Come back when you have thrown $37 billion ("scraps") at some school system
So: * Bill&Melinda tossed $37 billion in Windows licenses into schools * I did some minor contributions to the system of promoting programming in Poland's high schools
I admit that my contributions are close to 0; let's assume they're exactly 0 for the purposes of this post.
Still, I stand my claim that I have done more. Hell, Joe Sixpack or aunt May's hamster have done more. Neither me, Joe nor the hamster have pushed hapless kids into being prone to getting conned for the rest of their life.
Of course, this argument applies only to education. Feeding the poor has the arguable feel-good benefit. For, uhm, a day.
And Warrenn Buffett is certainly NOT donating 'scraps', he is donating 85% of his net worth, in the form of stock in the company that he spent the last 30 years building.
Buffett is giving that money to Gates' foundation, not to any good cause.
Putting any dough into research; something that can bring any lasting effects? NO WAY!
If your sole concern is getting as good PR as you want, you need to appease Joe Sixpacks. That is, throw the money to the poor who will use it for booze or, in the rare best case, at best eat it off.
Note that this kind of people actively do whatever they can to harm any kind of activity that can actually change the world. What they want, is conserving the current status quo. The scraps thrown to charity are just something to buy the hearts of the mindless crowd.
No, it's idiots from Hollywood stealing our word and our name for nothing but an attempt to squash yet another penny from Joe Sixpack and soccer moms. Bill's henchmen waging a rabid campaign against us don't help, too.
And remember: being a hacker doesn't mean you exploit security holes (for good or ill). It means that you employ a certain approach to programming/doing sysadmin tasks/solving physics problems/etc.
Just because a majority of the mindless part of the society fails to understand a word, the word doesn't change its meaning.
Yes, because all Mac users are genuises and all Windows users are idiots....stop with the fanboy attitude -- there are stupid people (in generous proportions) in both camps -- hey, Linux... stop smirking, you've got some too.
Being "not ready for desktop" means there is an entry barrier, and thus we at least get less idiots. And this is not something to shake a stick at.
EVERYONE should know not to run code you don't know is legitimate
Uhm, Xen (Linux code) or qemu/vmware?
There's a dingy little Windows app named "CursorXP" that allows you to have alpha-blended cursors and, as a side effect, makes cursors appear on screenshot (that's why I needed it). I used it once to make some documentation (and then left it running), however, when I needed to update the docs a year later, the box was already reinstalled. I re-downloaded the app, ran it first under vmware just due to my spinal reflexes, and guess what? The vmware virtual image got pwned. By an app from an unknown source I have tested before.
Hell, then a page of mine that uses all of: * bash * C * C++ * Perl * perhaps even Python or some such (hell, I don't look under the pants of programs I call) * sed * grep
And as far as I know, this is not a rare practice. If it's not a CPU-critical script, bash makes for good glue code. And you can't call it hard to maintain (at least until you look at sourceless configure scripts).
The problem is: most people on/. either know how to use Adblock (and thus don't see this kind of bullshit), or show ads themselves (being on the webmaster's side of the deal and thus being a part of the problem themselves).
For now, the "mere mortals" cope with the problem, just like they accept Windows and spyware, but with more than 33% of all http requests being relate to adverts, the situation just goes worse and worse.
Those who win: Google and advertisers. Those who lose: users and network providers.
The current state of net advertising is that someone else is paid for stealing your time and your bandwidth.
If it is a patent that hurts Microsoft, then it is good and that is how patents are supposed to work.
The reason why we cheer for some patents, is that it's good to see patent trolls themselves get hurt. In fact, this is the only way to fight -- it is them who get to buy laws, and without them getting ever hurt, our side simply has no leverage to persuade anyone who has any power.
Or, just get IPv6 to work. It's a panaceum for all NAT-related problems -- it fixes them by just removing the damn thing and restoring IP to work the way it was designed.
Having a dumb ISP is not an excuse as long as you have a public IPv4 address; googling for "6to4" will tell you what to. And if you're an ISP, slap a radvd on your network, please.
Hell, every transitioned user is a step towards getting rid of IPv4, and that's a noble deed.
What I mean is, IE crashes nearly as much even when given only more than two orders of magnitude less chances to crash. This means, in absolute numbers, Firefox crashes more, but these numbers are irrelevant. What counts, is the ratio between the use both browsers see and how often they do crash.
And, IE 7 has a yet another disqualifying problem: the OS it runs on:p
Same here. My usage is: * at home: 50% Firefox, 50% eLinks * at work: 99% Firefox, 1% MSIE Let's assume that the amount of browsing at home and at work is the same.
I would say that I witness Firefox crashes a tiny notch more often than IE ones, in absolute numbers.
Now, let's divide the absolute amount of crashes by the amount of use both browsers see. How do the numbers look now?
Uhm, "everything"? And BSD? And MIT? And X11? And LGPL? And a vast majority of free licenses in existence?
Among pieces of software that have significant use, are free according to the DFSG, and are not GPL compatible, I can name just openssl, old apache, core parts of TeX, and that's about it. (Before you correct me, read again the first clause of the previous sentence).
Well, not making their stuff intentionally GPL-incompatible would REALLY help a lot.
From what I hear around, most developers just look at Sun's licenses and decide they don't want to touch them with a 10-foot pole. And this is really a sad thing: things like Nexenta are nearly dead while a tiny move could turn them into all-out sharing of code between Linux and Solaris. But no, Sun's can't swallow its pride and make small concessions while entering a field where it's not them who are the current leaders.
Having Solaris as a yet another Debian arch would be just awesome. And there are people interested in doing the work.
The DPRC does consider Taiwan a rouge province, while Taiwan doesn't consider that to be the case.
In fact, it's the DPRC who's a rogue province there:p
We have a revolution where a government gets ousted by rebels once per like 1-2 years in the world, and in quite a bit of cases the rebels fail to grab control of the whole country. However, it's not every year when this happen in a billion+ country with nuclear weapons.
Perhaps some Linux users want software that installs and just works, without having to figure out crap about compiling versions, missing libraries, etc. Joe Sixpack don't care for Stallmanism, he just wants his software to work.
Yet, someone has to actually make the software work even if the system libraries change. That is, the distribution maintainers. Without the source, this is kind of impossible -- this is why Windows has to keep the binary compatibility all the way to Win1.0. (And yeah, they keep even the color of crash screens).
Also, if there is no third party who can check for your Joe Sixpack that the software in question is free of trojans of any kind, malicious programmers will exploit that and bundle all kinds of crapware.
Plus, without software freedoms -- "Stallmanism" as you call them, there is no way to fix any annoyances in the software. A nag screen? Do you see them in Free Software programs? If someone anything similar, it gets axed away by angry users in no time. Same applies to trivial bugs and enhancements -- if the original author doesn't get hit by a bug, he's unlikely to fix it. And porting to other platforms. And so on, so on.
For a Windows user, you provide the binary. For Linux/BSD people, you provide the source.
Quite simple for me. And, the results are pretty clear -- if you run that random gizmo you found somewhere, you're guaranteed to get pwned in no more than several of gizmos. And even the very OS keeps sending your private data everywhere (WGA anyone)? In the opposite corner, you have sources you can review. Of course, it's really unlikely you'll look inside, but in the case of problems, someone will. And, thanks to the licenses we demand, all the phoning-home code can be disabled.
And since having Free Software spyware would give you nothing but bad press, no one ever tries that.
Running unknown Windows binary blobs -> qemu[1], or you'll get pwned. Running unknown Linux binary blobs -> qemu, or you'll get pwned.
[1] Or vmware, if you somehow prefer them. At least, they don't have any business relationships. So, uhm, what's the difference?
And, as Google self-admittedly _does_ send home whatever data it can find about you, I'm not really rushing to install their binary on my box. Outside of a sandbox of some kind, at least.
Simply put, the French know far more about war than America. Take World War I, for example. France sustained over 1400000 dead citizens (both military and civilian). The US, on the other hand, suffered a mere 126000 or so. France suffered over ten times as many dead, for those of you who aren't good at math.
For those of you who aren't good at strategy, the more you know about war, the less men you lose.
Self awareness is a side effect of general intelligence. We can't make it yet, but when we can it will be useful.
Of course! The moment we can make general intelligence, it will be a big improvement, for any species. This whole article, for example, is a case of failing an intelligence check. Hint: it's not the robot who failed it.
And I don't want to have coworkers (or employees if I'll ever run a company) who would touch MySpace even with a 10-foot pole.
Come on, when I tried to take a look at MySpace, my eyes almost fell out. It was truly a traumatic experience. Please, don't even try to claim that an intelligent -- or even just sentient -- being would come anywhere near that site.
There may be intelligent people with a lack of good taste, but every page of ~10 I dared to look at on MySpace was beyond all reasonable limites.
Slashdot Mirror
Come back when you have thrown $37 billion ("scraps") at some school system
So:
* Bill&Melinda tossed $37 billion in Windows licenses into schools
* I did some minor contributions to the system of promoting programming in Poland's high schools
I admit that my contributions are close to 0; let's assume they're exactly 0 for the purposes of this post.
Still, I stand my claim that I have done more. Hell, Joe Sixpack or aunt May's hamster have done more. Neither me, Joe nor the hamster have pushed hapless kids into being prone to getting conned for the rest of their life.
Of course, this argument applies only to education. Feeding the poor has the arguable feel-good benefit. For, uhm, a day.
And Warrenn Buffett is certainly NOT donating 'scraps', he is donating 85% of his net worth, in the form of stock in the company that he spent the last 30 years building.
Buffett is giving that money to Gates' foundation, not to any good cause.
Putting any dough into research; something that can bring any lasting effects? NO WAY!
If your sole concern is getting as good PR as you want, you need to appease Joe Sixpacks. That is, throw the money to the poor who will use it for booze or, in the rare best case, at best eat it off.
Note that this kind of people actively do whatever they can to harm any kind of activity that can actually change the world. What they want, is conserving the current status quo. The scraps thrown to charity are just something to buy the hearts of the mindless crowd.
No, it's idiots from Hollywood stealing our word and our name for nothing but an attempt to squash yet another penny from Joe Sixpack and soccer moms.
Bill's henchmen waging a rabid campaign against us don't help, too.
And remember: being a hacker doesn't mean you exploit security holes (for good or ill). It means that you employ a certain approach to programming/doing sysadmin tasks/solving physics problems/etc.
Just because a majority of the mindless part of the society fails to understand a word, the word doesn't change its meaning.
Fraud? So you lost a lot of money due to this whole WinFS thing?
If you count the price of Windows licenses you had to re-purchase every single version, this does add up to a significant bit of cash.
Yes, because all Mac users are genuises and all Windows users are idiots. ...stop with the fanboy attitude -- there are stupid people (in generous proportions) in both camps -- hey, Linux... stop smirking, you've got some too.
Being "not ready for desktop" means there is an entry barrier, and thus we at least get less idiots. And this is not something to shake a stick at.
EVERYONE should know not to run code you don't know is legitimate
Uhm, Xen (Linux code) or qemu/vmware?
There's a dingy little Windows app named "CursorXP" that allows you to have alpha-blended cursors and, as a side effect, makes cursors appear on screenshot (that's why I needed it). I used it once to make some documentation (and then left it running), however, when I needed to update the docs a year later, the box was already reinstalled. I re-downloaded the app, ran it first under vmware just due to my spinal reflexes, and guess what? The vmware virtual image got pwned. By an app from an unknown source I have tested before.
Using too many languages is bad?
Hell, then a page of mine that uses all of:
* bash
* C
* C++
* Perl
* perhaps even Python or some such (hell, I don't look under the pants of programs I call)
* sed
* grep
And as far as I know, this is not a rare practice. If it's not a CPU-critical script, bash makes for good glue code. And you can't call it hard to maintain (at least until you look at sourceless configure scripts).
The problem is: most people on /. either know how to use Adblock (and thus don't see this kind of bullshit), or show ads themselves (being on the webmaster's side of the deal and thus being a part of the problem themselves).
For now, the "mere mortals" cope with the problem, just like they accept Windows and spyware, but with more than 33% of all http requests being relate to adverts, the situation just goes worse and worse.
Those who win: Google and advertisers.
Those who lose: users and network providers.
The current state of net advertising is that someone else is paid for stealing your time and your bandwidth.
$0.01 would be grossly outlandish, too.
If it is a patent that hurts Microsoft, then it is good and that is how patents are supposed to work.
The reason why we cheer for some patents, is that it's good to see patent trolls themselves get hurt. In fact, this is the only way to fight -- it is them who get to buy laws, and without them getting ever hurt, our side simply has no leverage to persuade anyone who has any power.
Or, just get IPv6 to work. It's a panaceum for all NAT-related problems -- it fixes them by just removing the damn thing and restoring IP to work the way it was designed.
Having a dumb ISP is not an excuse as long as you have a public IPv4 address; googling for "6to4" will tell you what to. And if you're an ISP, slap a radvd on your network, please.
Hell, every transitioned user is a step towards getting rid of IPv4, and that's a noble deed.
Speaking of Microsoft, I guess you made a typo. The word you need is asshats.
What I mean is, IE crashes nearly as much even when given only more than two orders of magnitude less chances to crash. This means, in absolute numbers, Firefox crashes more, but these numbers are irrelevant. What counts, is the ratio between the use both browsers see and how often they do crash.
:p
And, IE 7 has a yet another disqualifying problem: the OS it runs on
Dickhead.. Firefox crashes more than IE here..
Same here. My usage is:
* at home: 50% Firefox, 50% eLinks
* at work: 99% Firefox, 1% MSIE
Let's assume that the amount of browsing at home and at work is the same.
I would say that I witness Firefox crashes a tiny notch more often than IE ones, in absolute numbers.
Now, let's divide the absolute amount of crashes by the amount of use both browsers see. How do the numbers look now?
I see. That's pretty likely -- I haven't heard of many 1- or 2-year olds who are using computers.
Uhm, "everything"? And BSD? And MIT? And X11? And LGPL? And a vast majority of free licenses in existence?
Among pieces of software that have significant use, are free according to the DFSG, and are not GPL compatible, I can name just openssl, old apache, core parts of TeX, and that's about it. (Before you correct me, read again the first clause of the previous sentence).
Well, not making their stuff intentionally GPL-incompatible would REALLY help a lot.
From what I hear around, most developers just look at Sun's licenses and decide they don't want to touch them with a 10-foot pole. And this is really a sad thing: things like Nexenta are nearly dead while a tiny move could turn them into all-out sharing of code between Linux and Solaris. But no, Sun's can't swallow its pride and make small concessions while entering a field where it's not them who are the current leaders.
Having Solaris as a yet another Debian arch would be just awesome. And there are people interested in doing the work.
The DPRC does consider Taiwan a rouge province, while Taiwan doesn't consider that to be the case.
:p
In fact, it's the DPRC who's a rogue province there
We have a revolution where a government gets ousted by rebels once per like 1-2 years in the world, and in quite a bit of cases the rebels fail to grab control of the whole country. However, it's not every year when this happen in a billion+ country with nuclear weapons.
Perhaps some Linux users want software that installs and just works, without having to figure out crap about compiling versions, missing libraries, etc. Joe Sixpack don't care for Stallmanism, he just wants his software to work.
Yet, someone has to actually make the software work even if the system libraries change. That is, the distribution maintainers. Without the source, this is kind of impossible -- this is why Windows has to keep the binary compatibility all the way to Win1.0. (And yeah, they keep even the color of crash screens).
Also, if there is no third party who can check for your Joe Sixpack that the software in question is free of trojans of any kind, malicious programmers will exploit that and bundle all kinds of crapware.
Plus, without software freedoms -- "Stallmanism" as you call them, there is no way to fix any annoyances in the software. A nag screen? Do you see them in Free Software programs? If someone anything similar, it gets axed away by angry users in no time. Same applies to trivial bugs and enhancements -- if the original author doesn't get hit by a bug, he's unlikely to fix it. And porting to other platforms. And so on, so on.
Wrong.
For a Windows user, you provide the binary.
For Linux/BSD people, you provide the source.
Quite simple for me. And, the results are pretty clear -- if you run that random gizmo you found somewhere, you're guaranteed to get pwned in no more than several of gizmos. And even the very OS keeps sending your private data everywhere (WGA anyone)? In the opposite corner, you have sources you can review. Of course, it's really unlikely you'll look inside, but in the case of problems, someone will. And, thanks to the licenses we demand, all the phoning-home code can be disabled.
And since having Free Software spyware would give you nothing but bad press, no one ever tries that.
Not really.
Running unknown Windows binary blobs -> qemu[1], or you'll get pwned.
Running unknown Linux binary blobs -> qemu, or you'll get pwned.
[1] Or vmware, if you somehow prefer them. At least, they don't have any business relationships.
So, uhm, what's the difference?
And, as Google self-admittedly _does_ send home whatever data it can find about you, I'm not really rushing to install their binary on my box. Outside of a sandbox of some kind, at least.
By the way, where are those famous WMD Irak was supposed to produce en masse ?
In Russia.
Simply put, the French know far more about war than America. Take World War I, for example. France sustained over 1400000 dead citizens (both military and civilian). The US, on the other hand, suffered a mere 126000 or so. France suffered over ten times as many dead, for those of you who aren't good at math.
For those of you who aren't good at strategy, the more you know about war, the less men you lose.
Self awareness is a side effect of general intelligence. We can't make it yet, but when we can it will be useful.
Of course! The moment we can make general intelligence, it will be a big improvement, for any species.
This whole article, for example, is a case of failing an intelligence check.
Hint: it's not the robot who failed it.
And I don't want to have coworkers (or employees if I'll ever run a company) who would touch MySpace even with a 10-foot pole.
Come on, when I tried to take a look at MySpace, my eyes almost fell out. It was truly a traumatic experience. Please, don't even try to claim that an intelligent -- or even just sentient -- being would come anywhere near that site.
There may be intelligent people with a lack of good taste, but every page of ~10 I dared to look at on MySpace was beyond all reasonable limites.