Pirating has reached social acceptance, but hey, so has pot smoking. Social acceptance hasn't changed the fact that your government can throw you in jail at any minute.
Not that the rest of your post isn't on target — I think it is — but, dude, have you been paying attention?
This part is still technically true, but in a growing number of places only technically, and that not for very much longer. We all know the drug warriors are lying and have been lying all along (or rather, largely, to be fair, loyally repeating unexamined falsehoods), every bit as much and for the same reasons as the tobacco industry: because what they do gets them paid, and once they got that working for them they degenerated to raw tribalism, where everyone outside the tribe is, to choose the correct words, fair game.
And this correction is a ray of hope, perhaps an answer: OSS and its relatives can be grown at home, too, and the (if you listen to the tribalists) idealistic unworkable ways of running an economy are repeatedly being shown to work. Even if we ignore the playthings, a large majority of the products of free culture are crap, but have you checked the startup business (i.e. the businesses that got beyond plaything status) failure rate lately? Strangely enough, a large majority of them are crap, too. What's good, lasts. It's almost a tautology.
So support flattr, empty though it is at the moment. Get yourself on the beta invite list, and when you get in drop a euro a week into it, help put enough money in the pool to make it worth indie projects' time to put their products on it. Try to imagine what happens the first time one of the standouts hits.
I'm serious: flattr is the foundation of the right way to do it, it's pay what you want made so easy you can easily ask even kiddies "are you serious? you can't afford a nickel a day?" and not just shame them, but entice them into contributing. Because they can reward their friends, too.
Yes, there are legal issues to work out: how to avoid flattr getting sucked into lawsuits over who has the right to flattr'd material just for starters, so it'll have its ugly spots. Flattr will have to keep records of every transaction going back many years. I think they'll need ways of going back to correct flattrs that haven't yet been paid, so you can redirect or cancel the ones you've found to be plagiarized, or to just not stand up on reflection.
But imagine it again: you're contributing generally exactly as much as you're happy to contribute anyway, and here's something you like. There's the button. Imagine that button on every site you've had the impulse to reward. Imagine what happens when one of the big projects hits a release, or someone posts a genuinely entertaining video or beautiful photograph. Or you go back and reread a favorite article and find it's still worth a bump.
I don't know what the ratio has been recently, but those commissions many years ago rejected more than 3/4 of the appeals they heard.
So after being presented with the administration's best shot and the teacher's, this commission, which in all practicality boils down to the judge who chairs the commission, decided the allegations are overblown, that he isn't a danger to anyone, he's a good teacher, and the administrators didn't even care enough about firing him to document their case.
You'll also discover that the commission's decision is final
(4) The decision of the Commission on Professional Competence
shall be deemed to be the final decision of the governing board.
and that their decision was plainly that the employee should not be dismissed or suspended — since that's the only one of their three options that fits the story at all. It's remarkable that he's not back in the classroom.
Read this again: the appeals are over. The district lost. The judge who saw all the evidence rejected their allegations and said the district administration didn't do their jobs.
Yes, it's VERY hard to do your job if you can't be bothered to, you know, actually do it.
I think you left off the "even when or, even, because, they know their lies will hurt people" part that qualifies them as pathologically lying weasels.
Kids, of course, especially teenagers, are known for their measured approach, their abhorrence of drama. And we all know that parents never turn vengeful over Johnny's bad report or whether the coach is giving him a fair shake.
So I guess it'd be a good idea to hand out the power to destroy any teacher's life with a word.
Simple fact is, it's not actually that hard to fire a teacher. I've watched it operate over the course of decades. True: even for the ones are who just ordinarily bad, who just aren't cutting it, you have to go slow, you have to show that there genuinely is a problem and not a gaggle of histrionic parents, you have to show you tried to help with their weak spots, because teaching doesn't pay much and teachers who've gotten past the prerequisites, who look like they might be able to cut it, to do a genuinely good job, aren't easy to come by.
This isn't the corporate world, where people with friends get up-and-out promotions or just get ignored, given nothing meaningful to do. This isn't the corporate world, where little empire-builders hire huge teams to follow baroque procedures to solve problems better addressed by just one competent employee, if you could find one. This isn't the corporate world, where you can impress ignorant bosses by getting all showy with how hard you work and how much you produce.
These are schools, where slacking off hurts children.
Teaching shares this with programming: it's somewhere between a professional craft and an art, and anyone who genuinely knows anything about the product can see stellar work for what it is. Most people can identify a happy child with a lively, perceptive mind. It's strange, though: you'd be astonished how many people seem to be threatened by such children. You'd be astonished how many parents never give a shit about their children and then blame the teachers when their children don't care about themselves. You'd be astonished how many parents transfer fears and frustrations in their personal lives into their children's classrooms and start getting hysterical because of a chance remark.
And no, I've never been a teacher, never worked in a school, never been married or lovers or even friends with anyone who got fired or even needed help. But I have known someone well who was president of a teacher's union for decades, and I've been around for lots of bad or worse teachers getting fired.
Lazy principals who think growing good teachers is somebody else's job... now, they're hard to get rid of.
No, I'm not. You're arguing that private conversation on someone else's property,
The information is inscribed onto the carrier's property.
If you inscribe a piece of private information in somebody else's diary,
not only does your private conversation lose all protection from warrantless search and seizure
If people knew how little Constitutional protection they have in this situation, they'd be shocked.
carried out by some little martinet, but also, since it's the other party's property being searched, that somehow your private communications on someone else's property magically strips not only you but also that other party of his rights, too, because it's the other party's property being searched without a warrant, with maybe a requirement that some thrall writes himself a permission slip.
That's a recipe for unbridled tribalism. Pretending that that has anything to do with the this country's aspirations, its claims, its creed, its law, is cretinous. It serves only the martinets, the petty little tribal wanna-be chiefs with minds so coarse they can comprehend nothing beyond the simplest hierarchy and souls so small they worship it.
Exactly, why is there all the hate AGAINST having a patent free method of encoding audio and video that EVERYBODY can share?
TFA is addressing exactly that question for this method in particular. Some of its objections, including one of the main ones, betray complete ignorance of elementary methods.
The random-access objection in particular is truly stupid. The author claims that because of the absence of an index in the format, locating, say a particular spot in an 8GB video with 4K datablocks requires the full 20-seek binary search. I really hope the obvious solution doesn't need any explanation here.
There are other minor but even more stupid objections in there. Looking up one of a handful of 32-bit randomized stream ids requires a serial search that will be problematically expensive? Please.
Some of the objections are in territory I don't know well, but seem overstated.
Inconsistent streams are possible. That's unusual? Malformed streams can be constructed and detected, and that's bad? Some encoders are buggy and generate malformed streams, and that's a fault of the format?
Similarly with the 32-bit checksums. When the checksums matter, they matter. When they don't they can be ignored.
I have a hard time understanding why even 1.4% protocol overhead is really a problem. Yes, the length encoding is... well, the encoded size scales linearly, one byte per 255 bytes packet size. That's a genuine wtf? but again, so?
I have a very hard time understanding why putting the checksum in the packet header rather than the trailer constitutes a genuine problem. What protocol API delivers data at anything less than link-layer-frame granularity, and what link layer these days is so slow that the delay on a streaming-sized packet is even remotely significant? Even on a 1mb link, near the minimum tolerable for video, that's under 1ms added delay.
Pushing the protocol into audio-only territory, I can see that ogg's packetization could introduce measurable delay across a modem link with PPP header compression turned on and modem compression and error checking turned off. So it won't be very good for VOIP over analog-modem links until someone adds PPP-style header compression.
All the rest seem to me to be objections to unnecessarily-baroque format choices. He doesn't say how many of those choices are forced by patent avoidance.
His preference for the Matroska container format seems valid, but I"m untutored in the field, and his objections in the fields I do understand apparently also seem valid to outsiders in those. I'd be curious.
That's the high points: the most valid objection I can discuss with any authority at all amounts to the claim that MP4 would be a markedly better container format than ogg for streaming VOIP conversations over an uncorrected, uncompressed PPP-over-analog-modem link with PPP header compression turned on. Ok. Does anybody embed VOIP traffic in an MP4 container?
Of the rest, some of the major points are truly and deeply ignorant, others seem to me to be nitpicks. Is his 1.4%-payload-overhead objection, amounting to ten or so extra bytes per ethernet frame, really valid?
The information is inscribed onto the carrier's property
So: if you write a letter on paper someone else paid for, not only do you magically lose your right to be secure in your effects, that someone else loses theirs, too? Every teensiest little deviation from the microscopically-narrowest-conceivable construction of the limits on the Almighty Executive Authority throws you into the realm of unbridled tyranny?
Many kinds of searches don't require warrants
Every kind of search that doesn't match exactly the microscopically-narrowest-conceivable construction of the language describing those that do explicitly require a warrant... can be done at whim, because
We have to look to statutory law for protection.
... the government has absolute power except where a law explicitly denies it?
Every teensiest little deviation from the microscopically-narrowest-conceivable construction of the limits on the Almighty Executive Authority throws you into the realm of unbridled tyranny?
One of the main Federalist arguments against adding the Bill of Rights was that (a) it didn't say anything the Constitution didn't already imply and (b) if they bothered to state some of the consequent limits on government authority explicitly, cretinous martinets would try to argue that those were the only limits.
he was already a debian maintainer, so inside the cathedral
I see. Being committed to open source development and doing exactly what open source developers do means every good thing you do is a credit to Microsoft. Check.
an outsider making changes
I see. No corporate team ever failed to supervise the new guy. Failures of process only happen outside the cathedral. Check.
ought to have
I see. "Suitably expert" people's best efforts always have the effects they ought to have. Check.
Every failure of people's best efforts is a discredit to the process... oh, darn, I forgot my premises again. It's so hard to remember the false ones. Every failure of other people's best efforts is a discredit to their process. That doesn't apply our failures, not even the monstrous ones. We're here to attribute every failure to those other people and deny their successes or, better, claim them for ourselves. I won't forget that again. So sorry.
IBM mainframes at least used to have "expanded storage", block-addressed and fast enough that pagefaults backed there were handled synchronously. It made a good canary metric, "pagefaults across the main memory boundary" though it wasn't reported with that description.
I read his criticisms as being aimed at a naive understanding
...
if the FOSS model was watertight
Reality check time, dude. Are you hearing yourself?
the Debian ssl fiasco
It's interesting that you should cite that.
You are aware, aren't you, that a static analyzer was reporting uninitialized-data use, and the patch made the subtly-false-positive defect report go away?
That they were in fact following best practices, but in hindsight they missed a subtle detail?
That this bug was in fact found thanks to the many-eyeballs effect in operation?
That Mr. Hernan's premise and your claim that Microsoft's products are
NOT relying solely on "many eyeballs", which is why they are secure
is directly and contradicted by the only example you cite is... well, it leads me to the following observation:
You're making exactly the same equivocation he did and Microsoft does repeatedly and it's just as much a fallacy, "equivocation", pretending two things are equal when they're not.
You say KDE has 90 static test failures.
No, I didn't say KDE has 90 static test failures. I said it has 90 "defects Coverity can discover". Thanks to the SDL for nothing: we don't know how many Coverity's static tests can discover in Microsoft's code, because Microsoft won't tell.
It's quite certain from his dissection of the many-eyeballs observation as a syllogism that Mr. Hernan knows the basics of valid and invalid argument forms. Equivocation is one of the basics. Mr. Hernan either knows his argument is deceptive or just doesn't care.
Another bit of sophistry is making an irrelevant observation as if it were relevant, introducing a red herring, for which I don't know a formal name. His "hope" crack, which you repeat, is just that. You know as well as he does that it's irrelevant here and that bringing it up is dishonest, because (a) as you yourself say,
The examples you give are clearly NOT relying solely on "many eyeballs"
and (b) those aren't my examples. They're his. He and you know that his entire post is irrelevant to the evidence he's cherrypicking.
Given that a few projects use Coverity I assume that also means that those projects must be Coverity clean.
You assume what Mr. Hernan very, very carefully avoids claiming or even admitting as a possibility.
It is absolutely true to say
You repeat his sneer, affirm it, and then in the very next sentence openly acknowledge that you're quite well aware it's dishonest to pretend it applies to any of the projects under discussion. It doesn't apply to linux or apache or mysql or postgres or python or perl or glibc or X.org or vim or KDE or blender or php or tcl or samba or curl or emacs or monotone or gnome or gcc or mono or ncurses or squid or wine or gdb or postfix.
He and you are brazenly directing that sneer at projects that your own evidence conclusively demonstrates do not deserve it.
He reports Coverity's results on open source software ... but doesn't report Coverity's results on Microsoft's software.
He reports that Coverity scanned 280 open-source projects ...but doesn't report that only 180 of those have "active developer support".
He can't be bothered to present any data at all on the distribution of the reported or corrected defects — how many are in nethack or aalib or that long-abandoned "flash-based photo album generator"?
He doesn't, for instance, mention that Samba and several others have no defects Coverity can discover. None.
Vim has none. X.org has... three. All of KDE, nearly five million lines of code, has... ninety. glibc has none.
There have been MySQL and PostgreSQL and Berkeley DB versions with none. His bioblurb says he's "currently working to ensure that Microsoft SQL Server is secure". That's interesting. You mean it isn't, now? How many defects can Coverity find in SQL Server?
TFA is a nauseating pile of sneers and aspersions ("Hope is not a security strategy"?) built on a very carefully selected and very few facts. "No one is doing auditing" he quotes. "No one is doing auditing" and reporting it to some self-styled central authority almost no one ever heard of is what's true, but telling the truth isn't what he's doing here. He's a "Program Manager", and he works for Microsoft.
just imagine if the roads were done by private companies
If I recall long-ago reading correctly, frustration at petty little lords demanding excessive tolls at their borders, at a time when communications were becoming easy enough that people could see the larger picture, the inherent waste, was actually a factor propelling France's shift from a gaggle of feudal states to a nation.
These days, the barriers are at, let's call it "enterprise" boundaries. The little tribes demanding exorbitant fees from protected positions can be found everywhere, but what protects the positions is no longer armor and horses and weapons but economic, either by government fiat as in the case of inherited copy"right" or the drug warriors or the TSA; or by absence of government fiat as for the myriad unrestrained monopoly cartels.
Even against that backdrop, claiming that "NASA has always been a huge waste of money" as GP did is breathtakingly small-souled.
If the coded model doesn't behave correctly, patches that just compensate for individual consequences will look like "all that messy code" in short order, and the flood will not end until the users stop coming.
Tolerating api/ui/protocol changes during a complete rewrite is stark staring insane.
That said,
There is no point in rewriting it before you fully understand it. Attempting that can kill a product.
True.
But the rewrite tradeoff hinges on how much better the new model behaves than the old one when producing identical results on all its test cases. Your metric is the cogency of the code. A well done needed can turn a full-time maintenance team into one guy who has to spend maybe twenty hours a year on it.
There are, of course, managers and programmers who regard that as a a bad result.
Start at 3:00 into this video clip. This is a news anchor pointing out that on many channels the news reports on one candidate had been more often positive recently than those for another.
She cites that preponderance as if it were objectionable. That over any given stretch of time one candidate might actually do things right more often than another apparently doesn't even enter her mind.
Alpha particles are over 7,000 times more massive. — they're.50cal bullets to the spitwad of a beta particle.
Canada's limit is ten times the US limit and substantially less than the WHO's limit, and all are intended to prevent dangerous effects if stuff like this is ingested repeatedly and often for years.
If you steadily drink tritiated water like this for years or decades, it'll probably eventually hurt you. So it's worth fixing, which they're doing.
Meanwhile, if you want to do something approximately as dangerous, have a beer.
Slashdot Mirror
The echo is even more exact. Everything they're trying now failed then. They've tried nothing new.
not giving you a feature because it fails in some situations would be classic Apple.
You say that last as if you think it's a bad thing.
"Everything it does, it does well" is exactly equivalent.
Pirating has reached social acceptance, but hey, so has pot smoking. Social acceptance hasn't changed the fact that your government can throw you in jail at any minute.
Not that the rest of your post isn't on target — I think it is — but, dude, have you been paying attention?
This part is still technically true, but in a growing number of places only technically, and that not for very much longer. We all know the drug warriors are lying and have been lying all along (or rather, largely, to be fair, loyally repeating unexamined falsehoods), every bit as much and for the same reasons as the tobacco industry: because what they do gets them paid, and once they got that working for them they degenerated to raw tribalism, where everyone outside the tribe is, to choose the correct words, fair game.
And this correction is a ray of hope, perhaps an answer: OSS and its relatives can be grown at home, too, and the (if you listen to the tribalists) idealistic unworkable ways of running an economy are repeatedly being shown to work. Even if we ignore the playthings, a large majority of the products of free culture are crap, but have you checked the startup business (i.e. the businesses that got beyond plaything status) failure rate lately? Strangely enough, a large majority of them are crap, too. What's good, lasts. It's almost a tautology.
So support flattr, empty though it is at the moment. Get yourself on the beta invite list, and when you get in drop a euro a week into it, help put enough money in the pool to make it worth indie projects' time to put their products on it. Try to imagine what happens the first time one of the standouts hits.
I'm serious: flattr is the foundation of the right way to do it, it's pay what you want made so easy you can easily ask even kiddies "are you serious? you can't afford a nickel a day?" and not just shame them, but entice them into contributing. Because they can reward their friends, too.
Yes, there are legal issues to work out: how to avoid flattr getting sucked into lawsuits over who has the right to flattr'd material just for starters, so it'll have its ugly spots. Flattr will have to keep records of every transaction going back many years. I think they'll need ways of going back to correct flattrs that haven't yet been paid, so you can redirect or cancel the ones you've found to be plagiarized, or to just not stand up on reflection.
But imagine it again: you're contributing generally exactly as much as you're happy to contribute anyway, and here's something you like. There's the button. Imagine that button on every site you've had the impulse to reward. Imagine what happens when one of the big projects hits a release, or someone posts a genuinely entertaining video or beautiful photograph. Or you go back and reread a favorite article and find it's still worth a bump.
Aww, crap. Just saw the price breakdown. Maybe I should do just a little more than the teensiest bit of research.
They show stats on the fraction of Windows downloads, you know. Maybe do the teensiest bit of research, CannonballHead?
Bless you for that link. Oh, thank you.
Haskell makes quicksort run slow?
If you dig a little deeper, you'll find what that "Commission on Professional Competence" GGP's link refers to actually is:
(b) (1) The hearing provided for in this section shall be conducted by a Commission on Professional Competence. One member of the commission shall be selected by the employee, one member shall be selected by the governing board, and one member shall be an administrative law judge of the Office of Administrative Hearings
I don't know what the ratio has been recently, but those commissions many years ago rejected more than 3/4 of the appeals they heard.
So after being presented with the administration's best shot and the teacher's, this commission, which in all practicality boils down to the judge who chairs the commission, decided the allegations are overblown, that he isn't a danger to anyone, he's a good teacher, and the administrators didn't even care enough about firing him to document their case.
You'll also discover that the commission's decision is final
(4) The decision of the Commission on Professional Competence shall be deemed to be the final decision of the governing board.
and that their decision was plainly that the employee should not be dismissed or suspended — since that's the only one of their three options that fits the story at all. It's remarkable that he's not back in the classroom.
Read this again: the appeals are over. The district lost. The judge who saw all the evidence rejected their allegations and said the district administration didn't do their jobs.
Yes, it's VERY hard to do your job if you can't be bothered to, you know, actually do it.
All humans lie. All.
I think you left off the "even when or, even, because, they know their lies will hurt people" part that qualifies them as pathologically lying weasels.
So, fire them on accusation?
Kids, of course, especially teenagers, are known for their measured approach, their abhorrence of drama. And we all know that parents never turn vengeful over Johnny's bad report or whether the coach is giving him a fair shake.
So I guess it'd be a good idea to hand out the power to destroy any teacher's life with a word.
Simple fact is, it's not actually that hard to fire a teacher. I've watched it operate over the course of decades. True: even for the ones are who just ordinarily bad, who just aren't cutting it, you have to go slow, you have to show that there genuinely is a problem and not a gaggle of histrionic parents, you have to show you tried to help with their weak spots, because teaching doesn't pay much and teachers who've gotten past the prerequisites, who look like they might be able to cut it, to do a genuinely good job, aren't easy to come by.
This isn't the corporate world, where people with friends get up-and-out promotions or just get ignored, given nothing meaningful to do. This isn't the corporate world, where little empire-builders hire huge teams to follow baroque procedures to solve problems better addressed by just one competent employee, if you could find one. This isn't the corporate world, where you can impress ignorant bosses by getting all showy with how hard you work and how much you produce.
These are schools, where slacking off hurts children.
Teaching shares this with programming: it's somewhere between a professional craft and an art, and anyone who genuinely knows anything about the product can see stellar work for what it is. Most people can identify a happy child with a lively, perceptive mind. It's strange, though: you'd be astonished how many people seem to be threatened by such children. You'd be astonished how many parents never give a shit about their children and then blame the teachers when their children don't care about themselves. You'd be astonished how many parents transfer fears and frustrations in their personal lives into their children's classrooms and start getting hysterical because of a chance remark.
And no, I've never been a teacher, never worked in a school, never been married or lovers or even friends with anyone who got fired or even needed help. But I have known someone well who was president of a teacher's union for decades, and I've been around for lots of bad or worse teachers getting fired.
Lazy principals who think growing good teachers is somebody else's job ... now, they're hard to get rid of.
Oops. Sorry, was that unfair?
No, I'm not. You're arguing that private conversation on someone else's property,
The information is inscribed onto the carrier's property.
If you inscribe a piece of private information in somebody else's diary,
not only does your private conversation lose all protection from warrantless search and seizure
If people knew how little Constitutional protection they have in this situation, they'd be shocked.
carried out by some little martinet, but also, since it's the other party's property being searched, that somehow your private communications on someone else's property magically strips not only you but also that other party of his rights, too, because it's the other party's property being searched without a warrant, with maybe a requirement that some thrall writes himself a permission slip.
That's a recipe for unbridled tribalism. Pretending that that has anything to do with the this country's aspirations, its claims, its creed, its law, is cretinous. It serves only the martinets, the petty little tribal wanna-be chiefs with minds so coarse they can comprehend nothing beyond the simplest hierarchy and souls so small they worship it.
Or, in short, the "better to rule" crowd.
On real world MP3 players (and I've worked on some) that accounts for about 10% of your battery play time right there. I kid you not.
I didn't know MP3 was a general-purpose media embedding format.
Is there a good reason people don't store single audio-only recordings in single vorbis-only data files?
If the embedding is unnecessary and widespread, seems to me that'd be worth correcting.
Exactly, why is there all the hate AGAINST having a patent free method of encoding audio and video that EVERYBODY can share?
TFA is addressing exactly that question for this method in particular. Some of its objections, including one of the main ones, betray complete ignorance of elementary methods.
The random-access objection in particular is truly stupid. The author claims that because of the absence of an index in the format, locating, say a particular spot in an 8GB video with 4K datablocks requires the full 20-seek binary search. I really hope the obvious solution doesn't need any explanation here.
There are other minor but even more stupid objections in there. Looking up one of a handful of 32-bit randomized stream ids requires a serial search that will be problematically expensive? Please.
Some of the objections are in territory I don't know well, but seem overstated.
Inconsistent streams are possible. That's unusual? Malformed streams can be constructed and detected, and that's bad? Some encoders are buggy and generate malformed streams, and that's a fault of the format?
Similarly with the 32-bit checksums. When the checksums matter, they matter. When they don't they can be ignored.
I have a hard time understanding why even 1.4% protocol overhead is really a problem. Yes, the length encoding is ... well, the encoded size scales linearly, one byte per 255 bytes packet size. That's a genuine wtf? but again, so?
I have a very hard time understanding why putting the checksum in the packet header rather than the trailer constitutes a genuine problem. What protocol API delivers data at anything less than link-layer-frame granularity, and what link layer these days is so slow that the delay on a streaming-sized packet is even remotely significant? Even on a 1mb link, near the minimum tolerable for video, that's under 1ms added delay.
Pushing the protocol into audio-only territory, I can see that ogg's packetization could introduce measurable delay across a modem link with PPP header compression turned on and modem compression and error checking turned off. So it won't be very good for VOIP over analog-modem links until someone adds PPP-style header compression.
All the rest seem to me to be objections to unnecessarily-baroque format choices. He doesn't say how many of those choices are forced by patent avoidance.
His preference for the Matroska container format seems valid, but I"m untutored in the field, and his objections in the fields I do understand apparently also seem valid to outsiders in those. I'd be curious.
That's the high points: the most valid objection I can discuss with any authority at all amounts to the claim that MP4 would be a markedly better container format than ogg for streaming VOIP conversations over an uncorrected, uncompressed PPP-over-analog-modem link with PPP header compression turned on. Ok. Does anybody embed VOIP traffic in an MP4 container?
Of the rest, some of the major points are truly and deeply ignorant, others seem to me to be nitpicks. Is his 1.4%-payload-overhead objection, amounting to ten or so extra bytes per ethernet frame, really valid?
Of that time, 800 ms are spent just stabilizing the clocks.
That makes me a "cretinous martinet"?
What I addressed was really just icing on the cake. The formal proof follows:
The Constitution does not expressly forbid something like this.
Q.E.D.
The information is inscribed onto the carrier's property
So: if you write a letter on paper someone else paid for, not only do you magically lose your right to be secure in your effects, that someone else loses theirs, too? Every teensiest little deviation from the microscopically-narrowest-conceivable construction of the limits on the Almighty Executive Authority throws you into the realm of unbridled tyranny?
Many kinds of searches don't require warrants
Every kind of search that doesn't match exactly the microscopically-narrowest-conceivable construction of the language describing those that do explicitly require a warrant ... can be done at whim, because
We have to look to statutory law for protection.
... the government has absolute power except where a law explicitly denies it?
Every teensiest little deviation from the microscopically-narrowest-conceivable construction of the limits on the Almighty Executive Authority throws you into the realm of unbridled tyranny?
One of the main Federalist arguments against adding the Bill of Rights was that (a) it didn't say anything the Constitution didn't already imply and (b) if they bothered to state some of the consequent limits on government authority explicitly, cretinous martinets would try to argue that those were the only limits.
And here we have one, doing just that.
he was already a debian maintainer, so inside the cathedral
I see. Being committed to open source development and doing exactly what open source developers do means every good thing you do is a credit to Microsoft. Check.
an outsider making changes
I see. No corporate team ever failed to supervise the new guy. Failures of process only happen outside the cathedral. Check.
ought to have
I see. "Suitably expert" people's best efforts always have the effects they ought to have. Check.
Every failure of people's best efforts is a discredit to the process ... oh, darn, I forgot my premises again. It's so hard to remember the false ones. Every failure of other people's best efforts is a discredit to their process. That doesn't apply our failures, not even the monstrous ones. We're here to attribute every failure to those other people and deny their successes or, better, claim them for ourselves. I won't forget that again. So sorry.
IBM mainframes at least used to have "expanded storage", block-addressed and fast enough that pagefaults backed there were handled synchronously. It made a good canary metric, "pagefaults across the main memory boundary" though it wasn't reported with that description.
I read his criticisms as being aimed at a naive understanding
...
if the FOSS model was watertight
Reality check time, dude. Are you hearing yourself?
the Debian ssl fiasco
It's interesting that you should cite that.
You are aware, aren't you, that a static analyzer was reporting uninitialized-data use, and the patch made the subtly-false-positive defect report go away?
That they were in fact following best practices, but in hindsight they missed a subtle detail?
That this bug was in fact found thanks to the many-eyeballs effect in operation?
That Mr. Hernan's premise and your claim that Microsoft's products are
NOT relying solely on "many eyeballs", which is why they are secure
is directly and contradicted by the only example you cite is ... well, it leads me to the following observation:
Given enough eyeballs, all shills are shallow.
You're making exactly the same equivocation he did and Microsoft does repeatedly and it's just as much a fallacy, "equivocation", pretending two things are equal when they're not.
You say KDE has 90 static test failures.
No, I didn't say KDE has 90 static test failures. I said it has 90 "defects Coverity can discover". Thanks to the SDL for nothing: we don't know how many Coverity's static tests can discover in Microsoft's code, because Microsoft won't tell.
It's quite certain from his dissection of the many-eyeballs observation as a syllogism that Mr. Hernan knows the basics of valid and invalid argument forms. Equivocation is one of the basics. Mr. Hernan either knows his argument is deceptive or just doesn't care.
Another bit of sophistry is making an irrelevant observation as if it were relevant, introducing a red herring, for which I don't know a formal name. His "hope" crack, which you repeat, is just that. You know as well as he does that it's irrelevant here and that bringing it up is dishonest, because (a) as you yourself say,
The examples you give are clearly NOT relying solely on "many eyeballs"
and (b) those aren't my examples. They're his. He and you know that his entire post is irrelevant to the evidence he's cherrypicking.
Given that a few projects use Coverity I assume that also means that those projects must be Coverity clean.
You assume what Mr. Hernan very, very carefully avoids claiming or even admitting as a possibility.
It is absolutely true to say
You repeat his sneer, affirm it, and then in the very next sentence openly acknowledge that you're quite well aware it's dishonest to pretend it applies to any of the projects under discussion. It doesn't apply to linux or apache or mysql or postgres or python or perl or glibc or X.org or vim or KDE or blender or php or tcl or samba or curl or emacs or monotone or gnome or gcc or mono or ncurses or squid or wine or gdb or postfix.
He and you are brazenly directing that sneer at projects that your own evidence conclusively demonstrates do not deserve it.
He reports Coverity's results on open source software
... but doesn't report Coverity's results on Microsoft's software.
He reports that Coverity scanned 280 open-source projects
...but doesn't report that only 180 of those have "active developer support".
He can't be bothered to present any data at all on the distribution of the reported or corrected defects — how many are in nethack or aalib or that long-abandoned "flash-based photo album generator"?
He doesn't, for instance, mention that Samba and several others have no defects Coverity can discover. None.
Vim has none. X.org has ... three. All of KDE, nearly five million lines of code, has ... ninety. glibc has none.
There have been MySQL and PostgreSQL and Berkeley DB versions with none. His bioblurb says he's "currently working to ensure that Microsoft SQL Server is secure". That's interesting. You mean it isn't, now? How many defects can Coverity find in SQL Server?
TFA is a nauseating pile of sneers and aspersions ("Hope is not a security strategy"?) built on a very carefully selected and very few facts. "No one is doing auditing" he quotes. "No one is doing auditing" and reporting it to some self-styled central authority almost no one ever heard of is what's true, but telling the truth isn't what he's doing here. He's a "Program Manager", and he works for Microsoft.
just imagine if the roads were done by private companies
If I recall long-ago reading correctly, frustration at petty little lords demanding excessive tolls at their borders, at a time when communications were becoming easy enough that people could see the larger picture, the inherent waste, was actually a factor propelling France's shift from a gaggle of feudal states to a nation.
These days, the barriers are at, let's call it "enterprise" boundaries. The little tribes demanding exorbitant fees from protected positions can be found everywhere, but what protects the positions is no longer armor and horses and weapons but economic, either by government fiat as in the case of inherited copy"right" or the drug warriors or the TSA; or by absence of government fiat as for the myriad unrestrained monopoly cartels.
Even against that backdrop, claiming that "NASA has always been a huge waste of money" as GP did is breathtakingly small-souled.
Two observations:
That said,
There is no point in rewriting it before you fully understand it. Attempting that can kill a product.
True.
But the rewrite tradeoff hinges on how much better the new model behaves than the old one when producing identical results on all its test cases. Your metric is the cogency of the code. A well done needed can turn a full-time maintenance team into one guy who has to spend maybe twenty hours a year on it.
There are, of course, managers and programmers who regard that as a a bad result.
Start at 3:00 into this video clip. This is a news anchor pointing out that on many channels the news reports on one candidate had been more often positive recently than those for another.
She cites that preponderance as if it were objectionable. That over any given stretch of time one candidate might actually do things right more often than another apparently doesn't even enter her mind.
She's not ignorant, and not stupid. She knows full well that the facts she cites don't even remotely support any accusation of bias.
And despite her heated tone, she doesn't actually make that accusation. Her accusation is that the reports aren't "balanced".
Plainly, "News" at Fox doesn't mean reporting what actually happened, it means selecting what's reported to fit preconceived, acceptable notions.
"Even" alpha emitters?
Alpha particles are over 7,000 times more massive. — they're .50cal bullets to the spitwad of a beta particle.
Canada's limit is ten times the US limit and substantially less than the WHO's limit, and all are intended to prevent dangerous effects if stuff like this is ingested repeatedly and often for years.
If you steadily drink tritiated water like this for years or decades, it'll probably eventually hurt you. So it's worth fixing, which they're doing.
Meanwhile, if you want to do something approximately as dangerous, have a beer.