We agree. Perhaps I just worded it less accurately than I intended. The only issue with the municipalities getting in is that they could end up closing the market via regulation (rather than allowing the cable company to come in and compete if it wants to). This is the slippery slope I see. No the company shouldn't be able to win a lawsuit for it, but suing might be in their best interest, since it establishes their protest of having to compete with the government for customers (which is never pretty).
Your analogy is false because the customers of a business are generally not those doing the voting, whereas in government, the users of the service (customers, in a sense) are. Corporations are neccesarily private and are defined that way in law (the word actually has a real and legally binding meaning, you know). Last I heard, public corporations were referred to as authorities. Read up on Robert Moses and his reign of tyranny if you think that public authorities are a good idea. Robert Caro has written a very revealing book on the topic that's worth the read, despite its size.
It's only a market force if the government and economy are one, which they aren't in the states. The cable companies have one responsibility--to profit by selling cable. If a market is not profitable, then they shouldn't have an obligation to be there and the users demanding the service should find it themselves, as they have (regrettably) through the socialization of said service.
Uh if you have a severe shellfish allergy, "cover our ass" warnings are severe enough to keep you away. You just don't take the chance, since exposure can result in anaphylaxis within seconds or minutes.
It's not hasty to run to walgreens in this case, but due dilligence. The company isn't going to be able to tell you conclusively whether your particular shellfish allergy will or not react to their product and I wouldn't trust them anyhow. The only way to know is a pinprick test with the offending substance. Until that's done, the possibility of a catastrophic reaction still looms.
Why would you advocate such carelessness? Have you never dealt with an allergy/allergic person before? You're view of it is far more casual than the life-or-death issue it so often represents.
In this magical memory boot, when would devices needing firmware flashes get sent their stuff? How about exchanges with hardware to set up DMA and memory mapping? The address space is more than the physical RAM. All kinds of weird and scary things are there like mmaped files, mmaped graphics RAM, etc. All of this would need to be set up each boot anyways. Really, most of the binary/driver loading that goes on in a modern OS is just mmaping. Lots is loaded lazily.
Basically, there's much more to the state of the system than memory. Thanks to USB, Firewire, PCI, et. all, it's going to be hard to put your finger on it all and keep it steady while breaking the boot process.
In the end, it would probably take longer to "load memory", then do all of the neccesary device initialization than it does now to boot.
I know that I use much less in services than I pay for in taxes. That's what bothers me about the "social contract". I want to buy my own health insurance, unemployment insurance, workman's comp, and retirement plan, not yours.
That's my problem with the social contract. Hard working people who don't use many of the more expensive government services get screwed by it. When it comes down to it, I benefit directly from transit taxes, military funding, emergency services, public sanitation, and schools. Not medicaire, medicaid, welfare, social security, subsidized bussing, pensions for highway toll collectors, etc, etc. Why am I paying for all those things? Can I please opt out of my right to ever benefit from those services in return for not paying for them? Of course not.
Doesn't sound like a contract I'd sign. The whole idea of a contract is that two consenting parties come to an agreement over an issue. In real contracts, you can cross things out, make additions, etc. The contract analogy is false.
Your mention of the early church in reference to communism is at least a stretch. It would be more accurately compared to eastern religions which value property at 0. They didn't believe that worldly things had any value whatsoever so they didn't care if they had them or not. That's not communism because the motivation is essentially different, as is the mechanism (not done via government) and the form it took (not an economic system).
Name for me a major communist state which was not also totalitarian.
Stop splitting hairs and listen to the grandparents' point. It's a good one--it's not the western companies that are the root cause of this, but the Chinese government.
>Sure, choose what you will or won't share-- but >don't tell others that they cannot make that same >decision. If you are overcharging so much that >there is a market for someone to >repackage-and-sell, that's nobody's fault but your own.
Huh? Last I checked, it costs more than $0 to develop software. Repackaging and selling costs significantly less than putting in the time and money to make the software in the first place.
It's no one's right to modify and resell my software, doubly so for server-side apps (where I am). Anyone has the right to decide how their ideas and software are used. They put the time and money (often, in the form of time) into developing them and they are theirs. They don't belong to everyone, but to the person who came up with them.
It does require me to give away something--my rights. Don't get me wrong, I've GPL'd things and contributed to GPL projects, of my own volition. I just disagree with the premise that everyone should be required to do that with anything that they decide to write and make in any way public (i.e. by selling it).
This discussion is over. You're full of propaganda and void of logic. It's unfortunate, but I've pointed out at least three points where you failed to clarify yourself in this exchange and you've failed to even attempt.
It's not competition if you're forced from the get-go to give away everything you do. I feel that my work has value. No one has rights to my ideas but me or someone I sign them over to. You are little more than an intellectual thief. You want me to do your thinking for you. Sorry, that's not how the world works. You haven't explained the correlation between the GPL and natural rights or either of the points that I requested you clarify previously.
Unlike you, I value personal choice. If I have an idea that I want to share, I will share it and if I don't I won't. It's not competition of the "competitor" is just repackaging your stuff with a thin wrapper or none at all. My work violates no one's rights, and in fact merely exercises my own. Whether there exist ways to make money from software licensed under the GPL is irrelevant since it is inherently my choice what I do with my ideas.
Why does the union have to do anything else? Why not just form an insurance union (like a credit union) and have everyone put in $130 a month and insure against those things as a group. I know my employer is in a union like this for their workman's comp because they're in a 'low risk pool' and qualified for it. It saves them a bunch and gets rid of the other 98% of bullshit.
Seriously, don't you think organizing a private insurance pool would be cheaper for you than having a union in its current state while providing the only benefit that you care about?
Whoa. Too much logical leap for me. Please substantiate the following statements:
1. The GPL restrictions should replace copyright law-- that solves all your problems.
2. the GPL restrictions are equivalent to what proper laws concerning information would be.
You've done nothing to demonstrate them true, yet used them as your assumptions. tsk tsk.
I personally find the GPL to be extremely limiting. If I were required to abide by it, then I would need to find another line of work. If I were to go into business making and selling GPL software, then my cards would be out on the table for my competitors to see. There is power in secrecy. Like it or not, if it weren't for business, the world would fall apart. If there is no competition, there is no incentive to get better. the GPL inhibits competition as much as a monopoly. Think about it for a second before you expunge any more of your socialist drivel.
Here you go again with the socialistic, top-down demands. Qt isn't gratis, it's offered with *severe limitations in licensing*. GPL isn't gratis. It takes away quite a bit of freedom in and of itself, though the zealots wouldn't have you think so. I've always found BSD/Apache/MIT licenses to be much more free. Regardless of that, though.
Earlier in the argument you could have taken the opportunity to voice your assumption that e-tax should be GPL'ed, but you didn't. Until this moment, neither of us should have assumed that we were placing GPL restrictions on e-tax because it wasn't mentioned and because e-tax isn't GPL'ed.
GPLing e-tax has a lot of implications that you wouldn't run into in your fuzzy open source fantasy, but are very real in a corporate world. First of all, the company who wrote it probably relied on other products in the process, perhaps in ways that violate GPL linking. What about them? A GUI library isn't the only thing required to make a product. The company shouldn't be required to GPL other things of theirs that they might have nodified for use in e-tax--should they? Having common internal code is par for the course at software contract shops.
More importantly, I want to know--why the GPL? The BSD license is just as open as far as source-code viewing, but also much more flexible as far as future use of code. There's lots of licenses...why do you assume that GPL is the best for this?
Hahaha. Qt is only available gratis for building GPL linux and more recently macintosh applications. You're not suggesting that they abandon windows? As far as I know, e-tax isn't GPL'd AND needs to have a windows port, ergo in their case Qt wouldn't be free.
As I said, you've never worked in a large software company. The current set of programmers are likely responsible for maintaining oodles of code produced over the last few years/decades. They can't just be let go without damn good reason. There isn't always time to train in a new technology when a perfectly fine older one will do. Quite frankly, the manufacturer of e-tax has no responsibility to you, only to the government with which it signed a contract. If it was specced that it had to be portable, it would have been, and at much greater cost no doubt. Bottom line is programmers with cross-platform skills come at a premium. Personally, I wouldn't want to pay that premium. For the programmers It's not an issue of being good or bad, but where their experience lies. How many libraries/platforms you know is hardly a measure of "good" for a programmer.
You're trying to implement top-down socialism on business. If that were an efficient way to get things done, then businesses would self-organize that way. Sadly for you, it isn't and they don't.
The crown vic's used in nyc are extended. If you're going to compare numbers, compare the prius to the extended crown vic. No I don't know where you can find those numbers.
2. Production/distribution architecture for carbon filters for a wide variety of vehicles
3. A way to coerce everyone running a diesel engine currently to switch to them
4. A source of biodiesel in large quantities
5. A transportation infrastructure for biodiesel, in large quantities
This sounds like a pipe dream. Sure if you changed the whole world, it would be perfect. Guess what--gradual change is all that's going to happen. We can't convert to biodiesel overnight, no matter how environmentally sound or wonderful it is. Mandatory in "a few EU countries" doesn't translate to mandatory and implemented on every diesel vehicle in New York. Keep in mind that in the US, most consumer goods (and we consume a lot) are transported by (hideously inefficient) diesel trucks. There's going to be a lot of resistance to anything that increases the cost, even momentarily. Can you _introduce_ biodiesel in quantity at a price that competes with ordinary diesel while providing nationwide availability?
The town car and crown vic are built on the same platform...I call bullshit on the suspension argument. The crown-vics they drive these days are extremely well outfitted.
The cabs in new york have leather seats, separate rear climate control and are very, very clean (at least as of two weeks ago. Have things changed since the last time I had occasion to get into a yellow cab?).
In fact, aside from the color and the means for hailing/payment, I don't see much difference between the two.
Out of curiosity, what does a ride in one of the black ones cost?
The partition hardly eats into legroom. An inch or two, maybe, but the Crown Vic's in New York are extended to compensate for it. The prius would still need the partition (it's there for security purposes, y'know) and starts out with much, much less legroom than an extended Crown Vic. You can say "there's plenty of room" but is there? I'd say the definition of plenty is the current status quo. People use cabs to carry a lot of things.
Personally, I'd rather drive. Even if it costs more, I like the freedom. My little subaru gets better mileage than a cab and can haul more stuff, since that matters to me. I don't think the prius is a good idea in the city. I think a hybrid-converted Crown Vic is a great idea, though.
First of all, a cross-platform developer license to Qt costs several thousand dollars. This isn't actually as much of a barrier as my second point. You could have said 'wx' or 'swing' and the cost woudn't have been there.
More importantly, though, is the experience of the developers on the project. Even in a huge company, there's often a resistance to using the best tool for the job because no one (or only one person) knows how to use it. There's too many concerns of maintainability/training costs/etc. Generally, when hiring, companies try and bias their teams towards a certain baseline set of skills. If that included MFC, then gui is in MFC until everyone magically learns something else. Companies can't afford to stop and have everyone learn a new tool to satisfy your open source whims.
Rather than trolling on a mundane and impractical point, the grandparent was talking about direct hydrogen prodcution. Do you really believe that creating hydrogen by electroysis is practical or efficient at all?
The reason there's no cows in your neighborhood is because it's ridiculously expensive to comply with the regulations you must to be allowed to produce milk for consumption (i.e. for someone other than you or your family. The only thing keeping you from having a cow of your own is zoning laws and yourself...and eceonomics).
I know an ex-dairy farmer and have talked to him quite a bit about it. You wouldn't believe the standards they're held to, both in the treatment of animals and the quality and purity of the product. Traces of impurities (usually antibiotics) legally contaminate a truckload of milk. Have it happen more than once and no one will buy from you anymore. He only got out of the business around ten years ago, so what he has to say is probably still applicable.
Now I realize that in your post, cows are an example. Bottom line is that it's very small for decentralized food production to work since everyone who produces food for sale needs to comply to overbearingly harsh fda regulations. The cost of compliance is way too high (in some industries you're required to directly subsidize full-time government inspectors). If you want decentralized, smaller-scale food production, why aren't you speaking against the regulations that truly prevent it?
You've just suggested to yourself a system of vast injustice in the other direction. When someone creates something, they should be compensated for its effects, not their effort. If they work really hard and it sucks, they should get nothing. Likewise, if they work very little and it revoolutionizes an industry they recieve significant compensation.
You can't say anything about a creative work the moment it's published. If you paid the person up front then the there would be no positive feedback mechanism to increase the quality of the work. The song that was listened to 0 times will net the author as much as the song that was listened to 100,000,000 times.
The copyright is owned by the copyright holder. Unfortunately, in this case, that tends to be the RIAA/MPAA/etc. I'm not endorsing them, but the solutions should be looked for in the direction of artists owning the to their own creations rather than losing them as soon as they create it. The problem with such an oppressively communist policy (communist in the sense that the worker's output becomes common property for an arbitrary compensation unrelated to his works' merit) is that it will completely alienate the artist. At least in the current system he has a theoretical chance of making lots and lots of money. In yours that would be gone, completely.
I understand that. Using poor hardware and lowering your productivity as a result is not in your best interest. Good companies make resources available. If you want to innovate, a shitty company is a bad place to do it, since they'll probably not let you see an extra cent for your off-hours work and in fact, you've probably already signed over all rights to any idea you had while employed there anyhow.
As far as selling anything to any business of mine, you're not going to impress me with a cuecat. I want to know that you're going to be around to back up your product before I lock in something as vital as a POS.
I'm not up on the details of TPM, but I thought the idea was to prevent OS X from running on non apple hardware, not prevent windows/linux/whatever from running on apple hardware? Apple hasn't done anything to lock out alternative operating systems on their current line of computers--why should they? They get paid for the OS either way. Why lower the value of the system to anyone when apple stands to gain *nothing* by doing so?
If your business can't afford $300/developer on R&D you're in more trouble than a cuecat can get you out of. I'm all for cheap prototyping, but seriously, get the client to pay for R&D as he should. If you're developing in house and you really can't afford it, perhaps you don't have the capital to develop the product?
Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE.
on
Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 2, Insightful
ActiveRecord is a *design pattern*. It dictates, to a certain extent, the shape of the database it supports. In reality, using it well is often a relatively good way to get a flexible/good schema from scratch with less db knowledge. It's not completely braindead, but a reasonably aware developer can do much better with the active record limitations than with a blank slate IMHO.
Rails itself could be put on top of any persistence layer. Instiki uses Madeliene instead of AR and it works fine. It just comes, out of box, with AR installed and that is the most natural. If you write your own ORM, it can work with rails. People have had success working with legacy schemas by frontending them with postgres views that behave more in the way that AR expects.
In any case, rails is more suited to new projects with new databases at this time. AR doesn't propose nonstandard database design in principle, it just dictates certain facts (mostly naming conventions for columns/tables) which can often be overridden. The most obvious one is that rails expects non-join tables to have an INT(11) PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT field. Not being a DBA, I don't know what database design patterns are out there. Being a performance and efficiency conscious developer, I don't see how AR's patterns could get you into a performance or maintainability muddle by using them on a new project.
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We agree. Perhaps I just worded it less accurately than I intended. The only issue with the municipalities getting in is that they could end up closing the market via regulation (rather than allowing the cable company to come in and compete if it wants to). This is the slippery slope I see. No the company shouldn't be able to win a lawsuit for it, but suing might be in their best interest, since it establishes their protest of having to compete with the government for customers (which is never pretty).
Your analogy is false because the customers of a business are generally not those doing the voting, whereas in government, the users of the service (customers, in a sense) are. Corporations are neccesarily private and are defined that way in law (the word actually has a real and legally binding meaning, you know). Last I heard, public corporations were referred to as authorities. Read up on Robert Moses and his reign of tyranny if you think that public authorities are a good idea. Robert Caro has written a very revealing book on the topic that's worth the read, despite its size.
It's only a market force if the government and economy are one, which they aren't in the states. The cable companies have one responsibility--to profit by selling cable. If a market is not profitable, then they shouldn't have an obligation to be there and the users demanding the service should find it themselves, as they have (regrettably) through the socialization of said service.
Uh if you have a severe shellfish allergy, "cover our ass" warnings are severe enough to keep you away. You just don't take the chance, since exposure can result in anaphylaxis within seconds or minutes.
It's not hasty to run to walgreens in this case, but due dilligence. The company isn't going to be able to tell you conclusively whether your particular shellfish allergy will or not react to their product and I wouldn't trust them anyhow. The only way to know is a pinprick test with the offending substance. Until that's done, the possibility of a catastrophic reaction still looms.
Why would you advocate such carelessness? Have you never dealt with an allergy/allergic person before? You're view of it is far more casual than the life-or-death issue it so often represents.
In this magical memory boot, when would devices needing firmware flashes get sent their stuff? How about exchanges with hardware to set up DMA and memory mapping? The address space is more than the physical RAM. All kinds of weird and scary things are there like mmaped files, mmaped graphics RAM, etc. All of this would need to be set up each boot anyways. Really, most of the binary/driver loading that goes on in a modern OS is just mmaping. Lots is loaded lazily.
Basically, there's much more to the state of the system than memory. Thanks to USB, Firewire, PCI, et. all, it's going to be hard to put your finger on it all and keep it steady while breaking the boot process.
In the end, it would probably take longer to "load memory", then do all of the neccesary device initialization than it does now to boot.
I know that I use much less in services than I pay for in taxes. That's what bothers me about the "social contract". I want to buy my own health insurance, unemployment insurance, workman's comp, and retirement plan, not yours.
That's my problem with the social contract. Hard working people who don't use many of the more expensive government services get screwed by it. When it comes down to it, I benefit directly from transit taxes, military funding, emergency services, public sanitation, and schools. Not medicaire, medicaid, welfare, social security, subsidized bussing, pensions for highway toll collectors, etc, etc. Why am I paying for all those things? Can I please opt out of my right to ever benefit from those services in return for not paying for them? Of course not.
Doesn't sound like a contract I'd sign. The whole idea of a contract is that two consenting parties come to an agreement over an issue. In real contracts, you can cross things out, make additions, etc. The contract analogy is false.
Your mention of the early church in reference to communism is at least a stretch. It would be more accurately compared to eastern religions which value property at 0. They didn't believe that worldly things had any value whatsoever so they didn't care if they had them or not. That's not communism because the motivation is essentially different, as is the mechanism (not done via government) and the form it took (not an economic system).
Name for me a major communist state which was not also totalitarian.
Stop splitting hairs and listen to the grandparents' point. It's a good one--it's not the western companies that are the root cause of this, but the Chinese government.
>Sure, choose what you will or won't share-- but
>don't tell others that they cannot make that same
>decision. If you are overcharging so much that
>there is a market for someone to
>repackage-and-sell, that's nobody's fault but your own.
Huh? Last I checked, it costs more than $0 to develop software. Repackaging and selling costs significantly less than putting in the time and money to make the software in the first place.
It's no one's right to modify and resell my software, doubly so for server-side apps (where I am). Anyone has the right to decide how their ideas and software are used. They put the time and money (often, in the form of time) into developing them and they are theirs. They don't belong to everyone, but to the person who came up with them.
It does require me to give away something--my rights. Don't get me wrong, I've GPL'd things and contributed to GPL projects, of my own volition. I just disagree with the premise that everyone should be required to do that with anything that they decide to write and make in any way public (i.e. by selling it).
This discussion is over. You're full of propaganda and void of logic. It's unfortunate, but I've pointed out at least three points where you failed to clarify yourself in this exchange and you've failed to even attempt.
It's not competition if you're forced from the get-go to give away everything you do. I feel that my work has value. No one has rights to my ideas but me or someone I sign them over to. You are little more than an intellectual thief. You want me to do your thinking for you. Sorry, that's not how the world works. You haven't explained the correlation between the GPL and natural rights or either of the points that I requested you clarify previously.
Unlike you, I value personal choice. If I have an idea that I want to share, I will share it and if I don't I won't. It's not competition of the "competitor" is just repackaging your stuff with a thin wrapper or none at all. My work violates no one's rights, and in fact merely exercises my own. Whether there exist ways to make money from software licensed under the GPL is irrelevant since it is inherently my choice what I do with my ideas.
Why does the union have to do anything else? Why not just form an insurance union (like a credit union) and have everyone put in $130 a month and insure against those things as a group. I know my employer is in a union like this for their workman's comp because they're in a 'low risk pool' and qualified for it. It saves them a bunch and gets rid of the other 98% of bullshit.
Seriously, don't you think organizing a private insurance pool would be cheaper for you than having a union in its current state while providing the only benefit that you care about?
Whoa. Too much logical leap for me. Please substantiate the following statements:
1. The GPL restrictions should replace copyright law-- that solves all your problems.
2. the GPL restrictions are equivalent to what proper laws concerning information would be.
You've done nothing to demonstrate them true, yet used them as your assumptions. tsk tsk.
I personally find the GPL to be extremely limiting. If I were required to abide by it, then I would need to find another line of work. If I were to go into business making and selling GPL software, then my cards would be out on the table for my competitors to see. There is power in secrecy. Like it or not, if it weren't for business, the world would fall apart. If there is no competition, there is no incentive to get better. the GPL inhibits competition as much as a monopoly. Think about it for a second before you expunge any more of your socialist drivel.
Here you go again with the socialistic, top-down demands. Qt isn't gratis, it's offered with *severe limitations in licensing*. GPL isn't gratis. It takes away quite a bit of freedom in and of itself, though the zealots wouldn't have you think so. I've always found BSD/Apache/MIT licenses to be much more free. Regardless of that, though.
Earlier in the argument you could have taken the opportunity to voice your assumption that e-tax should be GPL'ed, but you didn't. Until this moment, neither of us should have assumed that we were placing GPL restrictions on e-tax because it wasn't mentioned and because e-tax isn't GPL'ed.
GPLing e-tax has a lot of implications that you wouldn't run into in your fuzzy open source fantasy, but are very real in a corporate world. First of all, the company who wrote it probably relied on other products in the process, perhaps in ways that violate GPL linking. What about them? A GUI library isn't the only thing required to make a product. The company shouldn't be required to GPL other things of theirs that they might have nodified for use in e-tax--should they? Having common internal code is par for the course at software contract shops.
More importantly, I want to know--why the GPL? The BSD license is just as open as far as source-code viewing, but also much more flexible as far as future use of code. There's lots of licenses...why do you assume that GPL is the best for this?
Hahaha. Qt is only available gratis for building GPL linux and more recently macintosh applications. You're not suggesting that they abandon windows? As far as I know, e-tax isn't GPL'd AND needs to have a windows port, ergo in their case Qt wouldn't be free.
As I said, you've never worked in a large software company. The current set of programmers are likely responsible for maintaining oodles of code produced over the last few years/decades. They can't just be let go without damn good reason. There isn't always time to train in a new technology when a perfectly fine older one will do. Quite frankly, the manufacturer of e-tax has no responsibility to you, only to the government with which it signed a contract. If it was specced that it had to be portable, it would have been, and at much greater cost no doubt. Bottom line is programmers with cross-platform skills come at a premium. Personally, I wouldn't want to pay that premium. For the programmers It's not an issue of being good or bad, but where their experience lies. How many libraries/platforms you know is hardly a measure of "good" for a programmer.
You're trying to implement top-down socialism on business. If that were an efficient way to get things done, then businesses would self-organize that way. Sadly for you, it isn't and they don't.
The crown vic's used in nyc are extended. If you're going to compare numbers, compare the prius to the extended crown vic. No I don't know where you can find those numbers.
I wouldn't live in a city without a car, even ny.
Right. So we're going to need:
1. Laws mandating carbon filters
2. Production/distribution architecture for carbon filters for a wide variety of vehicles
3. A way to coerce everyone running a diesel engine currently to switch to them
4. A source of biodiesel in large quantities
5. A transportation infrastructure for biodiesel, in large quantities
This sounds like a pipe dream. Sure if you changed the whole world, it would be perfect. Guess what--gradual change is all that's going to happen. We can't convert to biodiesel overnight, no matter how environmentally sound or wonderful it is. Mandatory in "a few EU countries" doesn't translate to mandatory and implemented on every diesel vehicle in New York. Keep in mind that in the US, most consumer goods (and we consume a lot) are transported by (hideously inefficient) diesel trucks. There's going to be a lot of resistance to anything that increases the cost, even momentarily. Can you _introduce_ biodiesel in quantity at a price that competes with ordinary diesel while providing nationwide availability?
The town car and crown vic are built on the same platform...I call bullshit on the suspension argument. The crown-vics they drive these days are extremely well outfitted.
The cabs in new york have leather seats, separate rear climate control and are very, very clean (at least as of two weeks ago. Have things changed since the last time I had occasion to get into a yellow cab?).
In fact, aside from the color and the means for hailing/payment, I don't see much difference between the two.
Out of curiosity, what does a ride in one of the black ones cost?
The partition hardly eats into legroom. An inch or two, maybe, but the Crown Vic's in New York are extended to compensate for it. The prius would still need the partition (it's there for security purposes, y'know) and starts out with much, much less legroom than an extended Crown Vic. You can say "there's plenty of room" but is there? I'd say the definition of plenty is the current status quo. People use cabs to carry a lot of things.
Personally, I'd rather drive. Even if it costs more, I like the freedom. My little subaru gets better mileage than a cab and can haul more stuff, since that matters to me. I don't think the prius is a good idea in the city. I think a hybrid-converted Crown Vic is a great idea, though.
You've never worked in a large software shop.
First of all, a cross-platform developer license to Qt costs several thousand dollars. This isn't actually as much of a barrier as my second point. You could have said 'wx' or 'swing' and the cost woudn't have been there.
More importantly, though, is the experience of the developers on the project. Even in a huge company, there's often a resistance to using the best tool for the job because no one (or only one person) knows how to use it. There's too many concerns of maintainability/training costs/etc. Generally, when hiring, companies try and bias their teams towards a certain baseline set of skills. If that included MFC, then gui is in MFC until everyone magically learns something else. Companies can't afford to stop and have everyone learn a new tool to satisfy your open source whims.
Rather than trolling on a mundane and impractical point, the grandparent was talking about direct hydrogen prodcution. Do you really believe that creating hydrogen by electroysis is practical or efficient at all?
The reason there's no cows in your neighborhood is because it's ridiculously expensive to comply with the regulations you must to be allowed to produce milk for consumption (i.e. for someone other than you or your family. The only thing keeping you from having a cow of your own is zoning laws and yourself...and eceonomics).
I know an ex-dairy farmer and have talked to him quite a bit about it. You wouldn't believe the standards they're held to, both in the treatment of animals and the quality and purity of the product. Traces of impurities (usually antibiotics) legally contaminate a truckload of milk. Have it happen more than once and no one will buy from you anymore. He only got out of the business around ten years ago, so what he has to say is probably still applicable.
Now I realize that in your post, cows are an example. Bottom line is that it's very small for decentralized food production to work since everyone who produces food for sale needs to comply to overbearingly harsh fda regulations. The cost of compliance is way too high (in some industries you're required to directly subsidize full-time government inspectors). If you want decentralized, smaller-scale food production, why aren't you speaking against the regulations that truly prevent it?
You've just suggested to yourself a system of vast injustice in the other direction. When someone creates something, they should be compensated for its effects, not their effort. If they work really hard and it sucks, they should get nothing. Likewise, if they work very little and it revoolutionizes an industry they recieve significant compensation.
You can't say anything about a creative work the moment it's published. If you paid the person up front then the there would be no positive feedback mechanism to increase the quality of the work. The song that was listened to 0 times will net the author as much as the song that was listened to 100,000,000 times.
The copyright is owned by the copyright holder. Unfortunately, in this case, that tends to be the RIAA/MPAA/etc. I'm not endorsing them, but the solutions should be looked for in the direction of artists owning the to their own creations rather than losing them as soon as they create it. The problem with such an oppressively communist policy (communist in the sense that the worker's output becomes common property for an arbitrary compensation unrelated to his works' merit) is that it will completely alienate the artist. At least in the current system he has a theoretical chance of making lots and lots of money. In yours that would be gone, completely.
I understand that. Using poor hardware and lowering your productivity as a result is not in your best interest. Good companies make resources available. If you want to innovate, a shitty company is a bad place to do it, since they'll probably not let you see an extra cent for your off-hours work and in fact, you've probably already signed over all rights to any idea you had while employed there anyhow.
As far as selling anything to any business of mine, you're not going to impress me with a cuecat. I want to know that you're going to be around to back up your product before I lock in something as vital as a POS.
I'm not up on the details of TPM, but I thought the idea was to prevent OS X from running on non apple hardware, not prevent windows/linux/whatever from running on apple hardware? Apple hasn't done anything to lock out alternative operating systems on their current line of computers--why should they? They get paid for the OS either way. Why lower the value of the system to anyone when apple stands to gain *nothing* by doing so?
If your business can't afford $300/developer on R&D you're in more trouble than a cuecat can get you out of. I'm all for cheap prototyping, but seriously, get the client to pay for R&D as he should. If you're developing in house and you really can't afford it, perhaps you don't have the capital to develop the product?
ActiveRecord is a *design pattern*. It dictates, to a certain extent, the shape of the database it supports. In reality, using it well is often a relatively good way to get a flexible/good schema from scratch with less db knowledge. It's not completely braindead, but a reasonably aware developer can do much better with the active record limitations than with a blank slate IMHO.
Rails itself could be put on top of any persistence layer. Instiki uses Madeliene instead of AR and it works fine. It just comes, out of box, with AR installed and that is the most natural. If you write your own ORM, it can work with rails. People have had success working with legacy schemas by frontending them with postgres views that behave more in the way that AR expects.
In any case, rails is more suited to new projects with new databases at this time. AR doesn't propose nonstandard database design in principle, it just dictates certain facts (mostly naming conventions for columns/tables) which can often be overridden. The most obvious one is that rails expects non-join tables to have an INT(11) PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT field. Not being a DBA, I don't know what database design patterns are out there. Being a performance and efficiency conscious developer, I don't see how AR's patterns could get you into a performance or maintainability muddle by using them on a new project.