businesses don't just pay taxes. They COLLECT taxes.
I dependant upon every level of government to either raise money or close up shop. The only means that government has to do this is to take it from constituents (by force). How to do that fairly is an extremely subjective area. Taxing manufacturers who export goods has the effect of passing the tax burden onto people not voting for the current people in power. Hence, the popularity of hotel and restaurant taxes. The locals are happy, since their property taxes aren't raised, but what they don't realize is that the manufacturer passes the losses onto the employees by forgoing hiring, raises and benefits. This is one more case of politicians looking for more money without being up front about it.
This government learned nothing from the USA's abuse of the Social Security number
Pull your head out of your computer and look around for a while. The Hong Kong politicos learned a great deal from the US system. They learned that people are sheep and will take anything if you slip it in slow enough. They learned that if you promise bread and circuses that they will even help you insert the object. They learned that once a system has been in place a while that the people will accept the reduction of their citizenship to chattel as gospel and a requirement to efficient government. They learned that an overbearing central government can be made stronger and more power delivered to fewer people if the people are reduced to interchangeable numbers. But most of all, they learned that people are sheep and will respond well to an idiot smiling about being reduced to a statistic. ("See, I got my check. Isn't the government so nice to give me money for nothing. What do you mean the government had to take the money from someone else? The government doesn't have to do that, 'cause the government can MAKE money")
How can you begin to think that the other countries would not pick up on these valuable lessons that the US government has provided for the world.
Sun can bring it up at the trial, great, but Microsoft can also bring up the fact that Jackson was dismissed from the case and his 'findings of law' thrown out by the appeals court for gross procedural violations, apparent and actual bias. They can also quote from the Appeals court judges statement that the fact that Jackson describes something as a finding of fact does not make it a finding of fact.
(snicker)OK, troll. Calm down. 'findings of law'? where did you get that term? The fact is that the appeals court upheld Jackson's finding of 'facts', and just sent the sentencing back to the lower court for reconsideration. Try to get out and read a newpaper occasionally, dipshit.
(Unless you want to fly the airplane in the "experimental" category which means you can't carry passengers or offer instruction except in a few limited cases.)
Just a small point. But you can definitely carry passengers in an Experimental. In fact, I'm building a 4-seater right now. The regulation is that you have to inform all passengers that it is an experimental, and you have to have placards that state the fact. You can also offer instruction in one. In fact, several people have gotten their Private Pilot's Liscense in planes they built themselves (though, the cases of this are rare).
There are many things an experimental can't do (mostly revolving around not making money off the craft), but these two are not amoung the forboden.
A decent implementation of the algorithm would search for and rank pages as it currently does, but then 'communitize' the results. If result 5 is in the same community as result 2, don't put 5 on the page. Instead, change result 2 to point to another page that will list most of the community that 2 and 5 share, and then increase the ranking of 2 or just list the 'communities' first in the result. This will greatly shorten the results that must manually be looked at by categorizing them.
If I sells doors made of paper covered styrofoam and advertise that it is the strongest door ever invented and a burglar breaks down the door and robs someone's home, who is legally liable? The door manufacturer? Or the criminal?
I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
Ummm..No. The draw for cable TV in its infancy was watching movies without commercials (HBO), and get more than the 3 broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, CBS). Cable TV offered value above and beyond broadcast TV that I lusted for but never attained as a child. (Now that I'm grown, I don't sit still long enough to watch TV 8*)
Jack, et al, know that the general public is controlled by the media moguls. Expect to start seeing characters in sitcoms being repulsed at the idea that someone is 'stealing' movies off the internet. Expect to see the 'disgusting thief' ostracized for his/her 'illegal' behavior.
I'd like to see a lot more OS/2isms in a desktop. A lot of the OS/2 Workplace Shell developers are still around. You think we could convince IBM to fund a desktop developement effort?
I assert that the need, the demand if you will, is created by the politicians need to spend a lot of money on misleading and vague TV/Radio advertisements. As long as this demand exist, there will be someone to supply it. That IS America.
But all is not lost. While we can't completely eliminate the demand, we can moderate it. My idea is to open the system up; let anyone contribute as much as they like (with full disclosure). But the demand is caused by the need to publicize the politicians position. Provide a way to publicize those positions without the need for donations. The FCC liscenses out the radio and tv spectrum, and part of the requirement is that they must contribute to the common good. Make it a requirement that anyone holding a liscense must air public debates conducted a month before the elections (this will also limit the competition of the debates with the Simpsons).
Bush/Gore can continue to advertise all the want, but they'll still have to stand up with all the other third party candidates on the all important debate day. Thus, the big money contributions can at least be partially nullified, making them less useful as a 'lobbying' tool.
The school I had my first son in taught cursive writing before they taught print. The argument was that print is so easy that they will pick up on it naturally without spending a lot of time on it. What they fail to consider was that learning to print developes a lot of basic motor skills that are need to form letters on paper. Today, my sons writing is borderline illegible, and that is with me sitting beside him coaching, screaming and pulling my hair out. ( I know it's not his fault, and he is trying really hard...doesn't make it any less frustrating.)
My point is that newfangled ideas and gimmicks (which are all that computers really offer), should have to withstand the same stress that the scientific method puts on scientific claims. It should be widely accepted only after reproducible results are corroborated by several parties. Computers in the classroom haven't been shone to produce any beneficial results in a reproducible manner.
Debugging require not merely a pair of eyeballs, nor even crackerjack programming skills,but mostly an understanding of the problems and compromises that went into the creation of the software system in the first place.
I've done formal software testing. What is more important than anything else is having enough different situations for a bug to manifest itself and then being able to isolate the piece of code involved. You do not have to have a complete understanding of an entire codebase in order to debug a specific problem. With OS, I can debug my specific problem, and you can debug yours. Then we both check-in our fixes. I never even see the problem you saw, and you never saw mine, and once we both upgrade neither we never will.
Bugs are usually shallow if you have specific enough example situation for that bug to manifest itself. If you only have a team of 10 to consider the situations, they will be very busy and the bug reports pile deep. If you have exactly one bug to worry about, the pile is VERY shallow.
Several replies, but none answer the question directly.
"If the people who designed and wrote the software can't find the bugs, what makes you think that throwing somebody at it in their spare cycles is going to help?
Because, it isn't until the software is tried on a different platform or within a different environment that the bug manifest itself. The bug would be there whether it was Open Source or not, but with Open Source we can actually have a hope of fixing it before our competition. Our business may not be writing this software, but sometimes if we want the right tool to do our job, we have to make them ourselves.
He then goes on to say that the solution to the problem of the scalability of one maintainer is to partition the different subsystems of the kernel to such an extent that there would be precious few patches that actually require a knowledge of the entire kernel source.
Which is the proper way to design a complex system anyway. Partition the system and then present well defined interfaces, versus making a complex, monolithic system more complex and monolithic.
Linus is correct. CVS just gives you an extremely efficient filing cabinet. Without a someone to file things properly, the filing cabinet is no better than a shoebox. Running a CVS tree makes you the equivalent of a secretary. People will just come by, throw things on your desk, and yell "File this" as they run home for the day. Linux chooses to be an engineer. He refuses to just accept what it thrown at him. He wants explanations and reasoning as to WHY a patch should be included. Not using CVS slows the development system down so that it is comprehensible by a single person. The kernel isn't just a collection of source files collected in a cabinet. It's a fine masterpiece of artwork on Linus' desk.
Farmer Dale sold a mule to Farmer Jim saying that the mule would do whatever he's told. Farmer Jim took the mule home, and went out to work the next morning. Hooked the mule to the plow and yelled, "Hoe mule, hoe."
Mule didn't move. Jim spent half the morning trying to get the mule to plow, but eventually ended up calling Dale. Dale came over, cracked a board across the mules head and yelled, "Hoe." The mule dutifully started pulling the plow.
"I thought you said the mule would do whatever he's told," Jim said, increduously.
"Yep, but you've got to get his attention first."
Old joke, but it applies here. You can't be an elitist unless there is something to be elite at. Most people using Outlook don't even realize that they're using a piece of crap and send trash that others can't use; furthermore, they will refuse to even look at the problem until someone cracks them over the head with something.
From here on out, everything I post to mailing list and newsgroups will begin with:
Virus infected or Microsoft software may be confused by the following message:
begin
I'm replying to this, because/. wouldn't let me pull up the parent.
I used to work in a software house. A very large, International company that made Business Machines. I worked in the networking section. As part of my work, I found some horrendously inefficient code that had been cut-n-pasted because it had been used and worked somewhere else. When I pointed out, and then documented the inneficiency by implementing and benchmarking, all I got for a reply was "We don't modify working code!!"
Pissed at the boneheaded attitude, I began inspecting lots of code. Everything was hacks tacked on top of more hacks, and all because "We don't modify working code!!"
Please note that this whole thread is way off topic; however, I just can't ever let this 'Linux is hobbyist quality' attitude go unanswered. Software isn't a bridge where a fuckup is forever. It's much more organic. If one piece is of low quality, it can often be ripped out and replace completely. So the 'fix' for the 'important functions' you speak of is often to completely replace a subsystem, which will be less stable until it is thoroughly tested and debugged (but that is what the odd numbered dot releases are for). In the final analysis though, having a substandard system replaced will eventually result in the most stable, highest performing system.
This actually follows one of my goals in government. Don't write laws prohibiting X, Y and Z. Instead, educate the public. Investigate and publish information about X, Y and Z, and then let God sort 'em out.
I like the labelling requirements for food in the US (standard format that list specific values for specific nutrients that can be compared against different products). I hate FDA (no, you can't have ephedrine, because we said so!).
Give me info and let me choose. Force the market to use a single standard that everyone understands, and punish anyone that tries to fudge it too much. (damn-it, when I buy a 8' 2x4, it better be close enough to 8' for no one to care about the difference).
I got tired of N64 wires running all over the living room floor, so I bought my boys a TV tuner card. Now not only does the LR floor stay clear, but I no longer have to repeateadly watch 'Land Before Time 17'. TVs and computers have ALREADY converged.
What would be the best way for MS to keep 'linux zealots' concentrated on the desktop space while they try to move the industry in a different direction?
With enough funding, America is capable of getting 60-70% of the population into higher education.
America has too many people in higher education now. Things that should be learned in high school are being pushed into colleges, where everyone is trying to get a 'business' degree.
Not everyone in the population can be a scientist or engineer. Someone has to actually drive a crane and someone has to weld that bridge together. Anyone with a desire and ability can go to college now. I do think that vocational training should increase, 'cause you always need truck drivers, farmers, welders, carpenters, gardeners, waiters, dishwashers, assembly-line workers,...
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businesses don't just pay taxes. They COLLECT taxes.
I dependant upon every level of government to either raise money or close up shop. The only means that government has to do this is to take it from constituents (by force). How to do that fairly is an extremely subjective area. Taxing manufacturers who export goods has the effect of passing the tax burden onto people not voting for the current people in power. Hence, the popularity of hotel and restaurant taxes. The locals are happy, since their property taxes aren't raised, but what they don't realize is that the manufacturer passes the losses onto the employees by forgoing hiring, raises and benefits. This is one more case of politicians looking for more money without being up front about it.
This government learned nothing from the USA's abuse of the Social Security number
Pull your head out of your computer and look around for a while. The Hong Kong politicos learned a great deal from the US system. They learned that people are sheep and will take anything if you slip it in slow enough. They learned that if you promise bread and circuses that they will even help you insert the object. They learned that once a system has been in place a while that the people will accept the reduction of their citizenship to chattel as gospel and a requirement to efficient government. They learned that an overbearing central government can be made stronger and more power delivered to fewer people if the people are reduced to interchangeable numbers. But most of all, they learned that people are sheep and will respond well to an idiot smiling about being reduced to a statistic. ("See, I got my check. Isn't the government so nice to give me money for nothing. What do you mean the government had to take the money from someone else? The government doesn't have to do that, 'cause the government can MAKE money")
How can you begin to think that the other countries would not pick up on these valuable lessons that the US government has provided for the world.
Sun can bring it up at the trial, great, but Microsoft can also bring up the fact that Jackson was dismissed from the case and his 'findings of law' thrown out by the appeals court for gross procedural violations, apparent and actual bias. They can also quote from the Appeals court judges statement that the fact that Jackson describes something as a finding of fact does not make it a finding of fact.
(snicker)OK, troll. Calm down. 'findings of law'? where did you get that term? The fact is that the appeals court upheld Jackson's finding of 'facts', and just sent the sentencing back to the lower court for reconsideration. Try to get out and read a newpaper occasionally, dipshit.
(Unless you want to fly the airplane in the "experimental" category which means you can't carry passengers or offer instruction except in a few limited cases.)
Just a small point. But you can definitely carry passengers in an Experimental. In fact, I'm building a 4-seater right now. The regulation is that you have to inform all passengers that it is an experimental, and you have to have placards that state the fact. You can also offer instruction in one. In fact, several people have gotten their Private Pilot's Liscense in planes they built themselves (though, the cases of this are rare).
There are many things an experimental can't do (mostly revolving around not making money off the craft), but these two are not amoung the forboden.
A decent implementation of the algorithm would search for and rank pages as it currently does, but then 'communitize' the results. If result 5 is in the same community as result 2, don't put 5 on the page. Instead, change result 2 to point to another page that will list most of the community that 2 and 5 share, and then increase the ranking of 2 or just list the 'communities' first in the result. This will greatly shorten the results that must manually be looked at by categorizing them.
all pieces of the system have to be infinitely replaceable.
Can you say, "DLL"?
This is a bogus problem that was solved years ago.
If I sells doors made of paper covered styrofoam and advertise that it is the strongest door ever invented and a burglar breaks down the door and robs someone's home, who is legally liable? The door manufacturer? Or the criminal?
I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
Ummm..No. The draw for cable TV in its infancy was watching movies without commercials (HBO), and get more than the 3 broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, CBS). Cable TV offered value above and beyond broadcast TV that I lusted for but never attained as a child. (Now that I'm grown, I don't sit still long enough to watch TV 8*)
Jack, et al, know that the general public is controlled by the media moguls. Expect to start seeing characters in sitcoms being repulsed at the idea that someone is 'stealing' movies off the internet. Expect to see the 'disgusting thief' ostracized for his/her 'illegal' behavior.
There is power in words.
I'd like to see a lot more OS/2isms in a desktop. A lot of the OS/2 Workplace Shell developers are still around. You think we could convince IBM to fund a desktop developement effort?
I assert that the need, the demand if you will, is created by the politicians need to spend a lot of money on misleading and vague TV/Radio advertisements. As long as this demand exist, there will be someone to supply it. That IS America.
But all is not lost. While we can't completely eliminate the demand, we can moderate it. My idea is to open the system up; let anyone contribute as much as they like (with full disclosure). But the demand is caused by the need to publicize the politicians position. Provide a way to publicize those positions without the need for donations. The FCC liscenses out the radio and tv spectrum, and part of the requirement is that they must contribute to the common good. Make it a requirement that anyone holding a liscense must air public debates conducted a month before the elections (this will also limit the competition of the debates with the Simpsons).
Bush/Gore can continue to advertise all the want, but they'll still have to stand up with all the other third party candidates on the all important debate day. Thus, the big money contributions can at least be partially nullified, making them less useful as a 'lobbying' tool.
The school I had my first son in taught cursive writing before they taught print. The argument was that print is so easy that they will pick up on it naturally without spending a lot of time on it. What they fail to consider was that learning to print developes a lot of basic motor skills that are need to form letters on paper. Today, my sons writing is borderline illegible, and that is with me sitting beside him coaching, screaming and pulling my hair out. ( I know it's not his fault, and he is trying really hard...doesn't make it any less frustrating.)
My point is that newfangled ideas and gimmicks (which are all that computers really offer), should have to withstand the same stress that the scientific method puts on scientific claims. It should be widely accepted only after reproducible results are corroborated by several parties. Computers in the classroom haven't been shone to produce any beneficial results in a reproducible manner.
There's going to be a lot more of this in the near future.
Not once the bureaucrats find out about what he's up to.
And I must say that in this case they would probably be correct. Can't have everyone walking around polluting the EM spectrum.
Debugging require not merely a pair of eyeballs, nor even crackerjack programming skills,but mostly an understanding of the problems and compromises that went into the creation of the software system in the first place.
I've done formal software testing. What is more important than anything else is having enough different situations for a bug to manifest itself and then being able to isolate the piece of code involved. You do not have to have a complete understanding of an entire codebase in order to debug a specific problem. With OS, I can debug my specific problem, and you can debug yours. Then we both check-in our fixes. I never even see the problem you saw, and you never saw mine, and once we both upgrade neither we never will.
Bugs are usually shallow if you have specific enough example situation for that bug to manifest itself. If you only have a team of 10 to consider the situations, they will be very busy and the bug reports pile deep. If you have exactly one bug to worry about, the pile is VERY shallow.
Several replies, but none answer the question directly.
"If the people who designed and wrote the software can't find the bugs, what makes you think that throwing somebody at it in their spare cycles is going to help?
Because, it isn't until the software is tried on a different platform or within a different environment that the bug manifest itself. The bug would be there whether it was Open Source or not, but with Open Source we can actually have a hope of fixing it before our competition. Our business may not be writing this software, but sometimes if we want the right tool to do our job, we have to make them ourselves.
all of my organs were grown from stem cells.
My mom didn't even need a petri dish.
He then goes on to say that the solution to the problem of the scalability of one maintainer is to partition the different subsystems of the kernel to such an extent that there would be precious few patches that actually require a knowledge of the entire kernel source.
Which is the proper way to design a complex system anyway. Partition the system and then present well defined interfaces, versus making a complex, monolithic system more complex and monolithic.
Linus is correct. CVS just gives you an extremely efficient filing cabinet. Without a someone to file things properly, the filing cabinet is no better than a shoebox. Running a CVS tree makes you the equivalent of a secretary. People will just come by, throw things on your desk, and yell "File this" as they run home for the day. Linux chooses to be an engineer. He refuses to just accept what it thrown at him. He wants explanations and reasoning as to WHY a patch should be included. Not using CVS slows the development system down so that it is comprehensible by a single person. The kernel isn't just a collection of source files collected in a cabinet. It's a fine masterpiece of artwork on Linus' desk.
Farmer Dale sold a mule to Farmer Jim saying that the mule would do whatever he's told. Farmer Jim took the mule home, and went out to work the next morning. Hooked the mule to the plow and yelled, "Hoe mule, hoe."
Mule didn't move. Jim spent half the morning trying to get the mule to plow, but eventually ended up calling Dale. Dale came over, cracked a board across the mules head and yelled, "Hoe." The mule dutifully started pulling the plow.
"I thought you said the mule would do whatever he's told," Jim said, increduously.
"Yep, but you've got to get his attention first."
Old joke, but it applies here. You can't be an elitist unless there is something to be elite at. Most people using Outlook don't even realize that they're using a piece of crap and send trash that others can't use; furthermore, they will refuse to even look at the problem until someone cracks them over the head with something.
From here on out, everything I post to mailing list and newsgroups will begin with:
Virus infected or Microsoft software may be confused by the following message:
begin
I'm replying to this, because /. wouldn't let me pull up the parent.
I used to work in a software house. A very large, International company that made Business Machines. I worked in the networking section. As part of my work, I found some horrendously inefficient code that had been cut-n-pasted because it had been used and worked somewhere else. When I pointed out, and then documented the inneficiency by implementing and benchmarking, all I got for a reply was "We don't modify working code!!"
Pissed at the boneheaded attitude, I began inspecting lots of code. Everything was hacks tacked on top of more hacks, and all because "We don't modify working code!!"
Please note that this whole thread is way off topic; however, I just can't ever let this 'Linux is hobbyist quality' attitude go unanswered. Software isn't a bridge where a fuckup is forever. It's much more organic. If one piece is of low quality, it can often be ripped out and replace completely. So the 'fix' for the 'important functions' you speak of is often to completely replace a subsystem, which will be less stable until it is thoroughly tested and debugged (but that is what the odd numbered dot releases are for). In the final analysis though, having a substandard system replaced will eventually result in the most stable, highest performing system.
This actually follows one of my goals in government. Don't write laws prohibiting X, Y and Z. Instead, educate the public. Investigate and publish information about X, Y and Z, and then let God sort 'em out.
I like the labelling requirements for food in the US (standard format that list specific values for specific nutrients that can be compared against different products). I hate FDA (no, you can't have ephedrine, because we said so!).
Give me info and let me choose. Force the market to use a single standard that everyone understands, and punish anyone that tries to fudge it too much. (damn-it, when I buy a 8' 2x4, it better be close enough to 8' for no one to care about the difference).
I got tired of N64 wires running all over the living room floor, so I bought my boys a TV tuner card. Now not only does the LR floor stay clear, but I no longer have to repeateadly watch 'Land Before Time 17'. TVs and computers have ALREADY converged.
Now all you have to do is define 'force'.
Damn details.
What would be the best way for MS to keep 'linux zealots' concentrated on the desktop space while they try to move the industry in a different direction?
But if you look at this case, they are buying BUNDLED software, and then breaking it up and selling it.
And if you buy a car, you shouldn't be able to remove the tires and sell those. They are part of a BUNDLE.
With enough funding, America is capable of getting 60-70% of the population into higher education.
...
America has too many people in higher education now. Things that should be learned in high school are being pushed into colleges, where everyone is trying to get a 'business' degree.
Not everyone in the population can be a scientist or engineer. Someone has to actually drive a crane and someone has to weld that bridge together. Anyone with a desire and ability can go to college now. I do think that vocational training should increase, 'cause you always need truck drivers, farmers, welders, carpenters, gardeners, waiters, dishwashers, assembly-line workers,