Comment Using frameworks and libraries (Score 1) 296
It's good to use frameworks and libraries because you don't have to "reinvent the wheel".
The thing is... it's often good to reinvent the wheel so that you get *just a wheel*.
It's good to use frameworks and libraries because you don't have to "reinvent the wheel".
The thing is... it's often good to reinvent the wheel so that you get *just a wheel*.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Of course, it's the nature of the open-source world that there will be a bunch of different projects that more or less all function similarly.
Quoting the original article, in the "Linux Mint" section:
"but replaces them with dodgy bits of its own, such as a confusing choice of not one, not two, but three Windows-like desktops,"
This is what led me to say that the article seems to consider having multiple desktops available a flaw.
I have this problem that, unlike what most people seem to think is obvious, I *don't* want my desktop to operate like Mac. I find using a Mac desktop is like using a text editor other than my preferred one (which is increasingly necessary as text editing is moving to being whatever javascript monstrosity is attached to the collaboration or notebook platform you're forced to use); I'm always fighting with it and trying to work around it's little assumptions that are different from what I want.
Lots of the Linux desktops have been moving in directions that are nominally to make them more Mac-like. I think they often don't really do, or they *would* if everybody else did what they thought everybody else should do. But, as a result, I recently went back to FVWM, because I can make it work the way I want to. I used xfce for a number of years, but as time went by, it was getting harder and harder to configure it to do what I want. Giving in to what I find as the extremely annoying trend of "client-side decorations" was the last straw for me.
FVWM's configuration system is *exactly* the sort of thing people point at when they try to say that it makes Linux unusable on the desktop. And, it's exactly what makes it usable for me.
The broader point is: the original article seemed to indicate that having a choice of desktops was a *flaw*. It confuses users, or something. But, from my point of view, having a choice of desktop managers is the killer feature of Linux on the desktop. You aren't stuck with the default assumptions of either Windows or Mac. Yeah, there are still a lot of default assumptions built in, but there's a lot more flexibility than you find in other worlds. The ascendence of GTK (linked with GNOME) and the assumptions it's trying to force on the LInux desktop world are not healthy, in my opinion, as it's going to make it harder and harder for people to configure desktops if they don't like the built-in assumptions of GTK. But, at least for now, you can still get things to work the way you want if what you want doesn't happen to match either the majority, or what somebody has convinced the majority to think they want (or at least accept).
Check the representations and warranties of the company (Article 4), particularly 4.6(a) and (b), which relate to the accuracy of its financials and SEC filings.
The accuracy of the representations and warranties are incorporated in 7.2(b) as a condition of the sale--so the buyer can use this to opt out.
Twitter has represented the number of bot accounts in its SEC filings (e.g. page 24 of its 2021 annual report).
You asked the right question, essentially, "which position benefits the rank and file users more?" I come to the opposite answer.
Vendor lock-in rarely benefits users. In this case, the creator proposal would allow rank and file users to switch social networks without having to rebuild their network from the ground up. It helps creators, but it also helps users.
I am more skeptical that it is feasible than that it would benefit users.
Unless you've seen the actual contract, I would be hesitant to claim that there is no due diligence provision.
(A due diligence provision is a provision where the purchaser examines the company purchased to see if the purchaser is getting what the seller claims. Determining the number of actual active users and users who are bots would normally be part of due diligence.)
Because due diligence provisions are standard boilerplate and don't get mentioned in news stories about contract terms. But they're omnipresent.
Honestly, I think the philosophy of software engineering has gone wrong.
I agree. Sadly, software engineering is not engineering. Nobody, out side of safety critical systems, analyses the program structure and makes valid correctness claims for it as part of their quality process.
Software is at a stage that architecture went through before structural engineering really became widely adopted towards the back end of 19th century.
While we have pretty good tools these days that could do formal verification of our software, the process is incredibly time consuming. Moreover, all formal verification can ever do is show conformity to the specification. The specification can, of course, still be wrong. The move from the informal world of business to the formal specification of a system leaves a lot of room for mistakes.
How does a buyer of software know whether one piece of software is higher quality than another? Is there any real way for them to independently judge the quality of the code in most purchases?
My final thought to reflect on is that acceptable quality is enough quality and for most users that is reached fairly quickly. People will tolerate software that is really quite buggy. Games developers are actually giving us relatively deep insight in to that part of the economics. They still make money shipping games that are basically broken.
This point about game development is quite illuminating I think. The reason that most software is quite buggy is fundamentally an economic question - not an engineering question. Generally speaking, people are not prepared to pay for quality. They want enough quality that the software isn't a false economy - and we as an industry largely supply software of that quality.
The US Government made the mistake of thinking that it was in charge of the country, instead of Amazon.
Amazon will set them straight.
Mac OS X [...] was the harbinger of the second Jobs era at Apple.
That's backward. The second Jobs era began in the late 90s, and then for years under Jobs' lead Apple was working to bring MacOS X to release. Jobs was a harbinger of OSX, not vice versa.
California, which voted to make daylight saving time permanent in 2018
That is not accurate. We voted to allow the state legislature to make it permanent if they choose to and if they're federally allowed to. So far they have not chosen to, and it's not clear if they are federally allowed to or not.
The median earner sees as much tax as they gain so they see no difference
Mean, not median, which makes a big difference. The mean (add all the incomes together and divide by number of people) is at around the 75th percentile, so about 75% of people see a net gain. If it were median (definitionally the 50th percentile), it would be a lot less people.
TL;DR: More than a supermajority of people would see a net gain under a universal basic income funded by a flat tax per capita.
And yet they perform exactly as well as the overall market and so by definition as well as the average investor, with much lower costs, for greater overall profits...
(Hint: it's because your account of how they work lacks all nuance. They increase their holdings of a security in proportion to its market capitalization, which already isn't exactly the same thing as its share price, but that aside, it means they're buying exactly while the security is performing bullishly -- not at the top of the curve, but on the way up it -- and selling when it's performing bearishly -- not at the bottom of the curve, but on the way down it. Which is the best you could hope to do, unless you could magically predict exactly where the top and bottom were, i.e. unless you gamble and get lucky, which is exactly why on average investors perform no better or worse than the index -- the only variance is luck, which cuts both ways.)
The only winning move is not to play.
...or better still, just buy a share of the casino (i.e. invest in index funds).
(I made this same post below before noticing you had made the first part of it already).
...or better still, just buy a share of the casino (i.e. invest in index funds).
Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks.