I think you underestimate the kind of work that goes on at Microsoft. Do you really think that the people who work there are stupid enough to ignore compiler warnings? That they don't use prototypes? That misuse of printf is a major problem in their graphical applications?
Having done cross-platform conversions of some Evil Software Empire code, I can say that the answer is a definite YES. Why? You inherit code which generates a huge number of warnings, mostly for things like missing prototypes and pointer conversion, and you turn those warnings off because you just don't have the time to fix them because of time pressure.
I for one would welcome such pauses-- It's sometimes embarassing to go back to look at my own code and realize that my error checking only worked correctly because it never got called.
What an incredibly stupid idea. With government money comes government control.
Second point-- if you think paying for such software is a good idea, then use your own money directly, don't launder it through taxes. Forcing other people to pay for your favorite charity does not make you a better person, just a bigger thief.
I've noticed that all these posts seem to assume that the Chinese are telling the truth about the existence of the bugs, and then assume that somehow the evidence is conclusive that there is only one possible source for thealleged bugs.
Since the story validates most Slashbots' worldview, (US evil, everyone else good) I guess that's not surprising. I wouldn't doubt that these are the same people who during October were saying that any attacks against the Taliban were unjustified because the US gov't was fabricating evidence, and are even now a bit disappointed to learn the truth.
But then, what do you expect from people who also believe The X-Files is a documentary.
*P.S. Don't come back with any stupid analogies with physical property owned or developed with public funds - the analogy doesn't hold. I can't do anything I want with public lands - but I can sell pictures I take of public lands. That's the closest analogy between physical public property and publicly developed intellectual property.
Nice try, but you'd better research your own "stupid analogies" first.
In order to do commercial filming on NPS property, you must get a permit from the Park Superintendent. You will spell out, in detail, what you want to do, where and when. Then you will be escorted (and pay for the privilege) by uniformed NPS personnel. The payment part was added recently, because advertising agencies (especially ones for car companies) were using National Parks as a cheap and easy backdrops.
The same goes for scientific research- in order to place instruments or enter closed areas, you must get a permit, which for individuals requires you to submit a report on your findings. If you need physical samples, you also need to get a collecting permit, again detailing what, where and when you intend to collect, and where the specimines will go when you are finished with them (hint-- you don't get to keep them.)
But until you finish your research, all your notes and preliminary results are yours, and you do not have to tell anyone about them, even if your conclusions are being used to set NPS policy. When your research ends is your decisioin. I know of projects that have been going on for over thirty years, and one that only "ended" when the researcher died, years after his retirement.
As an extra benefit, the sudden conversion of account balances from decimal to octal numbers will be much need shot in the arm economically. Everyone will be richer! (or owe more money, but we can't all be winners unless we're competing in the Special Olympics.)
This has been moderated as "funny", but I doubt for the right reasons.
Inflation is generally not considered a good thing except by the economic illiterate . But here we have an example of mathematical stupidity too-- converting the digits from decimal to octal would result in everyone having less money, or owing less.
Format change is the only threat to information, printouts or actual paper photos can be viewed in 30,000 years while the DVD will require the archeologist to build a dvd reader to gain access to the contents.
Not true. Take a look at color slides taken in the 1950s-- most have faded, or turned red. Look at pulp magazines from the 1920s printed on acidic paper-- open them and you risk having them crumble in you hand. The same goes for nitrate based motion picture film.
The degradation of achived materials is an old problem. What's new is the speed at which that degradation is occurring, so that people can actually see it happen, rather than learn about it decades later, coupled with an ignorance of the past which leads people to assume that they are the first to experience a problem.
Profit should be made with support and consultancy
Oh, goodie. Software McDonald's-- franchising support with staffing supplied by min-wage comp-sci grads with B- grade averages. I guess the people who actually produce the code that's being supporting are to survive on handouts from (pick one)-- maw and paw, the university, the government , the MacArthur Foundation.
This is the "open source" attitude that is equivalent to the one that says that developing countries should embrase tourism as their economic salvation. Both always seems to be advocated by those with the most to gain by that arrangement.
And, finally, an interesting bit of thought from Michael Moore
How someone so lacking in talent and charm with such a contempt for his fellow citzens has gotten a reputation as a "populist" is one of the mysteries of the universe.
For a good start at refutation of Mr. Me's bloviations, see Ma
If Microsoft did it, I'd expect them to do the same, but Microsoft would probably do it to force the issue, make the EFF take them to trial to define the limits of open source, the BSD liscence , and the GPL liscense. That's the difference - this will be taken care of by peers, while Microsoft conflicts almost always involve lawyers.
It may surprise you, but Microsoft has actually killed projects because some of the code was unintentionally tainted by the GPL license (like by the inclusion of GPL'd libraries). A major reason was to not give the Microsoft haters an excuse to sue, like they constantly threaten.
As for "asshole celebrities"-- when you've got deep pockets, you are more likely to get sued for trivial reasons by "an honest citizen" looking for some quick bucks.
Too bad we aren't learning from the British and Soviet mistakes.
Could you back this up with evidence that the US is following previous British and Soviet models? Or perhaps, just perhaps, you might consider the remote possibility that the people running this operation aren't as stupid and ignorant of history as you seem to think they are.
Did the laws of gravitation exist prior to Newton?
Just because someone hasn't "described" economic laws to your satisfaction (and to fit your religious beliefs) does not mean that they do not exist, and that you (and the Internet) are not subject to them.
Honestly, Linux isn't the choice because the users are still dumb. Think about it.
The great thing about the Linux community is that they are well on their way to resurrecting the mainframe mentality of the 1970s-- Keep the computer in a glass walled room and only allow those initiated into the priesthood to actually touch them. Now, instead of hardware, it's software.
With this sort of attitude, no wonder the only place where Linux has any presence is with servers-- a the place where users are kept at a distance.
Noam Chomsky observed that the right to own property was unique among all others: If I have the right to a piece of property, *you don't*.
Wrong. The right to own property is not the same as a right to the owning a particular piece of property. My right to own property in no way lessens your right to own property. A subtle point that a intellectuals like Chomsky (and his followers) deliberately try to confuse to support a particluar world-view.
Re:Very cool, but what about copyrights?
on
images.google.com
·
· Score: 1
Already too many of the comments here seem to be from people who assume that all of these images are free for the taking.
On another note-- they are only cataloging images that appear in static pages. On my webserver I've got an online database of images, and the only of them
appeared in my searches was the one I use on the title page.
You also might like to consider how much "American Television" is actually made in Canada
I wouldn't exactly point to this with pride...
The main reason so much is produced in the Great White North is to escape union contracts and various stupid laws they have south of the border. And the shrinking value of the Northern Peso relative to Real Dollars has something to do with it, too.
The term is "survival of the fit", which has a completely different meaning from "survival of the fittest." The first means that only the "unfit" will not survive, which can range from all to none.
This is just one of many cases where, thanks to the abysmal education system, people repeat the inaccurate "bumper sticker" version, because they are under the impression that tossing out the pseudo-quote will mask their lack of understanding of the subject at hand.
"I think that it is fair to say that paper, presses, ink and distribution costs vanish on the internet.
Ah, but what about the cost of the servers, the cost of bandwidth and the cost of getting the content from the ISP to the user? And someone still has to pay people to run all that stuff and have to pay for a place to house it.
That's the real lesson of the dot-com meltdown.
They should really be looking at it from the mentality of an academic...
... where "free" means that someone else (the university, the feds, the MacArthur Foundation, or even mommy and daddy) pays for it. What most academics who demand "free" information seem to forget is that while the cost of the information may be "free", the cost of disseminating it (printing journals, conference rooms, bandwidth, buying and maintaining servers) isn't.
"we would have no freedom of religion"-- instead we have a regime that tries to impose "freedom from religion."
"our children would be indoctrinated into christianity at a very young age"-- instead we have our children indoctrinated into the cult of Gaia (among other left-wing cults).
"There would be no freedom of speech" -- Instead we have freedom from speech, speech that is deemed to be "hurtful", "hateful", "harassing", "offensive", "distateful", "racist", among others.
"Anything and everything that had anything to do with sex would be banned." Instead we are forced to everything and anything we find distateful, lest we be labeled "homophobe" or "sexist".
"It would be illegal to be gay." See previous.
"The war on drugs would have turned our country into a military state and the constitution all be suspended." Last I heard, the so-called War on Drugs is ongoing, and the left has done little or nothing to stop it, let along roll back all the civil liberties violations.
"99% of the wealth would belong to 1% of the population..." And who are you to decide what is the proper distribution?
"...and the rest of us wouild be working for 50 cents an hour in sweat shops." Instead we get to send 50% our our labors to the gov't. We aren't even three-fifths of a person anymore.
"Women would be second class citizens." If you listen to the left, they still are.
"Not only would abortion would be illegal, so would any form of birth control." This is an ignorance of history that could only be produced by a US public school eduation followed by university degree and law school. Abortion was well on its way to being legalized quietly and with the full consent of the governed (except in backward places like Lousiana and Utah) until the leftists got impatient and imposed their will though unelected judges.
"To extend the rights of free men to conservatives is to institute a [sic] immoral military state." Substitute for conservative any of the following and it will be obvious -- "black", "homosexual", "woman", "disabled person", "christian", "jew", "moslem," "left-handed". -- You are a bigot.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you underestimate the kind of work that goes on at Microsoft. Do you really think that the people who work there are stupid enough to ignore compiler warnings? That they don't use prototypes? That misuse of printf is a major problem in their graphical applications?
Having done cross-platform conversions of some Evil Software Empire code, I can say that the answer is a definite YES. Why? You inherit code which generates a huge number of warnings, mostly for things like missing prototypes and pointer conversion, and you turn those warnings off because you just don't have the time to fix them because of time pressure.
I for one would welcome such pauses-- It's sometimes embarassing to go back to look at my own code and realize that my error checking only worked correctly because it never got called.
What an incredibly stupid idea. With government money comes government control.
Second point-- if you think paying for such software is a good idea, then use your own money directly, don't launder it through taxes. Forcing other people to pay for your favorite charity does not make you a better person, just a bigger thief.
consult telephone "psychics"
Not for long-- 1-900 Numbers Going AT&T-away
You summed the series, but that's not what's being asked. You are supposed to sum the digits
For a series that would be
(n + 1) * (n / 2)
The answer is (45 * (10 ^(n-1)) * n) + 1 where n is the power of ten, 6 in this case.
Since the story validates most Slashbots' worldview, (US evil, everyone else good) I guess that's not surprising. I wouldn't doubt that these are the same people who during October were saying that any attacks against the Taliban were unjustified because the US gov't was fabricating evidence, and are even now a bit disappointed to learn the truth.
But then, what do you expect from people who also believe The X-Files is a documentary.
I believe it was James Oberg who debunked this urban legend a while back-- the swabs used for taking the samples were contaminated by the researchers.
Nice try, but you'd better research your own "stupid analogies" first.
In order to do commercial filming on NPS property, you must get a permit from the Park Superintendent. You will spell out, in detail, what you want to do, where and when. Then you will be escorted (and pay for the privilege) by uniformed NPS personnel. The payment part was added recently, because advertising agencies (especially ones for car companies) were using National Parks as a cheap and easy backdrops.
The same goes for scientific research- in order to place instruments or enter closed areas, you must get a permit, which for individuals requires you to submit a report on your findings. If you need physical samples, you also need to get a collecting permit, again detailing what, where and when you intend to collect, and where the specimines will go when you are finished with them (hint-- you don't get to keep them.)
But until you finish your research, all your notes and preliminary results are yours, and you do not have to tell anyone about them, even if your conclusions are being used to set NPS policy. When your research ends is your decisioin. I know of projects that have been going on for over thirty years, and one that only "ended" when the researcher died, years after his retirement.
As an extra benefit, the sudden conversion of account balances from decimal to octal numbers will be much need shot in the arm economically. Everyone will be richer! (or owe more money, but we can't all be winners unless we're competing in the Special Olympics.)
This has been moderated as "funny", but I doubt for the right reasons.
Inflation is generally not considered a good thing except by the economic illiterate . But here we have an example of mathematical stupidity too-- converting the digits from decimal to octal would result in everyone having less money, or owing less.
Not true. Take a look at color slides taken in the 1950s-- most have faded, or turned red. Look at pulp magazines from the 1920s printed on acidic paper-- open them and you risk having them crumble in you hand. The same goes for nitrate based motion picture film.
The degradation of achived materials is an old problem. What's new is the speed at which that degradation is occurring, so that people can actually see it happen, rather than learn about it decades later, coupled with an ignorance of the past which leads people to assume that they are the first to experience a problem.
Oh, goodie. Software McDonald's-- franchising support with staffing supplied by min-wage comp-sci grads with B- grade averages. I guess the people who actually produce the code that's being supporting are to survive on handouts from (pick one)-- maw and paw, the university, the government , the MacArthur Foundation.
This is the "open source" attitude that is equivalent to the one that says that developing countries should embrase tourism as their economic salvation. Both always seems to be advocated by those with the most to gain by that arrangement.
And, finally, an interesting bit of thought from Michael Moore
How someone so lacking in talent and charm with such a contempt for his fellow citzens has gotten a reputation as a "populist" is one of the mysteries of the universe.
For a good start at refutation of Mr. Me's bloviations, see Ma
If Microsoft did it, I'd expect them to do the same, but Microsoft would probably do it to force the issue, make the EFF take them to trial to define the limits of open source, the BSD liscence , and the GPL liscense. That's the difference - this will be taken care of by peers, while Microsoft conflicts almost always involve lawyers.
It may surprise you, but Microsoft has actually killed projects because some of the code was unintentionally tainted by the GPL license (like by the inclusion of GPL'd libraries). A major reason was to not give the Microsoft haters an excuse to sue, like they constantly threaten.
As for "asshole celebrities"-- when you've got deep pockets, you are more likely to get sued for trivial reasons by "an honest citizen" looking for some quick bucks.
Say what you will about evil corporate bosses, but at least Billy G had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.
Actually, it's too bad that he didn't come out for this, because that would give a highly visible face to this pernicious idea.
Too bad we aren't learning from the British and Soviet mistakes.
Could you back this up with evidence that the US is following previous British and Soviet models? Or perhaps, just perhaps, you might consider the remote possibility that the people running this operation aren't as stupid and ignorant of history as you seem to think they are.
I take it you didn' t have as much fun in Genoa as you'd expected.
Just because someone hasn't "described" economic laws to your satisfaction (and to fit your religious beliefs) does not mean that they do not exist, and that you (and the Internet) are not subject to them.
The great thing about the Linux community is that they are well on their way to resurrecting the mainframe mentality of the 1970s-- Keep the computer in a glass walled room and only allow those initiated into the priesthood to actually touch them. Now, instead of hardware, it's software.
With this sort of attitude, no wonder the only place where Linux has any presence is with servers-- a the place where users are kept at a distance.
Has anyone tried to introduce "Alice" to Eliza? That should be one intellectually stimulating conversation.
Wrong. The right to own property is not the same as a right to the owning a particular piece of property. My right to own property in no way lessens your right to own property. A subtle point that a intellectuals like Chomsky (and his followers) deliberately try to confuse to support a particluar world-view.
On another note-- they are only cataloging images that appear in static pages. On my webserver I've got an online database of images, and the only of them appeared in my searches was the one I use on the title page.
You also might like to consider how much "American Television" is actually made in Canada
I wouldn't exactly point to this with pride... The main reason so much is produced in the Great White North is to escape union contracts and various stupid laws they have south of the border. And the shrinking value of the Northern Peso relative to Real Dollars has something to do with it, too.
The term is "survival of the fit", which has a completely different meaning from "survival of the fittest." The first means that only the "unfit" will not survive, which can range from all to none. This is just one of many cases where, thanks to the abysmal education system, people repeat the inaccurate "bumper sticker" version, because they are under the impression that tossing out the pseudo-quote will mask their lack of understanding of the subject at hand.
"I think that it is fair to say that paper, presses, ink and distribution costs vanish on the internet. Ah, but what about the cost of the servers, the cost of bandwidth and the cost of getting the content from the ISP to the user? And someone still has to pay people to run all that stuff and have to pay for a place to house it. That's the real lesson of the dot-com meltdown.
They should really be looking at it from the mentality of an academic...
... where "free" means that someone else (the university, the feds, the MacArthur Foundation, or even mommy and daddy) pays for it. What most academics who demand "free" information seem to forget is that while the cost of the information may be "free", the cost of disseminating it (printing journals, conference rooms, bandwidth, buying and maintaining servers) isn't.
"we would have no freedom of religion"-- instead we have a regime that tries to impose "freedom from religion."
"our children would be indoctrinated into christianity at a very young age"-- instead we have our children indoctrinated into the cult of Gaia (among other left-wing cults).
"There would be no freedom of speech" -- Instead we have freedom from speech, speech that is deemed to be "hurtful", "hateful", "harassing", "offensive", "distateful", "racist", among others.
"Anything and everything that had anything to do with sex would be banned." Instead we are forced to everything and anything we find distateful, lest we be labeled "homophobe" or "sexist".
"It would be illegal to be gay." See previous.
"The war on drugs would have turned our country into a military state and the constitution all be suspended." Last I heard, the so-called War on Drugs is ongoing, and the left has done little or nothing to stop it, let along roll back all the civil liberties violations.
"99% of the wealth would belong to 1% of the population..." And who are you to decide what is the proper distribution?
"...and the rest of us wouild be working for 50 cents an hour in sweat shops." Instead we get to send 50% our our labors to the gov't. We aren't even three-fifths of a person anymore.
"Women would be second class citizens." If you listen to the left, they still are.
"Not only would abortion would be illegal, so would any form of birth control." This is an ignorance of history that could only be produced by a US public school eduation followed by university degree and law school. Abortion was well on its way to being legalized quietly and with the full consent of the governed (except in backward places like Lousiana and Utah) until the leftists got impatient and imposed their will though unelected judges.
"To extend the rights of free men to conservatives is to institute a [sic] immoral military state." Substitute for conservative any of the following and it will be obvious -- "black", "homosexual", "woman", "disabled person", "christian", "jew", "moslem," "left-handed". -- You are a bigot.