And if 99% was good enough, you'd be missing a paycheck every two years.
Or getting an extra one.
Which is much more likely to happen due to the serious legal consequences for employers who fail to pay their W2 employees on time. Just the other day I was talking to a client manager in a big corp who told me how one of his employees took unpaid maternity leave and yet the paychecks kept coming for at least 4 months into her leave. Eventually she called up this manager and told him about and that she had spent most of it because she really needed it. HR stopped the checks and arranged a payment plan to take a little bit out of each paycheck once she came back to work - essentially a zero-interest loan. If she had not come back to work, they would have just written it off.
So yeah, 99% is probably good enough for paychecks even though the stakes are a lot higher than what is essentially an arbitrarily imposed tax anyway.
So why not just make them 1/5th of the size of regular keys and move them to the topmost part of the keyboard?
FYI - you've almost described a Happy Hacking Keyboard - only real difference is that those keys are now combo-key presses instead of distinct keys. I use happy hacking keyboards for all of my systems, they save so much deskspace, more room for clutter.
Check out the BER on any modern tape and compare it to the BER on any hard disk. For example - Current model Seagate Barracuda ES drives - 1x10^-15. Current model HP LTO drives 1x10^-17.
That's two orders of magnitude better. Furthermore, consumer grade disks which are significantly cheaper (and thus competitive with tape) tend to be an additional order of magnitude worse.
That part isn't covered by the patent. Just because people like you sloppily refer to Microsoft's patent as the ".NET patent
"The Patent" - sorry, but what are you talking about? I never refered to "a" or "the" patent. Essentially I referred to every patent MS has, and that's a lot since they have been #1 or #2 in terms of the number of patents filed for probably close to a decade now. Patents which are deliberately written to be as obtuse and indecipherable as possible so as to maximize their applicability and minimize the ability of others to glean any useful knowledge from them. If you really think that there is only one patent that MS thinks applies to dotnet, then I can't sell you a bridge because you've already bought it.
I'm guessing there's a lot of web 2.0 bullshit going on in the background. You can't escape it by disabling Javascript because that'll break most of the sites out there.
I use noscript and have only a handful of sites permanently enabled for javascript (in fact, I even removed most of the ones in the default whitelist that comes with it). And I'd say at least 80% of the websites I visit are perfectly functional without any javascript. Maybe not quite as "pretty" as they would be with javascript, but I've always been a function over form guy anyway.
Isn't it possible to imagine the point reached where gathering news stops being a profitable activity and therefore fewer and fewer people will be willing to do it, until, taken to extreme, it dies out altogether?
Sorry, I didn't spell out my point clearly and the examples aren't quite there yet either. Ultimately timely and in-depth news is valuable to some people. These people will pay pay for it, just as they pay for it now with those subscription sites where coverage of the same events is eventually available from alternate sources. The way it needs to work is to pay for the reporting before hand instead of making it up on the distribution back-end. Similar to the way media companies, news and others, provide advances to reporters and other creators. Pay them up front (or maybe partially up front with the rest in escrow) from subscription fees so that once the reporting is completed, the reporters are already fully compensated. At some point the market will reach a point where there isn't enough 'free' news and people will either decide they don't need news at all, or like those subscribers, will start paying subscriptions to fund ongoing reporting. Similar to the way people pay for subscriptions to cable-tv and magazines today.
There are a couple of major benefits from such a subscription or escrow approach - nearly zero financial risk, the money is already there for the taking, no questions about if sales will be high enough to be profitable, if there isn't enough money to be profitable the work just doesn't get done to start with. It is hard to over-state the value of that kind of risk reduction. Benefits for the consumers mean no middlemen deciding what news to run based on other considerations (like commercial sponsors and corporate parentage) - the money from subscribers is the only determinant of what should be covered. If they don't like the results from last time, there won't be a next time.
Which is what I said: they have claimed that they have patents.
I'm lazy. Microsoft has created C# and dotnet from scratch and indications are that they have a very strategic and aggressive system in place to protect their interfaces with patents. Their aggressive patent strategy (judging by the number of patents they have acquired/sought in recent years). How can you compare a patent Microsoft might have related to a kernel or compiler that was developed years after the creation of the kernel/compiler/whatever with following a standard to the T that Microsoft created all by themselves (as mono does)?
that's not relevant to Tomboy or other Linux C# applications because those don't use.NET.
They use the runtime, that's part of what Mono is.
RMS still writes code
Yeah, but who actually cares?
Anyone who is paying attention instead of looking for a way to turn "doesn't use a gui web browser" into "doesn't know anything about software or IP law." Give it up.
That's really the same argument that the rest of the MAFIAA makes - just replace "gathering news" with "creating content."
Niche news seems to be leading the way - look at Consumer Reports and to a somewhat lesser extent The Economist and the WSJ as providing high quality reporting via profitable for-fee websites.
Supercomputer performance is always measured in FLOPs per second.
Sorry, as a guy who has built supercomputers (not the piddly CoW type either) and now consults on them on a daily basis, I can tell you that's not true. Common, but not an "always" worthy of bolding - dhrystones and whetstones and their modern versions in SPECint, SPECfp and their _scale counterparts and mcalpin's STREAM benchmark which reports bytes/s in addition to flops. Not every FLOP is created equal which is why more sophisticated measurements exist.
In fact, it is precisely because of my experience that I recognized your error of using "gigaflop" in the first place and made fun of you for doing so, its an extremely common error. One that anyone who does work in the high performance computing arena would recognize off the bat.
While you don't need a humor transplant, you do need an augmentation.
I think it's not terrible that a government have a working list of its citizens, especially if they put vital medical and other data on it.
Then put it on a fob the citizen can wear around their neck, or clipped to their cell phone or in their pocket in the same place they would keep their ID card. No need to centralize.
Having an easy way to contact or locate any citizen is also important.
Then use a phone book and the citizens who don't want to be contacted can get unlisted numbers.
We're so accustomed in the West to distrust of government that we've lost sight of the basic truth: it matters who you get into government, and how willing they are to fight back corruption (entropy).
No, it really doesn't. Sooner or later everyone succumbs to the corruption of power. I don't want to have to put all of my trust in individuals - people lie, and politicians are especially good at fooling you. There isn't enough face time or research time in the world for even a significant minority of voters to really become familiar enough with any one politician, never mind all of them, to determine how corrupt they are. I want a system that severely restricts what the government can do, the less they can do the less people they can screw over.
We don't see these as visibly as "Big Brother" scenarios, so we don't talk about them.
Just because "big brother" is not the only risk of big government doesn't mean we should ignore it. For sure we worry about all those issues too, its foolish to claim that things like "bad wars" aren't also of significant concern. Especially after Bush's recent reign and the near constant criticism of it from day one.
Letting Google keep records on who we are may be more destructive.
Yes, Google is a significant threat too, and requires significant watchdogging. That doesn't mean take the watchdog off the government and set it on google, it means we worry about both.
Leftists claim government is capitalist and dominated by white men; Rightists claim government is socialist and against white men. It seems every group is projecting its fears outside of itself in order to claim innocence.
Actually, in your example, it seems like both sides are complaining government is too big and has too much influence over their own lives. I don't think that an argument for further increasing the scope and power of the government would go over so well from either of those simplified viewpoints.
And which software "is" patent bait? Microsoft has claimed patents on the Linux kernel, Linux compilers, and lots of other Linux tools.
No they haven't. They've waived their hands with nothing distinct. But C# and dotnet - they've filed patents on an disclosed those patents to ECMA when they submitted their stuff for standardization.
You wouldn't take advice on how to tune a high performance sports car from someone who rides around in a horse and buggy "for personal reasons".
Typically bad analogy, so completely far off the mark. RMS still writes code and he still pays close attention to IP law, its pretty much his full time job. So yeah, he is the one to be talking about how IP law applies to coding. And, FWIW, Seth Green completely disagrees with your horse and buggy/sports-car inferences.
If you google for it yourself, you can keep your beginners-level trainee deck swab geek card:-)
Wow. Two uber-confident and completely incorrect responses in a row now, both citing the exact same text that should have been made it completely clear that without an 'S' in GigaFLOP there is no seconds.
Yes, I am sure. You should have noted the lack of an 's' at the end of the word "gigaflop." I can't believe two responses have been modded up for such blatant illiteracy.
So, your claim is that you just randomly, without any intent to lend support for the "RMS is lame, ignore what he says" meme decided to reply to a "GNU/Linux" post by saying that he "ALSO says no to web browsing?" I got that right? Absolutely no intent to misrepresent for the purposes of arguing the man, not the message?
Well, maybe that is what you meant. But the moderators don't seem think so any more than I do.
And, no he absolutely does not "quite literally says no" - the link you posted did not have him saying "no" at all, just explaining that he uses another method on a system other than his computer.
If you do not like the mean bad old boss or I.T. department mendling on the systems you use at work then buy your own computer.
You lack the historical context. At the time the quote was written, and for many years afterwards, the MIT systems that RMS was most associated with ran completely "open" anyone could log in (initially from just the MIT campus and but ultimately from anywhere on the internet). Anyone and everyone had full admin privileges because the community was small enough that they did not need to rely on programmatic restrictions, all the users knew each other and they were of a high enough calibre not to randomly fuck things up.
Eventually that all changed as more and more people got on the internet and MIT had to lock down those systems because of abuse. But at the time that RMS wrote that quote, such abuse was nearly inconceivable. It was a sort of garden of eden and that quote reflects the innocence of that time and place.
Slashdot Mirror
And if 99% was good enough, you'd be missing a paycheck every two years.
Or getting an extra one.
Which is much more likely to happen due to the serious legal consequences for employers who fail to pay their W2 employees on time. Just the other day I was talking to a client manager in a big corp who told me how one of his employees took unpaid maternity leave and yet the paychecks kept coming for at least 4 months into her leave. Eventually she called up this manager and told him about and that she had spent most of it because she really needed it. HR stopped the checks and arranged a payment plan to take a little bit out of each paycheck once she came back to work - essentially a zero-interest loan. If she had not come back to work, they would have just written it off.
So yeah, 99% is probably good enough for paychecks even though the stakes are a lot higher than what is essentially an arbitrarily imposed tax anyway.
nd I or anyone else can find 10 articles on Stallman's attention whorism in a second.
And you wrote two of them.
So why not just make them 1/5th of the size of regular keys and move them to the topmost part of the keyboard?
FYI - you've almost described a Happy Hacking Keyboard - only real difference is that those keys are now combo-key presses instead of distinct keys. I use happy hacking keyboards for all of my systems, they save so much deskspace, more room for clutter.
Long term - my ass! Reliable - bah! Cheap? no.
Hard-drives are surprisingly superior.
Check out the BER on any modern tape and compare it to the BER on any hard disk.
For example -
Current model Seagate Barracuda ES drives - 1x10^-15.
Current model HP LTO drives 1x10^-17.
That's two orders of magnitude better. Furthermore, consumer grade disks which are significantly cheaper (and thus competitive with tape) tend to be an additional order of magnitude worse.
Sweet, more room for p0rn. I mean, more room to store my philosophical musings about the world we live in...
And the difference is what again?
One is for masturbation, the other is mental masturbation.
That part isn't covered by the patent. Just because people like you sloppily refer to Microsoft's patent as the ".NET patent
"The Patent" - sorry, but what are you talking about? I never refered to "a" or "the" patent. Essentially I referred to every patent MS has, and that's a lot since they have been #1 or #2 in terms of the number of patents filed for probably close to a decade now. Patents which are deliberately written to be as obtuse and indecipherable as possible so as to maximize their applicability and minimize the ability of others to glean any useful knowledge from them. If you really think that there is only one patent that MS thinks applies to dotnet, then I can't sell you a bridge because you've already bought it.
I'm guessing there's a lot of web 2.0 bullshit going on in the background. You can't escape it by disabling Javascript because that'll break most of the sites out there.
I use noscript and have only a handful of sites permanently enabled for javascript (in fact, I even removed most of the ones in the default whitelist that comes with it). And I'd say at least 80% of the websites I visit are perfectly functional without any javascript. Maybe not quite as "pretty" as they would be with javascript, but I've always been a function over form guy anyway.
Nothing, and it doesn't matter.
That's the beauty of getting paid up front before you publish.
Same with the gigaFLOP. Contrary to your original nit-pick, my nit-pick shows that a gigaflop must have a time component :-)
No more so than saying that "cars" or "oranges" or "dogs" or "meters" must have time component. A gigaflop is a unit unto itself.
Isn't it possible to imagine the point reached where gathering news stops being a profitable activity and therefore fewer and fewer people will be willing to do it, until, taken to extreme, it dies out altogether?
Sorry, I didn't spell out my point clearly and the examples aren't quite there yet either. Ultimately timely and in-depth news is valuable to some people. These people will pay pay for it, just as they pay for it now with those subscription sites where coverage of the same events is eventually available from alternate sources. The way it needs to work is to pay for the reporting before hand instead of making it up on the distribution back-end. Similar to the way media companies, news and others, provide advances to reporters and other creators. Pay them up front (or maybe partially up front with the rest in escrow) from subscription fees so that once the reporting is completed, the reporters are already fully compensated. At some point the market will reach a point where there isn't enough 'free' news and people will either decide they don't need news at all, or like those subscribers, will start paying subscriptions to fund ongoing reporting. Similar to the way people pay for subscriptions to cable-tv and magazines today.
There are a couple of major benefits from such a subscription or escrow approach - nearly zero financial risk, the money is already there for the taking, no questions about if sales will be high enough to be profitable, if there isn't enough money to be profitable the work just doesn't get done to start with. It is hard to over-state the value of that kind of risk reduction. Benefits for the consumers mean no middlemen deciding what news to run based on other considerations (like commercial sponsors and corporate parentage) - the money from subscribers is the only determinant of what should be covered. If they don't like the results from last time, there won't be a next time.
Which is what I said: they have claimed that they have patents.
I'm lazy.
Microsoft has created C# and dotnet from scratch and indications are that they have a very strategic and aggressive system in place to protect their interfaces with patents. Their aggressive patent strategy (judging by the number of patents they have acquired/sought in recent years). How can you compare a patent Microsoft might have related to a kernel or compiler that was developed years after the creation of the kernel/compiler/whatever with following a standard to the T that Microsoft created all by themselves (as mono does)?
that's not relevant to Tomboy or other Linux C# applications because those don't use .NET.
They use the runtime, that's part of what Mono is.
RMS still writes code
Yeah, but who actually cares?
Anyone who is paying attention instead of looking for a way to turn "doesn't use a gui web browser" into "doesn't know anything about software or IP law." Give it up.
That's really the same argument that the rest of the MAFIAA makes - just replace "gathering news" with "creating content."
Niche news seems to be leading the way - look at Consumer Reports and to a somewhat lesser extent The Economist and the WSJ as providing high quality reporting via profitable for-fee websites.
Supercomputer performance is always measured in FLOPs per second.
Sorry, as a guy who has built supercomputers (not the piddly CoW type either) and now consults on them on a daily basis, I can tell you that's not true. Common, but not an "always" worthy of bolding - dhrystones and whetstones and their modern versions in SPECint, SPECfp and their _scale counterparts and mcalpin's STREAM benchmark which reports bytes/s in addition to flops. Not every FLOP is created equal which is why more sophisticated measurements exist.
In fact, it is precisely because of my experience that I recognized your error of using "gigaflop" in the first place and made fun of you for doing so, its an extremely common error. One that anyone who does work in the high performance computing arena would recognize off the bat.
While you don't need a humor transplant, you do need an augmentation.
I think it's not terrible that a government have a working list of its citizens, especially if they put vital medical and other data on it.
Then put it on a fob the citizen can wear around their neck, or clipped to their cell phone or in their pocket in the same place they would keep their ID card. No need to centralize.
Having an easy way to contact or locate any citizen is also important.
Then use a phone book and the citizens who don't want to be contacted can get unlisted numbers.
We're so accustomed in the West to distrust of government that we've lost sight of the basic truth: it matters who you get into government, and how willing they are to fight back corruption (entropy).
No, it really doesn't. Sooner or later everyone succumbs to the corruption of power. I don't want to have to put all of my trust in individuals - people lie, and politicians are especially good at fooling you. There isn't enough face time or research time in the world for even a significant minority of voters to really become familiar enough with any one politician, never mind all of them, to determine how corrupt they are. I want a system that severely restricts what the government can do, the less they can do the less people they can screw over.
We don't see these as visibly as "Big Brother" scenarios, so we don't talk about them.
Just because "big brother" is not the only risk of big government doesn't mean we should ignore it. For sure we worry about all those issues too, its foolish to claim that things like "bad wars" aren't also of significant concern. Especially after Bush's recent reign and the near constant criticism of it from day one.
Letting Google keep records on who we are may be more destructive.
Yes, Google is a significant threat too, and requires significant watchdogging. That doesn't mean take the watchdog off the government and set it on google, it means we worry about both.
Leftists claim government is capitalist and dominated by white men; Rightists claim government is socialist and against white men. It seems every group is projecting its fears outside of itself in order to claim innocence.
Actually, in your example, it seems like both sides are complaining government is too big and has too much influence over their own lives. I don't think that an argument for further increasing the scope and power of the government would go over so well from either of those simplified viewpoints.
shouldn't it be Gigaflo then? seeing as the P stands for per?
No.
And which software "is" patent bait? Microsoft has claimed patents on the Linux kernel, Linux compilers, and lots of other Linux tools.
No they haven't. They've waived their hands with nothing distinct. But C# and dotnet - they've filed patents on an disclosed those patents to ECMA when they submitted their stuff for standardization.
You wouldn't take advice on how to tune a high performance sports car from someone who rides around in a horse and buggy "for personal reasons".
Typically bad analogy, so completely far off the mark. RMS still writes code and he still pays close attention to IP law, its pretty much his full time job. So yeah, he is the one to be talking about how IP law applies to coding. And, FWIW, Seth Green completely disagrees with your horse and buggy/sports-car inferences.
Hm, let me get this straight... A few posts above, you compare me to George Bush for pointing out the fact that I didn't actually attack/insult RMS.
Hey, you are the one who insisted on using the word "literally." Don't use it if you don't mean it.
If you google for it yourself, you can keep your beginners-level trainee deck swab geek card :-)
Wow. Two uber-confident and completely incorrect responses in a row now, both citing the exact same text that should have been made it completely clear that without an 'S' in GigaFLOP there is no seconds.
Yes, I am sure. You should have noted the lack of an 's' at the end of the word "gigaflop."
I can't believe two responses have been modded up for such blatant illiteracy.
So, your claim is that you just randomly, without any intent to lend support for the "RMS is lame, ignore what he says" meme decided to reply to a "GNU/Linux" post by saying that he
"ALSO says no to web browsing?" I got that right? Absolutely no intent to misrepresent for the purposes of arguing the man, not the message?
Well, maybe that is what you meant. But the moderators don't seem think so any more than I do.
And, no he absolutely does not "quite literally says no" - the link you posted did not have him saying "no" at all, just explaining that he uses another method on a system other than his computer.
Redefine a Gigaflop. Say 1 billion floating point instructions per century.
Gigaflop doesn't even have a time dimension.
If you do not like the mean bad old boss or I.T. department mendling on the systems you use at work then buy your own computer.
You lack the historical context. At the time the quote was written, and for many years afterwards, the MIT systems that RMS was most associated with ran completely "open" anyone could log in (initially from just the MIT campus and but ultimately from anywhere on the internet). Anyone and everyone had full admin privileges because the community was small enough that they did not need to rely on programmatic restrictions, all the users knew each other and they were of a high enough calibre not to randomly fuck things up.
Eventually that all changed as more and more people got on the internet and MIT had to lock down those systems because of abuse. But at the time that RMS wrote that quote, such abuse was nearly inconceivable. It was a sort of garden of eden and that quote reflects the innocence of that time and place.
Simple as that, and yet every year the world moves more towards RMS's vision and further from yours.
So, you still have to pay US taxes on them, at least for anything over that ~$85K ex-pat margin, right?
He calls WTF on you, so you call him George Bush?
Yeah, that's right. The OP claimed RMS has WMDs. That's exactly what I said!