"Maybe because some of them have a terrible product and services?"
You are probably at least partly right. The interesting question is *why*.
Might it be because when you are out of big contracts by default you lack the money to build a proper product/service?
I now most of the big usual contenders have terrible product and services too. With luck, sometimes, their products and services become from terrible to hardly beareable (and utterly expensive and heavily entrenched by lock-in practices) after some iterations. Given this it might pay for the government and taxpayers to allow products/services with better future enter the equation.
"Not everything is a "M$" conspiracy."
Certainly not. You have the Oracle conspiracy, the ESRI conspirancy, the IBM conspiracy... too.
"they certainly attempt to make the threat seem real, and as such are trying to coerce."
Yes, of course. But as it's usually said on my land, it is not menacing that who wants, but that who can. Good luck trying to coerce me using a flying spaghetti monster walking over waters that restrains acting till the day after my death.
Wow, that's prescience! And what are my ignorant political beliefs, if I may know?
"Mathew 22 is NOT about taxes."
Let' see:
" 17Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? 18But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? 19Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. 20And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? 21They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's"
"So... "Do what I say or I'll beat you up" is coercive, but "Do what I say or my friend Bubba will beat you up" is not coercive because I won't be dealing the punishment personally?"
Of course they both are coercive.
On the other hand, "Do what I say or my friend Dubba will patiently wait till you die and then he will beat your death body" is not coercive... not for me, at least.
"I'm pretty sure a lot of religion is heavy into the idea of sending you to HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY if you don't follow the rules. Is that not coercive?"
No, it is not.
As long as they are able to wait till my natural death for their god to do with me as It see fits.
The problem is when they (the humans) insist in showing me ASAP how their god is going to send me to hell.
newsflash to your newsflash: then you won't get the best of the pool.
If that's good enough for you, it's good enough for me: I'm not even American, so it's better than enough for me that you don't get the best of the pool.
""Well Regulated" as in well trained or well disciplined."
That's your opinion on the meaning.
"Well Regulated" as in with proper regulations as to fulfill its goal, I'd say. Why your interpretation should be better considered than mine? (and don't even start on what "its goal" is, because it opens another can of worms, i.e., since an obvious goal is "the security of a free State", a well regulated militia needs to be able to stand against anything not being the State that might risk its security, i.e. the Federal Government, and since the Federal Government owns nukes, so the "well regulated militia" and thus any given well regulated group of free citizens has the undeniable right to own nukes to stand against this potential enemy).
"Means how it was interpreted, upheld, and practiced at the time of the writing"
Because: a) You perfectly know how it was interpreted, upheld, and practiced at the time of the writing and, more importantly how it would have been interpreted, upheld, and practiced if they themselves were asked to interpret and uphold it in the face of the cases that have appeared in the last two centuries. b) and there was an unanimous interpretation of what it was meant to say, even in the time when it was written down.
" If I write an application or design a user interface or build a tool or design a game, then I know what I am doing, know what needs to be done and how to do it."
You know it... now.
Back to that code you knew so well in some years, heck, sometimes in some months, and tell me how much sense it retains by itself.
"1) You still need to have above average skills to get your work done on Linux"
Above average or just different? I've been using Linux for so long that I almost can't have nothing done in Windows. I'd say it is Windows what requires above average skills, not Linux, it's only I can admit that maybe what needs is *different* knowledge, not less or more. But then, the more people using Linux, the less different it becomes.
"2) Some proprietary software is and always will be much better than anything comparable in the open-source world"
Why? Is there any magic wand that makes ones and zeroes perform better when you stamp a closed license onto them? Put the corporate and public money backing open source instead of closed and you'll see -as in fact you can already see, that it is not the license what makes the ones and zeroes become high quality but the effort and intelligence applied to them -and that's orthogonal to the distribution license.
"I fully approve of and support France's direction in supporting open source software in their government administration."
They could do much, much better. Instead of applying the savings into further develop open sourced software, which tends itself to lock in local minima*1, apply a percentage on licenses to develop open source alternatives in that very same field. *That* would put money exactly where it is more effective*2.
*1 Say, for instance, there's no good open source alternative to Arc/Info in the vectorial GIS field, so you pay the beefy ESRI licenses this year, and the next one, and the next one... *2 Say you pay one million a year on ArcInfo license and apply 100.000 to develop an open source alternative. Next year the alternative is still not there and you pay another million to ESRI and 100.000 to develop an alternative. Sooner or later you'll end up not having to pay the yearly million to ESRI and you'll have exactly the software you need, at a cheaper maintenance cost, instead of the software someone else wants to sell to you on a monopolist status.
Think about this for a moment: if in one of those galaxies in the further side of time and space, and intelligent species pointed a Hubble-like telescope to us, even if the telescope were sensible enough... they wouldn't see not a single, not even remotely meaningful signal, if only for the reason that they would be looking about 9 billion years too early.
"It doesn't matter how big of an effect education has; employers who simply throw out the resumes of people who do not have degrees are potentially missing out on great employees"
So what? No matter what, once you hire someone you already are missing out a lot of other great employees that you don't hire instead so, in the end, it is not about how many good candidates you reject but about how good is the one you hire.
Not saying that's good or bad but, from the point of view of HR as long as there're competent enough candidates with the right papers that's the target: in the least, is their "CYA policy": he was a bad hiring, but how would I know? he had all the right credentials! And what they know for sure is that their hiring policy is not so much better than throwing a dice (that's basically true from janitor to CEO), so better stay in the safe side.
"I wonder if the excess servers could be left off, and during rush periods, they could be turned on via IPMI?"
Of course yes.
But then, powering on a server via IPMI can take everything between 30 seconds to three minutes (discounting the case that any of its partitions need to be checked...).
Now, imagine your mails are stored in a server that is now off. Will you want to wait for minutes to get to them?
1) There used to be an old saying about democracy: "one man, one vote". If voting with your money counts, the more your money, the more share in the democratic decisions you have. Is that *really* what you want?
2) Sure, go vote with your money! But wait... people already voted with their money: they voted for instance, that GM should fail but, hey, still here they are. That's what happens when you allow for point 1 above.
Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe because some of them have a terrible product and services?"
You are probably at least partly right. The interesting question is *why*.
Might it be because when you are out of big contracts by default you lack the money to build a proper product/service?
I now most of the big usual contenders have terrible product and services too. With luck, sometimes, their products and services become from terrible to hardly beareable (and utterly expensive and heavily entrenched by lock-in practices) after some iterations. Given this it might pay for the government and taxpayers to allow products/services with better future enter the equation.
"Not everything is a "M$" conspiracy."
Certainly not. You have the Oracle conspiracy, the ESRI conspirancy, the IBM conspiracy... too.
"they certainly attempt to make the threat seem real, and as such are trying to coerce."
Yes, of course. But as it's usually said on my land, it is not menacing that who wants, but that who can. Good luck trying to coerce me using a flying spaghetti monster walking over waters that restrains acting till the day after my death.
"it aligns with your ignorant political beliefs."
Wow, that's prescience! And what are my ignorant political beliefs, if I may know?
"Mathew 22 is NOT about taxes."
Let' see:
" 17Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? 18But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? 19Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. 20And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? 21They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's"
No further questions, your Honor. Your witness.
"Letting the government take it at gunpoint and "redistribute" it is not Christian charity. "
Ahem... "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's" (Matthew 22:21) expliclity about taxes.
"So... "Do what I say or I'll beat you up" is coercive, but "Do what I say or my friend Bubba will beat you up" is not coercive because I won't be dealing the punishment personally?"
Of course they both are coercive.
On the other hand, "Do what I say or my friend Dubba will patiently wait till you die and then he will beat your death body" is not coercive... not for me, at least.
"I'm pretty sure a lot of religion is heavy into the idea of sending you to HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY if you don't follow the rules.
Is that not coercive?"
No, it is not.
As long as they are able to wait till my natural death for their god to do with me as It see fits.
The problem is when they (the humans) insist in showing me ASAP how their god is going to send me to hell.
"newsflash: they do."
newsflash to your newsflash: then you won't get the best of the pool.
If that's good enough for you, it's good enough for me: I'm not even American, so it's better than enough for me that you don't get the best of the pool.
""Well Regulated" as in well trained or well disciplined."
That's your opinion on the meaning.
"Well Regulated" as in with proper regulations as to fulfill its goal, I'd say. Why your interpretation should be better considered than mine? (and don't even start on what "its goal" is, because it opens another can of worms, i.e., since an obvious goal is "the security of a free State", a well regulated militia needs to be able to stand against anything not being the State that might risk its security, i.e. the Federal Government, and since the Federal Government owns nukes, so the "well regulated militia" and thus any given well regulated group of free citizens has the undeniable right to own nukes to stand against this potential enemy).
"Means how it was interpreted, upheld, and practiced at the time of the writing"
Because:
a) You perfectly know how it was interpreted, upheld, and practiced at the time of the writing and, more importantly how it would have been interpreted, upheld, and practiced if they themselves were asked to interpret and uphold it in the face of the cases that have appeared in the last two centuries.
b) and there was an unanimous interpretation of what it was meant to say, even in the time when it was written down.
It's neither right nor wrong. It's simply irrelevant.
"I firmly believe that the founding fathers intended for the constitution to be "as is". Black and White"
What the hell means "a is"? It is obvious that the text is not so clear that it only admits one interpretation, so what do you really mean?
Oh, I know: "I firmly believe that the founding fathers intended for the constitution to be as Cutting_Crew reads it".
"3. Ergo, there exists no future where time travel exists.
QED?"
QED? My ass!
Where's you scientific method? That obviously means that it was Hitler the one that invented the time machine!
"I'm tired of this argument because it's well, wrong."
Or it isn't.
"For any given time period/line-capacity combination, there is a finite amount of data that can be pushed through that line"
So, if any, the limited resource is *bandwith* not volume. Why, then, they want to limit data volume and not bandwith?
Might it be because by putting a price to something they got essentially for free they can get an insane benefit?
"There is no space & time outside the physical universe.
Are you sure? How do you know?"
He doesn't need to know: that's a per-definition fact.
A different question would be if the physical universe is composed of four dimensions or there are more.
"Correlation is reason for a hypothesis. Causation is the result of a lot of experimentation."
Well, in fact, as long as correlation is reason for a hypothesis; causation is the hypothesis.
"There are still pirates (ship-based) throughout the world. Ever hear of what's happening in Somalia?"
Yes. And Somalia is probably the place on Earth were there are less human-induced carbon emissions -ergo man-induced global warming.
There: pirates and global warming are inversely tied. QED.
" If I write an application or design a user interface or build a tool or design a game, then I know what I am doing, know what needs to be done and how to do it."
You know it... now.
Back to that code you knew so well in some years, heck, sometimes in some months, and tell me how much sense it retains by itself.
"The code shows the how and the why"
No, it doesn't because it can't. Typical book example:
#define SECONDS_PER_DAY 8000
Now, tell me the why, if you can.
"1) You still need to have above average skills to get your work done on Linux"
Above average or just different? I've been using Linux for so long that I almost can't have nothing done in Windows. I'd say it is Windows what requires above average skills, not Linux, it's only I can admit that maybe what needs is *different* knowledge, not less or more. But then, the more people using Linux, the less different it becomes.
"2) Some proprietary software is and always will be much better than anything comparable in the open-source world"
Why? Is there any magic wand that makes ones and zeroes perform better when you stamp a closed license onto them?
Put the corporate and public money backing open source instead of closed and you'll see -as in fact you can already see, that it is not the license what makes the ones and zeroes become high quality but the effort and intelligence applied to them -and that's orthogonal to the distribution license.
"I fully approve of and support France's direction in supporting open source software in their government administration."
They could do much, much better. Instead of applying the savings into further develop open sourced software, which tends itself to lock in local minima*1, apply a percentage on licenses to develop open source alternatives in that very same field. *That* would put money exactly where it is more effective*2.
*1 Say, for instance, there's no good open source alternative to Arc/Info in the vectorial GIS field, so you pay the beefy ESRI licenses this year, and the next one, and the next one...
*2 Say you pay one million a year on ArcInfo license and apply 100.000 to develop an open source alternative. Next year the alternative is still not there and you pay another million to ESRI and 100.000 to develop an alternative. Sooner or later you'll end up not having to pay the yearly million to ESRI and you'll have exactly the software you need, at a cheaper maintenance cost, instead of the software someone else wants to sell to you on a monopolist status.
"Could it be that we see sort of a mirage?"
An Einstenian mirage.
Think about this for a moment: if in one of those galaxies in the further side of time and space, and intelligent species pointed a Hubble-like telescope to us, even if the telescope were sensible enough... they wouldn't see not a single, not even remotely meaningful signal, if only for the reason that they would be looking about 9 billion years too early.
"It doesn't matter how big of an effect education has; employers who simply throw out the resumes of people who do not have degrees are potentially missing out on great employees"
So what? No matter what, once you hire someone you already are missing out a lot of other great employees that you don't hire instead so, in the end, it is not about how many good candidates you reject but about how good is the one you hire.
Not saying that's good or bad but, from the point of view of HR as long as there're competent enough candidates with the right papers that's the target: in the least, is their "CYA policy": he was a bad hiring, but how would I know? he had all the right credentials! And what they know for sure is that their hiring policy is not so much better than throwing a dice (that's basically true from janitor to CEO), so better stay in the safe side.
"If Dev and Prod aren't identical, then their Configuration Management team has failed."
Are you implying that, say, Google or Amazon have another bazillion servers in the dark just so Dev and Prod are identical?
"I wonder if the excess servers could be left off, and during rush periods, they could be turned on via IPMI?"
Of course yes.
But then, powering on a server via IPMI can take everything between 30 seconds to three minutes (discounting the case that any of its partitions need to be checked...).
Now, imagine your mails are stored in a server that is now off. Will you want to wait for minutes to get to them?
"Sure there is: don't buy their products."
1) There used to be an old saying about democracy: "one man, one vote". If voting with your money counts, the more your money, the more share in the democratic decisions you have. Is that *really* what you want?
2) Sure, go vote with your money! But wait... people already voted with their money: they voted for instance, that GM should fail but, hey, still here they are. That's what happens when you allow for point 1 above.
"I find it funny that the government thinks that changing the names of agencies actually results in anything better"
I find it funny that you think government change the name if agencies aiming to change anything.