If writing good bug reports is too hard, we should find ways to make it easier, or find ways to use "bad" bug reports, rather than let everyone give up in isolated desperation.
Even if you do get everyone together, you're only 1/2 way there. I gave up filing bug reports on OSS projects because it didn't seem that anybody really gave a crap. Ok, I will admit that I've never filed a bug with Ubuntu, but with Mozilla and Mandrake it seemed like the only time a bug got looked at is if the developer was in a good mood. I understand that open source runs on volunteers, so I really can't complain if the dev doesn't want to fix something and would prefer to do the next cool feature, but then how does anyone expect people to use their software if it's not dependable? I've seen Mozilla bugs languish for years with lots of comments suggesting a fix, only to find out that the original contributor of the feature no longer worked on it and that the new guy (if he existed at all) didn't care if there was a problem. And look at how many people have said that Firefox memory management on a default install sucks, only to be given the cold shoulder. Is this any way to treat your testers? For the record, I had a great experience with MySQL. Filed a bug report and got an immediate response back. It took a while to get a fix, but that's to be expected. What mattered was that someone cared enough to verify that the bug report was accurate.
So, what I'm proposing is that everyone shut up about how "evil" DRM is and get right down the point: You have rights to the copies of the music you've purchased, let's try to support a DRM scheme that works.
The problem with this statement is that, in their zeal to protect their content, the recording industry is doing little or nothing to protect the copy that I've purchased or to help me use that copy. When I purchase a DVD, I fully expect to be able to play that piece of music for my own personal enjoyment without restriction until such time as I chose to stop listening to it. But if my DVD goes bad then it's my problem. Or if I want to play my DVD on a device that uses a different format, too bad for me. As soon as the music industry realizes this and works to solve this problem then maybe you'll hear a little less of the DRM is evil talk.
The reasoning for making them illegal was that the criminal element used them to evade law enforcement.
This assumes, of course, that the criminal element (or anyone else for that matter) will be able to use the cloaks successfully. Think about how hard it would be to rob a bank. If you're wearing the cloak then how does the teller know that you're there demanding money? Perhaps you just want to cloak the getaway car. How do you find it back when you're done with the job? Even if you remembered where you parked it, finding the door handle would be problematic. If you could turn the cloak on and off then maybe you'd be ok, but with this particular technology it doesn't look like that's possible.
It not only solves the cooling problem, but if you use electrolysis to split seawater then you can solve all kinds of problems: (1) virtually unlimited power, (2) plenty of hydrogen for next-generation vehicles and other fuel cell powered stuff, and (3) lots of oxygen for whatever purpose you want. If you liquefy the hydrogen, you can push it through lines running on the sea floor and because of the pressure of the surrounding water it will stay that way for most of the trip. Oh, and if you really want, you can collect the water from the combustion of the hydrogen for drinking and irrigation.
I'm old enough to have a Social Security card from the 1960's that has the words "NOT TO BE USED FOR IDENTIFICATION" printed boldly on the front of the card.
Dorm fees have *nothing* to do with tution. Student's don't subsidize other students' housing, they are piad by dorm fees. It's akin to rent.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I wasn't trying to argue that they were linked. I know because I just paid separate fees for my kid's college bill recently. The bill is broken out into four charges: (1) tuition, (2) room, (3) meals, and (4) technology access and student activity fee. Because internet access is broken out separately, we know what it's worth. And I'll tell you, for $112.50 for four months my kid can't expect the same kind of service that I pay $70/month for here at home.
and on top of that you are not allowed to procure your own alternative internet access, that Internet access should be as unencumbered as is reasonable.
Sure you have options. It's called "a different school". If internet access is that important then find another university with policies that you like. Let the market decide. But if my son had made his decision based on which school had the lowest latency for gaming then I would have questioned his priorities.
That said, you also gotta remember, these kids *are payig for* that dormroom Internet
Well, yes and no. If the university has a clear $50/month charge on the bill then I'd say yes. I'm not sure all of them do though. If students really want ISP level internet access then they'd better be willing to pay for it, but I'm not sure that just because you're paying several thousand per year for tuition means that you get top-rate internet service. I really don't see internet access any different than dorm, food, or phone service.
I'm with you on this one. I ran Mandrake / Mandriva for a long time, but finally gave up last year and switched to Ubuntu. One huge problem for Mandrake is that they've never been able to put out two good releases in a row. That wouldn't be so bad if you could just skip every other release, but at one point their end-of-life policies didn't cover the last stable release. At that point I just gave up and switched distros.
I'm not sure that the bias is as bad as you think. I've done searches on companies and found both good and bad. I try to filter out the far extremes and take what's left over. This strategy works ok for me, but isn't perfect. I recently did business with a company that screwed me in exactly the same way as they'd nailed someone else. The benefit that I had was that I was prepared in advance, so it didn't take me long to remedy the situation.
Apparently you don't live in Auburn, Washington, where the local city government recently installed cameras at several intersections to catch people running red lights. It's a really nice way to pad city coffers, but I'm surprised that its citizens put up with this nonsense.
- todd
What protest? It isn't a protest to point out political reality.
For what it's worth, I voted for GWB in both elections. I personally think that most of the New Orleans/Katrina coverage is sniveling. I recently sent email to my Congressional delegation telling them to pull their head out of their collective asses and stop hating people just because they're Arabs. Of course you probably just assumed that because I'd point out a current political controversy that I'd be anti-Bush. Sorry to tell you, but I've voted Republican at every level of government going back to Reagan, the last of the true conservative Presidents.
It's people like you who've screwed up our political system with your inane, single-minded approach to debate.
But no, the CBO's decision in this matter is motivated only by sound accounting principles without regard for political ramifications.
The CBO was once asked to calculate the economic impact of taxing all income over $200K/year at 100%. They came back with an estimate that tax revenue would increase by several billion dollars. This ignores the reality that without a financial incentive, most people would stop working once they got to this level and that tax revenue would actually drop. Given this information, would you then continue to argue that CBO policy constitutes "sound accounting principles"?
For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting that the CBO scoring method was chosen purely because it benefits Democrats. I suspect that it's more motivated by the fact that it's difficult for the bean counters to work projected benefits into their models, so it's politically expedient for them to ignore the possibilities. I also suspect that they don't want to be held accountable when things go wrong, which isn't necessarily a bad idea.
Why would you think I was trying to incite a flame war? Because I noted that there is a current political firestorm over Homeland Security and the UAE? The whole point of my post is that it's easy for good data to get lost in political debate. I think your post proves my point.
I've been waiting several minutes now and have yet to be connected. Could you look into this for me? Also, I might suggest that you update your music-on-hold. I can only listen to "Rhinestone Cowboy" just so many times.
The branches of government like the GAO, NASA, the President's Office of Management and Budget are all known for this. Not everything that goes on in washington has to do with politics.
You can't really be that naive, can you? Take the OMB for example. There's a big debate going on about whether OMB should use static scoring or dynamic scoring. It doesn't really matter which one you prefer, but I can tell you that in the current political climate it makes a *huge* difference. Democrats prefer static modeling because then they can argue against tax cuts. Republicans favor dynamic modeling to support a "trickle down" effect. But the idea that somehow OMB is neutral is ignoring reality. Even if they don't intend to favor one party or another, the fact is that there is no action that they can take that won't benefit one group or another.
Interesting that you should mention NASA. Their very existence depends on the support of the aerospace community and the regions of the country that benefit from NASA centers. They are very good at using their influence to get what they want. Even if you could claim that they don't favor one political party over another, they are still very skilled at using political influence to their advantage.
I feel very conflicted by this report. On the one hand, I'm happy to see a report that favors open source. On the other hand, in the wake of the Katrina political fallout, it's difficult to say whether this report helps or hurts. The last thing LAMP needs right now is to get caught up in Brown/Chertoff/GWB affair. The only thing worse would be to have the UAE issue a similar report.:-)
Actually, in Soviet Russia all housing is supplied by the government. Better keep what you have, though, since I understand that the housing provided is generally sub-standard. Better to drink vodka instead, as you soon won't care what your housing looks like.
This is an interesting way of determining someone's understanding or competence about a subject. This must mean that it's ok for me to "observe" that you've made relatively few posts with that low Slashdot ID of yours.
You get -5 gazillion karma points for the high slashdot ID comment. You might as well be looking at my shoe size to determine my level of understanding on how Slashdot works. You say that you drew your conclusion through "logical deduction" and yet you include completely irrelevant facts in your reasoning. Simply amazing.
I know that you're going to try to respond to what I just said, but before you do I want you to think long and hard about this question - "What Slashdot ID number separates those who are experts in the workings of Slashdot from those who are not?" And don't tell me that its 42 or 451585. I'll retract everything I just said as soon as you can give me a number that you can defend. Otherwise, don't waste my time by using such a ridiculous argument.
But to fixate on all that is missing the point.
Explain this one to me. You say that judging people based on their submissions is bad, and I say it's good. You "observe" my behavior and make a judgement, and then somehow it's not relative to the discussion? Your point this entire time is that I was wrong in judging Asmor, yet you try to dodge the issue when judging me.
I don't subscribe to a market model for community interaction.
All communities are by definition markets. They provide something of value (service, product, friendship) at an expense to the participant (money, time, talent). The only exception that I can think of to this rule is a forced community such as a prison or slave labor camp.
I'm not saying give up spaceflight. I'm saying give up the shuttle, and use Soyuz.
I'd rephrase it as "give up the shuttle, and use a capsule". I know that capsules aren't sexy, which makes them harder to sell. In the post-Apollo era, we needed something to capture the public imagination. Sadly, instead of selling the commercial benefits of space, we stayed with the "scientific exploration" theme and built the shuttle. But since Apollo was really just an extension of our military program (to beat the Russians), the Shuttle and ISS were actually new programs rather than a continuation along the same path. So we threw out the old hardware to build something that the public would buy off on. In the process, we've killed 14 souls in flying what is by its very nature a much higher risk design that really doesn't offer any additional capability than we had post-Gemini once we had Saturn heavy-lift.
Say what you want about GWB's current space program, but at least from a commercial perspective it makes sense to exploit resources found throughout the solar system. I think that you'll find a lot more political backing for capsules now since they're cheaper and more reliable and they just "get the job done".
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you do get everyone together, you're only 1/2 way there. I gave up filing bug reports on OSS projects because it didn't seem that anybody really gave a crap. Ok, I will admit that I've never filed a bug with Ubuntu, but with Mozilla and Mandrake it seemed like the only time a bug got looked at is if the developer was in a good mood. I understand that open source runs on volunteers, so I really can't complain if the dev doesn't want to fix something and would prefer to do the next cool feature, but then how does anyone expect people to use their software if it's not dependable? I've seen Mozilla bugs languish for years with lots of comments suggesting a fix, only to find out that the original contributor of the feature no longer worked on it and that the new guy (if he existed at all) didn't care if there was a problem. And look at how many people have said that Firefox memory management on a default install sucks, only to be given the cold shoulder. Is this any way to treat your testers? For the record, I had a great experience with MySQL. Filed a bug report and got an immediate response back. It took a while to get a fix, but that's to be expected. What mattered was that someone cared enough to verify that the bug report was accurate.
The problem with this statement is that, in their zeal to protect their content, the recording industry is doing little or nothing to protect the copy that I've purchased or to help me use that copy. When I purchase a DVD, I fully expect to be able to play that piece of music for my own personal enjoyment without restriction until such time as I chose to stop listening to it. But if my DVD goes bad then it's my problem. Or if I want to play my DVD on a device that uses a different format, too bad for me. As soon as the music industry realizes this and works to solve this problem then maybe you'll hear a little less of the DRM is evil talk.
This assumes, of course, that the criminal element (or anyone else for that matter) will be able to use the cloaks successfully. Think about how hard it would be to rob a bank. If you're wearing the cloak then how does the teller know that you're there demanding money? Perhaps you just want to cloak the getaway car. How do you find it back when you're done with the job? Even if you remembered where you parked it, finding the door handle would be problematic. If you could turn the cloak on and off then maybe you'd be ok, but with this particular technology it doesn't look like that's possible.
It not only solves the cooling problem, but if you use electrolysis to split seawater then you can solve all kinds of problems: (1) virtually unlimited power, (2) plenty of hydrogen for next-generation vehicles and other fuel cell powered stuff, and (3) lots of oxygen for whatever purpose you want. If you liquefy the hydrogen, you can push it through lines running on the sea floor and because of the pressure of the surrounding water it will stay that way for most of the trip. Oh, and if you really want, you can collect the water from the combustion of the hydrogen for drinking and irrigation.
I'm old enough to have a Social Security card from the 1960's that has the words "NOT TO BE USED FOR IDENTIFICATION" printed boldly on the front of the card.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I wasn't trying to argue that they were linked. I know because I just paid separate fees for my kid's college bill recently. The bill is broken out into four charges: (1) tuition, (2) room, (3) meals, and (4) technology access and student activity fee. Because internet access is broken out separately, we know what it's worth. And I'll tell you, for $112.50 for four months my kid can't expect the same kind of service that I pay $70/month for here at home.
and on top of that you are not allowed to procure your own alternative internet access, that Internet access should be as unencumbered as is reasonable.
Sure you have options. It's called "a different school". If internet access is that important then find another university with policies that you like. Let the market decide. But if my son had made his decision based on which school had the lowest latency for gaming then I would have questioned his priorities.
Well, yes and no. If the university has a clear $50/month charge on the bill then I'd say yes. I'm not sure all of them do though. If students really want ISP level internet access then they'd better be willing to pay for it, but I'm not sure that just because you're paying several thousand per year for tuition means that you get top-rate internet service. I really don't see internet access any different than dorm, food, or phone service.
I'm with you on this one. I ran Mandrake / Mandriva for a long time, but finally gave up last year and switched to Ubuntu. One huge problem for Mandrake is that they've never been able to put out two good releases in a row. That wouldn't be so bad if you could just skip every other release, but at one point their end-of-life policies didn't cover the last stable release. At that point I just gave up and switched distros.
I'm not sure that the bias is as bad as you think. I've done searches on companies and found both good and bad. I try to filter out the far extremes and take what's left over. This strategy works ok for me, but isn't perfect. I recently did business with a company that screwed me in exactly the same way as they'd nailed someone else. The benefit that I had was that I was prepared in advance, so it didn't take me long to remedy the situation.
Apparently you don't live in Auburn, Washington, where the local city government recently installed cameras at several intersections to catch people running red lights. It's a really nice way to pad city coffers, but I'm surprised that its citizens put up with this nonsense. - todd
What protest? It isn't a protest to point out political reality.
For what it's worth, I voted for GWB in both elections. I personally think that most of the New Orleans/Katrina coverage is sniveling. I recently sent email to my Congressional delegation telling them to pull their head out of their collective asses and stop hating people just because they're Arabs. Of course you probably just assumed that because I'd point out a current political controversy that I'd be anti-Bush. Sorry to tell you, but I've voted Republican at every level of government going back to Reagan, the last of the true conservative Presidents.
It's people like you who've screwed up our political system with your inane, single-minded approach to debate.
The CBO was once asked to calculate the economic impact of taxing all income over $200K/year at 100%. They came back with an estimate that tax revenue would increase by several billion dollars. This ignores the reality that without a financial incentive, most people would stop working once they got to this level and that tax revenue would actually drop. Given this information, would you then continue to argue that CBO policy constitutes "sound accounting principles"?
For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting that the CBO scoring method was chosen purely because it benefits Democrats. I suspect that it's more motivated by the fact that it's difficult for the bean counters to work projected benefits into their models, so it's politically expedient for them to ignore the possibilities. I also suspect that they don't want to be held accountable when things go wrong, which isn't necessarily a bad idea.
Wouldn't that be UEA?
Why would you think I was trying to incite a flame war? Because I noted that there is a current political firestorm over Homeland Security and the UAE? The whole point of my post is that it's easy for good data to get lost in political debate. I think your post proves my point.
I've been waiting several minutes now and have yet to be connected. Could you look into this for me? Also, I might suggest that you update your music-on-hold. I can only listen to "Rhinestone Cowboy" just so many times.
You can't really be that naive, can you? Take the OMB for example. There's a big debate going on about whether OMB should use static scoring or dynamic scoring. It doesn't really matter which one you prefer, but I can tell you that in the current political climate it makes a *huge* difference. Democrats prefer static modeling because then they can argue against tax cuts. Republicans favor dynamic modeling to support a "trickle down" effect. But the idea that somehow OMB is neutral is ignoring reality. Even if they don't intend to favor one party or another, the fact is that there is no action that they can take that won't benefit one group or another.
Interesting that you should mention NASA. Their very existence depends on the support of the aerospace community and the regions of the country that benefit from NASA centers. They are very good at using their influence to get what they want. Even if you could claim that they don't favor one political party over another, they are still very skilled at using political influence to their advantage.
I feel very conflicted by this report. On the one hand, I'm happy to see a report that favors open source. On the other hand, in the wake of the Katrina political fallout, it's difficult to say whether this report helps or hurts. The last thing LAMP needs right now is to get caught up in Brown/Chertoff/GWB affair. The only thing worse would be to have the UAE issue a similar report. :-)
I recommend that we take this off-line. Send me an email at spam@buiten.com and I'll reply to this thread.
Actually, in Soviet Russia all housing is supplied by the government. Better keep what you have, though, since I understand that the housing provided is generally sub-standard. Better to drink vodka instead, as you soon won't care what your housing looks like.
This is an interesting way of determining someone's understanding or competence about a subject. This must mean that it's ok for me to "observe" that you've made relatively few posts with that low Slashdot ID of yours.
You get -5 gazillion karma points for the high slashdot ID comment. You might as well be looking at my shoe size to determine my level of understanding on how Slashdot works. You say that you drew your conclusion through "logical deduction" and yet you include completely irrelevant facts in your reasoning. Simply amazing.
I know that you're going to try to respond to what I just said, but before you do I want you to think long and hard about this question - "What Slashdot ID number separates those who are experts in the workings of Slashdot from those who are not?" And don't tell me that its 42 or 451585. I'll retract everything I just said as soon as you can give me a number that you can defend. Otherwise, don't waste my time by using such a ridiculous argument.
But to fixate on all that is missing the point.
Explain this one to me. You say that judging people based on their submissions is bad, and I say it's good. You "observe" my behavior and make a judgement, and then somehow it's not relative to the discussion? Your point this entire time is that I was wrong in judging Asmor, yet you try to dodge the issue when judging me.
I don't subscribe to a market model for community interaction.
All communities are by definition markets. They provide something of value (service, product, friendship) at an expense to the participant (money, time, talent). The only exception that I can think of to this rule is a forced community such as a prison or slave labor camp.
Is this an assumption or judgement?
Absolutely.
Perhaps they're expecting a change in the orbit of the Earth as well. Can anyone say "conspiracy theory". :-)
I'd rephrase it as "give up the shuttle, and use a capsule". I know that capsules aren't sexy, which makes them harder to sell. In the post-Apollo era, we needed something to capture the public imagination. Sadly, instead of selling the commercial benefits of space, we stayed with the "scientific exploration" theme and built the shuttle. But since Apollo was really just an extension of our military program (to beat the Russians), the Shuttle and ISS were actually new programs rather than a continuation along the same path. So we threw out the old hardware to build something that the public would buy off on. In the process, we've killed 14 souls in flying what is by its very nature a much higher risk design that really doesn't offer any additional capability than we had post-Gemini once we had Saturn heavy-lift.
Say what you want about GWB's current space program, but at least from a commercial perspective it makes sense to exploit resources found throughout the solar system. I think that you'll find a lot more political backing for capsules now since they're cheaper and more reliable and they just "get the job done".
Nit pick - I said "one of the most powerful". :-)