Well, they said "extra layers," not all layers. Obviously, what is "extra" becomes a matter of taste. But it is true that most OS's carry a huge burden of legacy compatibility. Another problem is "feature bloat" with lots of code to support features that weren't that useful after all. (For example, the POSIX apis for networking seem awfully obtuse, mainly because they treat TCP/IP as just one of many network protocols, even though nobody uses the others any more).
All of this is just the normal software cycle - hopefully you start with a good design that represents the problems at hand at the time. But eventually the requirements change and the original design becomes insufficient, or outright irrelevant, or muddled by refactoring by people with different designs in mind (or outright hacking), until eventually you get a strong urge to chuck the whole thing and start over - which is what they are doing.
Interestingly, their homepage does not tout execution speed as a motivation: "Menuet has no roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards, nor is it based on any operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs." It sounds to me more like they are fed up with all the clutter and layers of abstraction in a modern OS and want to see what happens if you start with a clean slate. Then again, without open source, the aesthetic appeal of this "clean" approach is limited.
OK sometimes someone sees something the rest of us can't and makes a billion, but its amazing how many times ideas that look really stupid to most of us are actually really stupid.
Forgive me for over-generalizing a bit, but this is slashdot, most of us think everything is stupid. So we sit at our terminals and do our little IT jobs, draw a salary, and chuck rotten tomatoes at leaders of industry, science, and politics. And usually we're right. But occasionally we're wrong, and those are the occasions when history is made and fortunes are made.
Are the flacks who write these sorts of releases embittered mercenaries who know they are puking shit into the public consciousness... (etc)
That's all awfully dramatic. I think they're just some people doing a job to make a living. Just like the company higher-ups for that matter. The truth is, predicting the future - let alone controlling it - is hard to do. Unintended consequences are the norm, not the exception. Still, people who try to take matters into their own hands and bend the future to their will do achieve the desired effect on occasion, and tend to wind up better off than people who refuse to make any move for fear of doing the wrong thing or being shown up later.
I don't know, does that happen to many pro sports fans? Because they've had just these sorts of rules for years and years. But let's not allow that to spoil our fun extrapolating the most insane abuses we can imagine.
An overly long article is a sure sign of low quality. An encyclopedia should quickly give you the main facts. For most readers, adding too much detail to an article just makes it diluted.
Of course medicare is not -at all- sustainable. That's the little devil under the sheets.
Unreformed medicare is exactly as sustainable as unreformed private health care insurance in the US - which is to say, not at all. The era of stratospheric health care inflation is about to end no matter what we do, because we can't afford it any more.
Btw : it's not a death panel if you can choose your own panel. Only forced government coverage which outlawed or sabotaged private insurers (e.g. "single payer") would have death panels.
Most people already have no control over who their insurer is - your boss decides for you, or for an increasing number of people, you have no coverage at all.
The difference is that you know in advance what a private insurer's panel is going to say, so the decision (cost and benefit) is basically your own. You don't know in advance what a government panel is going to say, and you don't get to select another one.
That's nonsense, private insurers surprise people by denying coverage all the time. For that matter, even if your condition IS covered, they can still deny it; they'll go back through their records to find any excuse to retroactively cancel your insurance, like you saw a doctor for a hangnail 10 years ago and didn't state it as a pre-existing condition on your application.
Anyways, all the options that exist today will still exist, unless (I suppose) they run themselves out of business with ridiculous overhead, high advertising costs, and inflated executive pay. And if that's what you meant by "sabotaged" private insurers, I'd call that self-sabotage.
Therefore if a government panel like Obama suggests would come into existence, it's refusal to cover some life-saving treatment is a de-facto death sentence.
Certainly no more than what insurance companies do today. By the time you deny your claim, it's far too late to choose another insurer, since you obviously have a pre-existing condition.
Besides, doesn't it offend your sensibilities to accuse the government of pinching pennies?
The Dutch actually do this. If you're over 65 most care is actually denied.
Wow, that's quite a scary story, but at least some kid believed it enough to turn it in as a homework assignment. Hey, did you ever notice how the Dutch live longer than Americans on average? Pretty good for being routinely denied life-saving medical care. I wonder if the teeming droves of Dutch people fleeing their land for the American medical paradise are counted in those longevity stats? Which reminds me, I sure wish we Ameicans were allowed to buy medicine from Canada, but I guess it's too cheap to be good anyways, right?
Do you see anything odd about scare-mongering that people might be denied coverage while defending a system under which 1 in 6 people have no coverage at all?
And then you go on about euthanasia, as if elderly Americans weren't already under a government plan. It's called Medicare. Try putting the elimination of Medicare on the ballot sometime and see how that flies with the 65+ crowd. The truth is nothing could be more empowering for old people than government run health care. Under private insurance, they're just a liability, they produce little and cost a fortune - but they do vote in droves. We can't muster the political will to make them stop driving after they lose their sight but now you think we're one step away from sending them to the glue factory? Oh yeah, I'd love to see somebody run for re-election on that platform.
I think he's right. I asked a twit co-worker what the heck it was for, and he said aggregating all the various sorts of information, email, texts, rss, etc. My question was why did we split them up in the first place? It should all be email. (Especially texts, I'll never accept that one). Now get off my Korean lawn.
What's wrong with the postal service? They're in a sort-term downturn of a long-term declining industry, but they seem to be making cutbacks to cope. More to the point, I don't think my mail is any more likely to be snooped on than my phone is to being tapped or my computer monitored, and those are run by private companies.
As for medicare service being worse than private insurers, is it? Medicare has far lower administration and advertising costs. They're not perfect, but most of the people I know with complaints about denied coverage have been from private insurers. (Although I was never creative enough to call them "death panels," ha ha).
So, I will agree private industry beats government when there is good competition - look at fast food, it's amazingly efficient. But compared to monopolies or duopolies, I'm more please with govt services.
Court records are not something that should be more available to those with money. The goal here is justice that is blind to wealth. I know that's kind of preposterous, but we should be taking steps towards that goal wherever we can. Putting these records online would be a minuscule public burden; most of what they do collect probably goes to transaction overhead anyways. Like when you pay $3 to get into a state park and most of it goes to the person standing there collecting the $3.
I agree there is extra risk if the outsourcing is overseas, for whatever reason I was not assuming that. Even so, it could be possible over time to build trust. Look at all the people putting money in Switzerland, or even the Cayman Islands.
Yes, I'm still waiting for somebody to explain which part was blacked out that should not have been? So far all I see is a bunch of people having a hissy fit for no apparent reason. As a private company, doing business with the govt. does not mean you have to open your accounting, pricing, and HR database for the world to see - only to a certain degree as proscribed by law. Where are the violations here?
Why is somebody on-site any more trustworthy than somebody off-site?
It's not a rhetorical question. Maybe face-to-face contact promotes honesty? Or maybe off-site is more trustworthy because they are dedicated to that one job and know the norms of behavior and the pitfalls that violate user trust?
Why do we trust that original data "cloud" provider, the banking system? Maybe we'll need analogous regulations for IT outsourcing.
Yes, some have made the argument that kids of lower socioeconomic status "fail" this test because they are more "street savvy" and less trusting, i.e. conditioned through experience that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
If this is true, it means those kids are being set up to fail in life, the exposure to shifty characters is conditioning them with behaviors that discourage long-term relationships, calculated long-term financial risks, etc.
You have proposed and disputed the notion that these kids are inherently morally inferior, which is only one interpretation, and I doubt it is the one most researchers would embrace.
I see. Well, there is definitely gray area for grad students transitioning from student ("paying to work") to employee ("paid to work") at the same institution. I think frustration is common among students closing in on a PhD when you know practically as much as a PhD (and have more education than the masters' grads you know who are out there making real money), yet receive inferior treatment because you haven't crossed the finish line.
25% rejection just doesn't sound that bad to me, it's still 75% acceptance. Let's take a step back here and imagine we're not just talking about your contributions, which are of course wonderful, but edits from people at random on the 'net, most of whom are at least well-intentioned, but many who are non-experts, and some who are just trolls. In that context, does it really seem out of line that 25% of edits are not improvements and should be rejected?
I agree Wikipedia should be very inclusive in the number of entries. But when it comes to the core entires, the ones people actually read, I would rather have something reasonably short, accurate, and consistent. That means it can't be a free-for-all.
I'll go further, it would be a disaster if wikipedia didn't converge. Established facts are not in constant turmoil, neither should be an encyclopedia.
Fair enough, the assumption in what I said is that we could replicate others' success here. I do share that concern, especially given the lack of political will for major reforms (such as eliminating the fee-for-service model) and the influence of special interests on US policy. And most of all, the refusal of the US public to draw any rational boundaries from cost/benefit analysis. It's a finite world after all. So, yes, I favor "rationing" public health funds. But there would still be privately funded health care too. If somebody wants to sell their house instead of passing it on to their kids in order to extend their own suffering by a couple weeks, more power to them.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but when I look at the more centralized systems of all other western nations, I see universally lower costs, and also better health outcomes. Where's the assumption in that?
Seems every couple of weeks some timeserver leaves his laptop on a train with 300 million records on it. Don't think that'll happen with your medical records? Why is nobody talking about this?
I don't know what a timeserver is, but I do know the govt. agency I am familiar with is now mandating full disk encryption with machine-generated passwords for all mobile storage, including laptops and memory sticks, which is certainly a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
All of this is just the normal software cycle - hopefully you start with a good design that represents the problems at hand at the time. But eventually the requirements change and the original design becomes insufficient, or outright irrelevant, or muddled by refactoring by people with different designs in mind (or outright hacking), until eventually you get a strong urge to chuck the whole thing and start over - which is what they are doing.
Interestingly, their homepage does not tout execution speed as a motivation: "Menuet has no roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards, nor is it based on any operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs." It sounds to me more like they are fed up with all the clutter and layers of abstraction in a modern OS and want to see what happens if you start with a clean slate. Then again, without open source, the aesthetic appeal of this "clean" approach is limited.
Forgive me for over-generalizing a bit, but this is slashdot, most of us think everything is stupid. So we sit at our terminals and do our little IT jobs, draw a salary, and chuck rotten tomatoes at leaders of industry, science, and politics. And usually we're right. But occasionally we're wrong, and those are the occasions when history is made and fortunes are made.
Whom are you talking about? Given advances in bioengineering this was inevitable, sooner or later.
I've seen some awfully realistic-looking faked videos lately, too. Technology giveth, technology taketh away.
That's all awfully dramatic. I think they're just some people doing a job to make a living. Just like the company higher-ups for that matter. The truth is, predicting the future - let alone controlling it - is hard to do. Unintended consequences are the norm, not the exception. Still, people who try to take matters into their own hands and bend the future to their will do achieve the desired effect on occasion, and tend to wind up better off than people who refuse to make any move for fear of doing the wrong thing or being shown up later.
I don't know, does that happen to many pro sports fans? Because they've had just these sorts of rules for years and years. But let's not allow that to spoil our fun extrapolating the most insane abuses we can imagine.
Yeah, the seller sure got bamboozled!
Yeah, the buyer sure got bamboozled!
Uh, I mean... everybody sure is an idiot!
An overly long article is a sure sign of low quality. An encyclopedia should quickly give you the main facts. For most readers, adding too much detail to an article just makes it diluted.
At least now Microsoft can't object to Linux sales on the claim people are wiping them to install bootleg Windows - not on an ARM.
Unreformed medicare is exactly as sustainable as unreformed private health care insurance in the US - which is to say, not at all. The era of stratospheric health care inflation is about to end no matter what we do, because we can't afford it any more.
Most people already have no control over who their insurer is - your boss decides for you, or for an increasing number of people, you have no coverage at all.
That's nonsense, private insurers surprise people by denying coverage all the time. For that matter, even if your condition IS covered, they can still deny it; they'll go back through their records to find any excuse to retroactively cancel your insurance, like you saw a doctor for a hangnail 10 years ago and didn't state it as a pre-existing condition on your application.
Anyways, all the options that exist today will still exist, unless (I suppose) they run themselves out of business with ridiculous overhead, high advertising costs, and inflated executive pay. And if that's what you meant by "sabotaged" private insurers, I'd call that self-sabotage.
Certainly no more than what insurance companies do today. By the time you deny your claim, it's far too late to choose another insurer, since you obviously have a pre-existing condition.
Besides, doesn't it offend your sensibilities to accuse the government of pinching pennies?
Wow, that's quite a scary story, but at least some kid believed it enough to turn it in as a homework assignment. Hey, did you ever notice how the Dutch live longer than Americans on average? Pretty good for being routinely denied life-saving medical care. I wonder if the teeming droves of Dutch people fleeing their land for the American medical paradise are counted in those longevity stats? Which reminds me, I sure wish we Ameicans were allowed to buy medicine from Canada, but I guess it's too cheap to be good anyways, right?
Do you see anything odd about scare-mongering that people might be denied coverage while defending a system under which 1 in 6 people have no coverage at all?
And then you go on about euthanasia, as if elderly Americans weren't already under a government plan. It's called Medicare. Try putting the elimination of Medicare on the ballot sometime and see how that flies with the 65+ crowd. The truth is nothing could be more empowering for old people than government run health care. Under private insurance, they're just a liability, they produce little and cost a fortune - but they do vote in droves. We can't muster the political will to make them stop driving after they lose their sight but now you think we're one step away from sending them to the glue factory? Oh yeah, I'd love to see somebody run for re-election on that platform.
I think he's right. I asked a twit co-worker what the heck it was for, and he said aggregating all the various sorts of information, email, texts, rss, etc. My question was why did we split them up in the first place? It should all be email. (Especially texts, I'll never accept that one). Now get off my Korean lawn.
As for medicare service being worse than private insurers, is it? Medicare has far lower administration and advertising costs. They're not perfect, but most of the people I know with complaints about denied coverage have been from private insurers. (Although I was never creative enough to call them "death panels," ha ha).
So, I will agree private industry beats government when there is good competition - look at fast food, it's amazingly efficient. But compared to monopolies or duopolies, I'm more please with govt services.
Court records are not something that should be more available to those with money. The goal here is justice that is blind to wealth. I know that's kind of preposterous, but we should be taking steps towards that goal wherever we can. Putting these records online would be a minuscule public burden; most of what they do collect probably goes to transaction overhead anyways. Like when you pay $3 to get into a state park and most of it goes to the person standing there collecting the $3.
I agree there is extra risk if the outsourcing is overseas, for whatever reason I was not assuming that. Even so, it could be possible over time to build trust. Look at all the people putting money in Switzerland, or even the Cayman Islands.
Yes, I'm still waiting for somebody to explain which part was blacked out that should not have been? So far all I see is a bunch of people having a hissy fit for no apparent reason. As a private company, doing business with the govt. does not mean you have to open your accounting, pricing, and HR database for the world to see - only to a certain degree as proscribed by law. Where are the violations here?
It's not a rhetorical question. Maybe face-to-face contact promotes honesty? Or maybe off-site is more trustworthy because they are dedicated to that one job and know the norms of behavior and the pitfalls that violate user trust?
Why do we trust that original data "cloud" provider, the banking system? Maybe we'll need analogous regulations for IT outsourcing.
If this is true, it means those kids are being set up to fail in life, the exposure to shifty characters is conditioning them with behaviors that discourage long-term relationships, calculated long-term financial risks, etc.
You have proposed and disputed the notion that these kids are inherently morally inferior, which is only one interpretation, and I doubt it is the one most researchers would embrace.
I see. Well, there is definitely gray area for grad students transitioning from student ("paying to work") to employee ("paid to work") at the same institution. I think frustration is common among students closing in on a PhD when you know practically as much as a PhD (and have more education than the masters' grads you know who are out there making real money), yet receive inferior treatment because you haven't crossed the finish line.
I agree Wikipedia should be very inclusive in the number of entries. But when it comes to the core entires, the ones people actually read, I would rather have something reasonably short, accurate, and consistent. That means it can't be a free-for-all.
I guess you'll never publish in an academic journal, because the chances of rejection are a whole lot more than 25%.
I'll go further, it would be a disaster if wikipedia didn't converge. Established facts are not in constant turmoil, neither should be an encyclopedia.
I'm with them on this one. You think you should get unemployment benefits for losing a TA position?
Fair enough, the assumption in what I said is that we could replicate others' success here. I do share that concern, especially given the lack of political will for major reforms (such as eliminating the fee-for-service model) and the influence of special interests on US policy. And most of all, the refusal of the US public to draw any rational boundaries from cost/benefit analysis. It's a finite world after all. So, yes, I favor "rationing" public health funds. But there would still be privately funded health care too. If somebody wants to sell their house instead of passing it on to their kids in order to extend their own suffering by a couple weeks, more power to them.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but when I look at the more centralized systems of all other western nations, I see universally lower costs, and also better health outcomes. Where's the assumption in that?
I don't know what a timeserver is, but I do know the govt. agency I am familiar with is now mandating full disk encryption with machine-generated passwords for all mobile storage, including laptops and memory sticks, which is certainly a good idea.