Core reason why? Their limited shelf life. I happen to own the original Doom series, and in a fit of nostalgia, I decided to reload it on my new computer. After a hell of a lot of tinkering, as well as using an open-source engine mod, I was able to get it running again. More often than not, I've ended up chucking my old games simply because it's not worth the effort to get them working again. Yes, I have DOSBox on my system, but seriously, what's the point?
Manufacturers aren't going to be marketing them, and to be honest, few people are going to go through the effort of trying to make it work on new systems. So complaining that they shouldn't move into the public domain long after their day in sun is done feels more like "my precioussss..." than any economic argument.
The problem is that in trying to make his point, he's pointing at various commercial sites as "good examples," when in reality they aren't quite up to what he's talking about. I also note that there is nothing stopping him... or any of the complainers here... from developing and fielding such a system.
Seriously. Considering the amount of bitching, griping, moaning and whining I've seen about businesses failing to move to new operating systems and carrying around large amounts of legacy code, it doesn't appear that there's a pent-up demand for brand-new languages. The OP seems to be operating under the assumption that "if you build it, they will come" when it comes to programming languages, but the real world seems to be of a different opinion.
He was the swordmaster behind LOTR and the Princess Bride. His skill was not just being able to do it, but to teach others to do it so it looked right on screen. RIP, Bob Anderson.
It's always been a problem, and I see it hasn't changed. One of the things I remember from leaving one place a decade ago was just how many systems I had access to as a function of my job as a system admin, and the number of user accounts with that - including support vendor accounts. Even though I was ethical enough to tell them what I had access to, and that they needed to change all those passwords, it turned out that they didn't. I learned that when I was recalled as a contractor, and it turned out I didn't have to get a set of new passwords for the system, about half of the old ones still worked. Even worse, the ones that still worked were ones that gave me root access.
What bothers me about it was that no one at Lancet, not the editors or the peer-reviewers, bothered to question the data and the assumptions to begin with. I'm also curious to know just what role the other co-authors had in this paper. Were they just "courtesy additions," or were they complicit in this research? Having written a few research articles, I can only think of one that went through without a request for revisions, or additional data. Most of the time, we were put through the wringer.
About 5 years ago, I was able to recover data I'd written on some old (circa 1990) diskettes using an old 486 computer I had in my "spares." which worked surprisingly well. One of the challenges was that I'd used an archiving program called ZOO, and a lot of my data files were stored in that format. It took some digging to find a program that would extract the files, and then saved them onto a hard drive, which was then written to CD. The files themselves were actually from the mid-80s, and fortunately, were in an ASCII readable format, although the word processor used to create them (WordStar2000) was long obsolete.
Exactly. It's a problem across many industries - just ask any auto mechanic. The people designing the product aren't thinking in terms of servicing the product. I've had to disassemble an entire laptop just to replace a case fan. I had to buy specialty tools just so I could remove and replace the hard drive on another laptop. Those are just some of the examples I've had to deal with - and yes, each of them have been "top of the line" laptops. What was frustrating was that it shouldn't have required that much effort - I mean really, why the hell would you use a screw head type that no standard fitting matches?
It seems to me that the point is that programmers have a variant of "if all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail" saying. In this case, they have a huge toolbox, so every time they need to drive a nail, it means that they must design and use a methodology that will, eventually, cause the nail to be pushed into place, instead of just reaching for the hammer and getting the job done.
A good point. One of the other things I saw there was the assumption that people are going to easily remember passwords - and that they have a limited number of places they use them. Neither assumption is true, and particularly so these days. I have over thirty different sites I visit on a regular basis that require me to use a password of some sort - including this one. Keeping those straight using the "strong passwords, changed regularly" rule would mean that I'd stop visiting them after a while, or not bother participating - mainly because I lost the password or forgot it. That is, unless I committed the oldest security violation of writing down my passwords.
When I wrote code, I knew how the program was supposed to work. I made the user interfaces "obvious" - to me. So my "testing" was along the lines of "does this compile properly," and "does it output what I expected it to?" The rude awakening came when I handed off the "finished" product to someone else. All sorts of errors I hadn't thought about handling happened, people were confused by the user interface, and more than one "oops" cropped up. While the "boring" testing you're doing on your code may catch the obvious things, it's always better to have someone else test it.
Very little about studies like this surprise me. I'm of the age where I went to school before computers - or even calculators - were used in schools. Amazingly enough, somehow I managed to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic (and later on advanced mathematics) without them. Are they handy, and useful? Yes, absolutely. The advent of relatively cheap calculators made my college years a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Computers have made a lot of what used to be very onerous and time-consuming tasks simpler, easier, and faster. I know that because I had to do them by hand at one time.
That said, what I have noticed is that a lot of people have become totally helpless when the technology fails or isn't available. I've watched people struggle to add a simple column of numbers or make change when a calculator wasn't available. Something I consider trivially simple - even do in my head - they can't without technological help. GPS navigation systems seem to have caused many to have forgotten how to read a map or follow directions. What appears to have happened is that the technology isn't teaching them anything except which buttons to push. It's not teaching them the actual skill.
I doubt it. Firefox has always given users the ability to change the default search engine. While Google was paying Mozilla to make Google the default search on those products, it doesn't necessarily affect other deals made.
This is interesting, but I don't think it's all that big a problem. Although it's fun to get all paranoid about Microsoft - with some justification - I don't see this as an attempt to "take over" Ubuntu.
The problem with what you just said is that it's reactive, not creative. Yes, the traditional media misses the boat, or gets its facts wrong at times. It's just as bad - if not worse - in the blogosphere. I've seen any number of blogs detailing how 9-11 was a conspiracy, "break" a story that turns out to be totally wrong, and drop the ball on a number of stories. The idea that blogs are going to be able to supplant the functions of the professional journalists isn't realistic.
How do you make what you do pay when the distribution medium changes? While we like to celebrate the Internet for it's ability to disseminate information, the fact is that gathering that information has to be done by someone. Bloggers have done quite a bit in terms of gathering news, or breaking it, but the problem is that most of it is scattered, and tends to be narrowly focused. The other stories, coverage, and news is still done by the traditional media. It's going to be that way for quite a while - we need people who have expertise (and get paid for that) to dig into the complex stories, we need organizations who are going to aggregate it and check it. The actual functions of newspapers and television reporting are needed, but the distribution channel changed. The question for them is can they hold on long enough to make what they do pay in a new medium.
Unions are the parasites of corporations, taking profits that could have gone to R&D, new jobs, and channeling it to people who are paid much more than they are worth.
LOL! You mean like the number of non-union corporations have done? Last I looked, they weren't creating many jobs, were shipping them overseas, cutting R&D, and, speaking of people who were paid much more than they were worth - loading up CEO's and other executives with pay packages. Mind you, I'd love to be paid a few million dollars a year to tank a company. Heck, if necessary, I'd even try to shed tears as I took a multi-million dollar buyout to leave!
Exactly, and it's the same in the U.S. Most of the things employees take for granted - "it's my right" - are there because of unions. Wage and job protections. Workman's compensation. Health and safety regulations. Unions fought for all of those things. I've seem some stating that good employees don't need a union, it's amazing how often someone's perception of their capabilities doesn't always match their employer's perception.
That isn't to say that unions are perfect, either. Like any successful movement, they've gotten fat and happy, and at times, corrupt. That doesn't mean that unions are "evil" or that they still aren't necessary.
There's now the assumption (and we all know what assume means) that if it's "in the cloud," the data is safe or backed up somewhere. Servers fail. Backups fail. Software glitches happen. Disasters - natural or other - happen. Even if you're lucky and you don't lose the actual data, losing access to it is the same - and for an extended length of time, it can be expensive.
No matter how much we preach to the choir, it seems that most people simply don't get the message.
It's quite easy to simply stop carrying the feeds for those groups. What this action is, is the equivalent of using thermonuclear bomb to kill a fly. I'm sure that out of the multiple thousands of groups in the alt.* hierarchy, there's probably some kiddie porn. For all I know, there might be some in the free.* hierarchy, but I have zero interest in searching through all the hierarchies to see if I can turn up any kiddy porn. I guarantee you it isn't present in the alt.help.*, alt.health.*, alt.animal.*, alt.fan.*, or the alt.sport.* groups. Even looking through the list of the alt.binaries.* groups, they're overwhelmingly obviously not kiddie-porn groups. But hey, somewhere in there there might be some.
Saying Usenet is "full of kiddie porn" is pretty much a lie. There are a lot of groups in the alt.hierarchy I've belonged to over the years, and still do, and I've never seen any. However, I've always used the rule of "if it looks like something you're not going to want to see, then don't go there!
Partially true. I just spent some time testing out two of the 8.04 versions, and what stunned me was that the sound card that worked fine on Ubuntu didn't work at all in Kubuntu. No, I don't have "oddball hardware" either. It's one thing if I had some antique, or some just released card - I'd expect that I'd have some issues.
After reading the article, it appears that his gripe is that Canonical has a closed-source proprietary systems management function that you have to pay for if you want to use it. Oh, the horror! They actually want to make money, and even worse, aren't a "pure" open-source company!
Maybe I'm unusual for thinking this, but if you're going to have a support personnel and professional programmers on staff, it follows that you need a revenue stream, since most of them are real big on getting paid. There is no gun being held to the head of any one to purchase this. From my own experience, many businesses feel more comfortable paying for support and tools. You can tout "free" all you want, but "who do we get to support it - guaranteed" is a big part of the thinking. Shuttlesworth may be willing to support this, but he doesn't have unlimited resources. He has a lot, but not unlimited. He's also not immortal. So it makes sense for Ubuntu to be able to support itself.
FTA: The company argued that continuing the lawsuit might mean new disclosures of insider e-mails, which could "jeopardize Microsoft's goodwill" and "disrupt Microsoft's relationships with its business partners."
I think that what jeopardized their "goodwill" more than anything was their decision to actually release Vista! A bloated OS, that required major hardware upgrades, along with poor compatibility with many mission-critical software applications, and strong-arm marketing to attempt to force it on people. It's surprising that they think they have any goodwill left!
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Core reason why? Their limited shelf life. I happen to own the original Doom series, and in a fit of nostalgia, I decided to reload it on my new computer. After a hell of a lot of tinkering, as well as using an open-source engine mod, I was able to get it running again. More often than not, I've ended up chucking my old games simply because it's not worth the effort to get them working again. Yes, I have DOSBox on my system, but seriously, what's the point?
Manufacturers aren't going to be marketing them, and to be honest, few people are going to go through the effort of trying to make it work on new systems. So complaining that they shouldn't move into the public domain long after their day in sun is done feels more like "my precioussss..." than any economic argument.
The problem is that in trying to make his point, he's pointing at various commercial sites as "good examples," when in reality they aren't quite up to what he's talking about. I also note that there is nothing stopping him ... or any of the complainers here ... from developing and fielding such a system.
Seriously. Considering the amount of bitching, griping, moaning and whining I've seen about businesses failing to move to new operating systems and carrying around large amounts of legacy code, it doesn't appear that there's a pent-up demand for brand-new languages. The OP seems to be operating under the assumption that "if you build it, they will come" when it comes to programming languages, but the real world seems to be of a different opinion.
Exactly. The first thing I thought when seeing this story was "Where have I seen this before?" Oh, yeah, that was what Navigator was going to be.
He was the swordmaster behind LOTR and the Princess Bride. His skill was not just being able to do it, but to teach others to do it so it looked right on screen. RIP, Bob Anderson.
It's always been a problem, and I see it hasn't changed. One of the things I remember from leaving one place a decade ago was just how many systems I had access to as a function of my job as a system admin, and the number of user accounts with that - including support vendor accounts. Even though I was ethical enough to tell them what I had access to, and that they needed to change all those passwords, it turned out that they didn't. I learned that when I was recalled as a contractor, and it turned out I didn't have to get a set of new passwords for the system, about half of the old ones still worked. Even worse, the ones that still worked were ones that gave me root access.
What bothers me about it was that no one at Lancet, not the editors or the peer-reviewers, bothered to question the data and the assumptions to begin with. I'm also curious to know just what role the other co-authors had in this paper. Were they just "courtesy additions," or were they complicit in this research? Having written a few research articles, I can only think of one that went through without a request for revisions, or additional data. Most of the time, we were put through the wringer.
About 5 years ago, I was able to recover data I'd written on some old (circa 1990) diskettes using an old 486 computer I had in my "spares." which worked surprisingly well. One of the challenges was that I'd used an archiving program called ZOO, and a lot of my data files were stored in that format. It took some digging to find a program that would extract the files, and then saved them onto a hard drive, which was then written to CD. The files themselves were actually from the mid-80s, and fortunately, were in an ASCII readable format, although the word processor used to create them (WordStar2000) was long obsolete.
Exactly. It's a problem across many industries - just ask any auto mechanic. The people designing the product aren't thinking in terms of servicing the product. I've had to disassemble an entire laptop just to replace a case fan. I had to buy specialty tools just so I could remove and replace the hard drive on another laptop. Those are just some of the examples I've had to deal with - and yes, each of them have been "top of the line" laptops. What was frustrating was that it shouldn't have required that much effort - I mean really, why the hell would you use a screw head type that no standard fitting matches?
It seems to me that the point is that programmers have a variant of "if all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail" saying. In this case, they have a huge toolbox, so every time they need to drive a nail, it means that they must design and use a methodology that will, eventually, cause the nail to be pushed into place, instead of just reaching for the hammer and getting the job done.
A good point. One of the other things I saw there was the assumption that people are going to easily remember passwords - and that they have a limited number of places they use them. Neither assumption is true, and particularly so these days. I have over thirty different sites I visit on a regular basis that require me to use a password of some sort - including this one. Keeping those straight using the "strong passwords, changed regularly" rule would mean that I'd stop visiting them after a while, or not bother participating - mainly because I lost the password or forgot it. That is, unless I committed the oldest security violation of writing down my passwords.
My serious wake-up call came when I had to add the following line to my instruction sheet: "1. Turn on the computer. The switch is located..."
When I wrote code, I knew how the program was supposed to work. I made the user interfaces "obvious" - to me. So my "testing" was along the lines of "does this compile properly," and "does it output what I expected it to?" The rude awakening came when I handed off the "finished" product to someone else. All sorts of errors I hadn't thought about handling happened, people were confused by the user interface, and more than one "oops" cropped up. While the "boring" testing you're doing on your code may catch the obvious things, it's always better to have someone else test it.
Very little about studies like this surprise me. I'm of the age where I went to school before computers - or even calculators - were used in schools. Amazingly enough, somehow I managed to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic (and later on advanced mathematics) without them. Are they handy, and useful? Yes, absolutely. The advent of relatively cheap calculators made my college years a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Computers have made a lot of what used to be very onerous and time-consuming tasks simpler, easier, and faster. I know that because I had to do them by hand at one time.
That said, what I have noticed is that a lot of people have become totally helpless when the technology fails or isn't available. I've watched people struggle to add a simple column of numbers or make change when a calculator wasn't available. Something I consider trivially simple - even do in my head - they can't without technological help. GPS navigation systems seem to have caused many to have forgotten how to read a map or follow directions. What appears to have happened is that the technology isn't teaching them anything except which buttons to push. It's not teaching them the actual skill.
I doubt it. Firefox has always given users the ability to change the default search engine. While Google was paying Mozilla to make Google the default search on those products, it doesn't necessarily affect other deals made.
This is interesting, but I don't think it's all that big a problem. Although it's fun to get all paranoid about Microsoft - with some justification - I don't see this as an attempt to "take over" Ubuntu.
The problem with what you just said is that it's reactive, not creative. Yes, the traditional media misses the boat, or gets its facts wrong at times. It's just as bad - if not worse - in the blogosphere. I've seen any number of blogs detailing how 9-11 was a conspiracy, "break" a story that turns out to be totally wrong, and drop the ball on a number of stories. The idea that blogs are going to be able to supplant the functions of the professional journalists isn't realistic.
How do you make what you do pay when the distribution medium changes? While we like to celebrate the Internet for it's ability to disseminate information, the fact is that gathering that information has to be done by someone. Bloggers have done quite a bit in terms of gathering news, or breaking it, but the problem is that most of it is scattered, and tends to be narrowly focused. The other stories, coverage, and news is still done by the traditional media. It's going to be that way for quite a while - we need people who have expertise (and get paid for that) to dig into the complex stories, we need organizations who are going to aggregate it and check it. The actual functions of newspapers and television reporting are needed, but the distribution channel changed. The question for them is can they hold on long enough to make what they do pay in a new medium.
LOL! You mean like the number of non-union corporations have done? Last I looked, they weren't creating many jobs, were shipping them overseas, cutting R&D, and, speaking of people who were paid much more than they were worth - loading up CEO's and other executives with pay packages. Mind you, I'd love to be paid a few million dollars a year to tank a company. Heck, if necessary, I'd even try to shed tears as I took a multi-million dollar buyout to leave!
Exactly, and it's the same in the U.S. Most of the things employees take for granted - "it's my right" - are there because of unions. Wage and job protections. Workman's compensation. Health and safety regulations. Unions fought for all of those things. I've seem some stating that good employees don't need a union, it's amazing how often someone's perception of their capabilities doesn't always match their employer's perception.
That isn't to say that unions are perfect, either. Like any successful movement, they've gotten fat and happy, and at times, corrupt. That doesn't mean that unions are "evil" or that they still aren't necessary.
There's now the assumption (and we all know what assume means) that if it's "in the cloud," the data is safe or backed up somewhere. Servers fail. Backups fail. Software glitches happen. Disasters - natural or other - happen. Even if you're lucky and you don't lose the actual data, losing access to it is the same - and for an extended length of time, it can be expensive.
No matter how much we preach to the choir, it seems that most people simply don't get the message.
It's quite easy to simply stop carrying the feeds for those groups. What this action is, is the equivalent of using thermonuclear bomb to kill a fly. I'm sure that out of the multiple thousands of groups in the alt.* hierarchy, there's probably some kiddie porn. For all I know, there might be some in the free.* hierarchy, but I have zero interest in searching through all the hierarchies to see if I can turn up any kiddy porn. I guarantee you it isn't present in the alt.help.*, alt.health.*, alt.animal.*, alt.fan.*, or the alt.sport.* groups. Even looking through the list of the alt.binaries.* groups, they're overwhelmingly obviously not kiddie-porn groups. But hey, somewhere in there there might be some.
Saying Usenet is "full of kiddie porn" is pretty much a lie. There are a lot of groups in the alt.hierarchy I've belonged to over the years, and still do, and I've never seen any. However, I've always used the rule of "if it looks like something you're not going to want to see, then don't go there!
Partially true. I just spent some time testing out two of the 8.04 versions, and what stunned me was that the sound card that worked fine on Ubuntu didn't work at all in Kubuntu. No, I don't have "oddball hardware" either. It's one thing if I had some antique, or some just released card - I'd expect that I'd have some issues.
After reading the article, it appears that his gripe is that Canonical has a closed-source proprietary systems management function that you have to pay for if you want to use it. Oh, the horror! They actually want to make money, and even worse, aren't a "pure" open-source company!
Maybe I'm unusual for thinking this, but if you're going to have a support personnel and professional programmers on staff, it follows that you need a revenue stream, since most of them are real big on getting paid. There is no gun being held to the head of any one to purchase this. From my own experience, many businesses feel more comfortable paying for support and tools. You can tout "free" all you want, but "who do we get to support it - guaranteed" is a big part of the thinking. Shuttlesworth may be willing to support this, but he doesn't have unlimited resources. He has a lot, but not unlimited. He's also not immortal. So it makes sense for Ubuntu to be able to support itself.
FTA: The company argued that continuing the lawsuit might mean new disclosures of insider e-mails, which could "jeopardize Microsoft's goodwill" and "disrupt Microsoft's relationships with its business partners."
I think that what jeopardized their "goodwill" more than anything was their decision to actually release Vista! A bloated OS, that required major hardware upgrades, along with poor compatibility with many mission-critical software applications, and strong-arm marketing to attempt to force it on people. It's surprising that they think they have any goodwill left!
the state capital of NY, it'll cost a lot of money, spend years trying to accomplish anything, and work only part of the year.