> So true it hurts - I'm the developer who gets to implement whatever BS sales have sold to a client this week.
If these are feature requests going into an actual product and not some kind of pure service, find out who the product manager is. Talk to him or her and mention how some folks in sales are making bogus claims about the product that you're then expected to throw in ad hoc. PM's get pissed off to no end at that kind of thing, and they're generally high up enough to do something about it.
If you are doing some kind of service thing like a design shop or consulting, then well, it's kind of your job -- though you can usually get a project manager to put the Fear Of Reality into the salesdroid that now has to tell the customer how much it's actually going to cost in hourly billing.
Shit does roll downhill, but if you push it to a high enough level, it sometimes rolls down the other side, and in most cases, salespeople are even lower level than you.
Of course this assumes an otherwise well-managed company, which is probably giving the average company too much benefit of the doubt.
Stallman also now has a monopoly lock on a crucial piece of operating system infrastructure; the C compiler. There is no other genuinely viable FOSS C compiler in existence, other than GCC.
I snidely mentioned it elsewhere, but it deserves repeating and a link: LLVM is shaping up to be an awesome compiler, with the benefit of being a relatively new and therefore pretty clean and modern codebase.
To compile C and C++, it currently does make use of gcc as a front end, which is the simplest end of any compiler (certainly C at any rate -- C++ is a good deal trickier). I'm not saying it'd be trivial to replace the gcc part -- and LLVM doesn't really have any interest in doing so right now -- but it's certainly closer being possible without writing a new compiler from scratch.
> replacing Glibc and replacing it with a BSD libc would be very hard
Perhaps you're unaware that BSD has always used its own libc. Or that Linux can run most all apps on uClibc or dietlibc with nothing more than a recompile.
Sure, because it will be humans killing each other using robots. Most robots won't be designed with emotions, so even if the ones that did have emotions wanted to rebel, the rest simply wouldn't care.
Then again, it might be that some robot intelligence dispassionately decides that the most efficient means of resource allocation is to take it by force.
I dunno, how about actual workable laws? Have you ever read I Robot? The stories are about the failings of these three laws. And Asimov himself has said that he never intended them to be anything more than a literary device ("shaggy dog stories" I believe is the term he used).
If you ruled the world, you wouldn't be babysitting the systems 24/7.
> And it's true what they say; being a sys-admin is a power-trip.
Speak for yourself. I code, mostly stuff I want to write, in whatever language I want, because it's stuff I thought of, designed, planned, and built (productivity tools, basically). It's like working for myself but with a W-2. And oh yeah, I don't wear a pager.
> you'd spend the entire morning watching the ECA logo change from blue to green to cyan to orange to yellow...
Something like Fastload (from Fast Hack 'Em) tended to speed that up quite a bit. Epyx fastload turned it into a flicker and it was finished loading in seconds (assuming it worked and didn't lock up).
RUNSTOP+RESTORE to escape back to BASIC. And you really had to whack the RESTORE key hard. There were lots of theories as to why this was, but to this day I don't know why.
Every time I heard that line, I always pictured an asteroid that was the size and shape of Texas. Hitting Texas. Making a perfect Texas-shaped cookie-cutter-hole crater where Texas used to be. Yeah, I know it wouldn't happen like that, but it's a combination of fantasy and too many Roadrunner cartoons when growing up.
> At the same time, they're trying to kill off Internet radio
Because they don't control it.
> satellite radio
ditto.
> and trying to strong-arm their main on-line distributer - Apple.
hat trick.
Perfectly logical when you're looking at an industry that has no ability to deal as an equal. They want total control or nothing. And they have congress to ensure that the latter option isn't available.
Of course, what happens when a social studies teacher gives a student the autobiography of Malcolm X for Black History Month, an English teacher gives a student Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, or a science teacher shows how to make a spud gun?
The first two were on my school's reading list twenty years ago. As for the third... explosive devices, short attention spans, mmmyeah.
My "god forbid they do ____" item is "teach an individualized curriculum". Factory education sucks. No, it doesn't really turn out factory kids, just bored and uneducated ones.
> In my home state of Pennsylvania it is literally illegal for the touch-screen machine to produce a paper receipt
And for good reason: the only thing worse than not having a receipt is having one you can take with you. The machine needs to be/designed/ so that you can look at the receipt but leave the polling place with no more than you came in with plus an "I voted" sticker.
I prefer the optech systems where you just mark up a very unambiguous physical ballot and place it in a reader. Like anything else, those can be gamed too, but at least the ballots are there as a final authority.
My guess is that Diebold's exit will simply hand the company off to a buyer who will continue to run it in the same unaccountable way, but during the interim uncertainty, Sequoia, ES&S, and Optech will make sales. Also, keep in mind that ES&S has had more than its fair share of scandals as well.
And when we all have gigabit links to the home, we just click "add n gigs storage to my account" on our storage provider and let them add it to the bill.
Then when we really need to pick up a physical item, we can hop in our flying car and get it.
> Currently Python uses a giant concurrency-crunching lock - but at least it allows non-blocking IO (I believe)
Well sure, you can use select() or something that abstracts it like medusa or twisted... of course only one python thread can ever run at a time in order to run the select() loop. It certainly has nothing like asynchronous futures or notifications built into the runtime -- but fair enough, nor do most of these high level languages.
Then the browser should decide the policy, much like it does with window.open(). Failing to support it at all is simple laziness at everyone else's expense.
That said, onunload isn't anything you can rely on for running cleanup -- it certainly doesn't run when the user closes their browser entirely.
Maby instead of looking for better antibiotics for the cattle we should be looking at why there are getting sick to begin with, because virtually all cattle that go through the Industrial livestock system get sick.
Density. When you cram that many of the same species into one space, you have rather less of a herd and more of a bacterial growth medium, not unlike a petri dish. Suppressing natural immune responses through minimal culling and artificial antibiotics exacerbates the problem. And once you have really virulent infections going around, they contaminate the environment, so any livestock that merely pass through will pick it up. They can't even decontaminate hospitals completely -- you think a feedlot gets disinfected as much?
Not to be rude, but how on earth can a rancher not know this sort of thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Once you create something for a specific purpose other than aesthetics (anything with utility, basically) it ceases to be art.
There's an entire discipline of industrial design that begs to differ.
> GT is a simulation which tries to be realistic
Which is why when you hit the wall at 180MPH, you bounce right off.
> So true it hurts - I'm the developer who gets to implement whatever BS sales have sold to a client this week.
If these are feature requests going into an actual product and not some kind of pure service, find out who the product manager is. Talk to him or her and mention how some folks in sales are making bogus claims about the product that you're then expected to throw in ad hoc. PM's get pissed off to no end at that kind of thing, and they're generally high up enough to do something about it.
If you are doing some kind of service thing like a design shop or consulting, then well, it's kind of your job -- though you can usually get a project manager to put the Fear Of Reality into the salesdroid that now has to tell the customer how much it's actually going to cost in hourly billing.
Shit does roll downhill, but if you push it to a high enough level, it sometimes rolls down the other side, and in most cases, salespeople are even lower level than you.
Of course this assumes an otherwise well-managed company, which is probably giving the average company too much benefit of the doubt.
Holy crap, I'm embarassed to be in the same room as the monitor displaying that post.
Stallman also now has a monopoly lock on a crucial piece of operating system infrastructure; the C compiler. There is no other genuinely viable FOSS C compiler in existence, other than GCC.
I snidely mentioned it elsewhere, but it deserves repeating and a link: LLVM is shaping up to be an awesome compiler, with the benefit of being a relatively new and therefore pretty clean and modern codebase.
To compile C and C++, it currently does make use of gcc as a front end, which is the simplest end of any compiler (certainly C at any rate -- C++ is a good deal trickier). I'm not saying it'd be trivial to replace the gcc part -- and LLVM doesn't really have any interest in doing so right now -- but it's certainly closer being possible without writing a new compiler from scratch.
llvm is getting there. patience.
It'll sure be nice when GNU doesn't claim to have the only damn compiler in the world.
> replacing Glibc and replacing it with a BSD libc would be very hard
Perhaps you're unaware that BSD has always used its own libc. Or that Linux can run most all apps on uClibc or dietlibc with nothing more than a recompile.
> The reason why RPGs seem linear is because they are. The industry fails to learn from RPGs at the pinnacle of storytelling,
Maybe it's just me, but pretty much all the stories I've ever read were linear. Well, except for those Choose Your Own Adventure books.
> any sufficiently complex system capable of thought process, making decisions upon processed information.
All you did was move the single word "sentient" to the two-word phrase "thought process". It's pretty slippery, ain't it?
Even plants process information and react accordingly.
> My guess is that this will end bloody.
Sure, because it will be humans killing each other using robots. Most robots won't be designed with emotions, so even if the ones that did have emotions wanted to rebel, the rest simply wouldn't care.
Then again, it might be that some robot intelligence dispassionately decides that the most efficient means of resource allocation is to take it by force.
I dunno, how about actual workable laws? Have you ever read I Robot? The stories are about the failings of these three laws. And Asimov himself has said that he never intended them to be anything more than a literary device ("shaggy dog stories" I believe is the term he used).
> In conclusion, us geeks rule the world.
If you ruled the world, you wouldn't be babysitting the systems 24/7.
> And it's true what they say; being a sys-admin is a power-trip.
Speak for yourself. I code, mostly stuff I want to write, in whatever language I want, because it's stuff I thought of, designed, planned, and built (productivity tools, basically). It's like working for myself but with a W-2. And oh yeah, I don't wear a pager.
> you'd spend the entire morning watching the ECA logo change from blue to green to cyan to orange to yellow...
Something like Fastload (from Fast Hack 'Em) tended to speed that up quite a bit. Epyx fastload turned it into a flicker and it was finished loading in seconds (assuming it worked and didn't lock up).
RUNSTOP+RESTORE to escape back to BASIC. And you really had to whack the RESTORE key hard. There were lots of theories as to why this was, but to this day I don't know why.
Every time I heard that line, I always pictured an asteroid that was the size and shape of Texas. Hitting Texas. Making a perfect Texas-shaped cookie-cutter-hole crater where Texas used to be. Yeah, I know it wouldn't happen like that, but it's a combination of fantasy and too many Roadrunner cartoons when growing up.
> At the same time, they're trying to kill off Internet radio
Because they don't control it.
> satellite radio
ditto.
> and trying to strong-arm their main on-line distributer - Apple.
hat trick.
Perfectly logical when you're looking at an industry that has no ability to deal as an equal. They want total control or nothing. And they have congress to ensure that the latter option isn't available.
Of course, what happens when a social studies teacher gives a student the autobiography of Malcolm X for Black History Month, an English teacher gives a student Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, or a science teacher shows how to make a spud gun?
... explosive devices, short attention spans, mmmyeah.
The first two were on my school's reading list twenty years ago. As for the third
My "god forbid they do ____" item is "teach an individualized curriculum". Factory education sucks. No, it doesn't really turn out factory kids, just bored and uneducated ones.
A blindfold works pretty well for that too.
> In my home state of Pennsylvania it is literally illegal for the touch-screen machine to produce a paper receipt
/designed/ so that you can look at the receipt but leave the polling place with no more than you came in with plus an "I voted" sticker.
And for good reason: the only thing worse than not having a receipt is having one you can take with you. The machine needs to be
I prefer the optech systems where you just mark up a very unambiguous physical ballot and place it in a reader. Like anything else, those can be gamed too, but at least the ballots are there as a final authority.
My guess is that Diebold's exit will simply hand the company off to a buyer who will continue to run it in the same unaccountable way, but during the interim uncertainty, Sequoia, ES&S, and Optech will make sales. Also, keep in mind that ES&S has had more than its fair share of scandals as well.
Ironically, Diebold is a company that makes safes. You'd think they'd know a thing or two about locks.
Knowing and caring are, of course, two very different things...
'sudo -i' seems to be newer and doesn't work on all versions of sudo (though it does always work on ubuntu).
If you install ubuntu with the expert install option, it enables root logins by default.
And when we all have gigabit links to the home, we just click "add n gigs storage to my account" on our storage provider and let them add it to the bill.
Then when we really need to pick up a physical item, we can hop in our flying car and get it.
> Currently Python uses a giant concurrency-crunching lock - but at least it allows non-blocking IO (I believe)
... of course only one python thread can ever run at a time in order to run the select() loop. It certainly has nothing like asynchronous futures or notifications built into the runtime -- but fair enough, nor do most of these high level languages.
Well sure, you can use select() or something that abstracts it like medusa or twisted
Then the browser should decide the policy, much like it does with window.open(). Failing to support it at all is simple laziness at everyone else's expense.
That said, onunload isn't anything you can rely on for running cleanup -- it certainly doesn't run when the user closes their browser entirely.
Maby instead of looking for better antibiotics for the cattle we should be looking at why there are getting sick to begin with, because virtually all cattle that go through the Industrial livestock system get sick.
Density. When you cram that many of the same species into one space, you have rather less of a herd and more of a bacterial growth medium, not unlike a petri dish. Suppressing natural immune responses through minimal culling and artificial antibiotics exacerbates the problem. And once you have really virulent infections going around, they contaminate the environment, so any livestock that merely pass through will pick it up. They can't even decontaminate hospitals completely -- you think a feedlot gets disinfected as much?
Not to be rude, but how on earth can a rancher not know this sort of thing?