That is what I was thinking when I saw the picture. Most diagrams/Pictures of the Moon and Earth are not to scale or angled in a way that makes the distance distorted. While I know this is the fact, to actually see it to scale really puts it in perspective.
Selling your product at a loss or break even isn't going to help. Because it will mark your brand name as the cheap product. At the low price there will be more buyers yes. However you cant make up a loss by selling in bulk.
This open source mindset that you should give back. Is really a bad way to look at it.
If you are just focused on giving back on Source Code or Money then he is not seeing the big picture.
OpenSource Developers kinda scoff at the value of market share.
The fact that someone is just using the product is giving back. Because it is one more person who will probably use the product again if they like it. They will use it in work where others will learn and use the product. Then at some point there will be a need to change something and someone in the chain will want to add to the project. However if the person using the product will feel guilty using it, they probably will not let it spread to others as they don't want to share guilt with others. Thus reducing the chance it will fall in the hands of someone interested in fixing it.
The fact that the TiVo used OSS software could have allowed for a much rapid growth as other manufactures would begin using OSS and they would have contributed back, mostly because it may be cost effective to have those changes as part of the main code line vs their own patches. But the OSS community went and said Ohh look their Bad lets make GPL3 that stops these evil money making people from using OSS in that way. Basically sending a chilling effect across the industry. Microsoft mess up big time. They allowed their flagship products to linger for 10 years, Open Source Software was seen as ready to take its place... But they stepped on their own feet and made their rules even tighter, allowing Apple to come in and take the gold.
At work I had to be sure I never imported a GPL Library, because the rules would conflict with the companies business model.
A country debates with another country to preserve it's interests. Has Wikileaks released anything really informative?
Here are their big leaks. 1. The military during war isn't always the most upstanding group of people and wrong people get killed, and the government doesn't like to tell you that. Duh ask any veteran they will tell you the same thing.
2. Diplomats and leaders are a bunch of selfish pompous hypocritical jerks. They are still human. And they are humans with extra power, so yea. If you didn't know that you must live in a land with unicorns and flowers.
All Wikipedia is an anti-cheerleader for the US and it's allies. Digging up all the dirt and none of the good stuf, granted countries usually keep the good stuff public, but the population doesn't always get it.
As someone who recently had my normal car battery fail after 1 month of usage. I would be displeased if I had to pay say $20 a battery swap and have some days where I can only go 10 miles while other days I can go 100 miles. On those 10 mile days I may not be able to loop around an go back to the same dealer for a refund. And I doubt you will have competing companies honoring someone else refund for faulty products. So I get a battery swap at Exon Mobile, then 20 miles later I do an emergency stop at Hess. Will they give me a free swap of a battery... No. If they did how long do you think it would be for some shady companies to load cars with faulty batteries that can get them to their competitors and having to do the swap out just to drive them out of business.
So wise sage what is your solution to the problem? OR are you just one of those people who think they are very smart by pointing out the problems, then just sits there with no solutions on the problem escalates and you can just go "Well I told you so!".
Any Idiot and see the problems, What we need are solutions.
Here are some solutions I can think of and their problems.
1. Only allow Smart people to vote. How do we determine who is smart of not. (Education, IQ Test, Standardized Test, Personal Success) How do we make sure these values are fair and make sure they are not abused, as this way sub classing people and those who are deemed smart may not want to help the rest of the population who is not smart.
2. Groom a leader. Well during the grooming process, they will be influenced by the previous leader thus will think the same way, and be slower to adapt with the times. Also during this grooming phase the person will be isolated with the plight of the people.
3. Nepotism. Hey you're passing on those genetic traits for leadership right? Do they have genetic traits for leadership or does environment take place, and how do you know if the right stuff gets passed? Hey if he appoints a hours to be part of the console, so what he must be better then the rest of us.
4. The strongest shall rule. Lets do it Old School who ever wins the Civil War every few years becomes the leader.
5. A religious leader. |SARCASTIC| I don't see any problems with that right? We never had problems with countries who elect the religious leader to lead a government. |SARCASTIC|
6. Communism. Tried it didn't work. China is the only really successful Communist government they were able to succeed by bastardizing it to a point where it is just a Strong Socialist Government.
The United States is Unique in a lot of areas. There is a large population of people. There is a low population density. Population is quite diverse. Americans are self reliant (culturally)
The case of democracy isn't really a case of putting the best people in charge, but putting the one that the population will hate the least. People didn't like how Carter was running the US so they elected Reagan. Now Reagan wasn't smarter or better then Carter but they felt better with him then with Carter. People were overall happy with Reagan so he had 2 terms. They were actually still happy with him so they elected George Bush Sr., but the economy faltered under George Bush so Clinton was elected. The economy was strong so they elected Clinton again although he had a lot of baggage that the Christen Groups didn't like. Now Gore won over Bush in the popular vote but failed (arguably) to get the electoral votes. But we got 911 at the right time where people wanted a strong military president and the Democrats where too stupid to elect a good moderate Democrat, So they elected Bush again because they felt he was better then Kerry. But by the end of the Bush Administration the population was unhappy. So Obama won, Now we will see what the republican party does. If they pick someone who is too far gone or too right, Obama will still win, however there are people unhappy with him so if the republicans somehow get a good moderate candidate they will win.
The value of democracy isn't the best person for the job but getting the person who people will hate the least and be unwilling to take up arms and fight against. And if they do, there will be the majority of the population to defend the government. We look at dictatorships such as Libia, where the population goes and takes over the government because the greater population is against the leadership.
Democracy isn't getting great leadership, it value is keeping the government predictable and safe.
I use to use GIMP all the time... Then I switch to Photoshop and I found Photoshop being much better then the GIMP for the stuff that I needed to work with. GIMP has a lot of good features but getting to the ones that I need the most are more cumbersome, then with Photoshop.
Well those separate windows end up being a real pain in terms of finding what you want to do. Click to many Close of your images then you program quits... File -> New on one of your images you are working on to create a new window is very annoying. also with all that space you are wasting on having duplicate menus clutters things up more then they should. OS X handles this concept with that Global Menu bar, but for windows and Linux you need that Single Window Mode for the best UI for that platform.
Also those floating windows makes it so you cannot SNAP them in the same spot taking less overall space and giving you more room to work.
WebOS is the new beOS. A lot of people like it, but never really quite good enough to get mass market share. Then after its death developers spread across different platform and introducing a lot of beOS's goodness across many OS's
Sigh... I am all for companies making money and profit. However sites such as download.com were suppose to be sites we could trust the downloads from. Trust on the internet is a hard thing to get, and to toss it away like that is a great disservice to itself.
To bad it isn't the real world. Google has only so much pull... Companies choose android for a few reasons. 1. It is free as in beer. 2. It is free enough as in speech for them to do what they want with it. 3. It is widely used, they want to spend more time making hardware then writing OS code. 4. Googles name has some weigh but that is about it.
If Google makes their OS in a way that hinders the phone makers business model if they choose the use the product... They wont use it, and Google can yell all they want but the maker doesn't need to choose that platform. Google is a big company but it really cannot take on to many enemies at once. The mobile phone market isn't as dominated as the Desktop market is with Microsoft. There are good competing platforms that are just waiting for a Google mess-up like that.
And with the mobile market. Google would probably anger more then just the Phone manufactures, but the Carriers as well, who are often the biggest sellers of these devices. Google vs. ATT + Verizon + Sprint + Samsung + LG +... These guys are big and powerful too... You may be the biggest kid in the block but the block if filled with a lot of tough kids too.
8am and finished at 6pm. That's an awful long day for north-american standards Sigh, to be back in school again. I remember the 1pm-10:30pm back to back with one class overlapping by 5 minutes. Good times. Now Working for 8:00-6:00 with an hour break is the the norm.
Yes, I saw that documentary too. While his skills were really good, the point was he still needed a cane (although it didn't want to use it, because it would show people that he was blind) Also if you have fast moving objects it could effect your view of the world a fast moving car between clicks can go from well out of your range to about to hit you.
This skill is a great enhancement to using a cane. However not a full replacement for other services out there, and (at the risk of not being politically correct) the blind person isn't fully aware of what is going on and will need help from others to survive.
The problem with these lawsuits is that they are not really Religious Viewpoints but a reason for someone to sue the school, make a quick buck, and make some political point.
Oddly enough it is usually the Far Right that does this, and all this accomplishes is raising the taxes.
Perhaps they are angry because the unions have hindered the company so much, that it makes it difficult to expand and hire new employees. I have worked with non-union and unionized companies. And I often find that the Unionized companies employees are often more miserable, they are afraid to disagree with the union, the idea of collective bargaining is that you are not smart enough to bargain for yourself, so you are treated as a grunt, and any benefits you get from the union job, is often counter balanced dealing with a situation where you cannot grow. The Union makes its money from having more unionized employees and its uses this money to control politics and not to help the employee.
I am for the idea that Unions were supposed to bring, but it is outdated and needs to be severally fixed.
1. Unions were formed in a situation where they were a small handful of factories to work for in a City, and if you loose your job or unable to do your job you were fired and forced to live the rest of your life in poverty. 2. Single income family was expected. So a loss of a job was devastating. 3. Transportation wasn't wide scale and leaving your town to find work was hard and a major life changing problem. 4. The average education for these jobs was people with elementary school if that and a LOT of people who were illiterate, or couldn't speak english.
So back then Unions did a lot of stuff to clean stuff up and make working a job possible and a lot of the things that are common now are thanks to unions.
However just because they did good back then it doesn't mean they are doing good now. Culture has changed and unions need to be reformed but everyone is afraid to say that. They are either trying to get rid of them completely or keeping the same broken system working.
Unions need the following changes.
1. They need part of a profit sharing with the corporation, combined with dues from the employees. You need to keep the employees happy but also the company running smoothly and allow growth for more employees.
2. They need to figure out how to maintain long term growth of employees. It needs to encourage new employees with no skills and work with them to allow them to advance up and get more skills, and if they want to move to an other company they shouldn't feel stuck to do so.
3. Encourage good performance, A lot of the time in a unionized environment there is 20% of the people doing the work for the other 80% and that 20% isn't getting properly paid for their work.
4. Protection from bullying, While you are supporting the company you need to make sure management isn't bullying the lower ranks unfairly, and complaining WILL NOT put the complainer in a bad political position.
5. Staying competitive. That means some jobs will no longer be needed. The union should try to force people to change their skills or let them get fired. But the Union should strongly get employees to upgrade their skills.
6. Force the company of offer services that will keep the employee productive. Child Care, Employee health, etc...
7. Intelligent Layoffs, sometimes they need to happen, the union need to make sure it is the right people who get layoff and the right people stay, even if it means fire that director and keep a bunch of those low level guys.
8. Job Placement assistance. If they do get canned the union should really find a new job for the employee.
9. Law enforcement, make sure the company is following the existing laws.
10. Job Equality, Race, Religion (or Lack of), Gender, Sexual Preference should be well protected. As well different advancement tracks. Someone should be able to be promoted without having to be a manager,
So now in the future of Slashdot, except a bunch of people praising Virtualization we are going to get a bunch of mindless sheep now condemning it. Much like how RMS got Slashdot to loose its love for Cloud computing.
Virtualization is just taking your own Hardware and sharing some resources and partitioning others so you can run Multiple OS's on your hardware...
It is not much more of a jump of putting your faith on the OS who will manage your hardware, and give you an interface level to the hardware. Virtualization you can think of it as a OS for your OS.
The main value in Virtualization is from an Old computer science process... Keep you hardware running at high utilization doing something productive. As time went on people started to use separate servers running at 5% utilization. Because they needed all their Apps to run separate of other apps. Or groups of the same app running with different configurations. So now we virtualize on the same hardware to say for example to get that CPU 5% utilization to 50% and running 5 VMs sure there is some bloat going and it isn't efficient. But it is more efficient then having 5 servers running at 5% CPU utilization wasting power.
Then you have the more enterprise ready features of a virtualization where say your VM is on a SAN storage then you can swap hardware in real time. Or move from one Server to an other easily and without having to reconfigure your hardware settings for the new PC.
I hope one day Linus or RMS states they like the taste of poo, just to see how many nuts out there will just blindly go along and do it because these guys have an opinion and because they have done or are doing great things they must be always right.
You are under the assumption that grant givers are part of the Peer Review process... They are not... The people who are allowed to give these grants are under huge amount of political pressure, and can get fired for doing the right thing. So say University A is on the East Coast and University B is on the West Cost and there was a Grant for studying earthquakes. NSF will most likely give the grant to University B even if University A had the better plan and University B had a complete crap request. Because if the University B had found out A got it. They will go to their congressman and goes up and people in the NSF will need to debate and have a bunch of political rambling. So it would be easier to fire the guy who did the right thing.
Chances are someone with a White Sounding name a Todd vs. Tyrone will get a grant because chances are better that a Todd will have more political connections then a Tyrone will.
Scientific community isn't immune to corruption. You need to face that fact, when humans are involved self interest will kick in, and cloud the truth.
These guys seem to be missing the big picture here. They are missing out a lot of great returns for the future.
Verizon grows in wireless was because they had some of the best plans back in the late 90's. Back when Cell Phones charged you for Local, Long Distance calls, roaming fees.... Verizon was one of the first to give people a plan that allows a call to be a call no matter where you were at or who you were calling... A big deal back then. It opened Cell Phones for being a toy for the rich to an every-man tool.
But now Verizon AT&T Sprint and everyone else is not taking it to the next step. Unlimited Plans/Unrestricted plans.
Customers want to get rid of their cable companies. They want their internet plans to allow unrestricted tethering so they can get internet they can use at home or anywhere else. They want to use their phones without having to worry about a huge bill later on. A company who does the big push for this, and has the infrastructure to support it will Make a LOT of money and get a lot of switchers right after their other contracts expire.
I hate to sound like a think of the children type of person. But Wikipedia is a great tool to start your research with, and really good for education. However I can expect kids using Wikipedia in schools to view imagery that they are not allowed, and inappropriate for a school.
It isn't as much they are forced to view the data, but kids being both curious and wanting to show to there peers that they are cool, will use such imagery to cause trouble and get cool points because they can gather a bunch of curious kids with him to look at the forbidden data. Thus distracting the kids from doing real work in school
There's not that much more innovation going on today [Citation Needed]
15 years ago when I was in college... Classes were done with either Black/White Boards or Over Head projectors with a clear film and a Dry Erase marker. They were computer generated projectors available but they were very expensive and not widely used. In college I was one of the few students to get a Cell Phone. Most students didn't have one and they relied on a Phone Plugged into a phone system. My Moderns small form factor phone was about 1 inch thick, 2 inches wide, and 6 inches tall. This was a small phone. Black and white display, and it needed both an analog and digital cell receivers in it because digital voice transmission wasn't widely used. My Computer was one of the fastest PC I can build a Duel CPU 1 Core Pentium 200 chip with 64Megs of Ram, and a 6 Gig hard drive, and a SVGA card that can handle 1280x1024 resolution display with 32bit color. A campus of 6000 students shared a single T1 line and it was really fast. Rich students had a DVD player most didn't. And most music was still played on CD's and Downloading music was just barely getting popular, but only with the Techies.
Now compare that with today we are actually much further along then we realize.
Now compare USA in 1776 - 1856. Not that much improvements in technology, yes there were improvements but not as much in that 80 years as we would notice in the last 15 years.
There is a lot of in ovation that goes on today. And I see this as a good plan in the right direction, it isn't that we have to many patents, but a lot of them especially with software patents are too simple and any programmer could come up with the idea when they are approached with the same problem.
Slashdot Mirror
That is what I was thinking when I saw the picture.
Most diagrams/Pictures of the Moon and Earth are not to scale or angled in a way that makes the distance distorted. While I know this is the fact, to actually see it to scale really puts it in perspective.
Marketing 101 maybe but Marketing 510 no.
Selling your product at a loss or break even isn't going to help. Because it will mark your brand name as the cheap product. At the low price there will be more buyers yes. However you cant make up a loss by selling in bulk.
This open source mindset that you should give back. Is really a bad way to look at it.
If you are just focused on giving back on Source Code or Money then he is not seeing the big picture.
OpenSource Developers kinda scoff at the value of market share.
The fact that someone is just using the product is giving back. Because it is one more person who will probably use the product again if they like it. They will use it in work where others will learn and use the product. Then at some point there will be a need to change something and someone in the chain will want to add to the project. However if the person using the product will feel guilty using it, they probably will not let it spread to others as they don't want to share guilt with others. Thus reducing the chance it will fall in the hands of someone interested in fixing it.
The fact that the TiVo used OSS software could have allowed for a much rapid growth as other manufactures would begin using OSS and they would have contributed back, mostly because it may be cost effective to have those changes as part of the main code line vs their own patches. But the OSS community went and said Ohh look their Bad lets make GPL3 that stops these evil money making people from using OSS in that way. Basically sending a chilling effect across the industry. Microsoft mess up big time. They allowed their flagship products to linger for 10 years, Open Source Software was seen as ready to take its place... But they stepped on their own feet and made their rules even tighter, allowing Apple to come in and take the gold.
At work I had to be sure I never imported a GPL Library, because the rules would conflict with the companies business model.
A country debates with another country to preserve it's interests.
Has Wikileaks released anything really informative?
Here are their big leaks.
1. The military during war isn't always the most upstanding group of people and wrong people get killed, and the government doesn't like to tell you that. Duh ask any veteran they will tell you the same thing.
2. Diplomats and leaders are a bunch of selfish pompous hypocritical jerks. They are still human. And they are humans with extra power, so yea. If you didn't know that you must live in a land with unicorns and flowers.
All Wikipedia is an anti-cheerleader for the US and it's allies. Digging up all the dirt and none of the good stuf, granted countries usually keep the good stuff public, but the population doesn't always get it.
As someone who recently had my normal car battery fail after 1 month of usage. I would be displeased if I had to pay say $20 a battery swap and have some days where I can only go 10 miles while other days I can go 100 miles. On those 10 mile days I may not be able to loop around an go back to the same dealer for a refund. And I doubt you will have competing companies honoring someone else refund for faulty products. So I get a battery swap at Exon Mobile, then 20 miles later I do an emergency stop at Hess. Will they give me a free swap of a battery... No. If they did how long do you think it would be for some shady companies to load cars with faulty batteries that can get them to their competitors and having to do the swap out just to drive them out of business.
So wise sage what is your solution to the problem? OR are you just one of those people who think they are very smart by pointing out the problems, then just sits there with no solutions on the problem escalates and you can just go "Well I told you so!".
Any Idiot and see the problems, What we need are solutions.
Here are some solutions I can think of and their problems.
1. Only allow Smart people to vote. How do we determine who is smart of not. (Education, IQ Test, Standardized Test, Personal Success) How do we make sure these values are fair and make sure they are not abused, as this way sub classing people and those who are deemed smart may not want to help the rest of the population who is not smart.
2. Groom a leader. Well during the grooming process, they will be influenced by the previous leader thus will think the same way, and be slower to adapt with the times. Also during this grooming phase the person will be isolated with the plight of the people.
3. Nepotism. Hey you're passing on those genetic traits for leadership right? Do they have genetic traits for leadership or does environment take place, and how do you know if the right stuff gets passed? Hey if he appoints a hours to be part of the console, so what he must be better then the rest of us.
4. The strongest shall rule. Lets do it Old School who ever wins the Civil War every few years becomes the leader.
5. A religious leader. |SARCASTIC| I don't see any problems with that right? We never had problems with countries who elect the religious leader to lead a government. |SARCASTIC|
6. Communism. Tried it didn't work. China is the only really successful Communist government they were able to succeed by bastardizing it to a point where it is just a Strong Socialist Government.
The United States is Unique in a lot of areas.
There is a large population of people.
There is a low population density.
Population is quite diverse.
Americans are self reliant (culturally)
The case of democracy isn't really a case of putting the best people in charge, but putting the one that the population will hate the least.
People didn't like how Carter was running the US so they elected Reagan. Now Reagan wasn't smarter or better then Carter but they felt better with him then with Carter. People were overall happy with Reagan so he had 2 terms. They were actually still happy with him so they elected George Bush Sr., but the economy faltered under George Bush so Clinton was elected. The economy was strong so they elected Clinton again although he had a lot of baggage that the Christen Groups didn't like. Now Gore won over Bush in the popular vote but failed (arguably) to get the electoral votes. But we got 911 at the right time where people wanted a strong military president and the Democrats where too stupid to elect a good moderate Democrat, So they elected Bush again because they felt he was better then Kerry. But by the end of the Bush Administration the population was unhappy. So Obama won, Now we will see what the republican party does. If they pick someone who is too far gone or too right, Obama will still win, however there are people unhappy with him so if the republicans somehow get a good moderate candidate they will win.
The value of democracy isn't the best person for the job but getting the person who people will hate the least and be unwilling to take up arms and fight against. And if they do, there will be the majority of the population to defend the government. We look at dictatorships such as Libia, where the population goes and takes over the government because the greater population is against the leadership.
Democracy isn't getting great leadership, it value is keeping the government predictable and safe.
Dag Nabbit, I am still holding out for this Color TV Fad to end.
I use to use GIMP all the time... Then I switch to Photoshop and I found Photoshop being much better then the GIMP for the stuff that I needed to work with. GIMP has a lot of good features but getting to the ones that I need the most are more cumbersome, then with Photoshop.
Well those separate windows end up being a real pain in terms of finding what you want to do. Click to many Close of your images then you program quits... File -> New on one of your images you are working on to create a new window is very annoying. also with all that space you are wasting on having duplicate menus clutters things up more then they should. OS X handles this concept with that Global Menu bar, but for windows and Linux you need that Single Window Mode for the best UI for that platform.
Also those floating windows makes it so you cannot SNAP them in the same spot taking less overall space and giving you more room to work.
Yes but the police will often get the benefit of the doubt. Or in some areas they are just untouchable. Suing a teacher or a school is much easier.
WebOS is the new beOS. A lot of people like it, but never really quite good enough to get mass market share. Then after its death developers spread across different platform and introducing a lot of beOS's goodness across many OS's
Sigh... I am all for companies making money and profit. However sites such as download.com were suppose to be sites we could trust the downloads from. Trust on the internet is a hard thing to get, and to toss it away like that is a great disservice to itself.
To bad it isn't the real world.
Google has only so much pull... Companies choose android for a few reasons.
1. It is free as in beer.
2. It is free enough as in speech for them to do what they want with it.
3. It is widely used, they want to spend more time making hardware then writing OS code.
4. Googles name has some weigh but that is about it.
If Google makes their OS in a way that hinders the phone makers business model if they choose the use the product... They wont use it, and Google can yell all they want but the maker doesn't need to choose that platform. Google is a big company but it really cannot take on to many enemies at once. The mobile phone market isn't as dominated as the Desktop market is with Microsoft. There are good competing platforms that are just waiting for a Google mess-up like that.
And with the mobile market. Google would probably anger more then just the Phone manufactures, but the Carriers as well, who are often the biggest sellers of these devices. Google vs. ATT + Verizon + Sprint + Samsung + LG + ... These guys are big and powerful too... You may be the biggest kid in the block but the block if filled with a lot of tough kids too.
It CAN do both.
8am and finished at 6pm. That's an awful long day for north-american standards
Sigh, to be back in school again.
I remember the 1pm-10:30pm back to back with one class overlapping by 5 minutes. Good times.
Now Working for 8:00-6:00 with an hour break is the the norm.
Yes, I saw that documentary too. While his skills were really good, the point was he still needed a cane (although it didn't want to use it, because it would show people that he was blind) Also if you have fast moving objects it could effect your view of the world a fast moving car between clicks can go from well out of your range to about to hit you.
This skill is a great enhancement to using a cane. However not a full replacement for other services out there, and (at the risk of not being politically correct) the blind person isn't fully aware of what is going on and will need help from others to survive.
The problem with these lawsuits is that they are not really Religious Viewpoints but a reason for someone to sue the school, make a quick buck, and make some political point.
Oddly enough it is usually the Far Right that does this, and all this accomplishes is raising the taxes.
Perhaps they are angry because the unions have hindered the company so much, that it makes it difficult to expand and hire new employees.
I have worked with non-union and unionized companies. And I often find that the Unionized companies employees are often more miserable, they are afraid to disagree with the union, the idea of collective bargaining is that you are not smart enough to bargain for yourself, so you are treated as a grunt, and any benefits you get from the union job, is often counter balanced dealing with a situation where you cannot grow. The Union makes its money from having more unionized employees and its uses this money to control politics and not to help the employee.
I am for the idea that Unions were supposed to bring, but it is outdated and needs to be severally fixed.
1. Unions were formed in a situation where they were a small handful of factories to work for in a City, and if you loose your job or unable to do your job you were fired and forced to live the rest of your life in poverty.
2. Single income family was expected. So a loss of a job was devastating.
3. Transportation wasn't wide scale and leaving your town to find work was hard and a major life changing problem.
4. The average education for these jobs was people with elementary school if that and a LOT of people who were illiterate, or couldn't speak english.
So back then Unions did a lot of stuff to clean stuff up and make working a job possible and a lot of the things that are common now are thanks to unions.
However just because they did good back then it doesn't mean they are doing good now. Culture has changed and unions need to be reformed but everyone is afraid to say that. They are either trying to get rid of them completely or keeping the same broken system working.
Unions need the following changes.
1. They need part of a profit sharing with the corporation, combined with dues from the employees. You need to keep the employees happy but also the company running smoothly and allow growth for more employees.
2. They need to figure out how to maintain long term growth of employees. It needs to encourage new employees with no skills and work with them to allow them to advance up and get more skills, and if they want to move to an other company they shouldn't feel stuck to do so.
3. Encourage good performance, A lot of the time in a unionized environment there is 20% of the people doing the work for the other 80% and that 20% isn't getting properly paid for their work.
4. Protection from bullying, While you are supporting the company you need to make sure management isn't bullying the lower ranks unfairly, and complaining WILL NOT put the complainer in a bad political position.
5. Staying competitive. That means some jobs will no longer be needed. The union should try to force people to change their skills or let them get fired. But the Union should strongly get employees to upgrade their skills.
6. Force the company of offer services that will keep the employee productive. Child Care, Employee health, etc...
7. Intelligent Layoffs, sometimes they need to happen, the union need to make sure it is the right people who get layoff and the right people stay, even if it means fire that director and keep a bunch of those low level guys.
8. Job Placement assistance. If they do get canned the union should really find a new job for the employee.
9. Law enforcement, make sure the company is following the existing laws.
10. Job Equality, Race, Religion (or Lack of), Gender, Sexual Preference should be well protected. As well different advancement tracks. Someone should be able to be promoted without having to be a manager,
So now in the future of Slashdot, except a bunch of people praising Virtualization we are going to get a bunch of mindless sheep now condemning it.
Much like how RMS got Slashdot to loose its love for Cloud computing.
I am not following you?
Virtualization is just taking your own Hardware and sharing some resources and partitioning others so you can run Multiple OS's on your hardware...
It is not much more of a jump of putting your faith on the OS who will manage your hardware, and give you an interface level to the hardware.
Virtualization you can think of it as a OS for your OS.
The main value in Virtualization is from an Old computer science process... Keep you hardware running at high utilization doing something productive. As time went on people started to use separate servers running at 5% utilization. Because they needed all their Apps to run separate of other apps. Or groups of the same app running with different configurations. So now we virtualize on the same hardware to say for example to get that CPU 5% utilization to 50% and running 5 VMs sure there is some bloat going and it isn't efficient. But it is more efficient then having 5 servers running at 5% CPU utilization wasting power.
Then you have the more enterprise ready features of a virtualization where say your VM is on a SAN storage then you can swap hardware in real time. Or move from one Server to an other easily and without having to reconfigure your hardware settings for the new PC.
I hope one day Linus or RMS states they like the taste of poo, just to see how many nuts out there will just blindly go along and do it because these guys have an opinion and because they have done or are doing great things they must be always right.
You are under the assumption that grant givers are part of the Peer Review process... They are not... The people who are allowed to give these grants are under huge amount of political pressure, and can get fired for doing the right thing. So say University A is on the East Coast and University B is on the West Cost and there was a Grant for studying earthquakes. NSF will most likely give the grant to University B even if University A had the better plan and University B had a complete crap request. Because if the University B had found out A got it. They will go to their congressman and goes up and people in the NSF will need to debate and have a bunch of political rambling. So it would be easier to fire the guy who did the right thing.
Chances are someone with a White Sounding name a Todd vs. Tyrone will get a grant because chances are better that a Todd will have more political connections then a Tyrone will.
Scientific community isn't immune to corruption. You need to face that fact, when humans are involved self interest will kick in, and cloud the truth.
These guys seem to be missing the big picture here. They are missing out a lot of great returns for the future.
Verizon grows in wireless was because they had some of the best plans back in the late 90's. Back when Cell Phones charged you for Local, Long Distance calls, roaming fees.... Verizon was one of the first to give people a plan that allows a call to be a call no matter where you were at or who you were calling... A big deal back then. It opened Cell Phones for being a toy for the rich to an every-man tool.
But now Verizon AT&T Sprint and everyone else is not taking it to the next step. Unlimited Plans/Unrestricted plans.
Customers want to get rid of their cable companies. They want their internet plans to allow unrestricted tethering so they can get internet they can use at home or anywhere else. They want to use their phones without having to worry about a huge bill later on. A company who does the big push for this, and has the infrastructure to support it will Make a LOT of money and get a lot of switchers right after their other contracts expire.
I hate to sound like a think of the children type of person.
But Wikipedia is a great tool to start your research with, and really good for education. However I can expect kids using Wikipedia in schools to view imagery that they are not allowed, and inappropriate for a school.
It isn't as much they are forced to view the data, but kids being both curious and wanting to show to there peers that they are cool, will use such imagery to cause trouble and get cool points because they can gather a bunch of curious kids with him to look at the forbidden data. Thus distracting the kids from doing real work in school
There's not that much more innovation going on today [Citation Needed]
15 years ago when I was in college...
Classes were done with either Black/White Boards or Over Head projectors with a clear film and a Dry Erase marker.
They were computer generated projectors available but they were very expensive and not widely used.
In college I was one of the few students to get a Cell Phone. Most students didn't have one and they relied on a Phone Plugged into a phone system. My Moderns small form factor phone was about 1 inch thick, 2 inches wide, and 6 inches tall. This was a small phone. Black and white display, and it needed both an analog and digital cell receivers in it because digital voice transmission wasn't widely used. My Computer was one of the fastest PC I can build a Duel CPU 1 Core Pentium 200 chip with 64Megs of Ram, and a 6 Gig hard drive, and a SVGA card that can handle 1280x1024 resolution display with 32bit color. A campus of 6000 students shared a single T1 line and it was really fast. Rich students had a DVD player most didn't. And most music was still played on CD's and Downloading music was just barely getting popular, but only with the Techies.
Now compare that with today we are actually much further along then we realize.
Now compare USA in 1776 - 1856. Not that much improvements in technology, yes there were improvements but not as much in that 80 years as we would notice in the last 15 years.
There is a lot of in ovation that goes on today. And I see this as a good plan in the right direction, it isn't that we have to many patents, but a lot of them especially with software patents are too simple and any programmer could come up with the idea when they are approached with the same problem.