I believe that some people are addicted to debt. When faced with two options, they will always pick the one that drives them deeper into debt. What can you do about it? Start a twelve step program, I suppose. And charge a boatload for each step. Be sure to provide a high-interest loan option to help those who really need the program pay for it!
That's not an unreasonable criticism, though I believe the fact that illegal drug use is, well, illegal comes into play. It's not an employer's job to police their employees, nor is it economically feasible. Singling out one particular crime, a victimless one for the most part, for active enforcement, but not others like prostitution, hiring an illegal alien for a maid, etc is at the very least inconsistent. It's one thing to fire an employee convicted of a crime outside of work and another to actively look for a violation.
Even the US government, the biggest FUD-spreader there is about illicit drug usage doesn't over-focus on drug testing. No drug test is required for a secret level clearance, but if the background check reveals any sort of felony conviction without extenuating circumstances that clearance will probably not be granted.
Because bug fixes and error reports are the surest way to improve a tool, even more so than financial compensation. But you can't do them if you aren't using the tool in the first place. Sounds like you've never used one yourself.
PS, give me a break. Most major Free software development work is done by people who are either paid directly (like the engineers are Redhat, IBM, Intel and HP just to name a handful of big name employers of Free software developers) or indirectly by people who benefit in other ways - like college students working on their CS degrees.
Every post you make just further demonstrates your ignorance. So what, you can state this as often as you like, it doesn't make it true. It's not my stating it that makes it true, it's your doing it that makes it true.
You had invested interest in the money being spent, you profitted from it directly. So, because I must have made a killing on my Y2K consulting, exactly why am I lying about the severity of the issue seven years later? I've got absolutely nothing to lose by telling your truth. I won't even suffer damage to my professional reputation by posting it on slashdot. Yet I must be lying to you and to myself because someone who does professional risk analysis can't possibly be rational.
Like I said previously your argument boils down to your ignorance of the facts must make the facts untrue. I'm in a much better position to the know the facts - you did non-critical grunt coding of Y2K fixes and you quote a low-grade wikipedia article like it was gospel, I speak from professional analysis and experience.
unsubstantiated claims. In fact ridiculous claims. You are talking about something you have no clue about. How do you compare economic loss from Katrina to the perceived economic loss from something like Y2K rollover with a straight face? When a business that is responsible for 20k-50k white-collar jobs, and hundreds of millions in yearly revenue goes bankrupt the effects on the local economy are more than negligible. When 5 such businesses go bankrupt, the effect starts to impact the entire country as the amount of newly unemployed people approaches 0.5% of the total. That would have been just the direct effect of the failure of the companies I worked for.
You are ignorant of the facts so you think other people must be too.
But you know what? You win. I don't have time to continue to roll around in the mud with you. Feel free to spout your ignorance to everyone you meet confident that you successfully wasted enough of my time.
It's simple, you are arguing about this as if you have the kind of total knowledge that supercede mine Lol. It's not AS IF, it IS. Every post you make just further demonstrates your ignorance.
you probably worked on one of those projects and felt that what you were doing was extremely important I did risk analysis for multiple clients and indeed, the work was critical to all of them. If they had not implemented the fixes, they would have ceased to exist as business entities, many of their customers would have been similarly hurt, and their customers' customers would have sustained losses too, right on down the line.
I am saying that on the global scale of things it was peanuts. Was Katrina and the aftermath peanuts? Was 9/11 and the aftermath peanuts? Had Y2K failures been universally left unfixed until afterwards the ripple effect would have been orders of magnitude larger than either of those cases. Productivity losses mean progress and development slow, meaning the loss of vast amounts of economic opportunity. The world economy is highly interconnected, you can't expect to just lose some of its most critical infrastructure and have no significant impact on the rest of the system.
Not the end of civilization as they wanted the world to believe. Over and over again with the hyperbole. Losing major parts of the infrastructure that civilization depends on wouldn't kill it, but it would have hurt it enormously in both short term obvious ways - like hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of people ending up unemployed because their companies went bankrupt and in long term non-obvious ways like slowed social development such that a family in the Philippine provinces who would not have been able to afford indoor plumbing for their house for another 5 years.
Yes, some of us are prepared to use the best tool for the job rather than blindly follow FOSS. And some of us are prepared to use a Free tool that gets the job done in order to encourage the developers to make it the best tool for the job.
One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 106 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 220 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. That was from TFA (not just the summary). I asked my calculator about that but it just got a headache. This is GREAT!
Finally a controversy about measuring disk space where someone claims that a megabyte is neither a power of two nor a power of ten. 220 bytes, who would have guessed?
The cost of 6M/hour to who? To the same people who incurred the costs of having it fixed.
Besides, those parallel system were not used at the end, it was after all a hysteria. You keep on referencing that wikipedia article, clearly that's the sum total of your knowledge on the topic. Why do you even bother with the charade?
if nobody wants something, why are they sat in a queue to torrent it? you dont get the basic point do you? if you want something enough to take the full version of it, it must be worth having, if its worth having, its worth compensating the maker for. Indeed, if it is worth queuing up in bittorrent it must be worth the effort. Since the effort is equivalent to about a penny, then that's what it is worth to the guy who queued it up. Offer the product for that same price and 'piracy' will disappear.
Most of the world didn't bother upgrading anything Circles and circles. MOST of the world wasn't and still isn't seriously automated. MOST of the 1st world was automated and did fix their problems ahead of time.
As if the world would collapse if that stock exchange closes down. Do you think that continually misrepresenting my point with your own hyperbole somehow makes your argument stronger?
Go back and read carefully - the cost of fixing Y2K ahead of time was orders of magnitude less than the cost of cleaning up after the fact would have been. Large stock exchanges stop working and the cost is at least $6M/hour, roughly $100M/day from London to Tokyo, or $2B+ per month and that's just the cost to the exchanges in lost transaction fees. Not the losses to companies that depend on them to do business which are probably orders of magnitude greater, nor the cost of fixing the problems ASAP. Don't even bother repeating your silly claim that if the computers stopped working, it could all be done by hand, no amount of people could scale to the required levels.
Putting an '=' sign between hysteria and idiocy? Well then, another good reason not to bother with a rational conversation. Keep right on squirming there, your cognitive dissonance at facing your own hypocrisy just gets more and more obvious. All your ignorant claims about Y2K were obliterated and the best you could do was fall back on taking mock offense at being called out on your own rudeness.
B.S. Saying that someone is being subjected to hysteria is not a personal attack. It's the exact same thing as calling someone an idiot, just a slightly more sophisticated vocabulary. Thus my point that vulgarity does not equal severity. Stay out of the kitchen next time.
Why would I want to talk to anyone who starts personal attacks? Again, do not start the personal attacks if you can't take them. Your claims that I was subject to mass hysteria are far more insulting then being called a boy. Vulgarity is not a measure of severity. Next time mind your manners if you expect others to do the same.
I think we are done here. Too many fallacies exception thrown. Can't take the heat huh? You might consider that your accusations of being part of mass hysteria are far more insulting than being called a boy.
All of a sudden it's Overrated... That's how we know it IS a hysteria. You've now moved into kook land. The proof that aliens have invaded the whitehouse is that nobody wants to talk about aliens in the whitehouse and when I talk about it, THREE people laughed at me. It's a vast conspiracy of anti-alien hysteria!
Of course you are going to get modded down here as overrated. If there is one general public website with the collective experience to know the true severity of Y2K, it's slashdot. Your opinion about the unimportance of Y2K risk mitigation is the actual "hysteria" - your opinion is what the common man on the street believes because he does not know any better. At least here on slashdot there were 3 people with mod points who did know better.
this is what mass hysteria does, it wants to make you believe such things. Sorry boy, but unlike you I am a professional who had been involved with Y2K issues long before there was anything like "mass hysteria." I speak from broad personal and industry knowledge about the severity of the Y2K risks.
I do not have the 'what would have been if only' machine here, such arguments don't do anything for me. You see, I do have that machine. Every financial system of even moderate size was afflicted with Y2K issues. Many critical control systems - manufacturing, public utilities, military, telecomm, etc were also vulnerable to Y2K. Within the community of computer risk experts there is no question as to the original severity of the Y2K problem.
Most problems with Y2K were most definitely not critical You are correct. MOST problems were not critical. That's because there were a very large number of problems. Just as MOST systems are not critical. But be assured, just about every critical system had Y2K risk exposure.
Even when MONEY is lost it is not critical and has nothing to do with civilization. You really don't have a clue how the modern world operates do you? Imagine most of the country's payroll systems being down for a month, and not just down but data corrupted and lost. All the people who live paycheck to paycheck would be screwed, the total cost to our economy of just that single class of failure would be in the low billions.
Then factor in a total halt to all the billions of dollars that trade hands each day as part of the normal course of business. Then you can start to factor in the systems that don't directly involve money - like shipping and routing, manufacturing, and safety critical systems like power generation and dam flood controls. Just a handful of failures out of the thousands of those last type would do significant damage.
It would not have been a civilization ending event, but then again that's your hyperbole. However, it would have been orders of magnitude more costly to clean-up afterwards than it was to fix ahead of time.
The hysteria was unjustified and plenty of money were spent needlessly and quite a few fraudsters and politicians (same thing really) benefitted. You argument boils down to, "I'm damn ignorant of the scope of the Y2K risks and nothing happened so since I'm damn ignorant of the global warming risks nothing is going to happen either." You might be right about the later, but only out of sheer luck.
Think: I am not necessarily saying Y2K was not a problem in some cases, but it wouldn't kill our civilization even if multiple bugs would have surfaced after the year 2000. Again, the Y2K problem was real and significant. Money was not made from thin air, nor was it spent on thin air.
Almost every critical and semi-critical system was vulnerable to Y2K problems. It may not have "killed our civilization" if nothing had been done, but I am confident that we would have seen a significant drag our civilization, orders of magnitude larger than the cost of the pre-emptive fixes.
So, again I say that your comparison only benefits the counter to your argument - if Global Warming is like Y2K then the cost of pre-emptive fixes will be significantly less expensive than worrying about the problem after it is too late.
Global warming is a hysteria similar to the Y2K hysteria, it is propaganda that is created for the same reason: money. How much money was made on the believe of the world that the civilization will be destroyed because in the 2000 due to the computer bugs? If your goal is to refute the concept of global warming you may have possibly picked the absolute worst possible example. The reason Y2K was a fizzle and not a bang is precisely because all of that money was spent on work to retrofit the world's computer systems.
The professional community had been worrying about and working on fixes for Y2K for more than a decade prior. It was only as the deadline approached that the general public got a hold of the issue. Of course the companies that had procrastinated until the last minute were forced to pay outrageous sums of money to get their systems fixed - the engineering adage of "Fast, Good, Cheap - pick any two" was in full force and "fast" was a requirement.
Who has IBM gone after without provocation? Everybody?
IBM makes more than $2B of revenue per year from patent licensing. It's such a burden on the industry that it is commonly referred to as "The IBM Tax."
Wouldn't Judges be the CPUs, since (to stretch the analogy to within a nanometer of the breaking point) they "compute" the laws? Not really. Judges are swayed by lawyers' arguments and are themselves almost always lawyers too. So that out of spec lawyer, like Jack Thompson, who computs 1+1=i feeds that result into the judge cpu who may discard it as bad input, or depending on how far he is from spec, proceed to use that as part of his "computations" too.
Legislators and lawyers are the coders. The problem is that not only are they the coders they are the CPUs too. So the law "runs" one way according to one lawyer and "runs" a different way according to a different lawyer.
To stretch the analogy to the breaking point, it is as if each individual x86 CPU manufactured by Intel had a random distribution of computation errors such that 1+1 usually equaled something close 2, but occasionally you got one so far out of spec that it would compute 1+1 = i.
The point is not whether they have high R&D costs, the point is that in the debate, they present their total costs as being justification for patent extensions and other games. Thus their position, based on their own misrepresentation does not deserve sympathy.
The argument "used all the time around here" is not:
Drug companies don't deserve patents/as-lengthy-patents because they spend more on advertising than research." Instead it is a lot more like:
Drug companies claim they need lengthy patent protection because their R&D is so expensive. Except it turns out that the they spend substantially more on advertising than they do on R&D, so their claim deserves no sympathy.
In a world in which people are suing people left and right for patent infringement, IBM is mostly using their portfolio defensively. Sorry to be so blunt, but that's just plain ignorant.
Maybe back in the early 80s that was true. But since then, under the guidance of Marshall Phelps, IBM turned their patent portfolio into a $2B+/yr revenue stream. IBM's patent licensing has become so onerous that it is often referred to as the "IBM Tax."
And just so you know what to expect in the future - and maybe who to blame for the Novell patent licensing fiasco - Marshall Phelps joined Microsoft a few years back, explicitly to do for MS what he did for IBM.
Amazing how folks' minds go to Paris. I would argue her thinking is not restricted at all. This does not translate into "intelligent". Yet she is incredibly successful. Her goal is to be famous, nothing more than that. There are plenty of extremely wealthy people who would like to be famous but haven't achieved the level of fame she has (bet you can't even name one such person, see?) Yet here we are talking about her on website which wouldn't normally even acknowledge her existence.
Certainly this latest bruhaha with her arrest/sentencing is giving her fame beyond anything that money can normally buy. Can we even be sure that it wasn't all a stunt anyway - 45 days in a minimum security celebrity jail in exchange for a week or two of constant news coverage is a good trade off when your goal is simply to be famous, although you might consider it to be "thinking inside the box" at least for 45 days...
Slashdot Mirror
Be sure to provide a high-interest loan option to help those who really need the program pay for it!
Even the US government, the biggest FUD-spreader there is about illicit drug usage doesn't over-focus on drug testing. No drug test is required for a secret level clearance, but if the background check reveals any sort of felony conviction without extenuating circumstances that clearance will probably not be granted.
Because bug fixes and error reports are the surest way to improve a tool, even more so than financial compensation. But you can't do them if you aren't using the tool in the first place. Sounds like you've never used one yourself.
PS, give me a break. Most major Free software development work is done by people who are either paid directly (like the engineers are Redhat, IBM, Intel and HP just to name a handful of big name employers of Free software developers) or indirectly by people who benefit in other ways - like college students working on their CS degrees.
The starving Free software developer is a myth.
Like I said previously your argument boils down to your ignorance of the facts must make the facts untrue. I'm in a much better position to the know the facts - you did non-critical grunt coding of Y2K fixes and you quote a low-grade wikipedia article like it was gospel, I speak from professional analysis and experience. unsubstantiated claims. In fact ridiculous claims. You are talking about something you have no clue about. How do you compare economic loss from Katrina to the perceived economic loss from something like Y2K rollover with a straight face? When a business that is responsible for 20k-50k white-collar jobs, and hundreds of millions in yearly revenue goes bankrupt the effects on the local economy are more than negligible. When 5 such businesses go bankrupt, the effect starts to impact the entire country as the amount of newly unemployed people approaches 0.5% of the total. That would have been just the direct effect of the failure of the companies I worked for.
You are ignorant of the facts so you think other people must be too.
But you know what? You win. I don't have time to continue to roll around in the mud with you. Feel free to spout your ignorance to everyone you meet confident that you successfully wasted enough of my time.
Finally a controversy about measuring disk space where someone claims that a megabyte is neither a power of two nor a power of ten. 220 bytes, who would have guessed?
Go back and read carefully - the cost of fixing Y2K ahead of time was orders of magnitude less than the cost of cleaning up after the fact would have been. Large stock exchanges stop working and the cost is at least $6M/hour, roughly $100M/day from London to Tokyo, or $2B+ per month and that's just the cost to the exchanges in lost transaction fees. Not the losses to companies that depend on them to do business which are probably orders of magnitude greater, nor the cost of fixing the problems ASAP. Don't even bother repeating your silly claim that if the computers stopped working, it could all be done by hand, no amount of people could scale to the required levels.
Well then, another good reason not to bother with a rational conversation. Keep right on squirming there, your cognitive dissonance at facing your own hypocrisy just gets more and more obvious. All your ignorant claims about Y2K were obliterated and the best you could do was fall back on taking mock offense at being called out on your own rudeness.
Of course you are going to get modded down here as overrated. If there is one general public website with the collective experience to know the true severity of Y2K, it's slashdot. Your opinion about the unimportance of Y2K risk mitigation is the actual "hysteria" - your opinion is what the common man on the street believes because he does not know any better. At least here on slashdot there were 3 people with mod points who did know better.
Then factor in a total halt to all the billions of dollars that trade hands each day as part of the normal course of business. Then you can start to factor in the systems that don't directly involve money - like shipping and routing, manufacturing, and safety critical systems like power generation and dam flood controls. Just a handful of failures out of the thousands of those last type would do significant damage.
It would not have been a civilization ending event, but then again that's your hyperbole. However, it would have been orders of magnitude more costly to clean-up afterwards than it was to fix ahead of time. The hysteria was unjustified and plenty of money were spent needlessly and quite a few fraudsters and politicians (same thing really) benefitted. You argument boils down to, "I'm damn ignorant of the scope of the Y2K risks and nothing happened so since I'm damn ignorant of the global warming risks nothing is going to happen either." You might be right about the later, but only out of sheer luck.
Almost every critical and semi-critical system was vulnerable to Y2K problems. It may not have "killed our civilization" if nothing had been done, but I am confident that we would have seen a significant drag our civilization, orders of magnitude larger than the cost of the pre-emptive fixes.
So, again I say that your comparison only benefits the counter to your argument - if Global Warming is like Y2K then the cost of pre-emptive fixes will be significantly less expensive than worrying about the problem after it is too late.
The professional community had been worrying about and working on fixes for Y2K for more than a decade prior. It was only as the deadline approached that the general public got a hold of the issue. Of course the companies that had procrastinated until the last minute were forced to pay outrageous sums of money to get their systems fixed - the engineering adage of "Fast, Good, Cheap - pick any two" was in full force and "fast" was a requirement.
IBM makes more than $2B of revenue per year from patent licensing.
It's such a burden on the industry that it is commonly referred to as "The IBM Tax."
To stretch the analogy to the breaking point, it is as if each individual x86 CPU manufactured by Intel had a random distribution of computation errors such that 1+1 usually equaled something close 2, but occasionally you got one so far out of spec that it would compute 1+1 = i.
The point is not whether they have high R&D costs, the point is that in the debate, they present their total costs as being justification for patent extensions and other games. Thus their position, based on their own misrepresentation does not deserve sympathy.
The argument "used all the time around here" is not: Drug companies don't deserve patents/as-lengthy-patents because they spend more on advertising than research." Instead it is a lot more like: Drug companies claim they need lengthy patent protection because their R&D is so expensive. Except it turns out that the they spend substantially more on advertising than they do on R&D, so their claim deserves no sympathy.
Maybe back in the early 80s that was true. But since then, under the guidance of Marshall Phelps, IBM turned their patent portfolio into a $2B+/yr revenue stream. IBM's patent licensing has become so onerous that it is often referred to as the "IBM Tax."
And just so you know what to expect in the future - and maybe who to blame for the Novell patent licensing fiasco - Marshall Phelps joined Microsoft a few years back, explicitly to do for MS what he did for IBM.
Certainly this latest bruhaha with her arrest/sentencing is giving her fame beyond anything that money can normally buy. Can we even be sure that it wasn't all a stunt anyway - 45 days in a minimum security celebrity jail in exchange for a week or two of constant news coverage is a good trade off when your goal is simply to be famous, although you might consider it to be "thinking inside the box" at least for 45 days...