The second part of the advice is absurd, you can't expect any users outside of a tiny fraction of one percent of all computer users to know what compiling is, let alone actually perform it.
Then shut up and ask your admin to do it. Any admin worth his salt would rather do it for you than have you go bitching to *developers* about how they should better support you and your stupid ideas of what you should be able to do. You're not paying Linux devs for that level of support, remember?
The Open Source development model is vastly superior because it cuts idiots out of doing things they shouldn't be doing, and doesn't waste time supporting them when they try. Unfortunately, for most users, installing software is one of the things they can't handle.
Notice how efficient and secure system administration under a distro like, say, Debian can be? Do you think this is because they give endusers the ability to use bleeding edge software when they don't even have the skills to compile it themselves?
Correct software development mostly separates users into two groups: developers/admins and idiot users. That's because idiot users won't take the time to debug a program when it crashes and submit a useful bug report, or a patch. They mostly just knee-jerk and upgrade to the "latest version" hoping it's been fixed. This gets software development nowhere (witness the world of Windows) because it takes more effort to support endusers' constant "self-administration" than it does to just fix the problem, and upgrading to fix a bug usually causes more bugs than it fixes.
You can bet that Linux will move more towards the direction of development and support that I'm talking about. And, what's more, your boss will buy it, because this model will be able to provide the "100 desktops per admin" that he fantasizes about.
Care to elaborate on that? Or are you just admitting that an outsourcer would give a realistic estimate of the necessary work involved, and charge accordingly?
Seeing as how an outsourcer can take advantage of the economy of scale with intermittent support, as well as the benefits of specialization in administrative technologies, you've got the burden of proof when making assertions like that.
plus i'll wager that those 30 odd people will mostly be running windows
Managing a network of 50 users is a full time job, even when Windows is well-managed. I couldn't imagine what a clusterfuck it would be in a small business where everyone has admin privileges.
With 30 desktops, just keeping up with replacing computers will take you 2 weeks a year, which is around 3% of your time. So, yeah, 1% is complete bullshit.
Some larger businesses average as low as 20 users per admin.
It's nothing new, just a much larger scale. Mass drivers have been proposed for quite some time now for use as orbital launchers.
Really the only problem has been that they would probably destroy any electronics placed in them. Because of this, they're not multi-purpose enough to be a serious replacement for rockets unless they can be justified for some special-purpose use.
And actually, that wikipedia article has a nice write-up about their usefulness in disposal of radioactive waste. It says a nuclear power plant could catapault it's waste into space using 10% of the electricity it produces.
Actually that's not such a dumb idea. With a sufficiently long railgun, you could accelerate a projectile slowly and still achieve escape velocity.
The only fear would be a mishap on earth, but the nuclear material would have to be encased in something quite durable to withstand a railgun anyways. It's still 100 times more foolproof than any rocket designs.
Yay, the three least relevant justices on the USSC managed to be *in the minority* in making the most obviously correct determination, perhaps in the history of the US. Even the "strict constructionist" forgot what the words "among" and "commerce" meant.
Even better, the majority only managed to come up with *three pages* of dribble, containing trite, memorable fallacies like the one below, to justify their power-grab.
"If Congress decides that the 'total incidence' of a practice poses a threat to a national market, it may regulate the entire class."
"production of the commodity meant for home consumption, be it wheat or marijuana, has a substantial effect on supply and demand in the national market for that commodity."
Why doesn't QT even register to Mac developers? Seems to me that if you can code for three platforms at once, you'd at least avoid obsolecence.
I don't know what the particular quirks of QT are, but I can't help but think it may be of *some* use to Apple-heads, especially in situations like this. Am I right?
I'm going to add this because I'm not sure I was clear enough. All courts, including that in Roe v. Wade, recognize that the right of a live child to life takes precedence over that of a mother to abort him/her, except in very rare circumstances such as imminent physical harm.
That has never changed. What changed in Roe v. Wade was the determination of when and whether a child is alive. While it was previously a matter of observation of signs of life, in Roe v. Wade it became a statistical conglomeration of estimates for when those signs of life occur, based upon the testimony of experts rather than the facts of the case. It is this sort of mushy, compromising logic that is reserved to the legislature, because legislative bodies are more suited to it.
Yeah, yeah. I know what the term means. But I also know when it doesn't apply. There is a line between an all-powerful legislature and a judiciary that is respectful of individual rights.
Sorry, but your analysis of Roe v. Wade is ignorant of the facts of how our government works. Congress neither grants rights nor solely enumerates them. Rights exist independently of government. And any branch can recognize them. In fact, the judiciary is the branch that most often does so. To call this "legislating from the bench" is just ignorance of the origins of rights.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Roe v. Wade was bunk for a lot of reasons, don't get me wrong. And, you're right, it's a prominent example of judicial legislation. But not for the reason most fundies think. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court went *way* beyond just determination of rights and their precedence. The chief justice took vague expert testimony, turned it into a statistical approximation of the origins of life, and put that approximation into legal force by judicial fiat, overturning the approximation then in force for the previous 200 years. Normally, at least 2/3s of that process would be reserved to the legislature.
The case in question here, however, is in no way analogous. All courts recognize that the state has a high burden of proof in criminal prosecution. All courts recognize the defendant's right to cross examine the evidence against him. The fact is, this evidence under no circumstances meets the burden of proof because it is fundamentally inexplicable. All the judge is saying in this case is that no reasonable jury could ever find this evidence as proof, and, even if they did, I would throw out their verdict shortly thereafter. The judge has not created law, but merely recognized the right of the defendant to be confronted with reasonable evidence, not inexplicable magic "guilt detectors".
This sounds more like a worst case scenario of judges legislating from the bench.
Do you know what that term even means? Legislators create laws. Judges just nullify the bad ones or when they're improperly applied.
I would love to see these judges SUED and jailed if one of the people whose case they dismiss subsequently kill someone on their next DUI.
This is a joke, right? Which fairytale did you believe that told you the government is responsible for ensuring your safety and happiness? And, under what theory of law do you think you can sue them when they don't?
If they have a problem with the manufacturer then take it up with the state. If the state does not have a requirement of disclosure then by what basis do the judges operate?
What is this ranting about? Judges act independently of "the state". That's one of the signs of a republican form of government. And what do you think they're doing? By striking down a few of "the state's" cases, they are "taking it up with the state". It doesn't matter what the state's "requirements" are. The judges "requirements" are proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The state can either live up to that, or continue to lose cases.
The fact is, all of them are contingent upon public action. And it doesn't matter what Congress writes into the law; it's a Constitutional requirement.
What I do in my mom's basement is no business of the Federal government. This concept was widely accepted by the geeks who wrote our Constitution.
I'll believe that argument when you show me a music CD with an EULA. Until then, there's such a thing as fair use. And using software for which you've paid still fits that bill.
It's a project that benefits all users. Nobody will complain that it doesn't fit into his/her pet usage.
Software is a vertical monopoly. Free Software is close to being free of proprietary restrictions, but not quite there. With the ineveitable implementation of TCPA and hardware-based DRM, general computing may be at risk of becoming a thing of the past. Open source projects would be the first ones to suffer.
Heh. Maybe you're thinking of Fedora Extras, which never really was "split off" but was always separate. It was recently moved from the old fedora.us project to a RedHat-controlled server.
But, even if you're not, I wouldn't be suprised. RedHat is the most schizophrenic company ever to have existed. Look at their various experimental offerings in Linux support over the past ten years. Just as one of them starts gaining traction, it's killed off and replaced with a completely different business model.
It's like they don't employ actual "business" people there, just a bunch of engineers going "I know what would be cool! Subscriptions for.iso downloads and updates at faster speeds!" So they roll it out, piss off customers who are used to downloading the isos for free (who immediately start work on creating bittorrent), sell a bunch of subscriptions to noobs, *bam* bittorrent is released, the RH engineers go "oh shit" and cancel the whole thing. Meanwhile the noobs are going "WTF? Where's my faster.isos?" because they won't have realized what bittorrent is for another six months, by which time they'll have moved on to paying for SuSE or just said "Screw this, Linux sucks."
RedHat management says "We don't want another bittorrent debacle" and realize "Look, people are independently supporting our releases" so they decide to cooperate with "the community" instead of making them customers and decide to take control of the Fedora project. Of course, Fedora has had it's own growing pains, because "the community" doesn't really want to use RedHat, they just want a version of Debian with more frequent releases. Oops, did I say "Ubuntu"?
And, I haven't even begun to get started on RedHat's various ideas and prices of the "Linux desktop". That's a whole other rant...
killing off the other versions like they did the same way, or would they have gently migrated people over to Fedora.
I've heard this argument over and over, and I still don't understand it. I went straight from RH9 to FC1, as an upgrade, with almost no problems. If you look at the version numbers of the included software, FC1 barely qualifies as a point release of RH9.
Of course, 7.x -> RH8 -> RH9 had it's own problems, which I'm sure was a primary motivator for the creation of Fedora as a RedHat sponsored project. There were many who didn't even want to upgrade from 7.x at the time FC1 came out. What was RedHat supposed to do about that other than "kill it off"?
As far as I can tell, Fedora 1 had the same resources as any of the RedHat versions. If your complaint has to do with the difference in support lifetimes, then I don't know what to tell you. Surely you didn't expect RedHat to continue supporting, for free, a viable competitor to its paid products?
Good. Maybe "unlimited tech support" for 70,000 users will offset the "unknown product support lifetime" for the rest of us. I've been weary to even try Novell Desktop for the fact that I can't really compare their prices to something like, say RedHat.
In regards to "unlimited support" hurting them, though, I doubt it. Novell seems to be a company with the resources to take a long view of things. And, taking a long view of "unlimited support" for a client like this, with their own tech support resources and halfway capable users, only helps their distro when all is said and done.
"Because we achieved the switching with one electron -- instead of a million electrons as in today's smallest, fastest transistors -- we have the expectation that we can run these things with a million times less power. Imagine the power savings, and it takes less time."
So, is this just like an "in theory" type statement or what?
Slashdot Mirror
The second part of the advice is absurd, you can't expect any users outside of a tiny fraction of one percent of all computer users to know what compiling is, let alone actually perform it.
Then shut up and ask your admin to do it. Any admin worth his salt would rather do it for you than have you go bitching to *developers* about how they should better support you and your stupid ideas of what you should be able to do. You're not paying Linux devs for that level of support, remember?
The Open Source development model is vastly superior because it cuts idiots out of doing things they shouldn't be doing, and doesn't waste time supporting them when they try. Unfortunately, for most users, installing software is one of the things they can't handle.
Notice how efficient and secure system administration under a distro like, say, Debian can be? Do you think this is because they give endusers the ability to use bleeding edge software when they don't even have the skills to compile it themselves?
Correct software development mostly separates users into two groups: developers/admins and idiot users. That's because idiot users won't take the time to debug a program when it crashes and submit a useful bug report, or a patch. They mostly just knee-jerk and upgrade to the "latest version" hoping it's been fixed. This gets software development nowhere (witness the world of Windows) because it takes more effort to support endusers' constant "self-administration" than it does to just fix the problem, and upgrading to fix a bug usually causes more bugs than it fixes.
You can bet that Linux will move more towards the direction of development and support that I'm talking about. And, what's more, your boss will buy it, because this model will be able to provide the "100 desktops per admin" that he fantasizes about.
and it's not worth it to outsource it.
Care to elaborate on that? Or are you just admitting that an outsourcer would give a realistic estimate of the necessary work involved, and charge accordingly?
Seeing as how an outsourcer can take advantage of the economy of scale with intermittent support, as well as the benefits of specialization in administrative technologies, you've got the burden of proof when making assertions like that.
plus i'll wager that those 30 odd people will mostly be running windows
Managing a network of 50 users is a full time job, even when Windows is well-managed. I couldn't imagine what a clusterfuck it would be in a small business where everyone has admin privileges.
With 30 desktops, just keeping up with replacing computers will take you 2 weeks a year, which is around 3% of your time. So, yeah, 1% is complete bullshit.
Some larger businesses average as low as 20 users per admin.
From the we-be-hooked-on-the-brothers,-huhhhh dept.
Somehow I have a vague recollection of hearing that somewhere before... but whatever editor remembered it should definitely seek help.
It's nothing new, just a much larger scale. Mass drivers have been proposed for quite some time now for use as orbital launchers.
Really the only problem has been that they would probably destroy any electronics placed in them. Because of this, they're not multi-purpose enough to be a serious replacement for rockets unless they can be justified for some special-purpose use.
And actually, that wikipedia article has a nice write-up about their usefulness in disposal of radioactive waste. It says a nuclear power plant could catapault it's waste into space using 10% of the electricity it produces.
what kind of useful payload you'd put into space that could withstand the acceleration of being shot out of one of these.
As another poster pointed out, nuclear waste. It's not useful at all, but getting rid of it is.
Actually that's not such a dumb idea. With a sufficiently long railgun, you could accelerate a projectile slowly and still achieve escape velocity.
The only fear would be a mishap on earth, but the nuclear material would have to be encased in something quite durable to withstand a railgun anyways. It's still 100 times more foolproof than any rocket designs.
You mean he wasn't charged with violating the DMCA and arrested for hacking?
Yay, the three least relevant justices on the USSC managed to be *in the minority* in making the most obviously correct determination, perhaps in the history of the US. Even the "strict constructionist" forgot what the words "among" and "commerce" meant.
Even better, the majority only managed to come up with *three pages* of dribble, containing trite, memorable fallacies like the one below, to justify their power-grab.
"If Congress decides that the 'total incidence' of a practice poses a threat to a national market, it may regulate the entire class."
"production of the commodity meant for home consumption, be it wheat or marijuana, has a substantial effect on supply and demand in the national market for that commodity."
(emphasis mine)
What was going on Lucas's head with regards to Midichlorians
"A Wrinkle in Time" had a similar theme that revolved around mitochondira as the source of the "life force".
Why doesn't QT even register to Mac developers? Seems to me that if you can code for three platforms at once, you'd at least avoid obsolecence.
I don't know what the particular quirks of QT are, but I can't help but think it may be of *some* use to Apple-heads, especially in situations like this. Am I right?
I think we're working under different assumptions
Yeah, that seems to be the problem. You're assuming a bunch of things. Courts don't assume anything. Evidence must be proven.
I'm going to add this because I'm not sure I was clear enough. All courts, including that in Roe v. Wade, recognize that the right of a live child to life takes precedence over that of a mother to abort him/her, except in very rare circumstances such as imminent physical harm.
That has never changed. What changed in Roe v. Wade was the determination of when and whether a child is alive. While it was previously a matter of observation of signs of life, in Roe v. Wade it became a statistical conglomeration of estimates for when those signs of life occur, based upon the testimony of experts rather than the facts of the case. It is this sort of mushy, compromising logic that is reserved to the legislature, because legislative bodies are more suited to it.
Yeah, yeah. I know what the term means. But I also know when it doesn't apply. There is a line between an all-powerful legislature and a judiciary that is respectful of individual rights.
Sorry, but your analysis of Roe v. Wade is ignorant of the facts of how our government works. Congress neither grants rights nor solely enumerates them. Rights exist independently of government. And any branch can recognize them. In fact, the judiciary is the branch that most often does so. To call this "legislating from the bench" is just ignorance of the origins of rights.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Roe v. Wade was bunk for a lot of reasons, don't get me wrong. And, you're right, it's a prominent example of judicial legislation. But not for the reason most fundies think. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court went *way* beyond just determination of rights and their precedence. The chief justice took vague expert testimony, turned it into a statistical approximation of the origins of life, and put that approximation into legal force by judicial fiat, overturning the approximation then in force for the previous 200 years. Normally, at least 2/3s of that process would be reserved to the legislature.
The case in question here, however, is in no way analogous. All courts recognize that the state has a high burden of proof in criminal prosecution. All courts recognize the defendant's right to cross examine the evidence against him. The fact is, this evidence under no circumstances meets the burden of proof because it is fundamentally inexplicable. All the judge is saying in this case is that no reasonable jury could ever find this evidence as proof, and, even if they did, I would throw out their verdict shortly thereafter. The judge has not created law, but merely recognized the right of the defendant to be confronted with reasonable evidence, not inexplicable magic "guilt detectors".
Yeah, and in our society, that "random authority" consists of twelve people sitting in a juror box.
Mostly, because we don't trust our government, police, or corporate overlords as far as we could pick them up and throw them.
Do you know what that term even means? Legislators create laws. Judges just nullify the bad ones or when they're improperly applied.
I would love to see these judges SUED and jailed if one of the people whose case they dismiss subsequently kill someone on their next DUI.
This is a joke, right? Which fairytale did you believe that told you the government is responsible for ensuring your safety and happiness? And, under what theory of law do you think you can sue them when they don't?
If they have a problem with the manufacturer then take it up with the state. If the state does not have a requirement of disclosure then by what basis do the judges operate?
What is this ranting about? Judges act independently of "the state". That's one of the signs of a republican form of government. And what do you think they're doing? By striking down a few of "the state's" cases, they are "taking it up with the state". It doesn't matter what the state's "requirements" are. The judges "requirements" are proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The state can either live up to that, or continue to lose cases.
Is it just me or does that site say that Linux is "embedded" into their processor?
Umm, stop using it?
The fact is, all of them are contingent upon public action. And it doesn't matter what Congress writes into the law; it's a Constitutional requirement.
What I do in my mom's basement is no business of the Federal government. This concept was widely accepted by the geeks who wrote our Constitution.
I'll believe that argument when you show me a music CD with an EULA. Until then, there's such a thing as fair use. And using software for which you've paid still fits that bill.
It's a project that benefits all users. Nobody will complain that it doesn't fit into his/her pet usage.
Software is a vertical monopoly. Free Software is close to being free of proprietary restrictions, but not quite there. With the ineveitable implementation of TCPA and hardware-based DRM, general computing may be at risk of becoming a thing of the past. Open source projects would be the first ones to suffer.
Heh. Maybe you're thinking of Fedora Extras, which never really was "split off" but was always separate. It was recently moved from the old fedora.us project to a RedHat-controlled server.
.iso downloads and updates at faster speeds!" So they roll it out, piss off customers who are used to downloading the isos for free (who immediately start work on creating bittorrent), sell a bunch of subscriptions to noobs, *bam* bittorrent is released, the RH engineers go "oh shit" and cancel the whole thing. Meanwhile the noobs are going "WTF? Where's my faster .isos?" because they won't have realized what bittorrent is for another six months, by which time they'll have moved on to paying for SuSE or just said "Screw this, Linux sucks."
But, even if you're not, I wouldn't be suprised. RedHat is the most schizophrenic company ever to have existed. Look at their various experimental offerings in Linux support over the past ten years. Just as one of them starts gaining traction, it's killed off and replaced with a completely different business model.
It's like they don't employ actual "business" people there, just a bunch of engineers going "I know what would be cool! Subscriptions for
RedHat management says "We don't want another bittorrent debacle" and realize "Look, people are independently supporting our releases" so they decide to cooperate with "the community" instead of making them customers and decide to take control of the Fedora project. Of course, Fedora has had it's own growing pains, because "the community" doesn't really want to use RedHat, they just want a version of Debian with more frequent releases. Oops, did I say "Ubuntu"?
And, I haven't even begun to get started on RedHat's various ideas and prices of the "Linux desktop". That's a whole other rant...
killing off the other versions like they did the same way, or would they have gently migrated people over to Fedora.
I've heard this argument over and over, and I still don't understand it. I went straight from RH9 to FC1, as an upgrade, with almost no problems. If you look at the version numbers of the included software, FC1 barely qualifies as a point release of RH9.
Of course, 7.x -> RH8 -> RH9 had it's own problems, which I'm sure was a primary motivator for the creation of Fedora as a RedHat sponsored project. There were many who didn't even want to upgrade from 7.x at the time FC1 came out. What was RedHat supposed to do about that other than "kill it off"?
As far as I can tell, Fedora 1 had the same resources as any of the RedHat versions. If your complaint has to do with the difference in support lifetimes, then I don't know what to tell you. Surely you didn't expect RedHat to continue supporting, for free, a viable competitor to its paid products?
Good. Maybe "unlimited tech support" for 70,000 users will offset the "unknown product support lifetime" for the rest of us. I've been weary to even try Novell Desktop for the fact that I can't really compare their prices to something like, say RedHat.
In regards to "unlimited support" hurting them, though, I doubt it. Novell seems to be a company with the resources to take a long view of things. And, taking a long view of "unlimited support" for a client like this, with their own tech support resources and halfway capable users, only helps their distro when all is said and done.
"Because we achieved the switching with one electron -- instead of a million electrons as in today's smallest, fastest transistors -- we have the expectation that we can run these things with a million times less power. Imagine the power savings, and it takes less time."
So, is this just like an "in theory" type statement or what?