...it will never be error free. And that goes for all software.
It's hard to tell if this is overenthusiastic cynicism or not. It's not literally true that it is impossible for any software to be error free; it's simply the case that for software of sufficient complexity, it's very difficult to make it error free, and in addition, it's impossible in practice to prove that some software is error free. On the other hand, it is possible to prove that some software is free of certain kinds of bugs, and it is possible to know intuitively that some (extremely simple) software is free of design bugs.
For example, I believe that the ten line script that I wrote last night is free of design and implementation bugs, now that I've debugged it. It's so simple that debugging it isn't hard; it's just a bunch of nested loops that call another program with slightly different arguments on each iteration.
It is my opinion that bugs increase at a greater than linear rate with the size and complexity of a piece of software (and with other factors as well, such as how many different people work on that software.) In other words, a program that's 100 times as big is more than 100 times harder to bring to the same level of quality as its reference program. Certain coding practices can make it even worse than that; writing spaghetti code is worse than minimizing coupling between modules.
Someone else's claim was 'the worst'. My claim was 'among the worst'. If the person I responded to had considered Notes to be 'among the worst', he or she would not have written 'shred of evidence', because he or she would have been aware that there is a great deal of evidence of Notes' poor quality. The 'shred of evidence' statement might have given those among us who are lucky enough to be unfamiliar with Notes the false impression that there is not actually any evidence that Notes is a terrible application with many design flaws.
Teaching children relegion from a young age is no different than teaching love for Chairman Mao. It's just like any other kind of programming: garbage in, garbage out
Or teaching them that there is no god, for that matter. The real solution is to teach them critical thinking skills, so that they will be able to make good decisions for themselves, that their views might more closely resemble mine. Education is, as always, the key.
Any honest scientist will tell you that this is disturbing at some level, and would consider a proof on the matter one way or the other to be one of the greatest accomplishments of science ever. The fact that these are gaps that must (currently) be filled by faith is an embarrassment, not a point of pride.
Nevertheless, that doesn't change the conclusion: faith is still required. At some point, everybody must choose based on incomplete data what they are going to believe about the nature of life, the universe and everything.
That's an excellent way to put it. The definition *is* subjective. Worse, it's inconsistent: different people sometimes actually *define* pornography differently. ("Material designed to sexually arouse the audience" works for me, but that includes much of prime time TV, which isn't the majority opinion.)
That being said, there is a large common ground covering what most people consider to be pornography. For example, if a content creator intends for a work to be considered pornographic, it's reasonable to follow their wishes even if that work doesn't appeal to your particular kink.
So tell me how do you enforce something on the international internet with your national security organs without building a great firewall like China?
Build a great military like China. Sure, it would mean unleashing wave after wave of death and destruction upon an unsuspecting world, but it's for the children!
That's all very sensible and logical, unlike this type of legislation. The fact that one can't define porn objectively will simply lead to an over-broad definition. Yes, that means that laws like this would affect breast cancer awareness sites. Yes, that means your wife's innocent picture of your son would interest your local child welfare agency. (I suggest not showing it to them; people have had their kids taken away for less than that.)
The answer to the "can't define porn well" problem is not that there is no porn, it's that too much is considered "porn" by somebody, and attempts to ban it will necessarily overreach. That's what your parent poster is getting at.
In many ways, porn can be compared to recreational drugs. Some people say that it's bad, and some people say that it isn't. Some people say that it needs to be banned for the good of society, but really, whatever activities it supposedly promotes that should be made illegal already are (like robbing stores to get your porn fix.) In many ways, the police state that would be necessary to successfully ban porn (or recreational drugs) would be worse than simply tolerating that activity and dealing with whatever negative consequences occur.
One of my points is that RH has done a good PR job of convincing people that they're charging for support, when you don't get support unless you pay lots of money.
How is that not "charging for support"? (I get it that you don't like the low-tier option, "charging for not much support".)
I think you hit it with the brand name thing. If anything, I don't like paying for a brand name.
So, why are you still using Red Hat? You don't want to pay for the level of support you're getting, you don't like paying for a brand name and you don't like it that they don't care about small fry like you. So use one of the many RH-like distributions, if you like the distribution itself so much, or find a company that will sell support for an amount that you're willing to pay and use whatever distribution they suggest.
Ok, but in that light, shouldn't emerge, apt-get, the BSD ports, whatever that thing is Ubuntu uses, and pretty much every other package manager get the same accolades?
Absolutely, and they do. (FYI, Ubuntu also uses apt.)
But again my point remains... Yes, RPM is a significant project, but.... to claim it's a good reason to charge your clients thousands of dollars over the life cycle of the product is just... fleecing the very users who you depend on.
I don't think anybody's claimed that. Red Hat charges for support, and for the brand name.
RPM is relatively insignificant compared to Apache, the Kernel, mysql, sendmail, ldap, gcc, and most of the packages that make up the core of redhat.
That's a very shortsighted view. The package management system, whichever one is chosen, is an enormously important piece of software that touches every package of the distribution. It's certainly not "relatively insignificant compared to most of the packages that make up the core of redhat". RPM is one of the significant programs that make up the core of Red Hat's distributions.
The crazy thing is, evolution doesn't have to challenge anybody's worldview either; it's only an incomplete understanding of it that leads most of those who do into thinking that it somehow contradicts or affirms their religious opinions. The questions of the existence of God and the origin of life, the universe and everything are orthogonal to those answered by various theories of evolution. It's not the case that "evolution says where we come from, so now we don't need God," and it's not the case that science and religion are incompatible. This whole fight is just a waste of time.
Politics. Most Southern states are so-called "red states", so calling them "backwards" is an indirect way of calling Republicans backwards. For some reason, some people prefer to do this indirectly, rather than just calling a spade a spade and saying that Republicans are backwards.
Hogwash. Southern (and other rural) stereotyping has been going on since long before the Southern states went Republican. For decades, the South voted mostly Democratic, and urban people still called them backwards.
The other way in which your argument falls apart is that there are plenty of Republicans who call Southerners (and other rural folk) backwards, too. Are they politically motivated? If so, just exactly how is that?
I didn't claim that every instance of anti-Southerner bigotry was political in nature, so counterexamples are not sufficient to disprove my statement. The fact that some red-staters are stereotyped as a bunch of dumb hicks provides juicy fodder for the partisan among us, and the fact that other red-staters join in on the fun is simply icing on the cake to them. Claiming that politics is never a factor is just silly, so my claim is really not that far-fetched at all.
I still don't get why everyone in the country makes fun of the way southerners speak when there are so many screwed up dialects in this country. When you look at Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, Louisiana (in the south, but a different accent near New Orleans) how come the southern drawl is the only one that is worthy of ridicule?
Politics. Most Southern states are so-called "red states", so calling them "backwards" is an indirect way of calling Republicans backwards. For some reason, some people prefer to do this indirectly, rather than just calling a spade a spade and saying that Republicans are backwards. Maybe they're shy.
Also, hypocrisy. Society only considers it bad to be bigoted against recently oppressed people groups, and it turns a blind eye towards overlap between groups it's ok to be bigoted against and groups it's not ok to be bigoted against. (Some of those "backwards southerners" are women and minorities.)
What strikes me is that most OSS projects don't even collect use-cases, so their concept of who their audience is and what their habits are likely to be becomes unhinged.
In the stereotypical open source project, the developer is the audience. For those few projects that cater to the needs of others, I agree that more rigorous methodologies are appropriate.
I guess the smart kid wasn't so smart eh? I would just guide my group, giving little hints of direction if they were going off in the wrong direction.
That doesn't sound like the quickest way to get back to your book. I agree that your method is more appropriate for smart kids who care about others.
Re:And do we really want to?
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The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But, we did hundreds of problems under the premise of a solid foundation.
Long division and multiplication were the worst though. We were expected to show our work...
Ugh, yes. I can remember a turning point in my life that occurred sometime around third grade. We were assigned lots of problems of multiplication and long division where we had to show our work, just as you've described, and I sat in my room staring at them, a seemingly impossibly huge tremendously boring task that I thought I could never finish. The turning point part came when I realized that the easiest way to make it all go away was to just finish it as quickly as possible. Had it gone the other way (had I learned to make it all go away by simply not doing it), my life might have been very different.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to tell if this is overenthusiastic cynicism or not. It's not literally true that it is impossible for any software to be error free; it's simply the case that for software of sufficient complexity, it's very difficult to make it error free, and in addition, it's impossible in practice to prove that some software is error free. On the other hand, it is possible to prove that some software is free of certain kinds of bugs, and it is possible to know intuitively that some (extremely simple) software is free of design bugs.
For example, I believe that the ten line script that I wrote last night is free of design and implementation bugs, now that I've debugged it. It's so simple that debugging it isn't hard; it's just a bunch of nested loops that call another program with slightly different arguments on each iteration.
It is my opinion that bugs increase at a greater than linear rate with the size and complexity of a piece of software (and with other factors as well, such as how many different people work on that software.) In other words, a program that's 100 times as big is more than 100 times harder to bring to the same level of quality as its reference program. Certain coding practices can make it even worse than that; writing spaghetti code is worse than minimizing coupling between modules.
Or teaching them that there is no god, for that matter. The real solution is to teach them critical thinking skills, so that they will be able to make good decisions for themselves, that their views might more closely resemble mine. Education is, as always, the key.
Nevertheless, that doesn't change the conclusion: faith is still required. At some point, everybody must choose based on incomplete data what they are going to believe about the nature of life, the universe and everything.
If you don't think that Notes is among the worst business applications ever, then I'm glad that I've not seen the business applications that you have.
Some of us subscribe to the Sunday paper *because* of those ads. I wish my newspaper had a "print your own coupon" setup.
That being said, there is a large common ground covering what most people consider to be pornography. For example, if a content creator intends for a work to be considered pornographic, it's reasonable to follow their wishes even if that work doesn't appeal to your particular kink.
Build a great military like China. Sure, it would mean unleashing wave after wave of death and destruction upon an unsuspecting world, but it's for the children!
Quick, patent it!
Who decides? Those in power. (duh)
Who enforces it? The national security organs. They'll need additional police powers, of course.
The answer to the "can't define porn well" problem is not that there is no porn, it's that too much is considered "porn" by somebody, and attempts to ban it will necessarily overreach. That's what your parent poster is getting at.
In many ways, porn can be compared to recreational drugs. Some people say that it's bad, and some people say that it isn't. Some people say that it needs to be banned for the good of society, but really, whatever activities it supposedly promotes that should be made illegal already are (like robbing stores to get your porn fix.) In many ways, the police state that would be necessary to successfully ban porn (or recreational drugs) would be worse than simply tolerating that activity and dealing with whatever negative consequences occur.
As others have shown, they do give support with the basic workstation charge. Just not very much.
How is that not "charging for support"? (I get it that you don't like the low-tier option, "charging for not much support".)
So, why are you still using Red Hat? You don't want to pay for the level of support you're getting, you don't like paying for a brand name and you don't like it that they don't care about small fry like you. So use one of the many RH-like distributions, if you like the distribution itself so much, or find a company that will sell support for an amount that you're willing to pay and use whatever distribution they suggest.
Absolutely, and they do. (FYI, Ubuntu also uses apt.)
I don't think anybody's claimed that. Red Hat charges for support, and for the brand name.
Sorry, my mistake.
That's a very shortsighted view. The package management system, whichever one is chosen, is an enormously important piece of software that touches every package of the distribution. It's certainly not "relatively insignificant compared to most of the packages that make up the core of redhat". RPM is one of the significant programs that make up the core of Red Hat's distributions.
Lying has long been considered an ethical breach, which is what this story is about.
The crazy thing is, evolution doesn't have to challenge anybody's worldview either; it's only an incomplete understanding of it that leads most of those who do into thinking that it somehow contradicts or affirms their religious opinions. The questions of the existence of God and the origin of life, the universe and everything are orthogonal to those answered by various theories of evolution. It's not the case that "evolution says where we come from, so now we don't need God," and it's not the case that science and religion are incompatible. This whole fight is just a waste of time.
See, you're self-confident enough to not couch political criticism in ethnic terms. You are a credit to your worldview. Bravo!
I didn't claim that every instance of anti-Southerner bigotry was political in nature, so counterexamples are not sufficient to disprove my statement. The fact that some red-staters are stereotyped as a bunch of dumb hicks provides juicy fodder for the partisan among us, and the fact that other red-staters join in on the fun is simply icing on the cake to them. Claiming that politics is never a factor is just silly, so my claim is really not that far-fetched at all.
I'm neither a Republican nor a Southerner, though I do reside in the South now, which has raised my awareness of the fact that people here talk funny.
FWIW, I think that accents, including both southerner and yooper, are pretty nifty.
Politics. Most Southern states are so-called "red states", so calling them "backwards" is an indirect way of calling Republicans backwards. For some reason, some people prefer to do this indirectly, rather than just calling a spade a spade and saying that Republicans are backwards. Maybe they're shy.
Also, hypocrisy. Society only considers it bad to be bigoted against recently oppressed people groups, and it turns a blind eye towards overlap between groups it's ok to be bigoted against and groups it's not ok to be bigoted against. (Some of those "backwards southerners" are women and minorities.)
In the stereotypical open source project, the developer is the audience. For those few projects that cater to the needs of others, I agree that more rigorous methodologies are appropriate.
That doesn't sound like the quickest way to get back to your book. I agree that your method is more appropriate for smart kids who care about others.
Ugh, yes. I can remember a turning point in my life that occurred sometime around third grade. We were assigned lots of problems of multiplication and long division where we had to show our work, just as you've described, and I sat in my room staring at them, a seemingly impossibly huge tremendously boring task that I thought I could never finish. The turning point part came when I realized that the easiest way to make it all go away was to just finish it as quickly as possible. Had it gone the other way (had I learned to make it all go away by simply not doing it), my life might have been very different.