The trick is to pause before each article long enough to recollect what has been going on there, then skim the article to see what's changed. Do NOT get bogged down in reading every word. For instance, an article on Nigeria appears every few issues. Don't read it word for word. Recollect that they have a "new" president who has promised to eliminate corruption, that there are problems in the boonies with locals extorting money from the pipeline operators, etc. Then skim the article with that in mind. Usually it's just an update... new ministers making more promises about corruption, some stats to back it up or refute it, more stats on pipeline problems... you can finish an entire issue in just a couple of hours that way:-) It's not as satisfying as reading every word, but it gets you thru an issue in a reasonable time. I have to choose between skimming and cancelling the subscription.
One ship does not a blockade make. The Bismarck was not capable of blockading Britain (NOT England!) by itself, even if it had infinite fuel and ammo onboard. It had to refuel and resupply either at sea or in port and could not have maintained a blockade. Ditto for any single Japanese aircraft carrier. It did not have the fuel to sit out there all by itself, even for a week or two, while maintaining a blockade. Heck, the 7 Dec 1941 carriers didn't even have the fuel necessary to get to Hawaii itself, they had to bring tankers with them and refuel prior to the attack.
The island force could easily go a week or two without immediate resupply, but not the blockaders. Blockade has to be continuous and leakproof. That's why that web page didn't concern itself with island resupply. If the blockader can't maintain a blockade more than a day or two, it's not a blockade, it's a raid.
You are incredibly ignorant of military matters to think a single aircraft carrier can get to Hawaii, blockade the island all by itself for a month or two, all without resupply or refueling.
Even if the Japanese had taken Midway, that would not have helped them one white in blockading Hawaii. I am at a loss to see how anyone could think that way. Your ignorance and lack of imagination is apalling. A blockade takes a long sustained force, not one carrier for a week at most.
Domain names are case insignificant, but everything after the ? and all parts of the path after a found executable are entirely subject to the interpretation of the server. How the part of the path that leads to the executable is analyzed is probably also up to the server.
Considering that latitude and longitude would hardly ever be used except as a ? parameter, I doubt case would ever enter into it.
Perhaps you had better rethink your career choice of slashdot smart guy. Apparently you never even came close to getting it.
Good gosh. 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per degree, use base 60 for Pete's sake!
Good grief. This only confirms what we have all known for a long time, Microsoft is run by a bunch of morons. They can't even get a silly patent right.
This is not a troll, and I am not interested in fanboy reactions. I really am curious.
He says about Linux, same quote as the parent...
Linux keeps re-writing major portions of the kernel and has stability issues. It now depends on 3rd party vendors to integrate and make stable releases of the code.
which sounds worse than reality, so I wonder how much these other quotes similarly exaggerate...
FreeBSD took over the huge task to implement fine grain SMP and after two years of effort they still don't have a production quality system.
Is FreeBSD's SMP code that bad? Is their SMP still not reliable?
OpenBSD is still touting its security features but lacks the manpower to integrate major kernel features such as UBC and address performance problems. Instead it focuses in supporting and re-implementing major userland utilities.
How much is OpenBSD spinning its wheels, or rather reinventing them?
The Windows release cycles keep getting longer and longer and promised features keep getting postponed because of the increasing complexity of the operating system.
This is not exaggeration, and therein lies my curiousity... if this is simple truth, and the Linux quote is an exaggeration, where do the other quotes sit?
Sun is trying to keep Solaris relevant by open-sourcing it, but nobody is certain of what is going to be open-sourced and when.
Not much of an exaggeration, except that I doubt NetBSD is more relevant than Solaris, so I am not sure what to think of this quote.
Apple's Darwin effort does not seem to be producing any useful results, possibly because it is not complete, and the open-source version of the tree is always behind the commercial version.
Here I am really confused, I suppose from not following Apple very much. MacOS X is certainly useful to Apple, seems to be advancing well enough, so is Darwin some free source spinoff which is going nowhere? I had thought Darwin was Apple code, but maybe I have not been paying enough attention to know better.
Even if they had their entire intact naval force, they could not have maintained a blockade that far from home waters. The farther a force is from home waters, the longer the supply lines, the longer the transit times, everything takes longer. They did not have sufficent force to blockade Hawaii even with their entire intact force.
Conversely, the closer to the enemy, the shorter the enemy supply lines.
You say the Japanese could have blockaded Hawaii with a single ship. Please explain that. I don't know ho wmuch shipping was required to keep Hawaii supplied, but it must have been dozens of ships a week. What single ship can intercept that much traffic, let alone find it in a big ocean, even with no military protection? Are you supposing the entire US naval force had been sunk without loss to the Japanese?
Go read that web page I referenced. Prewar Japan required 10 million tons of shipping to keep it going. 3.5 million of that was foreign tonnage, unavailable as soon as war started. The army and navy drafted a huge portion of the remaining for carrying invasion forces and resupply, so the civilian economy was operating at something like 25% of the shipping it needed, not just to feed itself, but to collect raw materials to produce military supplies.
Please explain how you think Japan could have invaded Hawaii, or even starved it into submission. I'd like to know what you mean by a single ship accomplishing this.
The 7 Dec 1941 attack lost 10% of its airplanes in just two surprise raids. How many planes would they lose in just a few days of covering an invasion? They'd be drained within a week. Where would the replacement planes come from, since it was too far to fly, and they did not have sufficient tonnage to resupply by ship? Where would the replacement pilots have come from, since they had a very slow pilot traing rate?
It's real simple arithmetic. Read that web page and show me where its arithmetic is wrong.
Japan, before Pearl Harbor, had just enough shipping for their own civilian economy. Their invasions in southeast asia drafted so much civilan shipping as to cripple their own economy. They did not have enough shipping to get an amphibious force to Hawaii, and they did not have anywhere near the naval forces necessary to maintain a blackade at such distance from the homeland. They had no possibility of starving Hawaii into submission. They didn't even have enough naval forces to blockade closer smaller islands, they had long since lost touch with the reality of fighting a logistics based war to start with, heck, they didn't even start convoys of their own until far too late, and submarines were for attacking military targets, not merchant shipping, which was not glorious enough for any decent military officer.
If Japan had tried to invade Hawaii, they would have lost the war sooner, not just from all the men, supplies, and ships lost in the debacle, but also in the lost opportunities elsewhere. They were stretched to the limit right from the outset.
As for winning at Midway or Coral Sea, they had the very problem I described, of losing touch with reality. Dissent was stifled; during the war games for Midway, their American side sank several Japanese carriers. The referee said that was unfair and refloated them. They had lost touch with reality, and if they had gotten lucky once or twice more, it would simply have magnified their victory disease, and the subsequent bad luck would have been more disastrous and ended the war sooner.
It's like damming a river. The bigger the dam, the more spectacular the failure. You can block reality for a while, but the more effort you put into it, the bigger the bite when it wins, and reality always wins.
It makes no difference that they would willingly have starved the civilians. They did not have the shipping to invade unless they had dropped every other military campaign, and even that would have been barely enough to just get troops to Hawaii, let alone protect the invasion force and supply the them from such a distance.
That's my point. There were any number of things Hitler could have done to make life much worse for Britain, like build more U-boats sooner, not divert the Battle of Britain attacks from airfields to London, not interfere with the jet programs, not invade the USSR... but the same madness that made him act in those ways was also what made him act in the "positive" ways, like choosing a different plan for invading France.
If he had not been a mad "genius", he would not have been successful at the beginning and would never have been more than a beer half putsch footnote in history. But mad genius dictators have no feedback and end up losing eventually, usually spectacularly, all by their own doings.
I posted another comment explaining that I was NOT comparing Hitler to Bush. What amazes me time after time, in spite of having been caught by the same effect time after time, is how people are so eager to jump to conclusions. I nowhere said Bush was another Hitler, I said Bush has the same closed mind as the Nazis and other dictatorships.
What is it with people who jump so fast and so often? Is it the same jumpers each time, or is it the same random effect that leads us to believe that so many drivers are idiots, when we see just one or two during the morning commute, out of the tens of thousands of cars we pass? Is it because only the bozos stand out, and everyone is a bozo once in a while, or is it just a few bozos who jump over and over again?
Whatever it is, it is sure interesting reading comments from the rabid ones who think Bush is a saint and assumed I was comparing him to Hitler. They must have be extremely arrogant to think Bush is anywhere near that important, and extremely insecure to read that comparison into what I wrote.
And yes, this post is off-topic. Guess how much I care.
I am not comparing Shrub to Hitler. I am saying that this administration has a closed mind, just like dictatorships. It refuses to confuse itself with facts or tolerate any internal dissent or listen to any outside opinion. Bush has bragged about not reading newspapers and only getting what info Karl Rove feeds him. That is a sure recipe for losing touch with reality and eventually failing, and my guess is that this admin will crash and burn spectacularly.
Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and every other dictatorship suffer from the same malady, what the Japanese called Victory Disease. A successful madman, like Hitler, overwhelms anyone who disagrees, whether explicitly by murder or implicitly by the shadow of his popularity. You can see the same thing happening in the Bush administration. The leader has a closed mind by definition of being a genius madman, the followers have closed minds by virtue of being followers, and those who do not follow are sidelined.
Hitler's successes in the beginning of the war were half due to his madman attitude taking the French, British, and Soviets by surprise. They had expected at least rational war plans, as had his own general staff, only to be overruled by his ego. Not only did this element of surprise gradually diminish as his enemies learned what to expect, the gods of random chance eventually turned his lucky streak into disastrous failure, as is the fate of all lucky streaks. Either they are so short that no one notices them and they are never labeled lucky, or they are successful at first, people begin to depend on that, and when they fail, so much more is riding on continued success that the riders are utterly devastated by the failure, and have no Plan B to fall back on, because they have gambled all on continued success.
Hitler could not have invaded Britain. He did not have the shipping to land an invasion force or sustain an occupying force, or the air power and sea power to protect the invasion. His fighters had barely enough fuel to sustain 15 minutes of combat over the nearest parts of Britain, let alone anywhere else for the duration needed.
It's the same fallacy with regards to the Japanese invading Hawaii. They did not have the shipping to support even an invasion force that far away, the fuel and munitions and plain old food that would have been necessary, let alone an occupying army or the civilian populace. Hawaii was a food importer then, probably still is. Japan would have had to take up the slack in feeding the locals, just as Hitler would have had to take up the slack of the lost imports from the US.
If they can be strict with this standard, that can only mean they have pre-emptively co-opted it! They have embraced and extended it before anyone else had a chance to simply follow it. They must have bribed the committees. This has to have been an inside job.
This cannot be allowed to stand. We must stand up and fight for our rights to unpoluted standards. It is time to find a new standard.
There's a group of people who make and want to promote this thing called Linux.
Let's pretend there were a single product, Linux, that everybody involved wanted to support.
No no no. There are people using Linux. Period. Forget this group nonsense. This is not like a Hollywood movie trying to promote itself, or the Boy Scouts trying to promote themselves, or anything else like that. Linux is NOT a group of anything. It is people period.
There are corporations promoting their collection of Linux and utilities and services. They are not Linux. They are corporations promoting their own self interest.
You just don't get it. And that leads you to insult something you don't understand:
And anybody who looks at Linux can tell, at a glance, that it's not a high-quality product.
Wrong wrong wrong. It is NOT a product. Red Hat Linux is a product, Mandrake is a product, but Linux is NOT a product.
And aside from that, the only people who would be so foolish as to declare Linux low quality "at a glance" are those who look at boxes on shelves and tell the quality of the inner product by the flashy colors on the box. You simply cannot tell "at a glance" that millions of lines of code are indeed "low quality".
You go on and on, about branding, desperation, and so on. All show that you simply cannot grasp the concept of something standing on its own.
Whta is the sound of one hand clapping? You had better try to understand that before you try to understand something as simple as Linux.
See, there's your problem. You think only in terms of organizations, of corporations is it? You can't seem to wrap your head around the basic idea of people existing all by themselves, or cooperating all by themselves, without some overriding bureaucracy to control things. Thus you think patents and copyrights can only be good because they further the interests of big organized corporations. The idea that mere people would be better off without copyrights and patents as they are now abused is a foreign thought to you.
Right now, "Linux" is "Gimme gimme."
See? More of the same. Your thought patterns are one with the dinosaurs of the corporate world.
You are incapable of understanding the idea that people would say "Here, take this, see what I've done. Use it, but don't steal it as your own. Redistribute it, modify it, have a good time with it, but pass it on under the same circumstances as I gave it to you."
Who here is sick and tired of companies taking something made by others and proclaiming it as their own?
Who here is sick and tired of companies lying about what they release to the public in order to hoodwink fanboys?
Aside from those, I personally am sick and tired of so-called intellectual property. Patents and copyrights have become so abused that we have reached the point where the goal of stimulating the economy would be better served by getting rid of copyrights and patents altogether.
I didn't say it was Visual Studio. It was whatever was in use back then. It ran on a CGA monitor and graphics system IIRC. I am fully aware there was no Windows then, they hadn't copied anyone else yet.
I just love these anecdotal comments about something unknown. Hell every time I use slashdot some damn poster assumes he knows more about what I saw than I do and knows more about what I posted than is on the screen.
It doesn't matter what the state of UNIX IDEs was in 1989. The point is they released shoddy code which they must have known was shoddy. Whether IDE or not, it was shoddy, the developers themselves surely must have been using it all the time every day, they could not have avoided noticing it was shoddy, and they released it anyway.
As for you having inserted skeleton code without problems, that also is not the point. No doubt you have had some kind of training on it. I had to jump into it and use it the best I could. It is supposed to be intuitive, is it not? It wasn't. Clicking the X is supposed to close the window, right? Should not the IDE have known that it had closed its own window?
I found three repeatable bugs within half an hour of just stumbling around trying to figure out how it worked for some little pissant project. Are their QA people so jaded they can't find these problems? Are their development teams so rigid in their practices that they never stumbled across these bugs themselves?
If the development teams can't be bothered to fix their own dog food, either they eat something else, or they have extreme tolerance for crap. It does not bode well for their work on projects they don't use as much, which is just about everything else.
It all speaks of shoddy practices from one end to the other. That's the point.
I am generally a UNIX programmer, but I have also used custom operating systems. Only twice have I had to use M$ tools. Both times I have found obnoxious stupidities that led me to the conclusion that M$ does not use their own tools in any reasonable fashion.
Around 1989, I had to use whatever Visual Studio was called then. In the debugger, while stepping thru some C code, I accidentally stepped into strcmp or some other function for which the source code was not available. It dropped into assembler mode, quite fine, just a matter of stepping until it exited back to C code. Except it then displayed the C debug screen without first clearing the assembler debug screen. Lots of pieces left over, register displays, hex codes for instructions, etc. Almost unreadable. It gradually cleared itself up as I continued to use it.
Around 2002, I had to use Visual Studio for some small project. You can click on an API and it automatically adds skeleton code to source files. It leaves those windows open, and I did not want so many windows open at once, so I tried to close them. Nothing under any menu I could see, but the X in the corner worked. Next time I used the skeleton code inserter, it complained that the file had been modified by an external program.
Now I suppose I was doing things the non-M$ way. There is probably some perfectly normal way of getting rid of excess windows. Maybe I should have iconized them instead, but that clutters up the task bar. I found two other similar bugs within the first half hour of using the beast.
These are the kind of bugs that anyone using the program would stumble across very quickly. How can the M$ deveopers take any pride in releasing such buggy code? How can they stand to even use such crap software? Is it so crappy that they don't use it themselves?
Slashdot Mirror
The trick is to pause before each article long enough to recollect what has been going on there, then skim the article to see what's changed. Do NOT get bogged down in reading every word. For instance, an article on Nigeria appears every few issues. Don't read it word for word. Recollect that they have a "new" president who has promised to eliminate corruption, that there are problems in the boonies with locals extorting money from the pipeline operators, etc. Then skim the article with that in mind. Usually it's just an update ... new ministers making more promises about corruption, some stats to back it up or refute it, more stats on pipeline problems ... you can finish an entire issue in just a couple of hours that way :-) It's not as satisfying as reading every word, but it gets you thru an issue in a reasonable time. I have to choose between skimming and cancelling the subscription.
One ship does not a blockade make. The Bismarck was not capable of blockading Britain (NOT England!) by itself, even if it had infinite fuel and ammo onboard. It had to refuel and resupply either at sea or in port and could not have maintained a blockade. Ditto for any single Japanese aircraft carrier. It did not have the fuel to sit out there all by itself, even for a week or two, while maintaining a blockade. Heck, the 7 Dec 1941 carriers didn't even have the fuel necessary to get to Hawaii itself, they had to bring tankers with them and refuel prior to the attack.
The island force could easily go a week or two without immediate resupply, but not the blockaders. Blockade has to be continuous and leakproof. That's why that web page didn't concern itself with island resupply. If the blockader can't maintain a blockade more than a day or two, it's not a blockade, it's a raid.
You are incredibly ignorant of military matters to think a single aircraft carrier can get to Hawaii, blockade the island all by itself for a month or two, all without resupply or refueling.
Even if the Japanese had taken Midway, that would not have helped them one white in blockading Hawaii. I am at a loss to see how anyone could think that way. Your ignorance and lack of imagination is apalling. A blockade takes a long sustained force, not one carrier for a week at most.
Domain names are case insignificant, but everything after the ? and all parts of the path after a found executable are entirely subject to the interpretation of the server. How the part of the path that leads to the executable is analyzed is probably also up to the server.
Considering that latitude and longitude would hardly ever be used except as a ? parameter, I doubt case would ever enter into it.
Perhaps you had better rethink your career choice of slashdot smart guy. Apparently you never even came close to getting it.
2 * 26 + 10 = 62
No need to worry about confusing I/1 and O/0, these are not meant to be used by humans directly. Heck, you've even got two left over for E/W or N/S.
(sheesh, the arrogance displayed on Slashdot knows no bounds)
Sheesh, the lack of humor displayed on Slashdot knows no bounds.
Good gosh. 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per degree, use base 60 for Pete's sake!
Good grief. This only confirms what we have all known for a long time, Microsoft is run by a bunch of morons. They can't even get a silly patent right.
This is not a troll, and I am not interested in fanboy reactions. I really am curious.
...
...
... if this is simple truth, and the Linux quote is an exaggeration, where do the other quotes sit?
He says about Linux, same quote as the parent
Linux keeps re-writing major portions of the kernel and has stability issues. It now depends on 3rd party vendors to integrate and make stable releases of the code.
which sounds worse than reality, so I wonder how much these other quotes similarly exaggerate
FreeBSD took over the huge task to implement fine grain SMP and after two years of effort they still don't have a production quality system.
Is FreeBSD's SMP code that bad? Is their SMP still not reliable?
OpenBSD is still touting its security features but lacks the manpower to integrate major kernel features such as UBC and address performance problems. Instead it focuses in supporting and re-implementing major userland utilities.
How much is OpenBSD spinning its wheels, or rather reinventing them?
The Windows release cycles keep getting longer and longer and promised features keep getting postponed because of the increasing complexity of the operating system.
This is not exaggeration, and therein lies my curiousity
Sun is trying to keep Solaris relevant by open-sourcing it, but nobody is certain of what is going to be open-sourced and when.
Not much of an exaggeration, except that I doubt NetBSD is more relevant than Solaris, so I am not sure what to think of this quote.
Apple's Darwin effort does not seem to be producing any useful results, possibly because it is not complete, and the open-source version of the tree is always behind the commercial version.
Here I am really confused, I suppose from not following Apple very much. MacOS X is certainly useful to Apple, seems to be advancing well enough, so is Darwin some free source spinoff which is going nowhere? I had thought Darwin was Apple code, but maybe I have not been paying enough attention to know better.
Even if they had their entire intact naval force, they could not have maintained a blockade that far from home waters. The farther a force is from home waters, the longer the supply lines, the longer the transit times, everything takes longer. They did not have sufficent force to blockade Hawaii even with their entire intact force.
Conversely, the closer to the enemy, the shorter the enemy supply lines.
You say the Japanese could have blockaded Hawaii with a single ship. Please explain that. I don't know ho wmuch shipping was required to keep Hawaii supplied, but it must have been dozens of ships a week. What single ship can intercept that much traffic, let alone find it in a big ocean, even with no military protection? Are you supposing the entire US naval force had been sunk without loss to the Japanese?
Go read that web page I referenced. Prewar Japan required 10 million tons of shipping to keep it going. 3.5 million of that was foreign tonnage, unavailable as soon as war started. The army and navy drafted a huge portion of the remaining for carrying invasion forces and resupply, so the civilian economy was operating at something like 25% of the shipping it needed, not just to feed itself, but to collect raw materials to produce military supplies.
Please explain how you think Japan could have invaded Hawaii, or even starved it into submission. I'd like to know what you mean by a single ship accomplishing this.
The 7 Dec 1941 attack lost 10% of its airplanes in just two surprise raids. How many planes would they lose in just a few days of covering an invasion? They'd be drained within a week. Where would the replacement planes come from, since it was too far to fly, and they did not have sufficient tonnage to resupply by ship? Where would the replacement pilots have come from, since they had a very slow pilot traing rate?
It's real simple arithmetic. Read that web page and show me where its arithmetic is wrong.
... if Bush gets his way ...
Where is this fabled land where judges are in their right minds?
Note to humorless right-wing moderators: This is a joke. Look it up!
The mechanics of a Pearl Harbor invasion
Japan, before Pearl Harbor, had just enough shipping for their own civilian economy. Their invasions in southeast asia drafted so much civilan shipping as to cripple their own economy. They did not have enough shipping to get an amphibious force to Hawaii, and they did not have anywhere near the naval forces necessary to maintain a blackade at such distance from the homeland. They had no possibility of starving Hawaii into submission. They didn't even have enough naval forces to blockade closer smaller islands, they had long since lost touch with the reality of fighting a logistics based war to start with, heck, they didn't even start convoys of their own until far too late, and submarines were for attacking military targets, not merchant shipping, which was not glorious enough for any decent military officer.
If Japan had tried to invade Hawaii, they would have lost the war sooner, not just from all the men, supplies, and ships lost in the debacle, but also in the lost opportunities elsewhere. They were stretched to the limit right from the outset.
As for winning at Midway or Coral Sea, they had the very problem I described, of losing touch with reality. Dissent was stifled; during the war games for Midway, their American side sank several Japanese carriers. The referee said that was unfair and refloated them. They had lost touch with reality, and if they had gotten lucky once or twice more, it would simply have magnified their victory disease, and the subsequent bad luck would have been more disastrous and ended the war sooner.
It's like damming a river. The bigger the dam, the more spectacular the failure. You can block reality for a while, but the more effort you put into it, the bigger the bite when it wins, and reality always wins.
It makes no difference that they would willingly have starved the civilians. They did not have the shipping to invade unless they had dropped every other military campaign, and even that would have been barely enough to just get troops to Hawaii, let alone protect the invasion force and supply the them from such a distance.
That's my point. There were any number of things Hitler could have done to make life much worse for Britain, like build more U-boats sooner, not divert the Battle of Britain attacks from airfields to London, not interfere with the jet programs, not invade the USSR ... but the same madness that made him act in those ways was also what made him act in the "positive" ways, like choosing a different plan for invading France.
If he had not been a mad "genius", he would not have been successful at the beginning and would never have been more than a beer half putsch footnote in history. But mad genius dictators have no feedback and end up losing eventually, usually spectacularly, all by their own doings.
I posted another comment explaining that I was NOT comparing Hitler to Bush. What amazes me time after time, in spite of having been caught by the same effect time after time, is how people are so eager to jump to conclusions. I nowhere said Bush was another Hitler, I said Bush has the same closed mind as the Nazis and other dictatorships.
What is it with people who jump so fast and so often? Is it the same jumpers each time, or is it the same random effect that leads us to believe that so many drivers are idiots, when we see just one or two during the morning commute, out of the tens of thousands of cars we pass? Is it because only the bozos stand out, and everyone is a bozo once in a while, or is it just a few bozos who jump over and over again?
Whatever it is, it is sure interesting reading comments from the rabid ones who think Bush is a saint and assumed I was comparing him to Hitler. They must have be extremely arrogant to think Bush is anywhere near that important, and extremely insecure to read that comparison into what I wrote.
And yes, this post is off-topic. Guess how much I care.
I am not comparing Shrub to Hitler. I am saying that this administration has a closed mind, just like dictatorships. It refuses to confuse itself with facts or tolerate any internal dissent or listen to any outside opinion. Bush has bragged about not reading newspapers and only getting what info Karl Rove feeds him. That is a sure recipe for losing touch with reality and eventually failing, and my guess is that this admin will crash and burn spectacularly.
Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and every other dictatorship suffer from the same malady, what the Japanese called Victory Disease. A successful madman, like Hitler, overwhelms anyone who disagrees, whether explicitly by murder or implicitly by the shadow of his popularity. You can see the same thing happening in the Bush administration. The leader has a closed mind by definition of being a genius madman, the followers have closed minds by virtue of being followers, and those who do not follow are sidelined.
Hitler's successes in the beginning of the war were half due to his madman attitude taking the French, British, and Soviets by surprise. They had expected at least rational war plans, as had his own general staff, only to be overruled by his ego. Not only did this element of surprise gradually diminish as his enemies learned what to expect, the gods of random chance eventually turned his lucky streak into disastrous failure, as is the fate of all lucky streaks. Either they are so short that no one notices them and they are never labeled lucky, or they are successful at first, people begin to depend on that, and when they fail, so much more is riding on continued success that the riders are utterly devastated by the failure, and have no Plan B to fall back on, because they have gambled all on continued success.
Hitler could not have invaded Britain. He did not have the shipping to land an invasion force or sustain an occupying force, or the air power and sea power to protect the invasion. His fighters had barely enough fuel to sustain 15 minutes of combat over the nearest parts of Britain, let alone anywhere else for the duration needed.
It's the same fallacy with regards to the Japanese invading Hawaii. They did not have the shipping to support even an invasion force that far away, the fuel and munitions and plain old food that would have been necessary, let alone an occupying army or the civilian populace. Hawaii was a food importer then, probably still is. Japan would have had to take up the slack in feeding the locals, just as Hitler would have had to take up the slack of the lost imports from the US.
Dang that's good. I'll have to remember that next time, see if I can beat you to the punch :-)
XHTML strict
If they can be strict with this standard, that can only mean they have pre-emptively co-opted it! They have embraced and extended it before anyone else had a chance to simply follow it. They must have bribed the committees. This has to have been an inside job.
This cannot be allowed to stand. We must stand up and fight for our rights to unpoluted standards. It is time to find a new standard.
There's a group of people who make and want to promote this thing called Linux.
Let's pretend there were a single product, Linux, that everybody involved wanted to support.
No no no. There are people using Linux. Period. Forget this group nonsense. This is not like a Hollywood movie trying to promote itself, or the Boy Scouts trying to promote themselves, or anything else like that. Linux is NOT a group of anything. It is people period.
There are corporations promoting their collection of Linux and utilities and services. They are not Linux. They are corporations promoting their own self interest.
You just don't get it. And that leads you to insult something you don't understand:
And anybody who looks at Linux can tell, at a glance, that it's not a high-quality product.
Wrong wrong wrong. It is NOT a product. Red Hat Linux is a product, Mandrake is a product, but Linux is NOT a product.
And aside from that, the only people who would be so foolish as to declare Linux low quality "at a glance" are those who look at boxes on shelves and tell the quality of the inner product by the flashy colors on the box. You simply cannot tell "at a glance" that millions of lines of code are indeed "low quality".
You go on and on, about branding, desperation, and so on. All show that you simply cannot grasp the concept of something standing on its own.
Whta is the sound of one hand clapping? You had better try to understand that before you try to understand something as simple as Linux.
You people need to send the message ...
See, there's your problem. You think only in terms of organizations, of corporations is it? You can't seem to wrap your head around the basic idea of people existing all by themselves, or cooperating all by themselves, without some overriding bureaucracy to control things. Thus you think patents and copyrights can only be good because they further the interests of big organized corporations. The idea that mere people would be better off without copyrights and patents as they are now abused is a foreign thought to you.
Right now, "Linux" is "Gimme gimme."
See? More of the same. Your thought patterns are one with the dinosaurs of the corporate world.
You are incapable of understanding the idea that people would say "Here, take this, see what I've done. Use it, but don't steal it as your own. Redistribute it, modify it, have a good time with it, but pass it on under the same circumstances as I gave it to you."
Who here is sick and tired of companies taking something made by others and proclaiming it as their own?
Who here is sick and tired of companies lying about what they release to the public in order to hoodwink fanboys?
Aside from those, I personally am sick and tired of so-called intellectual property. Patents and copyrights have become so abused that we have reached the point where the goal of stimulating the economy would be better served by getting rid of copyrights and patents altogether.
People damage thumbs.
I didn't say it was Visual Studio. It was whatever was in use back then. It ran on a CGA monitor and graphics system IIRC. I am fully aware there was no Windows then, they hadn't copied anyone else yet.
I just love these anecdotal comments about something unknown. Hell every time I use slashdot some damn poster assumes he knows more about what I saw than I do and knows more about what I posted than is on the screen.
The head of a pin is not pointless...
Yes it is, Bunky. It's the other end that is not pointless.
It doesn't matter what the state of UNIX IDEs was in 1989. The point is they released shoddy code which they must have known was shoddy. Whether IDE or not, it was shoddy, the developers themselves surely must have been using it all the time every day, they could not have avoided noticing it was shoddy, and they released it anyway.
As for you having inserted skeleton code without problems, that also is not the point. No doubt you have had some kind of training on it. I had to jump into it and use it the best I could. It is supposed to be intuitive, is it not? It wasn't. Clicking the X is supposed to close the window, right? Should not the IDE have known that it had closed its own window?
I found three repeatable bugs within half an hour of just stumbling around trying to figure out how it worked for some little pissant project. Are their QA people so jaded they can't find these problems? Are their development teams so rigid in their practices that they never stumbled across these bugs themselves?
If the development teams can't be bothered to fix their own dog food, either they eat something else, or they have extreme tolerance for crap. It does not bode well for their work on projects they don't use as much, which is just about everything else.
It all speaks of shoddy practices from one end to the other. That's the point.
I am generally a UNIX programmer, but I have also used custom operating systems. Only twice have I had to use M$ tools. Both times I have found obnoxious stupidities that led me to the conclusion that M$ does not use their own tools in any reasonable fashion.
Around 1989, I had to use whatever Visual Studio was called then. In the debugger, while stepping thru some C code, I accidentally stepped into strcmp or some other function for which the source code was not available. It dropped into assembler mode, quite fine, just a matter of stepping until it exited back to C code. Except it then displayed the C debug screen without first clearing the assembler debug screen. Lots of pieces left over, register displays, hex codes for instructions, etc. Almost unreadable. It gradually cleared itself up as I continued to use it.
Around 2002, I had to use Visual Studio for some small project. You can click on an API and it automatically adds skeleton code to source files. It leaves those windows open, and I did not want so many windows open at once, so I tried to close them. Nothing under any menu I could see, but the X in the corner worked. Next time I used the skeleton code inserter, it complained that the file had been modified by an external program.
Now I suppose I was doing things the non-M$ way. There is probably some perfectly normal way of getting rid of excess windows. Maybe I should have iconized them instead, but that clutters up the task bar. I found two other similar bugs within the first half hour of using the beast.
These are the kind of bugs that anyone using the program would stumble across very quickly. How can the M$ deveopers take any pride in releasing such buggy code? How can they stand to even use such crap software? Is it so crappy that they don't use it themselves?
I have no respect for M$ programming skills.