We have no "general problem" with rare diseases, either. Still we try to find cures. Go figure.
And then there is also no general problem with overpopulation. In developed countries we sometimes even find a demographic decline, coincidentally Greece is one of them, and the problems the world population growth poses can hardly counteracted by denying individuals reproduction in regions which don't even contribute to it.
In benefiting the rich it is not so much different to other waves of increasing productivity – productivity gains always profit those owning the means of production first, never those who do the jobs, and even less those who'll be out of a job because of those gains.
Yes! Coming rather late to the Linux-as-the-primary-desktop-OS party, I started with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was quite happy with it and converted all my machines to Linux soon after that, but then found too many unwelcome changes in Ubuntu Mate 18.04 when it came out (which even made it stop working well enough to be usable on some slower machines), then tried a few other Linux distros including other Ubuntu flavours which all were ok somehow but all had something I disliked enough to make me continue the search, then tried Mint 19 with xfce on slower machines and Cinnamon on more recent hardware, and I immediately kept it and now that's where I hope to be staying for the foreseeable future.
Beside it being arguably one of the best-maintained and most solid distros around, one of the things I find incredibly nice in Mint is that even the different flavours (Cinnamon and xfce in my case) have been successfully made to look and feel very similar, so that changing between machines which user different flavours is really easy on my nerves.
Humanity is only good at one thing, and that is turning anything and everything into a weapon.
Right, but, while there are more reasons for humanity's being "good" at making weapons, the major reason for things staying that way in the 21st century is that the operating system humanity is continuing to live by is based on another thing humanity is good at, too: working for the profits of a few, instead of people's needs.
Linux is out, because of specific software packages I use that do not support Linux.
May I ask which ones? I ask because that was what I thought until the end of 2017, when out of sheer frustration with the idea of having to move to Windows 10 in the foreseeable future I just gave Linux a try. The plan was to resort to Wine and/or a Windows 7 VM for those Windows applications I really cannot do without yet. I wasn't too optimistic, I saw a less-than-fifty-percent chance for it working out well. But it did. A few weeks later, all machines in the household (the other inhabitant had been very sympathetic to the plan, too) had been converted to Linux as the only or primary OS, and we have never looked back. There's just one thing I've been asking myself once or twice – why did I wait that long?
Vision can change over time – that still is true after LASIK. Even if nothing went wrong, it can happen easily that two or three years later your eyes have changed again and you'll need glasses again even though you had them lasered.
What IBM is trying to do is bullshitting people into thinking that tech is inherently good, and tech companies are good, too, and people just have to buy stuff from them and do good work for them and everything will be good in the end.
What the responding video suggests instead is that tech companies are a problem, that they're not always good, that it's not enough to trust them, that we need to ensure that tech companies really become good so that tech will turn out good for all of us.
What even the people behind the responding video don't see, perhaps don't even want to see, is that it's not some individual badness, some individual evil, that sometimes creeps into some of the tech companies, making them act against people's and mankind's interest some of the time. The makers of the responding video neither see nor acknowledge that it's not just a few bad people and a few bad companies, but profit as the core principle of the world's operating system, that necessarily drives companies and decision makers in companies to do what they do. The video makers completely fail to understand that humankind's progress or people's wellbeing are not the business objective of any tech company or of any company whatsoever.
Within the parameters of the world's operating system, for a company, the only business objective there is and ever was is profit, and that, by tendency, works against the interests of humankind and this planet. The intention behind IBM's video is to make them as a company look good, while they're actually complicit in destroying the planet and producing and conserving disparity in wellbeing both geographically and between classes. The responding video, on the other hand, tries to address tech companies instead of the way the world is geared, the way we as humankind allow economy to be run and organized, and by what control variables we allow it to be driven.
There's still the problem that European health systems, too, need to rely on for-profit businesses to provide drugs and stuff, and they need to be sustainable, i.e. profitable, to survive.
A problem that has no solution within the confinements of the world's existing economic operating system.
[Joomla] already complains about PHP 7.0 being outdated, although that's still the default on current long-time support systems like Debian Stretch or Ubuntu Server 16.04.
Which is still fine for both Joomla and WordPress, because it still hopefully achieves the goal of getting at least some admins to notice there may be an issue and to assure themselves that they are getting any necessary security patches. An incompetent admin will ignore the message regardless, or course, but at least Joomla and WordPress will have led their horses to the water and offered them a drink.
Yes, but then there are those admins running hosting services on always up-to-date LTS platforms who have to deal with customers (running Joomla & Co.) who complain about outdated PHP versions...
No matter how much truth may be in that, I'll neither re-write every web app I find appropriate for my purpose in another language just because it was done in PHP, nor will I force myself or my customers to stick to web apps written in other languages...
... and it already complains about PHP 7.0 being outdated, although that's still the default on current long-time support systems like Debian Stretch or Ubuntu Server 16.04...
The number of sites I host is not huge, but I've run into problems with some current software like MyBB while in the process of switching as many sites as possible to at least PHP 7.2.
If many PHP sites still run on outdated PHP versions, it's not necessarily just because the admins were lazy and irresponsible...
I agree that much depends on the apps you use. Not so much with the familiarity aspect. On the contrary, I'm perpetually astounded how easily long-time Windows users in my surroundings have switched to Linux who not even had any kind of IT background to begin with.
There are valid reasons against Linux, but more maintenance time or hassle isn't one of them. On the contrary, with any popular distribution all of which employ mature, well-engineered package management tools, Linux system and application maintenance is at least by one order of magnitude easier and significantly less time-consuming to boot (pun not intended)...
No, I don't like them, either; in 2017 I finally managed to move everything to Linux except three or four apps still living under Wine or in a Virtualbox VM, and it was the best decision regarding my home/homeoffice IT I ever made.
I'm still surprised, though, that so many intelligent people see the evil in Microsoft (or Google, Facebook, Oracle, Amazon, eBay, IBM,...) as a specific property of Microsoft (and Google, Facebook, Oracle, Amazon, eBay, IBM), Microsoft (Google, etc.; you get the lyrics) as a particularly evil entity within the otherwise potentially good or at least neutral economic system.
While Microsoft etc. really are just the essence of what this economic system is about. Microsoft etc. is the rule, not the exception. And all the (as righteous as it is) complaining about evil Microsoft etc. won't change a thing. Even if it would lead to an improbable breaking up of Microsoft through competiton laws, something similar would follow soon.
And even if the whole world would from January 1 on start using only free software and installing free operating systems, the world still would be the place of the corporations, not the people, unless there'd be a change of the world operating system, too.
Seems nobody who's into alternative currencies, whether "blockchain" based or not, understands the principle by which money gets and retains its value, even though it's perfectly simple. No, it's neither by government decree nor by belief, that would be too simple, but then again it's only slightly more complex. It is by the objective trustworthiness of the promise that money invested in the currency area will come back as more money, meaning how reliably the promise is backed by the industry's profitability and growth within the currency area. Any alternative currency needs to be widely established and used in production, commerce and the payment of wages, before it gets such an ability, or the value needs to be fixed to an existing 'real' currency with an institution that can reliably guarantee the exchange into that currency.
Nonsense. The only problem of public transport is everyone expecting it to be profitable. If it is supposed to retain usability and at least a minimum of attractiveness in terms of both service and price, it just can't be profitable in the long run. To be and stay an affordable and usable means of transportation, it has to be publicly financed, and generously so. It's really that simple.
Reducing its attractiveness further in order to cut losses will just make it even less attractive, as TFA correctly said.
Slashdot Mirror
... who are also drunk!
We have no "general problem" with rare diseases, either. Still we try to find cures. Go figure.
And then there is also no general problem with overpopulation. In developed countries we sometimes even find a demographic decline, coincidentally Greece is one of them, and the problems the world population growth poses can hardly counteracted by denying individuals reproduction in regions which don't even contribute to it.
In benefiting the rich it is not so much different to other waves of increasing productivity – productivity gains always profit those owning the means of production first, never those who do the jobs, and even less those who'll be out of a job because of those gains.
Yes! Coming rather late to the Linux-as-the-primary-desktop-OS party, I started with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was quite happy with it and converted all my machines to Linux soon after that, but then found too many unwelcome changes in Ubuntu Mate 18.04 when it came out (which even made it stop working well enough to be usable on some slower machines), then tried a few other Linux distros including other Ubuntu flavours which all were ok somehow but all had something I disliked enough to make me continue the search, then tried Mint 19 with xfce on slower machines and Cinnamon on more recent hardware, and I immediately kept it and now that's where I hope to be staying for the foreseeable future.
Beside it being arguably one of the best-maintained and most solid distros around, one of the things I find incredibly nice in Mint is that even the different flavours (Cinnamon and xfce in my case) have been successfully made to look and feel very similar, so that changing between machines which user different flavours is really easy on my nerves.
Humanity is only good at one thing, and that is turning anything and everything into a weapon.
Right, but, while there are more reasons for humanity's being "good" at making weapons, the major reason for things staying that way in the 21st century is that the operating system humanity is continuing to live by is based on another thing humanity is good at, too: working for the profits of a few, instead of people's needs.
May I ask which ones? I ask because that was what I thought until the end of 2017, when out of sheer frustration with the idea of having to move to Windows 10 in the foreseeable future I just gave Linux a try. The plan was to resort to Wine and/or a Windows 7 VM for those Windows applications I really cannot do without yet. I wasn't too optimistic, I saw a less-than-fifty-percent chance for it working out well. But it did. A few weeks later, all machines in the household (the other inhabitant had been very sympathetic to the plan, too) had been converted to Linux as the only or primary OS, and we have never looked back. There's just one thing I've been asking myself once or twice – why did I wait that long?
Here in Europe and as soon as glasses varifocals, we're talking about four-digit EUR figures for ones with good lenses...
Vision can change over time – that still is true after LASIK. Even if nothing went wrong, it can happen easily that two or three years later your eyes have changed again and you'll need glasses again even though you had them lasered.
What IBM is trying to do is bullshitting people into thinking that tech is inherently good, and tech companies are good, too, and people just have to buy stuff from them and do good work for them and everything will be good in the end.
What the responding video suggests instead is that tech companies are a problem, that they're not always good, that it's not enough to trust them, that we need to ensure that tech companies really become good so that tech will turn out good for all of us.
What even the people behind the responding video don't see, perhaps don't even want to see, is that it's not some individual badness, some individual evil, that sometimes creeps into some of the tech companies, making them act against people's and mankind's interest some of the time. The makers of the responding video neither see nor acknowledge that it's not just a few bad people and a few bad companies, but profit as the core principle of the world's operating system, that necessarily drives companies and decision makers in companies to do what they do. The video makers completely fail to understand that humankind's progress or people's wellbeing are not the business objective of any tech company or of any company whatsoever.
Within the parameters of the world's operating system, for a company, the only business objective there is and ever was is profit, and that, by tendency, works against the interests of humankind and this planet. The intention behind IBM's video is to make them as a company look good, while they're actually complicit in destroying the planet and producing and conserving disparity in wellbeing both geographically and between classes. The responding video, on the other hand, tries to address tech companies instead of the way the world is geared, the way we as humankind allow economy to be run and organized, and by what control variables we allow it to be driven.
This is a new low for Slashdot...
There's still the problem that European health systems, too, need to rely on for-profit businesses to provide drugs and stuff, and they need to be sustainable, i.e. profitable, to survive.
A problem that has no solution within the confinements of the world's existing economic operating system.
I'll still stick to Linux, though.
I know Program Manager, and I know that it cannot "say" a thing.
Which is still fine for both Joomla and WordPress, because it still hopefully achieves the goal of getting at least some admins to notice there may be an issue and to assure themselves that they are getting any necessary security patches. An incompetent admin will ignore the message regardless, or course, but at least Joomla and WordPress will have led their horses to the water and offered them a drink.
Yes, but then there are those admins running hosting services on always up-to-date LTS platforms who have to deal with customers (running Joomla & Co.) who complain about outdated PHP versions...
No matter how much truth may be in that, I'll neither re-write every web app I find appropriate for my purpose in another language just because it was done in PHP, nor will I force myself or my customers to stick to web apps written in other languages...
... and it already complains about PHP 7.0 being outdated, although that's still the default on current long-time support systems like Debian Stretch or Ubuntu Server 16.04...
The number of sites I host is not huge, but I've run into problems with some current software like MyBB while in the process of switching as many sites as possible to at least PHP 7.2.
If many PHP sites still run on outdated PHP versions, it's not necessarily just because the admins were lazy and irresponsible...
So did HostEurope, which used to be a good address, too...
I agree that much depends on the apps you use. Not so much with the familiarity aspect. On the contrary, I'm perpetually astounded how easily long-time Windows users in my surroundings have switched to Linux who not even had any kind of IT background to begin with.
Possibly; after all, they've got all the gear at hand that's necessary!
There are valid reasons against Linux, but more maintenance time or hassle isn't one of them. On the contrary, with any popular distribution all of which employ mature, well-engineered package management tools, Linux system and application maintenance is at least by one order of magnitude easier and significantly less time-consuming to boot (pun not intended)...
... to bickering toddlers in a sandpit.
No, I don't like them, either; in 2017 I finally managed to move everything to Linux except three or four apps still living under Wine or in a Virtualbox VM, and it was the best decision regarding my home/homeoffice IT I ever made.
I'm still surprised, though, that so many intelligent people see the evil in Microsoft (or Google, Facebook, Oracle, Amazon, eBay, IBM, ...) as a specific property of Microsoft (and Google, Facebook, Oracle, Amazon, eBay, IBM), Microsoft (Google, etc.; you get the lyrics) as a particularly evil entity within the otherwise potentially good or at least neutral economic system.
While Microsoft etc. really are just the essence of what this economic system is about. Microsoft etc. is the rule, not the exception. And all the (as righteous as it is) complaining about evil Microsoft etc. won't change a thing. Even if it would lead to an improbable breaking up of Microsoft through competiton laws, something similar would follow soon.
And even if the whole world would from January 1 on start using only free software and installing free operating systems, the world still would be the place of the corporations, not the people, unless there'd be a change of the world operating system, too.
Seems nobody who's into alternative currencies, whether "blockchain" based or not, understands the principle by which money gets and retains its value, even though it's perfectly simple. No, it's neither by government decree nor by belief, that would be too simple, but then again it's only slightly more complex. It is by the objective trustworthiness of the promise that money invested in the currency area will come back as more money, meaning how reliably the promise is backed by the industry's profitability and growth within the currency area. Any alternative currency needs to be widely established and used in production, commerce and the payment of wages, before it gets such an ability, or the value needs to be fixed to an existing 'real' currency with an institution that can reliably guarantee the exchange into that currency.
Nonsense. The only problem of public transport is everyone expecting it to be profitable. If it is supposed to retain usability and at least a minimum of attractiveness in terms of both service and price, it just can't be profitable in the long run. To be and stay an affordable and usable means of transportation, it has to be publicly financed, and generously so. It's really that simple.
Reducing its attractiveness further in order to cut losses will just make it even less attractive, as TFA correctly said.
The superb name. Hats off to whoever was the genius!