It didn't make news at the time (and makes only a little news now), but e-voting was in fact used in Florida and there were signifigant irregularities with the machines. One district reported massive negative votes for Gore, for example (and although this was noticed and 'corrected', there is no way whatsoever to verify that the 'corrected' results were in fact correct). The hanging chads and whatnot weren't the ONLY election problems in Florida.
Well, I was a teenager when it was happening to the steel industry and didn't really learn anything about it until after the fact. So I suppose you could say that it's only my self interest that got me interested in the "problems". People get interested in alot of things because of self interest. I'll go out on a limb and say it's the MAIN reason people get interested in things. There's an economic system designed around that, maybe you've heard of it.
It's neat how you quote problems like that, too, as if the decimation of an economy isn't a problem. Sure, other people are better off. That doesn't mean that the making it happen at the expense of other people isn't a problem.
I can't speak for the average UK teacher. The average US teachers salary varies widely from area to area, but is generally below the average for white collar work. It's certainly MUCH lower than "professional" industries.
Geographic location affects school choice more than money. There's not enough money in a voucher system to run a school "properly" (you need economies of scale - you couldn't pay a tutor with a voucher), so schools don't just spring up out of nowhere when theres a voucher system. They have in fact been implemented in a variety of places and education hasn't noticably improved. Know why? Because people just left the kids in the same schools.
Money for education does not trickle down properly to classrooms. It doesn't get reflected in teacher salaries. Even worse, schools (in the US) are normally funded largely by property taxes, which is just another way of keeping the "good" teaching in the rich areas. "Performance" base teaching is stupid because there's no simple metric for success, and because it would then encourage schools to ignore lower-achieving students or shunt them aside. You think it sucks being dyslexic now, wait till schools will actively try to get rid of you. Theres a whole ton of problems with educational funding (and it's not just about the amount of dollars, although thats a real problem in alot of places), but "teachers are lazy and deserve to be paid minimum wage" isn't one of them.
As for the last point - here's a pretty simple test of logic. Given, we've got a poor public education system. Given, other countries have superior ones. Should we a) attempt to emulate what others who are successfull are doing, or b) Switch to something totally new that hasn't had the desired effect when tested, in the hope that it'll be even BETTER than those other systems that our currently better than ours? Bear in mind that the future health of our country relies on your answer.
And screw quoting all your responses, it's early and I'm still tired. I'd like to know what personal knowledge you have of the education industry that you're able to place the blame on teachers so squarely. Being grumpy because Mrs. Gruder gave you detention in 4th grade really isn't enough.
It shouldn't have been waved away then, either. PA is STILL dealing from the effects of having basically it's entire local economy leave the country.
It's actually not what it HAS to feel like to live in the real world. It's not a given of economics that you have to trample on peoples lives to make money (I know, heresy! I must be a communist!). The free market isn't a panacea - sure, overall, its probably doing okay. But theres been plenty of hardship and death that it's caused also), so just hand-waving and saying "it'll all turn out okay, and if it doesn't you deserved it" is pretty immoral.
Teaching is hardly a "cushy job" basically anywhere. Maybe at the university level, but certainly not down in the trenches where it matters. Low pay, long hours, huge stress (not least of which from people who assume that you're just in it for a cushy job and deride you for it). Which is not to say that there aren't institutional issues with education, but it's not because teachers are getting a free ride.
Vouchers are stupid and don't solve any problems. "Performance" based teaching is totally moronic. What are you supposed to do with kids with learning disabilities? We'd be alot better off if we had "performance based" parenting, where you only got to have a say in your kids education if you can prove you won't act like an asshat.
Give teachers the money the deserve, fund classrooms and education properly, and (especially!) start working on outreach in low income areas and maybe we'll see an improvement. There's lots of problems with public education in the US but privatizing it won't fix it. As a data point - all those countries that totally kick our ass when it comes to the education of thier children don't do it with privatized voucher systems.
Just another way of playing with numbers. Of course the last decade outperformed the market, because the last decade included the bubble. I don't see any "alarm" involved here - outsourcing is (clearly and obviously) a growing trend, theres no reason to think that it'll slow down. Even more so, BECAUSE of the collapse of the bubble theres a huge pool of IT workers out there (code monkeys at least, certainly qualified for the kind of stuff that gets outsourced). Normally, this would mean that wages would go down a bit and the market would stabilize out. But because of cost-of-living differences between the US and India, even a skilled engineer there is cheaper than the cheapest out-of-work-since-95 post-bubble Javahead in the US.
See, here's the problem with the whole "down with multicuturalism" thing. Basically, I agree with the concept (although it's important to remember that the US does not have an official language, and that cultural "ghettos" have always existed - this isn't something new and people bitched exactly the same way about EVERY cultural group in the US, starting with the native Americans).
I agree that it's really annoying working with people who don't speak the same language you do. This is especially frustrating in service industries where you can't even talk to someone who is trying to take your order. But, on the other hand, it's a very small step from "damnit, people need to learn English" to "Goddamn niggers are taking over, send em back where they came from". The politically INCORRECT crowd likes to jump on these sort of statements too and it breeds alot of hate and lends a sort of legitimacy to the real foul racism that, sadly, is all too common.
here is a link to a story about a politician who makes some pretty straightforward, reasonable remarks about multiculturalism. Can't argue much with what he's saying. But the kind of "support" he's getting from people about it makes my skin crawl.
Sure, our economy (probably) won't collapse. IT outsourcing isn't going to cause a breakdown of American culture. On the other hand, it IS going to decimate a portion of the economy (as it did other industries earlier - no textile manufacturing left in the US) and it does and will lead to disaster on smaller scales. It's probably not as bad as, say, steelwork outsourcing, where you had entire company run towns that just dried up and died almost overnight.
The human cost is real and it's not something that should be waved away, even if it does make economic sense. US employers are real quick to complain about a lack of employee loyalty and a US workers lack of work ethics - this is why, guys.
Geez, man, your tinfoil hat is blinding me. MS doesn't especially care about the toolkit market. They never have, which is why WTL and ATL and MFC are all kinda icky and lame. Microsoft doesn't care what toolkit you use as long as your app runs on windows. Toolkits and libraries have NEVER been a profit center or even a major focus for MS, until.NET, when they had to present a compelling environment to get people to switch to the new runtime. Even then, the idea wasn't to compete in the IDE/toolkit/compiler market but to provide the base that people demanded before they'd switch (remember, you can't be just as good for people to change, you have to be better).
MS couldn't possible care less about Qt. It wouldn't even suprise me to know that they have a decent working relationship, much like Borland does (although, to be fair, the Borland/MS relationship is not so much "decent" as "an expression of slavish subservience").
Which just goes to show how much your customers know, since they should have been asking your for streamlined, more robust alternatives to MFC for ten years now
And pfft to this stupid Avalon xml nonsense. If I wanted to write HTA apps I'd have been doing it for years.
As well as the (more important) legal and social opening of the code, which enables you to fork, fix, etc. The source was available for viewing, but you couldn't (legally) modify it and ship an app using your modified version, for example.
Because of (as the GP said) artificial scarcity. The articifial scarcity being the government-mandated monopoly granted by copyright. It's not scarce because you can run out the supply, it's ARTIFICIALLY scarce because the supply is controlled and you can't just walk outside and pick one up.
However, the fact that in many environments you CAN do just that (via P2P or other warez channels) really does affect the digital economy. Which is not to say that there's not still money to be made there but I think an understanding and acceptance of the fact the the copyright monopoly is not as all-encompassing as it used to be and your profit margins aren't going to be as high is pretty much essential for survival in coming years. Which, of course, is basically what the paper is bitching about (FUD aside). Margins are going to go down, the "worth", both percieved and real of IP is going to go down, and companies that rely on that artificial model are going to have to do some thinking.
Sex offender laws can suck. I know a guy who has to register for the rest of his life (although he's left the country) for having consensual sex with jis fiancee. 21 (maybe 22) year old guy living with a 17 year old, he's being a good husband (although they aren't yet legally married), good job, she's pregnant and he's at the hospital as she's giving birth. Cause the girl is a minor, the nurse has to (by law) report the father if she knows who it is, and, of course, the proud daddy is there watching. A few days later the police show up and cart him away.
I'm not sure what the details of the court case are, whether he pleaded or not, but he spent a while in jail and then got out on probation, but has to register as a sex offender. His now 18 year old wife and infant daughter are waiting for him.
Last I heard he'd basically fled the country. Can't say I blame him.
I should point out that you can only do all that stuff if you can afford it. Expert testimony in particular is very expensive, as is a lawuer who's go the time and inclination to defend you to that degree. Sadly, this happens all the time, especially with immigrants and the under-educated. The PD tells them to plea, they do, and they find out they're getting fucked. On top of that, the DA will relly put pressure on you to make that plea, and they're allowed to lie and claim things they don't know, etc, etc in order to pressure you.
You may be guaranteed the right to your day in court, but the system can and does make if very expensive and trying for you to actually claim it.
Most (I can't conclusively say all) of the common controls are indeed drawn using primitives. You could possibly trap the theme API available in XP to redirect calls to a native theme engine, but that would be a tremendous amount of work (and might not work period).
He's pissed off that a MS guy is talking about how well Longhorn and RedHat interoperate, when MS actively attempts to make this difficult. I'd be pissed off too - if MS made an effort to interoperate with Samba servers that'd be a different story.
I should have said "Creative Commons-like", my bad. As for being revokable, it's no more or less revokable than any other license. You can't retract permission after the fact with any license, and you can retract any license at any time. The Creative Commons license is just a formalization.
Take a system and start removing components one by one. When you finally get to the point where you cannot remove any more and still have a working system, THAT is the operating system
Thats the worst definiton of an operating system I've ever heard. For one thing, it doesn't define "usable". Theres alot of definitions of "operating system" and it's really a semantic issue. And, of course, just because something is part of the "GNU System" doesn't mean that it's an essential part of an OS.
You can easily get to the point where the OS consists of little or no GNU software.
Of course you can replace all the GNU components - nobody ever said that GNU was the ONLY system. You can run BSD userland on a Linux kernel and call it BSD/Linux if you want.
I don't call it GNU/Linux because I think the distinction is silly and it's not important enough to get upset about. Maybe if I were a major GNU contributor I'd fee differently. On the other hand, I don't care if people DO call it GNU/Linux, either.
I believe that most of the FSFs offical papers are released under a Creative Commons license. The GPL isn't especially suited for written works.
In fact, from www.fsf.org:
Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Your facts are correct but your conclusion is not - the GPL is not a contract and, in fact, there is no way for you to force anyone to release sourcecode for exactly that reason. There's no such thing as a "GPL violation", thats merely a term of convenience. If you illegaly distribute a program thats GPLed, you can only be sued under copyright law. However, one possible remdedy would be compliance with the license, and it's possible that a court force that. From what I've read, though, courts generally don't like to do that and instead require (monetary) damages instead (and, of course, they have to stop distributing your software).
The preferred remedy, from the point of view of the person with the GPLed code, of course, is adherence to the license and thats why we talk about showing the code and GPL violations and such. But it's really terms of convenince for using pressure to force compliance - IE, comply with the GPL or we'll sue you and you'll have to stop selling your product (or whatever), not a legal power to compel.
I think is is part of the reason why there's so much argument and confusion over the "enforcability" of the GPL. If you mean "enforce" as in compel compliance, it's no stronger than any other license, which is pretty weak assuming that the violator is willing to pay damages and cease the behavior. In terms of people being able to just pretend that the GPL grants rights without conditions, it's practically ironclad and I've never heard any real legal argument (except from SCO, and I think they even gave up on that) to that effect.
There's no price war - the people pushing for the price increase control prices at all the OTHER online stores, too. Sony may be in a special cirucmstance because they're also a record label, but being too obvious about it would probably bring antitrust claims.
There was anther (or this may be the same one you're thinking of) involving adobe, where a company bought bundles of Adobe software, cut them open and resold the individual titles. Adobe got pissed off and sued, but the court decided that right of first sale and lack of a formal agreement basically meant that Adobes EULA didn't apply. This was in a CA district court, not federal.
It's actually a little more complicated - at one time (I don't know if this is still true), EVERY major OEM and most minor ones had Windows OEM licenses. The agreement for that license (which got you Windows priced cheap enough to be competetive) required that you pay MS for every PC you sold, whether Windows was shipped with it or not. Therefore, the price for pretty much every PC you could buy included the price for an OEM copy of Windows. THAT was the "Windows Tax" and it was an issue in the antitrust case.
The most important reason to wait is because, almost inevitably, the part that you THINK is slow is not the part that actually hangs you up. You may spend an extra couple days working on you super-fast optimized sort & data structure only to find when you deploy that your bottleneck is RAM usage and all your clever caching is just slowing stuff down. Another good example is earlier in this thread, with the super-fast optimized MD5 libraries - spending money or time writing/buying those libraries if your data set is IO bound doesn't make much sense.
Optimization is great, but profiling to make sure that your optimization isn't wasted is more important.
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It didn't make news at the time (and makes only a little news now), but e-voting was in fact used in Florida and there were signifigant irregularities with the machines. One district reported massive negative votes for Gore, for example (and although this was noticed and 'corrected', there is no way whatsoever to verify that the 'corrected' results were in fact correct). The hanging chads and whatnot weren't the ONLY election problems in Florida.
Free as in puppies is a good one. My free puppy has cost me $300 so far.
It's neat how you quote problems like that, too, as if the decimation of an economy isn't a problem. Sure, other people are better off. That doesn't mean that the making it happen at the expense of other people isn't a problem.
Geographic location affects school choice more than money. There's not enough money in a voucher system to run a school "properly" (you need economies of scale - you couldn't pay a tutor with a voucher), so schools don't just spring up out of nowhere when theres a voucher system. They have in fact been implemented in a variety of places and education hasn't noticably improved. Know why? Because people just left the kids in the same schools.
Money for education does not trickle down properly to classrooms. It doesn't get reflected in teacher salaries. Even worse, schools (in the US) are normally funded largely by property taxes, which is just another way of keeping the "good" teaching in the rich areas. "Performance" base teaching is stupid because there's no simple metric for success, and because it would then encourage schools to ignore lower-achieving students or shunt them aside. You think it sucks being dyslexic now, wait till schools will actively try to get rid of you. Theres a whole ton of problems with educational funding (and it's not just about the amount of dollars, although thats a real problem in alot of places), but "teachers are lazy and deserve to be paid minimum wage" isn't one of them.
As for the last point - here's a pretty simple test of logic. Given, we've got a poor public education system. Given, other countries have superior ones. Should we a) attempt to emulate what others who are successfull are doing, or b) Switch to something totally new that hasn't had the desired effect when tested, in the hope that it'll be even BETTER than those other systems that our currently better than ours? Bear in mind that the future health of our country relies on your answer.
And screw quoting all your responses, it's early and I'm still tired. I'd like to know what personal knowledge you have of the education industry that you're able to place the blame on teachers so squarely. Being grumpy because Mrs. Gruder gave you detention in 4th grade really isn't enough.
It's actually not what it HAS to feel like to live in the real world. It's not a given of economics that you have to trample on peoples lives to make money (I know, heresy! I must be a communist!). The free market isn't a panacea - sure, overall, its probably doing okay. But theres been plenty of hardship and death that it's caused also), so just hand-waving and saying "it'll all turn out okay, and if it doesn't you deserved it" is pretty immoral.
Vouchers are stupid and don't solve any problems. "Performance" based teaching is totally moronic. What are you supposed to do with kids with learning disabilities? We'd be alot better off if we had "performance based" parenting, where you only got to have a say in your kids education if you can prove you won't act like an asshat.
Give teachers the money the deserve, fund classrooms and education properly, and (especially!) start working on outreach in low income areas and maybe we'll see an improvement. There's lots of problems with public education in the US but privatizing it won't fix it. As a data point - all those countries that totally kick our ass when it comes to the education of thier children don't do it with privatized voucher systems.
Just another way of playing with numbers. Of course the last decade outperformed the market, because the last decade included the bubble. I don't see any "alarm" involved here - outsourcing is (clearly and obviously) a growing trend, theres no reason to think that it'll slow down. Even more so, BECAUSE of the collapse of the bubble theres a huge pool of IT workers out there (code monkeys at least, certainly qualified for the kind of stuff that gets outsourced). Normally, this would mean that wages would go down a bit and the market would stabilize out. But because of cost-of-living differences between the US and India, even a skilled engineer there is cheaper than the cheapest out-of-work-since-95 post-bubble Javahead in the US.
I agree that it's really annoying working with people who don't speak the same language you do. This is especially frustrating in service industries where you can't even talk to someone who is trying to take your order. But, on the other hand, it's a very small step from "damnit, people need to learn English" to "Goddamn niggers are taking over, send em back where they came from". The politically INCORRECT crowd likes to jump on these sort of statements too and it breeds alot of hate and lends a sort of legitimacy to the real foul racism that, sadly, is all too common. here is a link to a story about a politician who makes some pretty straightforward, reasonable remarks about multiculturalism. Can't argue much with what he's saying. But the kind of "support" he's getting from people about it makes my skin crawl.
The human cost is real and it's not something that should be waved away, even if it does make economic sense. US employers are real quick to complain about a lack of employee loyalty and a US workers lack of work ethics - this is why, guys.
MS couldn't possible care less about Qt. It wouldn't even suprise me to know that they have a decent working relationship, much like Borland does (although, to be fair, the Borland/MS relationship is not so much "decent" as "an expression of slavish subservience").
And pfft to this stupid Avalon xml nonsense. If I wanted to write HTA apps I'd have been doing it for years.
As well as the (more important) legal and social opening of the code, which enables you to fork, fix, etc. The source was available for viewing, but you couldn't (legally) modify it and ship an app using your modified version, for example.
However, the fact that in many environments you CAN do just that (via P2P or other warez channels) really does affect the digital economy. Which is not to say that there's not still money to be made there but I think an understanding and acceptance of the fact the the copyright monopoly is not as all-encompassing as it used to be and your profit margins aren't going to be as high is pretty much essential for survival in coming years. Which, of course, is basically what the paper is bitching about (FUD aside). Margins are going to go down, the "worth", both percieved and real of IP is going to go down, and companies that rely on that artificial model are going to have to do some thinking.
I'm not sure what the details of the court case are, whether he pleaded or not, but he spent a while in jail and then got out on probation, but has to register as a sex offender. His now 18 year old wife and infant daughter are waiting for him.
Last I heard he'd basically fled the country. Can't say I blame him.
You may be guaranteed the right to your day in court, but the system can and does make if very expensive and trying for you to actually claim it.
Most (I can't conclusively say all) of the common controls are indeed drawn using primitives. You could possibly trap the theme API available in XP to redirect calls to a native theme engine, but that would be a tremendous amount of work (and might not work period).
He's pissed off that a MS guy is talking about how well Longhorn and RedHat interoperate, when MS actively attempts to make this difficult. I'd be pissed off too - if MS made an effort to interoperate with Samba servers that'd be a different story.
I should have said "Creative Commons-like", my bad. As for being revokable, it's no more or less revokable than any other license. You can't retract permission after the fact with any license, and you can retract any license at any time. The Creative Commons license is just a formalization.
Thats the worst definiton of an operating system I've ever heard. For one thing, it doesn't define "usable". Theres alot of definitions of "operating system" and it's really a semantic issue. And, of course, just because something is part of the "GNU System" doesn't mean that it's an essential part of an OS.
You can easily get to the point where the OS consists of little or no GNU software.
Of course you can replace all the GNU components - nobody ever said that GNU was the ONLY system. You can run BSD userland on a Linux kernel and call it BSD/Linux if you want.
I don't call it GNU/Linux because I think the distinction is silly and it's not important enough to get upset about. Maybe if I were a major GNU contributor I'd fee differently. On the other hand, I don't care if people DO call it GNU/Linux, either.
In fact, from www.fsf.org: Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
The preferred remedy, from the point of view of the person with the GPLed code, of course, is adherence to the license and thats why we talk about showing the code and GPL violations and such. But it's really terms of convenince for using pressure to force compliance - IE, comply with the GPL or we'll sue you and you'll have to stop selling your product (or whatever), not a legal power to compel.
I think is is part of the reason why there's so much argument and confusion over the "enforcability" of the GPL. If you mean "enforce" as in compel compliance, it's no stronger than any other license, which is pretty weak assuming that the violator is willing to pay damages and cease the behavior. In terms of people being able to just pretend that the GPL grants rights without conditions, it's practically ironclad and I've never heard any real legal argument (except from SCO, and I think they even gave up on that) to that effect.
There's no price war - the people pushing for the price increase control prices at all the OTHER online stores, too. Sony may be in a special cirucmstance because they're also a record label, but being too obvious about it would probably bring antitrust claims.
There was anther (or this may be the same one you're thinking of) involving adobe, where a company bought bundles of Adobe software, cut them open and resold the individual titles. Adobe got pissed off and sued, but the court decided that right of first sale and lack of a formal agreement basically meant that Adobes EULA didn't apply. This was in a CA district court, not federal.
It's actually a little more complicated - at one time (I don't know if this is still true), EVERY major OEM and most minor ones had Windows OEM licenses. The agreement for that license (which got you Windows priced cheap enough to be competetive) required that you pay MS for every PC you sold, whether Windows was shipped with it or not. Therefore, the price for pretty much every PC you could buy included the price for an OEM copy of Windows. THAT was the "Windows Tax" and it was an issue in the antitrust case.
Optimization is great, but profiling to make sure that your optimization isn't wasted is more important.