If that money is not going into R&D, where is it going?
It's a decades old Government Program. Do you even need to ask if there's fat, sloth, and 'organized labor' involved in the bloated cost? Stuff like that grows like moss on anything involving government funding.
You're just supposed to tithe to the FSF and/or various other special interest groups and it'll all be better. The scary stuff they campaign about will magically wither away. (at least until they need new office furniture)
You're just dancing around legalisms and technicalities. Software can and is as reliable as it's made by it's developers. It's as provably reliable as it's tested by various testing organizations.
For critical software, somebody needs to be diligent about testing it, no matter if it's commercial closed-source software or home-brew or open-source software.
Software companies may start codifying their testing procedures and start making claims to the letter of their testing standards. I've worked in a company that makes pacemakers, and believe me, there is a testing methodology and it is possible to do thorough testing.
If consumers and software customers 'wise up' as you claim, it won't 'kill' the software vendors. A new layer of much more rigorous testing will just be established to cover the concerns.
There's no 'hell in a handbasket' scenario that ends in the world just adopting 'open source' as a cureall for software defects. Anybody who thinks in such terms needs to stop drinking Raymond's koolaide, and fast.
but wouldn't that be the kind of thing that'd force software vendors to test before they ship?
That would be the kind of thing that would force Linus to stop putting out new versions of the Linux source. And any other Free Software without a big corporate sponsor as well. The NO WARRANTY clause in GPL'd software would be null and void, and all software would have to be passed down from Cathederal-type development teams, through extensive testing, before it could be distributed.
From reading the article (**), it sounds like the Linux computer is almost just going along for the ride. All controlling aspects of the flight are offloaded to dedicated microcontrollers. The Linux computer is sort of, uh, a passenger. It's an honorary flight computer.
** Instead of burdening the flight computer with repetitive tasks such as sampling sensors, PSAS opted to offload those tasks to other processors. Small and fast microcontrollers run everything from the inertial measurement system to the recovery device, which triggers a small explosive to deploy the parachutes.
There's never a zero percent chance. Ask anybody who's bought a retail box Red Hat version with glaring flaws in it. Say, Red Hat 5.0 which had bugs in 'glint', the graphical RPM installer of the time. Unless you knew how to manually run the rpm from command line (in which case you didn't really need 'glint' in the first place...) you were SOL. And 'glint' at the time wasn't some obscure package stuck away in an archive, it was 'the' graphical method of installing RPMs. It was a glaring example of nobody at all doing quality checking on the default packages included on the commercial Red Hat CD. And there have been others since then. Which I've never had to deal with directly, having gone back to Slackware.
On the Enterprise it's not an issue. However, when a member of a landing party.....
But seriously, folks. It's Linux. Either it's Open Source and companies with expertise can admin and update it themselves, or you're paying somebody else to do that for you. And why pay Red Hat big bucks unless you need their expertise? Are they going to stop chasing bugs in the consumer division because of the obvious conflict of interest with their revenue stream selling support? Red Hat can either sell one or the other (well supported expensive enterprise or cheap you're-on-your-own consumer distros) otherwise it's obvious they don't care what happens to you if you buy the latter.
This has always been the case in the phone phreaker's culture. A phreaker who I knew quit the hobby entirely when he reached the age of 18 because now he was legally an adult. It's sort of a 'coming of age' thing in certain circles. You grow up and the thuggish things you did as a kid cease.
My copy of 'The Thief' is one I bought on eBay. It contains the original CDROM, but the paper liner in the jewel box is a blurry copy made on a color inkjet printer.
Let me guess: they kicked you out of the room when all the smarmy fucks were using magic markers to make posters for the 'Student Council' election, eh?
"You're either part of the solution, or part of the precipitate."
And, more seriously, no, you do NOT have to 'participate' in the dog and pony show called 'the political process' to have a say. Any taxpayer has a right to a say in how his/her money is spent, wether s/he wastes time playing around with those idiot poly-tricksters or not.
The term 'life savings' is misapplied here for dramatic effect, but lacks the significance it holds when it's properly used.
'Life Savings' usually applies to some little old lady or elderly couple who have scrimped and saved over a lifetime. Applying it this way to some young 19 year old pup, unless he has a terminal illness and will be dying in six months, is ridiculous.
"......He erected a card table on the sidewalk outside the disco playing RAP with a big sign that said 'free Handguns,' where people could pick up a free handgun for whatever purpose they might have. Mind you, this is not a stand expressly set up for people to get handguns to carry into the disco, this is just a free handgun table....."
Well, geez, of course I have heard of Sturgeon's Law. I'm part of the SF subculture. Just as you apparently are.
That doesn't mean that mainstream literature lovers are going to have heard of it.
And the difference is- everything SF gets gathered into special bookstores, is published by special publishers, is sold to the special niche market for SF books. In some regards it almost gets to seem like 'Short Bus' Special Ed programs.
A lot of the dreck wouldn't be publishable in any other market. Or at the least, it would be remaindered and pulped faster, and not hoarded away in cult-oriented dusty specialty bookshelves. The great SF writers reach beyond the genre and become something more than SF authors. J.G. Ballard is an example of that.
SF is a genre. It has it's own publishing houses/subdivisions, it's own bookstore networks, it's own magazines. SF works have their own section in most major libraries. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a ghetto thing, but there's a clear delineation and there has been for decades. It's a genere, just like 'westerns' and 'harlequin romance' and 'mystery.'
And it has to be, because, sadly, none of those 'genere' subcultures of literature stand on their own as mainstream fiction. There are great SF and Western and Mystery writers, but they're the exception. It's like O. Henry's writing. The term for it is 'commercial stories' and there's been a market for that kind of thing for over a century and a half now.
Instead of making our government BIGGER & MORE INTRUSIVE & STRIPPING AWAY OUR RIGHTS, why don't we investigate how 9/11 was allowed to happen when we had ALL THE INFO REQUIRED to prevent it?!?!?
The glaring contradiction in what you typed there has to be pointed out and addressed. The only way the 'info required' to prevent 9/11 could have been used to prevent the attack was the kind of 'intrusive government action' that would have had many people screaming and fuming. The 'fight racial profiling' sorts have done their damnest to gut the intelligence organizations of their ability to track 'foreigners' and would have screamed Racist at the top of their lungs if the Arabs who highjacked the planes had been busted the morning before the attack. Ramsey Clark would have been representing them in court by that afternoon.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. If you want to accuse Government of not taking action to prevent 9/11, you better be asking why BlowJob didn't bust Bin-Laden years earlier. Don't accuse the 'authoritarians' of not being 'authoritarian' enough while screaming at them for being 'authoritarian.'
A little authoritarianism, nationalism, and some emergency legislation.... hmmm, I don't know of a government in the world that broad generalizations like that can't be tossed at.
I do know that 'emergencies' like 'environmental disaster' are used by a lot of people in favor of a strong central state to drive through initiatives that some could consider 'fascist.' And that a large and powerful National government in charge of health care, education, etc. is something a Fascist would favor as well.
So why don't we just retire the term 'fascist' and admit we're all playing around with big words that we don't have the Political Science background to be using. Kay?
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If that money is not going into R&D, where is it going?
It's a decades old Government Program. Do you even need to ask if there's fat, sloth, and 'organized labor' involved in the bloated cost? Stuff like that grows like moss on anything involving government funding.
You better have a hell of a lot of cheese to pass around, then. 'Cuz there's a lot of whining going on on this site. Why do you even come here?
That 'get involved' attitude reminds me of the smarmy kids who 'ran' the student council. Just shut it down, cut off it's funding, etc.
You're just supposed to tithe to the FSF and/or various other special interest groups and it'll all be better. The scary stuff they campaign about will magically wither away. (at least until they need new office furniture)
You're just dancing around legalisms and technicalities. Software can and is as reliable as it's made by it's developers. It's as provably reliable as it's tested by various testing organizations.
For critical software, somebody needs to be diligent about testing it, no matter if it's commercial closed-source software or home-brew or open-source software.
Software companies may start codifying their testing procedures and start making claims to the letter of their testing standards. I've worked in a company that makes pacemakers, and believe me, there is a testing methodology and it is possible to do thorough testing.
If consumers and software customers 'wise up' as you claim, it won't 'kill' the software vendors. A new layer of much more rigorous testing will just be established to cover the concerns.
There's no 'hell in a handbasket' scenario that ends in the world just adopting 'open source' as a cureall for software defects. Anybody who thinks in such terms needs to stop drinking Raymond's koolaide, and fast.
but wouldn't that be the kind of thing that'd force software vendors to test before they ship?
That would be the kind of thing that would force Linus to stop putting out new versions of the Linux source. And any other Free Software without a big corporate sponsor as well. The NO WARRANTY clause in GPL'd software would be null and void, and all software would have to be passed down from Cathederal-type development teams, through extensive testing, before it could be distributed.
It sounds like they're using an assortment of small embedded controllers to guide the rocket. The linux computer is along for the ride.
zero feet. Hams aren't allowed to transmit music.
Cringely is sort of a Jon Katz type, but with half a clue, instead of no clue, and PBS backing.
There's never a zero percent chance. Ask anybody who's bought a retail box Red Hat version with glaring flaws in it. Say, Red Hat 5.0 which had bugs in 'glint', the graphical RPM installer of the time. Unless you knew how to manually run the rpm from command line (in which case you didn't really need 'glint' in the first place...) you were SOL. And 'glint' at the time wasn't some obscure package stuck away in an archive, it was 'the' graphical method of installing RPMs. It was a glaring example of nobody at all doing quality checking on the default packages included on the commercial Red Hat CD. And there have been others since then. Which I've never had to deal with directly, having gone back to Slackware.
I am not meaning to imply anything.
I am asserting that it's a phoney arguement that his 'search engine' cover story is anything but that.
On the Enterprise it's not an issue. However, when a member of a landing party.....
But seriously, folks. It's Linux. Either it's Open Source and companies with expertise can admin and update it themselves, or you're paying somebody else to do that for you. And why pay Red Hat big bucks unless you need their expertise? Are they going to stop chasing bugs in the consumer division because of the obvious conflict of interest with their revenue stream selling support? Red Hat can either sell one or the other (well supported expensive enterprise or cheap you're-on-your-own consumer distros) otherwise it's obvious they don't care what happens to you if you buy the latter.
Paraphrasing the comment title:
Hate to tell you this, but that was pointless.
This has always been the case in the phone phreaker's culture. A phreaker who I knew quit the hobby entirely when he reached the age of 18 because now he was legally an adult. It's sort of a 'coming of age' thing in certain circles. You grow up and the thuggish things you did as a kid cease.
My copy of 'The Thief' is one I bought on eBay. It contains the original CDROM, but the paper liner in the jewel box is a blurry copy made on a color inkjet printer.
Go figure, huh?
Let me guess: they kicked you out of the room when all the smarmy fucks were using magic markers to make posters for the 'Student Council' election, eh?
Heh.
You should change your tagline. It should read: "Hillary Clinton: a presidential candidate who doesn't suck (ask Bill)."
"You're either part of the solution, or part of the precipitate."
And, more seriously, no, you do NOT have to 'participate' in the dog and pony show called 'the political process' to have a say. Any taxpayer has a right to a say in how his/her money is spent, wether s/he wastes time playing around with those idiot poly-tricksters or not.
The term 'life savings' is misapplied here for dramatic effect, but lacks the significance it holds when it's properly used.
'Life Savings' usually applies to some little old lady or elderly couple who have scrimped and saved over a lifetime. Applying it this way to some young 19 year old pup, unless he has a terminal illness and will be dying in six months, is ridiculous.
"......He erected a card table on the sidewalk outside the disco playing RAP with a big sign that said 'free Handguns,' where people could pick up a free handgun for whatever purpose they might have. Mind you, this is not a stand expressly set up for people to get handguns to carry into the disco, this is just a free handgun table....."
I mean, comeon folks...
Shit, man. If someone offered me a free plane ticket to Australia I wouldn't carp and whine about it.
Maybe you didn't read the part about 'make sure you supply me with a local cellphone in case you need to reach me when I go sightseeing.'
Well, geez, of course I have heard of Sturgeon's Law. I'm part of the SF subculture. Just as you apparently are.
That doesn't mean that mainstream literature lovers are going to have heard of it.
And the difference is- everything SF gets gathered into special bookstores, is published by special publishers, is sold to the special niche market for SF books. In some regards it almost gets to seem like 'Short Bus' Special Ed programs.
A lot of the dreck wouldn't be publishable in any other market. Or at the least, it would be remaindered and pulped faster, and not hoarded away in cult-oriented dusty specialty bookshelves. The great SF writers reach beyond the genre and become something more than SF authors. J.G. Ballard is an example of that.
Sturgeon paints with too broad a brush.
SF is a genre. It has it's own publishing houses/subdivisions, it's own bookstore networks, it's own magazines. SF works have their own section in most major libraries. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a ghetto thing, but there's a clear delineation and there has been for decades. It's a genere, just like 'westerns' and 'harlequin romance' and 'mystery.'
And it has to be, because, sadly, none of those 'genere' subcultures of literature stand on their own as mainstream fiction. There are great SF and Western and Mystery writers, but they're the exception. It's like O. Henry's writing. The term for it is 'commercial stories' and there's been a market for that kind of thing for over a century and a half now.
The glaring contradiction in what you typed there has to be pointed out and addressed. The only way the 'info required' to prevent 9/11 could have been used to prevent the attack was the kind of 'intrusive government action' that would have had many people screaming and fuming. The 'fight racial profiling' sorts have done their damnest to gut the intelligence organizations of their ability to track 'foreigners' and would have screamed Racist at the top of their lungs if the Arabs who highjacked the planes had been busted the morning before the attack. Ramsey Clark would have been representing them in court by that afternoon.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. If you want to accuse Government of not taking action to prevent 9/11, you better be asking why BlowJob didn't bust Bin-Laden years earlier. Don't accuse the 'authoritarians' of not being 'authoritarian' enough while screaming at them for being 'authoritarian.'
A little authoritarianism, nationalism, and some emergency legislation.... hmmm, I don't know of a government in the world that broad generalizations like that can't be tossed at.
I do know that 'emergencies' like 'environmental disaster' are used by a lot of people in favor of a strong central state to drive through initiatives that some could consider 'fascist.' And that a large and powerful National government in charge of health care, education, etc. is something a Fascist would favor as well.
So why don't we just retire the term 'fascist' and admit we're all playing around with big words that we don't have the Political Science background to be using. Kay?