Don't bother. We had a large source code base in mixed C/C++ we were attempting to port to z/OS, and the SAS compiler just couldn't get it done. Add to that the nightmare involved in trying to create something allowing assembler modules to interface with our C/C++ code, and we had one expensive mess.
We eventually tried Dignus' compilers (http://www.dignus.com/) and had different, but equally crippling compile & ASM C/C++ interfacing issues. Eventually we just sucked it up and went back to IBM's compiler for this.
Why can't you outsource most of it? There are some damn fine manufactured homes coming out -- don't think double-wides, think actual homes.
Once these lose more of their stigma, why can't they just be carried on trains from Mexico to the US/Canada, or transported on boats from anywhere in the world to anywhere else?
On a tangent: why would it be sad if doing actual, physical work paid more than sitting in a chair slinging code? It would depress a lot of geeks, but why would the larger world find it sad?
Isn't it sad enough that the good code-slingers, the ones who write good, reliable tools, may be automating themselves out of jobs?
The most important thing you can learn during your undergrad years is how to make friends with people you wouldn't have associated with before. Something that the 'geek' community often forgets is that college is your best opportunity to learn how to network effectively. 4+ years of learning how to connect to people, with lower risk than you're going to have at any other time in life.
Learn how to have fun, as well. College is a time to collect stories that you can think fondly back on, and do things you'll have much less of a chance to do later. Once you enter the 'real world', not only will you have some idea how to network, but some of those stories should make great conversation material.
Yes. In the same way I am forced to subsidize the sick, lame, and lazy with my paycheck, and my taxes. I want to be on the receiving end of some subsidizing for once.
So, you never drive on a public road? You have an agreement set up where the police won't come when you're raped, the fire department will let your house burn down and the paramedics won't bother you when something happens? Good to hear.
You've never voted? You've never gone to the library, or a park? Good to hear that, should you go swimming, the lifeguards know to let you drown. I, for one, am happy that when your boat starts to sink, you've made the appropriate people aware that your sorry ass is going down with it, cap'n.
I subsidize the sorry asses of morons like you every day. Why? Because, I may pay a lot in taxes, but I get a lot out in the form of a civil society where there exist things to help everyone, myself included.
'course, if you don't like it, you could leave. But, as you've never been to school nor a museum, or done anything else we've subsidized to educate your ignorant self, I bet you never thought of that, did you?
How'bout them roads? Hundreds of millions of passenger miles a day, and they still don't make enough to avoid massive government subsidies.
I say, we stop throwing money at the roads first. Make them pay for themselves or go under, damnit! Then we'll take out all those wackos who think the gummit ought to be giving the railroads money, the bastards!
What if the transponders along the road are more powerful than the ones used in the toll lanes? There's more profit for the state in having a system that almost works, but churns out a lot of fines, than there is in a system that works perfectly.
But transponders along the road are there to track you, so the state can use this in prosecuting persons -- so it's more profittable in the long run to make sensors that are more powerful, and that work better...
Really -- why would New York put in EZ-Pass if there wasn't something in it for them? And, now that it's there, why wouldn't they try to take as much advantage of it as possible?
Re:Hmmm. Complexity vs. Cash
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RSA-576 Factored
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· Score: 2, Funny
I read this quickly and agreed that NFS does have exponential complexity, and is impossibly slow. Damn Network File System!
You kidding? A pound of edible fruit/vegetables is usually a good deal cheaper than a pound of processed food... hell, I can get 1lb of carrots for $1.00, and a pound of bananas for less.
Find me a pound of processed food of similar nutritional value for that...
Slightly divergent -- our company was recently looking for a support engineer: someone who can do a little programming, can make nice with customers, and who wants to stay in a very good role (our company is awfully nice) for a number of years.
We got 500+ resumes, of which 90% were developers, looking for anything out there. These were automatically pitched.
Out of the 2 people we got who were qualified, we took one -- kinda crapshoot, it was a team consensus on who we got along with better while interviewing. These two people were both barely qualified.
Good people are hard to find. A lot of them aren't looking...
PDF was not meant to reflow, and was never designed as an HTML-like abstract "yeah, this thing goes after this one... well, wherever the program displaying it feels like." Though the addition of Tagged PDF means that information can be grouped, and reflowed. Besides, what's stopping anyone from reflowing PDF?
PDF is a page-description language. On a page, glyphs need to go in specific places, so that what gets printed is reliable between printers. Legal documents can't just throw letters wherever they end up, after all. When I send a chapter of a book to press, my words and illustrations damn well better be where I put them.
And what, pray tell, is stopping anyone from writing another viewer plugin for MSIE? Adobe even lets anyone use their patents to do so, go read the PDF Reference.
It's sad that I'll base my opinion of Al Qaeda's members on the actions of a few terrorists. We should give 'em a break, right? They can't help who they work for...
When you sign on to work for a company, guess what -- part of the deal is that you're endorsing them and their way of interacting with the world. You don't like what they do, you *can* leave. Choosing to stay on because you can't get another job; well, so you like to eat more than you hate your employer's ethics, thus you endorse them.
People need to grow up and take responsibility for the choices they make. Everyone screws some of them up -- that doesn't let anyone off the hook for anything.
I believe you only need 2 employees in a company to qualify for group-rate health insurance, which is quite a bit cheaper than one can get as an individual. As a contract worker, you should be doing all your work through a properly set-up company anyhow (so you personally can't be sued for everything at someone's whim).
So just find a couple other contract workers, incorporate, and get all the happy stuff out of the way. Chipping in for the maintenance on a small company probably comes out to save money in the end.
Or -- get catastrophic health insurance, something with a high deductable ($2500+) and which covers 100% (ideally) of expenses over and above that. Such policies can run under $100/month, which is still pricy, but more reasonable than the alternatives. Someone who quits their job to live on whenever-work should have at least the above saved in the bank, anyhow.
It's a bit complicated. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here...
The short version is that workers who are paid hourly must be paid overtime if they work over 40 hours/week. Persons who are salaried are paid a set amount per pay period, and by law their employer has to pay this as long as the person has worked at least an hour during that period. No overtime is paid - these are "exempt" employees.
Now, nobody has to work overtime. But most employees are known as at-will employees. What this means is that the employee can leave at any time, for any reason, and give as little or as much notice as they'd like. Likewise, their employer can terminate the hiring agreement at any time, with any amount of notice, for any reason (save a few things: a person cannot be let go because of their race, because they file a harassment report with HR, etc.)
What it comes to is that for most people, if they refuse to work overtime, the company can let them go w/o much effort. They use this to keep employees in line and from demanding too much; most Americans haven't nearly enough savings to live on for more than a few days, and feel they can't afford to lose their job.
This is how Americans got chained to their desks, working too long for too little cash... well, it's one reason, anyway. There's a lot more to it, of course...
No, but here's a great way to avoid that - stop thieving the music.
Easy there. You're forgetting about folks who have legal MP3s which don't have corresponding CDs they can just re-rip from...
Example: I have a good collection of live shows from bands who encourage their fans to tape their shows and spread them far and wide as long as it's not a commercial enterprise. Some of these, for whatever reason, aren't the best MP3s on earth -- maybe someone had them up for others to stream, maybe this person likes distributing files which don't take half an eon for their friends w/ modems to download. Maybe the band hired some company that just wanted the job done, rather than done right.
Or maybe the band puts out MP3s of their disc tracks, for which you haven't the chance to get the disc at the moment. Yeah, it happens -- some bands still care about their fans, surprising as that may be. So you shouldn't be able to convert these, either?
Before you go calling all of us theives: how much did you blow on music from an RIAA member? You buy it new?
All of you who did: stop bitching. You're paying them, why should they care what you think if you're going to keep putting out like some two-dollar whore? Same with your DVDs -- anyone who has them, we can discount their bitching because they just don't care enough.
(Unless you bought your DVD player & your DVDs & your CDs used. In which case, rock on, friend, they've nothing from you...)
... is that it's a lot tougher to find the *space* to store and work on a car than it is a computer. A number of us live in apartments where the landlords get awfully cranky when we go out, tools in hand. A smaller number, such as me, live in apartments in cities where we just don't have the space to fix a car, period. Nevermind that I don't have to pay upteen hundreds of dollars every month just to insure and park my computer.
Something broader, though, is that for a lot in both camps, there's a lot of showing off in it -- whether you're cruising on a Saturday night or bragging about your framerate... and, yes, I know this doesn't apply to everyone out there. But there are significant groups for which this does, and for them, they're simply not as likely to have peers who respect the merits of both, thus they're not pushed in both directions.
Ya know, asbestos was harmless to, for a while at least...
Really, I'm hardly convinced we know enough to think that these things are safe; there are a lot of people marketing this stuff, who profess to know everything about it -- and if we know anything, it's that someone who says they know everything -- knows a little and fakes the rest.
If you had spent that long, and that much cash, to develop these things, wouldn't you downplay the risks as well?
ISO documents are charged, at least for paper copies, on a per-page basis; there's something rather weirdly high (like $.80 US - ish) assessed as a "copying fee". Why PDF files would be more expensive beats me.
For emerging standards, though, the ISO usually releases draft copies for public comment -- there's something like a 30-day window -- and these drafts, I believe are free. Plus, they tend to be fairly close to what actually goes in as a standard. This was recommended to me as the cheapest way to get copies of up-and-coming standards at the last CGATS (the graphics arts subcomittee of the ISO) meeting I was at.
Dunno if this will help in your case, but it might help someone, or down the road.
Methinks that the real problem that companies have is not Linus, per se. There are two big ones:
1) Nobody can just go out and hire Mr. Torvals and thereby acquire "Linux" in its entirety and use that to club the rest of the market down. Not only has Linus signaled that he just wouldn't do that (probably because he doesn't want Linux to become the whole of his life, more than it is right now anyhow), but even if somebody did, there wouldn't be too much advantage to it, because of
2) the license it came from. This is what really pisses people in business off, the notion that any improvements they make, well, have to get fed back into the common trough.
Remember that this just isn't how the industry is used to working -- it's used to coming up with a good idea, or what's thought to be one which will make some money, and then being able to keep everybody from it through a combination of IP law and marketing resources. Business is not mad about Linus, or anybody else; he could be my pet rock and he'd still be a problem, since nobody can go and get a hammerlock on the industry.
Why should Linus care? It's the industry's job to figure out how to make a buck off this, not his. They can't control it, or bend it to their direction. A fork would be seen as useless because it wouldn't confer much of a competitive advantage, having to give their effort away and all of that.
What's the article really about: nobody remember RMS, or they do and don't want to give him credit for what they see as a problem. And it's seen as a problem only because, well, companies just don't want to sit down and make the effort to create a model which goes with the spirit of the license, take all the time to establish it, and so forth.
Ah, I see. Do you refuse to go to the movies as well?
I mention this because I refuse, and I've found that I don't really miss them. As for DVDs and players, I've found a solution I'm happy with & it's the same I use for major-label CDs: buy used. That way, not only is the MPAA not getting your tithe, but you've help keep one less drive from getting wasted & thrown away.
There are some disadvantages to telecommuting, though, which people seem to gloss over. To whit:
- Out of sight, out of mind: I'm not just talking about being able to goof off all day . A lot of places work on the basis of office politics; like every other social situation, it's inevitable. You're not going to be thought of in as good a light if you're never around, and though you may not care right now, you will when the person who doesn't get as much done get the promotion you wanted because they were at the office every day, and stayed in the head of their boss. I'm not saying this is good, or bad, merely that it is.
- Knowledge sharing: I've found (as someone who is the first to admit that I don't even know a lil' bit of everything) that a good deal of what I've picked up has been odd random geeky junk from being able to wander into the other programmers' cubes and gossipping. Ditto for weird conversations at lunch. And it's a lot easier to help someone out (and, in turn, be helped) when you have a physical presence.
- Gripability: This is more important than it may seem. If I'm having a tough time with something outside of work, it's a lot easier to get a little sympathy if I'm there to whine in person. Ditto with saying, "well, I've gotta skip out tomorrow afternoon, but I'll make it up during the rest of the week."
I'm not against the idea of telecommuting, just that it's not a good all-the-time solution. I find that most of the really kick-ass programmers around me show up two days a week; it's enough time to ask and be asked questions, let people know you're alive, transfer all that weird stuff which never gets documented but is vital to getting your product to compile correctly, etc.
Some of this may not matter to everyone who is expected to work 70+ hours a week anyhow. In this case, the best thing I can say is that you need to show up to work, quit, and find a better job. Never discount the fact that your job/company/chosen locale just sucks, and all the telecommuting in the world isn't going to change what the real problems are.
The place I'm at now, for example, I turned down a boatload more money to come here because they actually care whether we're alive or not. It's 5:30, and one of the people I work with asked why I was staying late.
and it's because I feel like doing so, nobody's forcing me to; in fact, I get thanked that I put in more than 40 hours.
We just took on a new developer, he's probably in his 40's -- doesn't know C, but we're going to teach him.
Point is, research places. Good ones, just like good employees, are hard to find. But they're out there.
Consider the situation in Philly. Much like the WTO, the opening days were peaceful. Very little confrontation
between activist and policeman. As it should be. Then we consider the final day of protests, where the groups
that advocated the destruction of public and private property came out to play. These are people, some of
whom have been trained so that they can 'fight back' when the Police come to break them up.
So then why do many eyewitnesses swear that the police got violent long before the protesters did? And, more importantly, you seem to have your timeline somewhat wrong -- the police did get more violent as things progressed; by the middle of the week they were gassing residential neighborhoods and stopping cars just to get the people inside to roll down their windows, and gas them. Whereas in the beginning of the week they were only gassing random people downtown. The people who advocated property damage came out early; they were used to justify the way the police ran over the town later on.
The Police HAVE to come break them up. You can't allow people to go around destroying property. These
people then say they have to "defend themselves" from the Police. Then, you get the mob mentality. Other
people join the violence because they can. And some of these people have the gall to say that they are in the
right.
Replace protester with hacker in your argument above. People who publish security breaches are causing property destruction, and need to be rounded up. After all, their right to free speech ends when it costs some company money, right? That seems the crux of your argument.
You don't give a good reason why every other protester needs to be rounded up as well. Because a few people damage things, everyone needs to be shipped off? At the very least, that's a dangerous thing to say; that logic could be used to break up nearly any group.
Now, at the same time, you cannot argue whatsoever with the right to protest, the right to speak and be heard.
But where do we draw the line in the sand? When it gets violent, should it be the fault of the Police? What if the
Police overstep their bounds, refusing due process and basic human rights? There's a lot more here then just
"Blame the Man, blame the Pigs" because some people are abusing everyone's right to protest by doing so
violently.
So the fact that the police instigate the violence makes it the fault of the protesters? I dunno, there, partner, I don't think you'd be arguing that way if it were you to whom this was happening, but I could be wrong.
People getting arrested for carrying cell phones (just like in Seattle), puppets as bomb-making tools, million-dollar bails for misdemeanor charges... sexual and physical assaults in prisons, refusing council and lying to both the prisoners and their lawyers about the arrainment process... violating the writ of habeus corpeus, because the police decided to instigate violence -- I'll agree with you that there's a line which is getting crossed, but it hardly seems to be the protesters who are crossing it. They are out there fighting for your right and my right to speak and assemble freely; you may not agree with them, but neither you nor I are doing as much to help them out as they are trying to keep the rights of you and I intact.
...because, while the author questions other people's statistics, he doesn't provide any inkling as to where he got most of his. So when he says that Linux has a higher 'defect density', he doesn't quantify this -- most likely because he cannot. But this article is a great argument if one assumes that the industry will stay as it is, which has always been risky. IBM and others thought that mainframes would always rule the earth, Microsoft was once unknown too. Hell, I remember not very long ago when everybody did the BBS thing and life was good. But things change. This article also seems to assume that CIOs will continue to have huge supplies of cash to throw at technologies and at blaming others (i.e. look at the support industry at present for what it really boils down to), and just as the computer has whet the corporate appetite for more profits, there has to be another target after all is eeked out from these machines. And guess who'll be in line? That's right, the ones who keep buying things for them.
But the largest problem, and the problem that the Linux community has to deal with right now, is that we're in a position where we just don't have to care about being commercial, or being big, or so on. This article treats Linux as a business, which it never intended to become. But more and more now I see people who are treating it as if it should be profit-motivated, and it's a shame that the chase after money has caught so many of us. Yes, Linus can be considered a bottleneck, but only if one feels that a certain schedule of releases must be kept up, which just isn't the case. Too often, we seem to be sacrificing our ideals to win approval of business, and by-and-by most of what business cares about here is making money, not keeping freedom.
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Don't bother. We had a large source code base in mixed C/C++ we were attempting to port to z/OS, and the SAS compiler just couldn't get it done. Add to that the nightmare involved in trying to create something allowing assembler modules to interface with our C/C++ code, and we had one expensive mess.
We eventually tried Dignus' compilers (http://www.dignus.com/) and had different, but equally crippling compile & ASM C/C++ interfacing issues. Eventually we just sucked it up and went back to IBM's compiler for this.
Why can't you outsource most of it? There are some damn fine manufactured homes coming out -- don't think double-wides, think actual homes.
Once these lose more of their stigma, why can't they just be carried on trains from Mexico to the US/Canada, or transported on boats from anywhere in the world to anywhere else?
On a tangent: why would it be sad if doing actual, physical work paid more than sitting in a chair slinging code? It would depress a lot of geeks, but why would the larger world find it sad?
Isn't it sad enough that the good code-slingers, the ones who write good, reliable tools, may be automating themselves out of jobs?
This is a better point than you realize.
The most important thing you can learn during your undergrad years is how to make friends with people you wouldn't have associated with before. Something that the 'geek' community often forgets is that college is your best opportunity to learn how to network effectively. 4+ years of learning how to connect to people, with lower risk than you're going to have at any other time in life.
Learn how to have fun, as well. College is a time to collect stories that you can think fondly back on, and do things you'll have much less of a chance to do later. Once you enter the 'real world', not only will you have some idea how to network, but some of those stories should make great conversation material.
Yes. In the same way I am forced to subsidize the sick, lame, and lazy with my paycheck, and my taxes. I want to be on the receiving end of some subsidizing for once.
So, you never drive on a public road? You have an agreement set up where the police won't come when you're raped, the fire department will let your house burn down and the paramedics won't bother you when something happens? Good to hear.
You've never voted? You've never gone to the library, or a park? Good to hear that, should you go swimming, the lifeguards know to let you drown. I, for one, am happy that when your boat starts to sink, you've made the appropriate people aware that your sorry ass is going down with it, cap'n.
I subsidize the sorry asses of morons like you every day. Why? Because, I may pay a lot in taxes, but I get a lot out in the form of a civil society where there exist things to help everyone, myself included.
'course, if you don't like it, you could leave. But, as you've never been to school nor a museum, or done anything else we've subsidized to educate your ignorant self, I bet you never thought of that, did you?
How'bout them roads? Hundreds of millions of passenger miles a day, and they still don't make enough to avoid massive government subsidies.
I say, we stop throwing money at the roads first. Make them pay for themselves or go under, damnit! Then we'll take out all those wackos who think the gummit ought to be giving the railroads money, the bastards!
Are you sure about this?
What if the transponders along the road are more powerful than the ones used in the toll lanes? There's more profit for the state in having a system that almost works, but churns out a lot of fines, than there is in a system that works perfectly.
But transponders along the road are there to track you, so the state can use this in prosecuting persons -- so it's more profittable in the long run to make sensors that are more powerful, and that work better...
Really -- why would New York put in EZ-Pass if there wasn't something in it for them? And, now that it's there, why wouldn't they try to take as much advantage of it as possible?
You kidding? A pound of edible fruit/vegetables is usually a good deal cheaper than a pound of processed food... hell, I can get 1lb of carrots for $1.00, and a pound of bananas for less.
Find me a pound of processed food of similar nutritional value for that...
I gotta second this...
Slightly divergent -- our company was recently looking for a support engineer: someone who can do a little programming, can make nice with customers, and who wants to stay in a very good role (our company is awfully nice) for a number of years.
We got 500+ resumes, of which 90% were developers, looking for anything out there. These were automatically pitched.
Out of the 2 people we got who were qualified, we took one -- kinda crapshoot, it was a team consensus on who we got along with better while interviewing. These two people were both barely qualified.
Good people are hard to find. A lot of them aren't looking...
PDF was not meant to reflow, and was never designed as an HTML-like abstract "yeah, this thing goes after this one... well, wherever the program displaying it feels like." Though the addition of Tagged PDF means that information can be grouped, and reflowed. Besides, what's stopping anyone from reflowing PDF?
PDF is a page-description language. On a page, glyphs need to go in specific places, so that what gets printed is reliable between printers. Legal documents can't just throw letters wherever they end up, after all. When I send a chapter of a book to press, my words and illustrations damn well better be where I put them.
And what, pray tell, is stopping anyone from writing another viewer plugin for MSIE? Adobe even lets anyone use their patents to do so, go read the PDF Reference.
Right. Yep. Yep.
It's sad that I'll base my opinion of Al Qaeda's members on the actions of a few terrorists. We should give 'em a break, right? They can't help who they work for...
When you sign on to work for a company, guess what -- part of the deal is that you're endorsing them and their way of interacting with the world. You don't like what they do, you *can* leave. Choosing to stay on because you can't get another job; well, so you like to eat more than you hate your employer's ethics, thus you endorse them.
People need to grow up and take responsibility for the choices they make. Everyone screws some of them up -- that doesn't let anyone off the hook for anything.
Health care can be an issue, yes.
I believe you only need 2 employees in a company to qualify for group-rate health insurance, which is quite a bit cheaper than one can get as an individual. As a contract worker, you should be doing all your work through a properly set-up company anyhow (so you personally can't be sued for everything at someone's whim).
So just find a couple other contract workers, incorporate, and get all the happy stuff out of the way. Chipping in for the maintenance on a small company probably comes out to save money in the end.
Or -- get catastrophic health insurance, something with a high deductable ($2500+) and which covers 100% (ideally) of expenses over and above that. Such policies can run under $100/month, which is still pricy, but more reasonable than the alternatives. Someone who quits their job to live on whenever-work should have at least the above saved in the bank, anyhow.
It's a bit complicated. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here...
The short version is that workers who are paid hourly must be paid overtime if they work over 40 hours/week. Persons who are salaried are paid a set amount per pay period, and by law their employer has to pay this as long as the person has worked at least an hour during that period. No overtime is paid - these are "exempt" employees.
Now, nobody has to work overtime. But most employees are known as at-will employees. What this means is that the employee can leave at any time, for any reason, and give as little or as much notice as they'd like. Likewise, their employer can terminate the hiring agreement at any time, with any amount of notice, for any reason (save a few things: a person cannot be let go because of their race, because they file a harassment report with HR, etc.)
What it comes to is that for most people, if they refuse to work overtime, the company can let them go w/o much effort. They use this to keep employees in line and from demanding too much; most Americans haven't nearly enough savings to live on for more than a few days, and feel they can't afford to lose their job.
This is how Americans got chained to their desks, working too long for too little cash... well, it's one reason, anyway. There's a lot more to it, of course...
No, but here's a great way to avoid that - stop thieving the music.
Easy there. You're forgetting about folks who have legal MP3s which don't have corresponding CDs they can just re-rip from...
Example: I have a good collection of live shows from bands who encourage their fans to tape their shows and spread them far and wide as long as it's not a commercial enterprise. Some of these, for whatever reason, aren't the best MP3s on earth -- maybe someone had them up for others to stream, maybe this person likes distributing files which don't take half an eon for their friends w/ modems to download. Maybe the band hired some company that just wanted the job done, rather than done right.
Or maybe the band puts out MP3s of their disc tracks, for which you haven't the chance to get the disc at the moment. Yeah, it happens -- some bands still care about their fans, surprising as that may be. So you shouldn't be able to convert these, either?
Before you go calling all of us theives: how much did you blow on music from an RIAA member? You buy it new?
All of you who did: stop bitching. You're paying them, why should they care what you think if you're going to keep putting out like some two-dollar whore? Same with your DVDs -- anyone who has them, we can discount their bitching because they just don't care enough.
(Unless you bought your DVD player & your DVDs & your CDs used. In which case, rock on, friend, they've nothing from you...)
... is that it's a lot tougher to find the *space* to store and work on a car than it is a computer. A number of us live in apartments where the landlords get awfully cranky when we go out, tools in hand. A smaller number, such as me, live in apartments in cities where we just don't have the space to fix a car, period. Nevermind that I don't have to pay upteen hundreds of dollars every month just to insure and park my computer.
Something broader, though, is that for a lot in both camps, there's a lot of showing off in it -- whether you're cruising on a Saturday night or bragging about your framerate... and, yes, I know this doesn't apply to everyone out there. But there are significant groups for which this does, and for them, they're simply not as likely to have peers who respect the merits of both, thus they're not pushed in both directions.
Bah! Everything's just an excuse for our lazy asses not building that Turing machine!
Kids...
Really, I'm hardly convinced we know enough to think that these things are safe; there are a lot of people marketing this stuff, who profess to know everything about it -- and if we know anything, it's that someone who says they know everything -- knows a little and fakes the rest.
If you had spent that long, and that much cash, to develop these things, wouldn't you downplay the risks as well?
Note: to the best of what I remember, ...
ISO documents are charged, at least for paper copies, on a per-page basis; there's something rather weirdly high (like $.80 US - ish) assessed as a "copying fee". Why PDF files would be more expensive beats me.
For emerging standards, though, the ISO usually releases draft copies for public comment -- there's something like a 30-day window -- and these drafts, I believe are free. Plus, they tend to be fairly close to what actually goes in as a standard. This was recommended to me as the cheapest way to get copies of up-and-coming standards at the last CGATS (the graphics arts subcomittee of the ISO) meeting I was at.
Dunno if this will help in your case, but it might help someone, or down the road.
Well, yes, but not quite...
Methinks that the real problem that companies have is not Linus, per se. There are two big ones:
1) Nobody can just go out and hire Mr. Torvals and thereby acquire "Linux" in its entirety and use that to club the rest of the market down. Not only has Linus signaled that he just wouldn't do that (probably because he doesn't want Linux to become the whole of his life, more than it is right now anyhow), but even if somebody did, there wouldn't be too much advantage to it, because of
2) the license it came from. This is what really pisses people in business off, the notion that any improvements they make, well, have to get fed back into the common trough.
Remember that this just isn't how the industry is used to working -- it's used to coming up with a good idea, or what's thought to be one which will make some money, and then being able to keep everybody from it through a combination of IP law and marketing resources. Business is not mad about Linus, or anybody else; he could be my pet rock and he'd still be a problem, since nobody can go and get a hammerlock on the industry.
Why should Linus care? It's the industry's job to figure out how to make a buck off this, not his. They can't control it, or bend it to their direction. A fork would be seen as useless because it wouldn't confer much of a competitive advantage, having to give their effort away and all of that.
What's the article really about: nobody remember RMS, or they do and don't want to give him credit for what they see as a problem. And it's seen as a problem only because, well, companies just don't want to sit down and make the effort to create a model which goes with the spirit of the license, take all the time to establish it, and so forth.
That's the real bone of contention, IMHO.
Ah, I see. Do you refuse to go to the movies as well?
I mention this because I refuse, and I've found that I don't really miss them. As for DVDs and players, I've found a solution I'm happy with & it's the same I use for major-label CDs: buy used. That way, not only is the MPAA not getting your tithe, but you've help keep one less drive from getting wasted & thrown away.
There are some disadvantages to telecommuting, though, which people seem to gloss over. To whit:
- Out of sight, out of mind: I'm not just talking about being able to goof off all day . A lot of places work on the basis of office politics; like every other social situation, it's inevitable. You're not going to be thought of in as good a light if you're never around, and though you may not care right now, you will when the person who doesn't get as much done get the promotion you wanted because they were at the office every day, and stayed in the head of their boss. I'm not saying this is good, or bad, merely that it is.
- Knowledge sharing: I've found (as someone who is the first to admit that I don't even know a lil' bit of everything) that a good deal of what I've picked up has been odd random geeky junk from being able to wander into the other programmers' cubes and gossipping. Ditto for weird conversations at lunch. And it's a lot easier to help someone out (and, in turn, be helped) when you have a physical presence.
- Gripability: This is more important than it may seem. If I'm having a tough time with something outside of work, it's a lot easier to get a little sympathy if I'm there to whine in person. Ditto with saying, "well, I've gotta skip out tomorrow afternoon, but I'll make it up during the rest of the week."
I'm not against the idea of telecommuting, just that it's not a good all-the-time solution. I find that most of the really kick-ass programmers around me show up two days a week; it's enough time to ask and be asked questions, let people know you're alive, transfer all that weird stuff which never gets documented but is vital to getting your product to compile correctly, etc.
Some of this may not matter to everyone who is expected to work 70+ hours a week anyhow. In this case, the best thing I can say is that you need to show up to work, quit, and find a better job. Never discount the fact that your job/company/chosen locale just sucks, and all the telecommuting in the world isn't going to change what the real problems are.
The place I'm at now, for example, I turned down a boatload more money to come here because they actually care whether we're alive or not. It's 5:30, and one of the people I work with asked why I was staying late.
and it's because I feel like doing so, nobody's forcing me to; in fact, I get thanked that I put in more than 40 hours.
We just took on a new developer, he's probably in his 40's -- doesn't know C, but we're going to teach him.
Point is, research places. Good ones, just like good employees, are hard to find. But they're out there.
(and, yes, we're looking for people)
Consider the situation in Philly. Much like the WTO, the opening days were peaceful. Very little confrontation between activist and policeman. As it should be. Then we consider the final day of protests, where the groups that advocated the destruction of public and private property came out to play. These are people, some of whom have been trained so that they can 'fight back' when the Police come to break them up.
So then why do many eyewitnesses swear that the police got violent long before the protesters did? And, more importantly, you seem to have your timeline somewhat wrong -- the police did get more violent as things progressed; by the middle of the week they were gassing residential neighborhoods and stopping cars just to get the people inside to roll down their windows, and gas them. Whereas in the beginning of the week they were only gassing random people downtown. The people who advocated property damage came out early; they were used to justify the way the police ran over the town later on.
The Police HAVE to come break them up. You can't allow people to go around destroying property. These people then say they have to "defend themselves" from the Police. Then, you get the mob mentality. Other people join the violence because they can. And some of these people have the gall to say that they are in the right.
Replace protester with hacker in your argument above. People who publish security breaches are causing property destruction, and need to be rounded up. After all, their right to free speech ends when it costs some company money, right? That seems the crux of your argument.
You don't give a good reason why every other protester needs to be rounded up as well. Because a few people damage things, everyone needs to be shipped off? At the very least, that's a dangerous thing to say; that logic could be used to break up nearly any group.
Now, at the same time, you cannot argue whatsoever with the right to protest, the right to speak and be heard. But where do we draw the line in the sand? When it gets violent, should it be the fault of the Police? What if the Police overstep their bounds, refusing due process and basic human rights? There's a lot more here then just "Blame the Man, blame the Pigs" because some people are abusing everyone's right to protest by doing so violently.
So the fact that the police instigate the violence makes it the fault of the protesters? I dunno, there, partner, I don't think you'd be arguing that way if it were you to whom this was happening, but I could be wrong.
People getting arrested for carrying cell phones (just like in Seattle), puppets as bomb-making tools, million-dollar bails for misdemeanor charges... sexual and physical assaults in prisons, refusing council and lying to both the prisoners and their lawyers about the arrainment process... violating the writ of habeus corpeus, because the police decided to instigate violence -- I'll agree with you that there's a line which is getting crossed, but it hardly seems to be the protesters who are crossing it. They are out there fighting for your right and my right to speak and assemble freely; you may not agree with them, but neither you nor I are doing as much to help them out as they are trying to keep the rights of you and I intact.
Don't forget that.
...because, while the author questions other people's statistics, he doesn't provide any inkling as to where he got most of his. So when he says that Linux has a higher 'defect density', he doesn't quantify this -- most likely because he cannot.
But this article is a great argument if one assumes that the industry will stay as it is, which has always been risky. IBM and others thought that mainframes would always rule the earth, Microsoft was once unknown too. Hell, I remember not very long ago when everybody did the BBS thing and life was good. But things change.
This article also seems to assume that CIOs will continue to have huge supplies of cash to throw at technologies and at blaming others (i.e. look at the support industry at present for what it really boils down to), and just as the computer has whet the corporate appetite for more profits, there has to be another target after all is eeked out from these machines. And guess who'll be in line? That's right, the ones who keep buying things for them.
But the largest problem, and the problem that the Linux community has to deal with right now, is that we're in a position where we just don't have to care about being commercial, or being big, or so on. This article treats Linux as a business, which it never intended to become. But more and more now I see people who are treating it as if it should be profit-motivated, and it's a shame that the chase after money has caught so many of us. Yes, Linus can be considered a bottleneck, but only if one feels that a certain schedule of releases must be kept up, which just isn't the case. Too often, we seem to be sacrificing our ideals to win approval of business, and by-and-by most of what business cares about here is making money, not keeping freedom.