I hate to say it, but my first reaction to this ludicrious idea is that we should organize "ping parties" so that each of us will send a few megabytes of data to every single person who was either responsible for the idea of billing a person for the actions of others, or who declined to strangle this shining example that of misconceived raw capitalism in the cradle.
Let's see, if we get even 1% of the people who currently devote cycles to SETI@Home to donate bandwidth we should be able to saturated this arseholes' bandwidth. That way the don't get horrible performance and a sizeable bill. (E.g., 250 kbps, for a month solid, is over 80 GB.)
Of course, in deference to Jane's that would be cyberwar if non-Australians did it. But if it was done by Australians, within Australia, the worst they could call it is cybercivil war, and most people could call it the world's first cybercivil disobedience. That, and a damn fine example of being hoist by your own petard.
The saddest thing is that I honestly can't decide whether I'm serious about this. I have a very low opinion of DoS attackers, but I have an even lower opinion of anyone who would casually break one of the central foundations of Western Society. If a country allows you to become liable for a substantial charge for something totally beyond your control, it's only a very small step to other charming ideas we left behind at the last millennium (or at least the last century).
Some other ideas not far removed from this, at least IMnsHO? Visiting the sins of the father on the son. (Your mother died owing MegaHospital for his cancer treatment? *You* are now responsible for her unpaid $500,000 bill. Your father died in prison after serving only 12 years of a 20 year sentence? *You* will spend the next 8 years in prison finishing his term, and if you die, your child will finish the term!). Debtor's prison. Slavery (or in polite society, "indentured servitude") in lieu of payment of debt.
Sadly, a strong argument can be made that the victums of bullying are potentially more dangerous than the bullies themselves. Emphasis on "potentially."
We would call the logic sick, but it matches reality. Bullies already know how to handle anger and frustration - they go beat up somebody weaker than themselves. If they fought someone as strong as themselves they would called "fighters," not "bullies," and if they fought somebody stronger than themselves they would be described as having a death wish.
But how do the victims of the bullies handle anger and frustration? Some will have their own, non-violent, outlets, others will become bullies themselves, but the rest will keep that anger inside. When it becomes too much to bear, they might only have a single model for how to deal with it - taking out the "weak." But instead of using their fists, they'll use their brain and be *far* more dangerous.
So if we use history as a guide, it's appropriate to use a history of being bullied as a warning flag for future violence -- but we must also show absolutely no mercy to the bullies themselves. By this same logic, they are acting as recklessly as if they tossed a dozen loaded firearms into the schoolyard playground. Keep track of the victims, if necessary, but the bullies should be expelled on first offense, and locked up on the second offense. If that ruins the football season, tough shit.
The problem with your argument is that it establishes the precedence that the right of a company to collect marketing information supercedes your right to control what information is extracted from your computer without your knowledge or consent.
The worst case scenario, one that I don't expect to be a problem next year or two, but a possible problem in 5+ years, is the extention of the current collection of credit card information from stores to collection of *all* purchase information from applications such as MS Money or Quicken. That's not a very far step from the current collection of credit card purchase information and unsolicited transfer of system information. A mildly offensive act this year, another next year, and one or two more and there you are!
Even if you think that possibility is too extreme to consider, how would you feel about a program that scans your disk for files from the competition? What about a program that quietly scans your disk for images, especially images with the word "sex" or "teen" in the title?
Finally, if you don't find ID's actions objectionable, exactly where do you draw the line? Is it enforceable (from the legal standpoint)? Will it be easy to cross that line as technology changes? (E.g., I'll bet you protect static image files, but forget to restrict access to frame grabbers. Let it's hard to think of a more invasive technology than a camcorder in the bedroom... Rare today, but not in a few years.)
A related idea, at least in the U.S., is that such licenses could be viewed as an infringement on the constitutional right to freedom of assembly.
Many people forget that this right has two faces. Not only does it prevent the government from preventing a group from peacefully assembling, it also prevents the government from requiring that its agent be present at all meetings. It even prevents the government from getting a list of all members in a group, or attendees at a meeting. (Two recent cases involved an attempt to get an NAACP membership list in the 1950's, or a KKK membership list in the 1990's (both dates iirc). Both attempts failed.)
If citizens are required to obtain a "surfing license" for *all* internet access, it would be trivial to identify everyone who visits every site. (Even if the group's servers don't keep such logs, it would be possible to monitor the network traffic upstream.) This would be akin to posting a cop outside of the meeting hall, one who demands everyone present their ID prior to entry. No US court would tolerate this.
I'm sure the latter-day Fascists would argue that this point is irrelevant since it is enforced by businesses, not the government. But since it's a government-issued (and -mandated) ID, I think even the current courts would recognize that this is a difference that doesn't matter.
Re:Accountable for their identity. ('pr0n')
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License to Surf
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· Score: 2
Anonymity must end. Without it the pr0n, w4r3z, trading would all but dry up.
I don't know what "pr0n" is, but a lot of "pornography" is in the eye of the beholder (especially in "commercial" porn - the risque ads used to sell undergarments, perfume, etc.). Even the hard-core "no doubt it's 'porn'" pornography is legal in many jurisdictions.
As for the quaint idea that pornography can only exist in anonymity, exactly how do you think the multi-billion dollar adult video rental industry works? Do you think the stores merely trust all patrons to return the tapes, or are they secured by credit cards? Likewise, how do you think the for-profit web sites operate? Did you honestly believe that the patrons dutifully send in anonymous cash and cashiers checks?
Of course, all of this changes when you're talking about something like child pornography, but I'm not gonna give you the benefit of the doubt since you couldn't be bothered to distinguish between legal and illegal content.
IANAL, but one of the many people caught up in the debian maintainer mess so I've given some thought to the DFSG.
This clause only makes sense if it's interpreted as applying to discrimination *not required by law*. The alternative is asserting that the original (and Debian's) license supercedes the law and courts, a risky position. We may not agree with the way minors are treated, but it's insane to disregard it.
As a trivial example, let's consider a family which uses "NetNanny" to keep a minor child from accessing a porn site. We might all agree this is silly and pointless, but it's within the parent's legal rights. The kid downloads Debian and installs it, and bypasses the parental controls. (If you're a conservative Republican, insert a sentence stating that the kid is so enflamed by the images on his screen that he goes out and rapes a girlscout going door to door selling cookies.) The parents (and DA) are pissed, and they're looking for someone to sue. Could Debian and/or Corel be held partially responsible, perhaps under an "attractive nuisance" ordinance? Even if the case is thrown out, how much will it cost?
It's easy to stand on a soapbox and say that Corel shouldn't care, but are you on the hook for the legal bills if you're wrong? An angry parent could still sue Corel for enabling their kid to access a porn site, but with that nod to existing law Corel will have a far better chance of getting the case thrown out immediately.
I'm not particularly happy about these clauses appearing in EULAs, but I recognize it as a sign that more people are taking us seriously, for better and worst.
No competent grad student or professor will be "dumbfounded" that an O(n lg(n)) algorithm that hits the swap will be slower than an O(n^2) algorithm that does not. They *will* ask you why the first algorithm is so much more memory expensive, though, since most such algorithms only require a modest amount of additional memory. A fast algorithm, poorly implemented, will still run slowly.
However, when all things are equal there's no doubt that many of us will recommend the more efficient algorithm *even when it is modestly slower for the task at hand*, but that's because experience shows that problems inevitably get larger and the the more efficient algorithm *will* be faster in the near future. That's why a new 500 MHz P-III running Windows 2000 is often *slower* than a 75 MHz 486 running Windows 3.1, your system may be approx. 10x faster, but the problems you're trying to solve are also 10x larger so the O(n^2) algorithms are much slower. (Even O(n lg (n)) is slightly slower, but by a smaller amount.)
Finally, never overlook the raw stupidity of most people who blindly dismiss the more efficient algorithms. Just last month I saw a bubble sort that had a comment stating that a "bubble sort was fast enough since the cost was in the swap, not the comparison." The author obviously never considered the fact that you would never do a comparison and *not* do the required swap. I replaced that code with a call to qsort() and cut the number of comparisons from 1,000,000 to 30k. The performance improvement came to something like 20 seconds.
I'm sure that there are some clueless profs who don't know how costly it is to hit the swap, but in my experience there are *far* more programmers who do a half-assed implementation of the faster algorithm, generally bitching the entire time about how their clueless boss doesn't understand the "real world," and they then complain that the faster algorithm is actually slower. Obviously I don't know if that happened to you, but I've seen it happen enough times that I always take such criticism with a grain of salt.
Besides the general rules (use better algorithms, use profilers to find slow code and test-Test-TEST!), something I've found very useful is caching reused values in low-level functions.
Two experiences with a client this spring show just how much this can help. The client needed to do some basic GIS functions, so there were a *lot* of trig functions off of the same values related to the lat-lon to display mapping. The original code did not cache values which were constant for each mapping; this was costly since it involved about half of all trig calculations in the code! Caching those values cut the running time in half, and no compiler would know to extend a data structure to include those cached values.
The second optimization involved a modest change to the code so that the data was organized in a rough hierarchy - the 360*180 1-degree square cells were clustered in 3-degree supercells, 15-degree super(2)-cells, and 60-degree super(3)-cells. If the area of interest wasn't in the super(3) cell, I didn't bother to check any of the 1-degree cells within it. Again, no compiler would have caught this, and few algorithm books discuss n-ary trees of spatial data. If you squint, this is also a "cache" approach, although the cache is hardcoded via the nesting factors.
Put the two modifications together and the program ran about 2 orders of magnitude faster! That was so much faster that the client started to compute the values on the fly - it was "cheaper" than precomputing the information and maintaining *that* cache!
Don't overlook the fact that much of the "first world" is located in the northern hemisphere - and a prolonged power disruption in "snow country" will be *far* more disruptive in the winter than in the summer.
You are missing the bigger picture here. The first few _Dune_ books are set in a world which is deliberately static to prevent a return to a period of human enslavement by machines. (The latter books show the consequences of the God Emperor and subsequent scattering.) Anyone who attempts to get an edge based on technology will be universally resented (Ix), with the people who manipulate the body (Bene T.) and mind (Bene Gesserit) not far behind. Such a society *will* reach a point where force and response are exactly matched.
As for some of your specific points, the Guild controls interstellar travel but each major house is fully capable of "dropping rocks" on its enemy. Remember that the Atreides family nukes were stored on one of the moons. If they drop rocks, it was because of the same social pressures not to use nukes against a population.
Also, I recall seeing nothing that said that a "lasgun" had any correlation to lasers. In fact, _Chapterhouse Dune_ has some comments from Idaho which clearly stated that lasguns and shields are both products of Hoffman's equation and that the "feedback" described in the first book falls out of these equations. No doubt you would immediately object that Idaho admits that nobody really understands those equations and hence it's inconsistent to claim that they're understood well enough to produce lasguns and shields.:-)
1) Insist on the terms of the contract and refuse to code. If he was idle because the company didn't provide a designated programmer, well that was their problem. (They are the ones who identified the job duties in the contract, after all.)
2) Write code even though he wasn't contractually obligated to do so... and act like a professional programmer. That means meaningful names and comments.
Instead, he choose a third option: write the code, then hide the details. Then harbor fantasies that they would bring him back in a "contract rates" for maintenance.
Here's a clue: he just had his interview as a "real" programmer, and he failed it with absolute prejudice. (That means that not only does he not get the job today, I'ld tell HR to add his name to the "*never* hire, with cause" pile.) He obviously didn't think through the consequences of his actions: when a bug occurs in his code his employer could never know if it was an honest mistake or an attempt to *extort* money for additional services. The use of a criminal term is intentional.
Speaking of sci.skeptic, I've been reading SI and the Skeptic for years... and a lot of skeptics forget that every so often one of the "kooks" is correct. They inevitable go through a period where they look like "kooks" at first glance, but I've noticed several common traits which this guy seems to share:
He *doesn't* compare himself to Galileo, an early Einstein, or any other genius "misunderstood in his own time,"
He's speaking in his area of professional interest. He's an analyst taking a hard line on the valuation of stock options, not a taxi driver discussing macroeconomic theory,
His stand is in an area of active debate. If just one major company hoses the books with stock options I think there's little doubt that the FASB will adopt a harder line. He seems to think MS may be that company.
The details *can* be checked. I don't have the MS annual statements handy, or the details of the proposed Expedia spinoff, but he could be easily discredited if he's bending the truth too far
Finally, some non-kooks have looked at his claims and said that they might have merit.
IMHO, he *might* be a kook, but it's at least as likely that he's just someone frustrated at the perceived indifference to something that's obvious to him.
As for the overall presentation, it's targeted towards the general public. If he presents the same document to Greenspan I would be worried, but I have no reason to believe that's the case.
It makes you wonder about MS's inclusion in the DJIA. These allegations are broader than those in the Michael Martinez case, but they fall into the same overall pattern. When MS's bubble bursts, it could cause a stampede effect among the investors who think the DJIA actually means something.
I had the LASIK procedure done, and I went from "must wear contacts since glasses cut off air supply," (-6.5 diopter contacts) to 20/25 or 20/30 - which is exactly right. (A reputable doctor won't aim for 20/20 in someone pushing forty because they're going to naturally become a bit farsighted in the next few years, so I should hit 20/20 in a few years.) I also had a modest amount of astigmatism which they completely eliminated.
My advice to anyone considering LASIK surgery is to whack yourself on the head a few times with a 2x4 until you get your priorities straight.
You do NOT want to make this decision on the basis of price. I paid $5000 (both eyes, plus followups), which was the usual price quoted by reputable doctors in this area.
I could have saved a thousand dollars or two... if I was willing to have my eyes operated on by the guy who wasn't making royalty payments on his laser gear. I think my doctor said that saved him $500 or so a pop -- but it also meant that his gear wasn't getting serviced. Maybe the laser delivering less power than he thought, or more. Or maybe it was randomly mixing the two. Any variation will make it much harder to get predictable results.
Or I could have saved some money by going with the guys who had just gotten back from their seminar and were excited at getting into the exciting new world of laser surgery.
During one of my follow up visits (and with myopia this severe it took me several weeks before I could drive at night or read the newspaper without reading glasses) my doctor (not the laser guy, but the glasses guy I have seen for a decade) mentioned that he had lunch with a peer a few weeks earlier. My vision, at the time, was still a little off but it was clearly getting better every time I came in. His peer's patient started out with slightly better vision than me, but she went to a cheaper doctor and one eye had severe astigmatism and her other eye was severely overcorrected -- and LASIK correction for farsightedness is far more invasive.
The point should be clear: PRICE IS THE LEAST OF YOUR WORRIES. Most people are focused on the "reasonable best" that can happen (e.g., "gee, I should have 20/25 vision and not need glasses"), and not on the "reasonable worst". An experienced doctor with good corporate support might have a "reasonable worst" that you'll still need (thin) glasses at times, but you won't have major vision problems. An inexperienced doctor or even an experienced one cutting corners may have a "reasonable worst" that you'll be overcorrected (farsighted), have bad astigmatism, or worst.
Is fucked up vision for the rest of your life really worth pennies per day? ($1000/40 years is $25/year, or something like 8c/day.)
And what, exactly, do you expect to the credit report to state?
Remember, Visa *settled*. The matter is closed, and they can't report that the woman didn't pay a lawful debt. (Note the key word "lawful.") They can't list the debt as unpaid during the time the charges were challenged.
Could they still manage to put a barb in the credit bureau report? Sure... and it would seem to be a slam dumk for slander because the case has already be brought before a court and Visa settled.
Go to your nearest burn unit and ask them if they would call "190F" liquids "hot".
*NEVER* make the mistake of thinking that the "temperature" shown by a thermometer has any direct correlation with the potential damage to human tissue. A child or elderly person can be scalded with water not much above 120F, and even a healthy adult can be scalded by water over 140F.
190F will scald anyone. 190F is *boiling water* in these parts. (Well, in the mountains to the west; in Denver water boils at around 200F). Anyone who quickly drank that coffee would require medical attention for severe burns in their mouth and throat... and at least they could vomit it out. The woman involved in the suit had the hot liquid dumped onto clothing which held it against her skin.
(Before you comment that anyone dumb enough to drink something that hot deserves what they get, what about people who have lost most feeling in their hands? *You* might be able to feel the heat through the cup, but many people will feel nothing or only mild warmth.)
I could understand that one particularly dumb manager didn't understand the consequences of keeping his coffee around 20F hotter than everyone else, but the plantiff's lawyers showed that McDonald's knew it was causing injury *and* refused to accept responsibility for those injuries.
Because I (and others) have to decide how to make our client's systems work in the real world. If we decide that MS isn't suitable for the project, we don't use MS. If the company insists on it, we smile and tell them to call us if they change their mind, but there's no guarantee that we'll be available and willing to clean up the mess. It sounds harsh, but we're all tired of working 60+ hour weeks because someone else picked the wrong tools for the job.
But we're professionals and recognize that sometimes MS is the correct solution... but the distortions over the past few weeks has been so transparent that we're left wondering if there's *anything* we can trust. In our situation, that question answers itself. If we don't have confidence in our tools we don't use them, and if we don't have confidence in the companies we don't bother paying attention to what they say.
Microsoft can make all of the claims it wants, but businesses have to find local staff to actually make their projects work. These people bring their own experiences to the job, and don't dismiss a major vendor out-of-hand lightly. But when they do, any sane company will ask *why*. It doesn't matter if the CTO thinks that Bill Gates is the hacker's god if he can't find the senior people who can actually bring a project to completion.
If you think I'm overstating the case, I invite you to compare the number of sites writing code in Pascal (or even Pascal, Modulo-2/-3, and Ada) vs. C. There are a lot of deep similarities.
As an aside, max-Q changes with the altitude of your launch. Depending upon far more factors than I am competent to analyze it might make sense to move launch sites from Florida (good equatorial boost) to Colorado (smaller boost, but launch track at 8000'-10000') except for the small problem of dropping empty tanks on Kansas.
But if we did that, Washington might not hear about it for a month.
(That's my obJamesBond reference, from _Diamonds are Forever_. Nobody should talk about this stuff without references to diamond encrusted laser spacecraft and bikini-clad starlets.)
But back to the serious stuff, I know that I only have about 85% of the air density from sea level at just over 5000'. I definitely feel it when I'm down in that thick soup at sea level! At 10000' the air density drops to 70% of sea level.
From a launch perspective, a rail in Mexico looks *very* good. (15,000' altoplane?, perhaps 60% of sea level?) It would also give you a good equatorial boost. Unfortunately there's the problems of politics, power (Colorado launch sites could tap into the Western US power grid), and launch techs ill from altitude sickness. Still, with NAFTA it's something to consider if it significantly cuts the cost-to-orbit.
Finally, a quick sanity check is the shuttle's SRBs. I don't recall the exact numbers but I thought they were dropped at something like 6 miles altitude/mach 3. In terms of the total trip to LEO it's fairly modest, but it's crucial because of the high cost of lifting fuel for the later stages. A maglev track in the mountains may be enough to get you 30-40% of the way to where the SRBs are dropped, when using the current shuttle stack!
Re:Hoax or not, there's a point here...
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Jesux is a Bad Pun
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(Responding for the record, since I missed the response while the article was live.)
The original Jesux page refered to a hierarchial user structure. Linux/Unix are slowly moving in the same direction, via "capacities."
Of course you can use standard permissions and override them as root, but that introduces all of the usual problems with using root for routine chores. The two-line change I mention are actually a form of hard-coded capacities tied to a two-tier user permissions space. It's silly in the case of "parents" vs. "children," but not so silly when you're trying to create a secure sandbox for your web server.
You know, I really don't care what Bill Gates says about anything... and that should terrify him.
This isn't a casual statement, I did give thought to a question. And I might still submit it, or a variant: A&E Biography recently named you the 41st most influential person of the past 1000 years. That is quite an honor... but Robin Williams in the same show attacked your truthfulness in a series of one-liners about several honorees. A well-regarded computer trade journalist (whose name I forget!) has commented that no one would throw Microsoft and the truth into the same room for fear of a matter-antimatter explosion.
Doesn't it concern you that Bill Gates and dishonesty are becoming as synonymous as John DeLorean and cocaine trafficking?
But the sad truth is that I simply don't give a damn what Bill Gates has to say about anything. There is simply nothing he can say that will interest me because I know, from a decade of Bill-watching, that it will be self-serving, vaporware, or both.
I wish Jeremy Paxman the best of luck, but I honestly think it would have been easier to interview Richard Nixon shortly after Watergate than Bill Gates today.
Guess what. I use Linux/Unix almost exclusively and find "OK" and "Cancel" confusing. If I'm doing a monster download and I bring up a dialog box that says "cancel", does it close the dialog or cancel the download?
Think twice before answering that. Windows still clearly shows its single-threaded/single-user origins in countless ways and a lot of dialogs are modal - there *is* no distinction between closing a dialog and cancelling an operation.
In contrast, Linux/Unix is multi-user and it's not uncommon for the user to run multiple downloads (as a simple example), each with their own status dialogs. I might want to dismiss some dialog boxes without canceling the underlying operation.
This observation brings up a number of secondary issues. E.g., a lot of Windows applications think nothing of popping themselves to the top of the stack and grabbing pointer/keyboard focus. Under Linux/Unix, that's an incredible gaffe that close to a fireable offense.
(It's only acceptable in cases where it's acceptable to walk up to someone talking on the phone, slap the handset away from their head and start talking to them. The building's on fire, or a gunman muttering your name just shot his way past the front door. Nothing less.)
I'm not gonna argue that Windows applications shouldn't continue to use "OK and "Cancel", since that's what people are used to. But don't presume to lecture us on our symbology unless and until you demonstrate that you understand how the Linux/Unix environment is very different from what people are used to under Windows.
This point keeps coming up, so I'll answer it globally instead of in several responses.
The current US position is that source code in electronic form is communications between the programmer and the compiler and hence under no Constitutional protection. Source code in printed form, since a computer can't read it, must be communications between two programmers and *is* Constitutionally protected.
Of course the government knows that OCR software exists and people who are serious about exporting software use special OCR fonts. (As an aside, where I can find those fonts?!) But they know that if they take OCR scanning programmer to court they may lose not only that case, but the larger issue of paper vs. disk vs. net distribution. The appeals courts in the Bernstein case make this seem likely.
As for motivations, I think a lot of the policy makers are driven by old-time military security policies and don't understand that they don't apply here. Leaking *any* information about most military hardware allows the enemy to work on ways to disrupt yours and improve their own, but mathematics and basic physical properties are things that can be done by anyone with the motivation and time. With them, all we can do is continously remind them that *all* public source cryptology can be understood by a motivated college maths major, and even some HS students.
At the same time, I'm sure that "industry" lobbyists are talking to their old colleagues and pointing out that the exposure is limited when a company exports its binary packages. Have you ever tried to disassemble a megabyte-sized "hello, world" windows program? The fact that this makes it easier for MS to export its Kerberos-enhanced W2K, but I can't export my Kerberos-enhanced Debian packages, isn't mentioned. Besides, MS has 90% of the market, and my distribution has 0%. (Because of the export laws, it's an on-again/off-again project and still in early beta.)
As a final comment, I know I could distribute my packages as source code, but that's completely unmanageable. The Kerberos source tarball is around 5 MB, and while many of the other packages (e.g., lprng, postgres, coda, cvs) can be rebuilt with a one-line change in the 'debian/rules' file you need a fully loaded development platform to recompile everything. Few people would use a distribution where you have to scan in a book (literally), then spend two days compiling everything.
... it helps to have permanent core members crew members who are in touch with [the larger computer universe]
This simply isn't possible. The longer they're "permanent," the more they lose touch with the rest of the world.
The sole exception, and it's only a partial solution, is someone who's active with OSS in addition to his day job. He'll be aware of new ways of fixing the nasty problems that never seem to go away, but it won't have the same impact as actually working on 6 contracts in three years. I have a fairly good idea of how things are really working in the world today (and the fact that only one project in 6 really had its act together is sobering), but I also know that if I stay at a single job for only 12-18 months I'll lose my touch on the tech pulse.
Wow. You rarely see anyone invite slander and defamation suits from tens of thousands of people at one time.
But what I find *really* interesting is his "Cause" . What "Cause" is this, exactly?
Prosecuting people for lawful assembly?
Prosecuting people for encouraging meaningful and fair competition in a major economic sector?
Prosecuting people for daring to say that the Emperor has no clothes?
Mr/Ms Sessions, if that's your name, exactly what crime is it you're alleging me of committing by frequenting SlashDot and the development mailing lists? My lawyer *really* wants to know....
The article, like the rest I've seen that covered this topic, never addressed the Alice in Wonderland quality to life when you're used to Linux and forced to buy Windows for something.
I normally run Linux exclusively and don't accept contracts for non-Unix work, but I recently needed business accounting software. So I bought the higher-priced software that I knew many of my clients used. It was Y2K ready. According to everyone I talked to, it was the best of the breed and could handle my company moving from single-programmer-in-a-garage stage to multimillion dollar company. (Yeah, right.)
It was such a load of crap that I demanded my money back (and got it, since their packaging did make a money-back guarantee) and am doing those tasks by hand while the Linux accounting packages stabilize. I decided I simply couldn't afford to lose any more weekends to produce a "professional" invoice after 6 hours of struggle, instead of whipping out an "unprofessional" one in 5 minutes with vi and lpr.
Some of the problems were related to the fact that I installed it on a laptop. The high latency display makes the "friendly" animations that appeared on every single fscking page a smear. But the software also clearly had absolutely no usability studies; e.g., I could enter POs but I never found a way to list open POs and associate checks with the PO.
Oh yeah, that was probably covered in the tutorial. The one that used lots of multimedia (always fun on a laptop) to train a clerk in advanced computer skills like using the mouse to pull down a menu. There was, as far as I could tell, no way to get a top-level summary for people who know computers but not accounting.
On the bright side, the company was willing to offer me support. At a fee for each incidence, and the fee was apparently *not* waived if the bug was because *they* screwed up the configuration. Nothing gives you a warm feeling like spending hundreds of dollars on a commercial accounting program, hitting 'create new business' button and watching it shit all over the floor because it's missing some value in one of its VB scripts. (That warm feeling is enhanced when you see that they want to charge you money to fix it. I think the feeling is due to acute alcohol poisoning....)
Oh, I almost forgot. A few months after installing this program my laptop took a hard crash. I picked up a virus even though it's never attached to the net, always in my physical control, and I only install commercial software in the original shrinkwrap. Surely a coincidence.
I actually enjoy it now when people tell me that Linux is hard to install. I tell them that I routinely install Debian in less than an hour, it takes me longer to burn the CD-Rs than it does to build a working system. But let me tell them about how long it takes me to reinstall Windows from my Toshiba disks (although that's not really fair since two hours are consumed removing those packages always in high demand in professional offices, like the big Disney Channel icon). Or let me tell them about the last "big, easy to use" Windows application I tried....
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say it, but my first reaction to this ludicrious idea is that we should organize "ping parties" so that each of us will send a few megabytes of data to every single person who was either responsible for the idea of billing a person for the actions of others, or who declined to strangle this shining example that of misconceived raw capitalism in the cradle.
Let's see, if we get even 1% of the people who currently devote cycles to SETI@Home to donate bandwidth we should be able to saturated this arseholes' bandwidth. That way the don't get horrible performance and a sizeable bill. (E.g., 250 kbps, for a month solid, is over 80 GB.)
Of course, in deference to Jane's that would be cyberwar if non-Australians did it. But if it was done by Australians, within Australia, the worst they could call it is cybercivil war, and most people could call it the world's first cybercivil disobedience. That, and a damn fine example of being hoist by your own petard.
The saddest thing is that I honestly can't decide whether I'm serious about this. I have a very low opinion of DoS attackers, but I have an even lower opinion of anyone who would casually break one of the central foundations of Western Society. If a country allows you to become liable for a substantial charge for something totally beyond your control, it's only a very small step to other charming ideas we left behind at the last millennium (or at least the last century).
Some other ideas not far removed from this, at least IMnsHO? Visiting the sins of the father on the son. (Your mother died owing MegaHospital for his cancer treatment? *You* are now responsible for her unpaid $500,000 bill. Your father died in prison after serving only 12 years of a 20 year sentence? *You* will spend the next 8 years in prison finishing his term, and if you die, your child will finish the term!). Debtor's prison. Slavery (or in polite society, "indentured servitude") in lieu of payment of debt.
Sadly, a strong argument can be made that the victums of bullying are potentially more dangerous than the bullies themselves. Emphasis on "potentially."
We would call the logic sick, but it matches reality. Bullies already know how to handle anger and frustration - they go beat up somebody weaker than themselves. If they fought someone as strong as themselves they would called "fighters," not "bullies," and if they fought somebody stronger than themselves they would be described as having a death wish.
But how do the victims of the bullies handle anger and frustration? Some will have their own, non-violent, outlets, others will become bullies themselves, but the rest will keep that anger inside. When it becomes too much to bear, they might only have a single model for how to deal with it - taking out the "weak." But instead of using their fists, they'll use their brain and be *far* more dangerous.
So if we use history as a guide, it's appropriate to use a history of being bullied as a warning flag for future violence -- but we must also show absolutely no mercy to the bullies themselves. By this same logic, they are acting as recklessly as if they tossed a dozen loaded firearms into the schoolyard playground. Keep track of the victims, if necessary, but the bullies should be expelled on first offense, and locked up on the second offense. If that ruins the football season, tough shit.
The problem with your argument is that it establishes the precedence that the right of a company to collect marketing information supercedes your right to control what information is extracted from your computer without your knowledge or consent.
The worst case scenario, one that I don't expect to be a problem next year or two, but a possible problem in 5+ years, is the extention of the current collection of credit card information from stores to collection of *all* purchase information from applications such as MS Money or Quicken. That's not a very far step from the current collection of credit card purchase information and unsolicited transfer of system information. A mildly offensive act this year, another next year, and one or two more and there you are!
Even if you think that possibility is too extreme to consider, how would you feel about a program that scans your disk for files from the competition? What about a program that quietly scans your disk for images, especially images with the word "sex" or "teen" in the title?
Finally, if you don't find ID's actions objectionable, exactly where do you draw the line? Is it enforceable (from the legal standpoint)? Will it be easy to cross that line as technology changes? (E.g., I'll bet you protect static image files, but forget to restrict access to frame grabbers. Let it's hard to think of a more invasive technology than a camcorder in the bedroom... Rare today, but not in a few years.)
A related idea, at least in the U.S., is that such licenses could be viewed as an infringement on the constitutional right to freedom of assembly.
Many people forget that this right has two faces. Not only does it prevent the government from preventing a group from peacefully assembling, it also prevents the government from requiring that its agent be present at all meetings. It even prevents the government from getting a list of all members in a group, or attendees at a meeting. (Two recent cases involved an attempt to get an NAACP membership list in the 1950's, or a KKK membership list in the 1990's (both dates iirc). Both attempts failed.)
If citizens are required to obtain a "surfing license" for *all* internet access, it would be trivial to identify everyone who visits every site. (Even if the group's servers don't keep such logs, it would be possible to monitor the network traffic upstream.) This would be akin to posting a cop outside of the meeting hall, one who demands everyone present their ID prior to entry. No US court would tolerate this.
I'm sure the latter-day Fascists would argue that this point is irrelevant since it is enforced by businesses, not the government. But since it's a government-issued (and -mandated) ID, I think even the current courts would recognize that this is a difference that doesn't matter.
Anonymity must end. Without it the pr0n, w4r3z, trading would all but dry up.
I don't know what "pr0n" is, but a lot of "pornography" is in the eye of the beholder (especially in "commercial" porn - the risque ads used to sell undergarments, perfume, etc.). Even the hard-core "no doubt it's 'porn'" pornography is legal in many jurisdictions.
As for the quaint idea that pornography can only exist in anonymity, exactly how do you think the multi-billion dollar adult video rental industry works? Do you think the stores merely trust all patrons to return the tapes, or are they secured by credit cards? Likewise, how do you think the for-profit web sites operate? Did you honestly believe that the patrons dutifully send in anonymous cash and cashiers checks?
Of course, all of this changes when you're talking about something like child pornography, but I'm not gonna give you the benefit of the doubt since you couldn't be bothered to distinguish between legal and illegal content.
IANAL, but one of the many people caught up in the debian maintainer mess so I've given some thought to the DFSG.
This clause only makes sense if it's interpreted as applying to discrimination *not required by law*. The alternative is asserting that the original (and Debian's) license supercedes the law and courts, a risky position. We may not agree with the way minors are treated, but it's insane to disregard it.
As a trivial example, let's consider a family which uses "NetNanny" to keep a minor child from accessing a porn site. We might all agree this is silly and pointless, but it's within the parent's legal rights. The kid downloads Debian and installs it, and bypasses the parental controls. (If you're a conservative Republican, insert a sentence stating that the kid is so enflamed by the images on his screen that he goes out and rapes a girlscout going door to door selling cookies.) The parents (and DA) are pissed, and they're looking for someone to sue. Could Debian and/or Corel be held partially responsible, perhaps under an "attractive nuisance" ordinance? Even if the case is thrown out, how much will it cost?
It's easy to stand on a soapbox and say that Corel shouldn't care, but are you on the hook for the legal bills if you're wrong? An angry parent could still sue Corel for enabling their kid to access a porn site, but with that nod to existing law Corel will have a far better chance of getting the case thrown out immediately.
I'm not particularly happy about these clauses appearing in EULAs, but I recognize it as a sign that more people are taking us seriously, for better and worst.
No competent grad student or professor will be "dumbfounded" that an O(n lg(n)) algorithm that hits the swap will be slower than an O(n^2) algorithm that does not. They *will* ask you why the first algorithm is so much more memory expensive, though, since most such algorithms only require a modest amount of additional memory. A fast algorithm, poorly implemented, will still run slowly.
However, when all things are equal there's no doubt that many of us will recommend the more efficient algorithm *even when it is modestly slower for the task at hand*, but that's because experience shows that problems inevitably get larger and the the more efficient algorithm *will* be faster in the near future. That's why a new 500 MHz P-III running Windows 2000 is often *slower* than a 75 MHz 486 running Windows 3.1, your system may be approx. 10x faster, but the problems you're trying to solve are also 10x larger so the O(n^2) algorithms are much slower. (Even O(n lg (n)) is slightly slower, but by a smaller amount.)
Finally, never overlook the raw stupidity of most people who blindly dismiss the more efficient algorithms. Just last month I saw a bubble sort that had a comment stating that a "bubble sort was fast enough since the cost was in the swap, not the comparison." The author obviously never considered the fact that you would never do a comparison and *not* do the required swap. I replaced that code with a call to qsort() and cut the number of comparisons from 1,000,000 to 30k. The performance improvement came to something like 20 seconds.
I'm sure that there are some clueless profs who don't know how costly it is to hit the swap, but in my experience there are *far* more programmers who do a half-assed implementation of the faster algorithm, generally bitching the entire time about how their clueless boss doesn't understand the "real world," and they then complain that the faster algorithm is actually slower. Obviously I don't know if that happened to you, but I've seen it happen enough times that I always take such criticism with a grain of salt.
Besides the general rules (use better algorithms, use profilers to find slow code and test-Test-TEST!), something I've found very useful is caching reused values in low-level functions.
Two experiences with a client this spring show just how much this can help. The client needed to do some basic GIS functions, so there were a *lot* of trig functions off of the same values related to the lat-lon to display mapping. The original code did not cache values which were constant for each mapping; this was costly since it involved about half of all trig calculations in the code! Caching those values cut the running time in half, and no compiler would know to extend a data structure to include those cached values.
The second optimization involved a modest change to the code so that the data was organized in a rough hierarchy - the 360*180 1-degree square cells were clustered in 3-degree supercells, 15-degree super(2)-cells, and 60-degree super(3)-cells. If the area of interest wasn't in the super(3) cell, I didn't bother to check any of the 1-degree cells within it. Again, no compiler would have caught this, and few algorithm books discuss n-ary trees of spatial data. If you squint, this is also a "cache" approach, although the cache is hardcoded via the nesting factors.
Put the two modifications together and the program ran about 2 orders of magnitude faster! That was so much faster that the client started to compute the values on the fly - it was "cheaper" than precomputing the information and maintaining *that* cache!
Don't overlook the fact that much of the "first world" is located in the northern hemisphere - and a prolonged power disruption in "snow country" will be *far* more disruptive in the winter than in the summer.
You are missing the bigger picture here. The first few _Dune_ books are set in a world which is deliberately static to prevent a return to a period of human enslavement by machines. (The latter books show the consequences of the God Emperor and subsequent scattering.) Anyone who attempts to get an edge based on technology will be universally resented (Ix), with the people who manipulate the body (Bene T.) and mind (Bene Gesserit) not far behind. Such a society *will* reach a point where force and response are exactly matched.
:-)
As for some of your specific points, the Guild controls interstellar travel but each major house is fully capable of "dropping rocks" on its enemy. Remember that the Atreides family nukes were stored on one of the moons. If they drop rocks, it was because of the same social pressures not to use nukes against a population.
Also, I recall seeing nothing that said that a "lasgun" had any correlation to lasers. In fact, _Chapterhouse Dune_ has some comments from Idaho which clearly stated that lasguns and shields are both products of Hoffman's equation and that the "feedback" described in the first book falls out of these equations. No doubt you would immediately object that Idaho admits that nobody really understands those equations and hence it's inconsistent to claim that they're understood well enough to produce lasguns and shields.
As I see it, he had two legitimate choices:
1) Insist on the terms of the contract and refuse to code. If he was idle because the company didn't provide a designated programmer, well that was their problem. (They are the ones who identified the job duties in the contract, after all.)
2) Write code even though he wasn't contractually obligated to do so... and act like a professional programmer. That means meaningful names and comments.
Instead, he choose a third option: write the code, then hide the details. Then harbor fantasies that they would bring him back in a "contract rates" for maintenance.
Here's a clue: he just had his interview as a "real" programmer, and he failed it with absolute prejudice. (That means that not only does he not get the job today, I'ld tell HR to add his name to the "*never* hire, with cause" pile.) He obviously didn't think through the consequences of his actions: when a bug occurs in his code his employer could never know if it was an honest mistake or an attempt to *extort* money for additional services. The use of a criminal term is intentional.
He *doesn't* compare himself to Galileo, an early Einstein, or any other genius "misunderstood in his own time,"
He's speaking in his area of professional interest. He's an analyst taking a hard line on the valuation of stock options, not a taxi driver discussing macroeconomic theory,
His stand is in an area of active debate. If just one major company hoses the books with stock options I think there's little doubt that the FASB will adopt a harder line. He seems to think MS may be that company.
The details *can* be checked. I don't have the MS annual statements handy, or the details of the proposed Expedia spinoff, but he could be easily discredited if he's bending the truth too far
Finally, some non-kooks have looked at his claims and said that they might have merit.
IMHO, he *might* be a kook, but it's at least as likely that he's just someone frustrated at the perceived indifference to something that's obvious to him.
As for the overall presentation, it's targeted towards the general public. If he presents the same document to Greenspan I would be worried, but I have no reason to believe that's the case.
It makes you wonder about MS's inclusion in the DJIA. These allegations are broader than those in the Michael Martinez case, but they fall into the same overall pattern. When MS's bubble bursts, it could cause a stampede effect among the investors who think the DJIA actually means something.
I had the LASIK procedure done, and I went from "must wear contacts since glasses cut off air supply," (-6.5 diopter contacts) to 20/25 or 20/30 - which is exactly right. (A reputable doctor won't aim for 20/20 in someone pushing forty because they're going to naturally become a bit farsighted in the next few years, so I should hit 20/20 in a few years.) I also had a modest amount of astigmatism which they completely eliminated.
My advice to anyone considering LASIK surgery is to whack yourself on the head a few times with a 2x4 until you get your priorities straight.
You do NOT want to make this decision on the basis of price. I paid $5000 (both eyes, plus followups), which was the usual price quoted by reputable doctors in this area.
I could have saved a thousand dollars or two... if I was willing to have my eyes operated on by the guy who wasn't making royalty payments on his laser gear. I think my doctor said that saved him $500 or so a pop -- but it also meant that his gear wasn't getting serviced. Maybe the laser delivering less power than he thought, or more. Or maybe it was randomly mixing the two. Any variation will make it much harder to get predictable results.
Or I could have saved some money by going with the guys who had just gotten back from their seminar and were excited at getting into the exciting new world of laser surgery.
During one of my follow up visits (and with myopia this severe it took me several weeks before I could drive at night or read the newspaper without reading glasses) my doctor (not the laser guy, but the glasses guy I have seen for a decade) mentioned that he had lunch with a peer a few weeks earlier. My vision, at the time, was still a little off but it was clearly getting better every time I came in. His peer's patient started out with slightly better vision than me, but she went to a cheaper doctor and one eye had severe astigmatism and her other eye was severely overcorrected -- and LASIK correction for farsightedness is far more invasive.
The point should be clear: PRICE IS THE LEAST OF YOUR WORRIES. Most people are focused on the "reasonable best" that can happen (e.g., "gee, I should have 20/25 vision and not need glasses"), and not on the "reasonable worst". An experienced doctor with good corporate support might have a "reasonable worst" that you'll still need (thin) glasses at times, but you won't have major vision problems. An inexperienced doctor or even an experienced one cutting corners may have a "reasonable worst" that you'll be overcorrected (farsighted), have bad astigmatism, or worst.
Is fucked up vision for the rest of your life really worth pennies per day? ($1000/40 years is $25/year, or something like 8c/day.)
And what, exactly, do you expect to the credit report to state?
Remember, Visa *settled*. The matter is closed, and they can't report that the woman didn't pay a lawful debt. (Note the key word "lawful.") They can't list the debt as unpaid during the time the charges were challenged.
Could they still manage to put a barb in the credit bureau report? Sure... and it would seem to be a slam dumk for slander because the case has already be brought before a court and Visa settled.
Go to your nearest burn unit and ask them if they would call "190F" liquids "hot".
... and at least they could vomit it out. The woman involved in the suit had the hot liquid dumped onto clothing which held it against her skin.
*NEVER* make the mistake of thinking that the "temperature" shown by a thermometer has any direct correlation with the potential damage to human tissue. A child or elderly person can be scalded with water not much above 120F, and even a healthy adult can be scalded by water over 140F.
190F will scald anyone. 190F is *boiling water* in these parts. (Well, in the mountains to the west; in Denver water boils at around 200F). Anyone who quickly drank that coffee would require medical attention for severe burns in their mouth and throat
(Before you comment that anyone dumb enough to drink something that hot deserves what they get, what about people who have lost most feeling in their hands? *You* might be able to feel the heat through the cup, but many people will feel nothing or only mild warmth.)
I could understand that one particularly dumb manager didn't understand the consequences of keeping his coffee around 20F hotter than everyone else, but the plantiff's lawyers showed that McDonald's knew it was causing injury *and* refused to accept responsibility for those injuries.
Because I (and others) have to decide how to make our client's systems work in the real world. If we decide that MS isn't suitable for the project, we don't use MS. If the company insists on it, we smile and tell them to call us if they change their mind, but there's no guarantee that we'll be available and willing to clean up the mess. It sounds harsh, but we're all tired of working 60+ hour weeks because someone else picked the wrong tools for the job.
But we're professionals and recognize that sometimes MS is the correct solution... but the distortions over the past few weeks has been so transparent that we're left wondering if there's *anything* we can trust. In our situation, that question answers itself. If we don't have confidence in our tools we don't use them, and if we don't have confidence in the companies we don't bother paying attention to what they say.
Microsoft can make all of the claims it wants, but businesses have to find local staff to actually make their projects work. These people bring their own experiences to the job, and don't dismiss a major vendor out-of-hand lightly. But when they do, any sane company will ask *why*. It doesn't matter if the CTO thinks that Bill Gates is the hacker's god if he can't find the senior people who can actually bring a project to completion.
If you think I'm overstating the case, I invite you to compare the number of sites writing code in Pascal (or even Pascal, Modulo-2/-3, and Ada) vs. C. There are a lot of deep similarities.
As an aside, max-Q changes with the altitude of your launch. Depending upon far more factors than I am competent to analyze it might make sense to move launch sites from Florida (good equatorial boost) to Colorado (smaller boost, but launch track at 8000'-10000') except for the small problem of dropping empty tanks on Kansas.
But if we did that, Washington might not hear about it for a month.
(That's my obJamesBond reference, from _Diamonds are Forever_. Nobody should talk about this stuff without references to diamond encrusted laser spacecraft and bikini-clad starlets.)
But back to the serious stuff, I know that I only have about 85% of the air density from sea level at just over 5000'. I definitely feel it when I'm down in that thick soup at sea level! At 10000' the air density drops to 70% of sea level.
From a launch perspective, a rail in Mexico looks *very* good. (15,000' altoplane?, perhaps 60% of sea level?) It would also give you a good equatorial boost. Unfortunately there's the problems of politics, power (Colorado launch sites could tap into the Western US power grid), and launch techs ill from altitude sickness. Still, with NAFTA it's something to consider if it significantly cuts the cost-to-orbit.
Finally, a quick sanity check is the shuttle's SRBs. I don't recall the exact numbers but I thought they were dropped at something like 6 miles altitude/mach 3. In terms of the total trip to LEO it's fairly modest, but it's crucial because of the high cost of lifting fuel for the later stages. A maglev track in the mountains may be enough to get you 30-40% of the way to where the SRBs are dropped, when using the current shuttle stack!
(Responding for the record, since I missed the response while the article was live.)
The original Jesux page refered to a hierarchial user structure. Linux/Unix are slowly moving in the same direction, via "capacities."
Of course you can use standard permissions and override them as root, but that introduces all of the usual problems with using root for routine chores. The two-line change I mention are actually a form of hard-coded capacities tied to a two-tier user permissions space. It's silly in the case of "parents" vs. "children," but not so silly when you're trying to create a secure sandbox for your web server.
You know, I really don't care what Bill Gates says about anything... and that should terrify him.
This isn't a casual statement, I did give thought to a question. And I might still submit it, or a variant:
A&E Biography recently named you the 41st most influential person of the past 1000 years. That is quite an honor... but Robin Williams in the same show attacked your truthfulness in a series of one-liners about several honorees. A well-regarded computer trade journalist (whose name I forget!) has commented that no one would throw Microsoft and the truth into the same room for fear of a matter-antimatter explosion.
Doesn't it concern you that Bill Gates and dishonesty are becoming as synonymous as John DeLorean and cocaine trafficking?
But the sad truth is that I simply don't give a damn what Bill Gates has to say about anything. There is simply nothing he can say that will interest me because I know, from a decade of Bill-watching, that it will be self-serving, vaporware, or both.
I wish Jeremy Paxman the best of luck, but I honestly think it would have been easier to interview Richard Nixon shortly after Watergate than Bill Gates today.
Then, Unix has its own symbology... hmpf
Guess what. I use Linux/Unix almost exclusively and find "OK" and "Cancel" confusing. If I'm doing a monster download and I bring up a dialog box that says "cancel", does it close the dialog or cancel the download?
Think twice before answering that. Windows still clearly shows its single-threaded/single-user origins in countless ways and a lot of dialogs are modal - there *is* no distinction between closing a dialog and cancelling an operation.
In contrast, Linux/Unix is multi-user and it's not uncommon for the user to run multiple downloads (as a simple example), each with their own status dialogs. I might want to dismiss some dialog boxes without canceling the underlying operation.
This observation brings up a number of secondary issues. E.g., a lot of Windows applications think nothing of popping themselves to the top of the stack and grabbing pointer/keyboard focus. Under Linux/Unix, that's an incredible gaffe that close to a fireable offense.
(It's only acceptable in cases where it's acceptable to walk up to someone talking on the phone, slap the handset away from their head and start talking to them. The building's on fire, or a gunman muttering your name just shot his way past the front door. Nothing less.)
I'm not gonna argue that Windows applications shouldn't continue to use "OK and "Cancel", since that's what people are used to. But don't presume to lecture us on our symbology unless and until you demonstrate that you understand how the Linux/Unix environment is very different from what people are used to under Windows.
This point keeps coming up, so I'll answer it globally instead of in several responses.
The current US position is that source code in electronic form is communications between the programmer and the compiler and hence under no Constitutional protection. Source code in printed form, since a computer can't read it, must be communications between two programmers and *is* Constitutionally protected.
Of course the government knows that OCR software exists and people who are serious about exporting software use special OCR fonts. (As an aside, where I can find those fonts?!) But they know that if they take OCR scanning programmer to court they may lose not only that case, but the larger issue of paper vs. disk vs. net distribution. The appeals courts in the Bernstein case make this seem likely.
As for motivations, I think a lot of the policy makers are driven by old-time military security policies and don't understand that they don't apply here. Leaking *any* information about most military hardware allows the enemy to work on ways to disrupt yours and improve their own, but mathematics and basic physical properties are things that can be done by anyone with the motivation and time. With them, all we can do is continously remind them that *all* public source cryptology can be understood by a motivated college maths major, and even some HS students.
At the same time, I'm sure that "industry" lobbyists are talking to their old colleagues and pointing out that the exposure is limited when a company exports its binary packages. Have you ever tried to disassemble a megabyte-sized "hello, world" windows program? The fact that this makes it easier for MS to export its Kerberos-enhanced W2K, but I can't export my Kerberos-enhanced Debian packages, isn't mentioned. Besides, MS has 90% of the market, and my distribution has 0%. (Because of the export laws, it's an on-again/off-again project and still in early beta.)
As a final comment, I know I could distribute my packages as source code, but that's completely unmanageable. The Kerberos source tarball is around 5 MB, and while many of the other packages (e.g., lprng, postgres, coda, cvs) can be rebuilt with a one-line change in the 'debian/rules' file you need a fully loaded development platform to recompile everything. Few people would use a distribution where you have to scan in a book (literally), then spend two days compiling everything.
... it helps to have permanent core members crew members who are in touch with [the larger computer universe]
This simply isn't possible. The longer they're "permanent," the more they lose touch with the rest of the world.
The sole exception, and it's only a partial solution, is someone who's active with OSS in addition to his day job. He'll be aware of new ways of fixing the nasty problems that never seem to go away, but it won't have the same impact as actually working on 6 contracts in three years. I have a fairly good idea of how things are really working in the world today (and the fact that only one project in 6 really had its act together is sobering), but I also know that if I stay at a single job for only 12-18 months I'll lose my touch on the tech pulse.
Wow. You rarely see anyone invite slander and defamation suits from tens of thousands of people at one time.
But what I find *really* interesting is his "Cause" . What "Cause" is this, exactly?
Prosecuting people for lawful assembly?
Prosecuting people for encouraging meaningful and fair competition in a major economic sector?
Prosecuting people for daring to say that the Emperor has no clothes?
Mr/Ms Sessions, if that's your name, exactly what crime is it you're alleging me of committing by frequenting SlashDot and the development mailing lists? My lawyer *really* wants to know....
The article, like the rest I've seen that covered this topic, never addressed the Alice in Wonderland quality to life when you're used to Linux and forced to buy Windows for something.
I normally run Linux exclusively and don't accept contracts for non-Unix work, but I recently needed business accounting software. So I bought the higher-priced software that I knew many of my clients used. It was Y2K ready. According to everyone I talked to, it was the best of the breed and could handle my company moving from single-programmer-in-a-garage stage to multimillion dollar company. (Yeah, right.)
It was such a load of crap that I demanded my money back (and got it, since their packaging did make a money-back guarantee) and am doing those tasks by hand while the Linux accounting packages stabilize. I decided I simply couldn't afford to lose any more weekends to produce a "professional" invoice after 6 hours of struggle, instead of whipping out an "unprofessional" one in 5 minutes with vi and lpr.
Some of the problems were related to the fact that I installed it on a laptop. The high latency display makes the "friendly" animations that appeared on every single fscking page a smear. But the software also clearly had absolutely no usability studies; e.g., I could enter POs but I never found a way to list open POs and associate checks with the PO.
Oh yeah, that was probably covered in the tutorial. The one that used lots of multimedia (always fun on a laptop) to train a clerk in advanced computer skills like using the mouse to pull down a menu. There was, as far as I could tell, no way to get a top-level summary for people who know computers but not accounting.
On the bright side, the company was willing to offer me support. At a fee for each incidence, and the fee was apparently *not* waived if the bug was because *they* screwed up the configuration. Nothing gives you a warm feeling like spending hundreds of dollars on a commercial accounting program, hitting 'create new business' button and watching it shit all over the floor because it's missing some value in one of its VB scripts. (That warm feeling is enhanced when you see that they want to charge you money to fix it. I think the feeling is due to acute alcohol poisoning....)
Oh, I almost forgot. A few months after installing this program my laptop took a hard crash. I picked up a virus even though it's never attached to the net, always in my physical control, and I only install commercial software in the original shrinkwrap. Surely a coincidence.
I actually enjoy it now when people tell me that Linux is hard to install. I tell them that I routinely install Debian in less than an hour, it takes me longer to burn the CD-Rs than it does to build a working system. But let me tell them about how long it takes me to reinstall Windows from my Toshiba disks (although that's not really fair since two hours are consumed removing those packages always in high demand in professional offices, like the big Disney Channel icon). Or let me tell them about the last "big, easy to use" Windows application I tried....