I loved the rationale that a recipe is "just a list of instructions and therefore not copyrightable". Maybe we should apply the same logic to software which is "just a list of instructions" and somehow therefore copyrightable? It does not compute... Personally, I have in the past 27 years of programming not once directly profited from copyright. The only software to which I've retained copyright is software that I wrote under the GPL, and all of the other software has been work for hire. Of the work for hire, not a single line of that code was ever sold! All of the code that was distributed as done so freely, usually to capture and audience or promote another product or event. Would it make any difference to me if software were not copyrightable? Hell Yes! I would have just as much programming to do, but I could re-use software I have already written. As it stands now, the only software I can reuse on each job is the code I wrote under that I placed under GPL! And it is because of that code, that I always have work that I have to turn down due to lack of time. So for some of us, the Fashion model is reality in software, just we end up knocking our own work off over and over again for different clients with different tastes.
It still boggles my mind that anyone thought zone files are a good idea. The file format is so damn brittle, that a single byte can spell disaster. On top of that, the hierarchical naming structure presents an inherent systemic risk for all sub-domains as exhibited by this.se fiasco. Nevermind the injection attacks, Pakistan taking out Youtube, and the rest, you have organizations like Verisign which profit immensely off of keeping the system broken. And don't even bother mentioning DNSSEC, as it still doesn't resolve this fundamental issue. The next systemic fuckup will simply be a signed fuckup.
and they said I'd only go for $11.29! I mean, I'm not even worth half of what I thought I was. I feel insulted and emasculated. Damn web form just took my balls!
The moral of the story is the same as with any business. You don't need to "win" by beating all of your competitors, you need to "survive". In life, like all infinite games, survival is its own reward. And if you don't understand that, or tend to disagree, please do us all a favor and leave the gene pool.:)
Come on, the meters are a great health initiative! All those lazy fucks who complain about walking 1 block total will get some much needed exercise, and maybe shave off a few pounds by kicking a few potato chips off their sweat pants...
--- on a less sarcastic note ---
For the record they just put these things in my neighborhood, and replaced a bunch of old parking meters with bike racks! For those of us who don't drive this is a god send.
If you live 40 miles from work... MOVE... For those of us who don't live an absurd distance from work, 100 miles is more than we need. Some of us haven't driven 100 miles in 9 years, so obviously for us 100 miles / day is more than enough.
I can't wait until the website is complete and consists of a single JPEG with the CEO grabbing his nut sack to a caption of, "Come and see where you tax money is being wasted! I gots it right here bitches!"
While I know the/. community hates anything that will make their power hungry habits more expensive, but quite frankly this sort of bill is great news for us. The United States has done a horrible job at implementing sane growth policies. We've out sprawled, out consumed, while neglecting design lessons learned during times when energy was more expensive. During the middle ages, cities were dense because energy was expensive. Development took place along natural trade routes, such as water ways, because it was too expensive energy wise to move things over land. Society developed in conjunction with energy that could largely be sustained, and when it didn't and over farmed, deforested, and depleted their water supply society collapsed.
For the past 100 years or so, we've been living high on the hog from new sources of energy we learned to exploit, with very little view to the long term consequences. Since we have the ability to anticipate problems, it falls to those social institutions best suited to direct the course of our society's development to prevent its eventual collapse. By paying a higher price now, we can defer the collapse of our civilization by several centuries. For those of us with kids, ardent transhumanists, or just a little more altruistic than selfish, this is a desirable goal.
Does this mean that society will have to change? Yes, but society has been changing faster and faster as technology advances. So rather than burning ancient marine life, we'll charge our hyper-sexy full electric cars with waste heat from the sun. Booo hooo. Will suburban shopping malls disappear? One can only hope!
The society of our future looks much more like the society of the 18th century, only with clean water, medicine, computers, plenty of food, and increasingly high levels of affluence globally. Most of us will return to living in small towns and villages, and the mega-cities will grow upwards (like Edinburgh did) not outwards. Most of us will live in walking distance of everything we need, including parks, wildlife, and recreation areas.
Also with having to make everything energy efficient, changes in technology mean huge work for all of us engineers. Huge money making opportunites will arise when the Feds start taxing waste. Construction will boom, durable goods spending will flourish, and any geek with half a brain will figure out how to "green" some old clunky tech and make a buck.
So quit your bitching... our green future is bright and profitable. Maybe with the higher energy costs, our server farms won't require air-conditioning to operate, and could just be shoved in a closet. Higher commuting costs mean telecommuting becomes even more attractive. As someone who has telecommuted for the past 6 years, let me tell you that's a very good thing.
Ummm... there is no such things as a "calm day" in which the whole earth has still air. The problem is one of transmission and planning, not of not enough wind. We already sell energy over grids spanning multiple states, do you honestly think it isn't windy somewhere in your region all of the time?
What if he was a Mac OS X pundit, and asked this question of Mac OS X? "Does Apple innovate too much to be competitive in the desktop market?" What people really want is System 7, all this innovation and UNIX underpinning are just developers writing for developers. Why do we need an object oriented runtime library, and a constantly changing AP that supports concurrent processingI? Most Mac users were happy with one mouse button, why do they need their track pads to sense multiple points? Changes like this just confuse the user and make them learn new ways to do old tasks.
Clearly he has a point. It just isn't a very good one. The real problem with the linux desktop has been INSUFFICIENT innovation. And I don't mean replacing X. I mean designing software that makes computing ubiquitous, transparent, and accessible. Why I as a user should ever be concerned about files, drives, network connections, applications, processes, etc. you know all those metaphors programmers have invented for themselves, is beyond me.
What the linux desktop sucks at (and this is true for all WIMPy interfaces) is cross-task operations. When I'm working on a project that involves, text, drawings, tables, and some computations, using a system like Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X is an exercise in frustration. Each "task" as defined by the system's designers requires a different set of tools. By generating a report is only one task from my point of view as a user. As a result, I will end up using 4 or more tools, because no one tool has my work flow in mind.
There are interfaces that solve this problem, however, and they've been around since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some of us still use them today. Now there is an experimental implementation of one for linux here you can run them in your web browser here and you can package up you can roll your own tools with this here. But all of these are still from the user's point of view in their infancy.
HTML5 is incredibly awesome. I've been building some apps that run only in safari and the things you can do in so very little code make Flash and Silverlight look like anemic. What people don't realize is that HTML5 means tools to author HTML5 in HTML5.
I've done a simple Object Oriented Javascript programming interface that currently only runs in Safari4 (only one with sufficient HTML5 support), and it is amazing what you can get done in 500 lines of code. Using the framework at http://www.dloh.org/ I built a graphing app by adding 2 lines of Javascript. A simple movie player is 5 lines of javascript. It takes stupidly little code to make compelling apps using the right tools and HTML5.
Furthermore, more and more phones are supporting the WebKit framework. Qualcomm is recruiting a team to port webkit, so we'll soon see it on Brew phones. Iphone runs it. Android phones run it. And even if you run Opera, once again you're getting decent HTML5 support on your phone.
This is game changing technology because it runs on the devices that most of the 6 billion people on the planet actually use.
Seriously, learn both. The languages aren't that far apart in reality. VHDL is simply a little more verbose. Both can be learned to an extent that you can make sense of most of the designs on OpenCodes.org in a day. (Yes I said a day! At least that is how long it took me.) There's really no good reason to avoid the little bit of work, that will make your life easier in the long run. If you really want to learn to program FPGAs you need to learn to read other people's designs. Many of the things you won't just figure out playing around with FPGAs have been solved by other people who have kindly placed designs under open licenses. However, since you have no idea which design language it will be, it is better to become familiar with both the popular ones. Eventually, you'll inevitably choose one for your own projects, and the only way to adequately assess them is to use both for a while and figure out which one meets your needs and you can tolerate.
Seiously, we should show these pictures in every drivers ed class. Giving children lethal weapons and letting them loose upon the world has consequences. Building a society where people think it is reasonable for an 18 year old to be driving around at night after partying is also part of the problem. But most importantly, if you do something fatally stupid in public, there are consequences for both you and for the ones you leave behind. Maybe we as a society need to confront the grim reality much more often. I for one have already lost too many family members to auto-accidents, and expect to lose many more before my time's up. We shouldn't hide the consequences of our choices, we should be forced to acknowledge them and live with them. And that goes for everyone.
A Great Big Nelsonian HA HA! to all of you affected by this. I personally think all of you driving your death mobiles (you are 43x more likely to die in a car crash than to be hit by a car as a pedestrian) should be forced to pay even higher fines and a greater share of taxes.
We subsidize car travel far too much in this country. Our foreign policy is geared towards making it economical for you to drive, which means brown skinned people elsewhere in the world need to be bombed to get you your oil.
And all I have to say, it is about god damn time you start paying tolls. I hope they put tolls on every road, until it costs too much to drive to work. Then maybe you'll stop living beyond the means of the planet to support.
I'm sick of seeing our green earth turned into a parking lot, so you can ride around in your mobile penis substitutes. I for one say it is about god damn time. Hoorah for Tolls!
PS. I stopped driving 8 years ago, my wife gave up her car 3 years ago. We walk, take the bus, and started our own businesses we can do from home. Life is much better, and we have hours each day to play with our kid. So let's not pretend you can't live without a car.
Quite frankly Steve McConnell and Dijkstra were both proponents of a school of programming that was just as wrong in the 1970s as they are today. The only difference is today we have had an entire generation of programmers schooled in their wrong-headedness.
If you look at the work of Alan Kay, and the people at VPRI, they are striving to produce a complete computing system in 20k lines of code. Charles Moore & friends have complete chip design CAD and simulation systems running on real world hardware written in fewer lines (and have produced actual hardware using them). Dijkstra and McConnell are apologists for a status-quo which promotes ignorance rather than valuing understanding.
This only proves that the Linux Kernel is in need of a significant refactoring effort. The capacity for any single developer to understand or even read a significant portion of this code is NIL. As a result, the opportunity to reduce duplication of effort is quickly diminishing, and the ability of new users to contribute anything other than additional bloat is similarly diminishing.
And while the core of the kernel may be "small", and much of this code is dealing with special cases for specific hardware, because of the size of the code involved it is increasingly difficult to identify what is substantial and what is merely stylistic differences between two drivers.
Increasing LOC counts is a sure sign of under analysis and over reliance on the availability of cheap labor. You can pick any arbitrary number of lines of code (less than say 20k) and pick that as the number of lines the kernel should occupy. As an individual line may define a new abstraction, LOC represent a potential for a geometric increase in complexity.
So either these 6-10 million lines of code represent some truly staggering level of irreducible complexity (most unlikely), or are merely the result of not refactoring the code sufficiently (most likely).
This really is a milestone in gratuitous complexification that should be morned, not hailed.
Oh this is sooo easy to do:
http://gumstix.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=202
Ok done. Only problem, it is going to run closer to $500 for all the parts you need.
Considering a 4.3" touch screen runs $85 if you're not buying in quantity, and a 4GB micro SD runs about $15, that's $100 right there.
And the cheapest retail 15" touchscreen I've seen is $299, Megavision MV155U, and the power requirements for that thing make "portable" an impossibility.
I've been playing around with building a dual screen ebook reader and I've come to the conclusion that it will cost at least $800 to make a one off prototype without doing anything really special engineering wise.
To get down to the $200 range you need basically need to get your screen for free, or buy an iPhone:)
Because, frankly, the stated aims of environmentalists - improving the forests, saving the fuzzy animals, and so on, is actually served by the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, as plants grow better in richer CO2 atmospheres and that leads to a stronger biosphere all round. My BS detector pegged a 10 here. If you actually read the projections by the US Govt, you'll see that increased CO2 will increase the total amount of biomass, but will also kill off the old growth forests, and reduce much of the country to desert grasslands.
Crop production is also hurt by increased CO2 because while the plants in take more CO2 that doesn't translate to increased yields of fruits. Additionally, many of our plants are extremely temperature sensitive. If you ever try to grow a Sycamore or White Oak from seed, you'll be amazed at the conditions for germination.
The facts are increase CO2 = increase in weeds and grasslands & lower quantities of forest and fruits; you know those economically valuable plants.
MSN - loses about $1B net loss on $2.2B in ad revenue (operating expense are around $3 billion / year)
Yahoo - makes about $600M net profit on $7B in revenue (ads, sales, etc).
Net result a combined Yahoo + MSN would still be losing money unless Microsoft fires a significant portion of the Yahoo/MSN staff and cuts their MSN R&D spending. In either event, Yahoo as a company is better off NOT tying that particular anchor around its neck.
Looking at the investment arena, Microsoft's share price has been hovering in the $25-30 / share range for the past 5 years... MSN represents such a small portion of the overall revenue it hardly impacts this value.... A combined MSN+Yahoo, would be not terribly compelling performance wise, and wouldn't change this fact. Any Yahoo shareholder who's share price was below water at the Microsoft bid, would still be underwater and remain that way. Hint most YHOO shareholders are currently underwater in this market.
A rational investor would look at this offer and see 2 things:
1. YAHOO is profitable and still growing especially internationally, with 7B in revenue
2. Microsoft has no other company it could buy to increase it marketshare by 300%
The conclusion to make is simple, refuse any acquisition offer short of 10x revenue. Look at Google w/ Double click. 3.1B acquisition for a company making 300M in revenue. Yahoo's management would be remiss in their duties to take any offer less than $48/share, ($70B evaluation) Yang is right to shoot MS down over $31/33 per share. The magic number is $48/share, which would put it well over Yahoo's 5 year high.
ISPs keep records and criminals simply use spoofed MAC address and piggyback on someone else's connection. Ultimately, from the point of view of the FBI, this is really just a law so that they can threaten ISPs with failing to keep "adequate" records, and then coerce them into "volunteering" to do things of questionable legality on their behalf. For the politicians, these laws are designed for the sole purpose of getting lobbying dollars out of telcos and ISPs who aren't coughing up enough $$$ for the 2008 re-election campaigns. Ultimately, this law will go away when ISPs cough up a combined total of $50-250k in campaign funds to the sponsoring parties.
Why can't we just get to a point where we just pay per bit? And I mean for everything, cellphone, internet, television, etc. If I'm downloading / uploading a bit, I should pay for that bit what it costs to transfer it plus say 20% which can be the profit margin split between the ISPs and carriers involved in the transfer. Such a system would be efficient, provide margins far higher than in many manufacturing industries, and would encourage bandwidth providers to build out the fatest pipes they can to the home.
For example: Theoretical small local ISP Foo.net has a pair of OC-12 connections (622mbps each, 1.2gpbs combined) and pays $30k / month for wholesale bandwidth, the ISP has 5 employees at an average salary and benefits of $120k/year each ($50k / month employees), and an additional $20k / month in overhead. So if they had 1200 subscribers, each sustaining a 1mbps connection, their price per month would be $120,000/1200 = $100 / month.
Now my Verizon Business class DSL (2.4mbps down, 700kbps up real world), runs $90 / month. I know that I don't sustain a 900kbps connection 24/7. Verizon posted $1.68b profit on $23.3 revenue last year according to Bloomberg, which is a 7% profit margin. Obviously Verizon is no where near as efficient as Foo.net. But these numbers are not unrealistic.:)
The DMCA has an explicit exemption for circumventing cellphone locks for purpose of using the cellphone on another network. Hacking your iPhone is legal if you just want to put in an unlocked SIM. Now you may be violating the contract you have with Apple, but given the DMCA exemption a court may deem those clauses unconscientiable and therefore null and void. So ultimately does Apple have the legal right to take your money and then deprive you of use of your own property?
My best friend is a PACS admin for one of our county hospitals. As a county hospital employee he had to join the government union. Does he get overtime and flex time when he gets a pager call? You bet ya! Does he get paid "private sector" wages, yep (was a matter of having the job's classified as a higher grade). So I gues the solution to your problem might actually be a union.
In the first case, Britney Spears doesn't get paid, and perhaps stops producing music.
In the second, 50,000 kids learn physics, maybe grow up and write their own textbooks. Talk about a win win situation!
Slashdot Mirror
I loved the rationale that a recipe is "just a list of instructions and therefore not copyrightable". Maybe we should apply the same logic to software which is "just a list of instructions" and somehow therefore copyrightable? It does not compute... Personally, I have in the past 27 years of programming not once directly profited from copyright. The only software to which I've retained copyright is software that I wrote under the GPL, and all of the other software has been work for hire. Of the work for hire, not a single line of that code was ever sold! All of the code that was distributed as done so freely, usually to capture and audience or promote another product or event. Would it make any difference to me if software were not copyrightable? Hell Yes! I would have just as much programming to do, but I could re-use software I have already written. As it stands now, the only software I can reuse on each job is the code I wrote under that I placed under GPL! And it is because of that code, that I always have work that I have to turn down due to lack of time. So for some of us, the Fashion model is reality in software, just we end up knocking our own work off over and over again for different clients with different tastes.
It still boggles my mind that anyone thought zone files are a good idea. The file format is so damn brittle, that a single byte can spell disaster. On top of that, the hierarchical naming structure presents an inherent systemic risk for all sub-domains as exhibited by this .se fiasco. Nevermind the injection attacks, Pakistan taking out Youtube, and the rest, you have organizations like Verisign which profit immensely off of keeping the system broken. And don't even bother mentioning DNSSEC, as it still doesn't resolve this fundamental issue. The next systemic fuckup will simply be a signed fuckup.
and they said I'd only go for $11.29! I mean, I'm not even worth half of what I thought I was. I feel insulted and emasculated. Damn web form just took my balls!
The moral of the story is the same as with any business. You don't need to "win" by beating all of your competitors, you need to "survive". In life, like all infinite games, survival is its own reward. And if you don't understand that, or tend to disagree, please do us all a favor and leave the gene pool. :)
Come on, the meters are a great health initiative! All those lazy fucks who complain about walking 1 block total will get some much needed exercise, and maybe shave off a few pounds by kicking a few potato chips off their sweat pants... --- on a less sarcastic note --- For the record they just put these things in my neighborhood, and replaced a bunch of old parking meters with bike racks! For those of us who don't drive this is a god send.
If you live 40 miles from work... MOVE... For those of us who don't live an absurd distance from work, 100 miles is more than we need. Some of us haven't driven 100 miles in 9 years, so obviously for us 100 miles / day is more than enough.
I can't wait until the website is complete and consists of a single JPEG with the CEO grabbing his nut sack to a caption of, "Come and see where you tax money is being wasted! I gots it right here bitches!"
Some of us still write games in Forth... get over it.
While I know the /. community hates anything that will make their power hungry habits more expensive, but quite frankly this sort of bill is great news for us. The United States has done a horrible job at implementing sane growth policies. We've out sprawled, out consumed, while neglecting design lessons learned during times when energy was more expensive. During the middle ages, cities were dense because energy was expensive. Development took place along natural trade routes, such as water ways, because it was too expensive energy wise to move things over land. Society developed in conjunction with energy that could largely be sustained, and when it didn't and over farmed, deforested, and depleted their water supply society collapsed.
For the past 100 years or so, we've been living high on the hog from new sources of energy we learned to exploit, with very little view to the long term consequences. Since we have the ability to anticipate problems, it falls to those social institutions best suited to direct the course of our society's development to prevent its eventual collapse. By paying a higher price now, we can defer the collapse of our civilization by several centuries. For those of us with kids, ardent transhumanists, or just a little more altruistic than selfish, this is a desirable goal.
Does this mean that society will have to change? Yes, but society has been changing faster and faster as technology advances. So rather than burning ancient marine life, we'll charge our hyper-sexy full electric cars with waste heat from the sun. Booo hooo. Will suburban shopping malls disappear? One can only hope!
The society of our future looks much more like the society of the 18th century, only with clean water, medicine, computers, plenty of food, and increasingly high levels of affluence globally. Most of us will return to living in small towns and villages, and the mega-cities will grow upwards (like Edinburgh did) not outwards. Most of us will live in walking distance of everything we need, including parks, wildlife, and recreation areas.
Also with having to make everything energy efficient, changes in technology mean huge work for all of us engineers. Huge money making opportunites will arise when the Feds start taxing waste. Construction will boom, durable goods spending will flourish, and any geek with half a brain will figure out how to "green" some old clunky tech and make a buck.
So quit your bitching... our green future is bright and profitable. Maybe with the higher energy costs, our server farms won't require air-conditioning to operate, and could just be shoved in a closet. Higher commuting costs mean telecommuting becomes even more attractive. As someone who has telecommuted for the past 6 years, let me tell you that's a very good thing.
Ummm... there is no such things as a "calm day" in which the whole earth has still air. The problem is one of transmission and planning, not of not enough wind. We already sell energy over grids spanning multiple states, do you honestly think it isn't windy somewhere in your region all of the time?
What if he was a Mac OS X pundit, and asked this question of Mac OS X? "Does Apple innovate too much to be competitive in the desktop market?" What people really want is System 7, all this innovation and UNIX underpinning are just developers writing for developers. Why do we need an object oriented runtime library, and a constantly changing AP that supports concurrent processingI? Most Mac users were happy with one mouse button, why do they need their track pads to sense multiple points? Changes like this just confuse the user and make them learn new ways to do old tasks.
Clearly he has a point. It just isn't a very good one. The real problem with the linux desktop has been INSUFFICIENT innovation. And I don't mean replacing X. I mean designing software that makes computing ubiquitous, transparent, and accessible. Why I as a user should ever be concerned about files, drives, network connections, applications, processes, etc. you know all those metaphors programmers have invented for themselves, is beyond me.
What the linux desktop sucks at (and this is true for all WIMPy interfaces) is cross-task operations. When I'm working on a project that involves, text, drawings, tables, and some computations, using a system like Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X is an exercise in frustration. Each "task" as defined by the system's designers requires a different set of tools. By generating a report is only one task from my point of view as a user. As a result, I will end up using 4 or more tools, because no one tool has my work flow in mind.
There are interfaces that solve this problem, however, and they've been around since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some of us still use them today. Now there is an experimental implementation of one for linux here you can run them in your web browser here and you can package up you can roll your own tools with this here. But all of these are still from the user's point of view in their infancy.
HTML5 is incredibly awesome. I've been building some apps that run only in safari and the things you can do in so very little code make Flash and Silverlight look like anemic. What people don't realize is that HTML5 means tools to author HTML5 in HTML5. I've done a simple Object Oriented Javascript programming interface that currently only runs in Safari4 (only one with sufficient HTML5 support), and it is amazing what you can get done in 500 lines of code. Using the framework at http://www.dloh.org/ I built a graphing app by adding 2 lines of Javascript. A simple movie player is 5 lines of javascript. It takes stupidly little code to make compelling apps using the right tools and HTML5. Furthermore, more and more phones are supporting the WebKit framework. Qualcomm is recruiting a team to port webkit, so we'll soon see it on Brew phones. Iphone runs it. Android phones run it. And even if you run Opera, once again you're getting decent HTML5 support on your phone. This is game changing technology because it runs on the devices that most of the 6 billion people on the planet actually use.
Seriously, learn both. The languages aren't that far apart in reality. VHDL is simply a little more verbose. Both can be learned to an extent that you can make sense of most of the designs on OpenCodes.org in a day. (Yes I said a day! At least that is how long it took me.) There's really no good reason to avoid the little bit of work, that will make your life easier in the long run. If you really want to learn to program FPGAs you need to learn to read other people's designs. Many of the things you won't just figure out playing around with FPGAs have been solved by other people who have kindly placed designs under open licenses. However, since you have no idea which design language it will be, it is better to become familiar with both the popular ones. Eventually, you'll inevitably choose one for your own projects, and the only way to adequately assess them is to use both for a while and figure out which one meets your needs and you can tolerate.
Seiously, we should show these pictures in every drivers ed class. Giving children lethal weapons and letting them loose upon the world has consequences. Building a society where people think it is reasonable for an 18 year old to be driving around at night after partying is also part of the problem. But most importantly, if you do something fatally stupid in public, there are consequences for both you and for the ones you leave behind. Maybe we as a society need to confront the grim reality much more often. I for one have already lost too many family members to auto-accidents, and expect to lose many more before my time's up. We shouldn't hide the consequences of our choices, we should be forced to acknowledge them and live with them. And that goes for everyone.
A Great Big Nelsonian HA HA! to all of you affected by this. I personally think all of you driving your death mobiles (you are 43x more likely to die in a car crash than to be hit by a car as a pedestrian) should be forced to pay even higher fines and a greater share of taxes. We subsidize car travel far too much in this country. Our foreign policy is geared towards making it economical for you to drive, which means brown skinned people elsewhere in the world need to be bombed to get you your oil. And all I have to say, it is about god damn time you start paying tolls. I hope they put tolls on every road, until it costs too much to drive to work. Then maybe you'll stop living beyond the means of the planet to support. I'm sick of seeing our green earth turned into a parking lot, so you can ride around in your mobile penis substitutes. I for one say it is about god damn time. Hoorah for Tolls! PS. I stopped driving 8 years ago, my wife gave up her car 3 years ago. We walk, take the bus, and started our own businesses we can do from home. Life is much better, and we have hours each day to play with our kid. So let's not pretend you can't live without a car.
Quite frankly Steve McConnell and Dijkstra were both proponents of a school of programming that was just as wrong in the 1970s as they are today. The only difference is today we have had an entire generation of programmers schooled in their wrong-headedness.
If you look at the work of Alan Kay, and the people at VPRI, they are striving to produce a complete computing system in 20k lines of code. Charles Moore & friends have complete chip design CAD and simulation systems running on real world hardware written in fewer lines (and have produced actual hardware using them). Dijkstra and McConnell are apologists for a status-quo which promotes ignorance rather than valuing understanding.
This only proves that the Linux Kernel is in need of a significant refactoring effort. The capacity for any single developer to understand or even read a significant portion of this code is NIL. As a result, the opportunity to reduce duplication of effort is quickly diminishing, and the ability of new users to contribute anything other than additional bloat is similarly diminishing. And while the core of the kernel may be "small", and much of this code is dealing with special cases for specific hardware, because of the size of the code involved it is increasingly difficult to identify what is substantial and what is merely stylistic differences between two drivers. Increasing LOC counts is a sure sign of under analysis and over reliance on the availability of cheap labor. You can pick any arbitrary number of lines of code (less than say 20k) and pick that as the number of lines the kernel should occupy. As an individual line may define a new abstraction, LOC represent a potential for a geometric increase in complexity. So either these 6-10 million lines of code represent some truly staggering level of irreducible complexity (most unlikely), or are merely the result of not refactoring the code sufficiently (most likely). This really is a milestone in gratuitous complexification that should be morned, not hailed.
Oh this is sooo easy to do: http://gumstix.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=202 Ok done. Only problem, it is going to run closer to $500 for all the parts you need. Considering a 4.3" touch screen runs $85 if you're not buying in quantity, and a 4GB micro SD runs about $15, that's $100 right there. And the cheapest retail 15" touchscreen I've seen is $299, Megavision MV155U, and the power requirements for that thing make "portable" an impossibility. I've been playing around with building a dual screen ebook reader and I've come to the conclusion that it will cost at least $800 to make a one off prototype without doing anything really special engineering wise. To get down to the $200 range you need basically need to get your screen for free, or buy an iPhone :)
MSN - loses about $1B net loss on $2.2B in ad revenue (operating expense are around $3 billion / year) Yahoo - makes about $600M net profit on $7B in revenue (ads, sales, etc). Net result a combined Yahoo + MSN would still be losing money unless Microsoft fires a significant portion of the Yahoo/MSN staff and cuts their MSN R&D spending. In either event, Yahoo as a company is better off NOT tying that particular anchor around its neck. Looking at the investment arena, Microsoft's share price has been hovering in the $25-30 / share range for the past 5 years... MSN represents such a small portion of the overall revenue it hardly impacts this value.... A combined MSN+Yahoo, would be not terribly compelling performance wise, and wouldn't change this fact. Any Yahoo shareholder who's share price was below water at the Microsoft bid, would still be underwater and remain that way. Hint most YHOO shareholders are currently underwater in this market. A rational investor would look at this offer and see 2 things: 1. YAHOO is profitable and still growing especially internationally, with 7B in revenue 2. Microsoft has no other company it could buy to increase it marketshare by 300% The conclusion to make is simple, refuse any acquisition offer short of 10x revenue. Look at Google w/ Double click. 3.1B acquisition for a company making 300M in revenue. Yahoo's management would be remiss in their duties to take any offer less than $48/share, ($70B evaluation) Yang is right to shoot MS down over $31/33 per share. The magic number is $48/share, which would put it well over Yahoo's 5 year high.
ISPs keep records and criminals simply use spoofed MAC address and piggyback on someone else's connection. Ultimately, from the point of view of the FBI, this is really just a law so that they can threaten ISPs with failing to keep "adequate" records, and then coerce them into "volunteering" to do things of questionable legality on their behalf. For the politicians, these laws are designed for the sole purpose of getting lobbying dollars out of telcos and ISPs who aren't coughing up enough $$$ for the 2008 re-election campaigns. Ultimately, this law will go away when ISPs cough up a combined total of $50-250k in campaign funds to the sponsoring parties.
Why can't we just get to a point where we just pay per bit? And I mean for everything, cellphone, internet, television, etc. If I'm downloading / uploading a bit, I should pay for that bit what it costs to transfer it plus say 20% which can be the profit margin split between the ISPs and carriers involved in the transfer. Such a system would be efficient, provide margins far higher than in many manufacturing industries, and would encourage bandwidth providers to build out the fatest pipes they can to the home.
:)
For example: Theoretical small local ISP Foo.net has a pair of OC-12 connections (622mbps each, 1.2gpbs combined) and pays $30k / month for wholesale bandwidth, the ISP has 5 employees at an average salary and benefits of $120k/year each ($50k / month employees), and an additional $20k / month in overhead. So if they had 1200 subscribers, each sustaining a 1mbps connection, their price per month would be $120,000/1200 = $100 / month.
Now my Verizon Business class DSL (2.4mbps down, 700kbps up real world), runs $90 / month. I know that I don't sustain a 900kbps connection 24/7. Verizon posted $1.68b profit on $23.3 revenue last year according to Bloomberg, which is a 7% profit margin. Obviously Verizon is no where near as efficient as Foo.net. But these numbers are not unrealistic.
The DMCA has an explicit exemption for circumventing cellphone locks for purpose of using the cellphone on another network. Hacking your iPhone is legal if you just want to put in an unlocked SIM. Now you may be violating the contract you have with Apple, but given the DMCA exemption a court may deem those clauses unconscientiable and therefore null and void. So ultimately does Apple have the legal right to take your money and then deprive you of use of your own property?
My best friend is a PACS admin for one of our county hospitals. As a county hospital employee he had to join the government union. Does he get overtime and flex time when he gets a pager call? You bet ya! Does he get paid "private sector" wages, yep (was a matter of having the job's classified as a higher grade). So I gues the solution to your problem might actually be a union.