GnuCash is a long program (well at work we deal with about 150 times that much code..) but from a user perspective of someone who's known better, it sucks.
GNUCash as an application--once it is built--is really not all that bad. The badness comes from the laziness programmed into Quicken users by Intuit, who are then stubborn to anything more formal, like GNUCash's double-entry system.
GNUCash as a software architecture is pretty darn bad, but--once it is built--does its job reasonably well.
ahem, I just installed gnucash, it was difficult,...
You are missing the point. The debian developers did all the hard work for you. You didn't hear their cursing, nor their grumbling, nor their heads hitting the wall.
GNOME apps are a PITA on non-Linux systems. Thankfully, Sun engineers are beginning to do the cursing for us in Solaris...but still not enough to get GNUCash to compile easily.
You're complaining they use libraries for HTTP and XML?
Actually, the complaints should be pointed towards crap like g-wrap, which changes its freakin directory structure between minor releases. Can't compile with g-wrap X.Y.A but can with X.Y.B...wtf?
Some of GNUCash's dependencies should clearly be internalized into the application.
(most of these people aren't newbies to Linux either.)
Like that space race thing, someone should put up a $1 million reward to anyone who can get the latest version of GNUCash to build and run under Solaris (or other non-Linux environments, for that matter).
Most parents will approve of this for safety reasons.
Those are the same parents responsible for the decline of the free world, too. People cannot be free in a surveillence state. It is simply not possible.
500 cameras, say at least 10KB/sec per camera, that's 5 MB/sec, 18 GB/hour, at least 8 hours a day, so about 150GB a day. About 200 days in a school year, 30 tera bytes/year.
What, you see a problem in putting off the lab supplies and new textbooks in favor of a $15,000 RAID array? Think of the children, man! Think of the children!!!
Now, all the parents can watch their children do nothing all day, because the school could only afford the camera system and nothing else.
I certainly hope they don't increase taxes over this. I'd pay for textbooks, but not some contrived surveillence scheme.
"If you don't do something about (PERSON X) and (PERSON Y) picking on me, I'll just tell the Principal to review the tapes."
Teach our kids about coersion and blackmail. You are a genius!
A lot of kids (myself included) come away from the public school system with a REALLY negative attitude...
That's because the public school system is essentially a failure, and no amount of cameras will fix that. This is why it is essential for private schools and home schooling to pick up the slack leaving public schools to become even more the daycare system for delinquent parents and hopeless children. It will come to a point where every public school teacher will either also be a Marine or a Prison Warden, making the public schools effectively a part of the prison system. When that happens, all they need to do is build a razor-wire fence, and the transformation is complete.
You make a good point. So many of these cameras will be vandalized that the whole project will turn into a rediculous money pit that should make the taxpayers so angry smoke shoots out of their ears. They don't say how much these things are going to cost--but I would bet it is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (I wonder if they bitch about having no money about textbooks...).
This sort of thing shouldn't be for the benefits of the police or the administration... it should allow the parents to keep an eye out for their kids.
Class webcams are not the answer for you. What you want is a camera in your kid's underwear, so you know that he/she isn't doing anything counter to your imagined idealism about children or, perhaps, a dogmatic fantasy about morality.
...if my parents had an idea the kind of crap I soaked up as a kid, I would have had a much easier young life.
Mommy and daddy would have come and bailed you out of all the problems you faced and bought you an ice cream cone to make it all better?
The idea that Mr. Blair has to periodically submit himself to fairly brutal question-and-answer sessions there is something that I wish we could implement in the U.S.
The US has this, but the president keeps changing the subject when asked really hard questions. You should watch the press conferences. Sometimes a journalist will become frustrated (you didn't answer my question...) and he is simply cut off in favor of the next journalist.
I mean like it's not like teachers these days are under that much stress anyway.
The family unit has failed, and the public schools are among the victims. We now live in a culture, where children cannot rely on their parents and parents cannot rely on their children, so the GOVERNMENT has to step in, shove a thermometer up everyones ass, and say that as long as everyone conforms to an artifical program of conformance to hackneyed legislated projects that everything will be just dandy.
Cameras will do anything BUT interfere with teaching.
It will quench the great teachers and allow mediocrity to flourish. I'm not sure I want a teacher whose greatest skill is conforming to bureaucratic mandate.
The real problem is a pervasive counter-productive culture among our kids, where learning is bad but inseminating the bitches and dreaming of busting a cap is cool.
Fuck the Biloxi schools and their damn cameras. The school administration there is naive, weak, pessimistic, and ignorant. The fact that we trust each other so little that we have to have our every action watched and recorded is so fucking sick that it is living proof the USA peaked long long ago.
It needs to regulated sort of how food stamps are by not letting those items be bought without a sales tax...
Get rid of food stamps, too. Food is not expensive.
Poor kids don't need Tony the Tiger, nor do they need to sweat Gatorade to get by. If a family can't budget for food, then I don't know how to help them.
And if a parent can't choose between buying beer and supporting his/her children, then their problems are far beyond the federal government's reach.
People see them only having a spoiling effect -- voting third party has the same effect as staying home, as far as the results are concerned.
This is the problem--people don't see their vote counting as a voice. So, they make a weak choice and vote for the Republocrat or the Demolican running on the ballot.
Is this the future we want? Two insanely powerful groups of people more or less able to stay in power indefinitely? Are we so inherently weak that going with the "winning" team is the only choice left to us?
Americans used to be optimists setting an example to the rest of the world. What happened? Now we are so fat and lazy that only federalized health care (Democrats) or waging war on the world (Republicans) is the only way we will survive? We just sit back into our cushy sofa, watch CNN, and suck of the US Government propery milk bottle provided to each and every American each morning?
You forgot to ask about the children! By God, think of the children!
And, pray tell, what will we do with all the hobbyists?
Well, it will probably end up like the automotive industry, where regulations took much of the fun away. I guess, with modern cars, unless you use only carfully selected replacement parts, you end up with something that can only be driven "off road" (i.e., you tow it to a race track and then tow it back home). Perhaps, this is why all people seem to do, anymore, is ruin their ten-year-old Neon with crappy wheels, spoilers, and a exhaust thingy and think they are cool. If I were to be an automotive hobbyist, I would probably have to restore pre-1970s cars.
What happens when someone makes a mistake?
Like other engineering firms, software companies should be liable for situations where lives are at stake or where time == money (what did Bill Gates say, two weeks lost per person per year due to Windows 9x?).
When will we see reliable and reputable, under penalty of legal action, firms which check and authorize "secure" code from companies?
The software industry is still at a point where people will not pay for quality, except at the very high end of UNIX servers and Mainframes. Even UNIX workstations are being displaced by Windows PCs (this really makes me ill--at least Linux will rescue people from their own naivete...one day).
When will we see a Commercial Software Secure Standard?
Well, there are Common Criteria standards, other MILSPEC things, and the Capability Maturity Model, for example. However, these things increase the barriers to success by such a huge margin that practically no one but the government will foot the bill. It will get to the point, like other industries, where there will be the "Big 3" of commercial software. If it ever gets to be the "Big 1" (aka, Microsoft), then I will simply leave the software industry entirely (it simply isn't worth it at that point).
When will we see a Computer User's Bill of Rights?
Would it come with a EULA voiding any warranty of its weight in court? If such a "bill of rights" was created, it should be no longer than the first 10 amendments of the US Constitution. Otherwise, no one will understand them to care.
...should I trust someone who only wants my money? Why should I trust a monopolizer?
Absolutely not. The people and companies who went whole-hog with Microsoft are starting to look pretty foolish, now. Worms, viruses, trojans, crashes, proprietary file formats, obfuscated communications protocols...this is what they paid good money for!
So then, are computers truly "secure" to begin with? Can we trust *anything* a computer says?
No. And, no. Ultimately a computer is only as secure as the people who use it and the people who created it. The only way to truly secure computers, then, is to kill all the people...and all the extraterrestrials who might come to earth after all the locals are gone.
When *are* they?
If you design and fabricate your own microprocessor and peripheral busses, write your own compiler in assembly code, and, then, write all your own software, then you can rest assured no one else has mucked around behind the scenes. That is, as long as you never network your computer or let other people near it, either.
Fifty years ago, health care in the United States was relatively unregulated, and we had the best health care in the world bar-none. Medical insurance was cheap and easily available, and the destitute had access to free charity medical care. But thirty years of intensive government meddling has left our health care system in shambles.
Agreed. Removing the individual consumer from the picture also removes the most powerful price check available. If doctors try to charge too much, individuals can tell doctors where to stuff the bill, but with nationalized health care, we have to rely on the federal government to do our negotiating for us--and we all know how effective the federal government is at controlling costs.
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I've been using Quicken since version 1, and I still remember the horror the first time I saw banner ads inside a program I paid good money to use.
Quicken started out good, then they got very popular, then they got very greedy, and now they are just assholes. That about sums it up.
GnuCash is a long program (well at work we deal with about 150 times that much code..) but from a user perspective of someone who's known better, it sucks.
GNUCash as an application--once it is built--is really not all that bad. The badness comes from the laziness programmed into Quicken users by Intuit, who are then stubborn to anything more formal, like GNUCash's double-entry system.
GNUCash as a software architecture is pretty darn bad, but--once it is built--does its job reasonably well.
ahem, I just installed gnucash, it was difficult,...
You are missing the point. The debian developers did all the hard work for you. You didn't hear their cursing, nor their grumbling, nor their heads hitting the wall.
GNOME apps are a PITA on non-Linux systems. Thankfully, Sun engineers are beginning to do the cursing for us in Solaris...but still not enough to get GNUCash to compile easily.
You're complaining they use libraries for HTTP and XML?
Actually, the complaints should be pointed towards crap like g-wrap, which changes its freakin directory structure between minor releases. Can't compile with g-wrap X.Y.A but can with X.Y.B...wtf?
Some of GNUCash's dependencies should clearly be internalized into the application.
(most of these people aren't newbies to Linux either.)
Like that space race thing, someone should put up a $1 million reward to anyone who can get the latest version of GNUCash to build and run under Solaris (or other non-Linux environments, for that matter).
Most parents will approve of this for safety reasons.
Those are the same parents responsible for the decline of the free world, too. People cannot be free in a surveillence state. It is simply not possible.
I assume that means that there isn't a general website where people can view the feeds.
No, you will need one of those "porn pay" or whatever single-sign-on IDs to access them. The login page is www.hotyoungprepubescenthookers.com.
500 cameras, say at least 10KB/sec per camera, that's 5 MB/sec, 18 GB/hour, at least 8 hours a day, so about 150GB a day. About 200 days in a school year, 30 tera bytes/year.
What, you see a problem in putting off the lab supplies and new textbooks in favor of a $15,000 RAID array? Think of the children, man! Think of the children!!!
Now, all the parents can watch their children do nothing all day, because the school could only afford the camera system and nothing else.
I certainly hope they don't increase taxes over this. I'd pay for textbooks, but not some contrived surveillence scheme.
"If you don't do something about (PERSON X) and (PERSON Y) picking on me, I'll just tell the Principal to review the tapes."
Teach our kids about coersion and blackmail. You are a genius!
A lot of kids (myself included) come away from the public school system with a REALLY negative attitude...
That's because the public school system is essentially a failure, and no amount of cameras will fix that. This is why it is essential for private schools and home schooling to pick up the slack leaving public schools to become even more the daycare system for delinquent parents and hopeless children. It will come to a point where every public school teacher will either also be a Marine or a Prison Warden, making the public schools effectively a part of the prison system. When that happens, all they need to do is build a razor-wire fence, and the transformation is complete.
I was frequently yelled at by the principal for kicking particular students out of class.
The problem isn't the cameras or the students; rather, it is the principal, in this case.
Cameras are a very weak band-aid solution to much more fundamental problems.
If your boss wants to watch you, your emails, your net activity, whatever, that's their perogative.
It is also the employees' perogative to quit. If not, then we just lost 100 years of progress in employee empowerment, right?
...adding microphones is going one step too far.
But you could set up one hell of a class clown farting sounds fan site.
Could children have any fun in front of these cameras???
...they WILL destroy/render it useless.
You make a good point. So many of these cameras will be vandalized that the whole project will turn into a rediculous money pit that should make the taxpayers so angry smoke shoots out of their ears. They don't say how much these things are going to cost--but I would bet it is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (I wonder if they bitch about having no money about textbooks...).
This sort of thing shouldn't be for the benefits of the police or the administration... it should allow the parents to keep an eye out for their kids.
...if my parents had an idea the kind of crap I soaked up as a kid, I would have had a much easier young life.
Class webcams are not the answer for you. What you want is a camera in your kid's underwear, so you know that he/she isn't doing anything counter to your imagined idealism about children or, perhaps, a dogmatic fantasy about morality.
Mommy and daddy would have come and bailed you out of all the problems you faced and bought you an ice cream cone to make it all better?
The idea that Mr. Blair has to periodically submit himself to fairly brutal question-and-answer sessions there is something that I wish we could implement in the U.S.
The US has this, but the president keeps changing the subject when asked really hard questions. You should watch the press conferences. Sometimes a journalist will become frustrated (you didn't answer my question...) and he is simply cut off in favor of the next journalist.
I mean like it's not like teachers these days are under that much stress anyway.
The family unit has failed, and the public schools are among the victims. We now live in a culture, where children cannot rely on their parents and parents cannot rely on their children, so the GOVERNMENT has to step in, shove a thermometer up everyones ass, and say that as long as everyone conforms to an artifical program of conformance to hackneyed legislated projects that everything will be just dandy.
Cameras will do anything BUT interfere with teaching.
It will quench the great teachers and allow mediocrity to flourish. I'm not sure I want a teacher whose greatest skill is conforming to bureaucratic mandate.
The real problem is a pervasive counter-productive culture among our kids, where learning is bad but inseminating the bitches and dreaming of busting a cap is cool.
Fuck the Biloxi schools and their damn cameras. The school administration there is naive, weak, pessimistic, and ignorant. The fact that we trust each other so little that we have to have our every action watched and recorded is so fucking sick that it is living proof the USA peaked long long ago.
...Microsoft
Microsoft is a Fortune 500 company, right?
Once it finds a vulnerable system, it will spawn a shell on port 4444 and use it to download the actual worm via tftp.
HAHAHA!!! You bought it, you deal with it, suckers!
It needs to regulated sort of how food stamps are by not letting those items be bought without a sales tax...
Get rid of food stamps, too. Food is not expensive.
Poor kids don't need Tony the Tiger, nor do they need to sweat Gatorade to get by. If a family can't budget for food, then I don't know how to help them.
And if a parent can't choose between buying beer and supporting his/her children, then their problems are far beyond the federal government's reach.
Nearly all personal hygiene products should be exempt from sales tax.
Soap, at least. It helps keep poor people from catching every damn communicable disease they come by.
No, but I believe diseases grow in poverty.
We would get a lot more milage by making soap and condoms available to everyone, and teaching them how to use them.
It doesn't take a prescription in every pot to do tremendous amounts of good for the poor.
People see them only having a spoiling effect -- voting third party has the same effect as staying home, as far as the results are concerned.
This is the problem--people don't see their vote counting as a voice. So, they make a weak choice and vote for the Republocrat or the Demolican running on the ballot.
Is this the future we want? Two insanely powerful groups of people more or less able to stay in power indefinitely? Are we so inherently weak that going with the "winning" team is the only choice left to us?
Americans used to be optimists setting an example to the rest of the world. What happened? Now we are so fat and lazy that only federalized health care (Democrats) or waging war on the world (Republicans) is the only way we will survive? We just sit back into our cushy sofa, watch CNN, and suck of the US Government propery milk bottle provided to each and every American each morning?
How many questions did I just ask?
...should I trust someone who only wants my money? Why should I trust a monopolizer?
You forgot to ask about the children! By God, think of the children!
And, pray tell, what will we do with all the hobbyists?
Well, it will probably end up like the automotive industry, where regulations took much of the fun away. I guess, with modern cars, unless you use only carfully selected replacement parts, you end up with something that can only be driven "off road" (i.e., you tow it to a race track and then tow it back home). Perhaps, this is why all people seem to do, anymore, is ruin their ten-year-old Neon with crappy wheels, spoilers, and a exhaust thingy and think they are cool. If I were to be an automotive hobbyist, I would probably have to restore pre-1970s cars.
What happens when someone makes a mistake?
Like other engineering firms, software companies should be liable for situations where lives are at stake or where time == money (what did Bill Gates say, two weeks lost per person per year due to Windows 9x?).
When will we see reliable and reputable, under penalty of legal action, firms which check and authorize "secure" code from companies?
The software industry is still at a point where people will not pay for quality, except at the very high end of UNIX servers and Mainframes. Even UNIX workstations are being displaced by Windows PCs (this really makes me ill--at least Linux will rescue people from their own naivete...one day).
When will we see a Commercial Software Secure Standard?
Well, there are Common Criteria standards, other MILSPEC things, and the Capability Maturity Model, for example. However, these things increase the barriers to success by such a huge margin that practically no one but the government will foot the bill. It will get to the point, like other industries, where there will be the "Big 3" of commercial software. If it ever gets to be the "Big 1" (aka, Microsoft), then I will simply leave the software industry entirely (it simply isn't worth it at that point).
When will we see a Computer User's Bill of Rights?
Would it come with a EULA voiding any warranty of its weight in court? If such a "bill of rights" was created, it should be no longer than the first 10 amendments of the US Constitution. Otherwise, no one will understand them to care.
Absolutely not. The people and companies who went whole-hog with Microsoft are starting to look pretty foolish, now. Worms, viruses, trojans, crashes, proprietary file formats, obfuscated communications protocols...this is what they paid good money for!
So then, are computers truly "secure" to begin with? Can we trust *anything* a computer says?
No. And, no. Ultimately a computer is only as secure as the people who use it and the people who created it. The only way to truly secure computers, then, is to kill all the people...and all the extraterrestrials who might come to earth after all the locals are gone.
When *are* they?
If you design and fabricate your own microprocessor and peripheral busses, write your own compiler in assembly code, and, then, write all your own software, then you can rest assured no one else has mucked around behind the scenes. That is, as long as you never network your computer or let other people near it, either.
Fifty years ago, health care in the United States was relatively unregulated, and we had the best health care in the world bar-none. Medical insurance was cheap and easily available, and the destitute had access to free charity medical care. But thirty years of intensive government meddling has left our health care system in shambles.
Agreed. Removing the individual consumer from the picture also removes the most powerful price check available. If doctors try to charge too much, individuals can tell doctors where to stuff the bill, but with nationalized health care, we have to rely on the federal government to do our negotiating for us--and we all know how effective the federal government is at controlling costs.