You know, you really personify the "wanker customer."
To make high grade consumer electronics, you basically need billions of billions of dollars, right? So there are basically only a handful of companies that really do this and they all compete in a highly competitive highly innovative market that provides new and exciting things at reasonable prices.. if not new, then wait three years and get a very useful but slightly older item on ebay for a song.
But some customers have some perceived or real indignation with some companies and then get all self-righteous, as you have done. Ooohh.. some salesperson was wrong about the future capabilities of some product or some product didn't quite come through engineering as they suspected it would in the future. are you the same guy who sued his uni in the UK for not kicking him out fast enough after he had been caught cheating?
But you want to know the real point of my rant and a dirty little secret (and, by the way, this applies to laptops too! you will be able to find X people for ANY laptop manufacturer who say "they suck! I will never buy from them again!")
THE COMPANIES LIKE IT WHEN YOU SAY YOU WON'T BUY FROM THEM AGAIN.
That's right, they like it. And not because they don't like dealing with twats. It's because IT MAKES THEM More MONEY.
What? Am I nuts?
No. Consider this. In the normal market, you have a choice of X goods. Of the X goods, let's say that one is optimum for you.. that is, if you knew everything, then buying that one would be your best choice when all factors are considered (price, performance, etc.)
however, let's say that you automatically exclude one company from consideration because you have a slightly irrational grudge towards them. if there are 5 companies in the market, then, say, 1/5th of the time that means that when you go to buy your next product you will at best choose the second best possible product.
and the simple fact is, that when you choose anything but the best possible product, speaking broadly (over hundreds of millions of transactions) the companies make more profit.
Ah, but you say--the market needs a mechanism to correct bad companies! true, but the fact is (as I started out this piece with), the companies are highly competitive. they know what their levels of price/service/customer satisfaction are. they have mbas with clipboards and spreadsheets monitoring this kind of stuff and, in a competitive market they all come out on more or less the same efficiency curve.
ah, but then you say - but this inefficiency will attract new manufacturers into the market! at the margins, yes. but in practice--do you have a trillion dollars to start the next Sony?
in the end, wanker, grudge-bearing customers in businesses like laptops and electronics where there are few suppliers and entry costs are high increase corporate profits.
There actually is an important difference between and image format and an embedded video/flash/javascript thingy. A image is 'passive' it just stays there, it doesn't waste CPU resources, it doesn't jump at you or anything, its just passive. A video, flash or javascript (or all together) on the other side is 'active', they do things on their own, often are impossible to stop, let new windows popup, deadlock the browser, or just waste CPU resources and other not so nice stuff.
This is a meaningless, stupid, and arbitrary distinction. JPEGs take system resources to decompress / view and, as you said, there are animated.gifs. Many sites these days have shockwave in there in a 'passive' state (menus and stuff--you may not agree with the decision, but it's there), and there is plenty of 'active' html in the form of DHTML and javascript.
I understand what you are saying from a practical standpoint. However, the original poster was making a philosophical claim so i responded with an appropriate philosophical response. likewise, i think your claim has an aura of reasonableness about it, but really you have to recognize that your 'active vs passive' spiel is just as arbitrary as his decison.
Re:I'm with linus torvalds on this one
on
Browser Wars Mark II
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Just as good software should be modularized and decentralized, a web browser should be just that: a secure configurable and stable html viewer.
There should be a new logical fallacy called "fallacy of false convenience" or something like that. this is where some poster attempts to throw some bullshit by you by starting with reasonable premises and then hoping tht you won't notice the sleight of hand.
Let's look: "good software should be modularized and decentralized." This is a reasonable propositon. but looks at where he goes from there: "a web browser shoud be just that.. a secure configurable and stable HTML viewer."
Im sorry, you conclusions do NOT follow from your premises. You have instead chosen an arbitrary standard that you happen to agree with and more or less declare this to be 'obvious' when it in fact is not.
Why should a web browser be a secure configurable (stable i'll take for granted) viewer when it is clear to anybody that today's web is much more than that? why do you NOT have a problem with your web browser being able to view a myriad of image formats but not a myriad of video formats? is there some fundamental difference? NO! or are you suggesting that maybe image viewing should be shucked out an external program? No? Then why is your line in the sand so 'obvious?' (remember, there are lynx users out there who WOULD say that the image viewing should be shucked out to an external viewer and who used to campaign against any web page containing any non-essential information in graphical format; clearly technology has passed those people by).
For that matter, why shouldn't you have a different program to display each letter of the alphabet, or each color? That's modularized and decentralized, no? While that is of course a silly example, it just goes to show that _your_ definition of "what some AC thinks a web browser should be" is not necessarily what follows from your premises just because "games and fancy bloated intros" don't suit you.
Only on slashdot would your sort of wishful thinking be marked 'insightful.'
Oh for fuck's sake.. [READ THIS SUBMITTER]
on
Browser Wars Mark II
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
good god, submitter.. you have written a baldfaced piece of advocacy. your article is completely unbalanced and paints firebird in the best possible light while painting microsoft in the worst possible. this is not journalism; this belongs on some dork's rant blog; journalists don't write "mozilla is technically better than IE; this is a fact." without supporting information, much less basic criteria from which this conclusion was drawn. I'm sorry--you have seen the IE source code?
I run firebird and IE, and while i use firebird in some cases and it *does* have a number of neat features and IE *does* have a number of annoyances; i could just as easily reverse the terms "firebird" and "IE" in the beginning half of this sentence and I'd be just as accurate.
IE, by the way, is massively more sophisticated than firebird from a developer's perspective. I can embed IE inside of a windows program transparently. This provides a great many USEFUL features that mozilla can't even dream of as yet.
but no, what are mere facts compared to your baldfaced assertions.
Umm, Canada, unlike the United States, claims "government copyright" on many items and thus items that are owned by the government are NOT necessarily in the public domain.
For example, have a look at some of the small print on Transport-Canada published aviation maps.
Umm, because that would mean that for $100 you could download all the music and movies you wanted. And, of course, the average person spends more than $100 on music and movies.
And then you have to consider the immense cost in identifying, confronting, and collecting from infringers.
More to the point, your statement that "people are not making money from file sharing" is bullshit. Forget for a moment the kazaas and so forth who are making millions, but consider this: each person only has X amount of leisure time per week. If you spend ten hours playing a pirated video game, then that's ten hours where you didn't pay for some entertainment product. Now, I'm not saying that you in particular would have spent those 10 hours spending money--you might spend them in the park walking around--but IN AGGREGATE people are making money off file sharing--the infringers are because their entertainment budget necessarily goes down and the amount of extra money that they have for bills and savings then goes up.
This should *clearly* be left a civil matter. Stealing is already illegal. Piracy is already illegal.
In the first sentence above you state that this should "clearly" be a civil matter. In the second sentence, you note that 'stealing is illegal' and we all know that prosecution for 'stealing', such as burglary, is a criminal matter, not a civil matter (ie, police go after robbers). In your third sentence you note a strong similarity between piracy and stealing (both are AGAINST THE LAW).
Do you find consistency unimportant when making your arguments?
NYT comes out of nowhere with this idiotic, inflammatory headline. It's disheartening that mainstream technology journalists are still attributing anarchy, punk rock and anti-establishment to Open Source.
Yes, it's hard to figure out where they get their ideas, given the well-thought-out and mainstream ideas on copyright (not to mention perhaps-rarer but still around anti-GUI rants we see every so often) we see on slashdot every day. Yes, slashbots spend more time blathering about (as I am doing now) than writing code, but, like it or not, this is seen as a major orifice of the OSS community.
First, it's pretty sad when the NYT scoops slashdot on a major piece of linux news like this.
But, more importantly, you have to realize--this has nothing to do with giving (positive) "props" to the kernel authors and everything to do with identifying sources of blame when it all goes to hell.
Forget whether or not you like software patents for a moment; the fact is that right now they exist. Previously, you could in theory contribute some patented or even copyrighted (direct copied) source into the kernel and it might go unnnoticed for years. Now, the theory goes, once the infringing bit is noticed, IBM or Autozone can't be sued as easily anymore--rather, what they will do is say "no, look - this piece of code came from monkeyboy332, a programmer in serbia".. sue him instead!
In short, this is a nice way for large companies attempting to wash their hands of responsibility for a linux kernel that they arguably have access to because it's open. In simpler terms still, this is corporate welfare by linus to try to win wider adoption of linux. It's not a bad strategy, but accept it for what it is.
It has nothing to do whatsoever with giving authors "credit." That is already well handled by other mechanisms.
A piece of open source software, although fine for small applications and perhaps enough to make a point in some thin-on-specifics Internet flamewar that OSS has the "same things" as pay-to-play software does, is not as good as commercial equivalents.
When I posted the same thing about 5 times before (in previous threads), it was marked as flamebait. Nice to see that you finally got this pretty obvious message through to slashdotters.
Can somebody please explain to me how there are these thousands upon thousands of discussions on Star Wars throughout the internet, and only a miniscule percentage of them even acknowledge the 800 pound gorilla in the room -- that the series is largely an exploration of Lucas' rather exclusivist and no terribly enlightened religious beliefs. Sure, as watchers of ep 4-6 we were willing to let that slide because, well, it was a fun story, but if you're going to be discussing the movies, their future, and how they pertain to Lucas, you can't not talk about this.
But who wrote the version of Basic that started bill gates on his path to riches?
The answer of course is that every creative engineering endeavour builds upon what came before. the detractors will call the step that the developer in question took as derivative, obvious, insignificant, or larcenous. the supporters will shine light upon the principal's ability to fuse diverse, unfocused, and/or unapplied parts into a cohesive whole.
to mis-quote grandpa simpson, 'the fax machine isn't anything more than a waffle iron with (something or other that i forgot).'
so, the question is really this: those of you who accuse (probably correctly) whoever is claiming that linus didn't write linux of spreading FUD, have you ever written a similar post smearing gates on basic? pot kettle?
There is SOME inevitable blowback from the commercial world to OSS, but most large companies very carefully isolate the OSS parts to give back as ltitle as possible or make meaningless OSS contributions. Look! Sony's OSS'd some kernel hardware interface that enables communication with an embedded sony controller! if you just build your own chip foundry and reverse engineer sony's chips you can save on software costs!
Oh lookie! Red Hat open sources everything except the proprietary bits that actually give their software market value.
Oh lookie! IBM uses linux, but its most important software (DB2).. well.. no, not quite.
and here you are being happy about the crumbs they throw back to OSS. I'd like to sell you real estate.
$49.99 / month plan includes 250mb of web space and up to 7gb of monthly transfer.
Go over your monthly transfer, and your are billed at a rate of 10 cents per megabyte.
This happened to me once. "those are 1997 prices!" you say. Well, yes, I was overpaying for the hosting, but they had always been rock solid and I had a critical application running there which i wasnt going to touch, so I continued to pay the 49.99/month.
But when they charged me $85 last month for 850 mb of overage, I pulled the plug. 10c/mb is highway robbery. i asked the woman whether she wanted the $85 or whether they wanted my $50/month for a hosting plan that costs 6.95 everywhere else. I am no longer an SBC customer.
"Dear linux developers: you won't get any of our money, and you will still live in your parents' basement, but to us, and we say this from our hearts, you are true heroes. For you and your naivete are what turns Gulfstream IVs into Gulfstream Vs, Mercedes into Maybachs, and 'beach view' into 'beach front.'"
The CEOs of IBM, RedHat, Sony, and every other company on the bandwagon that you are working for for free.
just because you mark this 'troll' doesn't make it any less true
The Indian "IT boom" is at least partly the result of outsourcing and paying coders a hell of a lot less money than they should be earning given the effort they're putting in. Thing is if you're scratching in the dirt trying to find a feed, you just aren't in a position to turn work down no matter how bad. So yeah their life is improved from poverty to slavery. They won't starve but they sure as hell aren't free to prosper.
You're an idiot and don't know what the hell you're talking about.
So, you think that pay should be proportional to effort? By that standard, is there anybody who actually gets paid correctly?
Indian IT workers live and get paid like rockstars given PPP (purchasing power parity) reality. You're "won't starve" comment = "I am ignorant and am talking out of my ass."
Great job mods at modding the question as "insightful". in fact, i think we shoudl modify the slashcode to allow for +6, insightful because i am sure that this is something that the folks at evergreen have not yet considered!
it is not very helpful to think of the cruising speed of jets in terms of "miles per hour." rather, it is helpful to think of it as a percentage of mach. big jets typically cruise at between.68 (quite old and slow ones) and.86 mach.
what is mach? why, it's (rule of thumb) 38.94 * ((temp in K)^(1/2)). Given a jet standard atmosphere lapse rate of -2 deg c per 1000 feet, on a day where the surface temperature is at 30c, a.85 mach cruise at 36000 would be 589 knots (683 mph). on the same day,.85 mach cruise at 4000 feet would theoretically be 598 knots. why don't airliners fly lower then? short answer: the fuel consumption at such low altitude is massive largely due to the denser atmosphere (imagine swimming in thick glue as opposed to 'thin' water)
ah, of course there was going to be a troll like this.
the simple fact is, and as much as it pains me to say this, SECURITY BY OBSCURITY DOES WORK.
now, before you turn on your flamethrowers, consider this: if cisco opened their source last year, would you have looked at it since then in a meaningful way? cisco employs dozens to hundreds of people who look at their source code all day every day. are you going to have such an interest in doing the same work that those people for real salaries for free?
there may be an academic researcher or two who may be a minor exception, but the fact of the matter is that i doubt there's even one white hat who would spend their lazy weekends bug checking cisco's (a multi-billion dollar company) code. i mean, really.. why? you have no real motivation at all. on the other hand, if the source was opened up, a black-hat hacker does have motivation (notoriety, crEd, whatever) to burn the midnight oil looking for holes.
you see boys and girls, it's not just whether the source code is 'open' as in freely obtainable that matters, it's *how many eyeballs will actually look at it*. you could open source the code to all sorts of meaningless and/or for-profit crap today, and i guarantee you that the most you'd do would be to attract more black hats than white hats..
Re:is this just an excuse to write sloppy code
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
i couldn't disagree more.
as the japanese car makers discovered (or at least the idea came to prominence) in the 1950s, ANYBODY (even people with 93 PhDs) who assembles something makes mistakes occasionally. the trick is to limit the number of modalities that allow for mistakes. a person who is asked to make a wheel fairing in three minutes using simple hand tools will make far more mistakes than one who has a dedicted stamping machine.
in fact, the japanese cars excelled in quality, worker satisfaction, and in the competitive marketplace for many years in large part that their idea that a) errors are natural stochastic processes b) the rate of errors in an any process is more determined by the design of the process than some inherent quality of the worker and therefore c) when a mistake is made, analyze the process, don't blame the worker as this will lead to d) continuous improvement and also empower workers to speak up.
even the most experienced PhP programmer can make an error. education helps, but fixing the system is a better idea.
Slashdot Mirror
To make high grade consumer electronics, you basically need billions of billions of dollars, right? So there are basically only a handful of companies that really do this and they all compete in a highly competitive highly innovative market that provides new and exciting things at reasonable prices .. if not new, then wait three years and get a very useful but slightly older item on ebay for a song.
But some customers have some perceived or real indignation with some companies and then get all self-righteous, as you have done. Ooohh.. some salesperson was wrong about the future capabilities of some product or some product didn't quite come through engineering as they suspected it would in the future. are you the same guy who sued his uni in the UK for not kicking him out fast enough after he had been caught cheating?
But you want to know the real point of my rant and a dirty little secret (and, by the way, this applies to laptops too! you will be able to find X people for ANY laptop manufacturer who say "they suck! I will never buy from them again!")
THE COMPANIES LIKE IT WHEN YOU SAY YOU WON'T BUY FROM THEM AGAIN.
That's right, they like it. And not because they don't like dealing with twats. It's because IT MAKES THEM More MONEY.
What? Am I nuts?
No. Consider this. In the normal market, you have a choice of X goods. Of the X goods, let's say that one is optimum for you.. that is, if you knew everything, then buying that one would be your best choice when all factors are considered (price, performance, etc.)
however, let's say that you automatically exclude one company from consideration because you have a slightly irrational grudge towards them. if there are 5 companies in the market, then, say, 1/5th of the time that means that when you go to buy your next product you will at best choose the second best possible product.
and the simple fact is, that when you choose anything but the best possible product, speaking broadly (over hundreds of millions of transactions) the companies make more profit.
Ah, but you say--the market needs a mechanism to correct bad companies! true, but the fact is (as I started out this piece with), the companies are highly competitive. they know what their levels of price/service/customer satisfaction are. they have mbas with clipboards and spreadsheets monitoring this kind of stuff and, in a competitive market they all come out on more or less the same efficiency curve.
ah, but then you say - but this inefficiency will attract new manufacturers into the market! at the margins, yes. but in practice--do you have a trillion dollars to start the next Sony?
in the end, wanker, grudge-bearing customers in businesses like laptops and electronics where there are few suppliers and entry costs are high increase corporate profits.
yay!
This is a meaningless, stupid, and arbitrary distinction. JPEGs take system resources to decompress / view and, as you said, there are animated .gifs. Many sites these days have shockwave in there in a 'passive' state (menus and stuff--you may not agree with the decision, but it's there), and there is plenty of 'active' html in the form of DHTML and javascript.
I understand what you are saying from a practical standpoint. However, the original poster was making a philosophical claim so i responded with an appropriate philosophical response. likewise, i think your claim has an aura of reasonableness about it, but really you have to recognize that your 'active vs passive' spiel is just as arbitrary as his decison.
There should be a new logical fallacy called "fallacy of false convenience" or something like that. this is where some poster attempts to throw some bullshit by you by starting with reasonable premises and then hoping tht you won't notice the sleight of hand.
Let's look: "good software should be modularized and decentralized." This is a reasonable propositon. but looks at where he goes from there: "a web browser shoud be just that .. a secure configurable and stable HTML viewer."
Im sorry, you conclusions do NOT follow from your premises. You have instead chosen an arbitrary standard that you happen to agree with and more or less declare this to be 'obvious' when it in fact is not.
Why should a web browser be a secure configurable (stable i'll take for granted) viewer when it is clear to anybody that today's web is much more than that? why do you NOT have a problem with your web browser being able to view a myriad of image formats but not a myriad of video formats? is there some fundamental difference? NO! or are you suggesting that maybe image viewing should be shucked out an external program? No? Then why is your line in the sand so 'obvious?' (remember, there are lynx users out there who WOULD say that the image viewing should be shucked out to an external viewer and who used to campaign against any web page containing any non-essential information in graphical format; clearly technology has passed those people by).
For that matter, why shouldn't you have a different program to display each letter of the alphabet, or each color? That's modularized and decentralized, no? While that is of course a silly example, it just goes to show that _your_ definition of "what some AC thinks a web browser should be" is not necessarily what follows from your premises just because "games and fancy bloated intros" don't suit you.
Only on slashdot would your sort of wishful thinking be marked 'insightful.'
I run firebird and IE, and while i use firebird in some cases and it *does* have a number of neat features and IE *does* have a number of annoyances; i could just as easily reverse the terms "firebird" and "IE" in the beginning half of this sentence and I'd be just as accurate.
IE, by the way, is massively more sophisticated than firebird from a developer's perspective. I can embed IE inside of a windows program transparently. This provides a great many USEFUL features that mozilla can't even dream of as yet.
but no, what are mere facts compared to your baldfaced assertions.
- infringes on music copyrights... applaud
- infringes on non-GPL licensing stipulations
... applaud
- infringes on GPL licensing stipulations
... flame
- infringes on website owner copyrights by reposting text that requires free registration
... flame
- infringes on website owner copyrights by putting up an (unauthorized) mirror of the same material
... cheer
- cheats in class by using a graphing calculator's memory functions
.. cheer
hmm.. it's not here.writes in additional line
- plagarizes in class by plagarizing from the web
... flame
glad we got that sorted.Umm, Canada, unlike the United States, claims "government copyright" on many items and thus items that are owned by the government are NOT necessarily in the public domain.
For example, have a look at some of the small print on Transport-Canada published aviation maps.
And then you have to consider the immense cost in identifying, confronting, and collecting from infringers.
More to the point, your statement that "people are not making money from file sharing" is bullshit. Forget for a moment the kazaas and so forth who are making millions, but consider this: each person only has X amount of leisure time per week. If you spend ten hours playing a pirated video game, then that's ten hours where you didn't pay for some entertainment product. Now, I'm not saying that you in particular would have spent those 10 hours spending money--you might spend them in the park walking around--but IN AGGREGATE people are making money off file sharing--the infringers are because their entertainment budget necessarily goes down and the amount of extra money that they have for bills and savings then goes up.
In the first sentence above you state that this should "clearly" be a civil matter. In the second sentence, you note that 'stealing is illegal' and we all know that prosecution for 'stealing', such as burglary, is a criminal matter, not a civil matter (ie, police go after robbers). In your third sentence you note a strong similarity between piracy and stealing (both are AGAINST THE LAW).
Do you find consistency unimportant when making your arguments?
Yes, it's hard to figure out where they get their ideas, given the well-thought-out and mainstream ideas on copyright (not to mention perhaps-rarer but still around anti-GUI rants we see every so often) we see on slashdot every day. Yes, slashbots spend more time blathering about (as I am doing now) than writing code, but, like it or not, this is seen as a major orifice of the OSS community.
But, more importantly, you have to realize--this has nothing to do with giving (positive) "props" to the kernel authors and everything to do with identifying sources of blame when it all goes to hell.
Forget whether or not you like software patents for a moment; the fact is that right now they exist. Previously, you could in theory contribute some patented or even copyrighted (direct copied) source into the kernel and it might go unnnoticed for years. Now, the theory goes, once the infringing bit is noticed, IBM or Autozone can't be sued as easily anymore--rather, what they will do is say "no, look - this piece of code came from monkeyboy332, a programmer in serbia".. sue him instead!
In short, this is a nice way for large companies attempting to wash their hands of responsibility for a linux kernel that they arguably have access to because it's open. In simpler terms still, this is corporate welfare by linus to try to win wider adoption of linux. It's not a bad strategy, but accept it for what it is.
It has nothing to do whatsoever with giving authors "credit." That is already well handled by other mechanisms.
A piece of open source software, although fine for small applications and perhaps enough to make a point in some thin-on-specifics Internet flamewar that OSS has the "same things" as pay-to-play software does, is not as good as commercial equivalents.
In other news:
Note to gambit3: go learn something about statistics before contributing to the noise/signal ratio on slashdot again.
When I posted the same thing about 5 times before (in previous threads), it was marked as flamebait. Nice to see that you finally got this pretty obvious message through to slashdotters.
Can somebody please explain to me how there are these thousands upon thousands of discussions on Star Wars throughout the internet, and only a miniscule percentage of them even acknowledge the 800 pound gorilla in the room -- that the series is largely an exploration of Lucas' rather exclusivist and no terribly enlightened religious beliefs. Sure, as watchers of ep 4-6 we were willing to let that slide because, well, it was a fun story, but if you're going to be discussing the movies, their future, and how they pertain to Lucas, you can't not talk about this.
right?
But who wrote the version of Basic that started bill gates on his path to riches?
The answer of course is that every creative engineering endeavour builds upon what came before. the detractors will call the step that the developer in question took as derivative, obvious, insignificant, or larcenous. the supporters will shine light upon the principal's ability to fuse diverse, unfocused, and/or unapplied parts into a cohesive whole.
to mis-quote grandpa simpson, 'the fax machine isn't anything more than a waffle iron with (something or other that i forgot).'
so, the question is really this: those of you who accuse (probably correctly) whoever is claiming that linus didn't write linux of spreading FUD, have you ever written a similar post smearing gates on basic? pot kettle?
There is SOME inevitable blowback from the commercial world to OSS, but most large companies very carefully isolate the OSS parts to give back as ltitle as possible or make meaningless OSS contributions. Look! Sony's OSS'd some kernel hardware interface that enables communication with an embedded sony controller! if you just build your own chip foundry and reverse engineer sony's chips you can save on software costs!
Oh lookie! Red Hat open sources everything except the proprietary bits that actually give their software market value.
Oh lookie! IBM uses linux, but its most important software (DB2) .. well.. no, not quite.
and here you are being happy about the crumbs they throw back to OSS. I'd like to sell you real estate.
Go over your monthly transfer, and your are billed at a rate of 10 cents per megabyte.
This happened to me once. "those are 1997 prices!" you say. Well, yes, I was overpaying for the hosting, but they had always been rock solid and I had a critical application running there which i wasnt going to touch, so I continued to pay the 49.99/month.
But when they charged me $85 last month for 850 mb of overage, I pulled the plug. 10c/mb is highway robbery. i asked the woman whether she wanted the $85 or whether they wanted my $50/month for a hosting plan that costs 6.95 everywhere else. I am no longer an SBC customer.
No sympathy for SBC now. Go strikers go!
The CEOs of IBM, RedHat, Sony, and every other company on the bandwagon that you are working for for free.
just because you mark this 'troll' doesn't make it any less true
You're an idiot and don't know what the hell you're talking about.
So, you think that pay should be proportional to effort? By that standard, is there anybody who actually gets paid correctly?
Indian IT workers live and get paid like rockstars given PPP (purchasing power parity) reality. You're "won't starve" comment = "I am ignorant and am talking out of my ass."
what is mach? why, it's (rule of thumb) 38.94 * ((temp in K)^(1/2)). Given a jet standard atmosphere lapse rate of -2 deg c per 1000 feet, on a day where the surface temperature is at 30c, a .85 mach cruise at 36000 would be 589 knots (683 mph). on the same day, .85 mach cruise at 4000 feet would theoretically be 598 knots. why don't airliners fly lower then? short answer: the fuel consumption at such low altitude is massive largely due to the denser atmosphere (imagine swimming in thick glue as opposed to 'thin' water)
john travolt owns a 747? wow.. what a coiincidence, because john travolta owns a 707.
"flown the 747 straight up" sounds about as dumb to a pilot as those tech support calls that ask what the cupholder is for to a computer company.
Now, I can't speak for the -200, but as far as the -400 goes, if you fly the 747 straight up in real life, you will in all probability die.
the simple fact is, and as much as it pains me to say this, SECURITY BY OBSCURITY DOES WORK.
now, before you turn on your flamethrowers, consider this: if cisco opened their source last year, would you have looked at it since then in a meaningful way? cisco employs dozens to hundreds of people who look at their source code all day every day. are you going to have such an interest in doing the same work that those people for real salaries for free?
there may be an academic researcher or two who may be a minor exception, but the fact of the matter is that i doubt there's even one white hat who would spend their lazy weekends bug checking cisco's (a multi-billion dollar company) code. i mean, really.. why? you have no real motivation at all. on the other hand, if the source was opened up, a black-hat hacker does have motivation (notoriety, crEd, whatever) to burn the midnight oil looking for holes.
you see boys and girls, it's not just whether the source code is 'open' as in freely obtainable that matters, it's *how many eyeballs will actually look at it*. you could open source the code to all sorts of meaningless and/or for-profit crap today, and i guarantee you that the most you'd do would be to attract more black hats than white hats..
as the japanese car makers discovered (or at least the idea came to prominence) in the 1950s, ANYBODY (even people with 93 PhDs) who assembles something makes mistakes occasionally. the trick is to limit the number of modalities that allow for mistakes. a person who is asked to make a wheel fairing in three minutes using simple hand tools will make far more mistakes than one who has a dedicted stamping machine.
in fact, the japanese cars excelled in quality, worker satisfaction, and in the competitive marketplace for many years in large part that their idea that a) errors are natural stochastic processes b) the rate of errors in an any process is more determined by the design of the process than some inherent quality of the worker and therefore c) when a mistake is made, analyze the process, don't blame the worker as this will lead to d) continuous improvement and also empower workers to speak up.
even the most experienced PhP programmer can make an error. education helps, but fixing the system is a better idea.