This post and its associated rating (currently 50% Troll) is a prime example of how/.'s moderators have really gone downhill. The text of the post is both relevant and spot-on, rather more insightful than otherwise, and in no way is it seeking to get a rise out of the readership by misleading obstinacy. Sure, it's cynical as hell, but then again, the current situation in the US would seem to warrant precisely such an attitude.
It seems the mods need more education about what "Troll" really means -- for starters, "Troll" != "Disagree", and "Troll" != "Do not like".
Methinks this kind of modding behaviour is the/. equivalent of griefers. Meh.
Perhaps someone like Gartner needs to write a TCO report on outsourced code... only then would the MBAs take notice.
Seriously though, it really sounds like a study of the TCO of MBAs is more in order -- how many outsourcing snafus, and how much of the current financial woes in the US, are due to MBAs with precisely the mentality noted by the GP:
"I cut our expenses by x%. I want a bonus. Now let me find another place to work before this decision catches up with me."
Amount of money earned by a married U.S. Army sergeant with children per day in Iraq in 2007: $170
Amount of money earned by a Blackwater military contractor per day: $600
"We support our troops," indeed. How bitter. I have good friends in the military, and these Blackwater goons are effectively stealing wages from them. Meh. Another example:
Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad overseeing more than 160,000 U.S. troops, makes roughly $180,000 a year, or about $493 a day. That comes out to less than half the fee charged by Blackwater for its senior manager of a 34-man security team.
By any strict economic definition, there is another word for "profit" -- "inefficiency". Ethically speaking, one might even stretch things a bit and call it "theft". Making a living is one thing, but fleecing your customers simply because you can is a crime in all but name.
Also, if one type of swing doesn't suit you, look around! Lindy was what I started with, but with Lindy, if you only know the basic step, you get dizzy *really* fast. So I moved over to East Coast, where basic is a little less loopy and the non-basic steps a little less complex, and things are good.:) There's also West Coast, Balboa, and at least one or two other types that I forget the names to. So browse around, find something you like!
For one, if you're geeky enough to use the word in casual speech, you might well find people who freak out at such vocabulary to be tiresome, so using the term works as a kind of social self selection.
"You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much..."
There was a practical study conducted by the town government of the German municipality of Rheine. The article here in Der Spiegel mentions this. Despite turning off much of the town's night lighting, night crime incidence rates remained low.
It seems that the modern streetlight is little more than the grown-up's version of the night light. I say it's high time we all grow up and learn to live with the dark. It's really not that frightening.
In Japan, they've become so rare in most areas that they're practically mythical. Growing up 30 years ago in suburban northern Virginia, they were so numerous it was no big deal to fill a jar with them. I haven't been back during the summer since, maybe, 1997... I have no idea if they're still so numerous, but Japan's history makes me think they probably aren't.:-(
I see your point, and I likewise do not think we are on "the doorstep of fascism". That said, I would hazard that some of the legislation accreting in the annals of the Congress and the Federal Register are not improvements -- for the awkward fact remains that the Congress can create laws that are apparently unconstitutional, and they will remain on the books until such time as a lawsuit advances far enough to have such law stricken down as unconstitutional by the judiciary. The way the federal government has arrogated some very far-reaching powers to itself by bending the interstate commerce clause presents one such lasting example.
"Strait", "straight", "strict", and "stretch" all seem to come from the same semantic root of stretching something -- such that it becomes narrow, linear, and rigid.
</Language_Geek_Update>
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.:D
Interestingly, I read jmorris42's post with a different interpretation altogether. Simply read "progressive" to mean, not necessarily anyone presently described as "liberal" or "left-wing", but instead as anyone unhappy with the actual rules of government and wanting to change or work around them -- not any specific group, but rather all wannabe work-arounders on any side of the political spectrum. Using this meaning, jmorris42's post suddenly sounds much less paranoid and more insightful.
I could certainly be off the mark, but I don't think he's talking about any conspiracy at all, and instead describing the aggregate effects of many different actors, all likely with different motives, who happen to be using similar means to their various and disparate ends: to wit, ignoring or downplaying the original rules of the game, i.e. the constitutional underpinnings of the country, and backing / writing / lobbying for legislation that establishes new rules regardless of their constitutionality.
When I saw how incomplete and different v. XP is from v. Vista I could simply not believe it.
No drivers? No support for XYZ application? (if there is any it isn't working) and a complete redesign of the user interface (a complete no,no when it comes to user interface design)...
A text book case of how *not* to transition to a new version of a product.
This is honestly not intended as flamebait. Simply swap some of the variables as I did above, and we see some of the same dynamics, and similar upset, as we saw with Vista.
It seems the Amarok folks haven't taken the time to learn from Microsoft's expensive lessons, which is a genuine shame. Love them or hate them, Microsoft *does* give us all a lot, in terms of vicarious experiences and case studies for how, or how not, to undertake software development.
Let them spend the billions, fine. The punchline is that we too can learn from what they do.
Frankly, after hearing and reading about the water infrastructures of many major cities, NYC included, I strongly suspect such a system as this would be more readily useful in verifying that tap water is actually safe from pollutants caused by run-of-the-mill industry and poor water treatment / storage / transportation facilities. Good chunks of the NYC aqueduct system are 100+ years old, with some sections of pipe coming in from the Adirondacks still made of wood, fer cryin' out lout.
Sure, pesticides intentionally dumped in a reservoir are definitely a Very Bad Thing (TM), but polychlorinated biphenyl or polycyclic hydrocarbon aromatics are also *not* Part Of This Nutritious Breakfast (TM). There are plenty of nasties we've put into our *own* water supply, either out of cluelessness or laziness or greed, and new and easy ways of detecting these can only be good.
On a serious note, I have tried changing my diet to see if that has an effect on my legs. I have gone completely off caffeine for a couple of weeks. No change. I drink very little alcohol so there isn't much for me to cut out. I have never used tobacco. There are other dietary changes that RLS suffers can make like cutting back on high-carb foods at night. I have also tried supplements like magnesium. None of the dietary changes have helped me but that doesn't mean other people should not try them.
Interesting. I occasionally have RLS symptoms, but over the years I've narrowed it down to a few clear causes:
Sugar before bed (sometimes even just high carbs).
Gas. Sounds silly, but getting all gassy also makes my legs jumpy.
Any downshift in exercise. For instance, getting less exercise than usual when the weather turns crappy in the winter.
I don't suppose items 2 or 3 might have any bearing on your own situation?
That said, YMWV (your mileage *will* vary), as everyone's system is different -- something modern Western medicine (or at least the medical mass media) is particularly bad at publicly recognizing.
I haven't watched TV in ages, not since living in an apartment building that had basic cable service for everyone as an amenity. And even then I seldom found the time to watch aside from when the San Jose Sharks were playing (hockey for those scratching their heads). Now, the "TV" as in "the display device" is hooked up to the Wii and the DVD player, but "TV" as in "programming some big media company beams to my tuner" is unknown in this house. Why bother? I have plenty else to keep me entertained.
The idea that Merck is in any way 'surprised' by this turn of events, when their drug is essentially the same substance at work in the body more than a century ago, is well beyond the outer limits of credibility. Never mind the sharp increase in cases of osteonecrosis of the jaw just in the last few years, since the introduction of bisphosphonate drugs -- by Merck.
Corporations generally incentivize behaviours that are sociopathic on an interpersonal scale but deemed favorable by investors -- in a nutshell, maximize profits by any means available. This ethical vacuum is one of the real flaws of capitalism in its current implementation. Merck's actions are therefore not in the least surprising, and stand as a pointed reminder that corporate excesses must be held in check by some other external mechanism that is not subject to conflicts of interest. This is generally identified as government regulation, though we have seen time and again how government interests can be made to align with those of the corporations and in opposition to those of the public that the government is ostensibly supposed to serve and protect.
Food for thought. Ain't nothing new under the sun, as it's all recurring patterns of human behaviour. The devil is in the details.
Sure, it's great they've figured out how to do this artificially, but we've known for *years* that cancer smells differently, and we've even had dogs trained to do it:
i.e. you want to have your cake and eat it too. i.e. dual licenses schemes like MySQL's. i.e. you want to sell your GPL code.
Just to be clear, I had boiled things down to software either as a tool, or as a product, but here you bring up more complicated licensing schemes where folks try to keep the software as a product and dabble in open-sourceness for other reasons. I generally agree that doing so seems kind of weaselly, at least from my (admittedly limited) perspective.
The alternate model of giving the software away for free and charging for service instead adds an interesting wrinkle to the equation.
A sucky one though. I doubt many programmers on this board want to be in a position that the work they produce for a company is essentially worthless and the way to move up is through the tech support department. I also doubt customers would benefit either since giving away the software and charging for support creates an incentive to make shoddy software that requires a lot of hand-holding.
I see your point, but I think it might be a bit of hyperbole to describe such coding efforts as "essentially worthless" -- somehow Red Hat seems to do well in this space.:) Plus, I think you might be unintentionally discounting all the systems integration work that often goes into corporate deployments -- this very often includes gobs of code to wire things together, and that code itself isn't free (as in beer), even if the initially provided FOSS software is. I also doubt IBM would get behind Linux quite as much as they have if there weren't a good business case to be had.
There would be more competition in densely populated areas, and no service whatsoever in sparsely populated areas.
It costs a lot of money to run cables under the streets, and takes a long time to recoup those costs.
You would at best have limited competition, a couple of large suppliers offering you service in a densely populated area.
Small suppliers simply couldn't afford to lay the cable, and you would never have very many suppliers because that would dilute the market and even big players wouldn't be able to recover the cable costs.
Funny, that sounds a lot like the present situation.:) Only the big players haven't had to worry about recovering the cable costs in many cases because they got government help to pay for it.
[The] essential matter is whether the software in question is a tool you use or the product you sell itself. If it's just a tool, the GPL makes sense, so you get contributions back. If it's your product itself, neither GPL nor Apache makes sense.
And there you hit the nail on the head. If the software is the means to some other end, then yes, the GPL or some derivative would seem to make the most sense, in order to ensure that any improvements someone else might come up with are propagated back into the main branch. I would wager that this holds true for most FOSS projects -- and the SourceForge figures of 70% of projects using the GPL would seem to back this up.
But if, as you note, the software is the end in itself, if it is the product one is trying to sell, then proprietary is really the only way to go, simply from the perspective of locking others out.
And therein lies the crux of the conflict -- those keenest to use any piece of software are also keenest to see it spread and improve as quickly and efficiently as possible, while those trying to sell any piece of software are less interested in improvements than in maintaining exclusive control. These would appear to be orthogonal goals. The alternate model of giving the software away for free and charging for service instead adds an interesting wrinkle to the equation.
Indeed. I hope you don't mean that in a pejorative sense? When TFQ is asking about translation, it's perfectly appropriate for professionals in the field to chime in with
their insights and expertise.
There was an article recently in the Japan Times about a project at the University of Tokyo to build a very similar system, though it is apparently just for texts being translated into Japanese. For the curious: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20090422a1.html. I don't agree with some of the pronouncements in the article (understanding the nuances of the source text and accurately conveying those in a fluently written target text does indeed take some skill, whereas the article and even the project name Minna no Honyaku suggest that 'anyone can translate!'), but the project itself looks interesting. The project site is http://trans-aid.jp/ (Japanese only).
Perhaps the TFQ submitter could contact the Professor Kyo Kageura mentioned in the article to find out more about the Minna no Honyaku system? It's basically crowdsourcing for translation projects that don't merit the time, money, and quality of professional translation, which kinda sounds like what they're looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
This post and its associated rating (currently 50% Troll) is a prime example of how /.'s moderators have really gone downhill. The text of the post is both relevant and spot-on, rather more insightful than otherwise, and in no way is it seeking to get a rise out of the readership by misleading obstinacy. Sure, it's cynical as hell, but then again, the current situation in the US would seem to warrant precisely such an attitude.
It seems the mods need more education about what "Troll" really means -- for starters, "Troll" != "Disagree", and "Troll" != "Do not like".
Methinks this kind of modding behaviour is the /. equivalent of griefers. Meh.
Cheers,
Seriously though, it really sounds like a study of the TCO of MBAs is more in order -- how many outsourcing snafus, and how much of the current financial woes in the US, are due to MBAs with precisely the mentality noted by the GP:
Unfortunately, we find much of this same short-sighted idiotic MBA behaviour in the US government over the past several years:
"We support our troops," indeed. How bitter. I have good friends in the military, and these Blackwater goons are effectively stealing wages from them. Meh. Another example:
By any strict economic definition, there is another word for "profit" -- "inefficiency". Ethically speaking, one might even stretch things a bit and call it "theft". Making a living is one thing, but fleecing your customers simply because you can is a crime in all but name.
Cheers,
Also, if one type of swing doesn't suit you, look around! Lindy was what I started with, but with Lindy, if you only know the basic step, you get dizzy *really* fast. So I moved over to East Coast, where basic is a little less loopy and the non-basic steps a little less complex, and things are good. :) There's also West Coast, Balboa, and at least one or two other types that I forget the names to. So browse around, find something you like!
Cheers,
For one, if you're geeky enough to use the word in casual speech, you might well find people who freak out at such vocabulary to be tiresome, so using the term works as a kind of social self selection.
For two, read the wonderful short story, They're Made out of Meat . Choice quote:
Cheers,
There was a practical study conducted by the town government of the German municipality of Rheine. The article here in Der Spiegel mentions this. Despite turning off much of the town's night lighting, night crime incidence rates remained low.
It seems that the modern streetlight is little more than the grown-up's version of the night light. I say it's high time we all grow up and learn to live with the dark. It's really not that frightening.
Cheers,
In Japan, they've become so rare in most areas that they're practically mythical. Growing up 30 years ago in suburban northern Virginia, they were so numerous it was no big deal to fill a jar with them. I haven't been back during the summer since, maybe, 1997... I have no idea if they're still so numerous, but Japan's history makes me think they probably aren't. :-(
I see your point, and I likewise do not think we are on "the doorstep of fascism". That said, I would hazard that some of the legislation accreting in the annals of the Congress and the Federal Register are not improvements -- for the awkward fact remains that the Congress can create laws that are apparently unconstitutional, and they will remain on the books until such time as a lawsuit advances far enough to have such law stricken down as unconstitutional by the judiciary. The way the federal government has arrogated some very far-reaching powers to itself by bending the interstate commerce clause presents one such lasting example.
Cheers,
"Strait", "straight", "strict", and "stretch" all seem to come from the same semantic root of stretching something -- such that it becomes narrow, linear, and rigid.
</Language_Geek_Update>
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. :D
Cheers,
The proper phrase is "dire straits", "strait" as in "a narrow place" -- "a tight squeeze". :)
Cheers,
Interestingly, I read jmorris42's post with a different interpretation altogether. Simply read "progressive" to mean, not necessarily anyone presently described as "liberal" or "left-wing", but instead as anyone unhappy with the actual rules of government and wanting to change or work around them -- not any specific group, but rather all wannabe work-arounders on any side of the political spectrum. Using this meaning, jmorris42's post suddenly sounds much less paranoid and more insightful.
I could certainly be off the mark, but I don't think he's talking about any conspiracy at all, and instead describing the aggregate effects of many different actors, all likely with different motives, who happen to be using similar means to their various and disparate ends: to wit, ignoring or downplaying the original rules of the game, i.e. the constitutional underpinnings of the country, and backing / writing / lobbying for legislation that establishes new rules regardless of their constitutionality.
Cheers,
Mars.
Cheers,
It's on the to-do list. ;)
Cheers,
If only I had mod points today.
Cheers,
This is honestly not intended as flamebait. Simply swap some of the variables as I did above, and we see some of the same dynamics, and similar upset, as we saw with Vista.
It seems the Amarok folks haven't taken the time to learn from Microsoft's expensive lessons, which is a genuine shame. Love them or hate them, Microsoft *does* give us all a lot, in terms of vicarious experiences and case studies for how, or how not, to undertake software development.
Let them spend the billions, fine. The punchline is that we too can learn from what they do.
Cheers,
Frankly, after hearing and reading about the water infrastructures of many major cities, NYC included, I strongly suspect such a system as this would be more readily useful in verifying that tap water is actually safe from pollutants caused by run-of-the-mill industry and poor water treatment / storage / transportation facilities. Good chunks of the NYC aqueduct system are 100+ years old, with some sections of pipe coming in from the Adirondacks still made of wood, fer cryin' out lout.
Sure, pesticides intentionally dumped in a reservoir are definitely a Very Bad Thing (TM), but polychlorinated biphenyl or polycyclic hydrocarbon aromatics are also *not* Part Of This Nutritious Breakfast (TM). There are plenty of nasties we've put into our *own* water supply, either out of cluelessness or laziness or greed, and new and easy ways of detecting these can only be good.
Cheers,
Interesting. I occasionally have RLS symptoms, but over the years I've narrowed it down to a few clear causes:
I don't suppose items 2 or 3 might have any bearing on your own situation?
That said, YMWV (your mileage *will* vary), as everyone's system is different -- something modern Western medicine (or at least the medical mass media) is particularly bad at publicly recognizing.
Good luck,
I haven't watched TV in ages, not since living in an apartment building that had basic cable service for everyone as an amenity. And even then I seldom found the time to watch aside from when the San Jose Sharks were playing (hockey for those scratching their heads). Now, the "TV" as in "the display device" is hooked up to the Wii and the DVD player, but "TV" as in "programming some big media company beams to my tuner" is unknown in this house. Why bother? I have plenty else to keep me entertained.
Cheers,
We've known about the perils of phosphorous exposure, leading to phossy jaw, or basically the rotting-out of the jawbone, since well before the strikes of the late 1800's in England's match factories. More historical data here.
The idea that Merck is in any way 'surprised' by this turn of events, when their drug is essentially the same substance at work in the body more than a century ago, is well beyond the outer limits of credibility. Never mind the sharp increase in cases of osteonecrosis of the jaw just in the last few years, since the introduction of bisphosphonate drugs -- by Merck.
Corporations generally incentivize behaviours that are sociopathic on an interpersonal scale but deemed favorable by investors -- in a nutshell, maximize profits by any means available. This ethical vacuum is one of the real flaws of capitalism in its current implementation. Merck's actions are therefore not in the least surprising, and stand as a pointed reminder that corporate excesses must be held in check by some other external mechanism that is not subject to conflicts of interest. This is generally identified as government regulation, though we have seen time and again how government interests can be made to align with those of the corporations and in opposition to those of the public that the government is ostensibly supposed to serve and protect.
Food for thought. Ain't nothing new under the sun, as it's all recurring patterns of human behaviour. The devil is in the details.
Cheers,
Perhaps my humour's a little dry, I'll admit to that. But, once more for clarity:
Ba dum, tish!
Cheers,
God is dead! -- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead! -- God
Cheers,
Sure, it's great they've figured out how to do this artificially, but we've known for *years* that cancer smells differently, and we've even had dogs trained to do it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=dogs+sniff+cancer
Cheers,
Just to be clear, I had boiled things down to software either as a tool, or as a product, but here you bring up more complicated licensing schemes where folks try to keep the software as a product and dabble in open-sourceness for other reasons. I generally agree that doing so seems kind of weaselly, at least from my (admittedly limited) perspective.
I see your point, but I think it might be a bit of hyperbole to describe such coding efforts as "essentially worthless" -- somehow Red Hat seems to do well in this space. :) Plus, I think you might be unintentionally discounting all the systems integration work that often goes into corporate deployments -- this very often includes gobs of code to wire things together, and that code itself isn't free (as in beer), even if the initially provided FOSS software is. I also doubt IBM would get behind Linux quite as much as they have if there weren't a good business case to be had.
Cheers,
Funny, that sounds a lot like the present situation. :) Only the big players haven't had to worry about recovering the cable costs in many cases because they got government help to pay for it.
Cheers,
And there you hit the nail on the head. If the software is the means to some other end, then yes, the GPL or some derivative would seem to make the most sense, in order to ensure that any improvements someone else might come up with are propagated back into the main branch. I would wager that this holds true for most FOSS projects -- and the SourceForge figures of 70% of projects using the GPL would seem to back this up.
But if, as you note, the software is the end in itself, if it is the product one is trying to sell, then proprietary is really the only way to go, simply from the perspective of locking others out.
And therein lies the crux of the conflict -- those keenest to use any piece of software are also keenest to see it spread and improve as quickly and efficiently as possible, while those trying to sell any piece of software are less interested in improvements than in maintaining exclusive control. These would appear to be orthogonal goals. The alternate model of giving the software away for free and charging for service instead adds an interesting wrinkle to the equation.
Cheers,
Indeed. I hope you don't mean that in a pejorative sense? When TFQ is asking about translation, it's perfectly appropriate for professionals in the field to chime in with their insights and expertise.
There was an article recently in the Japan Times about a project at the University of Tokyo to build a very similar system, though it is apparently just for texts being translated into Japanese. For the curious: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20090422a1.html. I don't agree with some of the pronouncements in the article (understanding the nuances of the source text and accurately conveying those in a fluently written target text does indeed take some skill, whereas the article and even the project name Minna no Honyaku suggest that 'anyone can translate!'), but the project itself looks interesting. The project site is http://trans-aid.jp/ (Japanese only).
Perhaps the TFQ submitter could contact the Professor Kyo Kageura mentioned in the article to find out more about the Minna no Honyaku system? It's basically crowdsourcing for translation projects that don't merit the time, money, and quality of professional translation, which kinda sounds like what they're looking for.
Cheers,