The measure of a movie maker is not the quality of the final product, but the quality divided by the budget. Did the producer get the the money up on the screen? By this standard, Ed Wood was one of the best movie makers of all time.
Many modern producers couldn't have breakfast for less than $7,000. The man was a genius.
This is a highly controversial theory that is not supported by facts. It verges on junk science.
There is absolutely no doubt that most, if not all, of our known petroleum reserves come from organic sources. Petroleum geology is a mature science - these people know what they are talking about.
As an example, I don't know of any petroleum deposits not found in or very near sediments and sedimentary geology. There was one famous case of people drilling deep into granite looking for signs of petroleum. They claimed they found traces, but it was in such small quantities that
it could easily have been contamination from drilling.
Until a petroleum deposit is found that could not have originated from organic sources, this theory should be placed in the "highly speculative" category.
I agree. All the author has said is that things change. Not that profound .
My job today as software developer is very different than 25 years ago when I started. And thank god for it, since I am far more productive. I regret not a bit the loss of punch cards and assembler. Yet I am still in the profession of instructing computers how to do things.
Perhaps a better article would have been about what the programmer's job of the future will look like. And a really good article would drop that idiotic phrase "post-modernism".
First, it is not necessary for unit tests to be absolutely complete to be useful. Anything that finds a hitherto-undiscovered flaw is valuable - extremely valuable.
Second, that there are bugs in a unit test is not, in practise, that big of a deal. At worst it means is you haven't tested a unit as thoroughly as you think you have. Unfortunate, but not a disaster. Perhaps two people should write their own units tests for a single module, and then compare the bugs they found in the module. An interesting experiment I think.
My experience with unit testing is that it greatly speeds up the development process. Trying to get a half dozen classes all up and working simultaneously is an arduous task that can take god-knows-how-long. Trying to get one class up and working through unit tests is generally straightforward and predictable.
And the quality of the component goes up. Waaaaaay up. It is rare when I write a unit test and don't catch at least one bug, thus easily paying for itself.
It is not a case of unit testing versus reviewing. It should be a case of unit testing
and reviewing.
It would be correct to say that the engine is hydrogen powered, but not the truck.
One does not say that a typical truck is powered by mechanical energy, even though conversion to mechanical energy is an essential step in its inner workings. One says it's powered by gasoline, or chemical energy, because that's the form of the energy as it enters the truck. This is just common usage.
P.S. The electricity powering a refinery is not the principal source of energy contained in gasoline. The raw oil is. Thus it would be a real stretch to say a typical truck is powered by electricity.
Okay, we've written a quasi-OO version of C, what what a true OO version look like?
But I agree that each language refects its mindset at the time of invention. Fortran was: What would a portable, human-readable assembler look like? The result was arithmetic ifs, computered goto's, and (shudder) alternate returns, all assembler features that should have stayed with assembler.
You are undoubtedly correct. SCO never did have much of a chance. I suspect SCO wanted someone to pay them off or buy them out before it ever got this far. The last thing they probably wanted was to have their bluff called.
And you are also correct that the SCO case is not going to change any laws. I don't think anyone thought it would.
So far as changing the law, I would be astonished if much happened in "a year or two". In the last few decades, however, the tide has flowed mostly one way - that is, towards ever stronger IP rights. Groklaw and others like it might help to stem the tide. There are even hints that
some judges read Groklaw, going by their writings.
And no, Groklaw, is not just about SCO. Two-thirds, perhaps. I've read a lot of interesting non-SCO articles on Groklaw.
Second, the cases
(there's a number of SCO cases going on, not just one) could certainly be considered farces, in that SCO appears to be losing badly. They are not farces in that the ultimate stakes are very, very high.
What Groklaw does provide is a central forum for some important issues that have come of age.
I'm not a total fan, however. I think Groklaw is too much of a political monoculture, a bit too intolerant of opinions outside of a narrow range of "correct" thinking. Having said that, I still think it deserves much credit.
Pamela Jones, instigator of Groklaw, might one day be seen as one of the most influential if her (and many other peoples') efforts result in a reworking of the intellectual property laws for software in the U.S.
This despite the fact that she might not ever have written a line of code in her life.
As I understand it, this poll is about the most influential people today. Given that, I have no problems putting Torvalds over Stallman. Linux is at the very eye of the storm these days,
Gnu as a whole not so much.
And totally ignoring your pleas for avoiding a flame war, Richard's personal "style" is not a particularly influential one. Linus seems adept at orchestrating many factions into a semblance of cohesion, and is more influential as a result.
To be blunt, Linus doesn't lead with his ego.
1945
In the Atlantic Monthly, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development Vannevar Bush describes the Memex, a hypothetical device for linking microfiche documents.
It's just like Al Gore to try to take credit for the rightful president's inventions. Thank God Bush swept
Florida.
Well, so people argue. I'm not really trying to take one side or other. .
I'm am suggesting that these are complicated issues that bear some consideration. The environmental groups have held strong positions on these technologies for a long time. At least some might be reconsidering their positions based on recent developments. Or not. Thus my question.
Oh, and I meant environmentally friendly herbicides, not pesticides, in my last post.
The advantages of genetically modified foods are whatever you engineer into them. It varies with the product. Drought-tolerant crops, for example, are one of the GM foods being developed. One type of rice even has a vitamin supplement that can prevent blindness.
Round-up Ready crops reduce the amount of environmentally unfriendly pesticides you need to use. Round-Up breaks down on contact with the soil, so it's fairly benign.
And many GM crops are bug-resistant (they produce their own pesticide), so that one need apply less pesticide.
Here are three technologies which environmental
groups have generally been opposed to, but which have undergone major advancements in recent years:
Nuclear energy.
High-temperature garbage incineration.
Genetically modified foods.
All of these technologies have drawbacks, but they also have many advantages over the alternatives. Nuclear energy does not produce greenhouse gases, incineration destroys toxic chemicals and does not require land fill, and GM foods can greatly reduce the amounts of pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, or water needed to grow food.
What is the Green Parties' stance on these, and do you see them changing their stance in the near future?
If they did invent such a thing, so that no one legally owned part of the company while still investing in it, then we would effectively be right back to the same situation we have now.
That's fine with me, but what was the purpose of dispensing with limited liability in the first place?
At least with one's own property, you are there almost every day. You can see if access to your swimming pool is too easy for the neighbourhood toddlers, or if there is ice on your sidewalk.
But what really goes on in companies you invest in half way across the continent? It's impossible to know for sure.
We want people to own things. That's what makes them responsible. People don't care for rentals the way they care for their own things. If you punish ownership too much, America will become a nation of renters. People's sense of responsibility will actually decrease, not increase.
This is called the law of unintended consequencies.
Most crimes require criminal intent - for example, it's not stealing to take something you truly, if mistakenly, believe is yours. Presumably the crime you propose would not require criminal intent, since it would be impossible to prove.
Effectively this would make it criminal to be a careless stock holder. Now that really would drive the small investor out of the market!
Insurance is supposed to protect doctors from malpractise lawsuits. Now many have been forced out of business due to the high cost of insurance premiums.
And I am extremely pessimistic about the ability of the small investor to "keep an eye on things". I have invested for many years and follow my stocks closely, but I am often taken by surprize by events.
Badnorak, in his response to free trade, proposed that shareholders be responsible for the company's liabilities beyond their investment in the company. I take this to mean an end to limited liability.
What a horrendous idea. It's not enough that a shareholder lose their investment. They have to lose their house as well.
Although this might improve accountability, this would drive the small investor right out of the stock market.
Adding to the problem is the arbitrariness of law suit damages that are now being awarded. They often have no relation to the actual damage done. There is no way an investor can accurately assess the risk.
One thing that constrains law suits is that you can't get a billion dollars out of a million dollar company. Removing limited liability, so that the lawyers can sue the shareholders, would make the Oklahoma land rush look like a trickle.
Nothing troll-like about your post. It's strikes me as good common sense.
My impression of IBM is that they would prefer not to be in the operating system business. They would rather that there exist some external, highly portable, highly popular OS that they can base their systems on, and perhaps enhance when they have to. They don't seem to want to push AIX everywhere, and they certainly do not want to be at the mercy of MicroSoft (even if they helped create that monster).
And then along comes Linux.
That they get extra benefits by supporting Linux and the Open Source community, like great press, shows that IBM managers aren't as dumb as they look.
I've read articles saying how the Open Source movement started in the early 1990's, or some such blather. But numerical analysts have been putting software into the public domain for almost 5 decades. The ACM, for example, have been publishing code since 1960. And look at LAPACK, EisPack, SparSpak, and no and on and on. And the tradition continues to this day.
Okay, want a name? How about Jim Wilkinson one of the fathers of modern numerical computation. Maybe not unsung, example, but perhaps unknown to most/.'s.
Slashdot Mirror
Many modern producers couldn't have breakfast for less than $7,000. The man was a genius.
There is absolutely no doubt that most, if not all, of our known petroleum reserves come from organic sources. Petroleum geology is a mature science - these people know what they are talking about.
As an example, I don't know of any petroleum deposits not found in or very near sediments and sedimentary geology. There was one famous case of people drilling deep into granite looking for signs of petroleum. They claimed they found traces, but it was in such small quantities that it could easily have been contamination from drilling.
Until a petroleum deposit is found that could not have originated from organic sources, this theory should be placed in the "highly speculative" category.
My job today as software developer is very different than 25 years ago when I started. And thank god for it, since I am far more productive. I regret not a bit the loss of punch cards and assembler. Yet I am still in the profession of instructing computers how to do things.
Perhaps a better article would have been about what the programmer's job of the future will look like. And a really good article would drop that idiotic phrase "post-modernism".
First, it is not necessary for unit tests to be absolutely complete to be useful. Anything that finds a hitherto-undiscovered flaw is valuable - extremely valuable.
Second, that there are bugs in a unit test is not, in practise, that big of a deal. At worst it means is you haven't tested a unit as thoroughly as you think you have. Unfortunate, but not a disaster. Perhaps two people should write their own units tests for a single module, and then compare the bugs they found in the module. An interesting experiment I think.
My experience with unit testing is that it greatly speeds up the development process. Trying to get a half dozen classes all up and working simultaneously is an arduous task that can take god-knows-how-long. Trying to get one class up and working through unit tests is generally straightforward and predictable.
And the quality of the component goes up. Waaaaaay up. It is rare when I write a unit test and don't catch at least one bug, thus easily paying for itself.
It is not a case of unit testing versus reviewing. It should be a case of unit testing and reviewing.
One does not say that a typical truck is powered by mechanical energy, even though conversion to mechanical energy is an essential step in its inner workings. One says it's powered by gasoline, or chemical energy, because that's the form of the energy as it enters the truck. This is just common usage.
P.S. The electricity powering a refinery is not the principal source of energy contained in gasoline. The raw oil is. Thus it would be a real stretch to say a typical truck is powered by electricity.
Pedantic maybe, but it does keep things clear.
Presumably they could also have used batteries and an electric motor rather than hydrogen and an engine.
I only bring this up because I find it annoying when people refer to hydrogen as an energy source.
But I agree that each language refects its mindset at the time of invention. Fortran was: What would a portable, human-readable assembler look like? The result was arithmetic ifs, computered goto's, and (shudder) alternate returns, all assembler features that should have stayed with assembler.
And you are also correct that the SCO case is not going to change any laws. I don't think anyone thought it would.
So far as changing the law, I would be astonished if much happened in "a year or two". In the last few decades, however, the tide has flowed mostly one way - that is, towards ever stronger IP rights. Groklaw and others like it might help to stem the tide. There are even hints that some judges read Groklaw, going by their writings.
And no, Groklaw, is not just about SCO. Two-thirds, perhaps. I've read a lot of interesting non-SCO articles on Groklaw.
Second, the cases (there's a number of SCO cases going on, not just one) could certainly be considered farces, in that SCO appears to be losing badly. They are not farces in that the ultimate stakes are very, very high.
What Groklaw does provide is a central forum for some important issues that have come of age. I'm not a total fan, however. I think Groklaw is too much of a political monoculture, a bit too intolerant of opinions outside of a narrow range of "correct" thinking. Having said that, I still think it deserves much credit.
This despite the fact that she might not ever have written a line of code in her life.
And totally ignoring your pleas for avoiding a flame war, Richard's personal "style" is not a particularly influential one. Linus seems adept at orchestrating many factions into a semblance of cohesion, and is more influential as a result. To be blunt, Linus doesn't lead with his ego.
I'm am suggesting that these are complicated issues that bear some consideration. The environmental groups have held strong positions on these technologies for a long time. At least some might be reconsidering their positions based on recent developments. Or not. Thus my question.
Oh, and I meant environmentally friendly herbicides, not pesticides, in my last post.
Round-up Ready crops reduce the amount of environmentally unfriendly pesticides you need to use. Round-Up breaks down on contact with the soil, so it's fairly benign.
And many GM crops are bug-resistant (they produce their own pesticide), so that one need apply less pesticide.
- Nuclear energy.
- High-temperature garbage incineration.
- Genetically modified foods.
All of these technologies have drawbacks, but they also have many advantages over the alternatives. Nuclear energy does not produce greenhouse gases, incineration destroys toxic chemicals and does not require land fill, and GM foods can greatly reduce the amounts of pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, or water needed to grow food.What is the Green Parties' stance on these, and do you see them changing their stance in the near future?
Green acres is the place to be
Farm living is the life for me
Land spreading out so far and wide
Forget Manhatten, just give me that country side
No need to thank me.
That's fine with me, but what was the purpose of dispensing with limited liability in the first place?
But what really goes on in companies you invest in half way across the continent? It's impossible to know for sure.
We want people to own things. That's what makes them responsible. People don't care for rentals the way they care for their own things. If you punish ownership too much, America will become a nation of renters. People's sense of responsibility will actually decrease, not increase.
This is called the law of unintended consequencies.
Most crimes require criminal intent - for example, it's not stealing to take something you truly, if mistakenly, believe is yours. Presumably the crime you propose would not require criminal intent, since it would be impossible to prove.
Effectively this would make it criminal to be a careless stock holder. Now that really would drive the small investor out of the market!
Insurance is supposed to protect doctors from malpractise lawsuits. Now many have been forced out of business due to the high cost of insurance premiums.
And I am extremely pessimistic about the ability of the small investor to "keep an eye on things". I have invested for many years and follow my stocks closely, but I am often taken by surprize by events.
What a horrendous idea. It's not enough that a shareholder lose their investment. They have to lose their house as well.
Although this might improve accountability, this would drive the small investor right out of the stock market.
Adding to the problem is the arbitrariness of law suit damages that are now being awarded. They often have no relation to the actual damage done. There is no way an investor can accurately assess the risk.
One thing that constrains law suits is that you can't get a billion dollars out of a million dollar company. Removing limited liability, so that the lawyers can sue the shareholders, would make the Oklahoma land rush look like a trickle.
My impression of IBM is that they would prefer not to be in the operating system business. They would rather that there exist some external, highly portable, highly popular OS that they can base their systems on, and perhaps enhance when they have to. They don't seem to want to push AIX everywhere, and they certainly do not want to be at the mercy of MicroSoft (even if they helped create that monster).
And then along comes Linux.
That they get extra benefits by supporting Linux and the Open Source community, like great press, shows that IBM managers aren't as dumb as they look.
Pocket nuclear devices could be a tough sell. On the other hand, it might provide the genetic diversity we need to evolve as a species.
Okay, want a name? How about Jim Wilkinson one of the fathers of modern numerical computation. Maybe not unsung, example, but perhaps unknown to most /.'s.