Some of these US posters come over as having a mental age of about 13.
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, meet pot.
...whereas in the US you can make false accusations and claim to "believe" them to avoid punishment.
No, you cannot. You can say, "My product is the best" without fear because "best" is a nebulous term with a near infinite number of plausible interpretations. If you say, "John Doe is a child rapist", John Doe can sue your ass off.
Yes, but that doesn't cover what's going on here. What the telecoms did was already illegal at the time they did it. This doesn't try to prosecute them for acts committed between the time the immunity was granted and now. It will prosecute them for the illegal acts they committed before the immunity was granted. Secondly, the immunity was conditioned on them confessing their sins, so to speak. That hasn't happened, so there is also no breach of contract involved.
Most servers anywhere are running on stuff like HP's Proliants, and I don't see customers ship back the SmartArray controllers.
That doesn't mean it isn't happening. We had three SmartArray controllers fail in rapid succession. Each one we replaced failed within days, until the fourth one finally worked. That was certainly a rare situation, but SmartArrays are not a magic bullet. They sometimes fail, and they sometimes fail spectacularly, just like everything else.
Screw you early 90's MS execs. I hope you tell your kids how you managed to cripple OS development around the world with your crimes.
They will. Unfortunately, though, it will be with pride in their voices. They will never see their crimes as anything shameful, as they are too warped and twisted to care.
It used a database as the filesystem; it was decades ahead of its' time.
Rest assured, that abomination of an abortion is still being used. Time has completely passed it by while it stood still.
And calling its filesystem a database requires a complete redefinition of a database (which, not coincidentally, Pick does redefine), or a large overdose of LSD. I have to work with those monstrosities on a daily basis, and absolutely despise every moment spent with them. They are crude, primitive, incredibly frustrating, and should have died long ago.
You apparently don't read, either. Microsoft didn't make any effort to ensure that the lump of code they were forced to release conformed in any way to the Linux kernel coding standards. In other words, the code was a clusterfuck that MS dumped onto Greg's plate and then abandoned. After Greg invested a significant amount of his time in cleaning up said clusterfuck, the code is now in a semi-reasonable condition for inclusion in the kernel.
However, Greg is not going to be the one to maintain someone's abandonware. If no one from Microsoft wants to maintain it, then the code is going to be dropped from the kernel. This is common practice for kernel development, and has nothing to do with where the code originated. Code without a maintainer tends to get removed.
Since I don't want to propagate any Microsoft filesystem, I format all of my USB devices with ext2. If anyone on Windows wants anything I have on those devices, they either install one of the Windows ext2 drivers, or I create a temporary Samba share for them use to get at the data over the LAN.
There is one, and only one, reason Microsoft is protesting this: they tried to do the same thing, and failed while Google can make it work. Period. End of story.
Microsoft has no moral qualms about anything that hurts non-Microsoft publishers, regardless of the societal damage it may or may not cause, if it would increase Microsoft's market power. The only reason Microsoft would even care about societal damage would be to calculate the spin needed to make their market rape look like feeding the poor.
As a general rule: if it's bad for Microsoft, it's good for the rest of the known universe.
Given the sub's proximity to the Bermuda Triangle, it's obvious that it was kidnapped by time traveling aliens living among us in order to probe its lower ports.
Some algorithms have a serious amount of R&D and ingenuity behind them.
And the Theory of Relativity is perhaps the most ingenious "invention" in human history. If it had been allowed to be patented, our understanding of the universe would have been seriously crippled -- the very thing that has happened to the software industry.
It's also hard for me to bitch out Microsoft while I am forced to tell people who actually want to use websites with flash (such as full screen youtube) that they can't use Linux.
If that's what you're telling people, then you need to learn more about desktop Linux since you're way behind the times. Linux and full screen YouTube play nicely together, and have for a number of years.
No, this is a case of standards trumping common (mis)usage.
No, this is marketing trying to oversimplify the correct measurement system as it applies to computers to something that is familiar to more people, thus changing the standards to maximize revenue. Computers are base-2 systems, and all calculations within computers are done in base 2. 1024 = 1K = 1 Kilo within a base 2 system. It mirrors 1K in a base-10 system with the exact same mechanism that base-10 uses to represent Kilo, which is the value of the number when the first significant digit of its number system is in the Kilo position. For a base 10 system, that value is 1000. For a base-2 system, that value is 1024. Within a base-2 system, it is completely and utterly wrong to think of Kilo as 1000, just as Kilo in other number systems will be something other than 1000.
Since magnetic storage media use a binary system to record data ("on" and "off", "1" and "0", "High" and "Low", etc.), using the base-2 prefix names are correct, and using the base-10 prefix names are incorrect (but more profitable). Using Kilo=1000 is only correct if you are using a base-10 number system, which is not the case for computing technology.
If you ever watched a cheap teen movie that has a story about some group of kids, the group would always have some white kids, one of them being fat, at least one Asian guy and at least one black guy.
At least for the first few minutes of the movie, until he/they get sacrificed to the crazed killer to save the pretty white girls.
The whole idea of a smart meter is (or should be) efficiency. It should be efficient for the municipality to collect fees, and it should be efficient for the user to use. That seems pretty self-evident to me. To that end, it is completely reasonable to expect a system that lets you pay electronically at the meter itself. Having to go out of your way an extra block, especially if you're planning on going the other direction, is completely unreasonable. And It has nothing to with fitness. It has everything to do with wasting time that you shouldn't have to spend to begin with. Smart meters should make the process better, not worse.
I'd say: "If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear".
That's retarded by any standard. In this case, they do have something to hide. That's the very nature of narcotics enforcement, where being discovered can be fatal. If any of these cops are hurt or killed due to the information on her blog, she should be prosecuted as an accessory to whatever crime is committed.
I have to disagree with everything you said. If you're creating complex object structures for even simple tasks, then you're using Java very poorly, and doing object oriented programming very badly. Java, when used competently, is an efficient, flexible language. It is extremely well suited for hacking things together and playing around, as well as serious development. Getting a simple GUI program up and running is a matter of about 10 lines of sparse code. Getting a simple console program running is about half that. As programs get large, Java's facilities for organization and object decoupling make maintenance much easier than it would be without those facilities.
I've used more programming languages than I can remember in the last 25 years of software development (I don't think I have enough fingers and toes to count them), and Java is one of my all time favorites (especially since version 6). It's simple, efficient, effective, powerful, maintainable, and lets me get a lot done quickly. As far as programming goes, those are key components of fun. Throw in Netbeans, and it's the closest thing to programming bliss I've ever seen.
As far as maintainability goes, that has more to do with the quality of the object structures than anything inherent in the language itself. Well designed C++ object structures are just as maintainable as well designed Java structures, just as poor object structures are difficult to maintain in any language.
Part of my CIS degree program required two semesters of business law, and I remember the liability lectures well. In the US, there is a chain of product liability that goes like this:
Company A make car windshields. Company B makes cars, and buys its windshields from Company A. Customer buys a car from Company B.
For whatever reason, a defect in the windshield causes Customer to incur a loss that can be recovered in court, so Customer wants to sue. Who does Customer sue?
A) Company A B) Company B C) No-one, as US law has left Customer to hang by the neck until dead.
Although most of you have instinctively chosen C, you're wrong. As are those of you who chose A. Customer did not buy from Company A, and so does not have standing to sue. Since Company B resells Company A's product, Company B assumes liability for defects. Company B has standing to sue Company A, and can do so to recover its losses for being sued over defects in the products it bought from Company A.
Obviously, this doesn't necessarily apply to this case since it's not in the US, but I suspect something similar to be true.
No, we expect the source to exercise self-control. It's a grown-up like the rest of us.
2. Can you make a build in one step?
That depends on what we're building. We've built some monumental cluster-fucks with one step. I mean, if you don't want the self-destruct button pressed, then don't make it a big red button that just screams out to be pushed.
3. Do you make daily builds?
On some days.
4. Do you have a bug database?
The biggest on the planet, if not the galaxy!
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
Sometimes, but we usually fix bugs after writing new code.
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
Yes, and it says I'm due at the gym now, so make this snappy.
7. Do you have a spec?
A spec of what?
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
I'm told that some do, somewhere.
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Yes, we use the best commercial tools we can find on Usenet.
10. Do you have testers?
Yes, I never eat a meal without having someone else try it first. If I had a dollar for every time I dodged a cyanide bullet...
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
Yes, "SOS" is a code, isn't it?
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?
We used to, but we found our hallways to be quite usable. So we stopped.
I don't think that's how it would shake out it court. Microsoft is able to get away with not paying for Windows refunds because people don't buy Windows directly from Microsoft. They buy Windows from resellers like Best Buy. In the same vein, The Wall Street Journal (which used to be reputable before Murdoch bought it) is sold to Kindle readers by Amazon, not News Corp. As such, they are Amazon customers.
And that makes a lot more sense, too. If I sign up with Amazon, I don't want Amazon to give my personal information to anyone else. If Rupert wants to get access to subscriber information, he needs to sell directly to subscribers. As it stands, he has no business getting any of Amazon's customer information.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of these US posters come over as having a mental age of about 13.
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, meet pot.
...whereas in the US you can make false accusations and claim to "believe" them to avoid punishment.
No, you cannot. You can say, "My product is the best" without fear because "best" is a nebulous term with a near infinite number of plausible interpretations. If you say, "John Doe is a child rapist", John Doe can sue your ass off.
He's about to undergo a bit of poking by others in the near future.
aren't retroactive laws mostly unconstitutional?
Yes, but that doesn't cover what's going on here. What the telecoms did was already illegal at the time they did it. This doesn't try to prosecute them for acts committed between the time the immunity was granted and now. It will prosecute them for the illegal acts they committed before the immunity was granted. Secondly, the immunity was conditioned on them confessing their sins, so to speak. That hasn't happened, so there is also no breach of contract involved.
Most servers anywhere are running on stuff like HP's Proliants, and I don't see customers ship back the SmartArray controllers.
That doesn't mean it isn't happening. We had three SmartArray controllers fail in rapid succession. Each one we replaced failed within days, until the fourth one finally worked. That was certainly a rare situation, but SmartArrays are not a magic bullet. They sometimes fail, and they sometimes fail spectacularly, just like everything else.
Screw you early 90's MS execs. I hope you tell your kids how you managed to cripple OS development around the world with your crimes.
They will. Unfortunately, though, it will be with pride in their voices. They will never see their crimes as anything shameful, as they are too warped and twisted to care.
It used a database as the filesystem; it was decades ahead of its' time.
Rest assured, that abomination of an abortion is still being used. Time has completely passed it by while it stood still.
And calling its filesystem a database requires a complete redefinition of a database (which, not coincidentally, Pick does redefine), or a large overdose of LSD. I have to work with those monstrosities on a daily basis, and absolutely despise every moment spent with them. They are crude, primitive, incredibly frustrating, and should have died long ago.
Troll?! The moderators need to pull their heads out of their asses today.
I don't get it.
You apparently don't read, either. Microsoft didn't make any effort to ensure that the lump of code they were forced to release conformed in any way to the Linux kernel coding standards. In other words, the code was a clusterfuck that MS dumped onto Greg's plate and then abandoned. After Greg invested a significant amount of his time in cleaning up said clusterfuck, the code is now in a semi-reasonable condition for inclusion in the kernel.
However, Greg is not going to be the one to maintain someone's abandonware. If no one from Microsoft wants to maintain it, then the code is going to be dropped from the kernel. This is common practice for kernel development, and has nothing to do with where the code originated. Code without a maintainer tends to get removed.
Since I don't want to propagate any Microsoft filesystem, I format all of my USB devices with ext2. If anyone on Windows wants anything I have on those devices, they either install one of the Windows ext2 drivers, or I create a temporary Samba share for them use to get at the data over the LAN.
There is one, and only one, reason Microsoft is protesting this: they tried to do the same thing, and failed while Google can make it work. Period. End of story.
Microsoft has no moral qualms about anything that hurts non-Microsoft publishers, regardless of the societal damage it may or may not cause, if it would increase Microsoft's market power. The only reason Microsoft would even care about societal damage would be to calculate the spin needed to make their market rape look like feeding the poor.
As a general rule: if it's bad for Microsoft, it's good for the rest of the known universe.
As chairman of the Hunt-And-Peck Association of Typists (HPAT), I demand equal representation in the class room.
As a member of the Association of Sightless Secretaries and Hearing Augmentation Technologists (ASSHAT), I want my voice heard, too.
Given the sub's proximity to the Bermuda Triangle, it's obvious that it was kidnapped by time traveling aliens living among us in order to probe its lower ports.
Some algorithms have a serious amount of R&D and ingenuity behind them.
And the Theory of Relativity is perhaps the most ingenious "invention" in human history. If it had been allowed to be patented, our understanding of the universe would have been seriously crippled -- the very thing that has happened to the software industry.
or lack thereof:
"The mechanics are so simple that can be easily explained to anybody possessing some minimal knowledge about how operating systems works."
"...so simple that it can be easily..."
Since we're being grammar Nazis:
"...so simple that they can be easily..."
It's also hard for me to bitch out Microsoft while I am forced to tell people who actually want to use websites with flash (such as full screen youtube) that they can't use Linux.
If that's what you're telling people, then you need to learn more about desktop Linux since you're way behind the times. Linux and full screen YouTube play nicely together, and have for a number of years.
No, this is a case of standards trumping common (mis)usage.
No, this is marketing trying to oversimplify the correct measurement system as it applies to computers to something that is familiar to more people, thus changing the standards to maximize revenue. Computers are base-2 systems, and all calculations within computers are done in base 2. 1024 = 1K = 1 Kilo within a base 2 system. It mirrors 1K in a base-10 system with the exact same mechanism that base-10 uses to represent Kilo, which is the value of the number when the first significant digit of its number system is in the Kilo position. For a base 10 system, that value is 1000. For a base-2 system, that value is 1024. Within a base-2 system, it is completely and utterly wrong to think of Kilo as 1000, just as Kilo in other number systems will be something other than 1000.
Since magnetic storage media use a binary system to record data ("on" and "off", "1" and "0", "High" and "Low", etc.), using the base-2 prefix names are correct, and using the base-10 prefix names are incorrect (but more profitable). Using Kilo=1000 is only correct if you are using a base-10 number system, which is not the case for computing technology.
If you ever watched a cheap teen movie that has a story about some group of kids, the group would always have some white kids, one of them being fat, at least one Asian guy and at least one black guy.
At least for the first few minutes of the movie, until he/they get sacrificed to the crazed killer to save the pretty white girls.
The whole idea of a smart meter is (or should be) efficiency. It should be efficient for the municipality to collect fees, and it should be efficient for the user to use. That seems pretty self-evident to me. To that end, it is completely reasonable to expect a system that lets you pay electronically at the meter itself. Having to go out of your way an extra block, especially if you're planning on going the other direction, is completely unreasonable. And It has nothing to with fitness. It has everything to do with wasting time that you shouldn't have to spend to begin with. Smart meters should make the process better, not worse.
It isn't the web site's responsibility to compensate for a shitty browser.
I'd say: "If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear".
That's retarded by any standard. In this case, they do have something to hide. That's the very nature of narcotics enforcement, where being discovered can be fatal. If any of these cops are hurt or killed due to the information on her blog, she should be prosecuted as an accessory to whatever crime is committed.
I totally agree that Java isn't fun.
I have to disagree with everything you said. If you're creating complex object structures for even simple tasks, then you're using Java very poorly, and doing object oriented programming very badly. Java, when used competently, is an efficient, flexible language. It is extremely well suited for hacking things together and playing around, as well as serious development. Getting a simple GUI program up and running is a matter of about 10 lines of sparse code. Getting a simple console program running is about half that. As programs get large, Java's facilities for organization and object decoupling make maintenance much easier than it would be without those facilities.
I've used more programming languages than I can remember in the last 25 years of software development (I don't think I have enough fingers and toes to count them), and Java is one of my all time favorites (especially since version 6). It's simple, efficient, effective, powerful, maintainable, and lets me get a lot done quickly. As far as programming goes, those are key components of fun. Throw in Netbeans, and it's the closest thing to programming bliss I've ever seen.
As far as maintainability goes, that has more to do with the quality of the object structures than anything inherent in the language itself. Well designed C++ object structures are just as maintainable as well designed Java structures, just as poor object structures are difficult to maintain in any language.
Part of my CIS degree program required two semesters of business law, and I remember the liability lectures well. In the US, there is a chain of product liability that goes like this:
Company A make car windshields.
Company B makes cars, and buys its windshields from Company A.
Customer buys a car from Company B.
For whatever reason, a defect in the windshield causes Customer to incur a loss that can be recovered in court, so Customer wants to sue. Who does Customer sue?
A) Company A
B) Company B
C) No-one, as US law has left Customer to hang by the neck until dead.
Although most of you have instinctively chosen C, you're wrong. As are those of you who chose A. Customer did not buy from Company A, and so does not have standing to sue. Since Company B resells Company A's product, Company B assumes liability for defects. Company B has standing to sue Company A, and can do so to recover its losses for being sued over defects in the products it bought from Company A.
Obviously, this doesn't necessarily apply to this case since it's not in the US, but I suspect something similar to be true.
It was as if a million mirror sites cried out, and were suddenly silenced under the upgrade onslaught.
1. Do you use source control?
No, we expect the source to exercise self-control. It's a grown-up like the rest of us.
2. Can you make a build in one step?
That depends on what we're building. We've built some monumental cluster-fucks with one step. I mean, if you don't want the self-destruct button pressed, then don't make it a big red button that just screams out to be pushed.
3. Do you make daily builds?
On some days.
4. Do you have a bug database?
The biggest on the planet, if not the galaxy!
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
Sometimes, but we usually fix bugs after writing new code.
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
Yes, and it says I'm due at the gym now, so make this snappy.
7. Do you have a spec?
A spec of what?
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
I'm told that some do, somewhere.
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Yes, we use the best commercial tools we can find on Usenet.
10. Do you have testers?
Yes, I never eat a meal without having someone else try it first. If I had a dollar for every time I dodged a cyanide bullet...
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
Yes, "SOS" is a code, isn't it?
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?
We used to, but we found our hallways to be quite usable. So we stopped.
I don't think that's how it would shake out it court. Microsoft is able to get away with not paying for Windows refunds because people don't buy Windows directly from Microsoft. They buy Windows from resellers like Best Buy. In the same vein, The Wall Street Journal (which used to be reputable before Murdoch bought it) is sold to Kindle readers by Amazon, not News Corp. As such, they are Amazon customers.
And that makes a lot more sense, too. If I sign up with Amazon, I don't want Amazon to give my personal information to anyone else. If Rupert wants to get access to subscriber information, he needs to sell directly to subscribers. As it stands, he has no business getting any of Amazon's customer information.