I have known police all my life, and let me tell you. A more stupid, ignorant, corrupt, belligerent, and disgusting group of people you'd be hard pressed to meet. In Connecticut a man sued to be on the state police force, he was denied. What was his offense? He was too smart. The fact that he scored quite well on their entrance exams was too much for the state police. They said he was too smart to be a police officer, the court agreed. hat about sums it up in my book.
Furthermore I have relatives in the police force, some very high up. One a head of a policeman's union. Calling them corrupt would be an insult to corrupt people everywhere. Calling the stupid would be an insult to stupid people everywhere.
Police do not solve crimes. They have no clue about scientific method or actual research. This is the truth, and think carefully about this, they "guess" who they think "did it" and then cherry pick the evidence to build a case. There is no intellectual work being done here. They guess and fit the evidence. It is a good thing that criminals are about as stupid as the police and most of the time this method works.
It is obvious that the DNA database would be helpful to the police. If they accuse you, there is more of a chance they will have "evidence" to convict you. "The accused has an obvious biological pre-dispensation to violence, you must convict!"
The U.S.A. and the U.K. are crumbling. Once shining examples of freedom and democracy, now imploding into surreal 1984-esque police states.
Your's is an example of unpopular work that makes no friends for the ACLU. On the surface it sounds like the law was "right," but upon analysis you must admit that the law as it was written was a very BAD law and had an overly broad definition of "illegal" which may have included legal residents and naturalized citizens. It also had provisions for "english-only" government.
While we may agree or disagree with the motives of government, the ACLU prevents government local and federal from overstepping their bounds, and the law you cite is a prime example of a local government assuming rights it does not have and potentially harming citizens. Were this law not challenged, it would harm citizens and legal residents and created a "show me your papers" society. No body wants that in the U.S.A. I hope.
As a card carrying member of the ACLU, you are full of crap.
I cherish the ACLU and commend them in the stands they take. It is not popular to defend horrible acts or people in order to prevent bad law or precedent.
As for the second amendment, any plain reading of it leaves some ambiguousness about the purpose for the right. Is it for a militia or for personal ownership? I tend to lean more toward personal ownership if only for the comma between the two clauses, but it is not cut and dry.
It is a god damned hard road to take, one which won't make you any friends, but the ACLU takes that road, many times against the popular will to protect the meaning of the constitution. The ACLU does important work.
I ask you, are you a member of the ACLU? If not, why not?
Some of my posts have been modded down because I say Companies have a responsibility to behave ethically. People as well.
The problem is that years ago, "unethical" behavior was a black mark on your reputation and "proper" business didn't operate that way. Well, it did when it could, but there was a sensitivity to unethical behavior that sort of made people think twice before doing scummy things.
These days, neither companies nor people value ethics. They are viewed as quaint little rules. If it isn't illegal, then it is "legal." So, hey!! do what ever you wish as long as it is not illegal. Well, illegal too if you're pretty sure you won't get caught. If you do get caught, stand at a podium with your wife and apologize.
The ISO standards process, as well as so many other "professional" organizations, depend and rely on ethics. Microsoft has proved time and again it has no ethics. So we have a process set up to rely on honorable people behaving honorably for the common good, defenseless against an unethical vandal.
Had this been an earlier time, this behavior would have cost Microsoft, these days, you can almost imagine people laughing at the balls it takes to pull shit like this, never thinking about how this behavior is corrupting business, and law, and society.
These guys are freaking out over nothing. As long as the cores are not all tied to a specific process (which would be STUPID), then the current computing models will work fine.
In other words, do you run one program on your system? No, on a slow day I have about 150 concurrent processes on my desktop. On my web servers and database servers, I have a lot of processes competing for CPU. The only thing that will have to happen is a modification to the linux process and scheduling code to accommodate many more processors than the SMP code currently does. Everyone focuses on one application, but everyone runs a multi-user multi-processing system these days. Multiple cores removes CPU contention! We *already* have systems that inherently use multi-core CPUs.
It looks more like they're worried about some fictional single application benchmark where they can measure throughput. That ship has sailed. As it is, processors are as fast as they can practically get (or need to get with RAM and I/O speeds) without a breakthrough or two. (That's why the computer sales slump) There is little Intel or AMD can do to speed up the processing of a single threaded application. So, how do you compete on the practical speed of multi-core CPUs? That's what they are really worried about.
I am an atheist, proud and true. I do not believe in *anything* that can't be proved. Unfortunately, I have to accept a lot of things as "probably true" barring evidence to the contrary. My wife is a catholic who reads the horoscope, go figure.
It is a good marriage. Every now and then, however, when we talk about those who have passed away or deeper meanings of life or what have you, it forces a reconciliation between philosophies. Sometimes a fight, sometimes a a discussion, either way, it can work.
So, should scientists date "believers of things?" Sure, but you have to be ready to "accept" the person "as-is." If you can't do that then it won't work.
I might be missing the joke and taking this way to seriously
Yes, you are.
On a serious note, let me ask, to what end is this pursuit? Of what practical use is it? Oh, sure, you can do what ever you want in life, but the whole excel thing sounds like something to do when you are bored.
I'm in my 40s now, and time is so precious and I just see something like this as a sad waste. Here's a guy who is obviously intelligent but he devoted an amount of his finite time on planet earth doing something basically useless to himself and others. Were his energies properly "self-directed" think what he could have done for himself!! Think about the lost potential in the form of dedication, intelligence, and time!!!
At the core of this issue is the GPL definition of a derivative work.
Do not flame me for what I am about to write as it is my understanding of RMS' guidelines, if you have a problem with it, take it up with him.
To clarify what is and what is not a derivative work, the GPL and its supporting documents claim that a GPL work is not how self contained as it may seem i.e. shared libraries or loadable modules, but whether or not it inhabits the "process space" of the GPL work.
When a non-GPL module is loaded into the process space of a GPL application, it violates the GPL license of the application. This is why NDIS wrapper violates the GPL because its job is to load non-GPL code into the process space of the kernel, thus tainting it.
Do I agree? I'm not sure as I can see both sides of the argument. One side is that the module is self contained and isolated. The other side is that one of the purposes of the GPL is to protect the work of the people who contribute frm being unfairly used. It can be argued that the NIC card vendors who's drivers are enabled by NDISWrapper are unfairly enriched by the work of GPL developers in that their proprietary hardware is supported on a free platform without themselves being free.
You are either very very young, or have very poor memory.
I usually dismiss people who like to insult or guess about people. It is obnoxious.
And this is compared to when DVD players cost $300 and VCRs cost $39. The price of the player is a concern, but not a huge one. As long as it is within the sweet spot of $100 it doesn't matter much. When DVD players were $300 most people didn't buy them.
What sold it for me and my friends was when movies weren't coming out on VHS anymore.
Having owned an 8track player and a cassette player, both were bad mediums for content. They wore out too fast. That's why CDs did so well at pushing them out of use. The same went for VHS and Betemax vs DVDs.
DVDs last longer than VHS tapes and DVDs already have a HUGE acceptance and user base. Where as Blue Ray has barely any uptake. Most people don't even have any idea what Blue Ray is. They don't want to pay $300 or more for a DVD player when an upscaling DVD player costs $39.
For the time being, an upscaling DVD player with an HDMI cable dirt cheap and HDMI cables no longer cost $60.
I don't believe it will be profitable to drop DVD support any time soon, and I don't trust that a Blue Ray bought today will work next year.
In 1995~1996 I was working at a medical imaging company and we were exploring the idea of using Java and its about to be announced graphics interface to be the basis of our new computerized viewers. This was in the time frame of the DEC Shark, a strong ARM based thin client, and Sun's HotJava browser.
Anyway, Sun has been harping about how the "JVM" could support multiple languages. They talked about Basic and fortran, I guess with M$ pushing C# and C++ on the JVM. Java can finally justify the multi-language aspect of their VM.
I remember an episode that happened about 10 years ago.
I live in a two family house. I moved from the first floor to the second floor. In the phone junction box, I just swapped the wires. I figured no problem. I called the phone company to tell them what I did (In the form of "I was about to do") and they said, no you can't do that. They have to send a technician to the pole in front of the house to change the wires and change their computer records, of course, there was a service fee involved.
I was pissed off, then it occurred to me, I called the phone company again to say that they had made a mistake and the phone lines had been wrongly addressed and would they please update the computer records for 911 service. The answer was O.K. Mr....
Moral of the story, a "mistake" is easily corrected when it isn't merely "you," but another bureaucracy that has an importance. In the case of the phone records, it was 911 service. Screw that up, and there is civil liability involved. In the case of the SSI, I bet they'd adjust those records quickly if you said you were having problems paying your income tax and should you just refer the IRS to them?
Software patents are not usable patents. "In the old days" a patent allowed a company to avoid R&D costs to produce a product. It was a way to allow inventors to create things and companies to build things. An inventor could invest his own time and money on his dream, patent an invention and a company could build the invention from the patent and pay a royalty. It was a beneficial arrangement. It makes a lot of sense in that context.
Patents today do nothing for the licensor except "protect" them from litigation on that patent. You still need to invest R&D to implement the idea. Worse yet, the ideas are so trivial they are valueless to the R&D. The only thing that they are good for is lawyers.
Law enforcement is probably the lowest form of job. I'm sorry, the police suck. They aren't the guys on TV. Most of the time they are stupid. They have no real concept of scientific method and most criminal investigation is nothing more than a witch hunt. Most of the time they are lucky because most criminals are just as dumb as the police.
The gods help you if one of these reptiles accuses you of a crime. They decide guilt before collecting evidence. Then they make their case that you are guilty. It is far easier to paint a picture that someone is guilty using the stuff laying around rather than actually thinking about the evidence.
The police would like nothing more than to track and have information on every person, find it inconvenient that things like civil rights get in the way, or that beating up a "suspect" is a bad thing. They are driven by power and the ability to intimidate people. In the locker room they joke about giving people shit. I know this because I know a lot of cops, and I've only met a couple who were decent people and they had to quit because they couldn't take it.
The police mind set is antipathy for freedoms we hold dear. When the police want to change something that exists, they will use "crime" as the excuse, but make no mistake, it is about control. Unfortunately politicians are not much removed from police.
Ethics are a lost cause. Ethics and being unethical used to be a serious issue. Honesty and Ethics used to be the characteristic of a great person. These days, no one expects ethics, no one even values ethics. When the majority of people act ethically and honestly, there is negative feedback to unethical behavior. When the majority of people don't care about ethics, unethical behavior is the norm.
So much of a free society depends on ethics and the deal of ethics will be the death of freedom.
It may be faster, but you waste time prefixing the variables in the first place.
There is no logic in this statement, typing 2 or 3 additional characters is hardly even measurable.
You don't. It's the easiest way, but not the fastest. Every IDE I've seen has some shortcut for that. Some also have the "Definition" window at the bottom, which is always synced with whatever is under the cursor.
As opposed to simply looking at it and knowing? There is no rational argument that can claim that an alternate contextual lookup of information is easier then just seeing it in context. No one with any intellectual integrity can pursue such an argument.
It does work just fine with all kinds of types short of specialized templates of templates and the like.
I have had many situations where it does not and can not correlate the variable with the definition. Surely you are not saying that it works 100.00% of the time, are you?
"Lastly, most software development in the world is NOT ON Windows."
References?
Bureau of Labor Statistics, excluding unaccounted open source Linux people, the majority of software jobs are system, web, embedded, scientific, with applications programming far down on the list. Remember, every electronic device that has a blinking LED has a computer in it, and that takes software development. There are far more cell phones than there are P.C.s There are for more Microwave ovens, far more automobiles (which have computers in them), there are far more everything electronics than P.C.s and WinCE is a small percent of that.
Like they said on T.V. "In Mayberry, he's world famous."
Beta was far superior to VHS, hands down. Better resolution, less noise, less crosstalk. At the time, the average TV was less than 19 inches. The average TV set had a single speaker with almost no audio range. So what advantage did Betamax have?
VHS may have been less at the time, but the average equipment of the time couldn't tell the difference.
VHS did, however, have longer tapes and was cheaper.
(1) The betamax people like to claim that betamax was "better" than VHS. This is simply not true. It had some features that were better than VHS, but VHS had features that were better than Betamax. It all came down to the fact that VHS was cheaper and allowed for longer record times.
(2) The amount of money Sony just sent is proof that Blue-Ray sucks.
No, it's not. You hover the mouse over the variable name in your IDE
Noob, listen. Being able to read something without having to hover the mouse is far far easier. If every time I come across a variable I have to reach out and grab the mouse, hover over the variable and hope that the IDE can find it, which doesn't always work in abstract types. Its like actually having a vocabulary when you read a book instead of having to consult a dictionary every time you get a word with more than 6 letters.
Secondly, Visual Studio is probably the LEAST productive environment I have ever worked in. It is nothing more than the GUIfication of Microsoft's PWB which was universally referenced as "Programmers Waste Basket."
Lastly, most software development in the world is NOT ON Windows.
If a person harasses a person or child to the point of suicide, does it really matter whether or not it was through the mail, over the phone, across the street, or over the internet.
The problem is the harassing behavior, not the medium through which the action occurred. Now, as the parent of a young girl, I am all for laws protecting minors from harassing adults. And one can really make the case that an adult posing as a 16 year old boy to taunt a 13 year old girl is a form of assault.
A teen age human being is just not emotionally capable of dealing with adult level harassment. It isn't her fault.
A think a civil suit should be filed, it won't get her back, but it will make a clear deterrent to anyone else that tries that crap.
This is one of those exploits that sound real and possible but in reality so unlikely that it is basically a bad movie plot.
DRAM decays very fast. Minutes? I don't think so. The longer a DRAM cell stays charged the more current it takes to change its state. If anything they decay faster today than before. But, for arguments sake, lets say, on average a DRAM will be 100% intact for 30 seconds and total decay to random in 1 minute.
Get your screwdrivers handy.
Try 1, reboot computer. Oops@! POST clears memory at startup. Try 2, power off computer, remove RAM, oops! touched ram static discharge randomized most data on ram. Try 3, power off computer, with anti-static clothing, remove RAM, put ram in device to read it. Oops!! when the computer powers down, it seems it writes crap to ram as it is losing power. Try 4, remove ram from powered computer, OOPS! crashing computer that loses RAM goes off into the weeds, as RAM is removed it remains partially powered and some, not all, of the address and data lines remain briefly connected, RAM is scrambled.
Try 5, you manage to remove the RAM successfully without it getting scrambled by the removal. You have a specially constructed device that allows the RAM to be plugged in and starts the refresh cycle. You dump the RAM, wait!!! you need ALL the RAM modules.
Try 6, you manage to remove all the ram modules in the computer, simultaneously and instantaneously, and get them into the fore mentioned device in less than 30 seconds. What are you really going to see that you couldn't get off the hard disk or swap partition, remember the machine has to be on.
It is not very well known, but I remember talking to an engineer at Yahoo, and I asked, "How do you make money?" He said, this was a couple years ago, that 60% of all e-commerce sites were hosted by yahoo. Think about that, credit cards, transactions, data, users, etc. M$ would live to control that.
Think of all the anti-competitive stuff they could do. Subtle problems with non-windows platforms or non IE browsers. A requirement of Microsoft Wallet. (Remember that?)
There are a ton of reasons why Yahoo owned by microsoft would be a bad thing for the world. I hope Yahoo remains independent.
Improving photogimp (a gimp version whith a user interface more similar to photoshop for people who do not want to learn another application) would imho be a better option than wine. Or even funding a native photoshop port. And to me both would still be mistakes.
Maybe photogimp is the way, but I'd rather see it folded into the main stream gimp. What we don't know is whether or not Google has approached the gimp in the first place. Also, Google has its own graphics package. Obviously, there is a business reason why photoshop is important to google.
"All you are restating is the argument that postulates that WINE support may erode native application support for Linux, and that position is not unreasonable." It's not unreasonable, but it has a negative incentive on further development of the existing alternatives.
Re-read the sentence to which you responded. I am agreeing, in part, to the premise.
"However, it is also not unreasonable to help users to use applications they are familiar with." I which case it would make perfect sense for said users to stick with an OS they are familiar with. Most if not all of the arguements/complaints/religious flamewars/... boil down to this : 'Linux does not behave like Windows'. Well, why not use Windows then ?
Here is the crux of the matter. It is the classic chicken and the egg problem. How do you get users to Linux? You get them with popular applications. How do you get popular application support for Linux? You get it with users.
Given a choice, I will always use free software, but there are certain applications which have loyal users who know almost nothing else. Photoshop, quicken, quickbooks, autocad, and applications like them trap users on Windows and it is unlikely that a free software package will duplicate the functionality and user interface sufficiently for these users. The users of these packages will not change.
By supporting the Windows versions of these packages, we may be able to ease them off Windows. You see, most people LOVE their work horse applications, but HATE the problems with windows. As my lawyer friend says, "I'm afraid of vista, so I can't buy a new computer." They have to use windows because their applications only run on Windows. Now, if WINE were to become a very solid system with almost seamless operation, a Windows user could simply pop in their Windows application CD and install it and run it flawlessly, then Linux could be their OS of choice. It would be faster, more stable, cheaper, safer, and better all around.
Now, once we get a userbase on Linux using something like Photoshop, Adobe will notice it. They will do a cost/benefit analysis of developing a Linux version. If there are enough users, then it will make business sense to do. THEN we get other vendors targeting Linux, maybe with frankenwine versions at first, but users will demand better.
There is no one solution to the problem of linux adoption, there are just a series of strategies. It is chess not arm wrestling.
The Vista fiasco is a great opportunity for Linux and WINE may be the answer.
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I have known police all my life, and let me tell you. A more stupid, ignorant, corrupt, belligerent, and disgusting group of people you'd be hard pressed to meet. In Connecticut a man sued to be on the state police force, he was denied. What was his offense? He was too smart. The fact that he scored quite well on their entrance exams was too much for the state police. They said he was too smart to be a police officer, the court agreed. hat about sums it up in my book.
Furthermore I have relatives in the police force, some very high up. One a head of a policeman's union. Calling them corrupt would be an insult to corrupt people everywhere. Calling the stupid would be an insult to stupid people everywhere.
Police do not solve crimes. They have no clue about scientific method or actual research. This is the truth, and think carefully about this, they "guess" who they think "did it" and then cherry pick the evidence to build a case. There is no intellectual work being done here. They guess and fit the evidence. It is a good thing that criminals are about as stupid as the police and most of the time this method works.
It is obvious that the DNA database would be helpful to the police. If they accuse you, there is more of a chance they will have "evidence" to convict you. "The accused has an obvious biological pre-dispensation to violence, you must convict!"
The U.S.A. and the U.K. are crumbling. Once shining examples of freedom and democracy, now imploding into surreal 1984-esque police states.
Your's is an example of unpopular work that makes no friends for the ACLU. On the surface it sounds like the law was "right," but upon analysis you must admit that the law as it was written was a very BAD law and had an overly broad definition of "illegal" which may have included legal residents and naturalized citizens. It also had provisions for "english-only" government.
While we may agree or disagree with the motives of government, the ACLU prevents government local and federal from overstepping their bounds, and the law you cite is a prime example of a local government assuming rights it does not have and potentially harming citizens. Were this law not challenged, it would harm citizens and legal residents and created a "show me your papers" society. No body wants that in the U.S.A. I hope.
As a card carrying member of the ACLU, you are full of crap.
I cherish the ACLU and commend them in the stands they take. It is not popular to defend horrible acts or people in order to prevent bad law or precedent.
As for the second amendment, any plain reading of it leaves some ambiguousness about the purpose for the right. Is it for a militia or for personal ownership? I tend to lean more toward personal ownership if only for the comma between the two clauses, but it is not cut and dry.
It is a god damned hard road to take, one which won't make you any friends, but the ACLU takes that road, many times against the popular will to protect the meaning of the constitution. The ACLU does important work.
I ask you, are you a member of the ACLU? If not, why not?
Some of my posts have been modded down because I say Companies have a responsibility to behave ethically. People as well.
The problem is that years ago, "unethical" behavior was a black mark on your reputation and "proper" business didn't operate that way. Well, it did when it could, but there was a sensitivity to unethical behavior that sort of made people think twice before doing scummy things.
These days, neither companies nor people value ethics. They are viewed as quaint little rules. If it isn't illegal, then it is "legal." So, hey!! do what ever you wish as long as it is not illegal. Well, illegal too if you're pretty sure you won't get caught. If you do get caught, stand at a podium with your wife and apologize.
The ISO standards process, as well as so many other "professional" organizations, depend and rely on ethics. Microsoft has proved time and again it has no ethics. So we have a process set up to rely on honorable people behaving honorably for the common good, defenseless against an unethical vandal.
Had this been an earlier time, this behavior would have cost Microsoft, these days, you can almost imagine people laughing at the balls it takes to pull shit like this, never thinking about how this behavior is corrupting business, and law, and society.
These guys are freaking out over nothing. As long as the cores are not all tied to a specific process (which would be STUPID), then the current computing models will work fine.
In other words, do you run one program on your system? No, on a slow day I have about 150 concurrent processes on my desktop. On my web servers and database servers, I have a lot of processes competing for CPU. The only thing that will have to happen is a modification to the linux process and scheduling code to accommodate many more processors than the SMP code currently does. Everyone focuses on one application, but everyone runs a multi-user multi-processing system these days. Multiple cores removes CPU contention! We *already* have systems that inherently use multi-core CPUs.
It looks more like they're worried about some fictional single application benchmark where they can measure throughput. That ship has sailed. As it is, processors are as fast as they can practically get (or need to get with RAM and I/O speeds) without a breakthrough or two. (That's why the computer sales slump) There is little Intel or AMD can do to speed up the processing of a single threaded application. So, how do you compete on the practical speed of multi-core CPUs? That's what they are really worried about.
I am an atheist, proud and true. I do not believe in *anything* that can't be proved. Unfortunately, I have to accept a lot of things as "probably true" barring evidence to the contrary. My wife is a catholic who reads the horoscope, go figure.
It is a good marriage. Every now and then, however, when we talk about those who have passed away or deeper meanings of life or what have you, it forces a reconciliation between philosophies. Sometimes a fight, sometimes a a discussion, either way, it can work.
So, should scientists date "believers of things?" Sure, but you have to be ready to "accept" the person "as-is." If you can't do that then it won't work.
In 2020, HHGTG will be 42 years old. I find it odd how much of Douglas Adams' stuff just works out neatly.
I might be missing the joke and taking this way to seriously
Yes, you are.
On a serious note, let me ask, to what end is this pursuit? Of what practical use is it? Oh, sure, you can do what ever you want in life, but the whole excel thing sounds like something to do when you are bored.
I'm in my 40s now, and time is so precious and I just see something like this as a sad waste. Here's a guy who is obviously intelligent but he devoted an amount of his finite time on planet earth doing something basically useless to himself and others. Were his energies properly "self-directed" think what he could have done for himself!! Think about the lost potential in the form of dedication, intelligence, and time!!!
I can't help but think that anyone smart enough to do something like that shouldn't.
At the core of this issue is the GPL definition of a derivative work.
Do not flame me for what I am about to write as it is my understanding of RMS' guidelines, if you have a problem with it, take it up with him.
To clarify what is and what is not a derivative work, the GPL and its supporting documents claim that a GPL work is not how self contained as it may seem i.e. shared libraries or loadable modules, but whether or not it inhabits the "process space" of the GPL work.
When a non-GPL module is loaded into the process space of a GPL application, it violates the GPL license of the application. This is why NDIS wrapper violates the GPL because its job is to load non-GPL code into the process space of the kernel, thus tainting it.
Do I agree? I'm not sure as I can see both sides of the argument. One side is that the module is self contained and isolated. The other side is that one of the purposes of the GPL is to protect the work of the people who contribute frm being unfairly used. It can be argued that the NIC card vendors who's drivers are enabled by NDISWrapper are unfairly enriched by the work of GPL developers in that their proprietary hardware is supported on a free platform without themselves being free.
You are either very very young, or have very poor memory.
I usually dismiss people who like to insult or guess about people. It is obnoxious.
And this is compared to when DVD players cost $300 and VCRs cost $39.
The price of the player is a concern, but not a huge one. As long as it is within the sweet spot of $100 it doesn't matter much. When DVD players were $300 most people didn't buy them.
What sold it for me and my friends was when movies weren't coming out on VHS anymore.
Having owned an 8track player and a cassette player, both were bad mediums for content. They wore out too fast. That's why CDs did so well at pushing them out of use. The same went for VHS and Betemax vs DVDs.
DVDs last longer than VHS tapes and DVDs already have a HUGE acceptance and user base. Where as Blue Ray has barely any uptake. Most people don't even have any idea what Blue Ray is. They don't want to pay $300 or more for a DVD player when an upscaling DVD player costs $39.
For the time being, an upscaling DVD player with an HDMI cable dirt cheap and HDMI cables no longer cost $60.
I don't believe it will be profitable to drop DVD support any time soon, and I don't trust that a Blue Ray bought today will work next year.
I'm playing a LONG wait and see with this.
In 1995~1996 I was working at a medical imaging company and we were exploring the idea of using Java and its about to be announced graphics interface to be the basis of our new computerized viewers. This was in the time frame of the DEC Shark, a strong ARM based thin client, and Sun's HotJava browser.
Anyway, Sun has been harping about how the "JVM" could support multiple languages. They talked about Basic and fortran, I guess with M$ pushing C# and C++ on the JVM. Java can finally justify the multi-language aspect of their VM.
I remember an episode that happened about 10 years ago.
....
I live in a two family house. I moved from the first floor to the second floor. In the phone junction box, I just swapped the wires. I figured no problem. I called the phone company to tell them what I did (In the form of "I was about to do") and they said, no you can't do that. They have to send a technician to the pole in front of the house to change the wires and change their computer records, of course, there was a service fee involved.
I was pissed off, then it occurred to me, I called the phone company again to say that they had made a mistake and the phone lines had been wrongly addressed and would they please update the computer records for 911 service. The answer was O.K. Mr
Moral of the story, a "mistake" is easily corrected when it isn't merely "you," but another bureaucracy that has an importance. In the case of the phone records, it was 911 service. Screw that up, and there is civil liability involved. In the case of the SSI, I bet they'd adjust those records quickly if you said you were having problems paying your income tax and should you just refer the IRS to them?
Software patents are not usable patents. "In the old days" a patent allowed a company to avoid R&D costs to produce a product. It was a way to allow inventors to create things and companies to build things. An inventor could invest his own time and money on his dream, patent an invention and a company could build the invention from the patent and pay a royalty. It was a beneficial arrangement. It makes a lot of sense in that context.
Patents today do nothing for the licensor except "protect" them from litigation on that patent. You still need to invest R&D to implement the idea. Worse yet, the ideas are so trivial they are valueless to the R&D. The only thing that they are good for is lawyers.
Law enforcement is probably the lowest form of job. I'm sorry, the police suck. They aren't the guys on TV. Most of the time they are stupid. They have no real concept of scientific method and most criminal investigation is nothing more than a witch hunt. Most of the time they are lucky because most criminals are just as dumb as the police.
The gods help you if one of these reptiles accuses you of a crime. They decide guilt before collecting evidence. Then they make their case that you are guilty. It is far easier to paint a picture that someone is guilty using the stuff laying around rather than actually thinking about the evidence.
The police would like nothing more than to track and have information on every person, find it inconvenient that things like civil rights get in the way, or that beating up a "suspect" is a bad thing. They are driven by power and the ability to intimidate people. In the locker room they joke about giving people shit. I know this because I know a lot of cops, and I've only met a couple who were decent people and they had to quit because they couldn't take it.
The police mind set is antipathy for freedoms we hold dear. When the police want to change something that exists, they will use "crime" as the excuse, but make no mistake, it is about control. Unfortunately politicians are not much removed from police.
Ethics are a lost cause. Ethics and being unethical used to be a serious issue. Honesty and Ethics used to be the characteristic of a great person. These days, no one expects ethics, no one even values ethics. When the majority of people act ethically and honestly, there is negative feedback to unethical behavior. When the majority of people don't care about ethics, unethical behavior is the norm.
So much of a free society depends on ethics and the deal of ethics will be the death of freedom.
It may be faster, but you waste time prefixing the variables in the first place.
There is no logic in this statement, typing 2 or 3 additional characters is hardly even measurable.
You don't. It's the easiest way, but not the fastest. Every IDE I've seen has some shortcut for that. Some also have the "Definition" window at the bottom, which is always synced with whatever is under the cursor.
As opposed to simply looking at it and knowing? There is no rational argument that can claim that an alternate contextual lookup of information is easier then just seeing it in context. No one with any intellectual integrity can pursue such an argument.
It does work just fine with all kinds of types short of specialized templates of templates and the like.
I have had many situations where it does not and can not correlate the variable with the definition. Surely you are not saying that it works 100.00% of the time, are you?
"Lastly, most software development in the world is NOT ON Windows."
References?
Bureau of Labor Statistics, excluding unaccounted open source Linux people, the majority of software jobs are system, web, embedded, scientific, with applications programming far down on the list. Remember, every electronic device that has a blinking LED has a computer in it, and that takes software development. There are far more cell phones than there are P.C.s There are for more Microwave ovens, far more automobiles (which have computers in them), there are far more everything electronics than P.C.s and WinCE is a small percent of that.
Like they said on T.V. "In Mayberry, he's world famous."
Beta was far superior to VHS, hands down. Better resolution, less noise, less crosstalk.
At the time, the average TV was less than 19 inches. The average TV set had a single speaker with almost no audio range. So what advantage did Betamax have?
VHS may have been less at the time, but the average equipment of the time couldn't tell the difference.
VHS did, however, have longer tapes and was cheaper.
A couple points:
(1) The betamax people like to claim that betamax was "better" than VHS. This is simply not true. It had some features that were better than VHS, but VHS had features that were better than Betamax. It all came down to the fact that VHS was cheaper and allowed for longer record times.
(2) The amount of money Sony just sent is proof that Blue-Ray sucks.
No, it's not. You hover the mouse over the variable name in your IDE
Noob, listen. Being able to read something without having to hover the mouse is far far easier. If every time I come across a variable I have to reach out and grab the mouse, hover over the variable and hope that the IDE can find it, which doesn't always work in abstract types. Its like actually having a vocabulary when you read a book instead of having to consult a dictionary every time you get a word with more than 6 letters.
Secondly, Visual Studio is probably the LEAST productive environment I have ever worked in. It is nothing more than the GUIfication of Microsoft's PWB which was universally referenced as "Programmers Waste Basket."
Lastly, most software development in the world is NOT ON Windows.
If a person harasses a person or child to the point of suicide, does it really matter whether or not it was through the mail, over the phone, across the street, or over the internet.
The problem is the harassing behavior, not the medium through which the action occurred. Now, as the parent of a young girl, I am all for laws protecting minors from harassing adults. And one can really make the case that an adult posing as a 16 year old boy to taunt a 13 year old girl is a form of assault.
A teen age human being is just not emotionally capable of dealing with adult level harassment. It isn't her fault.
A think a civil suit should be filed, it won't get her back, but it will make a clear deterrent to anyone else that tries that crap.
This is one of those exploits that sound real and possible but in reality so unlikely that it is basically a bad movie plot.
DRAM decays very fast. Minutes? I don't think so. The longer a DRAM cell stays charged the more current it takes to change its state. If anything they decay faster today than before. But, for arguments sake, lets say, on average a DRAM will be 100% intact for 30 seconds and total decay to random in 1 minute.
Get your screwdrivers handy.
Try 1, reboot computer. Oops@! POST clears memory at startup.
Try 2, power off computer, remove RAM, oops! touched ram static discharge randomized most data on ram.
Try 3, power off computer, with anti-static clothing, remove RAM, put ram in device to read it. Oops!! when the computer powers down, it seems it writes crap to ram as it is losing power.
Try 4, remove ram from powered computer, OOPS! crashing computer that loses RAM goes off into the weeds, as RAM is removed it remains partially powered and some, not all, of the address and data lines remain briefly connected, RAM is scrambled.
Try 5, you manage to remove the RAM successfully without it getting scrambled by the removal. You have a specially constructed device that allows the RAM to be plugged in and starts the refresh cycle. You dump the RAM, wait!!! you need ALL the RAM modules.
Try 6, you manage to remove all the ram modules in the computer, simultaneously and instantaneously, and get them into the fore mentioned device in less than 30 seconds. What are you really going to see that you couldn't get off the hard disk or swap partition, remember the machine has to be on.
It is not very well known, but I remember talking to an engineer at Yahoo, and I asked, "How do you make money?" He said, this was a couple years ago, that 60% of all e-commerce sites were hosted by yahoo. Think about that, credit cards, transactions, data, users, etc. M$ would live to control that.
Think of all the anti-competitive stuff they could do. Subtle problems with non-windows platforms or non IE browsers. A requirement of Microsoft Wallet. (Remember that?)
There are a ton of reasons why Yahoo owned by microsoft would be a bad thing for the world. I hope Yahoo remains independent.
Improving photogimp (a gimp version whith a user interface more similar to photoshop for people who do not want to learn another application) would imho be a better option than wine. Or even funding a native photoshop port. And to me both would still be mistakes.
Maybe photogimp is the way, but I'd rather see it folded into the main stream gimp. What we don't know is whether or not Google has approached the gimp in the first place. Also, Google has its own graphics package. Obviously, there is a business reason why photoshop is important to google.
"All you are restating is the argument that postulates that WINE support may erode native application support for Linux, and that position is not unreasonable."
It's not unreasonable, but it has a negative incentive on further development of the existing alternatives.
Re-read the sentence to which you responded. I am agreeing, in part, to the premise.
"However, it is also not unreasonable to help users to use applications they are familiar with."
I which case it would make perfect sense for said users to stick with an OS they are familiar with. Most if not all of the arguements/complaints/religious flamewars/... boil down to this : 'Linux does not behave like Windows'. Well, why not use Windows then ?
Here is the crux of the matter. It is the classic chicken and the egg problem. How do you get users to Linux? You get them with popular applications. How do you get popular application support for Linux? You get it with users.
Given a choice, I will always use free software, but there are certain applications which have loyal users who know almost nothing else. Photoshop, quicken, quickbooks, autocad, and applications like them trap users on Windows and it is unlikely that a free software package will duplicate the functionality and user interface sufficiently for these users. The users of these packages will not change.
By supporting the Windows versions of these packages, we may be able to ease them off Windows. You see, most people LOVE their work horse applications, but HATE the problems with windows. As my lawyer friend says, "I'm afraid of vista, so I can't buy a new computer." They have to use windows because their applications only run on Windows. Now, if WINE were to become a very solid system with almost seamless operation, a Windows user could simply pop in their Windows application CD and install it and run it flawlessly, then Linux could be their OS of choice. It would be faster, more stable, cheaper, safer, and better all around.
Now, once we get a userbase on Linux using something like Photoshop, Adobe will notice it. They will do a cost/benefit analysis of developing a Linux version. If there are enough users, then it will make business sense to do. THEN we get other vendors targeting Linux, maybe with frankenwine versions at first, but users will demand better.
There is no one solution to the problem of linux adoption, there are just a series of strategies. It is chess not arm wrestling.
The Vista fiasco is a great opportunity for Linux and WINE may be the answer.