I might argue over whether the design doc is meant to be an overview -- I think that depends on whether it's a high-level design or a detailed technical design (not to mention the size & scope of the system being designed to begin with). And in my organization, depending on the particular set of project documents used (which depends on project scope), the requirements might be a separate document from design.
But overall, your approach is at most mildly-different from my experience, so whatever... Glad to see somebody views development as more than just purely coding.:-)
Learn a couple languages very well, and be functionally-literate in a few other languages.
"Learn what is useful, and discard everything else" -- paraphrase of Bruce Lee, on developing one's individual style in martial arts. It applies to learning anything, really...
Oh, Thompson (if he has any sense of reality at all) probably understands that the bill will be shot-down in court.
But Thompson's job isn't to represent his own views; his job is to represent the views of his constituents. Assuming he actually *does* that, then that implies that he was elected by a whole lot of very ignorant people.
Well, *somebody* had to elect him, right?......
My guess is that he knows the bill will ultimately be struck-down. He's just ramming the bill through to please some special interest group in his constituency, e.g. some Southern Baptists -- some fucking nutjobs who can rot in hell in my book, regardless. Thompson wins points, some "liberal bedwetting pinko activist judge" shoots it down, it goes to appeals, appeals court shoots it down, the government gives up defending the bill (maybe), and ultimately, in 5 years, everybody's happy again -- except the same damn nutjobs who wanted to regulate their way into everybody else's lives in the first place.
It's either that, or Thompson might risk (to some degree) losing his seat in the next election. And we can't have a nice, pampered politician losing his cut of "government cheese", now can we? He doesn't want his cheese moved any more than anybody else does...
This is America. Blame the Nazi religious losers who think everybody else should live by *their* rules (actually, this goes for any strongly-religious country, whether it's the U.S., or Iran, or Pakistan, or some other. Mystical beliefs in the unproven convey stupidity on a massive scale.).
Your analysis of situation is based on an idealistic text book "free market" which does not exist in the real world. There are no free markets. There are trading agreements, treaties, immigration laws, manipulated currency valuations, etc. all of which are politicized, contrived and not influenced by magical "invisible hand of the market". These factors render your simplistic analysis and conclusions useless.
You've just pointed out exactly why there are no pure free markets: it is because governments stand in the way. You correctly note the politicization of various things that *could* be purely-economic: trade agreements, immigration laws, currency valuations, etc..
These are not the works nor the fault of the free market, nor the economists who espouse free market theory. These are the faults of various governments around the world.
Not that any government in a developed nation will be disbanded anytime soon, leaving an anarcho-capitalist society to remain. On that, you're quite right: libertarian ideals are clearly not aligned with modern reality.
And that's the whole point libertarians make: that the free-market systems they espouse *can* work -- if only governments would get out of the way and let them (it's the same argument the socialists of the 1960s made about big-government socialism, except in reverse). Whether that's *actually* true in practice is another question of considerable debate (and on which I debate myself and other libertarians)...
It looks great on paper. It's exporting jobs for reasons that make short-term economic sense, but it will have long-term costs to the whole economy.
It's just the other way around: there are considerable short-term costs (of retraining displaced workers), with considerable long-term economic gains (cheaper products and the evolution of technology due to the money saved by outsourcing/offshoring, which enables those products to be delivered ever more-cheaply).
Follow it to its natural completion: ALL easily exportable jobs being transferred out-of-country.
This isn't a dynamic thought. You're ignoring the changes that occur in supply/demand of labor over time.
Compare the wage dynamics of India vs. America over the last 5 years. There has been double-digit growth in wages for Indian techies (with single-digit inflation rates, i.e., they are seeing positive real wage growth), while in the U.S., wage growth has only kept pace with inflation (from around 1% in 2001, to some 3.5% currently, i.e., we are seeing no real wage growth nor decline). India's wages for IT people are now about 1/4 of what they are in the U.S., up from being 1/10 those of Americans' in the year 2000.
In short, there is a balancing of wages between the two nations: India is rising towards the level of America, while America stagnates. Eventually, America's wages will grow again, and India's will keep growing, but at a faster rate than America's.
My biggest concern is that India does not have *enough* IT people. Most of the people there are still dirt-poor, while the IT people get rich. There needs to be some training available for the other 80% of the nation's people, so they too can work in call centers, etc.. With over 1 billion people, India can soak up a lot of rather fantastic economic growth...
Given the long-term implication of widespread outsourcing, I'm fully within my right as a consumer to say, "No, I'm not buying your product if you outsource most of your workforce elsewhere." I'll buy local -- even if it costs a little more -- because that is of greater benefit to me. Somebody employed by a local company is more likely to buy *my* product, and keep *me* employed. This isn't socialism or xenophobia, it is understanding how the economy is interconnected in more ways than a single company's financial statements, or even the economy-wide corporate profitability, can show.
Why trade then? Take your argument to its logical conclusion.
Why trade with people from other states? They are just taking your job too. Why trade with people even from other cities -- those pesky assholes in L.A. might be taking jobs from the easy-going folk in San Francisco. In fact, why trade with even your next door neighbor? He too is out to take your job. Right?
Not really, because it is likely to be a *different* job, and not the exact same one you find yourself in. This becomes increasingly-true as an economy's workers become more specialized in the work they do, which will be the case as machines take over the routine work that used to be performed by armies of laborers (manufacturing automobiles comes readily to mind). And because of this, it allows your neighbor to do work you don't have time to do (or don't *want* to do, such as cleaning toilets at movie theaters, or flipping burgers). You trade your money for their time because it makes your life more efficient and more enjoyable.
You are making an argument against free trade at all levels -- neighborhood, city, state, national, international, and even interplanetary (if we ever find others on other planets to trade with), etc.. There is no sound argument against free trade whatseover -- it's one of the very few issues the vast majority of economists agree upon.
Is capitalism good for the poor (and everybody else, in the long run)? You bet it is! See my sig...:)
This Citizen watch is solar-powered and stores electricity in a capacitor rather than a battery. The capacitor rumoredly wears out after 5 years or so (hence, the warranty only lasts that long...).
It's a great watch, BTW, for anybody looking for a decent new watch.:-) (If you're ridiculously-loaded and/or exceptionally-generous, it'd make a fine father's day gift I'm sure.)
Yaaarr! Those greedy capitalists! We need more government regulation to reign in the horrors of those slave-driving, monopolistic scoundrel dirtba--...
Wait, you say competition between Intel and AMD is cutting the price of my Intel mobo and CPU by up to 60%?
I use dating sites. I do not want regulation of content on them. Stay the fuck out of my life. I will decide whether somebody is a fake, whether the site is putting up garbage, etc. (and it's not *that* difficult).
Go back to your home towns and find a school's bake sale to help run. Stop legislating your way into every goddamn nook and cranny of everybody's lives. While you're at it, how about repealing some other regulations, since you've already gone too far?
Seriously, each significant political party gets its chance to restrict so many freedoms. When was the last time either struck blows in favor of freedom?
The GP makes a fair point -- what's the point of 2nd Amendment rights, intended by the Founders to retake the government from its politicians when it runs amok, if the 2nd is never exercised by the nation's people to that end?
That is, what good is the right to bear arms (and thereby keep government in check) if there is no serious threat of use of those arms? The RKBA becomes an empty threat...
I would bet that if the govn't banned all guns -- not just NFA-restricted arms (automatics, suppressors, etc.), but rifles, shotguns, pistols, etc. -- and came around to collect them, by force if necesseary, that most people would comply with the ban rather than fight back.
Consider the examples where this is already true: airline security, many large cities (the limousine-liberal north shore suburbs of Chicago (Evanston, Wilmette, and Morton Grove have all banned the possession of handguns), and Chicago-proper particularly, but being from IL, I may be biased), the 1932 NFA and Reagan's (of all Presidents!) 1986 ban on the domestic manufacture of automatics...
Ultimately, most people bend over, for the "common good".
An executive branch that is pro second amendment and pro life.
Pro-life, yes, but pro-2nd Amendment? Is that why Bush publicly stated in 2004 that he would sign a bill renewing Bill Clinton's Assault Weapons Ban? (The AWB expired in Sept. 2004, and a bill to renew it never escaped Congress to the President's office. And contrary to leftist claims everywhere, our streets aren't flowing with rivers of blood...)
Alberto Gonzalez, Bush's uber-fascist right-hand jackoff man, wants to go even further...
Seriously, if an individual did what Sony has, that person would be doing either community service or time in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. And Sony?
Slap on the wrist, and no more.
I'm going to start a hacking corporation that runs a music industry as our legitimate, customer-facing front. We'll release rootkits on CDs of horrible music, and rip off as much privately-owned information from our unsuspecting users as we can. Of course, we won't get it directly -- we'll use elements of the non-corporate community to help us out; to help make us money by proxy...
OK, seriously, if the rule-of-law is to be consistent and thus mean anything in this country, Sony should be forced to send those responsible in the company to U.S. federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Why isn't this happening? Well, this was a civil case brought by the EFF. So what about the criminal case? The EFF says they're unaware of any such cases.
Start them out in a normal text editor -- vi/vim, emacs, Notepad, etc.. Then, after a while, have them use the IDE. That way, they get to see the progression that has occurred in the actual practice of using a programming tool. They will see firsthand how much nicer it is to be have the IDE do all kinds of grunt-work for you (building a GUI by typing in (x,y) pixel coords vs. click-n-drag the window and control sizes you want, etc.). They will also see the value in having a lightweight text editor around for looking over log files, etc..
As with learning anything, a broad set of experiences lets you see what is available and make an intelligent decision as to what your personal preference is. In this case, it will also provide a bit of historical background... (i.e., "in my day, when the brontasaurus was stepping on programmers who compiled using MSFT tools, all we had was the command-line and a text editor like this..." - much to the horror of students who didn't know a "command prompt" ever existed.)
Actually, T-Mo has not only GPRS (around 33.6kbps), but EDGE as well (around 110kbps, from a friend's experience).
I just bought a T-Mo smartphone that does GPRS, EDGE, 802.11b. Haven't received it yet, but I'm anxious to see what the $30/mo. unlimited data service (on EDGE and in their T-Mo hotspots) will be like.:) I've come away impressed with my experience on a friend's phone...
Silly Americans, trading your freedom for security! What kind of "free" society spies on its own citize--
Oh...
(At least even in Bush's America, we can still keep our private keys private. Of course, it takes little more than subpoena or warrant from a fascist rubber-stamp of a judge for the FBI to retrieve (read: steal) them, by violent physical force if necessary, or if the government feels like using it that day...)
The return on investments on the other hand is unpredictable, and may even be negative, and liquidity is a variable.
Of course. You can factor in inflation too to determine whether you're really making a real return on your investm-- err, "savings".
As Tango42 notes, what is generally thought of as "savings" is really just a low-risk, low-return investment. Perhaps it makes sense to classify them to the broader public as two different things, so that understanding the risk/reward ratio is simplified for the average person, but the fact is that you can lose your shirt in either "investments" or "savings" -- it just happens to be more likely in what you call "investments". And there, that is the whole point of diversification; of minimizing your risk profile... (you can even go so far as to invest so conservatively that you earn a worse rate of return than you would in some higher-yielding savings accounts)
Moreover, if you invest (using your distinction, such to mean that we are letting people borrow our money for business or public-sector development, i.e., we are buying equities or bonds) in a sufficiently-diversified manner for the long-term (e.g. for retirement) and over a long time horizon (like, when one is in their 20s), you are historically just about guaranteed to make a profit. You probably know as well as I do that the average real (inflation-adjusted) rate of return in the stock market, both considering a period of the last 200 years and the last 70 years, has been around 7%. (Some slicker elements of the financial world might tell you 10-11%, but they're ignoring the average 3.9% rate of inflation (my own calculation, not one I can cite) over the last 90 years.)
Savings and investments are, in terms of logical process, the same: Alice gives money to Bob to hold; Bob in turn gives some fraction (if "saved" as demand-deposits in a bank, or a 1/1 - fees, expenses, charges, etc. fraction if "invested" via a mutual fund or stock seller) of that money to Charlie to use for his organization's development. Charlie, in turn, intends to make repayments over time, and when he does, he does so with interest applied to the payment. The repayments and that interest returns back to Bob, who takes the interest and pays a portion of it (or again, a nearly 1/1 fraction of it, if an investment) back to Alice, as an incentive for her to save/invest with Bob.
Their only significant difference between savings and investment is in their risk/reward ratios, and the intents and advertising that represents them. That is, somebody who wants to "save" their money wants to *feel* confident that they can get their money back anytime they want and not have lost it to the whims of market forces. People who invest are more-willing to take that chance. This is fundamentally the distinction you're making, and what I am saying is that the distinction is, for practical, day-to-day purposes, possibly useful, but in terms of the logical path of money flow and the weightings (rates of return) applied at each link in the flow, it is a classification which does not exist.
"Savings" and "investment" are not a logical distinction, they are a *reasonable* distinction. We can argue over what is "reasonable" all day long (i.e., what should be classified into which bin), but at the end of the day, structurally-speaking, they are the same.
To your absolutist statement, that one must know what their software does before installing it, I responded:
*You* do, if you have not gone through and analyzed every last line of code in every file in your kernel and userland source, and all your applications too.
To which you have responded:
Don't forget that there is more people than only me who actually take a look at the code. When they are properly signed the risk is minimized drastically.
But now wait a minute. How do you know that the people reviewing the code are trustworthy? Have you ever met them? Moreover, do you realize how few people are actually reading the code? In my estimation, the OSS community behaves roughly like this: For any given OSS application, figure:
* Number of people writing code = 1 * Number of people reading the written code = 10 * Number of people submitting bug reports about the code = 100 * Number of people testing pre-release versions of the code, without submitting bug reports = 1,000 * Number of people just simply using the code, contributing only documentation back to the "community" (whatever a "community" actually is) = 10,000 * Number of people just simply using the code, without contributing additional code, bug fixes, documentation, or anything else back to the "community" (whatever a "community" actually is) = 100,000
Of course these aren't actual counts. The important thing here is the model; the x * 10^n behavior (starting at 0, naturally:P ). For each lesser level of involvement with a project, you have roughly 10 times as many people participating in it.
The important thing to realize is what that means for OSS developers: there are relatively very very few people who are going to care enough about your work to take the time to do anything more than be an end-user of it.
Personally, I only go through somebody else's OSS code when I get a few trivial build errors or if I'm looking for an example of how to implement some piece of functionality. I fixed a repeated mistake (a socket function was overloaded the same incorrect way in 4 places) in some network code in nmap once so it would work on my installation of Slackware, but never contributed the changes back...
Enjoy refreshing freebsd.org every half hour kid, and don't forget to have mommy bathe and dress you and tie your shoes before you go to school on Monday.
You're dodging your original point. Your original point, as I quoted it:
Besides, as I said before, there is no reason to configure the FreeBSD kernel.
To which I responded:
You need to configure the kernel to use IPSEC.
To which you have responded:
The problem isn't that a text editor is needed to configure IPsec, the problem is that it needs to be configured in the kernel to begin with. That is a much different issue.
Quite right. That a text editor needs to be used *is* irrelevant. But that was never my point on the sub-issue you raised (in my first quote) regarding *why* a kernel would need to be configured... [1]
You're right about needing a GUI to change the other config files -- if we are talking about GUI/TUI apps to configure more than just the kernel. Looking again at Linux, however, Linux basically has no such thing, except via some web interfaces and/or distro-specific tools. *looks at YAST2*
Then again, there's no reason that such app-config tools shouldn't exist -- is there? Not really, except that they add time-to-deliver and complexity to a project, which may or may not be warranted (depending on the project scope).
My suggestion for such config-file manipulation, if not via text editor, would be via an ncurses interface in a terminal, and/or a web-based configurator (e.g. Webmin). Of course, you run into problems of changing the config file for the things that go into such non-text-only config systems, but that's true of *any* means of configuration (e.g., configuring a text editor)...
[1] I made 2 points regarding the kernel: first, I made the explicit point that it's annoying to have no other means than a text editor to configure it (well, OK, you have command-line piping too, but this is even sillier). The second point I have made has been in responding to the people (not just you) who say "why are you rebuilding your kernel anyway?" -- my response to which has been "because it's necessary sometimes; for example..."; this second point is one tangential to the first.
Actually, there's another reason for kernel builds and reconfigurations: OS upgrades, e.g. from 6.0-RELEASE to 6.1-RELEASE...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I see... That makes more sense now.
:-)
I might argue over whether the design doc is meant to be an overview -- I think that depends on whether it's a high-level design or a detailed technical design (not to mention the size & scope of the system being designed to begin with). And in my organization, depending on the particular set of project documents used (which depends on project scope), the requirements might be a separate document from design.
But overall, your approach is at most mildly-different from my experience, so whatever... Glad to see somebody views development as more than just purely coding.
Just don't fly over Compton, else somebody's gonna bust a cap on the drone's ass!
Take what the parent and gp said, and mix them.
Learn a couple languages very well, and be functionally-literate in a few other languages.
"Learn what is useful, and discard everything else" -- paraphrase of Bruce Lee, on developing one's individual style in martial arts. It applies to learning anything, really...
You start with design? What about requirements gathering (and then having a 1:1 mapping between requirements and test cases)?
Oh, Thompson (if he has any sense of reality at all) probably understands that the bill will be shot-down in court.
But Thompson's job isn't to represent his own views; his job is to represent the views of his constituents. Assuming he actually *does* that, then that implies that he was elected by a whole lot of very ignorant people.
Well, *somebody* had to elect him, right?......
My guess is that he knows the bill will ultimately be struck-down. He's just ramming the bill through to please some special interest group in his constituency, e.g. some Southern Baptists -- some fucking nutjobs who can rot in hell in my book, regardless. Thompson wins points, some "liberal bedwetting pinko activist judge" shoots it down, it goes to appeals, appeals court shoots it down, the government gives up defending the bill (maybe), and ultimately, in 5 years, everybody's happy again -- except the same damn nutjobs who wanted to regulate their way into everybody else's lives in the first place.
It's either that, or Thompson might risk (to some degree) losing his seat in the next election. And we can't have a nice, pampered politician losing his cut of "government cheese", now can we? He doesn't want his cheese moved any more than anybody else does...
This is America. Blame the Nazi religious losers who think everybody else should live by *their* rules (actually, this goes for any strongly-religious country, whether it's the U.S., or Iran, or Pakistan, or some other. Mystical beliefs in the unproven convey stupidity on a massive scale.).
Very well said. Thanks for saving me from making a long post of my own. :)
You've just pointed out exactly why there are no pure free markets: it is because governments stand in the way. You correctly note the politicization of various things that *could* be purely-economic: trade agreements, immigration laws, currency valuations, etc..
These are not the works nor the fault of the free market, nor the economists who espouse free market theory. These are the faults of various governments around the world.
Not that any government in a developed nation will be disbanded anytime soon, leaving an anarcho-capitalist society to remain. On that, you're quite right: libertarian ideals are clearly not aligned with modern reality.
And that's the whole point libertarians make: that the free-market systems they espouse *can* work -- if only governments would get out of the way and let them (it's the same argument the socialists of the 1960s made about big-government socialism, except in reverse). Whether that's *actually* true in practice is another question of considerable debate (and on which I debate myself and other libertarians)...
It's just the other way around: there are considerable short-term costs (of retraining displaced workers), with considerable long-term economic gains (cheaper products and the evolution of technology due to the money saved by outsourcing/offshoring, which enables those products to be delivered ever more-cheaply).
This isn't a dynamic thought. You're ignoring the changes that occur in supply/demand of labor over time.
Compare the wage dynamics of India vs. America over the last 5 years. There has been double-digit growth in wages for Indian techies (with single-digit inflation rates, i.e., they are seeing positive real wage growth), while in the U.S., wage growth has only kept pace with inflation (from around 1% in 2001, to some 3.5% currently, i.e., we are seeing no real wage growth nor decline). India's wages for IT people are now about 1/4 of what they are in the U.S., up from being 1/10 those of Americans' in the year 2000.
In short, there is a balancing of wages between the two nations: India is rising towards the level of America, while America stagnates. Eventually, America's wages will grow again, and India's will keep growing, but at a faster rate than America's.
My biggest concern is that India does not have *enough* IT people. Most of the people there are still dirt-poor, while the IT people get rich. There needs to be some training available for the other 80% of the nation's people, so they too can work in call centers, etc.. With over 1 billion people, India can soak up a lot of rather fantastic economic growth...
Why trade then? Take your argument to its logical conclusion.
Why trade with people from other states? They are just taking your job too. Why trade with people even from other cities -- those pesky assholes in L.A. might be taking jobs from the easy-going folk in San Francisco. In fact, why trade with even your next door neighbor? He too is out to take your job. Right?
Not really, because it is likely to be a *different* job, and not the exact same one you find yourself in. This becomes increasingly-true as an economy's workers become more specialized in the work they do, which will be the case as machines take over the routine work that used to be performed by armies of laborers (manufacturing automobiles comes readily to mind). And because of this, it allows your neighbor to do work you don't have time to do (or don't *want* to do, such as cleaning toilets at movie theaters, or flipping burgers). You trade your money for their time because it makes your life more efficient and more enjoyable.
You are making an argument against free trade at all levels -- neighborhood, city, state, national, international, and even interplanetary (if we ever find others on other planets to trade with), etc.. There is no sound argument against free trade whatseover -- it's one of the very few issues the vast majority of economists agree upon.
Is capitalism good for the poor (and everybody else, in the long run)? You bet it is! See my sig...
This Citizen watch is solar-powered and stores electricity in a capacitor rather than a battery. The capacitor rumoredly wears out after 5 years or so (hence, the warranty only lasts that long...).
:-) (If you're ridiculously-loaded and/or exceptionally-generous, it'd make a fine father's day gift I'm sure.)
It's a great watch, BTW, for anybody looking for a decent new watch.
Yaaarr! Those greedy capitalists! We need more government regulation to reign in the horrors of those slave-driving, monopolistic scoundrel dirtba--...
Wait, you say competition between Intel and AMD is cutting the price of my Intel mobo and CPU by up to 60%?
Wohoo! Free markets, rah rah rah!
I use dating sites. I do not want regulation of content on them. Stay the fuck out of my life. I will decide whether somebody is a fake, whether the site is putting up garbage, etc. (and it's not *that* difficult).
Go back to your home towns and find a school's bake sale to help run. Stop legislating your way into every goddamn nook and cranny of everybody's lives. While you're at it, how about repealing some other regulations, since you've already gone too far?
Seriously, each significant political party gets its chance to restrict so many freedoms. When was the last time either struck blows in favor of freedom?
The GP makes a fair point -- what's the point of 2nd Amendment rights, intended by the Founders to retake the government from its politicians when it runs amok, if the 2nd is never exercised by the nation's people to that end?
That is, what good is the right to bear arms (and thereby keep government in check) if there is no serious threat of use of those arms? The RKBA becomes an empty threat...
I would bet that if the govn't banned all guns -- not just NFA-restricted arms (automatics, suppressors, etc.), but rifles, shotguns, pistols, etc. -- and came around to collect them, by force if necesseary, that most people would comply with the ban rather than fight back.
Consider the examples where this is already true: airline security, many large cities (the limousine-liberal north shore suburbs of Chicago (Evanston, Wilmette, and Morton Grove have all banned the possession of handguns), and Chicago-proper particularly, but being from IL, I may be biased), the 1932 NFA and Reagan's (of all Presidents!) 1986 ban on the domestic manufacture of automatics...
Ultimately, most people bend over, for the "common good".
Pro-life, yes, but pro-2nd Amendment? Is that why Bush publicly stated in 2004 that he would sign a bill renewing Bill Clinton's Assault Weapons Ban? (The AWB expired in Sept. 2004, and a bill to renew it never escaped Congress to the President's office. And contrary to leftist claims everywhere, our streets aren't flowing with rivers of blood...)
Alberto Gonzalez, Bush's uber-fascist right-hand jackoff man, wants to go even further...
Seriously, if an individual did what Sony has, that person would be doing either community service or time in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. And Sony?
Slap on the wrist, and no more.
I'm going to start a hacking corporation that runs a music industry as our legitimate, customer-facing front. We'll release rootkits on CDs of horrible music, and rip off as much privately-owned information from our unsuspecting users as we can. Of course, we won't get it directly -- we'll use elements of the non-corporate community to help us out; to help make us money by proxy...
OK, seriously, if the rule-of-law is to be consistent and thus mean anything in this country, Sony should be forced to send those responsible in the company to U.S. federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Why isn't this happening? Well, this was a civil case brought by the EFF. So what about the criminal case? The EFF says they're unaware of any such cases.
Why not have them do *both*?
Start them out in a normal text editor -- vi/vim, emacs, Notepad, etc.. Then, after a while, have them use the IDE. That way, they get to see the progression that has occurred in the actual practice of using a programming tool. They will see firsthand how much nicer it is to be have the IDE do all kinds of grunt-work for you (building a GUI by typing in (x,y) pixel coords vs. click-n-drag the window and control sizes you want, etc.). They will also see the value in having a lightweight text editor around for looking over log files, etc..
As with learning anything, a broad set of experiences lets you see what is available and make an intelligent decision as to what your personal preference is. In this case, it will also provide a bit of historical background... (i.e., "in my day, when the brontasaurus was stepping on programmers who compiled using MSFT tools, all we had was the command-line and a text editor like this..." - much to the horror of students who didn't know a "command prompt" ever existed.)
Actually, T-Mo has not only GPRS (around 33.6kbps), but EDGE as well (around 110kbps, from a friend's experience).
:) I've come away impressed with my experience on a friend's phone...
I just bought a T-Mo smartphone that does GPRS, EDGE, 802.11b. Haven't received it yet, but I'm anxious to see what the $30/mo. unlimited data service (on EDGE and in their T-Mo hotspots) will be like.
Silly Americans, trading your freedom for security! What kind of "free" society spies on its own citize--
Oh...
(At least even in Bush's America, we can still keep our private keys private. Of course, it takes little more than subpoena or warrant from a fascist rubber-stamp of a judge for the FBI to retrieve (read: steal) them, by violent physical force if necessary, or if the government feels like using it that day...)
Government is a gigantic criminal enterprise, much like the Mafia.
(at least!)
Mod me down -1, Obvious...
Of course. You can factor in inflation too to determine whether you're really making a real return on your investm-- err, "savings".
As Tango42 notes, what is generally thought of as "savings" is really just a low-risk, low-return investment. Perhaps it makes sense to classify them to the broader public as two different things, so that understanding the risk/reward ratio is simplified for the average person, but the fact is that you can lose your shirt in either "investments" or "savings" -- it just happens to be more likely in what you call "investments". And there, that is the whole point of diversification; of minimizing your risk profile... (you can even go so far as to invest so conservatively that you earn a worse rate of return than you would in some higher-yielding savings accounts)
Moreover, if you invest (using your distinction, such to mean that we are letting people borrow our money for business or public-sector development, i.e., we are buying equities or bonds) in a sufficiently-diversified manner for the long-term (e.g. for retirement) and over a long time horizon (like, when one is in their 20s), you are historically just about guaranteed to make a profit. You probably know as well as I do that the average real (inflation-adjusted) rate of return in the stock market, both considering a period of the last 200 years and the last 70 years, has been around 7%. (Some slicker elements of the financial world might tell you 10-11%, but they're ignoring the average 3.9% rate of inflation (my own calculation, not one I can cite) over the last 90 years.)
Savings and investments are, in terms of logical process, the same: Alice gives money to Bob to hold; Bob in turn gives some fraction (if "saved" as demand-deposits in a bank, or a 1/1 - fees, expenses, charges, etc. fraction if "invested" via a mutual fund or stock seller) of that money to Charlie to use for his organization's development. Charlie, in turn, intends to make repayments over time, and when he does, he does so with interest applied to the payment. The repayments and that interest returns back to Bob, who takes the interest and pays a portion of it (or again, a nearly 1/1 fraction of it, if an investment) back to Alice, as an incentive for her to save/invest with Bob.
Their only significant difference between savings and investment is in their risk/reward ratios, and the intents and advertising that represents them. That is, somebody who wants to "save" their money wants to *feel* confident that they can get their money back anytime they want and not have lost it to the whims of market forces. People who invest are more-willing to take that chance. This is fundamentally the distinction you're making, and what I am saying is that the distinction is, for practical, day-to-day purposes, possibly useful, but in terms of the logical path of money flow and the weightings (rates of return) applied at each link in the flow, it is a classification which does not exist.
"Savings" and "investment" are not a logical distinction, they are a *reasonable* distinction. We can argue over what is "reasonable" all day long (i.e., what should be classified into which bin), but at the end of the day, structurally-speaking, they are the same.
Heh, well, given their yields (loan interest rate - savings interest rate) they employ, I suppose that's a fair point. :-)
There is no way to be *absolutely* certain that you know what your code does, unless you have read it over yourself and understand everything in it. Moreover, you must do the same with your compiler, as Ken Thompson famously demonstrated at ACM to an all-too-trusting audience.
To your absolutist statement, that one must know what their software does before installing it, I responded:
To which you have responded:
But now wait a minute. How do you know that the people reviewing the code are trustworthy? Have you ever met them? Moreover, do you realize how few people are actually reading the code? In my estimation, the OSS community behaves roughly like this: For any given OSS application, figure:
* Number of people writing code = 1
* Number of people reading the written code = 10
* Number of people submitting bug reports about the code = 100
* Number of people testing pre-release versions of the code, without submitting bug reports = 1,000
* Number of people just simply using the code, contributing only documentation back to the "community" (whatever a "community" actually is) = 10,000
* Number of people just simply using the code, without contributing additional code, bug fixes, documentation, or anything else back to the "community" (whatever a "community" actually is) = 100,000
Of course these aren't actual counts. The important thing here is the model; the x * 10^n behavior (starting at 0, naturally
The important thing to realize is what that means for OSS developers: there are relatively very very few people who are going to care enough about your work to take the time to do anything more than be an end-user of it.
Personally, I only go through somebody else's OSS code when I get a few trivial build errors or if I'm looking for an example of how to implement some piece of functionality. I fixed a repeated mistake (a socket function was overloaded the same incorrect way in 4 places) in some network code in nmap once so it would work on my installation of Slackware, but never contributed the changes back...
Enjoy refreshing freebsd.org every half hour kid, and don't forget to have mommy bathe and dress you and tie your shoes before you go to school on Monday.
To which I responded:
To which you have responded:
Quite right. That a text editor needs to be used *is* irrelevant. But that was never my point on the sub-issue you raised (in my first quote) regarding *why* a kernel would need to be configured... [1]
You're right about needing a GUI to change the other config files -- if we are talking about GUI/TUI apps to configure more than just the kernel. Looking again at Linux, however, Linux basically has no such thing, except via some web interfaces and/or distro-specific tools. *looks at YAST2*
Then again, there's no reason that such app-config tools shouldn't exist -- is there? Not really, except that they add time-to-deliver and complexity to a project, which may or may not be warranted (depending on the project scope).
My suggestion for such config-file manipulation, if not via text editor, would be via an ncurses interface in a terminal, and/or a web-based configurator (e.g. Webmin). Of course, you run into problems of changing the config file for the things that go into such non-text-only config systems, but that's true of *any* means of configuration (e.g., configuring a text editor)...
[1] I made 2 points regarding the kernel: first, I made the explicit point that it's annoying to have no other means than a text editor to configure it (well, OK, you have command-line piping too, but this is even sillier). The second point I have made has been in responding to the people (not just you) who say "why are you rebuilding your kernel anyway?" -- my response to which has been "because it's necessary sometimes; for example..."; this second point is one tangential to the first.
Actually, there's another reason for kernel builds and reconfigurations: OS upgrades, e.g. from 6.0-RELEASE to 6.1-RELEASE...