>Taiwan being a part of China for thousands of years, >again this isn't automagically a bad thing. Oh noes they might end up like Hong Kong!!!
Taiwan was not part of China for "thousands of years," that is Chinese government propaganda. Chinese rule of Taiwan did not occur until 1683. China then had it for a while, until the Japanese took it over from 1895 until the end of world war II. Since then it has been independent.
So, China ruled Taiwan from 1683 until 1895, a period of 212 years that is now long past.
The Chinese government likes to claim that they "own" various lands for historical reasons. They do the same thing with Tibet to justify rule there. However, no one outside of China takes these claims seriously, and continuous violent crackdowns against monks don't do much to boost there claims.
Also, as I mentioned in another post, Taiwan is now democratic so it is ridiculous to suggest that they would benefit from Chinese rule, where real democracy is banned.
By contrast north korea is the number one country by spending as a percentage of their GDP at 22% and maintains one of the world largest ground forces (US power is primarily Air and Naval).
>So there would be one unified Korea, not some arbitrary division only >supported by outside influences. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
I don't know how you can even suggest that South Korea under brutal communist rule would be a good thing. You talked about the US attacking "democratic countries" (although you didn't give an example of when this has actually happened), but now you're advocating a communist country with a starving population and brutal political oppression take over a democratic country?
That's not even considering the massive loss of life if North Korea invaded the south. Current estimates suggest that there would be hundreds of thousands dead in the first days of fighting.
>Taiwan being a part of China for thousands of years, again this isn't >automagically a bad thing. Oh noes they might end up like Hong Kong!!!
Again, Hong Kong lost their democracy when they transfered to Chinese rule, so it *was* a bad thing, and it would be a bad thing for a democratic nation such as Taiwan to be ruled by a China, which does not allow democracy. Again, there's also the issue of the invasion and the massive number of people that would be killed during the Chinese crackdown.
I don't know how you can imagine that China expanding it's empire would be a good thing for anyone, least of all the Taiwanese.
>Sure, The ones I like only account for c.5% of the music I've downloaded, >but I was never going to pay for that stuff anyway. The other 95% have lost no revenue.
Yes, but the *reason* you weren't going to pay for them is that you could pirate them. Therefor, piracy *has* cost lost revenue. Unless of course, you are as I suspect, one of the DOLIMBs (Drop Out Living In Mom's Basement), who has no money in the first place to buy music with.
Hoards of college and high school drop outs living in their mom's basement seem to believe that society owes them a free ride, free music, and everything they want without having to pay for it or work a day. Additionally, they are also convinced that they are unappreciated "computer geniuses" because they know how to install Linux, and becuase they troubleshoot their mom's Windows install (does this sound familiar slashdot?). Those of you expressing these views should be aware that in the real world, outside of your Vampire the Masquerade LARPs, and furry fetish clubs, you are held in contempt.
On the internet, you can pretend to be highly skilled professionals, but no one buys it. I'm calling you all out, and letting you know that I can tell the difference. No professional software developer I have ever met has told me that they "deserve" to steal free music, or software. Nor have many of the complained about the one dollar fee for purchasing music legitimately on Itunes. Thus, you complainers are revealed as the jobless fucks that you are!
So, DOLIMB's, feel shame that you have been unmasked. Please leave the internet (which is serious business!) and spend the rest of your life masturbating to furry cartoons and reading 4chan in isolation. Or, maybe, just maybe, stop feeling sorry for yourself, get off your bum ass, and go back to school and get yourself a job. Then actually paying for music and software won't seem such a burden!
Wubi states that it uses a "loopmounted" filesystem to boot off a disk image contained within an NTFS filesystem. My question is, how does this work?
Don't you need a NTFS driver to read the disk image off of the loop mounted partition, and to be able to write back to it? How does linux know what blocks on the filesystem belong to it, and what blocks are for other files?
Is there any documentation out there on how this sort of thing works?
>So, it looks like the old "We don't have to interoperate" >arrogance is still going strong at Microsoft.
Really, why would Microsoft spend money on Linux integration with companies that they don't have a relationship with, like redhat? Why are you getting pissed at them for doing exactly what is in their own business interests?
>Let's see if they still think that way in another ten years.
Well, they thought that way 10 years ago, and then 10 years before that, and every business on the planet thinks that way, so by using logical induction to generalize *yes* Microsoft will think that way 10 years from now.
I'm always surprised when people get angry because Microsoft doesn't just choose to roll over and die.
It should be noted that the article misses the point of this new product, which is that it provides hypervisor support (like xen) as opposed to their old virtualization products which did not. Aside from that they seem to support Suse now.
Actually, presumably if Suse works, so will most other Linux distributions, after all the kernel is the same, and that is the piece of software which matters.
most of the comments here seem to indicate that the article "got it all wrong." Since the article is pretty much about how Steve Jobs is a jerk, this largely seems to be people taking offense to the idea that Steve The Great has human flaws.
It is a well known fact in the industry that both Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds are jerks with enormous egos and a habit of chewing people out for minor errors. That doesn't change the fact that they are extremely good at their jobs, and isn't taking a dig at OSX or Linux, it is just a fact about the personality of these guys.
Jobs tends to keep his ego and habit of chewing people out out of the public eye, but you can see Linus doing the same thing on LKML all the time, or at various talks such as this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
The fanboy crowd tends to see people like Jobs, Torvalds, and RMS as their own personal messiah and beyond any sort of criticism even if that criticism is unrelated to the software they produce.
On the other hand, consider how fast I'll get modded down if I suggest that Bill Gates is actually a pretty decent human being, and that his humanitarian work is pretty awesome. I've had people call me a "Microsoft shill" for saying things like that, and suggest that I was being *paid* to say such things. Note, I haven't even mentioned OSX, Linux, or Windows! In fact, the activities I've mentioned so far are totally unrelated to software development. Yet, people can't seem to separate the two.
I think it's pretty sad that there are so many people for whom these "Mac vs Windows" and "Linux vs Windows" debates become so religious and personal that they feel the need to demonize or glorify various people that they don't even know, and engage in such vitriolic behavior. I mean, it's just *software*, if I write a really nice piece of software, it doesn't make me Gandhi, and if it has bugs, it doesn't make me Hitler. As much as I hate using this phrase, because I am a developer and computer enthusiast, *it's just software*. There's a bigger world out there, and more criteria on how to judge someone as human being than their software defect rate or their licensing strategy.
there's been tons of dynamic programming languages coming out, most of which are pretty disappointing.
People say a language is "dynamic" as if it were a selling point, but what they really mean is that it is interpreted, they were too lazy to write a compiler for it, and that type checking is always deferred to runtime, even when you don't want it to be.
There's never really any excuse for not writing a compiler. Sometimes during development you don't want to compile things, and that's fine, but you need the choice. Many languages like Java and Ocaml have both interpreters *and* compilers, and I think that's the right way to go.
As for deferring type checks to runtime, any modern language can do that, but the so called dynamic languages have no choice *except* to do that, and have no mechanism whatsoever for checking for obvious type errors. You can run a python program a thousand times, only on the 1001th time to find that there was actually a type error in some statement that was never executed before. On the other hand Java and C# with generics, and C++ will catch your type errors *the first time you compile*. All these languages support dynamic typing, the difference is they *also* support static typing.
The reason languages like Python, Perl, and Ruby are written, the reason that aren't mentioned when evangelizing these languages, is that writing an interpreter is *easier* than writing a compiler (note I said easier and not easy). There's no need to write assembly for lots of platforms, or deal with things like register allocation, so some of the harder problems are taken off your plate. These languages are generally very ad hoc, and special purpose, and that's fine. They are great for writing dinky one off scripts. However, let's not glorify them to the point where we are doing something more sophisticated than that, say writing large web apps.
On the other hand, writing a c++ compiler is a major endeavor both because it is compiled and it is standardized (you can't just say that the standard is whatever the hell buggy way the reference implementation does it). Now, C++ has some problems of its own, but because it is statically typed, and compiles to a highly optimized form, it gives you a very powerful tool for writing large scale and high performance software. Much of the same can be said of java, although some performance is traded for things like cross platform support and ease of programming (a trade off which is appropriate in a number of domains like web programming).
what killed vista for me was that background services were constantly running spinning my harddrive. Since I 1. am on a laptop and run off the battery often 2. play games
this is totally unacceptable and made my laptop unusable. I even went so far as to disable the indexing service, but for some reason the machine continued to do *some* kind of processing on various files. I'd turn on the performance monitor to find that it was churning away, doing *something* to various large movie files.
Until the overactive services are addressed, I'm not touching vista again, as it just makes the computer unusable. If someone can comment on whether this has happened, I'd like to know.
It should be noted that after I went back to XP, I installed the google desktop, which does the same thing the vista file indexing does, but without the performance overhead. Whenever I'm using the computer for *anything* google desktop is smart enough to *immediately* stop indexing and let me get my work done. It only indexes when truly idle.
anti virus software is designed to make you feel safer without actually doing that much. Typically, all of the anti virus vendors out there combined can't remove more than a third of the viruses that will end up on your computer if it gets exposed while unpatched to the virus stew out on networks like comcast.
The truth is that running behind a hardware firewall and a NAT, having unnecessary services turned off, not running software from untrusted sources, and running everything you can as an unprivileged user are the best methods for preventing infection. If you actually do get infected, you're pretty much screwed. It's very unlikely that AV software will be able to remove all of the viruses on your machine. You pretty much have to reinstall.
For all of these reasons, I actually advise that even windows users do *not* run AV software, as it often provides a false sense of security. In addition to that, AV software often bogs down your computer and screws with your network traffic. A number of AV packages will actually listen in on your network traffic to see if virus traffic is being transmitted. Since everything has to be scanned before it is sent out, this will greatly increase your latency, decrease your throughput, and cause unnecessary CPU activity for network IO.
Cheap routers for home use largely make AV software obsolete on the home front, where it was most used. The places where you have to worry are large businesses and dorms. At dorms I advise that you throw a cheap router in between your windows box and the network connection. In businesses, the IT department will track what viruses are on the network you should just be careful to stay patched and not *introduce* any new viruses by running untrusted software.
As far as macs go, I've never even met anyone who's gotten a virus for his mac, and I used macs for well over 10 years. As long as there aren't too many macs on a given network, it is impossible for viruses to spread. Windows viruses can spread because there are many viruses written for them, and because there are networks with thousands of windows machines attached.
I think that software patents are bad as well; however, it's also stupid to say that they are bad because RMS said so.
There is a cult of personality built up around RMS, and there's nothing more frustrating than talking to someone who thinks that old hippy is some kind of "visionary" whose ever word is true. The guy wrote a port of emacs and some dogmatic diatribes on how he thinks software development should work, but people treat him like he is the Jesus of open source.
>Neither Iran nor North Korea have waged wars of aggression in the past 50 years.
North Korea hasn't waged a war of aggression in the past 50 years... for a reason. The korean war ended with the south free because there were US troups at the border to keep north korean troops from taking the south.
Iran I agree may be exaggerated as a threat, but you should consider the roll that America's wars have played in history over the past 50 years.
Cold War Era:
The Korean War Lebanon crisis of 1958 Bay of Pigs Invasion Dominican Intervention Vietnam War Tehran hostage rescue Grenada Beirut Panama
Post Cold War Era:
Gulf War Somalia Yugoslavia
Bush Era:
Afghanistan Philippines Liberia Iraq
A lot of these conflicts had minor US involvement, but I've listed them for completeness (Liberia involved sending "three warships with 2,300 Marines into view of the coast," and funding Economic Community of West African States troops.)
What should be most notable about every last one of these wars, is that while some of them were major mistakes, all of them were in defense of pretty much every first world democratic country, and not just the united states.
People seem to enjoy bashing the United States for it's mistakes, and sometimes we deserve it, but the truth is that the current balance of power has benefited pretty much everyone posting on slashdot. There have been no new world wars for a reason. The soviet union ended it's domination of europe, and was not able to press in further than they did for a reason. Every first world nation prizes it's military alliance with the US for a reason.
The truth is that the roll that the US plays is maintaining a balance of power with democratic nations at the top, and dictatorial nations at the bottom. The truth is that without the US forces there to maintain that balance of power, this would end quickly. The other first world nations do not have comparable military forces, and largely don't have the forces necessary to defend themselves from their neighbors.
Consider what would have happened without US forces to maintain the ballance of power: 1. In the cold war, pretty much all of Europe would have ended up in soviet hands. 2. South Korea would fall to North Korea *immediately* if US forces weren't there to back them up. 3. Taiwan would end up in Chinese hands *today* if the US wasn't committed to defending them from invasion. 4. Pakistan would have difficulty surviving without US military aid. 5. Israel probably wouldn't survive without US backing.
Israel is probably the most controversial of those choices, and a lot of people, myself included, are pretty unhappy with how they treat the palestinians, but I don't think anyone wants to see Israel destroyed (well... except for the people trying to destroy it) as that would cost considerably more lives than the current conflict.
So while it may be reasonable to criticize specific US actions, it's pretty ridiculous to act like you don't want the US there defending your interests, or that you're unhappy with the status quo.
>It is said that Anarchy is the absence of rulers, not the absence of rule. said by who? Let me guess, he was an "anarchist," by which I mean high school drop out living in his mom's basement, complaining that society would be "so much more awesome" if there weren't any rules, and he didn't have to keep his room clean.
Anarchy: "Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder."''
Any social endeavor has politics and power relationships and de facto governing processes by which collective decisions are made, they even exist within families and other tiny social units. Anarchy is just a society where those relationships are no longer functional and stable. You have groups competing for power without a mediator and chaos persists (e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan).
Humans can't survive in anarchy because we are social animals, and require cooperation and certain kinds of power relationships to survive. People naturally form social structures with leaders and followers, it's part of basic human psychology.
Even the free software movement has leaders with specific powers that they can enforce. That you think otherwise just goes to show that you've never contributed. Linus doesn't let any patches into mainline Linux that he doesn't want to, and that effectively kills those patches. Other organizations have even more stringent policies. To commit to FSF, Mono, and many other projects and organizations you must turn over your copyright to them, so that they can relicense it under whatever terms they want (presumably, the next version of the GPL, but who knows?).
Often a company is responsible for all of the high level design of a product, and controls the repository, and open source developers are either hired by said company to do the work, or are on the periphery.
Even if a specific company isn't responsible for high level design, some people are de facto designers. This isn't that different than in a company, and these relationships naturally form even if they aren't dictated, otherwise the project falls apart.
Open source isn't really a "governing model," it's just the same old human behavior and practices, but with a new software license.
this is the most bullshit communist diatribe I've ever heard.
Everyone can vote by universal suffrage, and the parties *select the people on the ticket* by the same means. Have you heard of a primary? You can run for president in the current election if you want, but I doubt you'll get elected, because, well, you're an idiot.
The number of people is not small either. 64% turned out in 2004 and more are going to turn out this year, so you can't say this isn't a representative government when the majority of the people are involved in selecting the government.
Then you have all this nonsense about feudal overlords, and how rich people from feudal society own everything. There never *were* any feudal lords in the united states, you idiot. The vast majority of the nobility never left Europe, and titles were abolished entirely during the revolution. How can they possibly own everything if they never lived here?
>Likely you are among the most common class of people stuck in a >meaningless job and staying there, so what does it matter work or not?
I'm a programmer. This is slashdot, you idiot. My job is extremely meaningful and effects a lot of people. Nor did I inherit it from my parents, neither of whom make nearly as much money as I do.
>In a healthy society everyone does what is best to support their community. >In american society almost no one does what's good to support their community
That's funny, because american society is ridiculously more successful than the communist shit holes of the world, so obviously we *must* be doing what's best for the community.
Are we supposed to have a centrally planned economy like the Soviet Union and China had before they *horribly failed* and millions of people died of starvation? You need to do some reading on the effects of communism before you start advocating it.
Check out China's "great leap forward" under Mao http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward " The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen - both within China and outside - as a major economic and humanitarian disaster (sometimes called the "giant step back"), with estimates of the number of people killed by famine during this period ranging from 14 to 43 million "
Are North Korea and soviet Russia your model societies? If not, tell me what country is?
For too many users, especially those who spend the most time bashing Windows and Microsoft, this seems like the primary reason they use Linux.
>If Linux becomes widely used, we'll probably switch to something else. >Or at least develop an obscure distro that only we will use. >Because, let's face it, we want to feel special.
In my mind, these are exactly the kind of users that Linux doesn't need, and the kind that the Linux community has let run the show far too often.
For Linux to succeed, it needs to be good software, and not just an opinionated and overbearing culture.
Now watch while those same people mod me as "troll."
>Churches, God, and Sin are ways of imposing codes of behavior that have >been show to be successful over several millennia. The concepts of >'God' and 'Sin' are necessary to impose these codes of behavior
The truth is that religion and morality have nothing to do with one another and never have. If they did, this would be a very different world considering how common religion is, and how uncommon morality is. Religions give lip service to morality, but the truth is it never goes any further than that.
If you consider most of the violence that's going on in the world right now, it is led by religious men preaching that murder and mayhem are good things. You can say that they don't represent the "true meaning" of their religion, or that their religion is different than your religion, but they are representative of how religion is practiced in the real world.
It's easy to be a saint in a rich country with police that *enforce* the law, when you don't really have a choice, and in those places you often see holy men positioning themselves as defending public morality (although what they consider public morality is often ridiculous). In regions of the world that are chaotic on the other hand, holy men are always the first to rally a mob and start some violence.
This is true of Islam, and of Christianity. No one who has studied any European history could claim that Christianity has promoted morality, or that it has ever been about anything more than power.
The true source of morality is reason, and the true source of public order is the law and the police force to enforce it. Without those two things, everything goes lord of the flies pretty quickly, whatever your religion is.
>But because it is happening on the Internet, nobody can prove who committed the crime. >Sure, there was an IP address logged. What, exactly does that prove? Nothing.
It's pretty easy to look up your home address given your IP address, and law enforcement officials do this on a regular basis... and this sort of thing has already held up in court. IP addresses are allocated to various institutions, such as ISP's, and they generally keep records of who has what IP address at what time, so all a cop has to do is get a warrant, and he can find out what person is responsible for what internet traffic.
The belief that people are anonymous on the internet is largely not true. I read your post and I am deeply concerned that you might end up in jail if you act on this false belief.
>Then they want someone to "enforce the law". >Only there isn't any law - as long as it stays on the Internet.
This is another common misconception. The internet is not legally distinct, because it is in fact not a place, just a technology. If you do something on the internet, you are bound by the laws of your local government. For instance, I live in Washington state, where the amazon.com company is. Even though I am doing my purchasing over the internet, I am a citizen of washington making a purchase from a washington state corporation, so I have to pay washington state sales taxes (amazon.com automatically adds them in). If you're a business in washington state, and you fail to collect these taxes and turn them in, the government will find out about it and will come down on you hard, whether you sell stuff over the internet or in a brick and mortar store.
Similarly, as an individual there's rising risk when downloading, say, movies over bittorent, because various organizations regularly connect to trackers and check who is downloading what files, and map those IP addresses to home addresses. A lot of people are getting (successfully) sued now.
let's keep in mind that this guy is a representative, and not a senator. There are 435 representatives, and freshman representative has about as much voice in national policy as the guy down at the DMV. Don't expect him to be authoring any bills.
The more significant news related to his election, if you follow the news, is that he replaced Dennis Hastert in a long time republican district. His election makes the democratic majority in the house that much more cemented, and generally is a signal of the upswing of the democratic party nationally.
Reducing power usage for a million americans can't be done with OLED displays because most of our power usage comes from things like industry (think the kind of power that producing aluminum requires), lighting, heating, etc. Increasing efficiency in these areas would be a good idea, but it's doubtful if it is possible to reduce consumption by half.
A solution that would go farther would be to just make more energy with less carbon using nuclear power plants.
>We can do both, you know. We can push for the removal of >screensavers (in favor of screen blanking) AND put wind farms in Kansas.
Yes, we can spend a lot of money doing things that make *no* significant impact on the environment but make us feel good about ourselves, and then we can use whatever money is left over for solving our actual environmental problems.
Or, here's a crazy idea, we could tackle the *actual* problems, and ignore the feel good but useless solutions.
Screen blanking is not going to have any measurable impact on the environment, because computer monitors are not a significant fraction of national energy use. Similar can be said of wind power, which could not become a significant fraction of national energy use due to technical problems.
Most police forces in the US are pretty hostile to the idea of any kind of kind of civilian oversight. I can sympathize to some degree because cops by the nature of their job have to do things that civilians don't like. They aren't out there to pick up the trash and mow your lawn, they are out there to maintain civic order, which means keeping civilians in line.
However, there are enough bad cops, and enough other cops who will protect their own even if they are doing something clearly wrong, that *some* kind of civilian oversight is needed most places to avoid the worst abuses. That said, I think this board is a really bad idea, and is actually probably illegal.
First, why it is a bad idea:
The fact is that it will get a lot harder for police to do their job if anonymous systems like this become widely used. Anyone from someone receiving traffic ticket, to someone who got busted for heroin trafficking can them go online and anonymously pretend to be some totally innocent guy who suffered horrible police brutality for no reason whatsoever by officer John D. Law. Hell, people could go online from *jail* and talk smack about their arresting officer in a totally anonymous system.
Second, why this is probably illegal: Libel and slander are and always have been illegal. The fact that it happens on "the intertubes" where information "wants to be free" does not change the law. If you start false rumors (the false part is important here) about someone being a murderer or something equally horrible and that person can't get a job and their wife leaves them, etc because of it, that person can legally sue the crap out of you. To make this clear why this is, consider if there were a website called "ratemyemployee" and people could go online anonymously and say that they were your boss and give you a performance review. Now, since that person did not have to identify himself, he could be anybody including some random guy you never worked for who had a grudge against you. You could easily lose your current job and not be able to find a new one in such a situation. Suing the person who started the rumor provides a way to clear your name in court and get monetary compensation.
As it stands, the web site may be liable for slander or libel if they don't give up information on who posted.
I think the correct thing to do is for the site to hold users contact information in escrow, and to provide some kind of means of redress, without immediately handing out addresses to police officers who just want to find out who talked smack about them. Futhermore, the site itself should probably require a contract is signed and make it clear it will fine users if they make a habit of posting slander on their site.
People on both end, police and civilians, need to be held accountable for their actions.
is almost doubtlessly responsible for forcing apple to block voip over their cellular data network. I bet that was part of the terms of their profit sharing agreement. However, is it possible that it will be ok to use voip over their 802.11b network?
Actually I'm not sure this makes much difference since, I mean, if you have an iphone you are already paying for some kind of cellular service...
What does seem scummy to me is blocking alternative browsers on the iPhone. I also don't really understand the motivation, since safari isn't really something that makes apple money. Really, it was something they were forced to develop when Microsoft dropped IE for mac.
It seems pretty silly to me that people think we are helping the environment by saving a few watts on our computer monitors. Meanwhile, billions of people are coming onto the grid and using coal power. It isn't even a drop in the ocean.
I see people putting up a few solar panels here and there, maybe generating enough energy to take a fraction out of their air conditioning bill, and I wonder if they are stupid. Even if everyone in the united states did the same thing, or even the entire world did the same thing, the carbon output would still be rising because industry requires a phenomenal amount of energy that can't be supplied or even offset significantly by these sorts of technologies.
These sorts of efforts are all about feeling good about the environment, while actually doing nothing to put a significant dent in the carbon output and reduce the damage that global warming will cause. Switching over to OLED monitors is kind of like spitting into a volcano to stop an eruption.
The truth is that most of the green technologies being put forward today are just fashion statements and a distraction from the real solutions, and it is technically impossible to solve our real problems with them. Most carbon output comes from power generation and transportation. In order to make a dent, we need to switch almost entirely over to power sources that have no carbon output, and we need to make a major push to mass transit.
Unfortunately, the issues get complicated in regards to power generation without carbon because the only existing technology that could replace all of our coal plants is nuclear power, and there isn't a lot of political will for nuclear power in the united states. Usually people put forward solar power, wind power, or biofuel as solutions, unfortunately, when you actually look at solar power and wind power, it is technically impossible to make a dent in our power output with these technologies because they only generate power a small percentage of the time, whereas power draw stays high 24/7. Biofuel production on the other hand actually generates more carbon than coal once you try to scale it up, and the government initiatives related to it are a huge fiasco.
People keep waiting around for an easy solution to our problems, and one that makes them feel good. Unfortunately, that's not how life works, all of the solutions have downsides and all of them require us to make sacrifices. Sadly, it's pretty obvious that we're going to wait until the situation is much more desperate than it already is before making significant efforts at change.
In my mind it's not important whether we have a shortage of workers or not. Software engineering isn't like steel mining, where you want lots of workers when there are lots of viable mines available, and then you get rid of them when you've taken all of the metal out of the mine.
Engineers *are* the mine. The more computer science people are in the field, the more opportunities will open up for computer scientists to work in, because there are an infinite number of applications for computers and robots and an infinite amount of money that can be made selling those applications.
An increase in the number of CS grads my dampen wages temporarily, but that only creates more incentive for grads to start their own companies and explore niches that the larger companies ignored up until then. In the long run, the market expands until wages approach a kind of equilibrium.
So, I say, we need as many CS people as we can get, and in the long run we will be way better off.
Also, some people worry about foreign workers coming into the US to work at US companies, but I don't for this reason. Those workers from Taiwan, China, India, Japan, are all coming from countries that have an enourmous demand for software, but which don't have an internal software industry comparable to the united states. What people don't understand is that the H1-b program is part of a long held policy of brain draining the crap out of countries that we compete with, which insures that all the smartest people are working in US companies and paying US income taxes.
As the software market rapidly expands both into new niches and into new physical territories like China, Russia, and India, the US and a small number of European countries still dominate the software market, and still reap all of the profits from billions of customers. The policy of expanding our workforce and brain draining the competition makes sure that we remain on the gravy train and will in the long run benefit US workers, even if there's a temporary depression of salaries in the short term.
Also, it should be noted that computer scientists still get paid quite well (65-90k jobs), although not nearly as much as professionals in fields that are vastly understaffed like medical personnel.
is that the students go away after the code is submitted, when a large software project really needs someone who understands the code to stick around and maintain it.
I've seen a lot of summer of code projects that look really cool, but then you never see the feature ending up in the final product.
I think the summer of code thing is a good idea in that it gets students involved in the open source community, but I hope that the projects spend some time thinking about who will maintain the code after the kid is back in school, and I suspect that doesn't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
>Taiwan being a part of China for thousands of years,
>again this isn't automagically a bad thing. Oh noes they might end up like Hong Kong!!!
Taiwan was not part of China for "thousands of years," that is Chinese government propaganda. Chinese rule of Taiwan did not occur until 1683. China then had it for a while, until the Japanese took it over from 1895 until the end of world war II. Since then it has been independent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan
So, China ruled Taiwan from 1683 until 1895, a period of 212 years that is now long past.
The Chinese government likes to claim that they "own" various lands for historical reasons. They do the same thing with Tibet to justify rule there. However, no one outside of China takes these claims seriously, and continuous violent crackdowns against monks don't do much to boost there claims.
Also, as I mentioned in another post, Taiwan is now democratic so it is ridiculous to suggest that they would benefit from Chinese rule, where real democracy is banned.
>Your bloated military is crippling your country financially,
>other first world countries aren't that stupid.
Our military spending is at only 4% of GDP, the difference is that our GDP is $13 trillion so that percentage leaves room for a large military.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
By contrast north korea is the number one country by spending as a percentage of their GDP at 22% and maintains one of the world largest ground forces (US power is primarily Air and Naval).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Actually, I don't know how you can say that our military has "crippled" our economy when we have the most prosperous economy in the world by far...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
>So there would be one unified Korea, not some arbitrary division only
>supported by outside influences. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
I don't know how you can even suggest that South Korea under brutal communist rule would be a good thing. You talked about the US attacking "democratic countries" (although you didn't give an example of when this has actually happened), but now you're advocating a communist country with a starving population and brutal political oppression take over a democratic country?
That's not even considering the massive loss of life if North Korea invaded the south. Current estimates suggest that there would be hundreds of thousands dead in the first days of fighting.
>Taiwan being a part of China for thousands of years, again this isn't
>automagically a bad thing. Oh noes they might end up like Hong Kong!!!
Again, Hong Kong lost their democracy when they transfered to Chinese rule, so it *was* a bad thing, and it would be a bad thing for a democratic nation such as Taiwan to be ruled by a China, which does not allow democracy. Again, there's also the issue of the invasion and the massive number of people that would be killed during the Chinese crackdown.
I don't know how you can imagine that China expanding it's empire would be a good thing for anyone, least of all the Taiwanese.
>Sure, The ones I like only account for c.5% of the music I've downloaded,
>but I was never going to pay for that stuff anyway. The other 95% have lost no revenue.
Yes, but the *reason* you weren't going to pay for them is that you could pirate them. Therefor, piracy *has* cost lost revenue. Unless of course, you are as I suspect, one of the DOLIMBs (Drop Out Living In Mom's Basement), who has no money in the first place to buy music with.
Hoards of college and high school drop outs living in their mom's basement seem to believe that society owes them a free ride, free music, and everything they want without having to pay for it or work a day. Additionally, they are also convinced that they are unappreciated "computer geniuses" because they know how to install Linux, and becuase they troubleshoot their mom's Windows install (does this sound familiar slashdot?). Those of you expressing these views should be aware that in the real world, outside of your Vampire the Masquerade LARPs, and furry fetish clubs, you are held in contempt.
On the internet, you can pretend to be highly skilled professionals, but no one buys it. I'm calling you all out, and letting you know that I can tell the difference. No professional software developer I have ever met has told me that they "deserve" to steal free music, or software. Nor have many of the complained about the one dollar fee for purchasing music legitimately on Itunes. Thus, you complainers are revealed as the jobless fucks that you are!
So, DOLIMB's, feel shame that you have been unmasked. Please leave the internet (which is serious business!) and spend the rest of your life masturbating to furry cartoons and reading 4chan in isolation. Or, maybe, just maybe, stop feeling sorry for yourself, get off your bum ass, and go back to school and get yourself a job. Then actually paying for music and software won't seem such a burden!
Wubi states that it uses a "loopmounted" filesystem to boot off a disk image contained within an NTFS filesystem. My question is, how does this work?
Don't you need a NTFS driver to read the disk image off of the loop mounted partition, and to be able to write back to it? How does linux know what blocks on the filesystem belong to it, and what blocks are for other files?
Is there any documentation out there on how this sort of thing works?
>So, it looks like the old "We don't have to interoperate"
>arrogance is still going strong at Microsoft.
Really, why would Microsoft spend money on Linux integration with companies that they don't have a relationship with, like redhat? Why are you getting pissed at them for doing exactly what is in their own business interests?
>Let's see if they still think that way in another ten years.
Well, they thought that way 10 years ago, and then 10 years before that, and every business on the planet thinks that way, so by using logical induction to generalize *yes* Microsoft will think that way 10 years from now.
I'm always surprised when people get angry because Microsoft doesn't just choose to roll over and die.
It should be noted that the article misses the point of this new product, which is that it provides hypervisor support (like xen) as opposed to their old virtualization products which did not. Aside from that they seem to support Suse now.
Actually, presumably if Suse works, so will most other Linux distributions, after all the kernel is the same, and that is the piece of software which matters.
most of the comments here seem to indicate that the article "got it all wrong." Since the article is pretty much about how Steve Jobs is a jerk, this largely seems to be people taking offense to the idea that Steve The Great has human flaws.
It is a well known fact in the industry that both Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds are jerks with enormous egos and a habit of chewing people out for minor errors. That doesn't change the fact that they are extremely good at their jobs, and isn't taking a dig at OSX or Linux, it is just a fact about the personality of these guys.
Jobs tends to keep his ego and habit of chewing people out out of the public eye, but you can see Linus doing the same thing on LKML all the time, or at various talks such as this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
The fanboy crowd tends to see people like Jobs, Torvalds, and RMS as their own personal messiah and beyond any sort of criticism even if that criticism is unrelated to the software they produce.
On the other hand, consider how fast I'll get modded down if I suggest that Bill Gates is actually a pretty decent human being, and that his humanitarian work is pretty awesome. I've had people call me a "Microsoft shill" for saying things like that, and suggest that I was being *paid* to say such things. Note, I haven't even mentioned OSX, Linux, or Windows! In fact, the activities I've mentioned so far are totally unrelated to software development. Yet, people can't seem to separate the two.
I think it's pretty sad that there are so many people for whom these "Mac vs Windows" and "Linux vs Windows" debates become so religious and personal that they feel the need to demonize or glorify various people that they don't even know, and engage in such vitriolic behavior. I mean, it's just *software*, if I write a really nice piece of software, it doesn't make me Gandhi, and if it has bugs, it doesn't make me Hitler. As much as I hate using this phrase, because I am a developer and computer enthusiast, *it's just software*. There's a bigger world out there, and more criteria on how to judge someone as human being than their software defect rate or their licensing strategy.
there's been tons of dynamic programming languages coming out, most of which are pretty disappointing.
People say a language is "dynamic" as if it were a selling point, but what they really mean is that it is interpreted, they were too lazy to write a compiler for it, and that type checking is always deferred to runtime, even when you don't want it to be.
There's never really any excuse for not writing a compiler. Sometimes during development you don't want to compile things, and that's fine, but you need the choice. Many languages like Java and Ocaml have both interpreters *and* compilers, and I think that's the right way to go.
As for deferring type checks to runtime, any modern language can do that, but the so called dynamic languages have no choice *except* to do that, and have no mechanism whatsoever for checking for obvious type errors. You can run a python program a thousand times, only on the 1001th time to find that there was actually a type error in some statement that was never executed before. On the other hand Java and C# with generics, and C++ will catch your type errors *the first time you compile*. All these languages support dynamic typing, the difference is they *also* support static typing.
The reason languages like Python, Perl, and Ruby are written, the reason that aren't mentioned when evangelizing these languages, is that writing an interpreter is *easier* than writing a compiler (note I said easier and not easy). There's no need to write assembly for lots of platforms, or deal with things like register allocation, so some of the harder problems are taken off your plate. These languages are generally very ad hoc, and special purpose, and that's fine. They are great for writing dinky one off scripts. However, let's not glorify them to the point where we are doing something more sophisticated than that, say writing large web apps.
On the other hand, writing a c++ compiler is a major endeavor both because it is compiled and it is standardized (you can't just say that the standard is whatever the hell buggy way the reference implementation does it). Now, C++ has some problems of its own, but because it is statically typed, and compiles to a highly optimized form, it gives you a very powerful tool for writing large scale and high performance software. Much of the same can be said of java, although some performance is traded for things like cross platform support and ease of programming (a trade off which is appropriate in a number of domains like web programming).
what killed vista for me was that background services were constantly running spinning my harddrive. Since I
1. am on a laptop and run off the battery often
2. play games
this is totally unacceptable and made my laptop unusable. I even went so far as to disable the indexing service, but for some reason the machine continued to do *some* kind of processing on various files. I'd turn on the performance monitor to find that it was churning away, doing *something* to various large movie files.
Until the overactive services are addressed, I'm not touching vista again, as it just makes the computer unusable. If someone can comment on whether this has happened, I'd like to know.
It should be noted that after I went back to XP, I installed the google desktop, which does the same thing the vista file indexing does, but without the performance overhead. Whenever I'm using the computer for *anything* google desktop is smart enough to *immediately* stop indexing and let me get my work done. It only indexes when truly idle.
anti virus software is designed to make you feel safer without actually doing that much. Typically, all of the anti virus vendors out there combined can't remove more than a third of the viruses that will end up on your computer if it gets exposed while unpatched to the virus stew out on networks like comcast.
The truth is that running behind a hardware firewall and a NAT, having unnecessary services turned off, not running software from untrusted sources, and running everything you can as an unprivileged user are the best methods for preventing infection. If you actually do get infected, you're pretty much screwed. It's very unlikely that AV software will be able to remove all of the viruses on your machine. You pretty much have to reinstall.
For all of these reasons, I actually advise that even windows users do *not* run AV software, as it often provides a false sense of security. In addition to that, AV software often bogs down your computer and screws with your network traffic. A number of AV packages will actually listen in on your network traffic to see if virus traffic is being transmitted. Since everything has to be scanned before it is sent out, this will greatly increase your latency, decrease your throughput, and cause unnecessary CPU activity for network IO.
Cheap routers for home use largely make AV software obsolete on the home front, where it was most used. The places where you have to worry are large businesses and dorms. At dorms I advise that you throw a cheap router in between your windows box and the network connection. In businesses, the IT department will track what viruses are on the network you should just be careful to stay patched and not *introduce* any new viruses by running untrusted software.
As far as macs go, I've never even met anyone who's gotten a virus for his mac, and I used macs for well over 10 years. As long as there aren't too many macs on a given network, it is impossible for viruses to spread. Windows viruses can spread because there are many viruses written for them, and because there are networks with thousands of windows machines attached.
I think that software patents are bad as well; however, it's also stupid to say that they are bad because RMS said so.
There is a cult of personality built up around RMS, and there's nothing more frustrating than talking to someone who thinks that old hippy is some kind of "visionary" whose ever word is true. The guy wrote a port of emacs and some dogmatic diatribes on how he thinks software development should work, but people treat him like he is the Jesus of open source.
>Neither Iran nor North Korea have waged wars of aggression in the past 50 years.
North Korea hasn't waged a war of aggression in the past 50 years... for a reason. The korean war ended with the south free because there were US troups at the border to keep north korean troops from taking the south.
Iran I agree may be exaggerated as a threat, but you should consider the roll that America's wars have played in history over the past 50 years.
Cold War Era:
The Korean War
Lebanon crisis of 1958
Bay of Pigs Invasion
Dominican Intervention
Vietnam War
Tehran hostage rescue
Grenada
Beirut
Panama
Post Cold War Era:
Gulf War
Somalia
Yugoslavia
Bush Era:
Afghanistan
Philippines
Liberia
Iraq
A lot of these conflicts had minor US involvement, but I've listed them for completeness (Liberia involved sending "three warships with 2,300 Marines into view of the coast," and funding Economic Community of West African States troops.)
What should be most notable about every last one of these wars, is that while some of them were major mistakes, all of them were in defense of pretty much every first world democratic country, and not just the united states.
People seem to enjoy bashing the United States for it's mistakes, and sometimes we deserve it, but the truth is that the current balance of power has benefited pretty much everyone posting on slashdot. There have been no new world wars for a reason. The soviet union ended it's domination of europe, and was not able to press in further than they did for a reason. Every first world nation prizes it's military alliance with the US for a reason.
The truth is that the roll that the US plays is maintaining a balance of power with democratic nations at the top, and dictatorial nations at the bottom. The truth is that without the US forces there to maintain that balance of power, this would end quickly. The other first world nations do not have comparable military forces, and largely don't have the forces necessary to defend themselves from their neighbors.
Consider what would have happened without US forces to maintain the ballance of power:
1. In the cold war, pretty much all of Europe would have ended up in soviet hands.
2. South Korea would fall to North Korea *immediately* if US forces weren't there to back them up.
3. Taiwan would end up in Chinese hands *today* if the US wasn't committed to defending them from invasion.
4. Pakistan would have difficulty surviving without US military aid.
5. Israel probably wouldn't survive without US backing.
Israel is probably the most controversial of those choices, and a lot of people, myself included, are pretty unhappy with how they treat the palestinians, but I don't think anyone wants to see Israel destroyed (well... except for the people trying to destroy it) as that would cost considerably more lives than the current conflict.
So while it may be reasonable to criticize specific US actions, it's pretty ridiculous to act like you don't want the US there defending your interests, or that you're unhappy with the status quo.
>It is said that Anarchy is the absence of rulers, not the absence of rule.
said by who? Let me guess, he was an "anarchist," by which I mean high school drop out living in his mom's basement, complaining that society would be "so much more awesome" if there weren't any rules, and he didn't have to keep his room clean.
Anarchy:
"Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder."''
Any social endeavor has politics and power relationships and de facto governing processes by which collective decisions are made, they even exist within families and other tiny social units. Anarchy is just a society where those relationships are no longer functional and stable. You have groups competing for power without a mediator and chaos persists (e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan).
Humans can't survive in anarchy because we are social animals, and require cooperation and certain kinds of power relationships to survive. People naturally form social structures with leaders and followers, it's part of basic human psychology.
Even the free software movement has leaders with specific powers that they can enforce. That you think otherwise just goes to show that you've never contributed. Linus doesn't let any patches into mainline Linux that he doesn't want to, and that effectively kills those patches. Other organizations have even more stringent policies. To commit to FSF, Mono, and many other projects and organizations you must turn over your copyright to them, so that they can relicense it under whatever terms they want (presumably, the next version of the GPL, but who knows?).
Often a company is responsible for all of the high level design of a product, and controls the repository, and open source developers are either hired by said company to do the work, or are on the periphery.
Even if a specific company isn't responsible for high level design, some people are de facto designers. This isn't that different than in a company, and these relationships naturally form even if they aren't dictated, otherwise the project falls apart.
Open source isn't really a "governing model," it's just the same old human behavior and practices, but with a new software license.
this is the most bullshit communist diatribe I've ever heard.
Everyone can vote by universal suffrage, and the parties *select the people on the ticket* by the same means. Have you heard of a primary? You can run for president in the current election if you want, but I doubt you'll get elected, because, well, you're an idiot.
The number of people is not small either. 64% turned out in 2004 and more are going to turn out this year, so you can't say this isn't a representative government when the majority of the people are involved in selecting the government.
Then you have all this nonsense about feudal overlords, and how rich people from feudal society own everything. There never *were* any feudal lords in the united states, you idiot. The vast majority of the nobility never left Europe, and titles were abolished entirely during the revolution. How can they possibly own everything if they never lived here?
>Likely you are among the most common class of people stuck in a
>meaningless job and staying there, so what does it matter work or not?
I'm a programmer. This is slashdot, you idiot. My job is extremely meaningful and effects a lot of people. Nor did I inherit it from my parents, neither of whom make nearly as much money as I do.
>In a healthy society everyone does what is best to support their community.
>In american society almost no one does what's good to support their community
That's funny, because american society is ridiculously more successful than the communist shit holes of the world, so obviously we *must* be doing what's best for the community.
Are we supposed to have a centrally planned economy like the Soviet Union and China had before they *horribly failed* and millions of people died of starvation? You need to do some reading on the effects of communism before you start advocating it.
Check out China's "great leap forward" under Mao
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
"
The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen - both within China and outside - as a major economic and humanitarian disaster (sometimes called the "giant step back"), with estimates of the number of people killed by famine during this period ranging from 14 to 43 million
"
Are North Korea and soviet Russia your model societies? If not, tell me what country is?
you can complain all you want, but we are responsible for who we elect. If you don't like it, then it is partially your fault.
>it gives us a feeling of being a special clique.
For too many users, especially those who spend the most time bashing Windows and Microsoft, this seems like the primary reason they use Linux.
>If Linux becomes widely used, we'll probably switch to something else.
>Or at least develop an obscure distro that only we will use.
>Because, let's face it, we want to feel special.
In my mind, these are exactly the kind of users that Linux doesn't need, and the kind that the Linux community has let run the show far too often.
For Linux to succeed, it needs to be good software, and not just an opinionated and overbearing culture.
Now watch while those same people mod me as "troll."
>Churches, God, and Sin are ways of imposing codes of behavior that have
>been show to be successful over several millennia. The concepts of
>'God' and 'Sin' are necessary to impose these codes of behavior
The truth is that religion and morality have nothing to do with one another and never have. If they did, this would be a very different world considering how common religion is, and how uncommon morality is. Religions give lip service to morality, but the truth is it never goes any further than that.
If you consider most of the violence that's going on in the world right now, it is led by religious men preaching that murder and mayhem are good things. You can say that they don't represent the "true meaning" of their religion, or that their religion is different than your religion, but they are representative of how religion is practiced in the real world.
It's easy to be a saint in a rich country with police that *enforce* the law, when you don't really have a choice, and in those places you often see holy men positioning themselves as defending public morality (although what they consider public morality is often ridiculous). In regions of the world that are chaotic on the other hand, holy men are always the first to rally a mob and start some violence.
This is true of Islam, and of Christianity. No one who has studied any European history could claim that Christianity has promoted morality, or that it has ever been about anything more than power.
The true source of morality is reason, and the true source of public order is the law and the police force to enforce it. Without those two things, everything goes lord of the flies pretty quickly, whatever your religion is.
>But because it is happening on the Internet, nobody can prove who committed the crime.
>Sure, there was an IP address logged. What, exactly does that prove? Nothing.
It's pretty easy to look up your home address given your IP address, and law enforcement officials do this on a regular basis... and this sort of thing has already held up in court. IP addresses are allocated to various institutions, such as ISP's, and they generally keep records of who has what IP address at what time, so all a cop has to do is get a warrant, and he can find out what person is responsible for what internet traffic.
The belief that people are anonymous on the internet is largely not true. I read your post and I am deeply concerned that you might end up in jail if you act on this false belief.
>Then they want someone to "enforce the law".
>Only there isn't any law - as long as it stays on the Internet.
This is another common misconception. The internet is not legally distinct, because it is in fact not a place, just a technology. If you do something on the internet, you are bound by the laws of your local government. For instance, I live in Washington state, where the amazon.com company is. Even though I am doing my purchasing over the internet, I am a citizen of washington making a purchase from a washington state corporation, so I have to pay washington state sales taxes (amazon.com automatically adds them in). If you're a business in washington state, and you fail to collect these taxes and turn them in, the government will find out about it and will come down on you hard, whether you sell stuff over the internet or in a brick and mortar store.
Similarly, as an individual there's rising risk when downloading, say, movies over bittorent, because various organizations regularly connect to trackers and check who is downloading what files, and map those IP addresses to home addresses. A lot of people are getting (successfully) sued now.
let's keep in mind that this guy is a representative, and not a senator. There are 435 representatives, and freshman representative has about as much voice in national policy as the guy down at the DMV. Don't expect him to be authoring any bills.
The more significant news related to his election, if you follow the news, is that he replaced Dennis Hastert in a long time republican district. His election makes the democratic majority in the house that much more cemented, and generally is a signal of the upswing of the democratic party nationally.
Reducing power usage for a million americans can't be done with OLED displays because most of our power usage comes from things like industry (think the kind of power that producing aluminum requires), lighting, heating, etc. Increasing efficiency in these areas would be a good idea, but it's doubtful if it is possible to reduce consumption by half.
A solution that would go farther would be to just make more energy with less carbon using nuclear power plants.
>We can do both, you know. We can push for the removal of
>screensavers (in favor of screen blanking) AND put wind farms in Kansas.
Yes, we can spend a lot of money doing things that make *no* significant impact on the environment but make us feel good about ourselves, and then we can use whatever money is left over for solving our actual environmental problems.
Or, here's a crazy idea, we could tackle the *actual* problems, and ignore the feel good but useless solutions.
Screen blanking is not going to have any measurable impact on the environment, because computer monitors are not a significant fraction of national energy use. Similar can be said of wind power, which could not become a significant fraction of national energy use due to technical problems.
Most police forces in the US are pretty hostile to the idea of any kind of kind of civilian oversight. I can sympathize to some degree because cops by the nature of their job have to do things that civilians don't like. They aren't out there to pick up the trash and mow your lawn, they are out there to maintain civic order, which means keeping civilians in line.
However, there are enough bad cops, and enough other cops who will protect their own even if they are doing something clearly wrong, that *some* kind of civilian oversight is needed most places to avoid the worst abuses. That said, I think this board is a really bad idea, and is actually probably illegal.
First, why it is a bad idea:
The fact is that it will get a lot harder for police to do their job if anonymous systems like this become widely used. Anyone from someone receiving traffic ticket, to someone who got busted for heroin trafficking can them go online and anonymously pretend to be some totally innocent guy who suffered horrible police brutality for no reason whatsoever by officer John D. Law. Hell, people could go online from *jail* and talk smack about their arresting officer in a totally anonymous system.
Second, why this is probably illegal:
Libel and slander are and always have been illegal. The fact that it happens on "the intertubes" where information "wants to be free" does not change the law. If you start false rumors (the false part is important here) about someone being a murderer or something equally horrible and that person can't get a job and their wife leaves them, etc because of it, that person can legally sue the crap out of you. To make this clear why this is, consider if there were a website called "ratemyemployee" and people could go online anonymously and say that they were your boss and give you a performance review. Now, since that person did not have to identify himself, he could be anybody including some random guy you never worked for who had a grudge against you. You could easily lose your current job and not be able to find a new one in such a situation. Suing the person who started the rumor provides a way to clear your name in court and get monetary compensation.
As it stands, the web site may be liable for slander or libel if they don't give up information on who posted.
I think the correct thing to do is for the site to hold users contact information in escrow, and to provide some kind of means of redress, without immediately handing out addresses to police officers who just want to find out who talked smack about them. Futhermore, the site itself should probably require a contract is signed and make it clear it will fine users if they make a habit of posting slander on their site.
People on both end, police and civilians, need to be held accountable for their actions.
is almost doubtlessly responsible for forcing apple to block voip over their cellular data network. I bet that was part of the terms of their profit sharing agreement. However, is it possible that it will be ok to use voip over their 802.11b network?
Actually I'm not sure this makes much difference since, I mean, if you have an iphone you are already paying for some kind of cellular service...
What does seem scummy to me is blocking alternative browsers on the iPhone. I also don't really understand the motivation, since safari isn't really something that makes apple money. Really, it was something they were forced to develop when Microsoft dropped IE for mac.
It seems pretty silly to me that people think we are helping the environment by saving a few watts on our computer monitors. Meanwhile, billions of people are coming onto the grid and using coal power. It isn't even a drop in the ocean.
I see people putting up a few solar panels here and there, maybe generating enough energy to take a fraction out of their air conditioning bill, and I wonder if they are stupid. Even if everyone in the united states did the same thing, or even the entire world did the same thing, the carbon output would still be rising because industry requires a phenomenal amount of energy that can't be supplied or even offset significantly by these sorts of technologies.
These sorts of efforts are all about feeling good about the environment, while actually doing nothing to put a significant dent in the carbon output and reduce the damage that global warming will cause. Switching over to OLED monitors is kind of like spitting into a volcano to stop an eruption.
The truth is that most of the green technologies being put forward today are just fashion statements and a distraction from the real solutions, and it is technically impossible to solve our real problems with them. Most carbon output comes from power generation and transportation. In order to make a dent, we need to switch almost entirely over to power sources that have no carbon output, and we need to make a major push to mass transit.
Unfortunately, the issues get complicated in regards to power generation without carbon because the only existing technology that could replace all of our coal plants is nuclear power, and there isn't a lot of political will for nuclear power in the united states. Usually people put forward solar power, wind power, or biofuel as solutions, unfortunately, when you actually look at solar power and wind power, it is technically impossible to make a dent in our power output with these technologies because they only generate power a small percentage of the time, whereas power draw stays high 24/7. Biofuel production on the other hand actually generates more carbon than coal once you try to scale it up, and the government initiatives related to it are a huge fiasco.
People keep waiting around for an easy solution to our problems, and one that makes them feel good. Unfortunately, that's not how life works, all of the solutions have downsides and all of them require us to make sacrifices. Sadly, it's pretty obvious that we're going to wait until the situation is much more desperate than it already is before making significant efforts at change.
In my mind it's not important whether we have a shortage of workers or not. Software engineering isn't like steel mining, where you want lots of workers when there are lots of viable mines available, and then you get rid of them when you've taken all of the metal out of the mine.
Engineers *are* the mine. The more computer science people are in the field, the more opportunities will open up for computer scientists to work in, because there are an infinite number of applications for computers and robots and an infinite amount of money that can be made selling those applications.
An increase in the number of CS grads my dampen wages temporarily, but that only creates more incentive for grads to start their own companies and explore niches that the larger companies ignored up until then. In the long run, the market expands until wages approach a kind of equilibrium.
So, I say, we need as many CS people as we can get, and in the long run we will be way better off.
Also, some people worry about foreign workers coming into the US to work at US companies, but I don't for this reason. Those workers from Taiwan, China, India, Japan, are all coming from countries that have an enourmous demand for software, but which don't have an internal software industry comparable to the united states. What people don't understand is that the H1-b program is part of a long held policy of brain draining the crap out of countries that we compete with, which insures that all the smartest people are working in US companies and paying US income taxes.
As the software market rapidly expands both into new niches and into new physical territories like China, Russia, and India, the US and a small number of European countries still dominate the software market, and still reap all of the profits from billions of customers. The policy of expanding our workforce and brain draining the competition makes sure that we remain on the gravy train and will in the long run benefit US workers, even if there's a temporary depression of salaries in the short term.
Also, it should be noted that computer scientists still get paid quite well (65-90k jobs), although not nearly as much as professionals in fields that are vastly understaffed like medical personnel.
is that the students go away after the code is submitted, when a large software project really needs someone who understands the code to stick around and maintain it.
I've seen a lot of summer of code projects that look really cool, but then you never see the feature ending up in the final product.
I think the summer of code thing is a good idea in that it gets students involved in the open source community, but I hope that the projects spend some time thinking about who will maintain the code after the kid is back in school, and I suspect that doesn't happen.