As well, in a big project, adding or removing a print for debugging can mean a fairly lengthy recompile.
Why? If you have done a proper job of writing the code, it should be a neatly separated bunch of modules. Doesn't take long to recompile 1 or 2 modules.
And you trot out the old argument over multithreading. I wish people would cut that out. Everyone is so scared of parallel programming, talks as if everything we learned about serial execution is inapplicable, as if race conditions and deadlocks are diabolically mysteriously difficult to find. They don't have to be hard to find. Really! The main thing is not to write "parallel spaghetti code" so to speak. For instance, I always found the Dining Philosophers problem a little stupid, in that it is somewhat contrived. There are a number of ways to avoid deadlock in that problem, such as make one of the philosophers left-handed, or make the operation of picking up both forks atomic. Or just give each philosopher their own 2 forks so they don't have to share. Such bugs can be found with humble old print debugging. It is a little more difficult if the print statement changes the timing so that the problem no longer occurs, but that can happen in a debugger too.
Yes, VS6 was what I used. I have used later versions, but not looked at the.NET part.
But if you go to the title page of a particular technology, and there is a better replacement available, it will tell you.
Not always. Documentation can quickly go stale. Easy to not have the latest if you don't update religiously.
There's more piddly breakage. I run Arch Linux, and recent updates have been giving me fits. Sound quit working because the update process removed all the users from the audio group. Not too big a deal to fix, but it's annoying to have to run down a problem like that. Worse is the way every kernel update mangles proprietary graphics driver installations. After a kernel update, I've adopted the simple method of reinstalling the kernel, with "pacman -S kernel26", done from the text screen naturally, as X can't come up. But the winner was the failure of kernel modules to load after a recent update. This was especially annoying on those computers with USB keyboards and mice. No USB driver, no keyboard. Couldn't ssh into the box remotely, as there was no networking either-- that was another module that didn't load. I booted the installation media to gain access so I could fix things.
I didn't find developing in MS's Visual Studio nearly as friendly. Last time I really used it was just before.NET came out. I see no reason why many of the bad things about it would have changed.
Here are some of the problems with developing with MS. There's "help" on some library functions and applications that wasn't "just the facts", but instead was meaningless marketing hype. The last thing I want to spend time doing is wading through something that's supposed to be documentation but instead is a horrid, insult to our intelligence sales pitch that goes on and on about how some "powerful" feature is going to save time, effort and money, and "spark my imagination", etc. Now, normally when I run into a lack of documentation, the usual answer is "use the source, Luke". But this is MS, it's all proprietary, you can't just look at the source code. Then there were libraries that had been phased out, only you didn't learn that on the first bit of documentation you found. You found that out after you'd spent hours coding an application to use it, when you ran into a bug in the library and went back to the docs, or the web for answers. You'd have the option of fixing that bug, if only you had source, but no. Same problem if a library is missing a feature. Can't add it, no source. You could request that MS fix the bug or add the feature, but you will be ignored, or at best told to use some other library. The missing feature happened when I was using a video capture and encoding library, and could not find any way to set some camera settings available in the GUI. The solution I came up with was dirty, but it mostly worked: shove appropriate keypresses into the buffer, then call the routine that makes the user interface pop up. Other people had resorted to the same trick for that same problem. Then there is an additional kind of problem you have to consider. Could DRM be causing the bug you are trying to figure out?
As for debugging, the old print statement is still king. Yeah, it's nice to have a debugger, with watches, breakpoints, inspection of variables, etc. That's great for some lame business logic or web app, or for quickly finding where a segfault happened, but not enough for complicated algorithms, where data must be displayed in a way that can be comprehended, and subtle errors will be easily missed. Or where the quantity of data is so great, and filtering out whichever parts are irrelevant is itself not trivial. When your display commands in the debugger get so complicated they ought to be checked in to a repository, you may as well just program that logic into the source code.
Why is "protection" a problem? Because it is a wholly artificial monopoly, the ultimate in scarceness, created by government fiat, on things that are not naturally scarce. Consequently, what little enforcement can be done is very expensive. We spend way too much time and money fighting over the boundaries of ideas without ever resolving them because they can't be resolved. Then we take these badly flawed, arbitrary, nebulous delineations of ideas and try to sort out who got them first, which one person deserves all the credit, no matter how many people had the same idea. We have an uneasy truce amongst those with the biggest portfolios, but little more. This is not a system based upon respect and good sense, this is Europe in 1900, with secret agreements, double dealing, suspicion, and large standing armies. And lawyers in the role of arms merchants.
In practice, what most people do about this comes down to 1 of 3 things. 1) Wait for relevant patents to expire, then you don't have to worry about lengthy and expensive efforts to make contact and negotiate a deal if possible. 2) Ignore the patents and hope not to be noticed, or if noticed not sued, because your portfolio of defensive patents is imposing enough to deter them. Or 3) try to buy off the rights holders, either by byuing the patents outright, or by licensing them.
The current system is horrible. It's a constant state of war, and for what? Not the good of the public, that's for sure! Maybe reforms such as your "dying on the vine" idea could make it workable, but I feel that the system is fundamentally flawed. Any reform that preserves the monopoly and artificial scarceness characteristics doesn't go far enough.
Since when is the patent system the only way to profit from an invention? The patent system is supposed to be a deal in which the inventor is NOT being compensated for an invention, but rather for revealing the workings of an invention to the public. The form that the compensation takes is the problem, even apart from all the abuse that goes on.
Sounds like they are assuming Uranus and Neptune are similar enough, calling them both "ice giants", that we'll learn a lot about both by studying one of them. We'll want to study both, eventually, of course. In the meantime, why Uranus first?
The sunlight is a little brighter, and it's a little closer and so we can get a probe there sooner, cheaper, and with less fuel used. And Uranus has one characteristic that sets it apart from all the other planets-- it's tilted so far over that it is on its side. So perhaps that makes it more interesting.
But Neptune's largest moon is much more massive than Uranus' largest. Cassini used Titan's gravity to visit places in the Saturn system. Titan is massive enough to make that easy. Uranus' moons may be too small to make that trick workable, while Triton may be big enough. We'd also like to study the sort of extreme seasonal changes Uranus' tilt produces. To do that we'd want to view at least one entire Uranian year, which is 84 Earth years. But how? Multiple probes? Or increase the longevity of our current probes? Or we settle for a briefer view. If we do, I'd suppose we'd rather see Uranus nearer a solstice than an equinox. If so, then right now the timing may or may not be the best. The next solstice is in 2028. That's good for a leisurely preparation of 2 to 5 years to launch followed by a route of 6 or 8 so years for a probe that hopefully will last another 10 years after the trip. It's not so good if we can move faster, and want to. Also, as Neptune's year is even longer-- 164 Earth years, we may prefer to start on Neptune sooner as we will be able to catch up faster on the faster orbiting Uranus.
Seems like if the extra distance and time doesn't make it too costly, Neptune would be a better first choice.
How are you going to make people pay if they don't want to? Neither laws nor DRM work. Nor on the whole can people be persuaded to voluntarily pay, though many do of course. In short, can't be done.
Since making people pay for individual copies is untenable, what should we do instead, to encourage art and science? This is the question we should be trying to answer.
It's not "Information wants to be free", it's "Information can't be controlled."
Horses may make a good comparison, since we have primarily used them for work and not food. Horses have some advantages, but are inferior to tractors and automobiles for most things. And so today, the population of horses is much lower. We've cut them.
To the contrary, options significantly complicate valuations. Dozens of employees can have options which expire at different times, have different strike prices, and may include additional terms such as a date before which they may not be exercised. It's not that the calculations are difficult, so much as that they are numerous and opaque. The stock market is in many ways a poker game, and options are like giving some players an extra card in the hole. They can be a backhanded way of transferring wealth from stockholders to upper management, as options almost always hurt the value of the underlying asset. (An exception is if the options never cease to be underwater.) In exchange, stockholders are supposed to receive better management. It's the old "to a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". But technical problems cannot be solved with "management fu". While throwing more money at a problem can marshal more resources, it cannot directly solve a problem. If they can be solved, it is ultimately with research and engineering.
The idea is, as I'm sure you know, that options are a means of tying pay to performance, to "incentivize" management. That sort of thinking sounds more like another feeble justification for the extreme pay they are given. How much research has been done on how well these sorts of incentives work? I would guess very little, and the conclusions are that they do not work and aren't worth the cost. And that we don't need lots of research to figure this out. These options are merely thinly veiled money grabs.
Everything you say about unions also applies to management.
If some one, a management type, can somehow pull off convincing someone he is actually worth millions a year, etc...then more power to him.
Managers already have way more advantages. They have more training and education. I would guess they are on average more intelligent, but there are many exceptions of course. They should be paid more, and they are. Peons are easier to replace. Why then do you dislike one of the few advantages the peon has? Only managers get to have even more advantages than they already have? I don't like some of the practices unions use, and some of the concessions they negotiate-- you mentioned featherbedding-- but that's not reason enough to bash unions generally. Not with the examples management sets with their own greed and irresponsibility.
reward lackluster or downright BAD performance.
Yep, lot of horrible managers who are paid very well even when they make terrible decisions that hurt the company. They lie, cheat, steal, and mess up people's lives. It's like, their pay isn't linked to their performance.
No one should be free of accountability. Not workers, and definitely not managers. But managers have to lead. If the workers see them looting the company treasury, perhaps even in cahoots with the board, why shouldn't they angle for a piece too? No reason at all.
Also, don't bother, because for the most part such elections are not meaningful. They are mere shows put on to give the appearance that the owners have a voice. But owners are routinely kept in the dark on a whole host of crucial matters. For instance, I can't recall the last time a recommendation to vote for a pay package actually told the amounts in easily understood terms such as dollars rather than percentages of profits or stock options. The people running the show-- setting the agenda, deciding which questions to put to the owners, what and how to tell as little as possible to satisfy pesky legal requirements, that sort of thing-- view stockholders with contempt.
If these were real votes, we would have long ago called them on the baloney they use to justify the outrageous pay of upper management. Interestingly, this problem seems confined to US corporations. I've heard "star power" as one justification. The CEO and his team are practically deified. They've got the board so afraid of their supposed irreplaceability, their ability to run the business better than any others, that they roll right over on issues of pay. I don't object to high pay, if it is deserved. But they've been handed the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, and they've used their power to loot companies of every penny the company can bear to lose without quite dying. May have to whip the peons a bit harder to ensure survival. This is money that should go to stockholders, not upper management. Of course managers are also stockholders themselves, which is okay, so long as they aren't cut sweetheart deals on options and such like, deals which come straight off the value of the stock. Except they are. And we can do very little about it. Good luck even getting such issues on the agenda. Only things restraining them is what's left of regulations against all manner of underhanded schemes, that we can still vote with our feet, and possibly unions. That is, I have no sympathy for screams of anguish over how union pay packages are outrageous and bankrupting companies, so long as upper management pay packages are also outrageous.
We lost the siege when Disney's forces penetrated via gifts from well-meaning relatives and friends, and the patriarch opted to be "practical" and take the path of least resistance. Only took a few Shockwave games and 1 Disney computer game to get Linux kicked to the curb in favor of Windows. And the Disney merchandise flooded through the breach caused by gifts of several DVDs of Disney movies.
Of course, nothing obligates them to grant permission.
And that is one of the biggest problems with the current system. Why should permission be required? Why should there even be such rights of absolute denial? Rights holders can ask ridiculously exorbitant amounts. Sometimes they do so insincerely, because they actually do not want to deal. Or they can outright refuse to deal, no matter what price is offered. Or, the rights holders can't be found or contacted, so the system defaults to denial. This lasts until the monopolies expire, which these days takes far too many years. The mere fact of having to seek permission is killingly costly in both time and money.
It's not that patronage is a great system necessarily, though I imagine we can improve hugely on how it worked in past centuries. It's that the current system is broken. Very, very broken. DRM is patently ridiculous. There hasn't been a DRM scheme yet that couldn't be broken, and there never will be. Currently, copying is incredibly easy. Copying will only get easier. Artificial scarcity can't be maintained. Enforcing it is absolutely impossible. How is any regulating body to know whether person A gave person B a thumbdrive full of copyrighted material, unless the persons involved tell? There is no other way, simply no way, to know. Even sex, which is notoriously hard to regulate, leaves more evidence. And trying to maintain artificial scarcity is very costly in itself. We will have to abandon copyright.
We have improved fantastically in our ability to copy information. Cheap, ubiquitous PCs can copy hundreds of hours of music to a thumb sized device in just a few minutes. Networks can transmit all that music all over the world, very quickly, and at very, very little cost. We are moving into a wondrous Age of Information. Think of the questions that can now be answered, the research that is now available at anyone's fingertips. And the immense savings we can realize by storing and transmitting information digitally. Plus the ability to search and analyze it in all the ways computers can and mere paper books cannot. But for the sake of a broken business model, we are being restrained from using all this capability. The costs are not just in not grabbing the savings to be had from switching to less costly mediums, but in all the progress we are not making and could be, all the time we waste worrying about how many copyrights are being violated and if lawsuits will come of it, or deprivation we suffer because doing without is cheaper than hunting down permission after permission or the risk is too great.
Why is US citizenship required? What does that matter for a contest like this?
And, this business of making SSNs dangerous is stupid. Like credit card numbers, they are used all over the place, in plain text, and so cannot reasonably be kept secret. Half the people in the HR department of every employer a person has ever worked for could know that person's SSN. Many government workers use them constantly. They can't be easily changed like a password can. But we have to try to conceal SSNs anyway, to slow down the identity thieves. We should quit using them as proof, of identity or US citizenship or anything else. Make it so that it doesn't matter if the whole world knows your SSN, doesn't matter if there is a big online database linking every SSN ever used to every name it was ever assigned to.
If you are a afraid to reboot your server when its working fine because you don't know it will come back up, then you ALREADY HAVE A PROBLEM.
Hear! Hear! What's with this hangup with rebooting? Do it, or not, as appropriate. I don't reboot out of wishful hoping that problems will be magically fixed, but I reboot quite often for other reasons. Such as, the company changed data centers and the machines have to be physically relocated, and before the big move, I want to be sure they will come back up. Kernel updates are pretty routine, but less diligence there can save a lot of unnecessary work, and possibly avoid trouble. If it's a high availability production machine, then I will spend extra time if by doing so I can avoid having to reboot. Even then, ought to have failovers, backups, and so forth, so that one machine at a time can be taken down for maintenance.
Some nasty problems I've encountered were 2 machines that had been configured with the same static IP address, and a drive partition that had been formatted with XFS with unusual parameters. No apparent problems, until a reboot. Then the load balancer grabbed the other machine with the same IP, and wouldn't listen to the first machine any more. The machine with the XFS partition couldn't mount it after a reboot-- parameters in fstab weren't correct. A routine problem is the kernel update in Arch Linux that breaks XWindows because the proprietary graphics driver has to be redone. (I just reinstall the kernel to fix that one. And reboot a 2nd time.) There are all kinds of ways UNIX machines can be ticking time bombs if you never check that booting up still works. Forgot to add sshd to the startup routines? Now you have to go to the data center. Rather like the cute trick of using fdisk to delete all the partitions on a Windows box while it is running. All is well, until the reboot....
If it isn't high availability, isn't running a database that takes 20 minutes to shut down and start up, then what's the big deal with doing a reboot? Usually the fastest way to switch to new versions of libraries, XWindows, etc. I'm not going to go in there and manually kill and restart dozens of processes, or close hundreds of terminal sessions that went zombie when the users disconnected without logging out first (assuming there isn't a timeout in place), when 1 reboot lets me move on to something else much more quickly.
And the law must operate within the confines of nature. Lawmakers can decree that pi = 3.0, global warming isn't happening, we aren't related to monkeys, or the earth is 6000 years old, but that won't make it so. They still don't really get it that sharing is a consequence of the way the universe works.
There are a few supervolcanoes around the world. Yellowstone has been going off about every 3/4 million years for around 20 milllion years, and it's due. Toba nearly wiped out humanity 75000 years ago. Can we do anything about it? Defuse them by sucking all the power out of them with geothermal energy extraction?
Seriously. Unless you are rehired, never touch your old accounts again, no matter how well intentioned. The law is over the top on punishing evil hackers. Even if the risks seem low, the law makes it so not worth helping out should things turn sour. The least you should have is decent compensation for the risks you're taking, and to help allay suspicions of whether you could have ulterior motives.
My last employer wanted me to continue to help out after the money ran out. So I was to keep right on doing what I had been doing, with no contract, and no pay? No way!
And take a leaf from T. Roosevelt and clean up some of the corruption and theft perpetrated by our so-called elites? Don't let them off with a mere apology like with those bankers who illegally foreclosed on the homes of our military members? Before our economy tanks even harder?
"Kid, take the money and do something good with it" is what I once heard about this problem. That's politics. Politically, security is an easy sell. It may be stupid and misguided. And there will be some unscrupulous characters who will take the money and use it to research something like the "evil bit", and they may even convince themselves they aren't wasting money. But most will do something good, and it will even be related to security. But it does help to have oversight with at least a little bit of a clue, which was rather lacking in the previous administration.
How about a microkernel based OS like Minix 3, that can be formally verified, is libre software, and actually works, doesn't have a performance penalty built in, and runs useful apps? Would be a big gain for more than security, and need not, perhaps is best not approached from that perspective. Approach this from the direction of making software more reliable. While of course telling the govt sponsors how it's actually all about security.
For Windows, I create C:\Software and C:\Hardware. Drivers, DirectX updates, and such all go in Hardware. Any software I install goes in Software. Games are the reason to use Windows, and are huge consumers of hard drive space, so they rate their own subdirectory, C:\Software\Game. (I've also decided to drop plurals from directory names I create. Was getting annoying having "pic", "pics", "pictures", "images", etc.) It doesn't have to be "Software", all it has to be is not C:\Program Files. That way I can tell at a glance what I put on there, and what else is there. Back in the days of dial up BBSes, I used C:\LOAD\DOWN and C:\LOAD\UP. When I installed Windows, I'd have it install into C:\W, figuring that would make various configuration files ever so slightly smaller.
For UNIX, of course I have/home mounted on its own partition. Makes upgrading and backing up a lot easier. I use 'u' (for "user") for my primary user name. (Some distros, such as SuSE, won't allow single char user names, so it's "u1" for those.) Besides keeping it as simple and short as possible, it also heads off any possibility of my real name being easily discovered from my chosen user name. As more and more crap has been stored in the home directories of users (directories like.mozilla,.gnome,.gnome2, Desktop, Documents, Downloads), I've recently taken to putting all my stuff in/home/u/own/, so I can easily tell them apart. I could live with it as long as they kept to hidden names, but when the desktop environments started pushing in with subdirs like/home/u/Documents, I decided to do something. Same idea with C:\HOME\U on Windows, when I have anything there. C:\My Whatever attracts too much junk from programs that take it upon themselves to save their ever so valuable configuration info there.
And lastly, I save configuration tweaks, with full path names, in/home/localconfig/. If I change, say,/etc/hosts.deny, I save the changed copy (not the original) in/home/localconfig/etc/hosts.deny. Really helps when I'm trying to remember what I had to do to get sshd, CUPS, XWindows, or whatever to work, or where the window manager du jour stores its global configuration and menus, or where the heck they moved DIRCOLORS functionality this time. Of course there is no user named "localconfig".
Some years ago I complained to my Representative about H1B visas.
He actually wrote back! But he twisted my complaint. Bragged how he was doing all he could to stop the evil Latinos from illegally swarming across our southern border. The government was building a fence! Great-- they were going to waste more of our money finding out that fences don't work well enough to be worth the trouble. Certainly I don't want totally uncontrolled borders, but that wasn't what I was complaining about.
"Suppose you were an idiot... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeat myself."
Mark Twain
When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation.
That statement assumes a great deal that is not true. It is terribly loaded. Competition harms a business' profitability. Should we therefore ban competition? Of course not! We recognize that competition (within limits-- don't want rival businesses murdering each other's employees) is what made the West great. But lately there's been confusion on this point, a tendency to ascribe our success to capitalism rather than competition. In the 19th century robber barons showed us that capitalism alone isn't sufficient, for the most profitable thing they could do, as many of them shrewdly saw, was eliminate all the competition. And that's not only the competition from rival producers, but employers as well, so that workers will have little choice but to take employment at the only company in town, at a very low pay rate of course. Therefore we now have some protections from all this in the form of labor and antitrust laws.
But creating monopolies is what current IP law does. You write as if the only way to profit from an innovation is to grant the innovator a monopoly on it. Then you scream about evil pirates whenever anyone intentionally or inadvertently infringes. And how they're undermining the system, and will ruin it if they aren't stopped! Well, the system is already dead. It just looks alive in the same way a zombie looks alive. Consider that piracy is unstoppable. Our attempts to quash it are ludicrous. Even if the Internet was shut down and we gave up the immense value it has brought us all, piracy would still be unstoppable. Why cannot we just pay the innovators? And stop wasting all this effort on futile enforcement and DRM that at best serves only to enrich IP lawyers? And at worst causes almost all innovation to grind to a halt? I'll hit back with another loaded statement: Do you want the West to fall behind China? All because anything other than patents and copyrights somehow isn't fair enough, and the poor starving innovators and artists might not get their due? But you see, the current system fails miserably at getting them their due now. And we know the "starving artists" line is a joke, what with the industry's long history of ripping off artists worse than pirates ever allegedly did, and so prevalent is it that we have this term, "Hollywood Accounting".
But don't be mislead into thinking that cleaning up the corruption will make the current system work well. Even if there was no unfair bargaining, and the patent office massively tightened up the standards, and terms were drastically shortened, even then, the system would still do a poor job. And that's because of a fundamental difficulty, stated so well in the very term "Intellectual Property". It tries to treat the intangible as "property" that can be held, sold, and traded like material goods. It almost totally fails to account for the biggest difference, that ideas are infinitely copyable, by simply declaring that by legislative fiat, copying is not allowed without permission! It treats ideas like they are mining claims. And so we have thousands of people out there staking and trying to defend claims. Too easy to spend more time fighting over claims than innovating, and many of our businesses have been doing that. And the disease has spread into our universities. It's worse than mining claims because at least boundaries of mining claims can be clearly established. Ideas cannot be so neatly bounded, and so it's never easy to decide when claim jumping has occurred.
Your comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia is too simplistic. You overlook that Wikipedia's expenses are way, way lower. Wikipedia does not pay contributors, and does not pay all the expenses associated with paper editions, things like printing and distribution. Wikipedia is a HUGE win for the public. More information than Britannica can ever hope to cram into a paper edition, at a fraction of the cos
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As well, in a big project, adding or removing a print for debugging can mean a fairly lengthy recompile.
Why? If you have done a proper job of writing the code, it should be a neatly separated bunch of modules. Doesn't take long to recompile 1 or 2 modules.
And you trot out the old argument over multithreading. I wish people would cut that out. Everyone is so scared of parallel programming, talks as if everything we learned about serial execution is inapplicable, as if race conditions and deadlocks are diabolically mysteriously difficult to find. They don't have to be hard to find. Really! The main thing is not to write "parallel spaghetti code" so to speak. For instance, I always found the Dining Philosophers problem a little stupid, in that it is somewhat contrived. There are a number of ways to avoid deadlock in that problem, such as make one of the philosophers left-handed, or make the operation of picking up both forks atomic. Or just give each philosopher their own 2 forks so they don't have to share. Such bugs can be found with humble old print debugging. It is a little more difficult if the print statement changes the timing so that the problem no longer occurs, but that can happen in a debugger too.
Yes, VS6 was what I used. I have used later versions, but not looked at the .NET part.
But if you go to the title page of a particular technology, and there is a better replacement available, it will tell you.
Not always. Documentation can quickly go stale. Easy to not have the latest if you don't update religiously.
There's more piddly breakage. I run Arch Linux, and recent updates have been giving me fits. Sound quit working because the update process removed all the users from the audio group. Not too big a deal to fix, but it's annoying to have to run down a problem like that. Worse is the way every kernel update mangles proprietary graphics driver installations. After a kernel update, I've adopted the simple method of reinstalling the kernel, with "pacman -S kernel26", done from the text screen naturally, as X can't come up. But the winner was the failure of kernel modules to load after a recent update. This was especially annoying on those computers with USB keyboards and mice. No USB driver, no keyboard. Couldn't ssh into the box remotely, as there was no networking either-- that was another module that didn't load. I booted the installation media to gain access so I could fix things.
I didn't find developing in MS's Visual Studio nearly as friendly. Last time I really used it was just before .NET came out. I see no reason why many of the bad things about it would have changed.
Here are some of the problems with developing with MS. There's "help" on some library functions and applications that wasn't "just the facts", but instead was meaningless marketing hype. The last thing I want to spend time doing is wading through something that's supposed to be documentation but instead is a horrid, insult to our intelligence sales pitch that goes on and on about how some "powerful" feature is going to save time, effort and money, and "spark my imagination", etc. Now, normally when I run into a lack of documentation, the usual answer is "use the source, Luke". But this is MS, it's all proprietary, you can't just look at the source code. Then there were libraries that had been phased out, only you didn't learn that on the first bit of documentation you found. You found that out after you'd spent hours coding an application to use it, when you ran into a bug in the library and went back to the docs, or the web for answers. You'd have the option of fixing that bug, if only you had source, but no. Same problem if a library is missing a feature. Can't add it, no source. You could request that MS fix the bug or add the feature, but you will be ignored, or at best told to use some other library. The missing feature happened when I was using a video capture and encoding library, and could not find any way to set some camera settings available in the GUI. The solution I came up with was dirty, but it mostly worked: shove appropriate keypresses into the buffer, then call the routine that makes the user interface pop up. Other people had resorted to the same trick for that same problem. Then there is an additional kind of problem you have to consider. Could DRM be causing the bug you are trying to figure out?
As for debugging, the old print statement is still king. Yeah, it's nice to have a debugger, with watches, breakpoints, inspection of variables, etc. That's great for some lame business logic or web app, or for quickly finding where a segfault happened, but not enough for complicated algorithms, where data must be displayed in a way that can be comprehended, and subtle errors will be easily missed. Or where the quantity of data is so great, and filtering out whichever parts are irrelevant is itself not trivial. When your display commands in the debugger get so complicated they ought to be checked in to a repository, you may as well just program that logic into the source code.
Why is "protection" a problem? Because it is a wholly artificial monopoly, the ultimate in scarceness, created by government fiat, on things that are not naturally scarce. Consequently, what little enforcement can be done is very expensive. We spend way too much time and money fighting over the boundaries of ideas without ever resolving them because they can't be resolved. Then we take these badly flawed, arbitrary, nebulous delineations of ideas and try to sort out who got them first, which one person deserves all the credit, no matter how many people had the same idea. We have an uneasy truce amongst those with the biggest portfolios, but little more. This is not a system based upon respect and good sense, this is Europe in 1900, with secret agreements, double dealing, suspicion, and large standing armies. And lawyers in the role of arms merchants.
In practice, what most people do about this comes down to 1 of 3 things. 1) Wait for relevant patents to expire, then you don't have to worry about lengthy and expensive efforts to make contact and negotiate a deal if possible. 2) Ignore the patents and hope not to be noticed, or if noticed not sued, because your portfolio of defensive patents is imposing enough to deter them. Or 3) try to buy off the rights holders, either by byuing the patents outright, or by licensing them.
The current system is horrible. It's a constant state of war, and for what? Not the good of the public, that's for sure! Maybe reforms such as your "dying on the vine" idea could make it workable, but I feel that the system is fundamentally flawed. Any reform that preserves the monopoly and artificial scarceness characteristics doesn't go far enough.
Since when is the patent system the only way to profit from an invention? The patent system is supposed to be a deal in which the inventor is NOT being compensated for an invention, but rather for revealing the workings of an invention to the public. The form that the compensation takes is the problem, even apart from all the abuse that goes on.
Sounds like they are assuming Uranus and Neptune are similar enough, calling them both "ice giants", that we'll learn a lot about both by studying one of them. We'll want to study both, eventually, of course. In the meantime, why Uranus first?
The sunlight is a little brighter, and it's a little closer and so we can get a probe there sooner, cheaper, and with less fuel used. And Uranus has one characteristic that sets it apart from all the other planets-- it's tilted so far over that it is on its side. So perhaps that makes it more interesting.
But Neptune's largest moon is much more massive than Uranus' largest. Cassini used Titan's gravity to visit places in the Saturn system. Titan is massive enough to make that easy. Uranus' moons may be too small to make that trick workable, while Triton may be big enough. We'd also like to study the sort of extreme seasonal changes Uranus' tilt produces. To do that we'd want to view at least one entire Uranian year, which is 84 Earth years. But how? Multiple probes? Or increase the longevity of our current probes? Or we settle for a briefer view. If we do, I'd suppose we'd rather see Uranus nearer a solstice than an equinox. If so, then right now the timing may or may not be the best. The next solstice is in 2028. That's good for a leisurely preparation of 2 to 5 years to launch followed by a route of 6 or 8 so years for a probe that hopefully will last another 10 years after the trip. It's not so good if we can move faster, and want to. Also, as Neptune's year is even longer-- 164 Earth years, we may prefer to start on Neptune sooner as we will be able to catch up faster on the faster orbiting Uranus.
Seems like if the extra distance and time doesn't make it too costly, Neptune would be a better first choice.
Not the issue. Enforceability is.
How are you going to make people pay if they don't want to? Neither laws nor DRM work. Nor on the whole can people be persuaded to voluntarily pay, though many do of course. In short, can't be done.
Since making people pay for individual copies is untenable, what should we do instead, to encourage art and science? This is the question we should be trying to answer.
It's not "Information wants to be free", it's "Information can't be controlled."
Horses may make a good comparison, since we have primarily used them for work and not food. Horses have some advantages, but are inferior to tractors and automobiles for most things. And so today, the population of horses is much lower. We've cut them.
stock options, it's not too hard to calculate...
To the contrary, options significantly complicate valuations. Dozens of employees can have options which expire at different times, have different strike prices, and may include additional terms such as a date before which they may not be exercised. It's not that the calculations are difficult, so much as that they are numerous and opaque. The stock market is in many ways a poker game, and options are like giving some players an extra card in the hole. They can be a backhanded way of transferring wealth from stockholders to upper management, as options almost always hurt the value of the underlying asset. (An exception is if the options never cease to be underwater.) In exchange, stockholders are supposed to receive better management. It's the old "to a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". But technical problems cannot be solved with "management fu". While throwing more money at a problem can marshal more resources, it cannot directly solve a problem. If they can be solved, it is ultimately with research and engineering.
The idea is, as I'm sure you know, that options are a means of tying pay to performance, to "incentivize" management. That sort of thinking sounds more like another feeble justification for the extreme pay they are given. How much research has been done on how well these sorts of incentives work? I would guess very little, and the conclusions are that they do not work and aren't worth the cost. And that we don't need lots of research to figure this out. These options are merely thinly veiled money grabs.
Everything you say about unions also applies to management.
If some one, a management type, can somehow pull off convincing someone he is actually worth millions a year, etc...then more power to him.
Managers already have way more advantages. They have more training and education. I would guess they are on average more intelligent, but there are many exceptions of course. They should be paid more, and they are. Peons are easier to replace. Why then do you dislike one of the few advantages the peon has? Only managers get to have even more advantages than they already have? I don't like some of the practices unions use, and some of the concessions they negotiate-- you mentioned featherbedding-- but that's not reason enough to bash unions generally. Not with the examples management sets with their own greed and irresponsibility.
reward lackluster or downright BAD performance.
Yep, lot of horrible managers who are paid very well even when they make terrible decisions that hurt the company. They lie, cheat, steal, and mess up people's lives. It's like, their pay isn't linked to their performance.
No one should be free of accountability. Not workers, and definitely not managers. But managers have to lead. If the workers see them looting the company treasury, perhaps even in cahoots with the board, why shouldn't they angle for a piece too? No reason at all.
Also, don't bother, because for the most part such elections are not meaningful. They are mere shows put on to give the appearance that the owners have a voice. But owners are routinely kept in the dark on a whole host of crucial matters. For instance, I can't recall the last time a recommendation to vote for a pay package actually told the amounts in easily understood terms such as dollars rather than percentages of profits or stock options. The people running the show-- setting the agenda, deciding which questions to put to the owners, what and how to tell as little as possible to satisfy pesky legal requirements, that sort of thing-- view stockholders with contempt.
If these were real votes, we would have long ago called them on the baloney they use to justify the outrageous pay of upper management. Interestingly, this problem seems confined to US corporations. I've heard "star power" as one justification. The CEO and his team are practically deified. They've got the board so afraid of their supposed irreplaceability, their ability to run the business better than any others, that they roll right over on issues of pay. I don't object to high pay, if it is deserved. But they've been handed the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, and they've used their power to loot companies of every penny the company can bear to lose without quite dying. May have to whip the peons a bit harder to ensure survival. This is money that should go to stockholders, not upper management. Of course managers are also stockholders themselves, which is okay, so long as they aren't cut sweetheart deals on options and such like, deals which come straight off the value of the stock. Except they are. And we can do very little about it. Good luck even getting such issues on the agenda. Only things restraining them is what's left of regulations against all manner of underhanded schemes, that we can still vote with our feet, and possibly unions. That is, I have no sympathy for screams of anguish over how union pay packages are outrageous and bankrupting companies, so long as upper management pay packages are also outrageous.
We lost the siege when Disney's forces penetrated via gifts from well-meaning relatives and friends, and the patriarch opted to be "practical" and take the path of least resistance. Only took a few Shockwave games and 1 Disney computer game to get Linux kicked to the curb in favor of Windows. And the Disney merchandise flooded through the breach caused by gifts of several DVDs of Disney movies.
Of course, nothing obligates them to grant permission.
And that is one of the biggest problems with the current system. Why should permission be required? Why should there even be such rights of absolute denial? Rights holders can ask ridiculously exorbitant amounts. Sometimes they do so insincerely, because they actually do not want to deal. Or they can outright refuse to deal, no matter what price is offered. Or, the rights holders can't be found or contacted, so the system defaults to denial. This lasts until the monopolies expire, which these days takes far too many years. The mere fact of having to seek permission is killingly costly in both time and money.
Yes, Patronage.
It's not that patronage is a great system necessarily, though I imagine we can improve hugely on how it worked in past centuries. It's that the current system is broken. Very, very broken. DRM is patently ridiculous. There hasn't been a DRM scheme yet that couldn't be broken, and there never will be. Currently, copying is incredibly easy. Copying will only get easier. Artificial scarcity can't be maintained. Enforcing it is absolutely impossible. How is any regulating body to know whether person A gave person B a thumbdrive full of copyrighted material, unless the persons involved tell? There is no other way, simply no way, to know. Even sex, which is notoriously hard to regulate, leaves more evidence. And trying to maintain artificial scarcity is very costly in itself. We will have to abandon copyright.
We have improved fantastically in our ability to copy information. Cheap, ubiquitous PCs can copy hundreds of hours of music to a thumb sized device in just a few minutes. Networks can transmit all that music all over the world, very quickly, and at very, very little cost. We are moving into a wondrous Age of Information. Think of the questions that can now be answered, the research that is now available at anyone's fingertips. And the immense savings we can realize by storing and transmitting information digitally. Plus the ability to search and analyze it in all the ways computers can and mere paper books cannot. But for the sake of a broken business model, we are being restrained from using all this capability. The costs are not just in not grabbing the savings to be had from switching to less costly mediums, but in all the progress we are not making and could be, all the time we waste worrying about how many copyrights are being violated and if lawsuits will come of it, or deprivation we suffer because doing without is cheaper than hunting down permission after permission or the risk is too great.
Why is US citizenship required? What does that matter for a contest like this?
And, this business of making SSNs dangerous is stupid. Like credit card numbers, they are used all over the place, in plain text, and so cannot reasonably be kept secret. Half the people in the HR department of every employer a person has ever worked for could know that person's SSN. Many government workers use them constantly. They can't be easily changed like a password can. But we have to try to conceal SSNs anyway, to slow down the identity thieves. We should quit using them as proof, of identity or US citizenship or anything else. Make it so that it doesn't matter if the whole world knows your SSN, doesn't matter if there is a big online database linking every SSN ever used to every name it was ever assigned to.
If you are a afraid to reboot your server when its working fine because you don't know it will come back up, then you ALREADY HAVE A PROBLEM.
Hear! Hear! What's with this hangup with rebooting? Do it, or not, as appropriate. I don't reboot out of wishful hoping that problems will be magically fixed, but I reboot quite often for other reasons. Such as, the company changed data centers and the machines have to be physically relocated, and before the big move, I want to be sure they will come back up. Kernel updates are pretty routine, but less diligence there can save a lot of unnecessary work, and possibly avoid trouble. If it's a high availability production machine, then I will spend extra time if by doing so I can avoid having to reboot. Even then, ought to have failovers, backups, and so forth, so that one machine at a time can be taken down for maintenance.
Some nasty problems I've encountered were 2 machines that had been configured with the same static IP address, and a drive partition that had been formatted with XFS with unusual parameters. No apparent problems, until a reboot. Then the load balancer grabbed the other machine with the same IP, and wouldn't listen to the first machine any more. The machine with the XFS partition couldn't mount it after a reboot-- parameters in fstab weren't correct. A routine problem is the kernel update in Arch Linux that breaks XWindows because the proprietary graphics driver has to be redone. (I just reinstall the kernel to fix that one. And reboot a 2nd time.) There are all kinds of ways UNIX machines can be ticking time bombs if you never check that booting up still works. Forgot to add sshd to the startup routines? Now you have to go to the data center. Rather like the cute trick of using fdisk to delete all the partitions on a Windows box while it is running. All is well, until the reboot....
If it isn't high availability, isn't running a database that takes 20 minutes to shut down and start up, then what's the big deal with doing a reboot? Usually the fastest way to switch to new versions of libraries, XWindows, etc. I'm not going to go in there and manually kill and restart dozens of processes, or close hundreds of terminal sessions that went zombie when the users disconnected without logging out first (assuming there isn't a timeout in place), when 1 reboot lets me move on to something else much more quickly.
And the law must operate within the confines of nature. Lawmakers can decree that pi = 3.0, global warming isn't happening, we aren't related to monkeys, or the earth is 6000 years old, but that won't make it so. They still don't really get it that sharing is a consequence of the way the universe works.
There are a few supervolcanoes around the world. Yellowstone has been going off about every 3/4 million years for around 20 milllion years, and it's due. Toba nearly wiped out humanity 75000 years ago. Can we do anything about it? Defuse them by sucking all the power out of them with geothermal energy extraction?
Seriously. Unless you are rehired, never touch your old accounts again, no matter how well intentioned. The law is over the top on punishing evil hackers. Even if the risks seem low, the law makes it so not worth helping out should things turn sour. The least you should have is decent compensation for the risks you're taking, and to help allay suspicions of whether you could have ulterior motives.
My last employer wanted me to continue to help out after the money ran out. So I was to keep right on doing what I had been doing, with no contract, and no pay? No way!
And take a leaf from T. Roosevelt and clean up some of the corruption and theft perpetrated by our so-called elites? Don't let them off with a mere apology like with those bankers who illegally foreclosed on the homes of our military members? Before our economy tanks even harder?
"Kid, take the money and do something good with it" is what I once heard about this problem. That's politics. Politically, security is an easy sell. It may be stupid and misguided. And there will be some unscrupulous characters who will take the money and use it to research something like the "evil bit", and they may even convince themselves they aren't wasting money. But most will do something good, and it will even be related to security. But it does help to have oversight with at least a little bit of a clue, which was rather lacking in the previous administration.
How about a microkernel based OS like Minix 3, that can be formally verified, is libre software, and actually works, doesn't have a performance penalty built in, and runs useful apps? Would be a big gain for more than security, and need not, perhaps is best not approached from that perspective. Approach this from the direction of making software more reliable. While of course telling the govt sponsors how it's actually all about security.
Than a story about women wanting men out of their business? Goes without saying, so why say it?
Sigh. Happy Valentine's day I guess.
These are what I've come up with.
For Windows, I create C:\Software and C:\Hardware. Drivers, DirectX updates, and such all go in Hardware. Any software I install goes in Software. Games are the reason to use Windows, and are huge consumers of hard drive space, so they rate their own subdirectory, C:\Software\Game. (I've also decided to drop plurals from directory names I create. Was getting annoying having "pic", "pics", "pictures", "images", etc.) It doesn't have to be "Software", all it has to be is not C:\Program Files. That way I can tell at a glance what I put on there, and what else is there. Back in the days of dial up BBSes, I used C:\LOAD\DOWN and C:\LOAD\UP. When I installed Windows, I'd have it install into C:\W, figuring that would make various configuration files ever so slightly smaller.
For UNIX, of course I have /home mounted on its own partition. Makes upgrading and backing up a lot easier. I use 'u' (for "user") for my primary user name. (Some distros, such as SuSE, won't allow single char user names, so it's "u1" for those.) Besides keeping it as simple and short as possible, it also heads off any possibility of my real name being easily discovered from my chosen user name. As more and more crap has been stored in the home directories of users (directories like .mozilla, .gnome, .gnome2, Desktop, Documents, Downloads), I've recently taken to putting all my stuff in /home/u/own/, so I can easily tell them apart. I could live with it as long as they kept to hidden names, but when the desktop environments started pushing in with subdirs like /home/u/Documents, I decided to do something. Same idea with C:\HOME\U on Windows, when I have anything there. C:\My Whatever attracts too much junk from programs that take it upon themselves to save their ever so valuable configuration info there.
And lastly, I save configuration tweaks, with full path names, in /home/localconfig/. If I change, say, /etc/hosts.deny, I save the changed copy (not the original) in /home/localconfig/etc/hosts.deny. Really helps when I'm trying to remember what I had to do to get sshd, CUPS, XWindows, or whatever to work, or where the window manager du jour stores its global configuration and menus, or where the heck they moved DIRCOLORS functionality this time. Of course there is no user named "localconfig".
Some years ago I complained to my Representative about H1B visas.
He actually wrote back! But he twisted my complaint. Bragged how he was doing all he could to stop the evil Latinos from illegally swarming across our southern border. The government was building a fence! Great-- they were going to waste more of our money finding out that fences don't work well enough to be worth the trouble. Certainly I don't want totally uncontrolled borders, but that wasn't what I was complaining about.
"Suppose you were an idiot... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeat myself." Mark Twain
When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation.
That statement assumes a great deal that is not true. It is terribly loaded. Competition harms a business' profitability. Should we therefore ban competition? Of course not! We recognize that competition (within limits-- don't want rival businesses murdering each other's employees) is what made the West great. But lately there's been confusion on this point, a tendency to ascribe our success to capitalism rather than competition. In the 19th century robber barons showed us that capitalism alone isn't sufficient, for the most profitable thing they could do, as many of them shrewdly saw, was eliminate all the competition. And that's not only the competition from rival producers, but employers as well, so that workers will have little choice but to take employment at the only company in town, at a very low pay rate of course. Therefore we now have some protections from all this in the form of labor and antitrust laws.
But creating monopolies is what current IP law does. You write as if the only way to profit from an innovation is to grant the innovator a monopoly on it. Then you scream about evil pirates whenever anyone intentionally or inadvertently infringes. And how they're undermining the system, and will ruin it if they aren't stopped! Well, the system is already dead. It just looks alive in the same way a zombie looks alive. Consider that piracy is unstoppable. Our attempts to quash it are ludicrous. Even if the Internet was shut down and we gave up the immense value it has brought us all, piracy would still be unstoppable. Why cannot we just pay the innovators? And stop wasting all this effort on futile enforcement and DRM that at best serves only to enrich IP lawyers? And at worst causes almost all innovation to grind to a halt? I'll hit back with another loaded statement: Do you want the West to fall behind China? All because anything other than patents and copyrights somehow isn't fair enough, and the poor starving innovators and artists might not get their due? But you see, the current system fails miserably at getting them their due now. And we know the "starving artists" line is a joke, what with the industry's long history of ripping off artists worse than pirates ever allegedly did, and so prevalent is it that we have this term, "Hollywood Accounting".
But don't be mislead into thinking that cleaning up the corruption will make the current system work well. Even if there was no unfair bargaining, and the patent office massively tightened up the standards, and terms were drastically shortened, even then, the system would still do a poor job. And that's because of a fundamental difficulty, stated so well in the very term "Intellectual Property". It tries to treat the intangible as "property" that can be held, sold, and traded like material goods. It almost totally fails to account for the biggest difference, that ideas are infinitely copyable, by simply declaring that by legislative fiat, copying is not allowed without permission! It treats ideas like they are mining claims. And so we have thousands of people out there staking and trying to defend claims. Too easy to spend more time fighting over claims than innovating, and many of our businesses have been doing that. And the disease has spread into our universities. It's worse than mining claims because at least boundaries of mining claims can be clearly established. Ideas cannot be so neatly bounded, and so it's never easy to decide when claim jumping has occurred.
Your comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia is too simplistic. You overlook that Wikipedia's expenses are way, way lower. Wikipedia does not pay contributors, and does not pay all the expenses associated with paper editions, things like printing and distribution. Wikipedia is a HUGE win for the public. More information than Britannica can ever hope to cram into a paper edition, at a fraction of the cos