, but in reality, rather than magic pixie dust land, the maximum theoretical improvement is still only 3x, and unless you improve absolutely EVERYTHING by this amount, your improvement can only go down.
Even if your assembly skills far, far outweighed the skills of the compilers, which is doubtful, you would not be able to a modern desktop OS in assembly where ALL parts of the OS is more efficient than what the C compilers would have created.
Attempting to write a whole desktop OS in assembly sounds to me like the most extreme form of premature optimisation. Unless you have infinite amounts of time and resources to write this OS, you'd be far better off writing it in a higher level language, profiling it, and then potentially going back and rewriting the most critical parts in assembly.