Vista took too long to develop, does not work and is not selling.
Whoa whoa whoa. Where are you getting all this? Yeah, Vista took a long time to develop, I'll give you that. But where do you come off immediately following that up by saying it doesn't work? I haven't had one crash or error since I started using it months ago (right after it came out). It works perfectly, and it has some great internal improvements (WPF, WCF, WF) that developers love and that will let us make better programs. And saying it isn't selling? It may not be selling as much as Microsoft had hoped/predicted, but saying it isn't selling is just flat wrong. The fact is, most software houses would kill to sell as many copies as Vista is selling.
Office is being escaped by real standards based productivity apps which can no longer be fought off.
Again, where do you get this garbage? Are you a troll? Office 2007 is actually crushing everything else. It is making people excited about an office suite again (which is pretty amazing, actually). Again, I've been using it for months and it is a VAST improvement over all previous versions of MS Office as well as all other office apps out there. Once you get used to the interface, it is just better by any measure you use. More intuitive, quicker to use, easier to find/understand power features, takes less mouse clicks to do things, gives real time previews of changes, etc. It makes openoffice look like something from the last decade. And as for standards based files, the new office files are open standards, and better because they also zip themselves up to save space. How many of the open standards you are referring to do that? And how average users can actually open all these open standards you say are crushing MS. You just try giving an open office document to a sample of the general public and see how many can open it. 95% of them can't. So get a clue: It doesn't matter that a standard is open if almost no one has software that uses it. What matters is having an open standard that everyone is ALSO using (which will shortly be the case with the MS standards, given the brisk selling pace of Office 2007).
And another issue is how many lawsuits MS is already embroiled in. MS may have many, many employees, but most of them are coders who can't work in the courtroom. They have lawyers, or course, but MS isn't a law firm and probably have a more limited supply. Even though I'm sure that supply is quite large, you have to bet they are strapped to the max, because they have to defend themselves from the big EU lawsuits, Iowa anti-trust cases, random consumers suing them, and the list goes on and on. They may know a patent is being infringed upon, but seriously, which is more important: suing a company or random open source group that probably isn't all that big or important for patent infringement, OR defending yourself from being sued by an entire continent (EU)?
The sucky thing about the cell Internet access is going to be the price. You will of course have to sign up with a cell phone company for some sort of plan, and those companies regard "data" as their goose that laid the golden egg and are constantly jacking up prices. You will get charged by the megabyte or even kilobyte for downloads, and as most of us know, even visiting a site like slashdot sends down lots data in the form of html text, scripts, etc. Visit (or even accidently visit) a site that needs to send down a flash file and your wallet will really be hurting. This current model for data fees will kill you even on a phone, and at least with a phone most people don't surf the web too much or download all that much data (due mostly to the small size of the screens and small storage space). Give them a laptop with an always on connection and a web browser (which they will use to naively surf the web like normal) and they will just get destroyed.
Christianity is an openly mocked religion, the butt of countless punchlines on late night TV.
I wonder how much of the mocking of Christianity on late night TV stems from the fact that Christianity really is a religion of peace, and everyone, including the late night TV hosts, knows it? A comedian can constantly make fun of Christianity without fear of reprisal, whereas saying anything about Islam can cause a fatwa (religious edict) to be issued calling for your death (just ask Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses, who had to go into hiding for years after a cleric in Iran issued a fatwa against him). Just publishing a cartoon about the prophet Mohammed can cause worldwide protests, rioting in every Muslim country, bombings, beheadings, beatings, arson, and all the rest. Just look at all the months of rioting that went on ALL OVER THE WORLD after one Danish newspaper published a few cartoons about the prophet Mohammed. That's certainly not peaceful.
Just looking at the facts as they stand now, I think we can make the following conclusions.
Christianity, whether you personally believe in it or not, is a religion of peace, as evidenced by the lack of a violent response to the constant mocking it recieves everywhere.
Late night comedians are cowards, because they only attack the religions they know won't hurt them.
Islam is NOT a religion of peace. Of course there are some Muslims who are peaceful, but Islam, as practiced today by the vast majority of Muslims, is clearly not a religion of peace. If the majority were peaceful, there is no way you could have violent riots for months in the Muslim countries of the world over a cartoon. If the majority were peaceful, you wouldn't have 20% of Muslims in even a secular country like the United States believing suicide bombings are acceptable.
Islam is NOT a religion that supports free speach. Again, there are some Muslims that do, of course, but Islam as a whole does not support it. Months long riots in every Muslim country over a few cartoons published in a small newspaper in a small country halfway around the world? I rest my case.
And just to pre-empt the argument that someone will no doubt make saying that the Crusades prove Christianity is a violent religion: I would like to point out that during the timeperiod when the Crusades happened, the following facts were true:
Almost no one, including the common people, could read, and
even if they could, there were almost no Bibles to read, as the printing press hadn't been invented yet.
The fact is, the common people had no way whatsoever to find out what Christ really said, what Christianity was really about, etc. All they could go on was what others said. And unfortunately, a deceitful, power hungry pope told them killing Muslims was the way to go to heaven. How were they to know any different? That's what the pope said, that's what the powerful nobility were saying, so of course they went out to fight on a Crusade. Of course, the Bible actually says exactly the opposite, so now that people can actually read it you don't see them calling for Crusades. Compare that to the situation in Muslim states today where the ability to read and the availability of Kuran's are commonplace. They all read the Kuran and still strap bombs to their chest. Just looking at this situation makes it clear that the argument that "Christianity is just as violent as Islam because of the Crusades" simply doesn't hold water. It is a completely invalid comparison.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the mods have an axe to grind on my above post? I made good points, but they are being consistently burried under the guise of being "overrated." I corrected some very obvious (and provably obvious) errors in the post above mine, and I'm being burried. It's not just the UK schools that have censorship, its this thread as well.
You are correct that cannibalism did happen, but it was only in a single conquered city during the first crusade. It was not an ongoing thing, and many of the crusaders (including those who chronicled it) were even ashamed of their actions later. If you want a very thorough, unbiased view of the Crusades, watch the History Channel program "The Crescent and the Cross." Their research shows that almost every leader on all sides was pretty cruel and barbaric (by today's terms) because, in their words, "you had to be during that time period." All of those rulers, whether they were Richard the Lionhearted on the Western side (exterminating all the captured Muslims after ransom talks broke down) or Saladin (suspected of repeatedly murdering rivals/superiors to gain power) were quite brutal, and I think that made it fairly easy for the History Channel to avoid taking sides in their program.
Here's a hint for you left-ponders -- the Daily Mail is the UK
equivalent of Fox: a racist rag which will print anything which puts
muslims, women, gays, trades-unionists or the working class in a
bad light. Check snopes before posting a story from them.
That's a bunch of complete flamebait (and should be modded down by anyone with mod points). I haven't observed the Daily Mail, as I'm not from the UK, and thus I can't comment on it. However, I've watched Fox news shows regularly as well as their talk shows, and I've read books by many of their talk show hosts (Bill O'Reilly, Shawn Hannity, etc.). In no way is Fox a racist rag. That is a myth perpetuated by people (traditionally left wing flamers and mudslingers) who continually bash Fox without ever having watched it. Bill O'Reilly often has gay and lesbian men and women on his show, and he is extremely fair and often takes their side if they are facing discrimination. He often has the Reverend Al Sharpton and other black leaders on his show, and they quite often have some very constructive dialogs (even agreeing on some issues). In addition, these talk shows almost NEVER present just one point of view. They are very good at bringing in people from both sides of the political aisle and letting them discuss and comment on the issues. Sometimes the dems win, and sometimes the republicans. It just depends on the issue, but at least you get BOTH sides of the story during their talk shows.
When it comes to the news, they cover a broad variety of issues, and they are very good about having their reporters stay as neutral as possible and not make opinionated comments. They don't just take the president's line, either. They cover things that are damaging or scandelous to the administration. And some of their opinion shows will hammer administration actions that are scandalous. The fact is, rather than being a "racist rag", they are actually a good journalistic organization, and in my opinion they do a better job than most other news networks. Did anyone watch CNN's coverage of the 2004 presidential election? As Kerry was losing, Wolf Blitzer got combative and emotional, and at one point looked like he was going to cry. Then on another network you have the big Dan Rather scandal where he reported all those damaging (and as we found out, fake) documents about Bush's guard record. The fact is, an honest observer has to admit that Fox has had a much better record lately of avoiding scandals and emotionalism in their broadcasts. And you'd have to really, really be a dishonest flamer to try to claim that they are a "racist rag."
Depends very much on where it is directing you to. The article said it directs you to a "Dell branded page full of google adds." If the page it redirects you to is in google's domain (i.e. - maybe has a URL of google.com/delladpage), then google will in fact be monitoring and tracking your traffic as you hit their servers. If the page it redirects you to is in Dell's domain, then Dell will be able to track your traffic. Either way, one of them can see you hit that page, and of course if you visit any of the google links, google will see that too. So in fact there is a way for them to see at least your immediate hit and possibly subsequent traffic/browsing decisions, because they did just toss you into their domain.
Yes it does. In fact, that is one of its biggest strengths. You use the merge command for it (and you can also use some other ones in combination with each other). Your trouble with Subversion probably has more to do with a lack of understanding than the working of the tool. The tool itself is solid (and no one would build a version control system without a way to roll back a change). Subversion does have a bit of a learning curve, in large part because it was one of the first (if not the first) version control system to fix the problems it does, and as a consequence of fixing them it had to depart of bit from how things on CVS and other systems worked in the past. If you are having difficulty, please read the first few chapters of the O'Reilly Subversion book. It is written by the Subversion team, and as I pointed out in another post, is provided free by them on the Internet. It is thorough and extremely up to date (they do nightly builds on the book). You can find it here: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ . The first few chapters not only teach you how to do all these things you are complaining about correctly, they also lay out best practices for project organization. Happy reading! This will if you do it.
My tests on our server show a 28MB binary checkout ( LAN, SPARC server, Pentium M client ) takes ~20 seconds. Export takes ~2sec. That must be a big set of files to cause a 9 minute *export*... several gigs, am I wrong? It'd be nice for them to say. Most of us, even in a worst case, won't have more than a few hundred MB in a single project.
What you say is true, but the problem is that that isn't how any organization I've seen tends to use Subversion (or Subversion like) version control systems (TFS comes to mind). What they typically do is have a root directory in the repository, and the roots of ALL projects are stored under that. Therefore, every project in the organization is in the same file tree in the Subversion repository. Most all of those projects are probably pretty small like yours, but all of them combined can be equal to many gigabytes of space. Despite these performance issues, most organizations still need that sort of structure so that they don't have tons of repositories sitting around. This way, they only have one repository and they can store every single project in it. But unfortunately, this is also where the performance hit comes in.
For those using Subversion (or TFS) at most organizations, you can see what I mean by looking at the revision or changeset (check in) numbers. Check something in. Note the number. Wait about an hour without checking something in. Look at the repository's latest revision. Odds are, the revision number has gone up. Why? Someone else on some other project stored in some other folder out on the tree checked something in, and the repository keeps track of binary deltas of the entire tree! That's a good thing because that is what lets you move and rename files without losing their history (even changing the name of your project or moving it), but again, it is also how you get gigabyte upon gigabyte into the repository and start crippling performance.
I do agree, and I'm open to experimentation, but I've used SourceSafe, Team Foundation Server, ClearCase, CMVC, CVS, and Subversion, and I've found Subversion to be the best by far, as well as very reliable. Is Subversion absolutely the best out there, or the very best system possible? Perhaps not, but the problem is that there are so many systems out there, and so many of them (nearly all) are inferior, that you can't be suprised or blame people for jumping for joy at Subversion and becoming huge fans. I think people (myself included) are getting tired of having to keep searching for a better version control system. CVS was good, but it had some pretty big flaws that Subversion fixed. Subversion made a good version control system great, and I think most people will probably start using that long term just liked they used CVS long term until a major reason to switch comes along. Subversion is familiar (if you've used CVS), stable, well documented and fully featured. Are other systems better? Possibly, but Subversion is so good that the marginal utility of switching to yet another new version control system is pretty low, especially given Subversion's edge with users in the area of familiarity.
For many open source projects, finding good documentation is hard. In the case of Subversion, it couldn't be easier. In fact, the Subversion team has taken documentation to such a level that they should be considered THE model for documentation in the open source community. They have written a book (published in print by O'Reilly, but maintained and posted for free by them on the Internet) that documents their system, and it is very good. My job at the last company I worked for was to write wizards for the Eclipse platform that would automate several of the most common tasks that a Subversion user would try to do, and that book was the only reference I needed. You can find the book on their site here: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ . They even do nightly builds of the book, so not only is their documentation complete and useful, it is also incredibly thorough and up to date.
If anyone on here hasn't read it, DO IT, because the first half will teach you why you want Subversion rather than CVS or some other alternative, and how to use it and how to get the most out of it (second half is lower level stuff you may not care about). It even includes best practices. Once you really learn how to use Subversion, you won't want to use anything else. And this is the way to get started.
And you can ALSO save space by version controlling ANY type of file because of its binary delta features. My software team often would place.doc files or other sorts of documentation into our projects, and CVS would save full copies of each document to version control them, chewing up space like crazy. If you work on a big software project, where you can run into things like 1000 page word specification files, you do NOT want a version control system that doesn't use binary differencing. This is another reason why SVN WILL replace CVS.
It is still the wave of the future. I've worked in it extensively, and it is still the best version control system I've ever used. Because of its other strengths, it is continuing to expand its user base and gain popularity. You can tell this because Microsoft is now actively attempting to copy Subversion's concepts and ways of doing things. Ever used Team Foundation Server? It is just like Subversion, only buggier (and without a good way to roll back a changeset... you have to download and install Team Foundation Power Tools to do it). I'm a new employee at my company (which uses Microsoft technology), and yet I've been explaining how the TFS system works to seasoned.Net architecture veterans. The reason I can do this? I worked extensively with Subversion, read the Subversion book a few times (the O'Reilly book maintained by the Subversion team), and worked on a project for my previous company that basically had the goal of making versions of the TFS wizards for Subversion on the Eclipse platform. It only took me about one day of using TFS to be able to predict how it would respond, what its quirks would be, etc, because it's technical underpinnings are just like Subversion. So even with performance issues, if even Microsoft is abandoning its years of efforts on Source Safe and jumping all over this, you can know that its strengths still make it worth adopting over the other alternatives. After all, if Microsoft was going to dump source safe, it had its pick of other systems to copy, as well as the option of trying to make something new. What did it pick? Subversion.
Not really. Linux "as a brand" is pretty much the same as it has always been. While Windows got the brand overhaul in 1995 that persists to this day, Linux really hasn't had a brand overhaul. It has always just been Linux, loosly represented by a penguin, Linus Torvalds and/or thoughts and ideas about open source. Those are the thoughts that come to mind when many people think about Linux, and those really haven't changed much. Linus Torvalds, open source, etc have been around since the beginning, and the penguin has been around much of the time as well.
What happens if you are in a downtown area with a lot of access points, and one shop has a "free wifi for customers" shop up, and another shop has a "FREE wifi up". According to what you say, the second is legal to access, and the first isn't. But what if you accidentally log onto the wrong network? What if their SSIDs aren't logically named so as to identify which one you are logging on to? What if you computer automatically jumps on one (because they do tend to do that).
I think a sign should never be considered sufficient for the following reason: you should not have your "legal" warning placed in real space when what you are trying to secure is actually in cyberspace. Cyberspace (as enabled by the wifi router) is most likely accessible in areas where the the sign is not visible in real space, and therefore it isn't fair to use a sign as a warning. It makes about as much sense as leaving the realspace door open, but having your router broadcast a warning (who knowns, maybe by settings its SSID) saying
NO TRESSPASSING! DO NOT ENTER! Cyberspace and realspace are seperate, and if you don't want someone tresspassing in one of those spaces, it makes sense that you warn them in the space that you don't want them to enter. If you don't want them on your router, you should probably do something like the following to make it clear:
Encrypt your Wi-Fi (even with weak encryption, that is the realspace equivalent of locking a door).
Do not set your SSID to broadcast (real space equivalent of closing, but not locking, a door).
At the very least, set your SSID to custonly or something link that. However, that still would (or at least should) make it difficult for you to process someone, because it is possible their computer just logged automatically. You should have to at least proved that they saw the SSID when logging on.
Your reply while partly true, has absolutely nothing to do with market share. Microsoft as a brand has been around since `81, Linux has been around since `92. Windows has been a household name for around 26 years, Linux is only begining to gain relevent mindshare.
Windows has definately not been a household name for 26 years. 2007-1981 = 26, but your problem is that Microsoft didn't launch Windows in 1981. It had DOS in 1981, and that "brand" is all but dead. If you want to compare Windows as a brand to Linux (created in 1991), then they are at best the same age. And that is if you are comparing pre 1995 versions of Windows to Linux, such as Windows 3.0. However, the first Windows most people would associate with the "Windows Brand" would be Windows 95. When people think of Windows as a brand, they think of the Start button, the flag, and all the other branding that first started with Windows 95. Thus, if you are going to do a realistic brand vs. brand comparison between Windows and Linux, Windows is 4 years younger than Linux.
That's garbage. We actually have a lot more control over companies than we do electoral systems. If you don't like what the company is doing or what prices it charges, DON'T BUY THE PRODUCT! You don't have to wait till the next election cycle, you don't have to wait up to 6 years to purge a body of incumbents completely (takes six years to purge the senate if you don't like its policies). You can immediately stop buying the product, and you can even organize boycotts. If a company is being unreasonable enough, they can't sell products, and they go out of business (which could be described as permanently voting a company out of the market place). One could argue that that doesn't work when you have a monopoly, but that's really only true of monopolies of critical services (such as water... we all can't just decide to stop consuming that). For other things though, such as Microsoft, if Europeans don't like their goods they COULD quit buying them. Alternatives exist, including Apple, Linux, etc. The reason MS continues to exist and continues to have 90% market share is because people WANT their products, and want them badly enough to pay the current prices. That's called free enterprise, and the EU, which claims to be a capitalistic society, should get the heck out.
It's very true. Outsourcing causes far more trouble than it is worth. I've had to work with outsourced developers, and there are three huge problems that you almost universally run into with them.
1. English: They can speak it to a degree, but it is often difficult to understand accents during phone conversations, they don't understand American expressions (and don't know what you are trying to say), and they often aren't very good at understanding chunks of universal English either (you ask them a question, they don't understand the question).
2. Time zones / disasters: I had a lot of problems with outsourced Indian developers in this area. They are awake when you are asleep, and vice versa. You need them to make a change to code they are delivering, you send them an email, they make the change, and you get the code back. Sounds pretty normal until you consider that with outsourcing the process takes 24 hours, because they don't get the email to after your day ends, they make the change, and you don't get the response until the next morning when you come in. Worse, if combined with #1 and #3, they didn't understand your request, didn't deliver what was required, and you have to try again and wait another 24 hours. I had that happen with a guy who seemed to just make changes to his code at random, hoping that it would give me what I wanted. Day after day I would get new versions from him that wouldn't do what I asked. Another issue relating to distance is the fact that they can have a bunch of natural disasters that you don't experience. Our developer in Mumbai got flooded out of the office for two weeks due to monsoons, and so the project just stalled because we were all waiting on a piece from him and couldn't get it.
3. Subpar skills: This is a huge problem with foreign developers. There aren't enough quality/accredited universities, so there are lots of subpar, poor universities springing up to try to meet demand (and giving developers the same degrees as the good universities), so you have to be able to somehow keep up with which university is which in order to decide if a developer is likely to have the skills you need. Also, the educational systems in general in a lot of these countries just aren't that great. You hear a lot about the US system being terrible, but it does turn out quality workers who can THINK CREATIVELY. A lot of these foreign systems focus on nothing but memorization and rote repetition. Looks great on the standardized math tests, but when it comes to problem solving or writing creative, optimized code many foreign developers simply can't. They haven't ever learned to do anything other than what is already in a book, and therefore can't do a lot of unique things to extend the state of the art. That's not to say all foreign educations fall into that category, but a good deal of them do.
Really, when it comes to getting what you pay for, hiring an American engineer from one of the top tier engineering schools is the way to go. And if you have to hire someone with questionable skills due to a lack of resources/applicants, you are still better off hiring a questionable American, because at least you won't have the turnaround and disaster delays discussed in problem 2. Really the only time I think outsourcing is a good idea is if you are a multinational corp and you want to make programs in another nation for the market in that nation, OR you want to provide really late night tech support, because it is hard to find techs that will want to work tech support at 4 AM (whereas Indians would normally be awake at that time).
I guess this is another good reason not to go to class. Something like this would never have affected me because I never went to a class before noon when I was in college. And I tended to never go to a class at any time of the day if it was online, which quite a few were. Perhaps this is another good reason to expand online offerings: it cuts down on the number of potential victims in one spot.
That's what I've been wanting to do for years, but you can't get people to wise up. We will forever have career politicians in both parties (especially the democrats) voting to further complicate the tax code in a power play. They vote to raise taxes on the rich (because that's a small group with few votes) and lower taxes on the "working class" (as though others don't work) just because the "working class" has more votes. Its an attempt to buy votes and everyone knows it. Once you start decreasing taxes and giving benefits to a group, they will always vote for you. The most insidious thing about this though is that the politicians don't even buy the votes with their own money, but with OTHER PEOPLE's money (take money from wealthier people, give to others, others vote for you). They ought to be thrown in jail for robbery, not repeatedly reelected to a posh job.
You can see the same thing in local governments too. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, the democrats are voting to increase property taxes to pay for welfare programs. The welfare roles in this state are full of able bodied adults with NO CHILDREN!! Explain to me why we increase property taxes rather than kick those people off the roles and make them get jobs? Oh yeah, they wouldn't vote for you anymore. That's just sick.
1 person = 1 vote = same percentage of taxes. That's fair, that's how it should be. If we are going to tax a certain group more, they should get more votes per person, because it was their money and they ought to have a say in how in gets spent.
Note: I am not wealthy, own no property, and barely have enough money to get to go out to eat. But blatant unfairness and thievery in my own government disgusts me, and I'm sick of laziness, sick of confusing and worthless tax codes and sick of the worthless beauracracy that supports them. Throw it all out and bring on the flat tax.
Hypothetical Question: If there was an all powerful designer, and he wanted to create a T-Rex and a chicken, would they not necessarilly be similar, just as this data shows? After all, you are dealing with very similar constraints (oxygen atmosphere for respiration, water needed for life, etc), the same programming language (DNA), and you want similar features in each organism (i.e. clawlike feet, etc). Wouldn't you need a lot more than a similarity to prove evolution and disprove God? You are going to see similarities between organisms based on constraints (and, if you assume creationsim, the fact that you have the same designer as well), so wouldn't you want to actually see the descendency path from the T-Rex to the chicken to prove an evolutionary link? In my opinion, saying a T-Rex shares a lot of similarities with a Chicken proves nothing except that they are similar. To prove that one truly descended from the other, I think you need to see a descendency path will all the intermediate species. After all, you can say Mars and the Earth are very similar, and indeed they are, but one didn't come from the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa whoa whoa. Where are you getting all this? Yeah, Vista took a long time to develop, I'll give you that. But where do you come off immediately following that up by saying it doesn't work? I haven't had one crash or error since I started using it months ago (right after it came out). It works perfectly, and it has some great internal improvements (WPF, WCF, WF) that developers love and that will let us make better programs. And saying it isn't selling? It may not be selling as much as Microsoft had hoped/predicted, but saying it isn't selling is just flat wrong. The fact is, most software houses would kill to sell as many copies as Vista is selling.
Again, where do you get this garbage? Are you a troll? Office 2007 is actually crushing everything else. It is making people excited about an office suite again (which is pretty amazing, actually). Again, I've been using it for months and it is a VAST improvement over all previous versions of MS Office as well as all other office apps out there. Once you get used to the interface, it is just better by any measure you use. More intuitive, quicker to use, easier to find/understand power features, takes less mouse clicks to do things, gives real time previews of changes, etc. It makes openoffice look like something from the last decade. And as for standards based files, the new office files are open standards, and better because they also zip themselves up to save space. How many of the open standards you are referring to do that? And how average users can actually open all these open standards you say are crushing MS. You just try giving an open office document to a sample of the general public and see how many can open it. 95% of them can't. So get a clue: It doesn't matter that a standard is open if almost no one has software that uses it. What matters is having an open standard that everyone is ALSO using (which will shortly be the case with the MS standards, given the brisk selling pace of Office 2007).
And another issue is how many lawsuits MS is already embroiled in. MS may have many, many employees, but most of them are coders who can't work in the courtroom. They have lawyers, or course, but MS isn't a law firm and probably have a more limited supply. Even though I'm sure that supply is quite large, you have to bet they are strapped to the max, because they have to defend themselves from the big EU lawsuits, Iowa anti-trust cases, random consumers suing them, and the list goes on and on. They may know a patent is being infringed upon, but seriously, which is more important: suing a company or random open source group that probably isn't all that big or important for patent infringement, OR defending yourself from being sued by an entire continent (EU)?
The sucky thing about the cell Internet access is going to be the price. You will of course have to sign up with a cell phone company for some sort of plan, and those companies regard "data" as their goose that laid the golden egg and are constantly jacking up prices. You will get charged by the megabyte or even kilobyte for downloads, and as most of us know, even visiting a site like slashdot sends down lots data in the form of html text, scripts, etc. Visit (or even accidently visit) a site that needs to send down a flash file and your wallet will really be hurting. This current model for data fees will kill you even on a phone, and at least with a phone most people don't surf the web too much or download all that much data (due mostly to the small size of the screens and small storage space). Give them a laptop with an always on connection and a web browser (which they will use to naively surf the web like normal) and they will just get destroyed.
I wonder how much of the mocking of Christianity on late night TV stems from the fact that Christianity really is a religion of peace, and everyone, including the late night TV hosts, knows it? A comedian can constantly make fun of Christianity without fear of reprisal, whereas saying anything about Islam can cause a fatwa (religious edict) to be issued calling for your death (just ask Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses, who had to go into hiding for years after a cleric in Iran issued a fatwa against him). Just publishing a cartoon about the prophet Mohammed can cause worldwide protests, rioting in every Muslim country, bombings, beheadings, beatings, arson, and all the rest. Just look at all the months of rioting that went on ALL OVER THE WORLD after one Danish newspaper published a few cartoons about the prophet Mohammed. That's certainly not peaceful.
Just looking at the facts as they stand now, I think we can make the following conclusions.
And just to pre-empt the argument that someone will no doubt make saying that the Crusades prove Christianity is a violent religion: I would like to point out that during the timeperiod when the Crusades happened, the following facts were true:
The fact is, the common people had no way whatsoever to find out what Christ really said, what Christianity was really about, etc. All they could go on was what others said. And unfortunately, a deceitful, power hungry pope told them killing Muslims was the way to go to heaven. How were they to know any different? That's what the pope said, that's what the powerful nobility were saying, so of course they went out to fight on a Crusade. Of course, the Bible actually says exactly the opposite, so now that people can actually read it you don't see them calling for Crusades. Compare that to the situation in Muslim states today where the ability to read and the availability of Kuran's are commonplace. They all read the Kuran and still strap bombs to their chest. Just looking at this situation makes it clear that the argument that "Christianity is just as violent as Islam because of the Crusades" simply doesn't hold water. It is a completely invalid comparison.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the mods have an axe to grind on my above post? I made good points, but they are being consistently burried under the guise of being "overrated." I corrected some very obvious (and provably obvious) errors in the post above mine, and I'm being burried. It's not just the UK schools that have censorship, its this thread as well.
You are correct that cannibalism did happen, but it was only in a single conquered city during the first crusade. It was not an ongoing thing, and many of the crusaders (including those who chronicled it) were even ashamed of their actions later. If you want a very thorough, unbiased view of the Crusades, watch the History Channel program "The Crescent and the Cross." Their research shows that almost every leader on all sides was pretty cruel and barbaric (by today's terms) because, in their words, "you had to be during that time period." All of those rulers, whether they were Richard the Lionhearted on the Western side (exterminating all the captured Muslims after ransom talks broke down) or Saladin (suspected of repeatedly murdering rivals/superiors to gain power) were quite brutal, and I think that made it fairly easy for the History Channel to avoid taking sides in their program.
That's a bunch of complete flamebait (and should be modded down by anyone with mod points). I haven't observed the Daily Mail, as I'm not from the UK, and thus I can't comment on it. However, I've watched Fox news shows regularly as well as their talk shows, and I've read books by many of their talk show hosts (Bill O'Reilly, Shawn Hannity, etc.). In no way is Fox a racist rag. That is a myth perpetuated by people (traditionally left wing flamers and mudslingers) who continually bash Fox without ever having watched it. Bill O'Reilly often has gay and lesbian men and women on his show, and he is extremely fair and often takes their side if they are facing discrimination. He often has the Reverend Al Sharpton and other black leaders on his show, and they quite often have some very constructive dialogs (even agreeing on some issues). In addition, these talk shows almost NEVER present just one point of view. They are very good at bringing in people from both sides of the political aisle and letting them discuss and comment on the issues. Sometimes the dems win, and sometimes the republicans. It just depends on the issue, but at least you get BOTH sides of the story during their talk shows.
When it comes to the news, they cover a broad variety of issues, and they are very good about having their reporters stay as neutral as possible and not make opinionated comments. They don't just take the president's line, either. They cover things that are damaging or scandelous to the administration. And some of their opinion shows will hammer administration actions that are scandalous. The fact is, rather than being a "racist rag", they are actually a good journalistic organization, and in my opinion they do a better job than most other news networks. Did anyone watch CNN's coverage of the 2004 presidential election? As Kerry was losing, Wolf Blitzer got combative and emotional, and at one point looked like he was going to cry. Then on another network you have the big Dan Rather scandal where he reported all those damaging (and as we found out, fake) documents about Bush's guard record. The fact is, an honest observer has to admit that Fox has had a much better record lately of avoiding scandals and emotionalism in their broadcasts. And you'd have to really, really be a dishonest flamer to try to claim that they are a "racist rag."
Depends very much on where it is directing you to. The article said it directs you to a "Dell branded page full of google adds." If the page it redirects you to is in google's domain (i.e. - maybe has a URL of google.com/delladpage), then google will in fact be monitoring and tracking your traffic as you hit their servers. If the page it redirects you to is in Dell's domain, then Dell will be able to track your traffic. Either way, one of them can see you hit that page, and of course if you visit any of the google links, google will see that too. So in fact there is a way for them to see at least your immediate hit and possibly subsequent traffic/browsing decisions, because they did just toss you into their domain.
What you say is true, but the problem is that that isn't how any organization I've seen tends to use Subversion (or Subversion like) version control systems (TFS comes to mind). What they typically do is have a root directory in the repository, and the roots of ALL projects are stored under that. Therefore, every project in the organization is in the same file tree in the Subversion repository. Most all of those projects are probably pretty small like yours, but all of them combined can be equal to many gigabytes of space. Despite these performance issues, most organizations still need that sort of structure so that they don't have tons of repositories sitting around. This way, they only have one repository and they can store every single project in it. But unfortunately, this is also where the performance hit comes in.
For those using Subversion (or TFS) at most organizations, you can see what I mean by looking at the revision or changeset (check in) numbers. Check something in. Note the number. Wait about an hour without checking something in. Look at the repository's latest revision. Odds are, the revision number has gone up. Why? Someone else on some other project stored in some other folder out on the tree checked something in, and the repository keeps track of binary deltas of the entire tree! That's a good thing because that is what lets you move and rename files without losing their history (even changing the name of your project or moving it), but again, it is also how you get gigabyte upon gigabyte into the repository and start crippling performance.
I do agree, and I'm open to experimentation, but I've used SourceSafe, Team Foundation Server, ClearCase, CMVC, CVS, and Subversion, and I've found Subversion to be the best by far, as well as very reliable. Is Subversion absolutely the best out there, or the very best system possible? Perhaps not, but the problem is that there are so many systems out there, and so many of them (nearly all) are inferior, that you can't be suprised or blame people for jumping for joy at Subversion and becoming huge fans. I think people (myself included) are getting tired of having to keep searching for a better version control system. CVS was good, but it had some pretty big flaws that Subversion fixed. Subversion made a good version control system great, and I think most people will probably start using that long term just liked they used CVS long term until a major reason to switch comes along. Subversion is familiar (if you've used CVS), stable, well documented and fully featured. Are other systems better? Possibly, but Subversion is so good that the marginal utility of switching to yet another new version control system is pretty low, especially given Subversion's edge with users in the area of familiarity.
For many open source projects, finding good documentation is hard. In the case of Subversion, it couldn't be easier. In fact, the Subversion team has taken documentation to such a level that they should be considered THE model for documentation in the open source community. They have written a book (published in print by O'Reilly, but maintained and posted for free by them on the Internet) that documents their system, and it is very good. My job at the last company I worked for was to write wizards for the Eclipse platform that would automate several of the most common tasks that a Subversion user would try to do, and that book was the only reference I needed. You can find the book on their site here: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ . They even do nightly builds of the book, so not only is their documentation complete and useful, it is also incredibly thorough and up to date.
If anyone on here hasn't read it, DO IT, because the first half will teach you why you want Subversion rather than CVS or some other alternative, and how to use it and how to get the most out of it (second half is lower level stuff you may not care about). It even includes best practices. Once you really learn how to use Subversion, you won't want to use anything else. And this is the way to get started.
And you can ALSO save space by version controlling ANY type of file because of its binary delta features. My software team often would place .doc files or other sorts of documentation into our projects, and CVS would save full copies of each document to version control them, chewing up space like crazy. If you work on a big software project, where you can run into things like 1000 page word specification files, you do NOT want a version control system that doesn't use binary differencing. This is another reason why SVN WILL replace CVS.
It is still the wave of the future. I've worked in it extensively, and it is still the best version control system I've ever used. Because of its other strengths, it is continuing to expand its user base and gain popularity. You can tell this because Microsoft is now actively attempting to copy Subversion's concepts and ways of doing things. Ever used Team Foundation Server? It is just like Subversion, only buggier (and without a good way to roll back a changeset... you have to download and install Team Foundation Power Tools to do it). I'm a new employee at my company (which uses Microsoft technology), and yet I've been explaining how the TFS system works to seasoned .Net architecture veterans. The reason I can do this? I worked extensively with Subversion, read the Subversion book a few times (the O'Reilly book maintained by the Subversion team), and worked on a project for my previous company that basically had the goal of making versions of the TFS wizards for Subversion on the Eclipse platform. It only took me about one day of using TFS to be able to predict how it would respond, what its quirks would be, etc, because it's technical underpinnings are just like Subversion. So even with performance issues, if even Microsoft is abandoning its years of efforts on Source Safe and jumping all over this, you can know that its strengths still make it worth adopting over the other alternatives. After all, if Microsoft was going to dump source safe, it had its pick of other systems to copy, as well as the option of trying to make something new. What did it pick? Subversion.
Not really. Linux "as a brand" is pretty much the same as it has always been. While Windows got the brand overhaul in 1995 that persists to this day, Linux really hasn't had a brand overhaul. It has always just been Linux, loosly represented by a penguin, Linus Torvalds and/or thoughts and ideas about open source. Those are the thoughts that come to mind when many people think about Linux, and those really haven't changed much. Linus Torvalds, open source, etc have been around since the beginning, and the penguin has been around much of the time as well.
Your reply while partly true, has absolutely nothing to do with market share. Microsoft as a brand has been around since `81, Linux has been around since `92. Windows has been a household name for around 26 years, Linux is only begining to gain relevent mindshare.
Windows has definately not been a household name for 26 years. 2007-1981 = 26, but your problem is that Microsoft didn't launch Windows in 1981. It had DOS in 1981, and that "brand" is all but dead. If you want to compare Windows as a brand to Linux (created in 1991), then they are at best the same age. And that is if you are comparing pre 1995 versions of Windows to Linux, such as Windows 3.0. However, the first Windows most people would associate with the "Windows Brand" would be Windows 95. When people think of Windows as a brand, they think of the Start button, the flag, and all the other branding that first started with Windows 95. Thus, if you are going to do a realistic brand vs. brand comparison between Windows and Linux, Windows is 4 years younger than Linux.
That's garbage. We actually have a lot more control over companies than we do electoral systems. If you don't like what the company is doing or what prices it charges, DON'T BUY THE PRODUCT! You don't have to wait till the next election cycle, you don't have to wait up to 6 years to purge a body of incumbents completely (takes six years to purge the senate if you don't like its policies). You can immediately stop buying the product, and you can even organize boycotts. If a company is being unreasonable enough, they can't sell products, and they go out of business (which could be described as permanently voting a company out of the market place). One could argue that that doesn't work when you have a monopoly, but that's really only true of monopolies of critical services (such as water... we all can't just decide to stop consuming that). For other things though, such as Microsoft, if Europeans don't like their goods they COULD quit buying them. Alternatives exist, including Apple, Linux, etc. The reason MS continues to exist and continues to have 90% market share is because people WANT their products, and want them badly enough to pay the current prices. That's called free enterprise, and the EU, which claims to be a capitalistic society, should get the heck out.
It's very true. Outsourcing causes far more trouble than it is worth. I've had to work with outsourced developers, and there are three huge problems that you almost universally run into with them. 1. English: They can speak it to a degree, but it is often difficult to understand accents during phone conversations, they don't understand American expressions (and don't know what you are trying to say), and they often aren't very good at understanding chunks of universal English either (you ask them a question, they don't understand the question). 2. Time zones / disasters: I had a lot of problems with outsourced Indian developers in this area. They are awake when you are asleep, and vice versa. You need them to make a change to code they are delivering, you send them an email, they make the change, and you get the code back. Sounds pretty normal until you consider that with outsourcing the process takes 24 hours, because they don't get the email to after your day ends, they make the change, and you don't get the response until the next morning when you come in. Worse, if combined with #1 and #3, they didn't understand your request, didn't deliver what was required, and you have to try again and wait another 24 hours. I had that happen with a guy who seemed to just make changes to his code at random, hoping that it would give me what I wanted. Day after day I would get new versions from him that wouldn't do what I asked. Another issue relating to distance is the fact that they can have a bunch of natural disasters that you don't experience. Our developer in Mumbai got flooded out of the office for two weeks due to monsoons, and so the project just stalled because we were all waiting on a piece from him and couldn't get it. 3. Subpar skills: This is a huge problem with foreign developers. There aren't enough quality/accredited universities, so there are lots of subpar, poor universities springing up to try to meet demand (and giving developers the same degrees as the good universities), so you have to be able to somehow keep up with which university is which in order to decide if a developer is likely to have the skills you need. Also, the educational systems in general in a lot of these countries just aren't that great. You hear a lot about the US system being terrible, but it does turn out quality workers who can THINK CREATIVELY. A lot of these foreign systems focus on nothing but memorization and rote repetition. Looks great on the standardized math tests, but when it comes to problem solving or writing creative, optimized code many foreign developers simply can't. They haven't ever learned to do anything other than what is already in a book, and therefore can't do a lot of unique things to extend the state of the art. That's not to say all foreign educations fall into that category, but a good deal of them do. Really, when it comes to getting what you pay for, hiring an American engineer from one of the top tier engineering schools is the way to go. And if you have to hire someone with questionable skills due to a lack of resources/applicants, you are still better off hiring a questionable American, because at least you won't have the turnaround and disaster delays discussed in problem 2. Really the only time I think outsourcing is a good idea is if you are a multinational corp and you want to make programs in another nation for the market in that nation, OR you want to provide really late night tech support, because it is hard to find techs that will want to work tech support at 4 AM (whereas Indians would normally be awake at that time).
I guess this is another good reason not to go to class. Something like this would never have affected me because I never went to a class before noon when I was in college. And I tended to never go to a class at any time of the day if it was online, which quite a few were. Perhaps this is another good reason to expand online offerings: it cuts down on the number of potential victims in one spot.
That's what I've been wanting to do for years, but you can't get people to wise up. We will forever have career politicians in both parties (especially the democrats) voting to further complicate the tax code in a power play. They vote to raise taxes on the rich (because that's a small group with few votes) and lower taxes on the "working class" (as though others don't work) just because the "working class" has more votes. Its an attempt to buy votes and everyone knows it. Once you start decreasing taxes and giving benefits to a group, they will always vote for you. The most insidious thing about this though is that the politicians don't even buy the votes with their own money, but with OTHER PEOPLE's money (take money from wealthier people, give to others, others vote for you). They ought to be thrown in jail for robbery, not repeatedly reelected to a posh job. You can see the same thing in local governments too. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, the democrats are voting to increase property taxes to pay for welfare programs. The welfare roles in this state are full of able bodied adults with NO CHILDREN!! Explain to me why we increase property taxes rather than kick those people off the roles and make them get jobs? Oh yeah, they wouldn't vote for you anymore. That's just sick. 1 person = 1 vote = same percentage of taxes. That's fair, that's how it should be. If we are going to tax a certain group more, they should get more votes per person, because it was their money and they ought to have a say in how in gets spent. Note: I am not wealthy, own no property, and barely have enough money to get to go out to eat. But blatant unfairness and thievery in my own government disgusts me, and I'm sick of laziness, sick of confusing and worthless tax codes and sick of the worthless beauracracy that supports them. Throw it all out and bring on the flat tax.
Hypothetical Question: If there was an all powerful designer, and he wanted to create a T-Rex and a chicken, would they not necessarilly be similar, just as this data shows? After all, you are dealing with very similar constraints (oxygen atmosphere for respiration, water needed for life, etc), the same programming language (DNA), and you want similar features in each organism (i.e. clawlike feet, etc). Wouldn't you need a lot more than a similarity to prove evolution and disprove God? You are going to see similarities between organisms based on constraints (and, if you assume creationsim, the fact that you have the same designer as well), so wouldn't you want to actually see the descendency path from the T-Rex to the chicken to prove an evolutionary link? In my opinion, saying a T-Rex shares a lot of similarities with a Chicken proves nothing except that they are similar. To prove that one truly descended from the other, I think you need to see a descendency path will all the intermediate species. After all, you can say Mars and the Earth are very similar, and indeed they are, but one didn't come from the other.