It's funny you say that because a lot of the time it's little glitches in IE that end up giving a user remote root.
IE is a full program, not a UI. A simple UI would be a form on an HTML page that uses some javascript. (I have heard of morons that use Javascript as a security mechanism. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Jpeg, mp3, and zip have proven to be capable carriers of exploits precisely because of the issue that either the official support code or a common library contained an exploit;
Yes, decoding all of these are good examples of where security problems can take hold. It's all untrusted input and should be treated as such. Well, given that basically every commonly used OS has had such built-in "minor" bugs and Windows, Linux, and Mac programs are now being built so that lots of minor bugs are turned into simple DoS attacks (by basically reducing every possible buffer overflow into a program crash), your analysis basically amounts to scrapping all modern OSs and starting over.
Not really. While the OS might be able to help, it's certainly possible to build layers into your program and many people do exactly that. Postfix (an SMTP server) is a good example of that. OpenSSH takes a slightly different approach and uses different processes with different levels of privilege associated with them. Both of these are examples of what I'd call layered software.
The rest of what you say I'm pretty much in agreement with. I _would_ say that there seems to be some developers who actually think "perfect" software is both somehow possible, and wanted by people. (Though I'd agree in reality most users take a pragmatic approach)
Then you're an idiot who didn't separate your software properly into layers and should learn, or get out.
I understand your example, but the ultimate fear you're expressing about "the unknown" isn't warranted. Software is complex and can lead to unexpected problems. But worrying about every single minor bug possibly being a major one is just silly if you understand how the system interacts with itself. That's why good software is developed in layers. If you've really got a system where a UI glitch leads to a root exploit, time to throw away the whole application and start over.
Most coders have to use the code they write. Leaving bugs is not something you do if you know they are there. Sure some people do that, but not the ones that want to get it right
This happens all the time. Have you never read release notes that have a list of "known bugs"? Generally that's open source software. The closed source software has the exact same list, it just exists on the software makers private network.
Sure, if you KNOW how to fix the bug and it's easy most people will just fix it. The other cases it depends on the economics. Open source software isn't any different than closed source in this respect. Resources are always finite whether they're money or time.
Isn't this how people ACTUALLY write software already? Resources aren't infinite, and unless you're NASA writing code for the space shuttle, all bugs don't have to be fixed. I learned about triage and fixing the "big bugs" 15 years ago in school and it was certainly common practice in the industry then.
I was going to say "what a stupid article, everyone already knows this". But judging from the responses I guess everyone doesn't.
I think this would have been better if you'd used a car analogy... maybe something with hose clamps?
Too many people already think software development and IT are merely glorified mechanics. I much prefer the idea that it's more like the un-matured medical field of the early 20th century.
You can reuse functions but you can't extend them and that's where OOs reuse shines. It's very powerful to be able to lay out your code as a tree and control the reuse 'flow' at the nodes.
With each new tool brings a new way to abuse it. What I'd add is that for code re-use to work (in whatever language) you have to design it to be reused in the first place. A function written by a halfway decent developer with at least some re-use in mind is going to be 10 times better than a shitty OO object designed by what I call a "get the cookie" developer.
It's really that simple. A standard dual socket server with the latest CPU's from Intel or AMD can handle hundreds of requests per second;
Hundreds of requests for WHAT per second?
Your idea of "just throw hardware at the problem" isn't generalizable. Throw hardware at WHAT problem? For some problems, you're right. For others, you couldn't be more wrong. There's really no point in saying anything further.
In some ways I agree with the general idea of your post. But stepping back a bit, code HAS gotten easier to write over the long term. I'd hope nobody would argue that writing a large application in a modern high level language is easier than writing it using 1970s technology in assembly. Those advancements in language came through a lot of trial and error (a lot of error). How many failed language exist that turned out to be dead ends (though spurred further advancements and refinements?). How do you know the technologies you mentioned won't turn into the next (your favorite productive language here)?
You're right that endlessly pursuing the latest trend is just foolhardy, as most "new latest greatest technology" turn out to be duds. The point being those duds sometimes DO pan out. Anyone that thinks that relational databases are the end-all-be-all of persistent data storage hasn't done enough relational database development to understand some of the limitations.
So you're in surgery for 3 hours doing a kidney transplant, having used your trusty medium vascular clamp that have served you for the past 20 years. You're finally done and the patient is in recovery, so you sit down to relax with the latest copy of JAMA. They've got a great article about the latest development of Cardiac clamps, and you think to yourself "Why not use a heart clamp for kidney transplants!" Brilliant. So you order up some new clamps from MedicalClamps.com, and use them on your next patient. The surgery goes fine, but 3 months later the patient is back in your office with a failed kidney. You open 'em up, and it's obvious the clamp exerted too much pressure on the artery, damaging it in the process. Stupid carciac clamps! You're not a heart surgeon!
It is a forgone conclusion that H.264 "won", because hardware manufacturers have come to that conclusion and are building all the new hardware with H.264 support. They are not developing Theora players.
Meh. Hardware is essentially disposable. Tomorrow it'll all be obsolete and you'll have to buy the NEW super-great hardware. Sorry, I just don't find this argument very compelling. The idea that one format "wins" and the other "loses" is simply not accurate. Formats live and die, not win or lose.
I see a lot of statements in your post, but not a lot of argument or information.
Why is this about H.264 OR Theora? Why isn't it about H.264 AND Theora? Like PNG vs Gif, why do we have to pick one or the other?
You seem to think H.264 having "won" is a forgone conclusion. Your only arguments seems to be hardware support, and the "lots of data" point. How is that a sustainable situation? Hardware support is nice and all, but every other format the hardware support has become largely irrelevant as processors have gotten faster.
No, the big issue here is the stupid software patents. Arguing about which one is less likely to anger the patent trolls misses the point. When patent trolls are holding everyone hostage don't start arguing about which hostage is least likely to be taken out and shot first.
He could have done one of two things: disable ping responses or changed a setting in his modem.
Disabling ping is merely a poor workaround. You can exploit it in at least one other way, CTCP also has a ping response. If the victim is running an SMTP server that you can connect to you can get the SMTP server to repeat +++ATH0 via several different tricks. I'm sure there's other services that behave in a similar manner. The only REAL fix is to disable the sequence in the modem.
no, they merely add an extra player to the game - the greedy union.
Do you really have no idea what labor was like in this country before unions were able to organize? The meatpacking industry was a prime example. Dangerous working conditions, low pay, etc Upton Sinclair wrote a popular book about it called The Jungle 104 years ago in 1906. Unions were able to organize in the 30s, and turned meat packing into a decent job. That all started to fail in the 70s when for various reasons the unions fell in meat packing. These days meatpacking is back to being a shit job done by illegal immigrants that's among the most dangerous in the nation. So it's gone full circle.
I also know some fairly idiotic counter-examples of the greed and power-hungry aspect of unions. That's why I stress the need for balance between the two.
I was making a simple observation, not writing a thesis.
Which doesn't stand up to examination. Your observation was that California was foolish in laying off your friend for purely economic reasons since they only saved 1/3 the money. Obviously that isn't true for the reasons I stated. Even a simple observation should be able to stand up to what amounts to 2 minutes of research about how unemployment works. But those complications don't change the overall irony of going from being an employee of the taxpayers in exchange for services rendered, to being an "employee" of the taxpayers for doing nothing at all.
I guess I don't see the irony. Being paid to do nothing is how unemployment works, and the benefit to society is we don't have people living on the streets. The other major benefit is all the cash the government gives out as unemployment goes right back into the economy. In a time of economic stress that's very important, otherwise the economy would collapse even further.
Since it's largely a payroll tax that you have to work a certain amount of time to even qualify for, it's more like an entitlement like Social Security than anything else. I really don't see how a public party being on unemployment is any more ironic than a private party. Each have paid into the system, so what's the problem? It's shit pay if that makes you feel any better. Frankly you just sound jealous of your friend because you work in a state that doesn't offer any kind of decent unemployment benefits.
Guess what? That's a lobby.
I guess you're right, there's an "unemployment lobby". What bothers be about your comment is that it reduces the real needs of people down to what amounts to politicking along the lines of "the tobacco lobby" or "the big oil lobby". People use the word "lobby" as a bludgeon to associate a certain political point with a negative connotation. It's like someone talking about how child labor laws are simply something pushed by "the child labor lobby", dismissing the real world problems that existed before child labor laws as merely "special interests". Maybe that's not what you're trying to say, but it sure sounds like it.
In fact, my entire original comment was a series of observations about government, indicting not the government for its wastefulness, but poking fun at people who get up-in-arms about that waste in one area but are quick to backpedal when their pet cause is on trial.
Or jettison subtlety, I suppose. Which is a real shame because beating people over the head makes me feel misanthropic.
I didn't get any of that whatsoever. Subtlety is largely conveyed through tone and reputation. That's lost entirely in text postings by anonymous people.
Unions strike a balance between greedy corporations, and greedy individuals. Sometimes one or the other gets out of whack, but to choose one side or the other ignores the need for balance.
Hence, in the original post, the teacher that was laid off still gets paid almost as much as before.
Uhh... haven't you ever heard of unemployment insurance. (Hint, this is a benefit everyone but the self-employed gets and has nothing to do with teachers unions). The only reason the person in question received 2/3 of their original salary is because the original salary was shit to begin with (unemployment benefits are generally capped to a relatively small amount).
The ignorance of some people just astounds me. Your entire argument is based on nothing of substance. You are a prime example of willful ignorance.
But I personally appreciate the irony of someone who is working for the government continuing to collect a non-trivial portion of their salary from the same revenue stream.
Except it's NOT the same revenue stream (and it's only "non-trivial because unemployment benefits are capped at a relatively small amount, so your friend was making shit to begin with). Contrary to popular belief "the government" isn't a single entity with one single revenue stream. Unemployment for instance is partially funded through federal tax dollars. But don't believe just me, look it up yourself (After reading through it, it is NOT simple) In the case I mentioned, California is saving 1/3 of a teacher's salary by eliminating one whole teacher.
Because of being partly funded through a federal payroll tax, California is saving more than that. Also, states are allowed to borrow money from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits. If you wanted to actually analyze the savings you'd have to know whether the California unemployment tax goes into a general fund, or whether it goes to pay unemployment benefits. But hey, just simplify it down and make the bare minimum calculation and assume everything supports your argument. Also just ignore the fact about how school funding ACTUALLY happens. I'm sure you're right that just assuming all revenue is just thrown into a general fund like your bank account and there's no allocation of funds to different branches of government. (Have you seriously never paid any attention at all to how government works?) and the unemployment lobby
What the fuck are you on, brother? The "unemployment lobby"? There's an "unemployment lobby"? Created by whom? The super-rich unemployed? What's the name of this "unemployment lobby" Do they have offices? You're just making shit up at this point and putting "lobby" in front of things you don't like because people don't like lobbyist (oh, except for the causes they personally support).
Among the classes I teach in a junior college... When I was teaching in the 1970s... When I gave the same assignment in the early 2000s I got room full of blank looks. One brave student asked what class they were supposed to have taken to learn what a number base was.
I suspect the first two sentences might have something to do with the last two sentences. I went though the public school system in the 1980s, and I assure you we learned about number bases. Growing up in the suburbs in MN I suspect my education might have been better than most. I recently was talking about set theory education in grade school with a few colleagues. Some said they had learned it, others said they hadn't. I don't recall exactly what my experience was, but at the very least it was a minor topic that was glossed over. I didn't get a GOOD education on set theory until college in discrete mathematics database classes.
The point being, math education varies widely. These days going to college is much more expected than it was even in the 70s. People aren't any smarter now than they were then, and junior college is (with some exceptions) where the lower tier of students in HS wind up. Given all that, is it any wonder that you're seeing people who don't understand what a number base is? People aren't any dumber, it's just the samples you're seeing are very different than they used to be.
I don't mean to demean anyone that went to Junior college. Some of the smartest people I've ever known started out their or some equivalent of it. (They've also reported back to me that the quality of students in Junior college is relatively lower).
at least on the computer systems developed by flexible-enough-minded people who are both willing to change and willing to correct a long-confusing problem.
And that consists of one potential release of Ubuntu, and one 6 month old release of OSX?
Do you really believe that an extremely minor share of operating systems changing to a new set of units will make which unit people are referring to MORE clear? How? Computers are and always have been an aspect of change in our society. Get over it and get with the program.
Being opposed to change because it's change is foolish. Being in favor of change because it's somehow "inevitable" is at least as equally foolish. Do you just roll over whenever anything comes along anywhere?
I'm surprised by the majority here that is against this. What kind of nerds exactly are you? Nerds that understand computing, and language?
Computers are inherently binary devices, not base 10 devices. It's quite natural that people who designed computers based all their units on base 2 rather than base 10. This has essentially been the case since the dawn of modern computing 70 years ago. Being consistently wrong for a very long time doesn't make it better
Consistently wrong about a word definition? Sounds like a weak argument to me. Ever read a dictionary?
How can you be all for standards-compliance with browsers and rile against a much stronger, decades-old ISO standard (which is based on a centuries old definition from the beginning of the metric system - "kilo" has been 1000 for over 200 years)?
Because we understand that words can have multiple definitions based on context. Everyone can easily understand that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, and a kilometer is 1000 meters. That's just how language works. Standards are about interoperability, not about "being right".
On the other hand, you are the same crowd regularly writing about "mbit/s" while meaning "Mbit/s", thereby being off by just a tiny, unimportant, paltry factor of a billion. Seriously, what's wrong with you?
Right. I've certainly never seen engineers in non-computing fields make the mistake of not even labeling a graph, or labeling a unit before. I've sure never heard of a mars space probe that went awry because of confusion over units before. But hey, it's only people in computing that make such mistakes, right?
Well, it took me half an hour to convince my old boss that "1.5 minutes" in his Excelsheet isn't actually 1 minute and 50 seconds, but one minute and 30 seconds. He finally got it when I asked him to enter "1.59" and "2" so that he could see the resulting amount of money changed quite dramatically for just one second of extra work, but I doubt he ever really grasped the root of the problem.
Your old boss is obviously a moron. Anyone that presumably got through school and never understood the concept of fractions (but thinks they did) is just plain stupid. You can't argue with stupid, and you can't base any decisions around stupid. Stupid will always find a way to continue to be stupid despite your best efforts. (Oh, and I draw a hard line between ignorance and stupid).
Anyway, The points you bring up that software has always changed and always will is a good one. I'm not going to address how it has and all the various ways it's been forced to do so. But it seems to me this is more a question of WHY it should change rather than if it's possible to do so. File sizes increase because people want to do new things with the machine, so that's easy to justify. The same is true with 8/16/32/64 bit machines. Endian-ness is a bit harder to justify, since it often means supporting an even wider variety of architectures.
The point being that rather than treating all computing like a passive attitude like the changes are simply inevitable and you're somehow flawed if you resist it for any reason is foolish. You need to take a more active role in evaluating which changes should be pursued, and which shouldn't. 15 years ago Intel was pushing Itanium as the next big leap in computing, and by all accounts in 2010 the x86 would be all but dead. We'd never have a 64 bit x86 processor, so just port everything to Itanium. Looking at the project sales forecasts vs actuals is very very funny. How's that working out for you, Intel?
quite a while before comp sci started breaking the standard by incorrectly using the prefixes for base-2.
Word meanings change all the time, and "standards bodies" sometimes try to stop people from "corrupting" meanings. This isn't necessarily bad.. but more often than not it's fruitless. France actually has a language police and a law to try to "preserve" the french language.
As someone else pointed out, language is inherently contextual. We can survive two meanings of kilo used in different contexts and survive quite nicely. If adherence to someone's standard is your only argument you might as well start a campaign complaining about the multiple definitions of dog.
I guess you don't know the half of it. They sell well to CIOs on the basis of sex-aiddict sportsmen but deliver chaos as they try to get stuff written as cheaply as possible whilst not spending money to manage their projects properly.
Oh I know that quite well (Though I'm not sure what you mean by sex-addict sportmen). I've never personally experienced their work, but I've heard from several people I trust that that's how they operate. Selling to CIOs and the like is relatively common if you're trying to sell something expensive. That part I've experienced and told vendors to go packing and found solutions at 1/30 of the cost. (Sales people don't like me because I actually know what I want and can see through their sophisticated 3-card Monte). That's obviously a bit of a luxury, and I'm sure someday I'll get dictated to to buy some insanely expensive and worthless system.
The project I know most about that they fucked up was rewriting University of Minnesota financial system. Through the grapevine I heard the project was doomed early on. A friend of mine actually worked with the "finished" product, and confirmed how utterly and complete a train wreck the thing was. The response of Accenture to the train wreck was to set up a "SWAT Team" that they could point towards whenever someone complained. The "SWAT Team" consisted of reportedly smart people that would look at the code, and kind of shrug essentially saying "Well of course that huge mess of crap doesn't work, but how the hell am I supposed to fix it?"
Governments waste money. Your local government does it. Your state government. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head (/sarcasm) but I'm pretty sure the federal government does it, too.
Private industry wastes gobs of money as well. The reason you don't hear about it is that the government actually has to report on what it spent, where private industry can usually sweep it all under the table.
Have you never heard of failed projects in private industry that wasted millions of dollars? Sometimes private enterprise has a very public failure they wasted millions of dollars on that's so public they can't sweep it under the rug. The London Stock Exchangeis a good example. (Brought to you by the fine folks at Accenture, whom I personally know have completely fucked up two other large projects).
Idiotic and colossal failures of software projects are embarrassingly common. I'm sure anyone worth their salt on slashdot has heard of many such failures in private industry. I know I have.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny you say that because a lot of the time it's little glitches in IE that end up giving a user remote root.
IE is a full program, not a UI. A simple UI would be a form on an HTML page that uses some javascript. (I have heard of morons that use Javascript as a security mechanism. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Jpeg, mp3, and zip have proven to be capable carriers of exploits precisely because of the issue that either the official support code or a common library contained an exploit;
Yes, decoding all of these are good examples of where security problems can take hold. It's all untrusted input and should be treated as such.
Well, given that basically every commonly used OS has had such built-in "minor" bugs and Windows, Linux, and Mac programs are now being built so that lots of minor bugs are turned into simple DoS attacks (by basically reducing every possible buffer overflow into a program crash), your analysis basically amounts to scrapping all modern OSs and starting over.
Not really. While the OS might be able to help, it's certainly possible to build layers into your program and many people do exactly that. Postfix (an SMTP server) is a good example of that. OpenSSH takes a slightly different approach and uses different processes with different levels of privilege associated with them. Both of these are examples of what I'd call layered software.
The rest of what you say I'm pretty much in agreement with. I _would_ say that there seems to be some developers who actually think "perfect" software is both somehow possible, and wanted by people. (Though I'd agree in reality most users take a pragmatic approach)
What if that little UI glitch gives remote root?
Then you're an idiot who didn't separate your software properly into layers and should learn, or get out.
I understand your example, but the ultimate fear you're expressing about "the unknown" isn't warranted. Software is complex and can lead to unexpected problems. But worrying about every single minor bug possibly being a major one is just silly if you understand how the system interacts with itself. That's why good software is developed in layers. If you've really got a system where a UI glitch leads to a root exploit, time to throw away the whole application and start over.
Most coders have to use the code they write. Leaving bugs is not something you do if you know they are there. Sure some people do that, but not the ones that want to get it right
This happens all the time. Have you never read release notes that have a list of "known bugs"? Generally that's open source software. The closed source software has the exact same list, it just exists on the software makers private network.
Sure, if you KNOW how to fix the bug and it's easy most people will just fix it. The other cases it depends on the economics. Open source software isn't any different than closed source in this respect. Resources are always finite whether they're money or time.
Isn't this how people ACTUALLY write software already? Resources aren't infinite, and unless you're NASA writing code for the space shuttle, all bugs don't have to be fixed. I learned about triage and fixing the "big bugs" 15 years ago in school and it was certainly common practice in the industry then.
I was going to say "what a stupid article, everyone already knows this". But judging from the responses I guess everyone doesn't.
I think this would have been better if you'd used a car analogy
Too many people already think software development and IT are merely glorified mechanics. I much prefer the idea that it's more like the un-matured medical field of the early 20th century.
You can reuse functions but you can't extend them and that's where OOs reuse shines. It's very powerful to be able to lay out your code as a tree and control the reuse 'flow' at the nodes.
With each new tool brings a new way to abuse it. What I'd add is that for code re-use to work (in whatever language) you have to design it to be reused in the first place. A function written by a halfway decent developer with at least some re-use in mind is going to be 10 times better than a shitty OO object designed by what I call a "get the cookie" developer.
It's really that simple. A standard dual socket server with the latest CPU's from Intel or AMD can handle hundreds of requests per second;
Hundreds of requests for WHAT per second?
Your idea of "just throw hardware at the problem" isn't generalizable. Throw hardware at WHAT problem? For some problems, you're right. For others, you couldn't be more wrong. There's really no point in saying anything further.
In some ways I agree with the general idea of your post. But stepping back a bit, code HAS gotten easier to write over the long term. I'd hope nobody would argue that writing a large application in a modern high level language is easier than writing it using 1970s technology in assembly. Those advancements in language came through a lot of trial and error (a lot of error). How many failed language exist that turned out to be dead ends (though spurred further advancements and refinements?). How do you know the technologies you mentioned won't turn into the next (your favorite productive language here)?
You're right that endlessly pursuing the latest trend is just foolhardy, as most "new latest greatest technology" turn out to be duds. The point being those duds sometimes DO pan out. Anyone that thinks that relational databases are the end-all-be-all of persistent data storage hasn't done enough relational database development to understand some of the limitations.
So you're in surgery for 3 hours doing a kidney transplant, having used your trusty medium vascular clamp that have served you for the past 20 years. You're finally done and the patient is in recovery, so you sit down to relax with the latest copy of JAMA. They've got a great article about the latest development of Cardiac clamps, and you think to yourself "Why not use a heart clamp for kidney transplants!" Brilliant. So you order up some new clamps from MedicalClamps.com, and use them on your next patient. The surgery goes fine, but 3 months later the patient is back in your office with a failed kidney. You open 'em up, and it's obvious the clamp exerted too much pressure on the artery, damaging it in the process. Stupid carciac clamps! You're not a heart surgeon!
It is a forgone conclusion that H.264 "won", because hardware manufacturers have come to that conclusion and are building all the new hardware with H.264 support. They are not developing Theora players.
Meh. Hardware is essentially disposable. Tomorrow it'll all be obsolete and you'll have to buy the NEW super-great hardware. Sorry, I just don't find this argument very compelling. The idea that one format "wins" and the other "loses" is simply not accurate. Formats live and die, not win or lose.
I see a lot of statements in your post, but not a lot of argument or information.
Why is this about H.264 OR Theora? Why isn't it about H.264 AND Theora? Like PNG vs Gif, why do we have to pick one or the other?
You seem to think H.264 having "won" is a forgone conclusion. Your only arguments seems to be hardware support, and the "lots of data" point. How is that a sustainable situation? Hardware support is nice and all, but every other format the hardware support has become largely irrelevant as processors have gotten faster.
No, the big issue here is the stupid software patents. Arguing about which one is less likely to anger the patent trolls misses the point. When patent trolls are holding everyone hostage don't start arguing about which hostage is least likely to be taken out and shot first.
He could have done one of two things: disable ping responses or changed a setting in his modem.
Disabling ping is merely a poor workaround. You can exploit it in at least one other way, CTCP also has a ping response. If the victim is running an SMTP server that you can connect to you can get the SMTP server to repeat +++ATH0 via several different tricks. I'm sure there's other services that behave in a similar manner. The only REAL fix is to disable the sequence in the modem.
no, they merely add an extra player to the game - the greedy union.
Do you really have no idea what labor was like in this country before unions were able to organize? The meatpacking industry was a prime example. Dangerous working conditions, low pay, etc Upton Sinclair wrote a popular book about it called The Jungle 104 years ago in 1906. Unions were able to organize in the 30s, and turned meat packing into a decent job. That all started to fail in the 70s when for various reasons the unions fell in meat packing. These days meatpacking is back to being a shit job done by illegal immigrants that's among the most dangerous in the nation. So it's gone full circle.
I also know some fairly idiotic counter-examples of the greed and power-hungry aspect of unions. That's why I stress the need for balance between the two.
I was making a simple observation, not writing a thesis.
Which doesn't stand up to examination. Your observation was that California was foolish in laying off your friend for purely economic reasons since they only saved 1/3 the money. Obviously that isn't true for the reasons I stated. Even a simple observation should be able to stand up to what amounts to 2 minutes of research about how unemployment works.
But those complications don't change the overall irony of going from being an employee of the taxpayers in exchange for services rendered, to being an "employee" of the taxpayers for doing nothing at all.
I guess I don't see the irony. Being paid to do nothing is how unemployment works, and the benefit to society is we don't have people living on the streets. The other major benefit is all the cash the government gives out as unemployment goes right back into the economy. In a time of economic stress that's very important, otherwise the economy would collapse even further.
Since it's largely a payroll tax that you have to work a certain amount of time to even qualify for, it's more like an entitlement like Social Security than anything else. I really don't see how a public party being on unemployment is any more ironic than a private party. Each have paid into the system, so what's the problem? It's shit pay if that makes you feel any better. Frankly you just sound jealous of your friend because you work in a state that doesn't offer any kind of decent unemployment benefits.
Guess what? That's a lobby.
I guess you're right, there's an "unemployment lobby". What bothers be about your comment is that it reduces the real needs of people down to what amounts to politicking along the lines of "the tobacco lobby" or "the big oil lobby". People use the word "lobby" as a bludgeon to associate a certain political point with a negative connotation. It's like someone talking about how child labor laws are simply something pushed by "the child labor lobby", dismissing the real world problems that existed before child labor laws as merely "special interests". Maybe that's not what you're trying to say, but it sure sounds like it.
In fact, my entire original comment was a series of observations about government, indicting not the government for its wastefulness, but poking fun at people who get up-in-arms about that waste in one area but are quick to backpedal when their pet cause is on trial.
Or jettison subtlety, I suppose. Which is a real shame because beating people over the head makes me feel misanthropic.
I didn't get any of that whatsoever. Subtlety is largely conveyed through tone and reputation. That's lost entirely in text postings by anonymous people.
Unions strike a balance between greedy corporations, and greedy individuals. Sometimes one or the other gets out of whack, but to choose one side or the other ignores the need for balance.
Hence, in the original post, the teacher that was laid off still gets paid almost as much as before.
Uhh... haven't you ever heard of unemployment insurance. (Hint, this is a benefit everyone but the self-employed gets and has nothing to do with teachers unions). The only reason the person in question received 2/3 of their original salary is because the original salary was shit to begin with (unemployment benefits are generally capped to a relatively small amount).
The ignorance of some people just astounds me. Your entire argument is based on nothing of substance. You are a prime example of willful ignorance.
But I personally appreciate the irony of someone who is working for the government continuing to collect a non-trivial portion of their salary from the same revenue stream.
Except it's NOT the same revenue stream (and it's only "non-trivial because unemployment benefits are capped at a relatively small amount, so your friend was making shit to begin with). Contrary to popular belief "the government" isn't a single entity with one single revenue stream. Unemployment for instance is partially funded through federal tax dollars. But don't believe just me, look it up yourself (After reading through it, it is NOT simple)
In the case I mentioned, California is saving 1/3 of a teacher's salary by eliminating one whole teacher.
Because of being partly funded through a federal payroll tax, California is saving more than that. Also, states are allowed to borrow money from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits. If you wanted to actually analyze the savings you'd have to know whether the California unemployment tax goes into a general fund, or whether it goes to pay unemployment benefits. But hey, just simplify it down and make the bare minimum calculation and assume everything supports your argument. Also just ignore the fact about how school funding ACTUALLY happens. I'm sure you're right that just assuming all revenue is just thrown into a general fund like your bank account and there's no allocation of funds to different branches of government. (Have you seriously never paid any attention at all to how government works?)
and the unemployment lobby
What the fuck are you on, brother? The "unemployment lobby"? There's an "unemployment lobby"? Created by whom? The super-rich unemployed? What's the name of this "unemployment lobby" Do they have offices? You're just making shit up at this point and putting "lobby" in front of things you don't like because people don't like lobbyist (oh, except for the causes they personally support).
Among the classes I teach in a junior college
When I was teaching in the 1970s
When I gave the same assignment in the early 2000s I got room full of blank looks. One brave student asked what class they were supposed to have taken to learn what a number base was.
I suspect the first two sentences might have something to do with the last two sentences. I went though the public school system in the 1980s, and I assure you we learned about number bases. Growing up in the suburbs in MN I suspect my education might have been better than most. I recently was talking about set theory education in grade school with a few colleagues. Some said they had learned it, others said they hadn't. I don't recall exactly what my experience was, but at the very least it was a minor topic that was glossed over. I didn't get a GOOD education on set theory until college in discrete mathematics database classes.
The point being, math education varies widely. These days going to college is much more expected than it was even in the 70s. People aren't any smarter now than they were then, and junior college is (with some exceptions) where the lower tier of students in HS wind up. Given all that, is it any wonder that you're seeing people who don't understand what a number base is? People aren't any dumber, it's just the samples you're seeing are very different than they used to be.
I don't mean to demean anyone that went to Junior college. Some of the smartest people I've ever known started out their or some equivalent of it. (They've also reported back to me that the quality of students in Junior college is relatively lower).
at least on the computer systems developed by flexible-enough-minded people who are both willing to change and willing to correct a long-confusing problem.
And that consists of one potential release of Ubuntu, and one 6 month old release of OSX?
Do you really believe that an extremely minor share of operating systems changing to a new set of units will make which unit people are referring to MORE clear? How?
Computers are and always have been an aspect of change in our society. Get over it and get with the program.
Being opposed to change because it's change is foolish. Being in favor of change because it's somehow "inevitable" is at least as equally foolish. Do you just roll over whenever anything comes along anywhere?
I'm surprised by the majority here that is against this. What kind of nerds exactly are you?
Nerds that understand computing, and language?
Computers are inherently binary devices, not base 10 devices. It's quite natural that people who designed computers based all their units on base 2 rather than base 10. This has essentially been the case since the dawn of modern computing 70 years ago.
Being consistently wrong for a very long time doesn't make it better
Consistently wrong about a word definition? Sounds like a weak argument to me. Ever read a dictionary?
How can you be all for standards-compliance with browsers and rile against a much
stronger, decades-old ISO standard (which is based on a centuries old definition from the
beginning of the metric system - "kilo" has been 1000 for over 200 years)?
Because we understand that words can have multiple definitions based on context. Everyone can easily understand that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, and a kilometer is 1000 meters. That's just how language works. Standards are about interoperability, not about "being right".
On the other hand, you are the same crowd regularly writing about "mbit/s" while meaning "Mbit/s",
thereby being off by just a tiny, unimportant, paltry factor of a billion.
Seriously, what's wrong with you?
Right. I've certainly never seen engineers in non-computing fields make the mistake of not even labeling a graph, or labeling a unit before. I've sure never heard of a mars space probe that went awry because of confusion over units before. But hey, it's only people in computing that make such mistakes, right?
Well, it took me half an hour to convince my old boss that "1.5 minutes" in his Excelsheet isn't actually 1 minute and 50 seconds, but one minute and 30 seconds. He finally got it when I asked him to enter "1.59" and "2" so that he could see the resulting amount of money changed quite dramatically for just one second of extra work, but I doubt he ever really grasped the root of the problem.
Your old boss is obviously a moron. Anyone that presumably got through school and never understood the concept of fractions (but thinks they did) is just plain stupid. You can't argue with stupid, and you can't base any decisions around stupid. Stupid will always find a way to continue to be stupid despite your best efforts. (Oh, and I draw a hard line between ignorance and stupid).
Anyway, The points you bring up that software has always changed and always will is a good one. I'm not going to address how it has and all the various ways it's been forced to do so. But it seems to me this is more a question of WHY it should change rather than if it's possible to do so. File sizes increase because people want to do new things with the machine, so that's easy to justify. The same is true with 8/16/32/64 bit machines. Endian-ness is a bit harder to justify, since it often means supporting an even wider variety of architectures.
The point being that rather than treating all computing like a passive attitude like the changes are simply inevitable and you're somehow flawed if you resist it for any reason is foolish. You need to take a more active role in evaluating which changes should be pursued, and which shouldn't. 15 years ago Intel was pushing Itanium as the next big leap in computing, and by all accounts in 2010 the x86 would be all but dead. We'd never have a 64 bit x86 processor, so just port everything to Itanium. Looking at the project sales forecasts vs actuals is very very funny. How's that working out for you, Intel?
quite a while before comp sci started breaking the standard by incorrectly using the prefixes for base-2.
Word meanings change all the time, and "standards bodies" sometimes try to stop people from "corrupting" meanings. This isn't necessarily bad.. but more often than not it's fruitless. France actually has a language police and a law to try to "preserve" the french language.
As someone else pointed out, language is inherently contextual. We can survive two meanings of kilo used in different contexts and survive quite nicely. If adherence to someone's standard is your only argument you might as well start a campaign complaining about the multiple definitions of dog.
I guess you don't know the half of it. They sell well to CIOs on the basis of sex-aiddict sportsmen but deliver chaos as they try to get stuff written as cheaply as possible whilst not spending money to manage their projects properly.
Oh I know that quite well (Though I'm not sure what you mean by sex-addict sportmen). I've never personally experienced their work, but I've heard from several people I trust that that's how they operate. Selling to CIOs and the like is relatively common if you're trying to sell something expensive. That part I've experienced and told vendors to go packing and found solutions at 1/30 of the cost. (Sales people don't like me because I actually know what I want and can see through their sophisticated 3-card Monte). That's obviously a bit of a luxury, and I'm sure someday I'll get dictated to to buy some insanely expensive and worthless system.
The project I know most about that they fucked up was rewriting University of Minnesota financial system. Through the grapevine I heard the project was doomed early on. A friend of mine actually worked with the "finished" product, and confirmed how utterly and complete a train wreck the thing was. The response of Accenture to the train wreck was to set up a "SWAT Team" that they could point towards whenever someone complained. The "SWAT Team" consisted of reportedly smart people that would look at the code, and kind of shrug essentially saying "Well of course that huge mess of crap doesn't work, but how the hell am I supposed to fix it?"
Governments waste money. Your local government does it. Your state government. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head (/sarcasm) but I'm pretty sure the federal government does it, too.
Private industry wastes gobs of money as well. The reason you don't hear about it is that the government actually has to report on what it spent, where private industry can usually sweep it all under the table.
Have you never heard of failed projects in private industry that wasted millions of dollars? Sometimes private enterprise has a very public failure they wasted millions of dollars on that's so public they can't sweep it under the rug. The London Stock Exchangeis a good example. (Brought to you by the fine folks at Accenture, whom I personally know have completely fucked up two other large projects).
Idiotic and colossal failures of software projects are embarrassingly common. I'm sure anyone worth their salt on slashdot has heard of many such failures in private industry. I know I have.
Correct according to everyone except computer science. Every other field goes by base-10.
Do you write to the publishers of dictionaries complaining when a word has two definitions as well?