But I also believe that constructive conversations on an idea are inherently good. My post here, and sometimes elsewhere, is to convince others that it is as well.
Fair enough and I apologize for the tone of my reply. In context, you are right that/. is a valid place to begin a discussion on the topic.
I disagree with your solution, and take exception to the idea that a solution to the problem is simple, but I overreacted. Suggesting that you shouldn't bother discussing it at all was just plain stupid on my part. Maybe I hadn't had enough coffee yet or something. I try to avoid/. arguments and I certainly don't like starting them!:)
I'll try to reply more sanely now.
Kids in rich neighbourhoods ALREADY get more money than kids in poor neighbourhoods (at least if the U.S. system works anything like the Canadian). The reason why I felt this system has a good chance at being acceptable is it doesn't start by turning the system on its head. A system that pays all schools equally from the get-go simply wouldn't have any political traction.
In the U.S. the money comes from four sources. The Federal tax base, the State tax base, the municipality, and the local community. The Municipality tends to give to schools in a more-or-less even fashion with the money they bring to the table, but the money offered by the federal and state government is apportioned to give more to schools in a lower socio-economic area than to schools that are already affluent. You'd think that this would give poorer schools the advantage, but it doesn't, because that is only 3/4 of the picture. The community, through donations and fund drives brings more money and resources to the table. These monies and resources are given directly to the school that the giver wants. In other words, schools that are fed from wealthy neighborhoods are given egregiously more than schools that are fed from poor neighborhoods. They get used computers, grants, volunteers (yes the affluent can and do volunteer FAR more than people who are working excessive hours just to make ends meet), and other non-tangibles. The end effect is that poor schools, despite starting with a marginal lead in funding (from Title 1 [Special Needs] funds and such) still end up behind rich schools.
This problem isn't easy to overcome because it would be near impossible to convince a parent to continue giving to the schools as they always have if the gift was apportioned by need instead of directly to benefit the parent's child's school.
So, despite claims that American's dislike 'socialist' structure and entitlement programs, we have maintained a pretty decent entitlement-based school system for a while. But such entitlements simply cannot match the resources brought to bear at a good upper end public school. A real-world example:
At my elementary school (the one I went to as a kid) they recently had a fund drive for supplies and raised $3,500, which was a substantial amount for that neighborhood! It was a noteworthy amount.
At another elementary school in the same year, that is fed by wealthy families (but not by ANY means the wealthiest in the city!), they raised around $32,000. That's nearly an order of magnitude difference. But we can't just take that money frome the parents that raised it to give to other kids. If we did, that would be the last time the parents gave so much, moreover, you'd see many of them pull their kids to a private education, thereby causing more funding problems for the municipality (they are paid from the fed and state by the student head). Also, how do you apportion parental volunteerism? A parent who is well off and afford to take time to help the school and the kids in that school. They simple will not accept being told that they must drive to another less affluent part of town to help those other kids instead. They won't do it. So what happens? Well off schools are
Re:This is cronyism at its finest
on
More A's, More Pay
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Schools earn x-y dollars per student where the actual value is determined by an objective performance measurement
Excellent. Schools that suffer the poorest performance, hence need the most help, get the least funding. Bravo. You've managed to reverse engineer the existing problem to perfection while maintaining that your new and fresh 'solution' is a bright alternative. You have a strong future in School Board politics.
Seriously, the vast vast vast majority of people who complain about and make decisions about our educational system know little to nothing about how it works under the hood. If you are serious about offering a solution, study the problem properly and in full, then come up with some ideas. Bounce those ideas off of others who've done the same. If you are not serious about offering a solution, then quit spouting off on chat boards about how 'simple' that solution assuredly is.
Society's toughest problems are not simple. They can't be solved by the average/. reader. They require serious study and research. They require hard work and years of trial and error. Also, they do not need people on the sidelines telling them how easy the problem is if on;y those doing the heavy lifting would just listen to the armchair social policy experts in the audience.
I don't disagree that Python is a good language, that makes development easy, but I'm not talking about languages. I'm talking frameworks---one totally divorced from the languages used to code against it. Python is great, but it's not even in the ballpark of.NET's scope, power and flexibility (Oh man, I am SO gonna get a/. beatdown over that comment ).
Python is to Linux as VB is to Windows. That has its place, and I'm glad it's there, but I mean a framework that would have compile to a VM that sits above the OS (perhaps even in userspace!) and that has bindings for c#, python, ruby, smalltalk, etc...).
I haven't thought through the details fully, and I could be totally wrong (wouldn't be the first time) but I don't know of anything that makes coding on Linux as easy as coding against.NET (except mono and java, which being/potentially/ non-free causes us some problems).
Consider this the feedback of a Windows developer by trade who uses Linux exclusively at home. Anecdotal, but it's the opinion of many/most Windows developers. And they often won't go with mono becuase mono is consistently about 15 months behind MS in its API.
I'm a developer. I've made considerable money as a.NET developer, specifically, and while I am fully entrenched in the Free Software camp, I admit that I like the.NET framework overall. That said......The open source community has some of the best and brightest minds in the software world involved in its improvement. So the question that naturally follows is, "Why haven't we designed and implemented our own framework?"
Seriously, we spend endless hours debating which is less evil---java or mono---and we complain that both don't offer us the flexibility we have grown accustomed to in the F/OSS world, so why haven't we just started from scratch and done our own linux-centric framework to ease RAD work and simplify the task of getting started in Linux development.
I'm not suggesting it has a place everywhere. Certainly most kernel work and most driver work would need to stay C-based, but if we had a framework designed from the ground up to open Gnome and KDE devlopment (well, userspace development in general, really) it would get used. There's obviously a market for it. Developers argue over Java and.NET/Mono endlessly as to which is best for Linux development, which is faster, which is easier, which is just plain better. Write in whatever language you want, but write to the framework that best opens Linux up the developer. Without question, that would be the framework that was written specifically for it.
I dunno. There may be good reasons, but I don't see them from my vantage point.
Til I see a solid and Free alternative, I'm gonna stick with Mono (which I'm impressed with so far), but I'll keep my eye out.
If you can show how you specifically voted outside the voting booth, then you can sell your vote or (arguably) worse can have your vote coerced away from you.
You want to see how you voted, then print a paper ballot from the machine that shows---IN PLAIN TEXT---what your vote was. Place that paper in the ballot box. The paper is anonymous. You don't carry home a receipt. If the vote needs to be recounted by hand any volunteer with an 85 or higher I.Q. can be employed to do a manual recount based on the plain text version to compare against to ballot box's count of bar codes. If they don't agree, something went awry.
This is simple stuff. We don't need encryption, web 2.0 interfaces, juggling monkeys, or moon rock sculptures! We need 3 things:
1) a way for the computer to count fast (barcode or some such) 2) a way for the voter to see what he's voted for (plain text on the same bar coded ballot) 3) a way to do a manual recount for verification (see "plain text" comment above
I agree, and I think most Linux folks would agree as well, that hardware support is important and is a priority, but blaming Linux for its lack of hardware support is just retarded.
Linux, unlike Microsoft, doesn't always have access to specs. They can't support hardware that they can't reverse engineer. They will always be behind the curve. But to blame Linux because hardware manufacturers don't write drivers for the platform and don't' release specs for Linux developers to write drivers for them is to misplace the blame.
Could Linux make it easier to write drivers? Sure, in some ways. But in the end, the blame falls squarely on the hardware manufacturers. This is why you should thank those few manufacturers who take the time and effort to offer support to our platform of choice.
But don't take potshots at Linux for something totally out of its control. It's either ignorant or disingenuous---and either way has no place in real journalism.
I'd say that's a fair assessment of my post. Actually, I do have some problems with him as a Senator (and I also liked him as Governor) that aren't just related to him strong allegiance to the current president, but I didn't want to get too far into Va politics in this thread.
He's made some decisions as senator that I vehemently disagree with. I'm not exactly excited about Webb (who is?) but I think he'll be marginally better than what we have now. I wish I could be more positive about our senatorial choices this year.:( At least we still have Warner!:)
Also unsurprising was George Allen, a first-term Virginia Republican who won the top score in the Senate, at 78 percent, after becoming chairman of the Senate High Tech Task Force five years ago.
Those of us from Virginia aren't surprised either. Senator Allen used to be our Governor where he spent consider energy and resources courting high tech companies and trying to bring legislation to the table that made us an attractive option for technology companies in search of a headquarters. As Governor, his approval rating was pretty damn high.
That said, as a Senator, he has not fared so well in the polls. He may be friendly to technology interests (apparently 78% friendly?) which is expected given his history on the subject, but he's even friendly to President Bush (apparently 96% friendly?) and that doesn't sit well with a nation or a state that isn't interested in more of the same right now.
I guess what I'm driving at here is that while our pet interest might be in technology, we can't let that drive our vote. It's an important issue category, but it's only one of many and on many other counts these people may be doing quite a poor job. I'd argue that voting so closely with President Bush's interests (seriously 96% is A LOT!) shows me that a great governor does not necessarily make a good senator. I suspect he is just courting the RNC because there has been talk of him being a serious presidential contender in the near future. I know you have to sell a little of your soul to get anywhere in politics nowadays, but I can't in good conscience vote for someone who does it so thoroughly and so blatantly...even if he is good on technology.
I think of a dozen things that would benefit the poor way before we start thinking about fucking PCs.
And yet here you are wasting your time ranting on/.
Seriously, get over it. People give what they are able to give. The people who started this project don't know how to get potable water to the middle of a desert or properly distribute condoms and sex education to AIDs-ravaged Africa. Nope. They know how to make computers. That's how they can help.
So quit bitching about other people not offering the right kind of help to the poor. You are not the arbiter of what sort of help is best to offer. Spend your time examining your own charitable works. Make improvements there and, for God's sake, stop criticising others who are actually doing some good in the fucking world. You aren't helping things.
Hatch is among the more conservative politicians on the issues of 'digital privacy' and 'fair use,'
Hatch is most certainly not conservative on the issues of digital privacy and fair use. He is strongly in the camp of the Republicans, a political party that has co-opted the use of the term 'conservative' in an attempt to make it mean something that it doesn't!
Traditionally, the conservative view on privacy and personal rights is almost precisely the opposite of its use in the above context. Conservatives have a history of fighting government intrusion into their personal and private lives. I wish I knew where those conservatives were now. I'd probably vote for one if I met him. All I can choose between now are these 'neo-conservatives' whose only interest is in conserving the power elite's status quo and these 'progressives' whose only interest seems to be progressing 50 or so incompatible agendii from their various special interest groups.
I know I'm fighting a losing battle in the War of Semantics here, but damn, it's just disheartening.
I have to admit that the number of emails surprised me. 74 million just doesn't seem like that much for a 2 year period. I'm not a spammer, but it just seems like they couldn't have been maxing out their pipe. I dunno. The spam business model confuses me a bit, anyway, but really, if I have a list of addresses that is, say, 1 million large (seems reasonable from what I've heard) that means they only send out 74 iterations over the span of 730 days. That's like less than one iteration a week. Does it take a week to push out a million simple text messages? What do they do for the other 9 days?
I'm not trying to learn the craft of "spammery" or whatever, it's just that the numbers seemed low. I guess I just had this impression that they sent out like a million a day or something.
Although I may not be a fan of M$, I am a fan of anything anti-spam
Here's my shocking intro: I'm not for just "anything" anti-spam.
I've said all this before on/., but let me explain again:
The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) so-called spam solution is being adopted all over the place without nary a complaint. But think about it. Tim Berners-Lee didn't just envision a web of equitable bandwidth, he envisioned a web of peers---a web of end points, all equally valid. What happens when my system is no longer considered a valid end point? Suddenly, we have a network of clients and servers rather than peers. When the SPF process looks to verify that the sender is the one valid smtp server for the mail address' domain (based on either MX or A records), it devalues all non-domain level systems on the web. Peers on the network become clients, fed valid packets from those servers that are approved to pass said packets. The SMTP semantic paradigm moves from Sender>Receiver to Server>Client.
But no one really cares because there is some belief that this will help reduce spam. It will, but so will turning off our mail clients. Neither is the right solution. The solution is a newer, better mail protocol, many of which have been proposed that DO NOT devalue the peers of the network. Probably one of the better known of the examples is the IM2000 protocol.
But we'd rather have a network of tiered rights, I suppose, than deal with the mess of changing a protocol for real.
In programming cicrles, this is called cruft. "What, the exosting app doesn't do all that's needed becuase we didn't think we'd need this functionality? Then just tack that functionality on it." Sometimes it makes sense to add small functional differences to an extant app. Sometimes it makes more sense to just move to an app that does what you want out of the box instead. This is an example of the second, but as a community, the Internet seems to have decided to do the first. the ISP's love it. It further adds control in their own hands (server-client models make them more powerful online) but why in God's name should we agree to use it?
...is out of his jurisdiction. Using "heals" instead of "heels" is a vocabulary issue, not a grammar issue. So is using "grammar" to describe a "vocabulary" inaccuracy. Grammar deals mostly with syntax and morphology. It has only a secondary interest in semantics due to its interest in morphology.
Like what? I haven't heard of anything fundamentally new from them.
When I wrote that I was thinking specifically of the new init stuff they are rolling out with Edgy Eft. Pretty neat stuff, and to the best of my knowledge not found elsewhere. They've done a few things like that, though overall I agree that most of their work is done standing on the shoulders of Debian.
Ask Google, who gets the best engineers in the world partly because the impression that "they are cool".
I stand corrected. That's a good counterexample. I still argue that it's the exception and not the norm, whereas in Free software it's the norm, but my original claim was perhaps too broad a statement. I should remember to avoid "always", "never", and similar boundless terms. They are difficult to defend.:)
WTF? The only "cool kids" buying plastic consumer goods advertised by the likes of Bono are younger teens. Bono and cool just don't sit together but there's another word beginning with 'c' that is quite appropriate.
Not sure I follow your logic here, but I'm sure you understand that the iPod isn't the top of the heap for technical, objective reasons but rather because it's just popular with the right crowd. Either way, the iPod is used in this context as an analogy. Be careful not to overthink anyone's analogies. They tend to break when under too much pressure.
I've seen posts by you before, you take your narrow world view and provide a high level commentry based on this flawed or limited understanding. Are you trying to come over like an arrogant asshole?
I do sometimes come across that way, yes. It's not my intent. Of course, though you ended with a question mark, you weren't really asking a question, but rather just trying to insult me. Not sure what place that has in reasonable discussion. I understand that on the Internet you feel freer to insult people, but it won't win you any real friends or influence the audience to whom you seem to be playing. Rational discourse has no place for the Ad Hominim arguments you are using here.
Sorry you don't like my comments. You can add be as a Foe or whatever and them set an automatic downmod for all foes. I think that'll keep me off your/. radar. I don't set any foes myself, as I tend to like to hear different viewpoints. You may not. That should help solve your problem. Of course, you'll have to log in as a real user to do that. AC's don't get to keep a Friends/Foes list, I don't think.
What implications will this have for SuSE users, and ReiserFS's future as a whole?
Assuming this wasn't a rhetorical question, I'd say the answer is that the ReiserFS will be impacted only slightly by Novell's decision. The far bigger impact will be from a criminal conviction. Free Software is about community and community is all about those subjective intangibles like reputation, "coolness", and mob effects.
Whether we like it or not, this highlights a serious problem with the development model. Likewise, it indirectly highlights one of its strengths. Free software programmers are very much pack animals, like the rest of us. We tend to folllow the herd (I don't mean that in the modern "bad" sense of the phrase. We stick with those we know and enjoy hanging with. We do things we perceive subjectively as fun or cool. We join projects that interest us, we leave projects that offend or dissappoint or bore us. With the GPL, a company that relies on a no-longer-cool project can always pick up the banner and try to reinvigorate interest, but in the end the projects that have momentum have it because they have that special unnamable something that brings people to the fold.
Ubuntu got the right press from the right people at the right time. Is it better than Fedora or Mandriva or whatever? Of course not. But it's market mindshare is through the roof from a perfect storm of developers that got interested in the things Mark Shuttleworth was preaching. They were NOT tempted by technology. The followed the herd, and lo and behold, now Ubuntu Is doing technically cool things. Now, with all this backing and interest, they ARE moving ahead of Fedora and Mandriva in some core ways. That happens in Free software. It does not ever happen in proprietary software, which is purely driven by corporate interest.
If the ReiserFS falls it will be for the same reason we will eventually have an iPod Killer---because eventually the cool kids that tend to lead the pack will decide there are better things to do. A murder conviction might just cause that. Novell's decision is a symptom of that, not a cause of it.
at least do something cool while you have the opportunity and lack of responsibilities.
Seriously? You're not kidding? Wake up dude. I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but if you can't make your life "cool" without an employer's direction, you have large problems.
Screw that. Work is about one thing: Trading time for money. You want that ratio to be as far in your favor as possible. Period. Let them keep their benefits and culture and intangibles, roll them in a tight ball, and shove them squarely up their corporate tax return.
I'll give a company free time when I see them start giving me free time. They will never. Neither will I.
Without commenting on SETI's chances of success (because that's just idle speculation for both of us) it's worth noting that your claim implicitly assumes a natural denoument in technologically advanced species. You seem to be advocating that there is naturally both a start and a stop to advanced species.
Not to sound too "Law and Order" about it, but I object. Facts not in evidence. We have no idea what happens when a species advances beyond the point at which we are currently advances, let alone do we know what happens statistically to those civilizations over the course of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of iteratons of the pattern.
That a civilization started millenia before us in no way indicates that they aren't still around to interact with.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you can't know that you're right.
The biggest diff between the two, in my opinion, is the drastically different methodolgy they took to acheive 4-core status.
Intel took two dual cores and packaged them in one unit (but inside that unit they are actually just two separate dual core CPUs) whereas AMD has made an actual quad core single die CPU.
I'm not saying Intel's method is wrong or even disadvantaged, just that it's quite different. Intel will therefore get to market much quicker than AMD, I beleive, but once bother are on the shelves (sans benchmarks, which we don't have yet) my money is on AMD's solution being the performance winner. Still, getting the market first is a huge bonus and will give Intel the breating room to go back and make a true quad core single die CPU. Who knows how this will end? All I know is we win!:) I'm looking forward the 80 core CPU another slashdotter mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough and I apologize for the tone of my reply. In context, you are right that /. is a valid place to begin a discussion on the topic.
/. arguments and I certainly don't like starting them! :)
I disagree with your solution, and take exception to the idea that a solution to the problem is simple, but I overreacted. Suggesting that you shouldn't bother discussing it at all was just plain stupid on my part. Maybe I hadn't had enough coffee yet or something. I try to avoid
I'll try to reply more sanely now.
In the U.S. the money comes from four sources. The Federal tax base, the State tax base, the municipality, and the local community. The Municipality tends to give to schools in a more-or-less even fashion with the money they bring to the table, but the money offered by the federal and state government is apportioned to give more to schools in a lower socio-economic area than to schools that are already affluent. You'd think that this would give poorer schools the advantage, but it doesn't, because that is only 3/4 of the picture. The community, through donations and fund drives brings more money and resources to the table. These monies and resources are given directly to the school that the giver wants. In other words, schools that are fed from wealthy neighborhoods are given egregiously more than schools that are fed from poor neighborhoods. They get used computers, grants, volunteers (yes the affluent can and do volunteer FAR more than people who are working excessive hours just to make ends meet), and other non-tangibles. The end effect is that poor schools, despite starting with a marginal lead in funding (from Title 1 [Special Needs] funds and such) still end up behind rich schools.
This problem isn't easy to overcome because it would be near impossible to convince a parent to continue giving to the schools as they always have if the gift was apportioned by need instead of directly to benefit the parent's child's school.
So, despite claims that American's dislike 'socialist' structure and entitlement programs, we have maintained a pretty decent entitlement-based school system for a while. But such entitlements simply cannot match the resources brought to bear at a good upper end public school. A real-world example:
At my elementary school (the one I went to as a kid) they recently had a fund drive for supplies and raised $3,500, which was a substantial amount for that neighborhood! It was a noteworthy amount.
At another elementary school in the same year, that is fed by wealthy families (but not by ANY means the wealthiest in the city!), they raised around $32,000. That's nearly an order of magnitude difference. But we can't just take that money frome the parents that raised it to give to other kids. If we did, that would be the last time the parents gave so much, moreover, you'd see many of them pull their kids to a private education, thereby causing more funding problems for the municipality (they are paid from the fed and state by the student head). Also, how do you apportion parental volunteerism? A parent who is well off and afford to take time to help the school and the kids in that school. They simple will not accept being told that they must drive to another less affluent part of town to help those other kids instead. They won't do it. So what happens? Well off schools are
Excellent. Schools that suffer the poorest performance, hence need the most help, get the least funding. Bravo. You've managed to reverse engineer the existing problem to perfection while maintaining that your new and fresh 'solution' is a bright alternative. You have a strong future in School Board politics.
Seriously, the vast vast vast majority of people who complain about and make decisions about our educational system know little to nothing about how it works under the hood. If you are serious about offering a solution, study the problem properly and in full, then come up with some ideas. Bounce those ideas off of others who've done the same. If you are not serious about offering a solution, then quit spouting off on chat boards about how 'simple' that solution assuredly is.
Society's toughest problems are not simple. They can't be solved by the average
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
I don't disagree that Python is a good language, that makes development easy, but I'm not talking about languages. I'm talking frameworks---one totally divorced from the languages used to code against it. Python is great, but it's not even in the ballpark of .NET's scope, power and flexibility (Oh man, I am SO gonna get a /. beatdown over that comment ).
.NET (except mono and java, which being /potentially/ non-free causes us some problems).
Python is to Linux as VB is to Windows. That has its place, and I'm glad it's there, but I mean a framework that would have compile to a VM that sits above the OS (perhaps even in userspace!) and that has bindings for c#, python, ruby, smalltalk, etc...).
I haven't thought through the details fully, and I could be totally wrong (wouldn't be the first time) but I don't know of anything that makes coding on Linux as easy as coding against
Consider this the feedback of a Windows developer by trade who uses Linux exclusively at home. Anecdotal, but it's the opinion of many/most Windows developers. And they often won't go with mono becuase mono is consistently about 15 months behind MS in its API.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
I'm a developer. I've made considerable money as a .NET developer, specifically, and while I am fully entrenched in the Free Software camp, I admit that I like the.NET framework overall. That said ... ...The open source community has some of the best and brightest minds in the software world involved in its improvement. So the question that naturally follows is, "Why haven't we designed and implemented our own framework?"
.NET/Mono endlessly as to which is best for Linux development, which is faster, which is easier, which is just plain better. Write in whatever language you want, but write to the framework that best opens Linux up the developer. Without question, that would be the framework that was written specifically for it.
Seriously, we spend endless hours debating which is less evil---java or mono---and we complain that both don't offer us the flexibility we have grown accustomed to in the F/OSS world, so why haven't we just started from scratch and done our own linux-centric framework to ease RAD work and simplify the task of getting started in Linux development.
I'm not suggesting it has a place everywhere. Certainly most kernel work and most driver work would need to stay C-based, but if we had a framework designed from the ground up to open Gnome and KDE devlopment (well, userspace development in general, really) it would get used. There's obviously a market for it. Developers argue over Java and
I dunno. There may be good reasons, but I don't see them from my vantage point.
Til I see a solid and Free alternative, I'm gonna stick with Mono (which I'm impressed with so far), but I'll keep my eye out.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
And over a full Library of Congress every three days! Wow! That's a whole lotta got-dang water!
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Running Fedora here. Could you post a yum comparison as well? Sorry to be so much trouble. Thanks!
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
If you can show how you specifically voted outside the voting booth, then you can sell your vote or (arguably) worse can have your vote coerced away from you.
You want to see how you voted, then print a paper ballot from the machine that shows---IN PLAIN TEXT---what your vote was. Place that paper in the ballot box. The paper is anonymous. You don't carry home a receipt. If the vote needs to be recounted by hand any volunteer with an 85 or higher I.Q. can be employed to do a manual recount based on the plain text version to compare against to ballot box's count of bar codes. If they don't agree, something went awry.
This is simple stuff. We don't need encryption, web 2.0 interfaces, juggling monkeys, or moon rock sculptures! We need 3 things:
1) a way for the computer to count fast (barcode or some such)
2) a way for the voter to see what he's voted for (plain text on the same bar coded ballot)
3) a way to do a manual recount for verification (see "plain text" comment above
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
I agree, and I think most Linux folks would agree as well, that hardware support is important and is a priority, but blaming Linux for its lack of hardware support is just retarded.
Linux, unlike Microsoft, doesn't always have access to specs. They can't support hardware that they can't reverse engineer. They will always be behind the curve. But to blame Linux because hardware manufacturers don't write drivers for the platform and don't' release specs for Linux developers to write drivers for them is to misplace the blame.
Could Linux make it easier to write drivers? Sure, in some ways. But in the end, the blame falls squarely on the hardware manufacturers. This is why you should thank those few manufacturers who take the time and effort to offer support to our platform of choice.
But don't take potshots at Linux for something totally out of its control. It's either ignorant or disingenuous---and either way has no place in real journalism.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
I'd say that's a fair assessment of my post. Actually, I do have some problems with him as a Senator (and I also liked him as Governor) that aren't just related to him strong allegiance to the current president, but I didn't want to get too far into Va politics in this thread.
:( At least we still have Warner! :)
He's made some decisions as senator that I vehemently disagree with. I'm not exactly excited about Webb (who is?) but I think he'll be marginally better than what we have now. I wish I could be more positive about our senatorial choices this year.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Those of us from Virginia aren't surprised either. Senator Allen used to be our Governor where he spent consider energy and resources courting high tech companies and trying to bring legislation to the table that made us an attractive option for technology companies in search of a headquarters. As Governor, his approval rating was pretty damn high.
That said, as a Senator, he has not fared so well in the polls. He may be friendly to technology interests (apparently 78% friendly?) which is expected given his history on the subject, but he's even friendly to President Bush (apparently 96% friendly?) and that doesn't sit well with a nation or a state that isn't interested in more of the same right now.
I guess what I'm driving at here is that while our pet interest might be in technology, we can't let that drive our vote. It's an important issue category, but it's only one of many and on many other counts these people may be doing quite a poor job. I'd argue that voting so closely with President Bush's interests (seriously 96% is A LOT!) shows me that a great governor does not necessarily make a good senator. I suspect he is just courting the RNC because there has been talk of him being a serious presidential contender in the near future. I know you have to sell a little of your soul to get anywhere in politics nowadays, but I can't in good conscience vote for someone who does it so thoroughly and so blatantly...even if he is good on technology.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
And yet here you are wasting your time ranting on
Seriously, get over it. People give what they are able to give. The people who started this project don't know how to get potable water to the middle of a desert or properly distribute condoms and sex education to AIDs-ravaged Africa. Nope. They know how to make computers. That's how they can help.
So quit bitching about other people not offering the right kind of help to the poor. You are not the arbiter of what sort of help is best to offer. Spend your time examining your own charitable works. Make improvements there and, for God's sake, stop criticising others who are actually doing some good in the fucking world. You aren't helping things.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Hatch is most certainly not conservative on the issues of digital privacy and fair use. He is strongly in the camp of the Republicans, a political party that has co-opted the use of the term 'conservative' in an attempt to make it mean something that it doesn't!
Traditionally, the conservative view on privacy and personal rights is almost precisely the opposite of its use in the above context. Conservatives have a history of fighting government intrusion into their personal and private lives. I wish I knew where those conservatives were now. I'd probably vote for one if I met him. All I can choose between now are these 'neo-conservatives' whose only interest is in conserving the power elite's status quo and these 'progressives' whose only interest seems to be progressing 50 or so incompatible agendii from their various special interest groups.
I know I'm fighting a losing battle in the War of Semantics here, but damn, it's just disheartening.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
P.S. And don't get me started about the Libertarians and the Green Party!
I have to admit that the number of emails surprised me. 74 million just doesn't seem like that much for a 2 year period. I'm not a spammer, but it just seems like they couldn't have been maxing out their pipe. I dunno. The spam business model confuses me a bit, anyway, but really, if I have a list of addresses that is, say, 1 million large (seems reasonable from what I've heard) that means they only send out 74 iterations over the span of 730 days. That's like less than one iteration a week. Does it take a week to push out a million simple text messages? What do they do for the other 9 days?
I'm not trying to learn the craft of "spammery" or whatever, it's just that the numbers seemed low. I guess I just had this impression that they sent out like a million a day or something.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Here's my shocking intro: I'm not for just "anything" anti-spam.
I've said all this before on
The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) so-called spam solution is being adopted all over the place without nary a complaint. But think about it. Tim Berners-Lee didn't just envision a web of equitable bandwidth, he envisioned a web of peers---a web of end points, all equally valid. What happens when my system is no longer considered a valid end point? Suddenly, we have a network of clients and servers rather than peers. When the SPF process looks to verify that the sender is the one valid smtp server for the mail address' domain (based on either MX or A records), it devalues all non-domain level systems on the web. Peers on the network become clients, fed valid packets from those servers that are approved to pass said packets. The SMTP semantic paradigm moves from Sender>Receiver to Server>Client.
But no one really cares because there is some belief that this will help reduce spam. It will, but so will turning off our mail clients. Neither is the right solution. The solution is a newer, better mail protocol, many of which have been proposed that DO NOT devalue the peers of the network. Probably one of the better known of the examples is the IM2000 protocol.
But we'd rather have a network of tiered rights, I suppose, than deal with the mess of changing a protocol for real.
In programming cicrles, this is called cruft. "What, the exosting app doesn't do all that's needed becuase we didn't think we'd need this functionality? Then just tack that functionality on it." Sometimes it makes sense to add small functional differences to an extant app. Sometimes it makes more sense to just move to an app that does what you want out of the box instead. This is an example of the second, but as a community, the Internet seems to have decided to do the first. the ISP's love it. It further adds control in their own hands (server-client models make them more powerful online) but why in God's name should we agree to use it?
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Indubiously and for surely.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
P.S. The "heals" thing was *SO* bugging the crap outta me, too.
You can laugh now. It's a joke.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
...the rest harvested from human energy siphoned off of the blissfully ignorant Matrix-dwellers. Hurray for alternative energy! :)
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
When I wrote that I was thinking specifically of the new init stuff they are rolling out with Edgy Eft. Pretty neat stuff, and to the best of my knowledge not found elsewhere. They've done a few things like that, though overall I agree that most of their work is done standing on the shoulders of Debian.
I stand corrected. That's a good counterexample. I still argue that it's the exception and not the norm, whereas in Free software it's the norm, but my original claim was perhaps too broad a statement. I should remember to avoid "always", "never", and similar boundless terms. They are difficult to defend.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Not sure I follow your logic here, but I'm sure you understand that the iPod isn't the top of the heap for technical, objective reasons but rather because it's just popular with the right crowd. Either way, the iPod is used in this context as an analogy. Be careful not to overthink anyone's analogies. They tend to break when under too much pressure.
I do sometimes come across that way, yes. It's not my intent. Of course, though you ended with a question mark, you weren't really asking a question, but rather just trying to insult me. Not sure what place that has in reasonable discussion. I understand that on the Internet you feel freer to insult people, but it won't win you any real friends or influence the audience to whom you seem to be playing. Rational discourse has no place for the Ad Hominim arguments you are using here.
Sorry you don't like my comments. You can add be as a Foe or whatever and them set an automatic downmod for all foes. I think that'll keep me off your
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Assuming this wasn't a rhetorical question, I'd say the answer is that the ReiserFS will be impacted only slightly by Novell's decision. The far bigger impact will be from a criminal conviction. Free Software is about community and community is all about those subjective intangibles like reputation, "coolness", and mob effects.
Whether we like it or not, this highlights a serious problem with the development model. Likewise, it indirectly highlights one of its strengths. Free software programmers are very much pack animals, like the rest of us. We tend to folllow the herd (I don't mean that in the modern "bad" sense of the phrase. We stick with those we know and enjoy hanging with. We do things we perceive subjectively as fun or cool. We join projects that interest us, we leave projects that offend or dissappoint or bore us. With the GPL, a company that relies on a no-longer-cool project can always pick up the banner and try to reinvigorate interest, but in the end the projects that have momentum have it because they have that special unnamable something that brings people to the fold.
Ubuntu got the right press from the right people at the right time. Is it better than Fedora or Mandriva or whatever? Of course not. But it's market mindshare is through the roof from a perfect storm of developers that got interested in the things Mark Shuttleworth was preaching. They were NOT tempted by technology. The followed the herd, and lo and behold, now Ubuntu Is doing technically cool things. Now, with all this backing and interest, they ARE moving ahead of Fedora and Mandriva in some core ways. That happens in Free software. It does not ever happen in proprietary software, which is purely driven by corporate interest.
If the ReiserFS falls it will be for the same reason we will eventually have an iPod Killer---because eventually the cool kids that tend to lead the pack will decide there are better things to do. A murder conviction might just cause that. Novell's decision is a symptom of that, not a cause of it.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Seriously? You're not kidding? Wake up dude. I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but if you can't make your life "cool" without an employer's direction, you have large problems.
Screw that. Work is about one thing: Trading time for money. You want that ratio to be as far in your favor as possible. Period. Let them keep their benefits and culture and intangibles, roll them in a tight ball, and shove them squarely up their corporate tax return.
I'll give a company free time when I see them start giving me free time. They will never. Neither will I.
Tom "Cynical-With-Age" Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/work.html
Lamest...railgun....EVER!
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
Without commenting on SETI's chances of success (because that's just idle speculation for both of us) it's worth noting that your claim implicitly assumes a natural denoument in technologically advanced species. You seem to be advocating that there is naturally both a start and a stop to advanced species.
Not to sound too "Law and Order" about it, but I object. Facts not in evidence. We have no idea what happens when a species advances beyond the point at which we are currently advances, let alone do we know what happens statistically to those civilizations over the course of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of iteratons of the pattern.
That a civilization started millenia before us in no way indicates that they aren't still around to interact with.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you can't know that you're right.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
The biggest diff between the two, in my opinion, is the drastically different methodolgy they took to acheive 4-core status.
:) I'm looking forward the 80 core CPU another slashdotter mentioned.
Intel took two dual cores and packaged them in one unit (but inside that unit they are actually just two separate dual core CPUs) whereas AMD has made an actual quad core single die CPU.
I'm not saying Intel's method is wrong or even disadvantaged, just that it's quite different. Intel will therefore get to market much quicker than AMD, I beleive, but once bother are on the shelves (sans benchmarks, which we don't have yet) my money is on AMD's solution being the performance winner. Still, getting the market first is a huge bonus and will give Intel the breating room to go back and make a true quad core single die CPU. Who knows how this will end? All I know is we win!
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/