Re:Strangely inspirational
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For a prime example of hypocrisy, look at the home page of the fsf. The GPL does not conform to a single one of the four freedoms outlined there. The GPL has many more restrictions than the BSD or MIT licenses, imposes restrictions on sharing and copying, as well as on adapting (ex: linkage restrictions), and on your freedom to work with others (ex: non-copyleft licenses, linking, etc).
The guy is a hypocritical lying freeloader. That, his misogyny, his antipathy to children, his foul personal habits - yes, he's been consistent on all that. That's not a "good thing." Its the sign of someone too stupid to learn from either their mistakes or the mistakes of others.
If you want to get your message out, you don't go around grossing people out and acting like the hobo version of Fred Phelps - because then YOU displace the message.
His ego is more important than the message. The whole childish "GNU/Linux" thing is an excellent example - it's no more "GNU/Linux" than it is "Firestone/Ford"... and we don't really need the GNU toolchain any more.
The point was that the airline industry has falsely claimed that air travel is the safest, when bus travel is safer, both by hours and by distance. So their claims are false no matter which way you slice them.
Add to that the fact that buses are MUCH more energy-efficient in terms of person-mile. And that the "air travel is safer" also ignores the trips to and from the airport as part of the overall package.
It's like claiming that space shuttles are the safest form of travel because they have fewer deaths per passenger mile - no matter that they're WAY more dangerous than #2 - motorcycles - in terms of users killed per trip.
First, IBM has has spent several BILLION funding open source, so RMS and the FSF "warning them of the dangers of proprietary software and offering to help" shows he's an idiot. It also says more about you that you would attack me for pointing out the obvious - that RMS is a manipulative liar.
He is a hypocrite, and his "logical consistancy" is the logical consistancy of con artists, liars, and other manipulators.
BTW - he has pretty much destroyed the ability to defend any copyrights assigned to the FSF with his public statements rwt violating copyright being ok providing anyone who infringes with a defense.
Re:First post? I brought up breakfast once
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
He lost his coding chops a couple of decades ago. The current emacs is a rebranded xemacs. The current gcc is a rebranded egcs. He also plays fast and loose with the facts. Contrary to his assertion that he grew up in the worlds' biggest city, he did not grow up in Tokyo, or Yokohama, or even Jakarta.
It's the same with his FUD against linux and android a couple of months ago, saying that they were risky for manufacturers because they weren't GPL3. Totally unfounded (and if linux were to switch to the gplv3, android would have to dump it for a bsd kernel).
With "friends" like that, ready to stab you in the back just to get some attention, who needs enemies?
Re:Strangely inspirational
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 2, Insightful
However you can't argue with his consistency.
Sure you can. He has made many speeches where he says that pirating copyright software is the right thing to do, because you're sticking it to the evil people who write such software, while he demands that his own copyright license (the GPL) be respected.
He's also a whack-job. His latest "campaign" is brain-dead Who in their right mind would think that writing a letter to, for example, IBM, offering to help them with open source, is anything but an insult and a waste of time? Or mailing it to Best Buy after the lawsuits? What a dope!
The fact is that he hasn't been able to write code in decades (the current gnu emacs is actually an import of the xemacs code, ditto for gcc being an import of egcs, because he totally screwed up both). So of course, he now makes his money bashing those who can.
His Steve Jobs remarks put him on the same level as Fred Phelps (perhaps even lower - I don't think even Phelps is going to eat his boogers and foot cheese in front of people because it's "finger-licking good", or tell women to "remove their spawn").
It's not the number of interactions that counts - it's the number of people affected. We can fake the same stats by claiming air travel is safer by looking at accidents per passenger-mile, as opposed to accidents per passenger-hour. By passenger-hour, buses are 3x safer than airplanes.
Even on a per-passenger-mile basis, because superhighways are 4x safer per mile than the average car journey, you're half as likely to be killed in a highway crash than in an airplane crash on a per-hour basis.
And if you took airplanes for all those short trips (less than 100km) that you take a car, you'd be exposed to many more hours in the "fatality zone" - landings and take-offs - so your deaths per km would also be worse for air travel than for a car on the highway.
So, just because facebook has a low "per transaction" incidence doesn't mean that it's not the #1 place to get scammed, because the number of transactions increases your risk to more than make up for the lower per-transaction risk.
Is Perl Better Than Another Randomly Generated Programming Language?
It's great for quick and dirty - unfortunately, everything written in perl tends to look like it was done "quick and dirty." Programming "clean" perl means ignoring most of perl's features, at which point you might as well just switch to a cleaner language.
In a one-hour look at Facebook and privacy, CBC's Doczone identified Facebook as the worlds #1 site for scammers and other illegal activity.
Facebook Follies is a one-hour documentary that takes a look at the unexpected consequences of people sharing their personal information on social media. Viewers meet people who lost their jobs, their marriages, their dignity, or who even ended up in jail - all because of their own or someone elseâ(TM)s Facebook posting. To give a broader context to the events, these stories are intercut with reflections from experts in the areas of social change, internet security and contemporary media.
If you missed it, it's also on again tomorrow night.
Other interesting points - researchers made an account for a plastic frog, and invited a couple of hundred random people to friend it - most did, sharing their contacts, personal info, etc., with a PLASTIC FROG! And they really do nail what facebook really is
For users - a large MMORPG where the object is to collect as many friends as possible
For facebook - a way of getting people to give it up to advertisers.
A few anecdotal data points does not equate to much in the grand scheme of things, now does it?
A quick check of dice, monster, and workopolis shows that you're far, far better off knowing c++, java, javascript, perl, php, or python. Ruby is well past its best-before date, it's 15 minutes of fame is here and gone, and the simple fact is that anyone entering the industry can safely ignore it - they'll probably never touch a ruby system in their lifetime.
HTML 4 as written in 2011 is vastly different from HTML 4 written in 1997 (for instance, we tend not to write our sites for a specific version of a specific browser anymore)
Funny you should mention that... I have always been opposed to browser sniffing, and have ALWAYS found ways to write code that doesn't depend on it.
XHTML hasn't changed any since XHTML 1.0 but that's because XHTML 1.1 is so problematic to use that nobody uses it.
No, it's because the next version of the standard was decertified by W3C a couple of years ago xhtml is officially dead.
A few years ago any manipulation of the DOM was done by hand-written JS; today we ask Google for an instance of jQuery and use that.
If you're willing to accept bloat, go for it. I still do all mine by hand.
And, quite frankly, if I wrote things like <script language="javascript"> today nobody would take me seriously as a web developer.
So what are you going to do when browsers begin supporting other scripting languages? Or when the OS itself begins supporting html5 without needing a browser to interpret it (because that's where we're heading).
My point, which you missed, is that learning new features of a language is not learning a new skill any more than learning to read a new book in your native language is a new skill - it's *might* be considered as adding to your current skill level for that skill, but that's not in any way a new "skill", whereas learning how to read that same book in a new language is a new skill, same as learning a new language is.
There were a lot of experimental predecessors to html - anyone who played around with them easily made the transition - which is the whole point - skills don't have a half-life of 2 years, since knowledge from one can be carried forward to another. The one exception might be perl... working with perl you need to throw away a lot of preconceived notions of "the right way to do something."
If you think knowing Java 1.0 will mean you have nothing to learn to program in Java 1.7,
Totally bogus argument. Keeping up with the libraries and the new features is just par for the course - it's NOT "learning a new skill." Next you'll be arguing that knowing that people who only know earlier versions of c need to learn a new skill to use the latest features - totally not true.
parents now have another tool to learn where offenders live so they can ensure their children stay away from those locations
What it really means
vigilantes now have another tool to learn where offenders live so they can ensure their children stay away from those locations, as well as beat the crap out of them and torch their homes, even if it means endangering others at the same location, or targeting the wrong person because the perp moved elsewhere and nobody updated the database.
Even COBOL refuses to die. C, C++ and it's variants are still everywhere (Objective C for Apple's iPhone App Store) decades later. Java has outlasted the fads of Ruby and Rails. HTML has been around... well... since the Internet. Javascript continues to be the #1 web scripting language.
So no, your skills don't have a half-life of "X" number of years.
That could be because they entered into a cross-licensing deal wrt patents, remember? So, while they can't sue over patents any more, they can still sue each other, which means that, contrary to the *other* assertion that was made, they aren't that friendly towards each other.
Microsoft has filed a complaint against Apple with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, claiming that the iPhone maker's attempt to claim exclusive rights to the "App Store" moniker should be voided.
In its filing with the USPTO, Microsoft says "App Store" is too much an everyday term to be trademarked.
So they definitely still do mix it up...
Apple couldn't care less about what happens to anyone else using BSD. They have their own branches already, the original writers and code can go to heck for all they care.
... or just switch the underlying OS to BSD and be done with it. After all, it worked for Apple, and any attack on BSD by Microsoft would then drag Apple into the fight.
You're still going to end up paying for it one way or another no matter what. People laboring under a huge debt that was secured by crappy for-profit institutions pushing bogus courses that go nowhere (which is what the majority of student loans are for nowadays - the educational equivalent of "rat farming") are not going to be contributing to the GNP.
Ending most subsidies would fix this problem fast and get rid of the leaches ("leaches" in this case being the educational institutions milking the subsidy system).
You're absolutely right. Originally, the overhaul was supposed to get rid of the non-performing for-profit colleges. Turns out that well over 90% would have been disqualified for making student loans, so... rather than push through the reform, they watered down the criteria.
Yet another example of government regulatory capture.
"students are borrowing twice what they did a decade ago after adjusting for inflation" and in the past five years total outstanding debt has doubled. That compares with falling debt on loans for houses and credit cards.
Remember, that's a trillion dollars of debt that can't even be wiped out by bankruptcy, unlike the previous bubbles of the dot-bombs and real estate.
Most real-life "computer jobs" don't need "computer learning". The workflow is predetermined, the range of inputs limited, etc.
Most kids learn more than enough at home - they don't need labs at school, and whatever they learn will be obsolete multiple times before they graduate.
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For a prime example of hypocrisy, look at the home page of the fsf. The GPL does not conform to a single one of the four freedoms outlined there. The GPL has many more restrictions than the BSD or MIT licenses, imposes restrictions on sharing and copying, as well as on adapting (ex: linkage restrictions), and on your freedom to work with others (ex: non-copyleft licenses, linking, etc).
The guy is a hypocritical lying freeloader. That, his misogyny, his antipathy to children, his foul personal habits - yes, he's been consistent on all that. That's not a "good thing." Its the sign of someone too stupid to learn from either their mistakes or the mistakes of others.
If you want to get your message out, you don't go around grossing people out and acting like the hobo version of Fred Phelps - because then YOU displace the message.
His ego is more important than the message. The whole childish "GNU/Linux" thing is an excellent example - it's no more "GNU/Linux" than it is "Firestone/Ford" ... and we don't really need the GNU toolchain any more.
Add to that the fact that buses are MUCH more energy-efficient in terms of person-mile. And that the "air travel is safer" also ignores the trips to and from the airport as part of the overall package.
It's like claiming that space shuttles are the safest form of travel because they have fewer deaths per passenger mile - no matter that they're WAY more dangerous than #2 - motorcycles - in terms of users killed per trip.
He is a hypocrite, and his "logical consistancy" is the logical consistancy of con artists, liars, and other manipulators.
BTW - he has pretty much destroyed the ability to defend any copyrights assigned to the FSF with his public statements rwt violating copyright being ok providing anyone who infringes with a defense.
He lost his coding chops a couple of decades ago. The current emacs is a rebranded xemacs. The current gcc is a rebranded egcs. He also plays fast and loose with the facts. Contrary to his assertion that he grew up in the worlds' biggest city, he did not grow up in Tokyo, or Yokohama, or even Jakarta.
It's the same with his FUD against linux and android a couple of months ago, saying that they were risky for manufacturers because they weren't GPL3. Totally unfounded (and if linux were to switch to the gplv3, android would have to dump it for a bsd kernel).
With "friends" like that, ready to stab you in the back just to get some attention, who needs enemies?
Sure you can. He has made many speeches where he says that pirating copyright software is the right thing to do, because you're sticking it to the evil people who write such software, while he demands that his own copyright license (the GPL) be respected.
He's also a whack-job. His latest "campaign" is brain-dead Who in their right mind would think that writing a letter to, for example, IBM, offering to help them with open source, is anything but an insult and a waste of time? Or mailing it to Best Buy after the lawsuits? What a dope!
The fact is that he hasn't been able to write code in decades (the current gnu emacs is actually an import of the xemacs code, ditto for gcc being an import of egcs, because he totally screwed up both). So of course, he now makes his money bashing those who can.
His Steve Jobs remarks put him on the same level as Fred Phelps (perhaps even lower - I don't think even Phelps is going to eat his boogers and foot cheese in front of people because it's "finger-licking good", or tell women to "remove their spawn").
He's the guy putting "Open Sores" in open source.
Even on a per-passenger-mile basis, because superhighways are 4x safer per mile than the average car journey, you're half as likely to be killed in a highway crash than in an airplane crash on a per-hour basis.
And if you took airplanes for all those short trips (less than 100km) that you take a car, you'd be exposed to many more hours in the "fatality zone" - landings and take-offs - so your deaths per km would also be worse for air travel than for a car on the highway.
So, just because facebook has a low "per transaction" incidence doesn't mean that it's not the #1 place to get scammed, because the number of transactions increases your risk to more than make up for the lower per-transaction risk.
Is Perl Better Than Another Randomly Generated Programming Language?
It's great for quick and dirty - unfortunately, everything written in perl tends to look like it was done "quick and dirty." Programming "clean" perl means ignoring most of perl's features, at which point you might as well just switch to a cleaner language.
In a one-hour look at Facebook and privacy, CBC's Doczone identified Facebook as the worlds #1 site for scammers and other illegal activity.
If you missed it, it's also on again tomorrow night.
Other interesting points - researchers made an account for a plastic frog, and invited a couple of hundred random people to friend it - most did, sharing their contacts, personal info, etc., with a PLASTIC FROG! And they really do nail what facebook really is
For users - a large MMORPG where the object is to collect as many friends as possible
For facebook - a way of getting people to give it up to advertisers.
FYI: A.C's user id is 666
A few anecdotal data points does not equate to much in the grand scheme of things, now does it?
A quick check of dice, monster, and workopolis shows that you're far, far better off knowing c++, java, javascript, perl, php, or python. Ruby is well past its best-before date, it's 15 minutes of fame is here and gone, and the simple fact is that anyone entering the industry can safely ignore it - they'll probably never touch a ruby system in their lifetime.
Maybe we need a [tongue-firmly-in-cheek] tag, to go with the proposed [sarcasm] tag :-)
Funny you should mention that ... I have always been opposed to browser sniffing, and have ALWAYS found ways to write code that doesn't depend on it.
No, it's because the next version of the standard was decertified by W3C a couple of years ago xhtml is officially dead.
If you're willing to accept bloat, go for it. I still do all mine by hand.
So what are you going to do when browsers begin supporting other scripting languages? Or when the OS itself begins supporting html5 without needing a browser to interpret it (because that's where we're heading).
My point, which you missed, is that learning new features of a language is not learning a new skill any more than learning to read a new book in your native language is a new skill - it's *might* be considered as adding to your current skill level for that skill, but that's not in any way a new "skill", whereas learning how to read that same book in a new language is a new skill, same as learning a new language is.
First, I never said that, nor did I imply it. To the contrary, my original post, which you quoted, points out the problems with vigilantism.
There were a lot of experimental predecessors to html - anyone who played around with them easily made the transition - which is the whole point - skills don't have a half-life of 2 years, since knowledge from one can be carried forward to another. The one exception might be perl ... working with perl you need to throw away a lot of preconceived notions of "the right way to do something."
Totally bogus argument. Keeping up with the libraries and the new features is just par for the course - it's NOT "learning a new skill." Next you'll be arguing that knowing that people who only know earlier versions of c need to learn a new skill to use the latest features - totally not true.
Ruby is dead. Stone cold dead. You can remove it from your resume, it will only improve it.
Seriously, if you had to recommend 5 languages for someone to learn, you'd suggest ruby to your biggest enemies.
What it says
What it really means
Even COBOL refuses to die. C, C++ and it's variants are still everywhere (Objective C for Apple's iPhone App Store) decades later. Java has outlasted the fads of Ruby and Rails. HTML has been around ... well ... since the Internet. Javascript continues to be the #1 web scripting language.
So no, your skills don't have a half-life of "X" number of years.
That could be because they entered into a cross-licensing deal wrt patents, remember? So, while they can't sue over patents any more, they can still sue each other, which means that, contrary to the *other* assertion that was made, they aren't that friendly towards each other.
First, Apple has sued Microsoft in the past, and Microsoft sued Apple earlier this year over the "App Store" trademark
So they definitely still do mix it up ...
Additionally, Apple has ~200 opensource projects that they do code commits to, including stuff included in *gasp* bsd and even linux. They employed FreeBSD coders to get their stuff off the ground, btw.
You're still going to end up paying for it one way or another no matter what. People laboring under a huge debt that was secured by crappy for-profit institutions pushing bogus courses that go nowhere (which is what the majority of student loans are for nowadays - the educational equivalent of "rat farming") are not going to be contributing to the GNP.
Ending most subsidies would fix this problem fast and get rid of the leaches ("leaches" in this case being the educational institutions milking the subsidy system).
You're absolutely right. Originally, the overhaul was supposed to get rid of the non-performing for-profit colleges. Turns out that well over 90% would have been disqualified for making student loans, so ... rather than push through the reform, they watered down the criteria.
Yet another example of government regulatory capture.
Your faith in kids today is touching ... :-p
The education bubble
Remember, that's a trillion dollars of debt that can't even be wiped out by bankruptcy, unlike the previous bubbles of the dot-bombs and real estate.
Most real-life "computer jobs" don't need "computer learning". The workflow is predetermined, the range of inputs limited, etc.
Most kids learn more than enough at home - they don't need labs at school, and whatever they learn will be obsolete multiple times before they graduate.