Money is speech?
You are seriously fucked.
Well, actually, it's the price of a louder megaphone.
But such subtleties are lost on the modern-day Supreme Court, which is less interested in preserving the balances of Government and more in their own peculiar interpretation of the Law of the Land.
Republics also support fragmented self-interests. Probably even more so than democracies.
The Founders made the US Government a Republic because they feared the tyranny of the majority would trample out the rights and interests of minorities. They made it a Democratic Republic because they also feared the tyranny of entrenched minorities. Checks and Balances were arguably the single most important consideration given to every facet of their governmental design.
Dollars are a measure of importance. If such an encrusted Pi were actually constructed, it would indeed be newsworthy.
Dollars are speech. Just ask the US Supreme Court.
The race to the bottom started long ago.
The destruction of the worker-employer bond even longer - back in the 1980s.
Tarrifs weren't primarily about environmental responsibility, although indirectly they worked in that direction by favoring local production with its more stringent environmental regulations. But Free Trade has pretty much killed that.
1950's Republicans would probably die of apoplexy. We gave Most Favored trade status to one of the world's biggest Communist countries.
If only there were organized groups of laborers that were able to band together to protect each others rights.
Socialisms! Evil! Burn the commie witch! Only corporations are allowed to work as bands to protect their rights!
Damn, I wish I'd known about that trick back then, that was exactly the problem I was having with mine. I've had a couple of 100$ all in one laserjets (both HP) since then. The one I've got now (I forget the model) is pretty decent, and obviously doesn't require its own nuclear reactor to print, but I do miss the reliability of that 30 pound monstrosity. I do, however, not miss the 5 degree increase in temperature around the thing when it was running though, lol
1KW is about right for one of the old-time laser printers. Warm-up power rush was a bitch and it was recommended not to put them on UPS's or lest they blow breakers.
I swore off HP devices. Most of the printer/scanner/whatever would still be working fine, but the paper traction would go all to hell and even new roller kits wouldn't fix them. Plus my scanner doesn't even offer replacement rollers for the duplexer part of the machine.
"I'm surprised a Logitech mouse was listed, as any I've had, the buttons died within months."
Wtf do you do with yours? Use a pneumatic hammer when you need to click?
My mice (Microsoft AND Logitech) get "Parkinson's Disease". After a while, they won't stay put on point. Not even the optical ones.
People talk about bug free code. It is a matter of won't, not a matter of can't.
Sometimes, there are products out there which can be considered "finished". Done as in no extra features needed, and there are no bugs to be found. Simple utilities like
The problem isn't the fact that secure or bug free software can't be made. It is that the procedures and processes to do this require resources, and most of the computer industry runs on the "it builds, ship it!" motto [1]. Unfortunately, with how the industry works, if a firm does do the policy of "we will ship it when we are ready", a competitor releasing an early beta of a similar utility will win the race/contracts. So, it is a race to the bottom.
[1]: The exception to this rule being malware, which is probably the most bug-free code written anywhere these days. It is lean, robust, does what it is purposed to do, and is constantly updated without a fuss.
Once upon a time, I read somewhere (Yourdon, possibly) that the number of bugs in a software product tends to remain constant once the product has reached stability. The number for IBM's OS/MVS mainframe operating system was somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000!
It's been likened to pressing on a balloon where when you squeeze one bump in, another pops out, because the process of fixing bugs itself introduces new bugs.
And OS/MVS is about the most critical software you could put on a mainframe. You can't just Ctrl-Alt-Delete a System/370. Or power it off and back on again. Mainframes are expensive, and expected to work virtually continually. Mainframe developers were expensive as well, since after a million dollars or so of hardware and software, paying programmers handsome salaries wasn't as big an issue back then. Plus there was no offshore race to the bottom where price trumped quality at the time. In fact, there wasn't even "perma-temping" yet.
Still, with all those resources on such an important product, they could only hold the bug count constant, not drive it down to zero.
Actually speaking of OS/MVS, there's a program (IEFBR14) whose sole purpose in life is to do nothing. There have been about 6 versions of this program so far, and several of them were bug fixes. More recently, it had to be upgraded to work properly on 64-bit architecture, but some of the bugs were hardware-independent.
The point being that if you give the ENTIRE project to Oracle instead of just part of it that it would all have been wonderful?
Back in the 1970s, General Electric created a company called Offshore Power Systems that was intended to build floating nuclear plants. I knew some of the people who worked there.
No such plants were ever built, though, and OPS is long gone.
I cancelled my subscription to another Linux magazine when they dropped paper. I figure I get fresher news from my RSS feeds and more up-to-date and more detailed technical info from blogs and project websites.
I truly do love my tablet for reading fiction and even the occasional reference manual, but the ability to randomly flip through a dead-tree magazine and idly learn about something that may someday become important is something I treasure and an e-reader just doesn't do it for me.
Larry wanted to rewrite it using JavaFX LOL
Larry wanted it to do something Sun never did - make a profit so he could build another yacht. He's been hoping to do that with other open-source acquisitions as well.
Unfortunately, people don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on open-source platforms, apps, and tools.
Poor Larry.
While I don't condone it, people in the Finance/Accounting departments have made complete applications in Excel. Then, they throw it over the wall to I/T and say "turn this into a web app for us -- it should take, what, two or three days?"
But again, I've seen plenty of complex spreadsheets that use way more functionality than I as a developer would ever use.
I'd say that you worked for the same company I did.
But at my company they waited until they'd exceeded Excel's row capacity and THEN they threw it over the wall. At which point they were having to break it up into multiple workbooks just to run the business while we scrambled to bail them out. Plus - yay! - critical corporate data existed on a laptop that they'd keep passing around (and occasionally taking out of town) and our IT department didn't backup files on desktops or laptops.
On the whole, I'm inclined to say that when you've gotten to the point that only 100% original Excel can do the job, you've probably reached the point where you shouldn't be doing the job in Excel anyway.
> The one thing that we didn't do (obviously!) was allow automated Windws updates.
> Then again, considering the damaged that some Windows Updates have done to
> desktop machines, I didn't even allow that on my desktop machine.
You have to perform OS updates in some industries. You might disable automatic updates, but that doesn't prevent damage, just that you'll be kicking it off manually.
Not always. Sometimes it's a matter of letting other people be your guinea pigs. Microsoft has on several occasions had to follow up an update with a corrected update, so in cases like that, you just ignore the bad update entirely and skip ahead to the better one.
The other thing deferred updates allow is the ability to do small-scale in-house testing before letting it loose on the entire infrastructure.
They want bureaucracy, they make the paperwork. Tell them to track windows and distro security pages, the changes are there. I would be toasted with that kind of tape, I updated my servers in a pinch immediately after the first news of heartbleed at 3 in the morning. 0300AM right. How about dusting your resume and changing jobs? Let them play the shuffling reports game alone.
I've served on a change control board. Every application and system update was supposed to be bundled to make the sysadmin's job easier, include a document that outlined the nature of the change and why it was needed, the instructions on how to apply the change, and the instructions on how to recover if it didn't work.
Change committee met once a week, approved/scheduled, deferred, or rejected changes. In case of emergency, the CIO or designated proxy could approve an out-of-band change request.
We didn't attempt to micro-manage changes, just understand the business risks and rewards. Obviously, the more details you could capture the better prepared you were to understand the consequences and the ways you could recover. But when Microsoft hands you a CAB that includes patches for SSL, IE, 6 GDI bugs and Windows notepad, that's their problem, not yours.
The one thing that we didn't do (obviously!) was allow automated Windws updates. Then again, considering the damaged that some Windows Updates have done to desktop machines, I didn't even allow that on my desktop machine.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
