but their names now live on in their philanthropic works.
Only because philanthropy is a way to avoid the government taking half of the estate upon your death.
Give it away to the charity of your choice or let the government take half upon your death.
It's not like you get to take it with you when you go:)
All the hand-wringing about "death taxes" is such bullshit.
Bill Gates Sr., one of many, thinks that the ideas floating around to eliminate the current high inheritance taxes are a bad idea and would be devastating to charities.
Low inheritance taxes preserves an effective nobility and leisure class that will use an accident of birth to make a living as a shareholder. Arguably the builders of wealth should obtain such benefits - not their progeny. Descendents should be provided equal opportunity to compete based on their own merits and talents.
I agree that each application should have a stand-alone context and that horizontal and vertical integration (sometimes genuinely useful, sometimes gratuitous lock-in attempt) should not be mandated.
But I do constantly get seminar and meeting reminders via email that I'd like to add to my calendar. Having a button to authorize negotiation between the email client and the calendar scheduling client would be a genuine convenient feature.
The interface specification should be fully-specified, open and documented so that even command line invocations of and communications with the calendaring application are possible.
Open source wins because it can afford to be completely open and to become interoperable with anyone.
The smart kids go teased and beat up. Who wants that.
Well, the obvious answer is that the less intelligent students have learned at home that validation comes from putting other people down. Not a sustainable model for a society, IMHO.
But this brings up a good point.
If society as a whole wanted to improve its overall standard of living as much as possible it would recognize that the most intelligent 5% of the population has given them 50% of the ideas that have promoted progress overall. And it would try to take as much advantage of this as possible.
A better learning environment and one which is not needlessly slowed down for the benefit of the average and below average students could be provided to those students who would be capable of achieving a lot more.
Set up special schools and programs to make the most of the best students. (I'm probably not the only nerd who was able to kick back and relax, who was bored to tears seeing repetitive math education in elementary and middle school.)
Once those students get out into the working world, they'll contribute back manifold discoveries, inventions and ideas. What we're doing now is morally equivalent to the Cultural Revolution in China, where an entire generation of intellectuals was lost as many of them were put in prison or forced to work on farms to gain a proper appreciation of the working class. You see the same distrust of intellectuals everywhere. "Damn college kid thinks he's smarter `n everyone!" Yes, I'm smarter than a lot of people - that doesn't make me a better or superior person. Just smarter.
Meanwhile, increase the investment in education for all the other students, too! Increase investment in Head Start, day care for working mothers, school nutrition programs, etc.
Finally, make education tuition free. Get rid of fees and make the only requirement for entrance and continuing education be sufficient academic performance.
Requirements that are too rigid are bad. But so too are requirements that are too loose.
I like requirements that are rigid on the edge, that is where they meet the world.
But then give me free rein to change ideas for the internal structure.
Of course, it always helps if you know your customers well enought to anticipate the inevitable change request that will come down the pike. Then, you'll see if your internals can be readjusted elegantly quickly to accomodate the new exposed services they want.
It's important to listen to customers, not just to hear what they're saying explicitly, but to get an idea of where they're going and what they might want in the future based on what they believe is important and valuable. Hint: customers/users may not just tell you explicitly what they think is important and valuable.
It has managed to do this with little commercial support
But not zero. And the commercial support is two-fold:
development of the Apache code base,
installation, customization and maintenance for users.
Sure, customers love high performing, reliable, more secure software such as Apache. And, if they have someone with some expertise with a few hours to spare once in a while, then they can maintain their own web sites cost effectively without ever cutting a check to anyone outside the company. And the effort required to support Apache may be lower than the competition in many situations. But it's still not zero. While the company can download and run Apache without ever contributing any code tot he project, code still had to be written and still needs to be maintained.
The Apache Foundation includes members of several commercial concerns. That commercial support of the open source project has probably helped immeasureably in making Apache better.
Also, for businesses and other users that would like to contract out Apache support there are vendors (eg, Covalent, IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell/SuSE,...) that will provide it.
I suspect that Gentoo and Debian users, per capita feedback more about bugs, fixes to the source application authors than users of other distros. OTOH, those other distro users probably gripe to Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake support and then those gripes are fielded and represented to the source maintainers that way.
But the more layers of communication and representation, the less efficient the communication. The best communication, of course, is when you develop the application that you use yourself ("eat your own dogfood").
OK, OK, I'm with everyone that decries the abomination and desecration of the Constitution that the "Patriot Act" is.
Let's move on, though.
Beneath the knee-jerk reaction is a reasonable intention: what can be done to better protect a free society from being victimized by terrorists?
Is it not possible to craft legislation that achieves this goal in a more effective manner with less infringement of individual liberties?
[I've been a fan of Bruce Schneier and his observation that more effective and more economical security policies, for computers and for the broader arena, are frequently overlooked.]
they are truly posed to begin doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to them: Eat away from the bottom up.
Yes, possibly.
MS has certainly gotten fat lazy with its monopoly. But it still has huge cash reserves adn hundreds of talented programmers that could be tasked with anything
And Sun has corporate culture to swim against. They've been a quality hardware/software company for some time. Low volume, high prices. In Linux land, there's a mindset that "I'm not going to pay a lot for this WHATEVER - otherwise I'd be sticking with MS!"
IMHO, a number of incredible products would be unleased if we had a decent fiber backbone coupled with WAP.
Something tells me, however, they'll be shown a lot more.
Time
Direction of travel
Location
which can then be correlated with
recent bank robberies
glimpses of same car at other locations, giving average speed, compare with speed limit
bars closing, time for breathalyzer stop
let out of rally against $PARTY_IN_POWER
and then correlated over time with
frequency of visits to relatives
location of friends houses
frequent trips downtown, must be to buy drugs, hookers
frequency of trips to what church, better be the right one
mindless loop cruising back and forth on main street, more probable gang member
Interesting Stuff Comes Out Late
on
The War Of The Word
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm sure more than a few of the bright employees at MS have some stories waiting to be told. OTOH, they're probably still grateful for the stock option wealth of the last 2 decades and feel some loyalty to the company that has done both good and bad.
Maybe Bob Woodward ought to interview some of them....
I'm hoping that the inspiring leadership of Daniel Robbins and his ability to get volunteers worldwide to work together on Gentoo will continue even if he isn't personally at the helm.
It kills me to walk into a library today and not see any books written before 2001.
What kills me is to walk into a library, when it does happen to be open, and
not see many people reading books.
especially kids,
and voters.
I see the same trend in the workplace as written documents become scarcer, being replaced by Powerpoint presentations with audio, video and all the flashiness necessary to present to an audience with short-attention spans created by a TV-rich, book-lean diet.
I'd agree that small businesses, shoestring budgets, home, school, charity, underdeveloped nations would be better off going OO.o.
At large corporations, smooth 2-way compatibility with MS Office is a must have and OO.o is not there yet.
It's ironic, though. If a few of the larger MS Office licensees were to pool their resources they could contract out to improve OO.o so that it would be sufficiently compatible.
But there's the tragedy of the commons: even though many would benefit from lower costs, etc., everyone hopes "George will do it" I'll just wait until its good enough for me and meanwhile I'll shell out for MS Office.
But the more small time users lap over the barrier, the more it wears down.
A day will come when a Fortune 500 company makes the jump. It will look impressive, but it will just be the culmination of years of work by others on OO.o
This reminds me of an idea I had a few years ago. I'm something of an outdoor enthusiast, hiker, etc.
Wouldn't it be cool to have outdoor trips recorded completely in video?
This would be the kind of thing that would make a great dynamic screensaver backdrop, or something to put on the TV in place of commercial chatter and hype (kind of like fishtank, fireplace, etc.)
But it could be really useful in planning trips, to help people know which fork to take, what do the landmarks really look like at different times of day, different seasons of the year, etc.
This could be good, too, for river trips when you're wondering what various rapids look like at different flowrates CFM before you go down through them.
Sometimes I've wished to be able to muck around with the stack more easily than Rolling down and doing xy interchanges.
xz interchanges
more than 4 high stacks
automatic remembering of last operations so you could say "do the samething except using 5.32 at this point" (I know, I know, if you think you'll do something again you should make it a function in advance, but with today's memory you should be able to make up functions on the fly from chunks of your.history
It would be really cool if this technology could somehow be integrated into the Gentoo [gentoo.org] project.
I'm a gentoo fan, but I'd definitely be in favor of this being done in a distributed kind of way, where the user can feed back a profile mix of usage patterns (eg, Web server, desktop, video encoding, scientific applications, etc.) and hardware and find the best compiler flags from a server. In that database that you described.
Otherwise, can you imagine doing NFLAG factorial complete builds with some synthetic loads for good measure? And some people already think a single build in gentoo takes too long!
Now that Novell has invested in SuSE and Ximian, go full steam ahead in the Linux market, why not bring out Novell Directory Service across platform?
IIRC, Novell had NDS ready years ago but were pre-empted by a vaporware announcement of AD from Microsoft. Corporate clients were wary of buying NDS, even if it was a nice product, just because they knew that in a year or two MS would come out with their own brand of directory service that would be tightly integrated into other MS products.
Either do that, or have Samba 4 include more of these combined directory authentication services, hopefully using standardized components such as LDAP and kerberos.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Evolution for my email and find its built-in calendaring adequate.
However, before I started using Evo, I used Thomas Dreimeyer's plan.
Plan has seen years of work on it, has lots of nice features, configurable birthdays, etc.
but their names now live on in their philanthropic works.
Only because philanthropy is a way to avoid the government taking half of the estate upon your death.
Give it away to the charity of your choice or let the government take half upon your death.
It's not like you get to take it with you when you go:)
All the hand-wringing about "death taxes" is such bullshit.
Bill Gates Sr., one of many, thinks that the ideas floating around to eliminate the current high inheritance taxes are a bad idea and would be devastating to charities.
Low inheritance taxes preserves an effective nobility and leisure class that will use an accident of birth to make a living as a shareholder. Arguably the builders of wealth should obtain such benefits - not their progeny. Descendents should be provided equal opportunity to compete based on their own merits and talents.
I agree that each application should have a stand-alone context and that horizontal and vertical integration (sometimes genuinely useful, sometimes gratuitous lock-in attempt) should not be mandated.
But I do constantly get seminar and meeting reminders via email that I'd like to add to my calendar. Having a button to authorize negotiation between the email client and the calendar scheduling client would be a genuine convenient feature.
The interface specification should be fully-specified, open and documented so that even command line invocations of and communications with the calendaring application are possible.
Open source wins because it can afford to be completely open and to become interoperable with anyone.
How does Thunderbird compare with Evolution, KMail, mutt, pine, Sylpheed, and Outlook?
[I use Mozilla Firefox for browsing but Evolution (on KDE) for email.]
The smart kids go teased and beat up. Who wants that.
Well, the obvious answer is that the less intelligent students have learned at home that validation comes from putting other people down. Not a sustainable model for a society, IMHO.
But this brings up a good point.
If society as a whole wanted to improve its overall standard of living as much as possible it would recognize that the most intelligent 5% of the population has given them 50% of the ideas that have promoted progress overall. And it would try to take as much advantage of this as possible.
A better learning environment and one which is not needlessly slowed down for the benefit of the average and below average students could be provided to those students who would be capable of achieving a lot more.
Set up special schools and programs to make the most of the best students. (I'm probably not the only nerd who was able to kick back and relax, who was bored to tears seeing repetitive math education in elementary and middle school.)
Once those students get out into the working world, they'll contribute back manifold discoveries, inventions and ideas. What we're doing now is morally equivalent to the Cultural Revolution in China, where an entire generation of intellectuals was lost as many of them were put in prison or forced to work on farms to gain a proper appreciation of the working class. You see the same distrust of intellectuals everywhere. "Damn college kid thinks he's smarter `n everyone!" Yes, I'm smarter than a lot of people - that doesn't make me a better or superior person. Just smarter.
Meanwhile, increase the investment in education for all the other students, too! Increase investment in Head Start, day care for working mothers, school nutrition programs, etc.
Finally, make education tuition free. Get rid of fees and make the only requirement for entrance and continuing education be sufficient academic performance.
Requirements that are too rigid are bad. But so too are requirements that are too loose.
I like requirements that are rigid on the edge, that is where they meet the world.
But then give me free rein to change ideas for the internal structure.
Of course, it always helps if you know your customers well enought to anticipate the inevitable change request that will come down the pike. Then, you'll see if your internals can be readjusted elegantly quickly to accomodate the new exposed services they want.
It's important to listen to customers, not just to hear what they're saying explicitly, but to get an idea of where they're going and what they might want in the future based on what they believe is important and valuable. Hint: customers/users may not just tell you explicitly what they think is important and valuable.
It has managed to do this with little commercial support
But not zero. And the commercial support is two-fold:
Sure, customers love high performing, reliable, more secure software such as Apache. And, if they have someone with some expertise with a few hours to spare once in a while, then they can maintain their own web sites cost effectively without ever cutting a check to anyone outside the company. And the effort required to support Apache may be lower than the competition in many situations. But it's still not zero. While the company can download and run Apache without ever contributing any code tot he project, code still had to be written and still needs to be maintained.
The Apache Foundation includes members of several commercial concerns. That commercial support of the open source project has probably helped immeasureably in making Apache better.
Also, for businesses and other users that would like to contract out Apache support there are vendors (eg, Covalent, IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell/SuSE, ...) that will provide it.
A fix in the source is a fix for every distro,
That's an excellent point.
I suspect that Gentoo and Debian users, per capita feedback more about bugs, fixes to the source application authors than users of other distros. OTOH, those other distro users probably gripe to Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake support and then those gripes are fielded and represented to the source maintainers that way.
But the more layers of communication and representation, the less efficient the communication. The best communication, of course, is when you develop the application that you use yourself ("eat your own dogfood").
how comfortable are people using an automated solution for refactoring
A fair number of proficient C++ programmers make a great living refactoring other peoples' mistakes.
In an average project, most objects and methods are still damn far from being prime.
OK, OK, I'm with everyone that decries the abomination and desecration of the Constitution that the "Patriot Act" is.
Let's move on, though.
Beneath the knee-jerk reaction is a reasonable intention: what can be done to better protect a free society from being victimized by terrorists?
Is it not possible to craft legislation that achieves this goal in a more effective manner with less infringement of individual liberties?
[I've been a fan of Bruce Schneier and his observation that more effective and more economical security policies, for computers and for the broader arena, are frequently overlooked.]
...of typing in BASIC programs on a Teletype with a large roll (yes, just like bathroom towels) of yellow newsprint on a Data General Nova.
And, to write and read my program - paper tape!
In those days, having a machine do math for you, math that would otherwise be tedious crunching by hand, gave me a sense of wonder and power.
they are truly posed to begin doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to them: Eat away from the bottom up.
Yes, possibly.
MS has certainly gotten fat lazy with its monopoly. But it still has huge cash reserves adn hundreds of talented programmers that could be tasked with anything
And Sun has corporate culture to swim against. They've been a quality hardware/software company for some time. Low volume, high prices. In Linux land, there's a mindset that "I'm not going to pay a lot for this WHATEVER - otherwise I'd be sticking with MS!"
IMHO, a number of incredible products would be unleased if we had a decent fiber backbone coupled with WAP.
Something tells me, however, they'll be shown a lot more.
- Time
- Direction of travel
- Location
which can then be correlated with- recent bank robberies
- glimpses of same car at other locations, giving average speed, compare with speed limit
- bars closing, time for breathalyzer stop
- let out of rally against $PARTY_IN_POWER
and then correlated over time withI'm sure more than a few of the bright employees at MS have some stories waiting to be told. OTOH, they're probably still grateful for the stock option wealth of the last 2 decades and feel some loyalty to the company that has done both good and bad.
Maybe Bob Woodward ought to interview some of them....
The list of the top 10 in the story and the top 10 of other posters with...
what the IT department puts onto new machines.
It's, like, different.
This experience would help qualify
As a side note, I'll say the IBM developerWorks articles on OpenSSH Key Management by Daniel Robbins (I don't know how much they paid him for these) are well-written and a useful introduction to any newbie wondering WTF is going on with ssh.
I'm hoping that the inspiring leadership of Daniel Robbins and his ability to get volunteers worldwide to work together on Gentoo will continue even if he isn't personally at the helm.
It kills me to walk into a library today and not see any books written before 2001.
What kills me is to walk into a library, when it does happen to be open, and
I see the same trend in the workplace as written documents become scarcer, being replaced by Powerpoint presentations with audio, video and all the flashiness necessary to present to an audience with short-attention spans created by a TV-rich, book-lean diet.
Why think when you can feel?
Get knowledgeable in something besides just IT.
Get to know the business that your IT infrastructure supports.
Then, you'll be able to come up with better ideas of how IT can benefit your business in ways that a pure IT geek cannot.
A friend of mine went the other way, coming in with a biochemistry background, picking up SQL database skills and ending up making good money.
I'd agree that small businesses, shoestring budgets, home, school, charity, underdeveloped nations would be better off going OO.o.
At large corporations, smooth 2-way compatibility with MS Office is a must have and OO.o is not there yet.
It's ironic, though. If a few of the larger MS Office licensees were to pool their resources they could contract out to improve OO.o so that it would be sufficiently compatible.
But there's the tragedy of the commons: even though many would benefit from lower costs, etc., everyone hopes "George will do it" I'll just wait until its good enough for me and meanwhile I'll shell out for MS Office.
But the more small time users lap over the barrier, the more it wears down.
A day will come when a Fortune 500 company makes the jump. It will look impressive, but it will just be the culmination of years of work by others on OO.o
This reminds me of an idea I had a few years ago. I'm something of an outdoor enthusiast, hiker, etc.
Wouldn't it be cool to have outdoor trips recorded completely in video?
This would be the kind of thing that would make a great dynamic screensaver backdrop, or something to put on the TV in place of commercial chatter and hype (kind of like fishtank, fireplace, etc.)
But it could be really useful in planning trips, to help people know which fork to take, what do the landmarks really look like at different times of day, different seasons of the year, etc.
This could be good, too, for river trips when you're wondering what various rapids look like at different flowrates CFM before you go down through them.
People who listen to Mozart score better
Not that I've seen.
But if you've got proof of scoring better with Britney then I'll reconsider that conclusion.
No, you can pledge all you like. But government agents (i.e. teachers) can't lead children in a statement that asserts the existence of God.
Of course, it might be better if we Christians read and meditated upon scripture ourselves rather than relegate that to (fallible) people.
Sometimes I've wished to be able to muck around with the stack more easily than Rolling down and doing xy interchanges.
It would be really cool if this technology could somehow be integrated into the Gentoo [gentoo.org] project.
I'm a gentoo fan, but I'd definitely be in favor of this being done in a distributed kind of way, where the user can feed back a profile mix of usage patterns (eg, Web server, desktop, video encoding, scientific applications, etc.) and hardware and find the best compiler flags from a server. In that database that you described.
Otherwise, can you imagine doing NFLAG factorial complete builds with some synthetic loads for good measure? And some people already think a single build in gentoo takes too long!
So why not make NDS more freely available?
Now that Novell has invested in SuSE and Ximian, go full steam ahead in the Linux market, why not bring out Novell Directory Service across platform?
IIRC, Novell had NDS ready years ago but were pre-empted by a vaporware announcement of AD from Microsoft. Corporate clients were wary of buying NDS, even if it was a nice product, just because they knew that in a year or two MS would come out with their own brand of directory service that would be tightly integrated into other MS products.
Either do that, or have Samba 4 include more of these combined directory authentication services, hopefully using standardized components such as LDAP and kerberos.