Unions are a pretty good answer to the question, "How do we turn this rich country into a poor country?"
See for example the economic history of Great Britain for the 80 years ending in about 1980. It started that period as the richest country in the world. By 1979, it looked ready for bankruptcy. What turned it around was drastic changes in the legal status of trade unions, which greatly reduced their power. Seen as partisan at the time, the new legal framework is now accepted by all political parties. And the country is back on its feet.
I think that since Linux is very clean, streamlined code
Perhaps you didn't actually read the page referred to in the story?: ---start quote---
The following code demonstrates exciting
features of GNU C used in Linux:
int a, b;
typedef int t, u;
void f1() { a * b; }
void f2() { t * u; }
void f3() { t * b; }
void f4() { int t; t * b; }
void f5(t u, unsigned t) {
switch ( t ) {
case 0: if ( u )
default: return;
}
} ---end quote---
This kind of code is CRAP. I don't know who wrote it, I don't care if he/she is a genius kernel guru. Hard to read, hard to maintain.
My parents bought a pair of swimming trunks for me in about 1962. They had a pocket with a Velcro flap. Velcro was pretty new at the time. I expected the Velcro to stop working after a couple of years. The elastic in the waistband failed after a few years but the waistband also had a drawstring, so it didn't matter. The stitching started to give out in the early 1990s. I lost them in about 1995. But the Velcro fastener was still working.
But that includes more than just books - a lot of software also has ISBN numbers. I used to run a software company which got ISBN numbers for its products. To assign ISBN numbers, all you had to do was register with the issuing authority, tell them how many numbers you were likely to need, and they'd issue you a range of numbers. When you assigned one to a product, you informed them. Apart from the time, and the postage, it didn't even cost anything. There are products consisting of a program on a floppy disk plus a 10-page manual, that have ISBN numbers. We issued different numbers for the same program on 5.25" media and 3.5" media (this was 15 years ago).
There are several treaties about space exploration. The one relating to the moon was never ratified by the USA. The treaty binds only those nations which have either ratified it, or subsequently "acceded" to it.
Furthermore, all of these treaties contain a clause that lets a country withdraw from it by giving notice. See, for example, Article 20 of the Moon treaty.
I get full color spam in my mailbox. Bulk advertisers have no problem paying a few cents per spamee, when one gullible shmuck in 1000 orders
You don't understand the economics of spam email. The response rate is much less than the 1 in 1000 that physical junk mail attracts, more like 1 in 10,000 or more. To make money, the spammer needs to send millions, not thousands, of emails. Currently that costs nothing (whether it's full color or not) per message. But charging even half a cent per message would completely destroy the spammer's business.
Furthermore, the effectiveness of charging would not be in any way impaired if 1,000 free emails per month were included in every paid subscription to an ISP. 1000 emails is far too few to be of any interest to a spammer.
Any major revlations in this "leaked" article?... Nope...
From the article: ..from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
You know, as a resident of this planet, I don't want it "cleansed" by some clown in Washington. The days when there was a standoff between the USA and the USSR, so that neither got to "take out" as many countries as they wanted, look pretty attractive in hindsight.
I'm basically a C++ programmer, but I like and use Perl for smallish text-processing tasks.
However, the main reason I see for preferring C++ for long-lived projects is one that has not been mentioned here: the stability of the language specification. The specification of C++ is extremely thorough, and changes glacially slowly. That's a big advantage for software that will have a long life. Remember, folks, that the main work that programmers do is not developing code. It's maintaining code. I've only ever used Perl 5.x; I'd hate to have to maintain something written in an earlier version that didn't have references. And in a year or so, I wonder how someone who started with Perl 6 will like MY code... probably not very much.
All languages have this problem but C++ has it much less than Perl.
As for the boundary between "real" programming languages and the wannabes: for me, the test is whether it's well enough specified that you can determine from reading the language spec whether a piece of code is valid, and if so, what it does. Perl passes this test. (well, 99%). Others, Ruby for example, don't. For this reason, I regard Ruby as a waste of time. But I'm very results-oriented. If you have a more playful disposition, YMMV.
Can someone show me a single example of the government regulating a service and the cost going DOWN
Basically you're right about what regulation of a product or service does, but be careful - this isn't about regulating the service, it's about regulating the anti-competitive behavior of a cartel. If you look at the countries where internet access is most expensive, they have either a monopoly ISP or a cartel which prevents small companies from entering the market.
at first I dismissed it because it was going to take a bank employee with access to programming the machines low level inputs, plus a Very large list of card numbers, plus access to the pin offsets, plus a way to launder the money
Do you have any idea how many low-paid bank employees there are in rich countries? Obviously not. Have you read Kevin Mitnick's book about the ease of deception? Obviously not. Very large lists of card numbers are routinely stolen from merchants (read the news).
Forget about North Korea and Nigeria, most of this fraud will be done right here.
It would be stupid if the purpose were to increase our safety or security. But that's not its purpose at all.
Its purpose is to help to persuade a lot of ignorant voters that their government is "doing something" about security. It will probably succeed in this. So it will do what the politicians want it to - help them get re-elected.
It's harmful, damaging, takes away freedoms, etc and is therefore bad for the USA. But if you think it is stupid, you just don't understand what motivates politicians.
Re:Sounds trollish
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Anyone care to confirm the facts mentioned?
The basic facts - and Sun's basic problem - are that Intel/AMD hardware is cheaper than SPARC hardware because of economies of scale; and that Linux is comparable with Solaris (behind in some areas, ahead in others). Do you really need confirmation of these facts?
Right now, it would be impossible to replace all Sun servers by Intel hardware because Sun makes "big iron" - multiprocessors with 64 cpus. A big bank, for example, that has to process hundreds of millions of transactions at month-end needs that performance. But inevitably, Intel hardware will become available in this kind of configuration, and Linux will support it. It's not a question of "whether", it's a question of "how soon". This is clearly a threat to Sun's business model.
There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who can write passable English. Many of them are poor (India might have more English speakers than any other country in the world), many would be willing to review English text for a low wage and flunk the bits that are incomprehensible. There are American / British / etc people who have been forced into early retirement and would work at this for very little money.
So why do the Japanese (especially) inflict incomprehensible product manuals on the world? When they could get them checked for maybe $1 per page for an entire product line?
Good grief, what a ridiculous article!
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot is supposed to be selective! As in, pick out the "stuff that matters" from all the hype and codswallop.
The Wired article was almost bad enough to be funny. My nomination for most outrageous hyperbole of the month - no wait - let's get into the spirit of the article - of the eon:
"... It's extremely meaningful. It took billions of years to build it. Deep programming is the result of that kind of effort."
I disagree. When it comes to user interface conventions, Different=Bad.
Just imagine walking into a car showroom to buy a car, and the sales guy shows you this neat-looking model. It has 2 pedals, one of them turns on the windshield wipers, the other turns on the heated rear window. The brake is operated by a stalk on the left of the steering column... need I continue?
A lot of user-interface conventions are pretty arbitrary. If we were starting from nothing, maybe something else would have been better. But we're not starting from nothing. We've all gotten used to a bunch of conventions. Products which conform to the conventions we know are easier to use than products which do not.
This is so far away from being a law, it isn't even funny. Nobody with the power to make this a law has come forward supporting it. If Fritz Hollings picks it up, then we can be a bit concerned,
This is a very naive comment. By the time an influential Senator picks it up, it is too late to be "a bit concerned". The only chance of stopping this steamroller is to start attacking it now.
NASA does what it has to do in order to get funding. That means that it has to have jobs in several different states, to get support from Representatives and Senators in those states. It spends a significant amount of money just to deal with the fact that it's split up into so many different centers.
Then, it has to award contracts into other different states to get support from the politicians in THOSE states. Ever wondered why Shuttle boosters are constructed in segments so that they can be conveniently shipped halfway across the country? Maybe you thought it had something to do with reliability or safety? (For the humor-impaired, that last sentence was sarcastic.)
It's a tribute to the few idealists left at NASA that it ever got anything done. Its main goal today is to preserve its own funding. It's become a nearly-complete waste of money.
This is a incredible loss for the hardware support in the Free Software world.
Yes, it damages the Free Software world. But who would want to do that apart from Microsoft?
Go to the PCISIG website.. Check out the press releases. You'll find one dated June 12, 2002, about the election of a new Chairman: Tony Pierce, of Microsoft.
The illogical attitudes of Western businesses are the result of all the propaganda about "theft" of "intellectual property" being in some way the same as theft of property.
US legislators love this game of "defining" a word or phrase to mean something completely different, for legal purposes, from its normal meaning. An example from a completely different subject area: in some US states, driving at a speed more than 15mph over the limit is "legally defined" to be "reckless driving". So somebody who drove at 70 mph when the highway limit was 55, on a road with no other traffic and perfect visibility for miles, could be convicted of "reckless driving". (Before you ask, no it didn't happen to me. Just an example.)
The way the GPL is worded I don't think you can say that. Now morally you've got a point,
No, morally he does not have a point. Nobody is forced to release their work under the GPL. It is a clearly-written license. You can't voluntarily choose to license under the GPL one day, then turn round and say "but I didn't mean you could use the software to run a business" the next day.
Nothing new here, it's exactly what Paypal was meant to be for. Unfortunately, Paypal does the job very badly and is very greedy (they take 10%). What we need is not yet another article about what a great idea micropayments are, but a competitor to Paypal that:
1. Doesn't keep screwing up
2. Charges 3% or less
Since the whole process of collecting the micropayments can be automated, a properly-run Paypal competitor should be able to charge just 1% over what the banks charge it, and still make money. Even when micropayments are measured in cents, not dollars. People, if we want a web not clogged by ads, we are going to have to pay for it. But, web-based businesses, your running costs per user are next to zero, so you're going to have to charge close to zero.
These slides present Microsoft's position cleverly. They are well thought out, and the material is intelligently organized. It is clearly the work of an experienced presenter, not some nerd halfway through a CS program.
Nobody from MS has disowned the slides.
None of this is proof (what kind of proof do you want, anyway?), but in my opinion these slides are probably authentic.
Slashdot Mirror
Unions are a pretty good answer to the question, "How do we turn this rich country into a poor country?"
See for example the economic history of Great Britain for the 80 years ending in about 1980. It started that period as the richest country in the world. By 1979, it looked ready for bankruptcy. What turned it around was drastic changes in the legal status of trade unions, which greatly reduced their power. Seen as partisan at the time, the new legal framework is now accepted by all political parties. And the country is back on its feet.
I think that since Linux is very clean, streamlined code
Perhaps you didn't actually read the page referred to in the story?:
---start quote---
The following code demonstrates exciting
features of GNU C used in Linux:
int a, b;
typedef int t, u;
void f1() { a * b; }
void f2() { t * u; }
void f3() { t * b; }
void f4() { int t; t * b; }
void f5(t u, unsigned t) {
switch ( t ) {
case 0: if ( u )
default: return;
}
}
---end quote---
This kind of code is CRAP. I don't know who wrote it, I don't care if he/she is a genius kernel guru. Hard to read, hard to maintain.
My parents bought a pair of swimming trunks for me in about 1962. They had a pocket with a Velcro flap. Velcro was pretty new at the time. I expected the Velcro to stop working after a couple of years.
The elastic in the waistband failed after a few years but the waistband also had a drawstring, so it didn't matter. The stitching started to give out in the early 1990s. I lost them in about 1995. But the Velcro fastener was still working.
The easies boundry would be anything with an ISBN
But that includes more than just books - a lot of software also has ISBN numbers. I used to run a software company which got ISBN numbers for its products. To assign ISBN numbers, all you had to do was register with the issuing authority, tell them how many numbers you were likely to need, and they'd issue you a range of numbers. When you assigned one to a product, you informed them. Apart from the time, and the postage, it didn't even cost anything. There are products consisting of a program on a floppy disk plus a 10-page manual, that have ISBN numbers. We issued different numbers for the same program on 5.25" media and 3.5" media (this was 15 years ago).
There are several treaties about space exploration. The one relating to the moon was never ratified by the USA. The treaty binds only those nations which have either ratified it, or subsequently "acceded" to it.
Furthermore, all of these treaties contain a clause that lets a country withdraw from it by giving notice. See, for example, Article 20 of the Moon treaty.
I get full color spam in my mailbox. Bulk advertisers have no problem paying a few cents per spamee, when one gullible shmuck in 1000 orders
You don't understand the economics of spam email. The response rate is much less than the 1 in 1000 that physical junk mail attracts, more like 1 in 10,000 or more. To make money, the spammer needs to send millions, not thousands, of emails. Currently that costs nothing (whether it's full color or not) per message. But charging even half a cent per message would completely destroy the spammer's business.
Furthermore, the effectiveness of charging would not be in any way impaired if 1,000 free emails per month were included in every paid subscription to an ISP. 1000 emails is far too few to be of any interest to a spammer.
Any major revlations in this "leaked" article? ... Nope...
..from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
From the article:
You know, as a resident of this planet, I don't want it "cleansed" by some clown in Washington. The days when there was a standoff between the USA and the USSR, so that neither got to "take out" as many countries as they wanted, look pretty attractive in hindsight.
I'm basically a C++ programmer, but I like and use Perl for smallish text-processing tasks.
... probably not very much.
However, the main reason I see for preferring C++ for long-lived projects is one that has not been mentioned here: the stability of the language specification. The specification of C++ is extremely thorough, and changes glacially slowly. That's a big advantage for software that will have a long life. Remember, folks, that the main work that programmers do is not developing code. It's maintaining code. I've only ever used Perl 5.x; I'd hate to have to maintain something written in an earlier version that didn't have references. And in a year or so, I wonder how someone who started with Perl 6 will like MY code
All languages have this problem but C++ has it much less than Perl.
As for the boundary between "real" programming languages and the wannabes: for me, the test is whether it's well enough specified that you can determine from reading the language spec whether a piece of code is valid, and if so, what it does. Perl passes this test. (well, 99%). Others, Ruby for example, don't. For this reason, I regard Ruby as a waste of time. But I'm very results-oriented. If you have a more playful disposition, YMMV.
Can someone show me a single example of the government regulating a service and the cost going DOWN
Basically you're right about what regulation of a product or service does, but be careful - this isn't about regulating the service, it's about regulating the anti-competitive behavior of a cartel. If you look at the countries where internet access is most expensive, they have either a monopoly ISP or a cartel which prevents small companies from entering the market.
at first I dismissed it because it was going to take a bank employee with access to programming the machines low level inputs, plus a Very large list of card numbers, plus access to the pin offsets, plus a way to launder the money
Do you have any idea how many low-paid bank employees there are in rich countries? Obviously not. Have you read Kevin Mitnick's book about the ease of deception? Obviously not. Very large lists of card numbers are routinely stolen from merchants (read the news).
Forget about North Korea and Nigeria, most of this fraud will be done right here.
13 lawyers (8 of 'em specialists in patent and copyright law)
27 managers
63 marketing analysts
1 programmer
You can save some development costs if the 1 programmer is in India or China. If in Bangladesh, you might be able to afford 2 programmers,
It would be stupid if the purpose were to increase our safety or security. But that's not its purpose at all.
Its purpose is to help to persuade a lot of ignorant voters that their government is "doing something" about security. It will probably succeed in this. So it will do what the politicians want it to - help them get re-elected.
It's harmful, damaging, takes away freedoms, etc and is therefore bad for the USA. But if you think it is stupid, you just don't understand what motivates politicians.
Anyone care to confirm the facts mentioned?
The basic facts - and Sun's basic problem - are that Intel/AMD hardware is cheaper than SPARC hardware because of economies of scale; and that Linux is comparable with Solaris (behind in some areas, ahead in others). Do you really need confirmation of these facts?
Right now, it would be impossible to replace all Sun servers by Intel hardware because Sun makes "big iron" - multiprocessors with 64 cpus. A big bank, for example, that has to process hundreds of millions of transactions at month-end needs that performance. But inevitably, Intel hardware will become available in this kind of configuration, and Linux will support it. It's not a question of "whether", it's a question of "how soon". This is clearly a threat to Sun's business model.
There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who can write passable English. Many of them are poor (India might have more English speakers than any other country in the world), many would be willing to review English text for a low wage and flunk the bits that are incomprehensible. There are American / British / etc people who have been forced into early retirement and would work at this for very little money.
So why do the Japanese (especially) inflict incomprehensible product manuals on the world? When they could get them checked for maybe $1 per page for an entire product line?
Slashdot is supposed to be selective! As in, pick out the "stuff that matters" from all the hype and codswallop.
The Wired article was almost bad enough to be funny. My nomination for most outrageous hyperbole of the month - no wait - let's get into the spirit of the article - of the eon:
"... It's extremely meaningful. It took billions of years to build it. Deep programming is the result of that kind of effort."
part of the patent reform would be getting the patent officers to do a proper job.
IMHO that's the last thing we need. What we really need is to get rid of the whole nonsense of software patents.
Different != bad.
... need I continue?
I disagree. When it comes to user interface conventions, Different=Bad.
Just imagine walking into a car showroom to buy a car, and the sales guy shows you this neat-looking model. It has 2 pedals, one of them turns on the windshield wipers, the other turns on the heated rear window. The brake is operated by a stalk on the left of the steering column
A lot of user-interface conventions are pretty arbitrary. If we were starting from nothing, maybe something else would have been better. But we're not starting from nothing. We've all gotten used to a bunch of conventions. Products which conform to the conventions we know are easier to use than products which do not.
This is so far away from being a law, it isn't even funny. Nobody with the power to make this a law has come forward supporting it. If Fritz Hollings picks it up, then we can be a bit concerned,
This is a very naive comment. By the time an influential Senator picks it up, it is too late to be "a bit concerned". The only chance of stopping this steamroller is to start attacking it now.
NASA does what it has to do in order to get funding. That means that it has to have jobs in several different states, to get support from Representatives and Senators in those states. It spends a significant amount of money just to deal with the fact that it's split up into so many different centers.
Then, it has to award contracts into other different states to get support from the politicians in THOSE states. Ever wondered why Shuttle boosters are constructed in segments so that they can be conveniently shipped halfway across the country? Maybe you thought it had something to do with reliability or safety? (For the humor-impaired, that last sentence was sarcastic.)
It's a tribute to the few idealists left at NASA that it ever got anything done. Its main goal today is to preserve its own funding. It's become a nearly-complete waste of money.
This is a incredible loss for the hardware support in the Free Software world.
Yes, it damages the Free Software world. But who would want to do that apart from Microsoft?
Go to the PCISIG website.. Check out the press releases. You'll find one dated June 12, 2002, about the election of a new Chairman: Tony Pierce, of Microsoft.
The illogical attitudes of Western businesses are the result of all the propaganda about "theft" of "intellectual property" being in some way the same as theft of property.
US legislators love this game of "defining" a word or phrase to mean something completely different, for legal purposes, from its normal meaning. An example from a completely different subject area: in some US states, driving at a speed more than 15mph over the limit is "legally defined" to be "reckless driving". So somebody who drove at 70 mph when the highway limit was 55, on a road with no other traffic and perfect visibility for miles, could be convicted of "reckless driving". (Before you ask, no it didn't happen to me. Just an example.)
The way the GPL is worded I don't think you can say that. Now morally you've got a point,
No, morally he does not have a point. Nobody is forced to release their work under the GPL. It is a clearly-written license. You can't voluntarily choose to license under the GPL one day, then turn round and say "but I didn't mean you could use the software to run a business" the next day.
Nothing new here, it's exactly what Paypal was meant to be for. Unfortunately, Paypal does the job very badly and is very greedy (they take 10%). What we need is not yet another article about what a great idea micropayments are, but a competitor to Paypal that:
1. Doesn't keep screwing up
2. Charges 3% or less
Since the whole process of collecting the micropayments can be automated, a properly-run Paypal competitor should be able to charge just 1% over what the banks charge it, and still make money. Even when micropayments are measured in cents, not dollars. People, if we want a web not clogged by ads, we are going to have to pay for it. But, web-based businesses, your running costs per user are next to zero, so you're going to have to charge close to zero.
I'de be willing to bet that while Java is real popular, you would get much higher pay for fortran.
Well, duh. You'd have to pay me a lot more bucks to agree to undergo the torture of programming in fortrash than in any of C++/Java/C etc.
These slides present Microsoft's position cleverly. They are well thought out, and the material is intelligently organized. It is clearly the work of an experienced presenter, not some nerd halfway through a CS program.
Nobody from MS has disowned the slides.
None of this is proof (what kind of proof do you want, anyway?), but in my opinion these slides are probably authentic.