This is an excellent idea, though I'm not the one developing this codebase. The developers are very prone to the "if it's java, I can do anything in java and any problems are the sysadmin's job" mentality. I think they actually believe the whole "write once, run anywhere" hype. Frustrating, but I appreciate this suggestion.
Well, direct accountability for bugs means nothing to me in this case. I can't argue that Java doesn't run better on Sun's platform, but I can guarantee that I'm reluctant to be pushed around like that. That kind of behavior is why I started using linux so long ago in the first place. My benches have shown Linux being considerably faster for what we're doing, and Solaris has been a giant pain in the ass to run. I have to install about 18 different gnu packages to get any kind of useful behavior out of a solaris machine. Frustrating.
I'm beginning to come to a similar conclusion. The reponses I've gotten from people when I ask this question have generally been along the lines of "You're trying to do what? The problem is at least partially our codebase (the developers build and test on NT machines, and are skeptical when I report linux-specific issues (like Thread.interrupt() being dangerous), but also with pthread. Lower load helps, as (I'm hoping) will a move to a glibc 2.2 base.
Music labels already rip off artists True, the system is broken, but it at least gives some artists some money. It's better than nothing, and, until you come up with a better system, it's the only game in town.
Ok, how about this: A friend of mine has a CD that I like. I copy that CD, and send a $10 money order to the artist's contact address. Enclosed with the money order is a note thanking them for making music that I like, and asking that they continue to do so.
The problem, obviously, is that I'm not paying the owner of the music. That's what frustrates me, even though I don't possess a single copy of any Itellectual property (that I know of) that I havn't paid for. I think Napster is a crock: As a business, it's a late-in-the-game tack-on to the filesharing software that Fanning wrote for fun. Napster's service is a wonderful thing, and has considerably greater benefit for every entity involved with music than the current system, with the notable exception of the distribution monopolists that extort ownership from the content creators.
And that's the important point. You bought that song. You paid for it. If the media on which it was stored disintegrates, it's within your rights to replace your copy. I'll be good godddamned if I'm going to pay $15-$20 for a bit of plastic, people. I pay that money for the music. The music is what's valuable to me, and the media on which it's written plays exactly the same role as the frame around the Boccioni print in my living room.
The division between physical copyright laws and intellectual copyright laws, is then a false dichotomy.
The difference is that physical property is inherently scarce, and intellectual property is not: Only one person can own a physical resource (land, car, pencil sharpener), thereby mkaing any other's use of it a necessary decrease in the value held by the original owner. Intellectual property just isn't scarce in this way. My creting and owning a copy of a digital work that you hold does _nothing_ to decrease the value you _actually_ hold; At most it decreases a _possible_ value in the form of a potential sale. These are _not_ the same kind of value.
I was once involved in a game of gnomic that will never end. One of the players managed to make a move such that he became the only player who was allowed to make moves, but at the same time rendered himself unable to move. All 20 or so players are still playing, since there's no way to end it (the initial timeout provisions had been somehow warped, IIRC). Anyway, it's a great game.
First off, I see no alternative suggestion here. What is your solution?
Beyond that, it's not the language that's to blame. I'm running an mta and nameserver that's guaranteed to have no root-level compromises, and (as far as I know) has never encountered a buffer overflow. You know why? Sound design.
qmail and djbdns are proof that the language is not to blame.
I disagree: Slashdot doesn't own any cable, and nobody pays physical network access fees to Andover. Slashdot may be inbred and hostile to outsiders, but that doesn't make is a "walled garden";)
It's not an issue of Right vs. Left, at least not for me. It's an issue of personal social freedom. The econompics of the right make a lot of sense, and would be generally beneficial to the hacker mentality, I think. It's therefore truly sad that the Republican party has allowed itself to be so poisonously infested by the moralisting christian right. I can't bring myself to vote for a candidate who is the favored man of somehing so anti-freedom as the Christian Coalition or the NRLF, regardless of how much better their economic policies might be.
I've been "speaking with my dollars" for years, and it's done this much good: None.
Think about how it looks from the manufacturers' perspective. It's a null event. They would have to infer, from all the other data they collect, that you would have made the purchase if not for this one feature. Think about how unlikely they are to make that connection. Unless you explicitely state to that manufacturer that you are not purchasing their product because of this feature, you have no chance of them noticing your claim. If, on the other hand, you DO write a Letter, then they get to handily ignore you, because they've got no reason to believe that you didn't just fire off 15 letters to 15 manufacturers with no intent of ever making a purchase. Call me cynical, but I can't think of any way to win in a situation like this. There is no mechanism outside of the lawsuit to communicate consumer displeasure to a large corporation.
Is it me, or is the CONSTANT use of CAPS hugely out of line with the value of the discourse? Maybe I've just trained myself to hate this writing style, but I found it very very hard to take the comments seriously with this kind of RIDICULOUS compositional STYLE.
Absolutely:) I've had 2.4 in pseudo-production since -test11 for the context switching time improvements and the multithreaded tcp stack. For reference, I posted an Ask Slashdot a few weeks ago about native threading linux JDKs, and after deciding on the sun 1.3 native, I found that our application (_many_ java threads, all doing _lots_ of network IO) was close to useless on 2.2. vmstat would show 5/95 percent user/system cpu usage... Yes, that much time switching between threads. 2.4 is more like 95/5, as it should be:) I'm glad that it's out so that the little bugs can really be squashed.
I just realized that when the 2.2.0 release happened, the job I was at was forced to roll it into production for the memory management improvements (what a nightmare _that_ was, having 2.2.0 in production;) Seems like every time a new kernel is released, I'm too busy working to celebrate.
For the sake of authors, publishers, readers and Amazon, a compromise must be found that will not discourage writers from writing or consumers from buying new books.
How about stopping the ridiculous practice of releasing only hardcover for a year or more before the title is available in paperback? Speaking only for myself, I would buy about thrice as many new books if they were available for 1/3rd the price. The way I see it, if I can get that price by buying used on amazon, that's great. If the publishers want my business, perhaps they should adjust their distribution practices in order to get it.
One thing to make sure you've got overed before you take the interim position: You must have a way to either force their hand in hiring after a specified (hopefully by you;) timeframe, or be willing to walk out the door. If my experience is any indication, things will go like this:
You take the position on the understanding that it's temporary.
They talk about how the process of finding someone to fill the position permanently is going.
You deal with twice the work for a while, and get frustrated. You demand they hire someone right away.
They can't or won't hire someone to fill the top job, but they can or will hire someone to fill your oldjob, just until someone to fill the top job can be located.
A year later, you're either in charge of the department, or you've quit.
I'm not attributing any malice to your HR department, but that's how this will turn out if you're not very careful about making absolutely sure that your return path to the job you like is clear. Don't ever accept their word that it'll all work out ok: Their job is not to make you happy.
That's a good question. You should ask a democrat.
The problem is that the Republican party is not only Politically Republican (less taxes, privatization, etc.) but also Socially Conservative (maintain current behaviors). A Republican system is dynamic. With 50 states, you can have 50 different policies on the same issue. This is directly counter to the core conservative concern of maintaining things as they are.
That said, it's not the Republicans that want to maintain control: It's the US Government(tm), a structure that supercedes either party. The Republicans just tend to be more hawkish, and less shy of enforcement legislation.
Until recently, I had quit a bit of faith in the supreme court's record of shooting down blatantly unconstitutional laws (as is their job, excellently demonstrated with the CDA a few years ago). After the recent election debacle, my faith in the institution is shaken to the point that I know the Justice's names. Before, I had some (justified) faith in the Court. Now I'm scared of Scalia.
Will they shoot something like this down? They should, and I hope they will. Then again, with more conservative (read: law and order, damnit) Justices on the bench, who knows?
Indeed, I see your point. One of the main issues is that of access, though. People don't listen to webcasts when driving to the grocery store, they listen to the radio. etc
The other huge issue is one of public property. The FCC regulates the em band, but the broadcasting associations own it. This is a frustrating thing. There is no technical reason (signal interferance, etc.) for these stations to be prohibited, it's simply a regulatory issue: They would compete with commercial radio stations, and commercial radio stations don't wan't competition.
These people don't want to broadcast globally, they want to broadcast locally. If you can capture a million listeners over the entire world that's great, but how does that help your goal of having a local broadcast of PTA meetings?
The target audience isn't people sitting at their desks, connected to the internet. It's people listening to the radio. There are many more of the latter in any given geographical area, and saturation is important here.
Webcasts are great. They really are an amazing thing, and a vastly useful tool. They won't do what a lowpower community broadcast will, though.
Development won't grind to a halt, everyone who develops will just become exposed to litigation. It's a pretty good bet that the only ones that would actually end up in court would be the ones that were ctitical of or competing with BT. Draconian laws/regulation and capricious enforcement is, in my opinion, the social policy issue right now, and this is a great example why. It's a very clear case of "Do what you want, just stay out of our way."
One of the reasons fandom.com was founded was as a way for fansites to band together, to share resources to fight off corporate bullies.
I think you're missing something pretty important here: Fandom.com was founded in order to profit from helping fansites band together, under the assumption that they needed to do so in order to remain active.
Fandom.com is a business, not a charity. They are in it to make a profit for their investors, not to make sure that Fandom survives (the latter is a path to the former, that's all).
Slashdot Mirror
This is an excellent idea, though I'm not the one developing this codebase. The developers are very prone to the "if it's java, I can do anything in java and any problems are the sysadmin's job" mentality. I think they actually believe the whole "write once, run anywhere" hype. Frustrating, but I appreciate this suggestion.
Well, direct accountability for bugs means nothing to me in this case. I can't argue that Java doesn't run better on Sun's platform, but I can guarantee that I'm reluctant to be pushed around like that. That kind of behavior is why I started using linux so long ago in the first place. My benches have shown Linux being considerably faster for what we're doing, and Solaris has been a giant pain in the ass to run. I have to install about 18 different gnu packages to get any kind of useful behavior out of a solaris machine. Frustrating.
I will do so. I'm currently juggling 4 different SDKs for testing, but abandoned blackdown long ago. It won't be hard to start pounding on it again.
I'm beginning to come to a similar conclusion. The reponses I've gotten from people when I ask this question have generally been along the lines of "You're trying to do what? The problem is at least partially our codebase (the developers build and test on NT machines, and are skeptical when I report linux-specific issues (like Thread.interrupt() being dangerous), but also with pthread. Lower load helps, as (I'm hoping) will a move to a glibc 2.2 base.
The kernel traffic editions since the release of 2.4.0. It's talked about as 'filesystem corruption', and was tracked to the VM (IIRC).
Music labels already rip off artists
True, the system is broken, but it at least gives some artists some money. It's better than nothing, and, until you come up with a better system, it's the only game in town.
Ok, how about this: A friend of mine has a CD that I like. I copy that CD, and send a $10 money order to the artist's contact address. Enclosed with the money order is a note thanking them for making music that I like, and asking that they continue to do so.
The problem, obviously, is that I'm not paying the owner of the music. That's what frustrates me, even though I don't possess a single copy of any Itellectual property (that I know of) that I havn't paid for. I think Napster is a crock: As a business, it's a late-in-the-game tack-on to the filesharing software that Fanning wrote for fun. Napster's service is a wonderful thing, and has considerably greater benefit for every entity involved with music than the current system, with the notable exception of the distribution monopolists that extort ownership from the content creators.
Excuse the ramble, by the way.
I DO have that song on vinyl
And that's the important point. You bought that song. You paid for it. If the media on which it was stored disintegrates, it's within your rights to replace your copy. I'll be good godddamned if I'm going to pay $15-$20 for a bit of plastic, people. I pay that money for the music. The music is what's valuable to me, and the media on which it's written plays exactly the same role as the frame around the Boccioni print in my living room.
Well, 2.4.2 fixes the ext2 filesystem corruption problem. Lots of people run ext2 :)
The division between physical copyright laws and intellectual copyright laws, is then a false dichotomy.
The difference is that physical property is inherently scarce, and intellectual property is not: Only one person can own a physical resource (land, car, pencil sharpener), thereby mkaing any other's use of it a necessary decrease in the value held by the original owner. Intellectual property just isn't scarce in this way. My creting and owning a copy of a digital work that you hold does _nothing_ to decrease the value you _actually_ hold; At most it decreases a _possible_ value in the form of a potential sale. These are _not_ the same kind of value.
I was once involved in a game of gnomic that will never end. One of the players managed to make a move such that he became the only player who was allowed to make moves, but at the same time rendered himself unable to move. All 20 or so players are still playing, since there's no way to end it (the initial timeout provisions had been somehow warped, IIRC). Anyway, it's a great game.
Beyond that, it's not the language that's to blame. I'm running an mta and nameserver that's guaranteed to have no root-level compromises, and (as far as I know) has never encountered a buffer overflow. You know why? Sound design.
qmail and djbdns are proof that the language is not to blame.
I disagree: Slashdot doesn't own any cable, and nobody pays physical network access fees to Andover. Slashdot may be inbred and hostile to outsiders, but that doesn't make is a "walled garden" ;)
It's not an issue of Right vs. Left, at least not for me. It's an issue of personal social freedom. The econompics of the right make a lot of sense, and would be generally beneficial to the hacker mentality, I think. It's therefore truly sad that the Republican party has allowed itself to be so poisonously infested by the moralisting christian right. I can't bring myself to vote for a candidate who is the favored man of somehing so anti-freedom as the Christian Coalition or the NRLF, regardless of how much better their economic policies might be.
I've been "speaking with my dollars" for years, and it's done this much good: None.
Think about how it looks from the manufacturers' perspective. It's a null event. They would have to infer, from all the other data they collect, that you would have made the purchase if not for this one feature. Think about how unlikely they are to make that connection. Unless you explicitely state to that manufacturer that you are not purchasing their product because of this feature, you have no chance of them noticing your claim. If, on the other hand, you DO write a Letter, then they get to handily ignore you, because they've got no reason to believe that you didn't just fire off 15 letters to 15 manufacturers with no intent of ever making a purchase. Call me cynical, but I can't think of any way to win in a situation like this. There is no mechanism outside of the lawsuit to communicate consumer displeasure to a large corporation.Is it me, or is the CONSTANT use of CAPS hugely out of line with the value of the discourse? Maybe I've just trained myself to hate this writing style, but I found it very very hard to take the comments seriously with this kind of RIDICULOUS compositional STYLE.
Shrug.
Absolutely :) I've had 2.4 in pseudo-production since -test11 for the context switching time improvements and the multithreaded tcp stack. For reference, I posted an Ask Slashdot a few weeks ago about native threading linux JDKs, and after deciding on the sun 1.3 native, I found that our application (_many_ java threads, all doing _lots_ of network IO) was close to useless on 2.2. vmstat would show 5/95 percent user/system cpu usage... Yes, that much time switching between threads. 2.4 is more like 95/5, as it should be :) I'm glad that it's out so that the little bugs can really be squashed.
I just realized that when the 2.2.0 release happened, the job I was at was forced to roll it into production for the memory management improvements (what a nightmare _that_ was, having 2.2.0 in production ;) Seems like every time a new kernel is released, I'm too busy working to celebrate.
How about stopping the ridiculous practice of releasing only hardcover for a year or more before the title is available in paperback? Speaking only for myself, I would buy about thrice as many new books if they were available for 1/3rd the price. The way I see it, if I can get that price by buying used on amazon, that's great. If the publishers want my business, perhaps they should adjust their distribution practices in order to get it.
One thing to make sure you've got overed before you take the interim position: You must have a way to either force their hand in hiring after a specified (hopefully by you ;) timeframe, or be willing to walk out the door. If my experience is any indication, things will go like this:
You take the position on the understanding that it's temporary.
They talk about how the process of finding someone to fill the position permanently is going.
You deal with twice the work for a while, and get frustrated. You demand they hire someone right away.
They can't or won't hire someone to fill the top job, but they can or will hire someone to fill your oldjob, just until someone to fill the top job can be located.
A year later, you're either in charge of the department, or you've quit.
I'm not attributing any malice to your HR department, but that's how this will turn out if you're not very careful about making absolutely sure that your return path to the job you like is clear. Don't ever accept their word that it'll all work out ok: Their job is not to make you happy.
That's a good question. You should ask a democrat.
The problem is that the Republican party is not only Politically Republican (less taxes, privatization, etc.) but also Socially Conservative (maintain current behaviors). A Republican system is dynamic. With 50 states, you can have 50 different policies on the same issue. This is directly counter to the core conservative concern of maintaining things as they are.
That said, it's not the Republicans that want to maintain control: It's the US Government(tm), a structure that supercedes either party. The Republicans just tend to be more hawkish, and less shy of enforcement legislation.
Just a note on my personal feelings lately.
Until recently, I had quit a bit of faith in the supreme court's record of shooting down blatantly unconstitutional laws (as is their job, excellently demonstrated with the CDA a few years ago). After the recent election debacle, my faith in the institution is shaken to the point that I know the Justice's names. Before, I had some (justified) faith in the Court. Now I'm scared of Scalia.
Will they shoot something like this down? They should, and I hope they will. Then again, with more conservative (read: law and order, damnit) Justices on the bench, who knows?
Indeed, I see your point. One of the main issues is that of access, though. People don't listen to webcasts when driving to the grocery store, they listen to the radio. etc
The other huge issue is one of public property. The FCC regulates the em band, but the broadcasting associations own it. This is a frustrating thing. There is no technical reason (signal interferance, etc.) for these stations to be prohibited, it's simply a regulatory issue: They would compete with commercial radio stations, and commercial radio stations don't wan't competition.
I think you're missing a couple basic points:
These people don't want to broadcast globally, they want to broadcast locally. If you can capture a million listeners over the entire world that's great, but how does that help your goal of having a local broadcast of PTA meetings?
The target audience isn't people sitting at their desks, connected to the internet. It's people listening to the radio. There are many more of the latter in any given geographical area, and saturation is important here.
Webcasts are great. They really are an amazing thing, and a vastly useful tool. They won't do what a lowpower community broadcast will, though.
Development won't grind to a halt, everyone who develops will just become exposed to litigation. It's a pretty good bet that the only ones that would actually end up in court would be the ones that were ctitical of or competing with BT. Draconian laws/regulation and capricious enforcement is, in my opinion, the social policy issue right now, and this is a great example why. It's a very clear case of "Do what you want, just stay out of our way."
One of the reasons fandom.com was founded was as a way for fansites to band together, to share resources to fight off corporate bullies.
I think you're missing something pretty important here: Fandom.com was founded in order to profit from helping fansites band together, under the assumption that they needed to do so in order to remain active.
Fandom.com is a business, not a charity. They are in it to make a profit for their investors, not to make sure that Fandom survives (the latter is a path to the former, that's all).Maybe Ellison and Gates should shut down their houses for a while to help out.