• tray (unregistered)

    "data exchange between virtually every governmental agency, airports, financial institutions, transit systems, and so forth, all for the purpose of being able to track people and the money they spend."

    I just don't think it's Eastern-Europe. Information technology is not that developed here that there would be a use for a system of this type. It's more likely a country that is well-developend and where anti-terrorism is taken seriously and gives a legal background for creating such an anti-privacy system. My guess is US or GB.

  • (cs) in reply to a former big-fiver
    a former big-fiver:
    Alun:
    I call bullshit. The nonsense beheading stuff is clearly bullshit, and so I very much doubt the rest is truthful.

    I dunno. I worked on a case management system for a (U.S.) state court system a while back, and every time one of the judges got P.O.d about something in it we were threatened with jail time. Might not have been strictly legal, but the guys with guns answered to them, not to us. None of us were anxious to be the poster children for another 'raped in jail after an invalid arrest' lawsuit in this particular county.

    Depends. If you receive a lawful court order from a judge, and you refuse to adhere to it, you can be held in contempt of court, which entails a fine and/or jail time. According to Wikipedia, at least, showing contempt for a judge in the judge's presence can legally be grounds for summary punishment with no trial or defense.

    Then again, I doubt it's supposed to apply to people who receive orders from a judge that are only legally binding because the recipients of the orders are under voluntary paid contract. I dunno, I'm not a lawyer.

  • (cs) in reply to foxyshadis
    foxyshadis:
    Devek:
    Even if you are not technically inclined, with a paypal account that has a little money in it.. you can get anything fixed or changed in OSS by visiting IRC. The only thing you couldn't get done is fix some compatibility issues with Microsoft products, but that is because no one actually knows how their formats and protocols work(not even Microsoft).
    Tried it, gave money to a few (very good) coders, none could come up with a complete fix for the problems I was having that didn't break something else or destroy performance. The project itself benefited from the attention, so it wasn't a complete wash, but I did have to go with a closed-source third-party solution. The founder/maintainer could have done it but wasn't interested in that direction of development.
    Which indicates that the OSS was, in this case, inferior to the proprietary software for you. It happens sometimes, and is no big surprise. If you need a significant change (which is to say implementationally significant, not necessarily significant to the user), you'll have to spend a significant amount of resources to implement it. You might not have those resources.

    In other words, as far as bugs/new features go, you can always fix/add them in OSS . . . provided you want to spend the time and money. That caveat is very important and often neglected. It's probably quite important in the case of a small and/or non-IT-focused enterprise -- but for a big business, it's not necessarily much of a caveat at all. Google does not want to depend on anyone else's software, for anything. And so Google uses open-source software, and adapts it to its own specialized needs.

    So if you're a small organization and don't have the time or money to hack around with the code yourself, then this advantage of OSS is indeed no advantage at all, for you. It still is for larger organizations, and the relevant one in this story sounds very much like a large organization. Had they used an open-source library, they could simply have assigned a couple of good programmers to figure out and fix the problem, without negotiating with anyone. Which is, indeed, an advantage of open source.

    Of course, odds are decent that there was no open-source library for what they wanted. But that's not the point, is it? The point of the comment wasn't necessarily to criticize the government for not using open-source, but to show how they would have been better off if the selfsame package had been released as open-source instead of closed-source. Everyone benefits from open-source, as long as it's economically feasible (and it seems to be in many cases, surprisingly enough).

  • (cs) in reply to Jamaal
    Jamaal:
    There's a special place in Hell for somebody willing to work on a project like this. I wish programmers had the morality of librarians.

    God I so agree with that statement.

  • rawr (unregistered) in reply to KozMoz
    KozMoz:
    Jamaal:
    There's a special place in Hell for somebody willing to work on a project like this. I wish programmers had the morality of librarians.

    God I so agree with that statement.

    I'd prefer managers to have even a slight trace of moral. ;)
  • (cs)

    I really can't be bothered to read such a long wtf. Can we keep them really short? My attention span is decreasing by the day.

  • (cs)

    The real WTF is that the defense department wont be told by the system that the country is under attack until after the invading army has already reached, sieged and conquered the capital and replaced the countrys leader with a small rubber chicken.

  • rro (unregistered) in reply to ajk
    ajk:
    rro:
    There are, literally, thousands, tens of thousands of developers on this planet who can fix any bug in OSS applications.

    give me a break.

    (My numbers were actually a big underestimation. If developers represent only 0.05% of the world population, then you have 3.3 million potential OSS developers. And you can choose to hire any one of them to fix your problems.)

    I like how people like you usually never comment on the huge downside of proprietary apps: being ENTIRELY dependent on the vendor to fix bugs and have absolutely NO OTHER option to wait for bugfixes while bugs are HURTING your business.

  • johny (unregistered) in reply to MrEleganza

    of course that the part about execution is exaggerated. but the idea sounds very funny - imagine where the all the stories would be if all IT characters in them would be in instant danger of death in case of stupid work done :)

  • rawr (unregistered) in reply to rro
    rro:
    ajk:
    rro:
    There are, literally, thousands, tens of thousands of developers on this planet who can fix any bug in OSS applications.

    give me a break.

    (My numbers were actually a big underestimation. If developers represent only 0.05% of the world population, then you have 3.3 million potential OSS developers. And you can choose to hire any one of them to fix your problems.)

    I like how people like you usually never comment on the huge downside of proprietary apps: being ENTIRELY dependent on the vendor to fix bugs and have absolutely NO OTHER option to wait for bugfixes while bugs are HURTING your business.

    One thing I personally found to be a bit of a downside to OSS is that it suffers from some quality issues and really slow growth. Or some really poor documentation. I know, I know, I can RTFS when its open source. Other than that, I like the advantage of fixing broken stuff yourself, but to do that you normally need skilled programmers that just wont go crashing into the code, breaking half of it while taking care of a minor issue. ;)

  • Devek (unregistered) in reply to rro

    Imagine trying to directly compete with a Microsoft service like Hotmail using Microsoft products like Exchange.

    You'll lose every single time because Microsoft has access to the source for everything and it still took them YEARS to get hotmail running Windows.

    "Oh, well our product is X and Microsoft isn't any competition in that area."

    Maybe not today... but if what you are doing looks like a good revenue stream nothing stops them from competing with you with their own software. Not only can they fix the bugs in their software to fix their problems, they have no obligations to fix the bug in the software that might be causing you problems.

    The world is littered with companies that were displaced when Microsoft shifted course.

  • AC (unregistered) in reply to Dude

    Unless your sarcasm is meant to will outwit most of US readers, Romania is not a Baltic country.

    Estonia, on the other hand, is a Baltic country with exactly this high profile informational infrastructure.

  • (cs) in reply to Jon W
    Jon W:
    If it works in Visual Studio, but doesn't work in production, then chances are that the Windows heap "helpful" behavior of initializing new memory to junk causes an uninitialized variable to be non-zero. When not running in Visual Studio, you get whatever happened to be there, which is usually pristine zeros for a previously unused memory page. So, when you attach a debugger to debug the problem, the problem goes away. Visual Studio is "helpful" like that.

    Actually that's not a debugger vs no debugger issue, that's a debug vs release build issue. Attaching a debugger to an application doesn't cause this.

    It's also perfectly possible to build a release build of an application with debugging info, but it tends to skip inlined functions completely, eliminate some variables, and put others in registers (with the debugger looking at memory addresses), so little more than the call stack is reliable.

  • The Mole Man (unregistered) in reply to rro
    rro:
    ajk:
    rro:
    There are, literally, thousands, tens of thousands of developers on this planet who can fix any bug in OSS applications.

    give me a break.

    (My numbers were actually a big underestimation. If developers represent only 0.05% of the world population, then you have 3.3 million potential OSS developers. And you can choose to hire any one of them to fix your problems.)

    I like how people like you usually never comment on the huge downside of proprietary apps: being ENTIRELY dependent on the vendor to fix bugs and have absolutely NO OTHER option to wait for bugfixes while bugs are HURTING your business.

    Take THAT, ajk! HURTING your business! ENTIRELY! If you HAD gone to school, and read some true STUFF, you would know about the 0.05% of developers IN the world. So, imagine if that NUMBER is 0.06... or 0.07! Can't you see THE possibilities? Eventually, we'll have ABOUT 100 million potential OSS developers! Wooohooo! Maybe 101 MILLION!

    So, this is the human natural progress, and you're stepping in front of it ajk. People like you are HURTING the world, and should be executed.

    (...)

  • Da' Man (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that there are weirdos in the USA who believe that more civilized parts of the world would still have capital punishment.

    It is considered to violate basic human rights, btw. and having not abolished capital punishment is considered a reason that definitely keeps a country from beeing admitted to the European Union.

    It is in fact abolished in all (but one!) democratic states in the world (guess which one..) - in Europe, it is only still practiced in Belarus. Turkey still 'officially' has it, but is has a moratorium on the execution.

  • Da' Man (unregistered) in reply to tray
    tray:
    I just don't think it's Eastern-Europe. Information technology is not that developed here that there would be a use for a system of this type. It's more likely a country that is well-developend and where anti-terrorism is taken seriously and gives a legal background for creating such an anti-privacy system. My guess is US or GB.

    Gee, you would wonder what kind of IT infrastructure they have in countries like Estonia. Leaves US or GB waaay behind!

  • Tei (unregistered)

    Well.. whats the backup plan for the portable?, because at 55º and 100% load, and using laptop hardware, this thing as to be a fire hazard. Even explode!

  • Tei (unregistered)

    About Est-Europe:

    Don't understimage these guys. Eastern Europe is Europe, only cheaper, and with people working hard. Prepare for some ass-kicking, as some jobs will be outsource here.

  • rro (unregistered) in reply to The Mole Man

    The Mole Man: your sarcastic post brings no argument to the debate.

  • The Mole Man (unregistered) in reply to rro
    rro:
    The Mole Man: your sarcastic post brings no argument to the debate.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum Even when poorly implemented, still funny to me.

    Two points: 1- it means you're exaggerating 2- I just like to exaggerate exaggerations. I would never call that a debate.

    oh... wait... were you sarcastic too? Sweet! You got me there dude!

  • (cs) in reply to Da' Man
    Da' Man:
    tray:
    I just don't think it's Eastern-Europe. Information technology is not that developed here that there would be a use for a system of this type. It's more likely a country that is well-developend and where anti-terrorism is taken seriously and gives a legal background for creating such an anti-privacy system. My guess is US or GB.

    Gee, you would wonder what kind of IT infrastructure they have in countries like Estonia. Leaves US or GB waaay behind!

    Skynet, of course!

  • (cs) in reply to Alun
    Alun:
    I call bullshit. The nonsense beheading stuff is clearly bullshit, and so I very much doubt the rest is truthful.

    Did you lose your sense of humor or your intelligence first? The "nonsense beheading stuff" is obviously humor, indicating your lack of same, and was obvious enough that it indicates your lack of smarts.

    Lighten up some and laugh once in a while. You'll live longer, and not look so foolish in public.

  • (cs) in reply to Linux
    Linux:
    Microsoft is a toy, not a tool, people.

    Nah, I think you're the tool.

    The majority of the computer users on the planet (well over 50%) disagree with you. Go on back to /. and play there instead.

  • (cs) in reply to citizen10bears
    citizen10bears:
    I really can't be bothered to read such a long wtf. Can we keep them really short? My attention span is decreasing by the day.

    Then don't read them. Jeez. Some people will complain about anything.

    No problem with the font, or using the name Victor, or words bigger than four letters and therefore not in your vocabulary?

  • igitur (unregistered)
    Over the next year or so, Christian got accustomed to the weekly Latverian commute: wake up at 4:00 AM on Monday, depart from Paris via airplane, arrive in Hassenstadt (Latveria’s capitol) several hours later, work five twelve-to-fifteen hour days, catch a plane back home, and sleep until noon on Saturday.

    Is sleeping till noon supposed to be something unusual?

  • Kharkov (unregistered) in reply to Tei

    I'd expect the 55° to be Fahrenheit. Which by the way definitely proves it was happening in the USA, every civilized country is using the international units.

  • P (unregistered)
    Victor’s laptop had just the right combination of patches, service packs, Win32 DLLs, and whatever other magic was needed to not crash the vendor’s library.

    This is why I would never use closed, 3rd party libraries for anything on any OS unless I really had no choice (which I'm sure was the case here).

    You leave yourself at the mercy of a company which may or may not care about your problems with their product, and if you're really unlucky might not even be around to supply fixes in a year or two when you need them.

    I don't want to be left with the choice of leaving critical systems unpatched for whatever security flaw is doing the rounds this week, or patching them and possibly bringing down the critical system anyway. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place...no thanks!

    The real WTF is they used Windows for a mission-critical high-uptime system. That's what Unix is for...

  • FIA (unregistered) in reply to Devek
    Devek:
    Imagine trying to directly compete with a Microsoft service like Hotmail using Microsoft products like Exchange.

    That'd just be crazy, Exchange is completely unsuitable for the task, just as procmail, postfix, etc etc would be to.

    Hotmail is a fairly atypical example though.

    Devek:
    You'll lose every single time because Microsoft has access to the source for everything and it still took them YEARS to get hotmail running Windows.

    I think YEARS may be a little unfair, especially since the service remained in operation throughout.

    http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html

    details the process of converting the front end web servers to 2k, 's an interesting read if you like this kind of stuff.

    Open source software is very good, and often worth the time and investment, but it doesn't magically fix all problems, or make badly written software amazing. Yes, I can trawl through the source code for Tomcat (say) to fix a bug, but am I realistically going to within the timescales of any given project, probably not. Also, I may be able to get small things fixed by touting for a coder in IRC, but I'd not use that as a model to hire developers for a large scale project. (Not for quality issues, but more accountability.)

    As an aside, does anyone have any experience with any open source licensing? (I'm thinking something like MySQL), how do they compare with closed source equivalents? eg, my place of work uses a closed source database, but we would get any problems in it fixed if it was impacting our business due to our support contract.)

  • (cs)

    I whipped this up in response to a funney I noticed in the article:

    [image]
  • rro (unregistered) in reply to The Mole Man
    The Mole Man:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum Even when poorly implemented, still funny to me.

    Two points: 1- it means you're exaggerating 2- I just like to exaggerate exaggerations. I would never call that a debate.

    What am I exaggerating ? That at least 0.05% of the world population are software developers ? This number sounds right to me:

    Let's take only 4 software companies with offices mostly in the USA: Microsoft (79000 employees), Oracle (68k), Google (16k), Yahoo (14k). Let's assume all of them are software developers and all work in the USA. Of course this is an overestimation, but let's ignore ALL THE OTHER software companies in the USA to counterbalance and transform this into an underestimation: you end up with 177000 software developers in the USA, or 0.06% of the population of this country. Now scale this to the world, the proportion of sw developers is likely lower in most other countries, but since 0.06% is a huge underestimation in the first place, then it is probably about right to say that 0.05% of the world population are sw developers.

    See ? I am right.

  • sweavo (unregistered) in reply to dlikhten

    surely you need a torch for that job, not a rifle

  • suuuure (unregistered) in reply to rro
    rro:
    The Mole Man:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum Even when poorly implemented, still funny to me.

    Two points: 1- it means you're exaggerating 2- I just like to exaggerate exaggerations. I would never call that a debate.

    What am I exaggerating ? That at least 0.05% of the world population are software developers ? This number sounds right to me:

    Let's take only 4 software companies with offices mostly in the USA: Microsoft (79000 employees), Oracle (68k), Google (16k), Yahoo (14k). Let's assume all of them are software developers and all work in the USA. Of course this is an overestimation, but let's ignore ALL THE OTHER software companies in the USA to counterbalance and transform this into an underestimation: you end up with 177000 software developers in the USA, or 0.06% of the population of this country. Now scale this to the world, the proportion of sw developers is likely lower in most other countries, but since 0.06% is a huge underestimation in the first place, then it is probably about right to say that 0.05% of the world population are sw developers.

    See ? I am right.

    Wow. You need to take a statistics class or two. Why don't you get some actual data before making such wild suppositions.

    Hint: the US is not representative of the population of the entire world. Also your basic premise is off, since you assume every developer is qualified for OSS development equally.

    I like OSS, but zealots like you aren't doing anything to add anything to its credibility. It's not a religion buddy.

  • ye olde poster (unregistered) in reply to Kharkov
    Kharkov:
    I'd expect the 55° to be Fahrenheit. Which by the way definitely proves it was happening in the USA, every civilized country is using the international units.

    Hmm, or maybe Alex is American and used the units most familiar to him?

  • The Mole Man (unregistered) in reply to rro
    rro:

    What am I exaggerating ? That at least 0.05% of the world population are software developers ? This number sounds right to me:

    Let's take only 4 software companies with offices mostly in the USA: Microsoft (79000 employees), Oracle (68k), Google (16k), Yahoo (14k). Let's assume all of them are software developers and all work in the USA. Of course this is an overestimation, but let's ignore ALL THE OTHER software companies in the USA to counterbalance and transform this into an underestimation: you end up with 177000 software developers in the USA, or 0.06% of the population of this country. Now scale this to the world, the proportion of sw developers is likely lower in most other countries, but since 0.06% is a huge underestimation in the first place, then it is probably about right to say that 0.05% of the world population are sw developers.

    See ? I am right.

    Rro,

    your argument was well-reasoned, well explained, clearly free from any possible resentment about my previous sarcasm (sarcasm always somehow discredits its victim), and certainly explains a possible true: there are X ammount of software developers, wich are by definition possible OSS developers. Just plain logic, and there's nothing wrong with that.

    Beyond challenge you to find out how i am being sarcastic right now saying that, i choose to show some respect for your willingness to debate and say this to you: the exaggeration wasn't your numbers. Your numbers were just an easy way, as technically improbable, to take it as an exaggeration. The Really Exaggeration(tm) is your original conclusion about the possible productivity of the OSS work model.

    OSS, as discussed in various previous comments, is viable, as everything else i can think of, conditionally. I personally had good and bad experience with OSS initiatives. There's not always the accesible ways to get OSS model apply to what you're doing.

    Sure, Google has the money. The office i work in, does not; this office has me and a few computers. I could, hypothetically, learn, with enough time and dedication, every single protocol and specification this office have to work with, design a system and tools based on every possible request, and do that in my way. Those are a lot of conditions.

    Just for the record: i'm on your side. If you check the coment history, my first comment was about that third party library in Alex's tale. I tried to implement Linux here, on my work, to absolutelly avoid Microsoft and third party close (expensive) software. And my boss actually heard me (cool guy), and we did the experiment. It didn't worked. And never will (was the conclusion). There's not the OSS tool for a certain task we gotta do here. There's not even a close, paid, software on Linux to make the job. And that's not all, as we had to handle a lot of Microsoft-formatted data from every customer and supplier (wich demands a lot of work), and that's simply much more expensive (if possible) than installing and automating Windows and its Office package. This office is not a software development enterprise. We do something else. We need software. I make the software needed. Sometimes, i can use tools i like and i find good. Sometimes, i can't.

    Also, as i'm in that software developer part of the world's population, again, i could very conditionally work for any OSS project. I need the money pal. It's always about money. My boss wants its money, our clients and suppliers wants their money, and everybody wants it now. You know, something like sex, but more perverse. Given those conditions, it's very hard, if possible, to implement OSS on every circunstance, and/or truly to be part of an OSS project.

    Yes, logically, i'm a pottential OSS developer. You're right there. My point can be resumed in this sentence: the map is not the territory. There are the arguments why i believe you're exaggerating.

    And, finally, yes, i believe Victor has lose its touch if he tolerated the use of a third party library on THAT project. Man!... even that guy can lose it. I found it amazing and sad. I believe the word is "tragic".

    CAPTCHA: howdy. (rite...)

  • poindexter (unregistered) in reply to suuuure
    suuuure:
    Wow. You need to take a statistics class or two. Why don't you get some actual data before making such wild suppositions.

    Hint: the US is not representative of the population of the entire world. Also your basic premise is off, since you assume every developer is qualified for OSS development equally.

    Here's some statistics: World Population: ~6 or 7 billion China Population: ~1 billion India Population: ~1 billion

    All of China's population can be listed as software developers. All of India's population can be listed as software developers. 2+ billion / 7 billion > 0.05% QED </idiocy>

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Pramod

    The whole story more or less quotes Tom de Marco's "The Deadline" for the environment. Including the beheading stuff.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to akatherder

    I would assume it is not a trivial task to shut the application down so you can image the laptop.

    So you think it was the only developer laptop? Don't think so.

  • guy (unregistered)

    One of the common pieces of FUD from Microsoft in the past has been how difficult and expensive it is to get a OSS "expert" to maintain systems because everyone knows Microsoft!

    Right on.

    Yesterday I got into an argument about the design docs for one of our products being ported out of prototype mode.

    They say the one button ms-win capable install package removes the need for a Linux expert.

    To which I replied that the button pusher person better damn well be an expert in something because the package is going to insert a web server, database server, mail server and java app server on an internet facing system.

  • someguy (unregistered) in reply to The Mole Man

    While they're at it, why not write their own operating system and develop their own programming language?

  • (cs) in reply to Devek
    Devek:
    Imagine trying to directly compete with a Microsoft service like Hotmail using Microsoft products like Exchange.

    You'll lose every single time because Microsoft has access to the source for everything and it still took them YEARS to get hotmail running Windows.

    "Oh, well our product is X and Microsoft isn't any competition in that area."

    Maybe not today... but if what you are doing looks like a good revenue stream nothing stops them from competing with you with their own software. Not only can they fix the bugs in their software to fix their problems, they have no obligations to fix the bug in the software that might be causing you problems.

    The world is littered with companies that were displaced when Microsoft shifted course.

    Chances are, those displaced companies are smaller otherwise they could push back. If they're smaller, they should be more agile. If you're agile, then adapt. If you're not, well that's your own damn fault for being some rutty company who can't compete. Survival of the fittest.

    Microsoft is a jack of all trades and a master of few. Sometimes people need a swiss army knife like Microsoft, and other times they need a precision scalpel. That's where custom/proprietary/internal/boutique software comes into play.

    To put it another way. Lots of people buy from IKEA, but there's still a market for hand crafted oak furniture.

  • Ben4jammin (unregistered)
    Victor’s laptop had just the right combination of patches, service packs, Win32 DLLs, and whatever other magic was needed to not crash the vendor’s library.

    I am a network/infrastructure guy, not a programmer but even without 3rd party tools you can find all the OS updates/patches/service packs on a Windows system. It can be tedious but it can be done. I would assume that the 3rd party provider could tell you what DLLs their product relies on, and again it is tedious and NOT FUN, but you could check the versions of each of those. This would give you an excellent chance of setting up another machine that would work. I have "fixed" machines running apps by tracking down to a single DLL that didn't get updated properly by a service pack upgrade. Did I mention the NOT FUN part?

    That, combined with the previous comments about virtual PCs/Servers etc makes me confused as to why anyone would choose to run a business critical app on that laptop for more than a day.

  • c (unregistered) in reply to The Mole Man
    The Mole Man:
    Can somebody please explain me why in the name of god would people with a zillion dollars project use a third party library to do anything?
    Because they decided to complete the project on time instead. You know, maybe the rest of the system relied on the third library and not using it would mean that you have to stall the project until the library has been designed, at least, or even worse - implemented.

    As to the country where it happened, Latveria sounds really close to Latvia. BTW the "executions" part was clearly a joke. That's just a stereotype, quite different from reality (the government in EE countries has significantly less influence on the life of ordianry people than in, say, the US - in other words, EE governments are weak).

  • ewww (unregistered) in reply to c
    c:
    That's just a stereotype, quite different from reality (the government in EE countries has significantly less influence on the life of ordianry people than in, say, the US - in other words, EE governments are weak).
    That's not what my government (US) tells me. :P
  • The Mole Man (unregistered) in reply to c
    c:
    The Mole Man:
    Can somebody please explain me why in the name of god would people with a zillion dollars project use a third party library to do anything?
    Because they decided to complete the project on time instead. You know, maybe the rest of the system relied on the third library and not using it would mean that you have to stall the project until the library has been designed, at least, or even worse - implemented.

    As to the country where it happened, Latveria sounds really close to Latvia. BTW the "executions" part was clearly a joke. That's just a stereotype, quite different from reality (the government in EE countries has significantly less influence on the life of ordianry people than in, say, the US - in other words, EE governments are weak).

    Man! Quote the whole thing! i said "time is not an excuse" if you have the money. And they did had it.

    Larveria is a fictional country on the Marvel Comics universe, ruled by Victor Von Doom, more known as Doctor Doom. This guy is some kind of tyrant, and that country was conquered by him. That's why Alex used the name. Has nothing to do with Latvia. If it has, blame Stan Lee, not the ignorant and diabolic yankees.

  • battlevampiress (unregistered)

    Now what worries me most about this article? It's not the what happened. That is pretty bad. It's not the how it happened, that is worse.

    It's the fact that this article mixes computer stuff, process stuff and comic references, and I understand them all.

    goes cry in a corner

  • AlG (unregistered) in reply to guy
    guy:
    > One of the common pieces of FUD from Microsoft in the past > has been how difficult and expensive it is to get a OSS > "expert" to maintain systems because everyone knows > Microsoft!

    Right on.

    Yesterday I got into an argument about the design docs for one of our products being ported out of prototype mode.

    They say the one button ms-win capable install package removes the need for a Linux expert.

    To which I replied that the button pusher person better damn well be an expert in something because the package is going to insert a web server, database server, mail server and java app server on an internet facing system.

    Do you know IBM Rational ClearQuest? This damn POS by default installs all of the above (except for maybe DB server)actually like 4 java services) into every client installation.

  • (cs) in reply to Da' Man
    Da' Man:
    The real WTF is that there are weirdos in the USA who believe that more civilized parts of the world would still have capital punishment.

    It is considered to violate basic human rights, btw. and having not abolished capital punishment is considered a reason that definitely keeps a country from beeing admitted to the European Union.

    It is in fact abolished in all (but one!) democratic states in the world (guess which one..) - in Europe, it is only still practiced in Belarus. Turkey still 'officially' has it, but is has a moratorium on the execution.

    It is, however, de facto abolished in approximately 0% of dictatorships in the world. It was made very clear in this article that the country in question was a dictatorship, or quasi-dictatorship. So your point is irrelevant.

    I think you will find, in any case, that the Bahamas, Belize, Botswana, Ghana, Guyana, India, Japan, Lesotho, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan are all democratic governments that have used the death penalty within the past decade or so. Don't be so superior. The U.S. is the most important democracy not to abolish the death penalty at least in practice, but it's hardly the only one.

    (List of countries comes from manual comparison of a Wikipedia map plus a Freedom House map. The former appears to be rather generous in saying countries like Russia have abolished the death penalty in practice.)

  • anonymous subject (unregistered) in reply to Simetrical
    Simetrical:
    I think you will find, in any case, that the Bahamas, Belize, Botswana, Ghana, Guyana, India, Japan, Lesotho, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan are all democratic governments
    Except for Botswana, Ghana, Guyana, Japan, Lesotho, Mongolia, Singapore, and some times India and some times South Korea and some times Taiwan. Elections != democracy.

    In 2000 the US wasn't a democracy either. Elections != democracy.

  • bg (unregistered) in reply to The Mole Man
    The Mole Man:
    c:
    The Mole Man:
    Can somebody please explain me why in the name of god would people with a zillion dollars project use a third party library to do anything?
    Because they decided to complete the project on time instead. You know, maybe the rest of the system relied on the third library and not using it would mean that you have to stall the project until the library has been designed, at least, or even worse - implemented.

    As to the country where it happened, Latveria sounds really close to Latvia. BTW the "executions" part was clearly a joke. That's just a stereotype, quite different from reality (the government in EE countries has significantly less influence on the life of ordianry people than in, say, the US - in other words, EE governments are weak).

    Man! Quote the whole thing! i said "time is not an excuse" if you have the money. And they did had it.

    This implies you can trade money for time which is not true.

  • rro (unregistered) in reply to suuuure
    suuuure:
    Wow. You need to take a statistics class or two. Why don't you get some actual data before making such wild suppositions.

    Did you read my post ? Apparently no :) My post is based on 5 pieces of data: the US population (which I assumed to be 300 million) and the number of employees in 4 companies (which I gave).

    Learn to read.

    Also, I took into account the fact that the US is not representative of the world population.

    Again, learn to read.

    And of course every developer is qualified for OSS development. OSS development is not fundamentally different than proprietary software development.

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