I always find it unfair when Linux distros are labelled poor because they don't support somebody's hardware, like their wireless card not working. The Linux developers would happily develop drivers for software if they were given the hardware specs to do so, but that isn't the case and drivers must be created with little help from the manufacturer.
In many cases the manufacturer would happily develop drivers if they could make a closed-source Linux driver without the exercise turning into a total buttfuckathon.
If everybody would get a raise significantly higher than the cost of living, things (produced by those employees) would become more expensive too, making the cost of living follow the increase. It is like saying 'everybody should be above average', no?
All basically true if the economy weren't growing. Which, you know, it is.
I can see where his thought processes are coming from, but I still think he lives in Computer Science Heaven, I'm afraid, where all hardware is mathematically perfect and I/O never happens (as it's not mathematically provable).
If by "him" you mean Andy Tanenbaum you probably ought to give him the benefit of the doubt, as his position is being represented by some random slashdot person. Maybe just email him.
But then again, as far as I could tell, that contest was never on AST's agenda anyway.
I'm pretty sure he has a blurb on his web page where he thanks Linus for making Linux, as people stopped asking him for stuff which didn't fit in Minix.
When p2p first took off file traders were enemies of the ISP, since they used vastly more resources than everyone else and paid the same amount. (in most places) Is the percentage of users who are doing heavy p2p now so high that they are the "mainstream"?
No, this is exactly what he wants. All this 'public lampooning' feeds the beast. There is no bad publicity for this guy.
Maybe not for him, personally, but he's sure making the anti-videogame people and their cause look very bad. That's why they are starting to back away from him publicly.
I love conspiracy math: Lets see, conservative estimate of 400 million printers in North America alone, and no method of tracking serial number to location or owner past the original purchase, assuming cash was not used. So, hmmmm a data base with 400 million records, tied to dubious information... yeah, that's useful, but on second thought, it would allow police to figure out if the printer that counterfit documents were created with was in North America or Europe... that would be helpful, but not really worth putting on the tin foil hats.
In other words: if you're the one in fifty who pays cash for their printer, you've earned your right to privacy. Cool.:/
Why should he hand over his title to some facist punk that will bank on his hard earned work. He's the brilliant guy that came up with this, he should run the company as he sees fits. Sometimes it's not about profit, but about ideals and vision.
Ownership and management authority are two entirely different things. If he hires a CEO, who says he needs to give any ownership of the company over to him? In fact he probably would give the CEO some stock, but that is absolutely not the same thing as selling out to a venture capitalist firm and having their management team come in.
It would be entirely reasonable for Bram to take the title of Chairman and create a board consisting of owners of the company, hire a CEO who seems to "get it", and focus more on the technology and what he's good at. It's not only reasonable, it's basically inevitable if the company is successful.
The usefulness of the comparison is, of course, to allow the reader to form a rational basis for the amount of risk, and thus form a rational opinion on what kind of response is appropriate.
Which it does not do in the slightest. There's a fallacy or two here I'll try to explain.
If you're not afraid to go out in traffic every day, you have no particular reason to hold a larger amount of irrational fear for something less likely to kill you
First, it's not an irrational fear. Second, a person does well to "fear" all the things that are likely to kill them, barring some situation like combat where there are so many threats that some must be discarded. It's a useful survival trait.
The notion you're advancing that the amount of "fear" (which isn't necessarily emotional fear at all but the dedication of thought and resources to dealing with a potential threat) we ought to allocate to a given theat ought to be proportional to the amount of perceived risk is not well thought out.
For us personally in our daily lives, dealing with a given threat will often entail making a single decision regardless of the seriousness of the threat. So there isn't going to be any scaling between the seriousness of the threat and the amount of resources needed to cope. It's just decision making.
For a society or government things get more complicated since we have so much trouble even quantifying risk associated with large groups. But with something like a pandemic we aren't talking about the same sort of risk as traffic accidents. With one sort of risk discussion will focus on incremental improvements to automobile safety, traffic patterns, and usage habits. The other sort of risk is something of a singularity: if the virus mutates the wrong way, a lot of people will get very sick and it'd be nice if we had some kind of way to treat them. You need to reduce the liklihood of it happening and prepare for if/when it does, drawing from a resource pool that frankly isn't zero-sum anyhow. A pat comparison in numbers between the two situations is really just nonsense.
And it happens so often. "So and so many people died on the streets last year, don't worry about the mere hundreds we're losing in Iraq." No reasoning, just a strange form of madness.
Now compare that to the number of car crash fatalities in the US last year
Why?
How is that a useful comparison at all?
You see this so much, when you are talking about so many different things. War casualties: "well sure 1200 died last year, but look at all the car accidents."
There's no reason here, it's just "well, that's a lot of human tradgedy, but look at how much worse it is on the roads!!!" Stupid nonsense which doesn't make any point at all.
How much news coverage do car crashes get in the national media?
If you read in the appropriate venue, car magazines or web pages, they get plenty of coverage.
One of the top ten methods of disinformation is to attack the messanger or the messangers credintials without reguard to the facts at hand.
The messanger [sic] in this case asserted his authority with his "I'm 99.9% certain" business and didn't give anything in the way of actual evidence. Attacking his authority was called for IMO, since, well, he doesn't have any. Or evidence.
Yeah, in Asia where their healthcare is crap or non-existant.
That's a good point, although it applies much more to Indonesia than to China. One of the things I worry about, though, is an outbreak where everyone gets sick all at once. American hospitals would run out of beds nice and quick, and treatment conditions would be not be great.
And maybe that 50% was older/unhealthy people.
The mortality rate for Spanish Flu was highest for people in the 25-34 age group. There are a number of theoretical explanations for that, but healthy people in this age bracket definitely aren't immortal.
So please, don't throw meaningless numbers around.
They aren't meaningless. They could use a little context, but they certainly aren't meaningless. "Mortality rate" still has a certain fundamental meaning, even in these enlightened postmodern times.
No. Amongst the 120 people who have gotten sick enough to be tested, 50% have died. Many more have had light infections.
You can't possibly know that, although you're right to point out a possible source of uncertainty. And it's not the only source of uncertainty: in the poorer areas especially, some will have become sick and even died without being properly diagnosed.
And in any case the point still stands: 50% mortality rate for those who are being treated. It's just dumb not to take that seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Rifles do it all the time. What's different for a canon (for whatever value of "canon" you happen to be talking about)?
In many cases the manufacturer would happily develop drivers if they could make a closed-source Linux driver without the exercise turning into a total buttfuckathon.
All basically true if the economy weren't growing. Which, you know, it is.
If by "him" you mean Andy Tanenbaum you probably ought to give him the benefit of the doubt, as his position is being represented by some random slashdot person. Maybe just email him.
Not at all. Remember, he specified the operating systems which are designed. Most simply accrete.
Come on, you can say it. The early Linuxes sucked.
There, that wasn't so hard.
I'm pretty sure he has a blurb on his web page where he thanks Linus for making Linux, as people stopped asking him for stuff which didn't fit in Minix.
When p2p first took off file traders were enemies of the ISP, since they used vastly more resources than everyone else and paid the same amount. (in most places) Is the percentage of users who are doing heavy p2p now so high that they are the "mainstream"?
It's not fighting, it's training. The missing element in so many software upgrades.
As long as it applies to everyone, including those who are somehow exempt from the glorious do-not-call list, it works for me.
I'm sure it won't work out that nicely, though.
That expression would have been more appropriate if, you know, you had done anything at all other than plug your own article.
Not a student of the labor movement and its history, eh?
Not only would it not make a sound, there would be no fossil record!
Um... hello, Mr. Coward? Doesn't that make it unenforceable? Yes, it does.
That's just straight-up weird. Totally unenforceable.
$3000? It's so remarkable that they haven't achieved economy of scale by making press releases for the last six years. What a mystery.
Maybe not for him, personally, but he's sure making the anti-videogame people and their cause look very bad. That's why they are starting to back away from him publicly.
Let him babble, works for me.
I'm sure the Florida authorities will get right on that. They're so reasonable about everything else...
In other words: if you're the one in fifty who pays cash for their printer, you've earned your right to privacy. Cool.
Ownership and management authority are two entirely different things. If he hires a CEO, who says he needs to give any ownership of the company over to him? In fact he probably would give the CEO some stock, but that is absolutely not the same thing as selling out to a venture capitalist firm and having their management team come in.
It would be entirely reasonable for Bram to take the title of Chairman and create a board consisting of owners of the company, hire a CEO who seems to "get it", and focus more on the technology and what he's good at. It's not only reasonable, it's basically inevitable if the company is successful.
Which it does not do in the slightest. There's a fallacy or two here I'll try to explain.
First, it's not an irrational fear. Second, a person does well to "fear" all the things that are likely to kill them, barring some situation like combat where there are so many threats that some must be discarded. It's a useful survival trait.
The notion you're advancing that the amount of "fear" (which isn't necessarily emotional fear at all but the dedication of thought and resources to dealing with a potential threat) we ought to allocate to a given theat ought to be proportional to the amount of perceived risk is not well thought out.
For us personally in our daily lives, dealing with a given threat will often entail making a single decision regardless of the seriousness of the threat. So there isn't going to be any scaling between the seriousness of the threat and the amount of resources needed to cope. It's just decision making.
For a society or government things get more complicated since we have so much trouble even quantifying risk associated with large groups. But with something like a pandemic we aren't talking about the same sort of risk as traffic accidents. With one sort of risk discussion will focus on incremental improvements to automobile safety, traffic patterns, and usage habits. The other sort of risk is something of a singularity: if the virus mutates the wrong way, a lot of people will get very sick and it'd be nice if we had some kind of way to treat them. You need to reduce the liklihood of it happening and prepare for if/when it does, drawing from a resource pool that frankly isn't zero-sum anyhow. A pat comparison in numbers between the two situations is really just nonsense.
And it happens so often. "So and so many people died on the streets last year, don't worry about the mere hundreds we're losing in Iraq." No reasoning, just a strange form of madness.
Why?
How is that a useful comparison at all?
You see this so much, when you are talking about so many different things. War casualties: "well sure 1200 died last year, but look at all the car accidents."
There's no reason here, it's just "well, that's a lot of human tradgedy, but look at how much worse it is on the roads!!!" Stupid nonsense which doesn't make any point at all.
If you read in the appropriate venue, car magazines or web pages, they get plenty of coverage.
The messanger [sic] in this case asserted his authority with his "I'm 99.9% certain" business and didn't give anything in the way of actual evidence. Attacking his authority was called for IMO, since, well, he doesn't have any. Or evidence.
That's a good point, although it applies much more to Indonesia than to China. One of the things I worry about, though, is an outbreak where everyone gets sick all at once. American hospitals would run out of beds nice and quick, and treatment conditions would be not be great.
The mortality rate for Spanish Flu was highest for people in the 25-34 age group. There are a number of theoretical explanations for that, but healthy people in this age bracket definitely aren't immortal.
They aren't meaningless. They could use a little context, but they certainly aren't meaningless. "Mortality rate" still has a certain fundamental meaning, even in these enlightened postmodern times.
You can't possibly know that, although you're right to point out a possible source of uncertainty. And it's not the only source of uncertainty: in the poorer areas especially, some will have become sick and even died without being properly diagnosed.
And in any case the point still stands: 50% mortality rate for those who are being treated. It's just dumb not to take that seriously.