That's how they *make* money - a debt to us is a credit to the bank
I had to watch this video twice, but once I did, I understood a lot more about what the bank does or does not have to have in its vault to be able to make loans. Very educational (assuming it's true).
The only real response required to this is that it's systemic - everybody does it. Sure, you may be able to fire the very worst offenders and replace them with more productive employees, but when it's systemic, who are you going to replace them with?
Too bad this analogy can't be effectively made to fight the RIAA's efforts against the general population, regarding 'stealing' music.
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
Sounds like a reasonable beginning of a spec.
Now making sure we get one of those is the tough part. Since the 'making sure' involves, most probably, human action, the whole idea is bound to fail, naturally.
How tough can it be?
Flesh out the spec
Start a project on sourceforge
call it skyn... no wait... rulernet
write up a good regression test suite against the spec
post on slashdot that you're starting a new project
It'll pretty much write itself after that. Did I miss anything?
The timing on that was quite close. I was thinking of her experience immediately after she was freed and just before she asked to be brought up to the roof, and how she transformed in the close-up shot on her.
I interpreted it not that she had become a fighter, but that freedom of fear of death meant profound peace, and total freedom -- which I guess is a great asset in someone who fights oppression. A very powerful image, something I'll probably remember for a while. Well, that and 'Your skin is so smooth, not rough like the sand.'
Re:Is the problem one of craft or mentality?
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 1
but they are solo silo stars and it's hard to pair or team them.
Not that hard, depending on how you do it. You really find out who can work well with a partner if you do it right.
I think we should start using it more in the US. Beats 'nerd' or 'geek' for the way it rolls off the tongue, and I especially like who turned out to be the most popular boffins in the UK. Being compared to those two is better than other portrayals, and if they're boffins, well then maybe that's not so bad.
Perhaps the science community in the US could reclaim the word -- use it to indicate scientists who take their work seriously and perform it diligently. Or would you prefer the boring 'physics/chemistry/biology/etc researcher' moniker instead?
I'm big on free speech, but I also know that boys need boundaries and guidance as to how to behave in civilization. Left to their own devices, it would be Lord of the Flies.
There, fixed that for you (in the literary context of the book). Dave Barry also had an article about boys being on a desert island would make pretend guns out of driftwood, while girls would get together and start being domestic. Oh, and the boys would all pick one piece of driftwood to fight over.
Of course, it's a different world today, so your mileage will vary.
Q: How does the Polish Constitution differ from the American?
A: Under the Polish Constitution citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, but under the United States constitution they are guaranteed freedom after speech.
And nobody's been burned by an employer? Have your own set of questions ready for the various interviewers and watch whether they squirm, lie outright, or tell the unpleasant truth -- "Name three things you hate about this company, and give examples."
Wasn't HP a major sponsor of Software in the Public Interest, Debian's parent organization, a couple years back? If they backed it substantially (they seemed to have featured prominently on SPI's sponsorship pages), would anyone here know if that was part of their strategy to eventually build a distro on top of Debian? Having both Ubuntu and HP contribute packaging fixes upstream to Debian would be great.
As far as I can tell, the killer app preventing linux from taking over the corporate world is the lack of an outlook replacement.
Google hosted mail is providing a drop-in solution for at least some companies. It might start gaining ground quietly until a tipping point as it starts providing more for less, and since it uses IMAP, you have your choice of clients to pick as a corporate standard. From a corporate perspective, if you could throw $50/employee yearly at a mail/calendar/document sharing solution and have that be pretty much the total cost, wouldn't you at least seriously consider that as an option, especially as a small company?
I also disagree with Shuttleworth saying that OS X hands down provides the best experience. I haven't used it recently, but I have never been blown away by OS X. It does things well, but I don't see a massive usability revolution.
It's quite good, but as you say, it's not revolutionary. It is, however, smooth, convenient, efficient, and attractive. The one wart I've seen in Finder is mounting of network shares -- the whole finder seems to hang while accessing CIFS. If they did the Apple thing and seamlessly used kioslaves behind the scenes for that functionality, though, it would really improve the user experience.
In that regard, I'd really like to see him put his money towards more of the underlying layers. You see a lot of contributors putting work towards the UI, but being able to pay people to work on items such as
groveling through the register documentation for ATI to provide all its polygon and texture features to the X server to accelerate 2-d things such as expose' and thumbnails
fixing some long-time problems in Unix -- e.g., the option to select() on a child for a exception/termination condition instead of having to wait() for it
the ALSA problems mentioned earlier
software suspend
multi-monitor support as straightforward and dynamically configurable as under MacOS/Windows
It seems like those kinds of things are not particularly glamorous or profitable in and of themselves, but could improve things for lots of developers and users. Money can be the motivator to fill in those cracks where fame isn't.
The cost is not irrelevant. If consumers are willing to buy for $.1 and the providers are willing to sell for $.01, economics says the price should be between $.01 and $.1. But why should it be $.1 and not $.01? Why is it clamped at what the consumers are willing to pay and not what the providers are willing to sell for?
Actually, I thought it was because people won't switch their plan or carrier over the difference between 1c and 5c and 10c texting. If there was a free market for texting -- you could have one carrier for voice and another for texting -- I'd think prices would change very quickly.
Your regexp example isn't awfully good - any language that has regexp support will have lines like that. These days, PHP has regexp support (possibly always has), C has regexp support, C++ has it, Java has it, and I expect that even C# has regexp libraries.
That's quite true. And in many cases, regexp support comes from this regexp library.
In addition, the level of expression (i.e. TMTOWTDI) means in practice that highly varying programming styles occur throughout large, long-lived bodies of code.
As a result, significant Perl-based business applications tend to become hard-to-maintain hairballs of divergent style and subtly variegated concept.
Very true... which is why Perl::Critic was created. While I suspect this isn't available for other languages, perl's flexibility in this case provides both the problem and a solution.
Dang, just ran out of mod points. The idea of representatives being people who want to do the right thing is considered naive, but even if writing them once in a while would produce a result like this, it's worth it. Good for you!
Generally -- except in one notable case, and expected in Debian lenny. As you can imagine, this caused a lot of complaints. From what I skimmed there and other places, the attitude is that/bin/sh under Debian should be a fully POSIX-compliant shell, and if you want to use bashisms, start your program with #!/bin/bash.
Of course this is going to date me, but when I was younger, I'd waste maybe 5-10 minutes playing a game that was worth 25c to me. That way entertainment was a refreshing diversion, not something you had to budget -- time and money -- for.
Sutor said that he was 'tired of waiting' for specialized applications to appear in other sectors,
So he's got an itch to scratch and in the hallowed tradition of open source, will start writing these apps that he desperately feels the absence of? Impatience is one of the traits of a good programmer, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how they *make* money - a debt to us is a credit to the bank
I had to watch this video twice, but once I did, I understood a lot more about what the bank does or does not have to have in its vault to be able to make loans. Very educational (assuming it's true).
This has been a problem for aeons -- we know exactly what you mean.
The only real response required to this is that it's systemic - everybody does it. Sure, you may be able to fire the very worst offenders and replace them with more productive employees, but when it's systemic, who are you going to replace them with?
Too bad this analogy can't be effectively made to fight the RIAA's efforts against the general population, regarding 'stealing' music.
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
Sounds like a reasonable beginning of a spec.
Now making sure we get one of those is the tough part. Since the 'making sure' involves, most probably, human action, the whole idea is bound to fail, naturally.
How tough can it be?
It'll pretty much write itself after that. Did I miss anything?
Which makes me wonder -- shouldn't they have oxygen masks available around the accelerator in case something like this happens?
I interpreted it not that she had become a fighter, but that freedom of fear of death meant profound peace, and total freedom -- which I guess is a great asset in someone who fights oppression. A very powerful image, something I'll probably remember for a while. Well, that and 'Your skin is so smooth, not rough like the sand.'
but they are solo silo stars and it's hard to pair or team them.
Not that hard, depending on how you do it. You really find out who can work well with a partner if you do it right.
Perhaps the science community in the US could reclaim the word -- use it to indicate scientists who take their work seriously and perform it diligently. Or would you prefer the boring 'physics/chemistry/biology/etc researcher' moniker instead?
I'm big on free speech, but I also know that boys need boundaries and guidance as to how to behave in civilization. Left to their own devices, it would be Lord of the Flies.
There, fixed that for you (in the literary context of the book). Dave Barry also had an article about boys being on a desert island would make pretend guns out of driftwood, while girls would get together and start being domestic. Oh, and the boys would all pick one piece of driftwood to fight over.
Of course, it's a different world today, so your mileage will vary.
Q: How does the Polish Constitution differ from the American?
A: Under the Polish Constitution citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, but under the United States constitution they are guaranteed freedom after speech.
Female voice: "Linux. Just like a Mac, but Free".
I'm thinking something more along the lines of PC = Natale Portman at the beginning of V for Vendetta, and Linux is her about 3/4 of the way through.
And nobody's been burned by an employer? Have your own set of questions ready for the various interviewers and watch whether they squirm, lie outright, or tell the unpleasant truth -- "Name three things you hate about this company, and give examples."
Wasn't HP a major sponsor of Software in the Public Interest, Debian's parent organization, a couple years back? If they backed it substantially (they seemed to have featured prominently on SPI's sponsorship pages), would anyone here know if that was part of their strategy to eventually build a distro on top of Debian? Having both Ubuntu and HP contribute packaging fixes upstream to Debian would be great.
As far as I can tell, the killer app preventing linux from taking over the corporate world is the lack of an outlook replacement.
Google hosted mail is providing a drop-in solution for at least some companies. It might start gaining ground quietly until a tipping point as it starts providing more for less, and since it uses IMAP, you have your choice of clients to pick as a corporate standard. From a corporate perspective, if you could throw $50/employee yearly at a mail/calendar/document sharing solution and have that be pretty much the total cost, wouldn't you at least seriously consider that as an option, especially as a small company?
I also disagree with Shuttleworth saying that OS X hands down provides the best experience. I haven't used it recently, but I have never been blown away by OS X. It does things well, but I don't see a massive usability revolution.
It's quite good, but as you say, it's not revolutionary. It is, however, smooth, convenient, efficient, and attractive. The one wart I've seen in Finder is mounting of network shares -- the whole finder seems to hang while accessing CIFS. If they did the Apple thing and seamlessly used kioslaves behind the scenes for that functionality, though, it would really improve the user experience.
In that regard, I'd really like to see him put his money towards more of the underlying layers. You see a lot of contributors putting work towards the UI, but being able to pay people to work on items such as
It seems like those kinds of things are not particularly glamorous or profitable in and of themselves, but could improve things for lots of developers and users. Money can be the motivator to fill in those cracks where fame isn't.
or, according to one result when I include my full middle name, dead.
Be careful! If you're from Chicago, they may also nail you on your voting record!
The cost is not irrelevant. If consumers are willing to buy for $.1 and the providers are willing to sell for $.01, economics says the price should be between $.01 and $.1. But why should it be $.1 and not $.01? Why is it clamped at what the consumers are willing to pay and not what the providers are willing to sell for?
Actually, I thought it was because people won't switch their plan or carrier over the difference between 1c and 5c and 10c texting. If there was a free market for texting -- you could have one carrier for voice and another for texting -- I'd think prices would change very quickly.
Your regexp example isn't awfully good - any language that has regexp support will have lines like that. These days, PHP has regexp support (possibly always has), C has regexp support, C++ has it, Java has it, and I expect that even C# has regexp libraries.
That's quite true. And in many cases, regexp support comes from this regexp library.
In addition, the level of expression (i.e. TMTOWTDI) means in practice that highly varying programming styles occur throughout large, long-lived bodies of code. As a result, significant Perl-based business applications tend to become hard-to-maintain hairballs of divergent style and subtly variegated concept.
Very true ... which is why Perl::Critic was created. While I suspect this isn't available for other languages, perl's flexibility in this case provides both the problem and a solution.
Dang, just ran out of mod points. The idea of representatives being people who want to do the right thing is considered naive, but even if writing them once in a while would produce a result like this, it's worth it. Good for you!
Exactly how excellent is your memory, then? This kind of corner-case made me reconsider best-practices password security.
Generally -- except in one notable case, and expected in Debian lenny. As you can imagine, this caused a lot of complaints. From what I skimmed there and other places, the attitude is that /bin/sh under Debian should be a fully POSIX-compliant shell, and if you want to use bashisms, start your program with #!/bin/bash.
Of course this is going to date me, but when I was younger, I'd waste maybe 5-10 minutes playing a game that was worth 25c to me. That way entertainment was a refreshing diversion, not something you had to budget -- time and money -- for.
Nachos will doom us all to perpetual oil dependency!
Sutor said that he was 'tired of waiting' for specialized applications to appear in other sectors,
So he's got an itch to scratch and in the hallowed tradition of open source, will start writing these apps that he desperately feels the absence of? Impatience is one of the traits of a good programmer, after all.