Uh, what exactly would a failure in fannie mae be?
Ok, assume economic downturn. People stop paying their mortgages. The investors in those mortgages lose money. Interest rates rise somewhat as a result (reflecting the true risk in loaning out money).
How does that lead to hundreds of thousands of foreclosures? Unless you're talking about the original defaults that led to the problem.
Of course, if millions of people can't pay their mortgages, most likely everybody will get a good deal and the only people who will lose money is those holding the mortgage bonds.
Most americans have very little invested in mortgage bonds. Sure, people with a few million in the bank will lose their shirts, but the average American just might see their 401k drop a little if they're close to retirement, in which case they work a little longer.
An investment collapse minaly hurts investors. Most americans invest very little - those who tend to invest a lot can afford to lose quite a bit more...
Perhaps I'm missing some downstream problem. However, as I see it the only affect will be to raise mortgage rates, cause some billionares to become millionares, and maybe lower home prices a bit due to the lower availability of credit...
The irony is that deep pockets sometimes get the best deals.
I know somebody who works for a Fortune 500 and in dealing with a niche-market software vendor they got good software deals since the vendor could then claim them as a customer. In the niche markets (where there are no Oracle's, Microsoft's, CA's, IBM's, etc) often the best advertisements are your customer reference lists. Often you will almost give your product away to a few big high-profile companies and then make your money off of the million 500 employee companies in the same market.
I agree. The other thing is that while a JPG is great 99% of the time, when you find that one photo that you really want to do something with but wish the exposure was a little better it is too late to go back and reshoot it if you didn't use RAW. The same goes for using the best resolution setting on your camera - most of the time 2MP is plenty (good enough for 5x7 or so), but you never know in advance which shots you'll want to make into an 11x14.
As for me - I can't justify buying a RAW-format camera, but if I did spend that kind of money I'd certainly not let 50 cents worth of hard drive space hold me back from using it...
No question that for many things in-person is better than email.
However, this is not always true. I hate it when somebody leaves me a voice mail that just says to call them back so that they can ask me something.
If they sent me an email, they could explain their problem with a few details, and when I do call them back to explain things to them, I'd actually have answers for them.
Instead, when people leave detailess voicemails or show up in person, they interrupt you and you end up playing 20 questions just so you can start on a 25 minute problem analysis with them sitting on the phone wasting their time.
If somebody wants me to do something for them, I'm happy to help them. However, I'll fit it into my schedule as my priorities dictate, in the most efficient manner, and I won't waste their time with speculation when I could give them a solid answer in 15 minute. Email is great for this.
I dunno - it took quite a bit of tinkering to get my inkjet working.
My observation is that as long as you spent money on a Postscript printer, then getting to work is easy. If, instead, you only can speak HPGL or something else, then you're looking at packages with interesting names like "gimp-print" and "foomatic". My own printer has about 4-5 matching model lines in the printer selection (would you like an 800 series, an 820, a stylus 820, an 820/830, etc...). It took some work to get it running...
Couldn't agree more - you get more ROI if you have more time to use the system.
My issue wasn't with the fact that the system still had bugs. The issue was that they should have figured out what bugs they were going to fix months before, so that they could focus on taking care of the show-stoppers and getting things wrapped up for distribution (trianing, packaging, etc.) You shouldn't be debating another build only a few days before going live - unless you plan on postponing. Otherwise there will be almost no QA on the final build.
At a staff meeting a group was discussing a MAJOR system that they were just finally getting ready to deploy in a week or two. They mentioned that they had one last meeting in a week to figure out what bugs wouldn't get fixed in the final release.
This was a multi-million-dollar project. Why on earth they were still debating build features a week before deployment I have no idea. Not surprisingly an annoucement was sent out to end-users a month later telling them to expect unusual delays from groups utilizing the new software...
I've just spent 3 days installing some esoteric science packages on a Linux distro they weren't certified for, and I could never have succeeded if I weren't an uber-geek.
Why not ask your distribution to add these packages? As long as they are open-source that shouldn't be a problem. If they weren't open-source, then that is just one of the issues with using commercial software - you have to play by the vendor's rule. If they say it only works on Red Hat, then you're going to fork out $1000 to Red Hat.
Besides, what standard was the problem here? Installing software in/usr/local/bin? Not listing all your dependencies correctly? As long as the software lists the libraries it is expecting to find and it looks for them someplace reasonably standard, you should be fine.
Still, the fact is that he is willing to put his work out for free for anybody who cares to listen.
Was linux-0.0.1 as feature-filled as Solaris? Some might argue that 2.6 isn't there yet. Does that mean that it has no place at all?
The difference between him and tens of thousands of others is that he is willing to put his work out there for everyone to enjoy, and I for one am not going to whine that he isn't the world's greatest pianist. I'm sure he will improve with time, and you're more than welcome to not listen to his works.
1. The desire of leaders to feel like they have power. (They speed all the time - but they're immune to tickets. They feel good that they get to decide what is safe for everybody else.)
2. The insurance industry. They do cash in on any law that limits driving in just about any way, since rates don't go down but accident rates do.
Well my brother was killed because he was hit by a speeding car.
Hardly.
Your brother was killed because he stepped out of his house. If he had been safe and reasonable and stayed indoors all day he'd still be alive (albeit jobless most likely).
I am truly sorry that your brother is dead. However, the fact that people are run over by people driving 70 mph is not in and of itself reason to set speed limits below that level. I'm sure people have been run over and killed by people driving 25 mph. Should we cap speeds at 10?
Some people have the attitude that as soon as one person dies we now have to ban any activity that was remotely associated with that person's death. You might as well ban breathing - everybody dies. 100% guaranteed!
That isn't to say that reckless driving shouldn't be illegal. However, speed limits are set mainly for the benefit of the insurance industry (who would prefer that we pay premiums but not drive at all).
I do not question that raising speed limits will increase the number of deaths due to collosions. However, it is also true that banning cars would reduce the number of deaths due to collosions. Society needs to find a balance, and I'd argue that we are not at that point now.
I wish I could do something that would bring back your brother. However, the fact is that people die every day. We don't need to turn their deaths into crusades to ban all human activity except for the essentials of eating, sleeping, and working.
This goes for home-built systems as well. Often it's just cheaper to buy a system built in taiwan than to build your own out of the exact same parts. I'm all for geeking it out and building something to your own specs, but for gaming machines or just basic desktop apps a pre-built system saves a lot of headaches.
I was able to put together a pretty decent AMD64 system last year for about $600. I saved a little by recycling DVD, floppy, and video card (not a gamer). I didn't recycle the parts that mattered most (power supply, motherboard, CPU, RAM, hard drive).
First, there aren't many vendors out there a year ago which even sold AMD64 systems. Second, for the performance level I got you'd easily spend double to triple with a major brand. Now, I value my time, but I don't value an hour or two of it at $1000+. Besides, it was fun, and I got a chance to catch up on the latest gear.
When you buy a name-brand PC, you get whatever the latest advertising buzzwords are. Probably lots of GHz. Probably a big hard drive, and probably even "7200RPM." You'll get a fast frontside bus since that is a buzzword now. You'll get lots of RAM. You won't get a decent motherboard, since most people don't know what one is. You will get a power supply that cost $20 which you'd never use for a comparable system since the only way the major brand got away with this is by buying 500 brands of $20 power supplies and figuring out which 2 of the 500 actually didn't burn out in a week. You won't get a hard drive with decent cache (cache - what's that?). You'll get a nice video card if you pay more, and you may or may not have an option to save money on a cheap one. You'll get some licenses for MS Works and Windows XP which you may or may not use (possibly the later, probably not the former).
Many benchmarks have shown motherboards to have a significant impact on system performance - sometimes equivalent to going up a notch in processor speed. Instead of spending $400 more for that extra bleeding-edge MHz level, you could spend $20 more on a motherboard which isn't a piece of junk.
I didn't spend a premium on any of my parts. However, I didn't get junk either.
I've been given brand-name PCs from friends who have had them stop working. I fix them up for the kids, when it makes sense to even do so. Often half the parts in them are just junk. I've read horror stories on Compaq power supplies which don't follow standard ATX pinouts despite having ATX plugs.
When buying commodity office workstations I'd just pay the premium and go with the name brand at work. However, at home I don't mind putting a little TLC into my systems and getting something which isn't junk...
I've never understood the way in which we punish act-of-passion prisoners.
For example, take manslaughter. I swerve to miss a schoolbus that drifts into my lane and I hit and kill a pedestrian on the sidewalk. Why should this be considered a crime? Now, driving recklessly should be a crime in itself, but whether or not somebody got killed was just a matter of whether everybody else in the area was lucky. Somebody who accidentally kills somebody is of no danger to society at all most likely - we just throw the book at them to make the victim's family feel nice that they ruined somebody else's life since their lives aren't going well at the moment.
Another example is that attempted murder gets a lighter sentence than homicide. Why should a murderer get lucky just because the victim was lucky? Acting on an intent to kill somebody should be just as much a crime as actually killing them.
Prioson has a couple of really good purposes. It gets bad people off the street, it deters crime by imposing the threat of punishment, and if run correctly it has some potential to rehabilitate those incarcerated within them (not that this actually happens in our current society).
I remember reading a story about some 70 year old getting arressted for a crime he committed 30 years prior. He was a model citizen during those three decades. He is now bound for prison, where he will most likely die. Now, I understand that we can't go around setting an example that you can get away with murder, but on the other hand if somebody wasn't a danger to society for 30 years, and is clearly not one now, then what purpose does tossing them in a cell serve?
The problem is that people use prison for all the wrong reasons. It is approached emotionally (the victims suffered - somebody else should suffer too - who cares if there is only a 51% chance that they are guilty).
Oh well, I'm probably not going to see change in my lifetime.
A final note - don't think I'm soft on crime. If a man commits a homicide and the evidence is clearn, jail him for life, or possibly even execute him. I'm all for serious punishment for serious crime. However, I'd treat otherwise-homicidal-murderers-whose-victimes-lived in exactly the same way. I'd get rid of most of the political-oriented laws and associated prisoners. I'd look to separate sociopaths from the rest of the prisoners so that everybody gets the help they need to reintegrate from society and so that people convicted of shoplifting aren't knifed over some petty prison power demonstration.
In fact, Apollo was a few percent of the entire gross national product. That is HUGE for a single government program. Normally the only programs that get that kind of funding in most nations are nationalized health care, welfare, and the military. The military doesn't generally spend that kind of money on a single project, either. Probably the only one that had that kind of spending was the Manhatten project, and that was in the middle of WWII...
Isn't it terribly inconvenient for your communist ideology, that america has blended the distinction between workers and owners? Most people I know own their own homes. Most of them invest what they can in the stock market. These are 'workers' just like you and me.
Hardly - how about this definition:
Worker - Somebody who obtains most of their income from working.
Owner - Somebody who obtains most of their income from dividends/capital gains.
99% of all Americans are in fact workers.
Go down the street and give each person an offer of giving up any hope of employment for the rest of their lives, or giving up any hope of investment income for the rest of their lives. 99% will choose to give up investment income, since most people have very little of it.
I'm not aware of any society in which more than about 1% of the population makes most of their money from investment. Probably the closest you'll get are farmers, who are more along the lines of self-employed, but they spend a lot more time working in the fields than they spend deciding which farms to buy and sell.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that all the world's ails will be solved by going communist or anything like that. However, I'm not under any kind of delusion that the average American is an "owner".
How many of those GPS-guided bombs use all-American-made components do you figure?
Sure, some guy in Kentucky probably puts the bombs together, but the metal probably comes from Asia, and the chips almost certainly do. The explosives probably are synthesized in the US using feedstocks manufactured overseas.
The US could do a lot of damange to Asia in general in a war, but they could not fight a protracted war against all of Asia due to an inability to resupply.
The US was a WWII powerhouse since it had its own oil, steel, manufacturing, etc. Britain ran into trouble since they imported everything, and U-boats made a mess of their supply lines. They were also close to the front lines and were bombed into the stone age (at least factories were).
The US can pick on an isolated country or two, but right now it can't take on half of the world. Nor should it try to do so.
The issues raised here are serious ones - the US needs to invest internally if it wants to remain a world power. The solution to the problem isn't building bombs - it is building factories or at least R&D labs...
I never liked the million-years-to-get-light-out-of-the-sun analogy.
When you look at the sun it takes a few minutes for the photons that hit your eyeball to travel there from the moment they are created to the moment they are destroyed.
The million year figure is how long it would take if you put a hot solar core in the middle of an otherwise cold star-sized cloud of gas where no convection occurred for the core to heat up the outer surface of the star.
Sunlight doesn't come from the solar core. It comes from the photosphere. Now, the reason that the photosphere is hot enough to glow is due to the core, and that heat does take a milion years to work its way up (again, assuming no convection, which I'm guessing would speed things considerably).
This would be like saying that light in your light bulb takes 1000 years to travel from the burning coal in the center of the power plant to your eyes. After all, the coal emits photons which boils water which drives generators. The electrons in the power line would probably take 1000 years to diffuse to your house (since power is transmitted without much net migration of electrons), and then those electrons emit photons as they interact at high energies in the filament of the bulb. It sounds nice, but anybody with an ounce of sense would realize that if it really took 1000 years then the light switch would not appear to operate.
In any case, stuff like this would really depend on where the photons are created. I doubt that when the neutron stars collide nothing would happen until their mass is consolidated, and then photons would emit from the core of the resulting star (which probably would be a black hole whose core can't emit anything). Instead, the interactions probably happen at the surface, where little blocks the emission of photons.
Neutrinos may very well give some warning, but it probably would be minutes or maybe hours - not months, years, or centuries as the million-years argument might suggest...
Actually - I'd argue that GPL gives more freedom to the original developer. That is the freedom to use all derived works.
The original BSD developer for the TCP stack has no access to the MS implementation of that stack - since they slapped a proprietary license on it.
On the other hand, the original GLP developer of linux code has full access to the Linksys implementation of it - since Linksys is compelled to release updates.
You will note that while companies love BSD-licensed projects (since they can just steal code from them), they rarely distribute their own works under the BSD, and that limits your ability to profit even more than the GPL, and arms your competitors with your technology. Companies only release under BSD if they don't care about the code at all, or if it is a reference implementation of something that they actually want everybody to just use as widely as possible - probably because it interfaces with some expensive proprietary product.
BSD does let you do more with the code, but GPL does more to protect the open source community, and to protect the original developer - and that is the person whose blood, seat, and tears were invested in the first place...
CVS space is cheap. Might as well let them use sourceforge and maybe somebody can use the code. 99% of the time it may not happen, but if the potential value of the code is $1000 and it is useful 1% of the time, and it costs 10 cents to host it, then it is still worthwhile...
If I write a major piece of software and give it away for anybody to use for free on the condition that anybody who improves it follows my example by giving back, then I could care less if some company would rather just exploit my work without any compensation at all and is upset that my license doesn't allow them to do so.
Compaines are no worse off than if linux didn't exist - so they should be happy that they're even allowed to use the software at all.
In any case, nobody really knows what the draft GPL v3 will look like anyway - this article is just wild speculation. I doubt it will require fee-for-use or anything like that. It might, however, require google to release their source code if they are using GPL software.
I'm already relaying via ISP - the only problem is that I have to use my ISP email address as my from address.
I'd rather use my own address as a from address so that I'm not locked in due to inability to switch email providers.
There is nothing elegant about dynamic DNS at all - so making TXT records inelegant is no big deal.
Really, there is no reason not to grant static IPs to all DSL users - that gets around the whole dynamic IP situation. However, the ISPs want to make money, and there is no law saying that we have to make it easy on them.
on the other hand its a barrier to those who want to develop closed source software for linux (i'm a beliver that an open os is far more important than having every single app open)
Uh, people are free to develop closed source for linux - the API is completely open. It sounds like you're complaining that some programmers give their services away for free since it harder for others to charge.
Keep in mind that there would probably not be a mysql if they didn't dual-license it. If they wanted to just charge a fortune they'd be competing against Oracle/IBM/MS - the field is already full of big players at various price levels and who wants to buy a no-name DB for a bunch of bucks? People looking for free would still have alternatives. The dual-license model allowed another solution to enter the field and become a fairly successful company. How is that bad?
It sounds like you don't like GPL libraries since they create a non-level playing field for open anc closed source. Suppose I own a refrigerated-trucking company. I'm a charitable man, so I offer to provide my services for free to charities who give food to the homeless - they can now get their food out to more locations without having to pay for expensive trucking. Now, in theory those charities are better-able to compete against McDonalds in remote areas which normally wouldn't be serviced by such charities. Should such charitable activity be banned? Hardly - they're my trucks, and if I want to donate my resources that is purely up to me. Has the world been shown disservice as a result of my activites - you'd be hard-pressed to say yes.
The beauty of open source is that it is market-driven. People write what people really want (strong demand), or at least what they're really interesting in writing (strong supply). The areas where the dimensions of supply and demand overlap get well serviced. Companies can still make a lot of money selling their software in areas where the free supply is low (maybe the software is boring to write, and so programmers need money to entice them).
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Uh, what exactly would a failure in fannie mae be?
Ok, assume economic downturn. People stop paying their mortgages. The investors in those mortgages lose money. Interest rates rise somewhat as a result (reflecting the true risk in loaning out money).
How does that lead to hundreds of thousands of foreclosures? Unless you're talking about the original defaults that led to the problem.
Of course, if millions of people can't pay their mortgages, most likely everybody will get a good deal and the only people who will lose money is those holding the mortgage bonds.
Most americans have very little invested in mortgage bonds. Sure, people with a few million in the bank will lose their shirts, but the average American just might see their 401k drop a little if they're close to retirement, in which case they work a little longer.
An investment collapse minaly hurts investors. Most americans invest very little - those who tend to invest a lot can afford to lose quite a bit more...
Perhaps I'm missing some downstream problem. However, as I see it the only affect will be to raise mortgage rates, cause some billionares to become millionares, and maybe lower home prices a bit due to the lower availability of credit...
The irony is that deep pockets sometimes get the best deals.
I know somebody who works for a Fortune 500 and in dealing with a niche-market software vendor they got good software deals since the vendor could then claim them as a customer. In the niche markets (where there are no Oracle's, Microsoft's, CA's, IBM's, etc) often the best advertisements are your customer reference lists. Often you will almost give your product away to a few big high-profile companies and then make your money off of the million 500 employee companies in the same market.
I agree. The other thing is that while a JPG is great 99% of the time, when you find that one photo that you really want to do something with but wish the exposure was a little better it is too late to go back and reshoot it if you didn't use RAW. The same goes for using the best resolution setting on your camera - most of the time 2MP is plenty (good enough for 5x7 or so), but you never know in advance which shots you'll want to make into an 11x14.
As for me - I can't justify buying a RAW-format camera, but if I did spend that kind of money I'd certainly not let 50 cents worth of hard drive space hold me back from using it...
No question that for many things in-person is better than email.
However, this is not always true. I hate it when somebody leaves me a voice mail that just says to call them back so that they can ask me something.
If they sent me an email, they could explain their problem with a few details, and when I do call them back to explain things to them, I'd actually have answers for them.
Instead, when people leave detailess voicemails or show up in person, they interrupt you and you end up playing 20 questions just so you can start on a 25 minute problem analysis with them sitting on the phone wasting their time.
If somebody wants me to do something for them, I'm happy to help them. However, I'll fit it into my schedule as my priorities dictate, in the most efficient manner, and I won't waste their time with speculation when I could give them a solid answer in 15 minute. Email is great for this.
I dunno - it took quite a bit of tinkering to get my inkjet working.
My observation is that as long as you spent money on a Postscript printer, then getting to work is easy. If, instead, you only can speak HPGL or something else, then you're looking at packages with interesting names like "gimp-print" and "foomatic". My own printer has about 4-5 matching model lines in the printer selection (would you like an 800 series, an 820, a stylus 820, an 820/830, etc...). It took some work to get it running...
Couldn't agree more - you get more ROI if you have more time to use the system.
My issue wasn't with the fact that the system still had bugs. The issue was that they should have figured out what bugs they were going to fix months before, so that they could focus on taking care of the show-stoppers and getting things wrapped up for distribution (trianing, packaging, etc.) You shouldn't be debating another build only a few days before going live - unless you plan on postponing. Otherwise there will be almost no QA on the final build.
At a staff meeting a group was discussing a MAJOR system that they were just finally getting ready to deploy in a week or two. They mentioned that they had one last meeting in a week to figure out what bugs wouldn't get fixed in the final release.
This was a multi-million-dollar project. Why on earth they were still debating build features a week before deployment I have no idea. Not surprisingly an annoucement was sent out to end-users a month later telling them to expect unusual delays from groups utilizing the new software...
I've just spent 3 days installing some esoteric science packages on a Linux distro they weren't certified for, and I could never have succeeded if I weren't an uber-geek.
/usr/local/bin? Not listing all your dependencies correctly? As long as the software lists the libraries it is expecting to find and it looks for them someplace reasonably standard, you should be fine.
Why not ask your distribution to add these packages? As long as they are open-source that shouldn't be a problem. If they weren't open-source, then that is just one of the issues with using commercial software - you have to play by the vendor's rule. If they say it only works on Red Hat, then you're going to fork out $1000 to Red Hat.
Besides, what standard was the problem here? Installing software in
Is it possible to enable Sysrq without enabling CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL?
I don't particularly want debug info, but I do want Sysrq.
My kernel is 1.6 MB, and I only have support for my hardware compiled in.
Still, the fact is that he is willing to put his work out for free for anybody who cares to listen.
Was linux-0.0.1 as feature-filled as Solaris? Some might argue that 2.6 isn't there yet. Does that mean that it has no place at all?
The difference between him and tens of thousands of others is that he is willing to put his work out there for everyone to enjoy, and I for one am not going to whine that he isn't the world's greatest pianist. I'm sure he will improve with time, and you're more than welcome to not listen to his works.
Actually, bigger reasons for this are:
1. The desire of leaders to feel like they have power. (They speed all the time - but they're immune to tickets. They feel good that they get to decide what is safe for everybody else.)
2. The insurance industry. They do cash in on any law that limits driving in just about any way, since rates don't go down but accident rates do.
Well my brother was killed because he was hit by a speeding car.
Hardly.
Your brother was killed because he stepped out of his house. If he had been safe and reasonable and stayed indoors all day he'd still be alive (albeit jobless most likely).
I am truly sorry that your brother is dead. However, the fact that people are run over by people driving 70 mph is not in and of itself reason to set speed limits below that level. I'm sure people have been run over and killed by people driving 25 mph. Should we cap speeds at 10?
Some people have the attitude that as soon as one person dies we now have to ban any activity that was remotely associated with that person's death. You might as well ban breathing - everybody dies. 100% guaranteed!
That isn't to say that reckless driving shouldn't be illegal. However, speed limits are set mainly for the benefit of the insurance industry (who would prefer that we pay premiums but not drive at all).
I do not question that raising speed limits will increase the number of deaths due to collosions. However, it is also true that banning cars would reduce the number of deaths due to collosions. Society needs to find a balance, and I'd argue that we are not at that point now.
I wish I could do something that would bring back your brother. However, the fact is that people die every day. We don't need to turn their deaths into crusades to ban all human activity except for the essentials of eating, sleeping, and working.
This goes for home-built systems as well. Often it's just cheaper to buy a system built in taiwan than to build your own out of the exact same parts. I'm all for geeking it out and building something to your own specs, but for gaming machines or just basic desktop apps a pre-built system saves a lot of headaches.
I was able to put together a pretty decent AMD64 system last year for about $600. I saved a little by recycling DVD, floppy, and video card (not a gamer). I didn't recycle the parts that mattered most (power supply, motherboard, CPU, RAM, hard drive).
First, there aren't many vendors out there a year ago which even sold AMD64 systems. Second, for the performance level I got you'd easily spend double to triple with a major brand. Now, I value my time, but I don't value an hour or two of it at $1000+. Besides, it was fun, and I got a chance to catch up on the latest gear.
When you buy a name-brand PC, you get whatever the latest advertising buzzwords are. Probably lots of GHz. Probably a big hard drive, and probably even "7200RPM." You'll get a fast frontside bus since that is a buzzword now. You'll get lots of RAM. You won't get a decent motherboard, since most people don't know what one is. You will get a power supply that cost $20 which you'd never use for a comparable system since the only way the major brand got away with this is by buying 500 brands of $20 power supplies and figuring out which 2 of the 500 actually didn't burn out in a week. You won't get a hard drive with decent cache (cache - what's that?). You'll get a nice video card if you pay more, and you may or may not have an option to save money on a cheap one. You'll get some licenses for MS Works and Windows XP which you may or may not use (possibly the later, probably not the former).
Many benchmarks have shown motherboards to have a significant impact on system performance - sometimes equivalent to going up a notch in processor speed. Instead of spending $400 more for that extra bleeding-edge MHz level, you could spend $20 more on a motherboard which isn't a piece of junk.
I didn't spend a premium on any of my parts. However, I didn't get junk either.
I've been given brand-name PCs from friends who have had them stop working. I fix them up for the kids, when it makes sense to even do so. Often half the parts in them are just junk. I've read horror stories on Compaq power supplies which don't follow standard ATX pinouts despite having ATX plugs.
When buying commodity office workstations I'd just pay the premium and go with the name brand at work. However, at home I don't mind putting a little TLC into my systems and getting something which isn't junk...
I've never understood the way in which we punish act-of-passion prisoners.
d in exactly the same way. I'd get rid of most of the political-oriented laws and associated prisoners. I'd look to separate sociopaths from the rest of the prisoners so that everybody gets the help they need to reintegrate from society and so that people convicted of shoplifting aren't knifed over some petty prison power demonstration.
For example, take manslaughter. I swerve to miss a schoolbus that drifts into my lane and I hit and kill a pedestrian on the sidewalk. Why should this be considered a crime? Now, driving recklessly should be a crime in itself, but whether or not somebody got killed was just a matter of whether everybody else in the area was lucky. Somebody who accidentally kills somebody is of no danger to society at all most likely - we just throw the book at them to make the victim's family feel nice that they ruined somebody else's life since their lives aren't going well at the moment.
Another example is that attempted murder gets a lighter sentence than homicide. Why should a murderer get lucky just because the victim was lucky? Acting on an intent to kill somebody should be just as much a crime as actually killing them.
Prioson has a couple of really good purposes. It gets bad people off the street, it deters crime by imposing the threat of punishment, and if run correctly it has some potential to rehabilitate those incarcerated within them (not that this actually happens in our current society).
I remember reading a story about some 70 year old getting arressted for a crime he committed 30 years prior. He was a model citizen during those three decades. He is now bound for prison, where he will most likely die. Now, I understand that we can't go around setting an example that you can get away with murder, but on the other hand if somebody wasn't a danger to society for 30 years, and is clearly not one now, then what purpose does tossing them in a cell serve?
The problem is that people use prison for all the wrong reasons. It is approached emotionally (the victims suffered - somebody else should suffer too - who cares if there is only a 51% chance that they are guilty).
Oh well, I'm probably not going to see change in my lifetime.
A final note - don't think I'm soft on crime. If a man commits a homicide and the evidence is clearn, jail him for life, or possibly even execute him. I'm all for serious punishment for serious crime. However, I'd treat otherwise-homicidal-murderers-whose-victimes-live
But hey, what do I know?
In fact, Apollo was a few percent of the entire gross national product. That is HUGE for a single government program. Normally the only programs that get that kind of funding in most nations are nationalized health care, welfare, and the military. The military doesn't generally spend that kind of money on a single project, either. Probably the only one that had that kind of spending was the Manhatten project, and that was in the middle of WWII...
Or better yet on at an air force base on an island in the middle of the pacific...
Isn't it terribly inconvenient for your communist ideology, that america has blended the distinction between workers and owners? Most people I know own their own homes. Most of them invest what they can in the stock market. These are 'workers' just like you and me.
Hardly - how about this definition:
Worker - Somebody who obtains most of their income from working.
Owner - Somebody who obtains most of their income from dividends/capital gains.
99% of all Americans are in fact workers.
Go down the street and give each person an offer of giving up any hope of employment for the rest of their lives, or giving up any hope of investment income for the rest of their lives. 99% will choose to give up investment income, since most people have very little of it.
I'm not aware of any society in which more than about 1% of the population makes most of their money from investment. Probably the closest you'll get are farmers, who are more along the lines of self-employed, but they spend a lot more time working in the fields than they spend deciding which farms to buy and sell.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that all the world's ails will be solved by going communist or anything like that. However, I'm not under any kind of delusion that the average American is an "owner".
How many of those GPS-guided bombs use all-American-made components do you figure?
Sure, some guy in Kentucky probably puts the bombs together, but the metal probably comes from Asia, and the chips almost certainly do. The explosives probably are synthesized in the US using feedstocks manufactured overseas.
The US could do a lot of damange to Asia in general in a war, but they could not fight a protracted war against all of Asia due to an inability to resupply.
The US was a WWII powerhouse since it had its own oil, steel, manufacturing, etc. Britain ran into trouble since they imported everything, and U-boats made a mess of their supply lines. They were also close to the front lines and were bombed into the stone age (at least factories were).
The US can pick on an isolated country or two, but right now it can't take on half of the world. Nor should it try to do so.
The issues raised here are serious ones - the US needs to invest internally if it wants to remain a world power. The solution to the problem isn't building bombs - it is building factories or at least R&D labs...
I never liked the million-years-to-get-light-out-of-the-sun analogy.
When you look at the sun it takes a few minutes for the photons that hit your eyeball to travel there from the moment they are created to the moment they are destroyed.
The million year figure is how long it would take if you put a hot solar core in the middle of an otherwise cold star-sized cloud of gas where no convection occurred for the core to heat up the outer surface of the star.
Sunlight doesn't come from the solar core. It comes from the photosphere. Now, the reason that the photosphere is hot enough to glow is due to the core, and that heat does take a milion years to work its way up (again, assuming no convection, which I'm guessing would speed things considerably).
This would be like saying that light in your light bulb takes 1000 years to travel from the burning coal in the center of the power plant to your eyes. After all, the coal emits photons which boils water which drives generators. The electrons in the power line would probably take 1000 years to diffuse to your house (since power is transmitted without much net migration of electrons), and then those electrons emit photons as they interact at high energies in the filament of the bulb. It sounds nice, but anybody with an ounce of sense would realize that if it really took 1000 years then the light switch would not appear to operate.
In any case, stuff like this would really depend on where the photons are created. I doubt that when the neutron stars collide nothing would happen until their mass is consolidated, and then photons would emit from the core of the resulting star (which probably would be a black hole whose core can't emit anything). Instead, the interactions probably happen at the surface, where little blocks the emission of photons.
Neutrinos may very well give some warning, but it probably would be minutes or maybe hours - not months, years, or centuries as the million-years argument might suggest...
Actually - I'd argue that GPL gives more freedom to the original developer. That is the freedom to use all derived works.
The original BSD developer for the TCP stack has no access to the MS implementation of that stack - since they slapped a proprietary license on it.
On the other hand, the original GLP developer of linux code has full access to the Linksys implementation of it - since Linksys is compelled to release updates.
You will note that while companies love BSD-licensed projects (since they can just steal code from them), they rarely distribute their own works under the BSD, and that limits your ability to profit even more than the GPL, and arms your competitors with your technology. Companies only release under BSD if they don't care about the code at all, or if it is a reference implementation of something that they actually want everybody to just use as widely as possible - probably because it interfaces with some expensive proprietary product.
BSD does let you do more with the code, but GPL does more to protect the open source community, and to protect the original developer - and that is the person whose blood, seat, and tears were invested in the first place...
CVS space is cheap. Might as well let them use sourceforge and maybe somebody can use the code. 99% of the time it may not happen, but if the potential value of the code is $1000 and it is useful 1% of the time, and it costs 10 cents to host it, then it is still worthwhile...
I'm an AMD64 user you insensitive clod!
Seems to work fine though (filed on buzilla as 88478)...
(Actually, even x86 users need to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" on their emerge...)
Then they can write their own code.
If I write a major piece of software and give it away for anybody to use for free on the condition that anybody who improves it follows my example by giving back, then I could care less if some company would rather just exploit my work without any compensation at all and is upset that my license doesn't allow them to do so.
Compaines are no worse off than if linux didn't exist - so they should be happy that they're even allowed to use the software at all.
In any case, nobody really knows what the draft GPL v3 will look like anyway - this article is just wild speculation. I doubt it will require fee-for-use or anything like that. It might, however, require google to release their source code if they are using GPL software.
I'm already relaying via ISP - the only problem is that I have to use my ISP email address as my from address.
I'd rather use my own address as a from address so that I'm not locked in due to inability to switch email providers.
There is nothing elegant about dynamic DNS at all - so making TXT records inelegant is no big deal.
Really, there is no reason not to grant static IPs to all DSL users - that gets around the whole dynamic IP situation. However, the ISPs want to make money, and there is no law saying that we have to make it easy on them.
on the other hand its a barrier to those who want to develop closed source software for linux (i'm a beliver that an open os is far more important than having every single app open)
Uh, people are free to develop closed source for linux - the API is completely open. It sounds like you're complaining that some programmers give their services away for free since it harder for others to charge.
Keep in mind that there would probably not be a mysql if they didn't dual-license it. If they wanted to just charge a fortune they'd be competing against Oracle/IBM/MS - the field is already full of big players at various price levels and who wants to buy a no-name DB for a bunch of bucks? People looking for free would still have alternatives. The dual-license model allowed another solution to enter the field and become a fairly successful company. How is that bad?
It sounds like you don't like GPL libraries since they create a non-level playing field for open anc closed source. Suppose I own a refrigerated-trucking company. I'm a charitable man, so I offer to provide my services for free to charities who give food to the homeless - they can now get their food out to more locations without having to pay for expensive trucking. Now, in theory those charities are better-able to compete against McDonalds in remote areas which normally wouldn't be serviced by such charities. Should such charitable activity be banned? Hardly - they're my trucks, and if I want to donate my resources that is purely up to me. Has the world been shown disservice as a result of my activites - you'd be hard-pressed to say yes.
The beauty of open source is that it is market-driven. People write what people really want (strong demand), or at least what they're really interesting in writing (strong supply). The areas where the dimensions of supply and demand overlap get well serviced. Companies can still make a lot of money selling their software in areas where the free supply is low (maybe the software is boring to write, and so programmers need money to entice them).