I honestly think, that Spice Girls, Ricky Martin and most other crap that is ever produced with enough pre-collected information about what sounds right to most of the people and then purely marketed to people down their throats is NOT worth more that some thousand bucks totally.
Ok, you agree, so let's go deeper. I also think that no artist in the whole world ever is so productive, so beneficial to the mankind and has so much good use for the money that he/she deserves more money than an average doctor, teacher, lawyer or leader. The idea of some pieces of music (the IDEA of a song) being more worthy to mankind than a satellite communications network, probe to Mars or vaccination for all the children in Africa sounds unbelievable!
That is, I find it totally absurd that anyone would earn more than $50k per year just by making music, no matter how talented he might ever be. Really. I think artist's earning millions are themselves thieves, and I'm not even talking about the label execs yet:)
The economists often talk about second man's advantage as you don't have to discover each and every part of the technological invention again and again but you can concentrate on the best one of them... I hope this answers your question.
Little do they know "real gurus" are the gentlest nicest people in the world.
While I do not exactly agree, having seen how arrogant, uncivil and misbehaving brats adult "real gurus" can be, this brings be to think about Linus Torvalds as a great role model for anyone. He's kind, thinks first and rarely has a fight with anyone. I just wish more flamers would follow his footsteps instead of trying to mark their territory by barking out loud!
Having seen the most uneducated "recommendations" on Slashdot every time there is a financial-related article, I really wouldn't trust geeks on this matter...:)
Gomez Advisors has previously had pretty good comparisons between brokers. I see they have changed their interface and added more advertising and "deals" crap, I hope the content isn't affected.
I myself use Datek, as they have been in web brokerage business the longest and have good prices ($9.95). Still, I think that is far too much for doing the trade as the actual costs of the transaction are just a few cents. I guess the real discount brokerage where trades cost less than a dollar is still in the future.
Also, what I think the U.S. stock market needs is a working wire transfer system. In Finland, for example, you don't actually have "an account" where you store your money at the broker's - you pay the trades after the transaction has been completed via wire transfer. Here you can transfer money between different banks' accounts just with the account number, no bank addresses/ABA numbers or anything needed. Private persons pay their bills from their homes using the bank web interface. No one uses checks here, actually they are no longer accepted currency at all.
CmdrTaco: What would you use this new metric for? Setting your user preferences to say "I only want to read stories with a metric of 5?" That seems pretty pathetic since these numbers would have great fluctuation.
We had 3 years (yeah, over 1000 days) of uptime on our Netware 3.x server, then the power supply let the smoke out and we had to change it. That really felt bad:)
Ha, considering the responses you got, sarcasm is such a difficult art. Good article:)
I also find it so funny how people worship ESR and RMS and other icons of/. promoting them so important for the world while they are only some geeks making software. And label me as "Troll", but I must add: quite self-centered geeks.
I must disagree with your well written post. I think that Marshall was maybe the American Man of the Century. I feel that his motivation for all these accomplishments was not for world peace or for a better world for us to live in, but to ensure greater global influence for United States. This is of course very different from the previous strategy of isolation, but still, his accomplishments were not in any matter altruistic or "good", but he was after his own good and the interests of USA more or less imperialistically.
Also, despite his accomplishments in more peaceful fields, Marshall is too much of a militarist for me to respect this much, me being a pacifist.
So, while George Marshall was certainly a great man, he was not a man I could nominate for this title as I am European.:)
I use Amanda, it's quite easy to setup, uses tar or dump to make the backups. It can do +2G backups, and it has sort of rotation management. I have opened the few necessary ports from our FW so that the backups can travel through.
I just wish there was a way to implement grandfather-father-child type of multi-level backup on Amanda. Anyone?
You can find the source at www.amanda.org, and Red Hat contrib dir in RPM format.
I have one word for you: Don't. A running disk drive backup is only good for deletion accidents and broken disk drives, but what if you have
a power surge (burns both drives!)
an earthquake
a fire
a kernel level messup making both filesystems unusable
a rm -rf / when disk is mounted?
Having the backups up and running is of course good, but also means that you can't store older backups nor have them off-site which makes a backup system quite worthless, IMHO. But you were looking for cheap:)
You can see this as a part of a bigger move in the PDA/cellular field. Motorola and Nokia are now seriously teaming up with Palm and around Palm OS and Ericsson will probably be working in close co-operation with Microsoft using WinCE (or "Powered").
This shows us a clear direction where mobile computing is now headed to: There will be a fierce fight between WinCE and Palm camps over dominance in handheld WAP handsets or, later in the future (not many years more, anyway), powerful handheld mobile Internet-enabled computers.
No one will be using their cell phone only for talking in ten years (+-5 years, depends on when the 3rd Generation UMTS cell phones start appearing on consumer market) AND no one will be using their Palm X disconnected at that time.
Excuse me sir, but you are so elitist it makes me blush!
While you got a point - the level of expertise needed to use Word to write a letter is low enough to attract 2/3 of the population (what an elitist way to say it) - you are making it sound all bad. It is definitely not, quick software learning curves are actually making life easier for people!
Are you deliberately misunderstanding this or only feeling unhappy because general public has moved over to your sandbox?:)
I'm of course not for "screw the artist" -stuff, but think about it this way:
Ever wondered why those totally copyright-free mp3s on free mp3 sites produced by artists themselves sound so crappy? They are like demo tapes, they just miss "that one thing" (or sometimes bunch of them:). It's because they're missing the producer.
This is one of the things that record companies (ok, not always them) provide the artists with and his job is to kick the artists' butts so that they FINISH the music and maybe even make them to change music so that it appeals to more people (no, it's not "faking it", it's actually making it better). And I am not talking here about some Britney Spears' etc. crap producer who makes all the music and hires guys to write the lyrics.
While I have heard some good indie music (but even then there have usually been one of those "big" names behind it doing the producing) I really don't think most of these "free" bands could attract the producer just with the music and talent.
I hope Microsoft doesn't get away by just paying a fine to US Government. You see, also millions of other people around the world have suffered from MSFT's monopolistic practices, and deserve a compensation, individually and as nations. Even a better one as software prices are much higher in other countries than in the US.
This comment came of course from the other Operating System Exporting Country, Finland:)
Data Fellows (makers of the F-Prot virus protection software and resellers of SSH) was listed today on Helsinki Stock Exchange and went from 7.7 euros selling price to 27.45 euros. The main owner of the company, Risto Siilasmaa, instantly became the richest man in the country.
So, it's not only US investors who are insane but it applies globally.
In Finland the allocations in IPOs are much more fair than in the US: All public is usually allowed to participate and the "public investors" quota is more or less evenly allocated to all the participants. In this case, everyone got only 25 shares:)
Only thing I am worried about is that every time I read from somewhere that *insert some energy source* causes cancer/memory loss/brain damage/hemorrhoids, lots of rats have been fried with radio transmissions/x-rays/ion cannons for no good reason at all. Human race is going far in abusing all other creatures on this planet.
Meanwhile, my cell phone and brains work ok, but memory loss and symptoms of radiation sickness are observed after alcohol consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
Print the DeCSS source, or better, get the shirt with the source on it. CD won't last 10 years...
Ok, you agree, so let's go deeper. I also think that no artist in the whole world ever is so productive, so beneficial to the mankind and has so much good use for the money that he/she deserves more money than an average doctor, teacher, lawyer or leader. The idea of some pieces of music (the IDEA of a song) being more worthy to mankind than a satellite communications network, probe to Mars or vaccination for all the children in Africa sounds unbelievable!
That is, I find it totally absurd that anyone would earn more than $50k per year just by making music, no matter how talented he might ever be. Really. I think artist's earning millions are themselves thieves, and I'm not even talking about the label execs yet :)
The economists often talk about second man's advantage as you don't have to discover each and every part of the technological invention again and again but you can concentrate on the best one of them... I hope this answers your question.
And then someone moderated this as "Insightful"? Come on...
While I do not exactly agree, having seen how arrogant, uncivil and misbehaving brats adult "real gurus" can be, this brings be to think about Linus Torvalds as a great role model for anyone. He's kind, thinks first and rarely has a fight with anyone. I just wish more flamers would follow his footsteps instead of trying to mark their territory by barking out loud!
Gomez Advisors has previously had pretty good comparisons between brokers. I see they have changed their interface and added more advertising and "deals" crap, I hope the content isn't affected.
I myself use Datek, as they have been in web brokerage business the longest and have good prices ($9.95). Still, I think that is far too much for doing the trade as the actual costs of the transaction are just a few cents. I guess the real discount brokerage where trades cost less than a dollar is still in the future.
Also, what I think the U.S. stock market needs is a working wire transfer system. In Finland, for example, you don't actually have "an account" where you store your money at the broker's - you pay the trades after the transaction has been completed via wire transfer. Here you can transfer money between different banks' accounts just with the account number, no bank addresses/ABA numbers or anything needed. Private persons pay their bills from their homes using the bank web interface. No one uses checks here, actually they are no longer accepted currency at all.
This is just why there should be choices like
How about it?
We had 3 years (yeah, over 1000 days) of uptime on our Netware 3.x server, then the power supply let the smoke out and we had to change it. That really felt bad :)
I also find it so funny how people worship ESR and RMS and other icons of /. promoting them so important for the world while they are only some geeks making software. And label me as "Troll", but I must add: quite self-centered geeks.
Also, despite his accomplishments in more peaceful fields, Marshall is too much of a militarist for me to respect this much, me being a pacifist.
So, while George Marshall was certainly a great man, he was not a man I could nominate for this title as I am European. :)
I just wish there was a way to implement grandfather-father-child type of multi-level backup on Amanda. Anyone?
You can find the source at www.amanda.org, and Red Hat contrib dir in RPM format.
Having the backups up and running is of course good, but also means that you can't store older backups nor have them off-site which makes a backup system quite worthless, IMHO. But you were looking for cheap :)
This shows us a clear direction where mobile computing is now headed to: There will be a fierce fight between WinCE and Palm camps over dominance in handheld WAP handsets or, later in the future (not many years more, anyway), powerful handheld mobile Internet-enabled computers.
No one will be using their cell phone only for talking in ten years (+-5 years, depends on when the 3rd Generation UMTS cell phones start appearing on consumer market) AND no one will be using their Palm X disconnected at that time.
While you got a point - the level of expertise needed to use Word to write a letter is low enough to attract 2/3 of the population (what an elitist way to say it) - you are making it sound all bad. It is definitely not, quick software learning curves are actually making life easier for people!
Are you deliberately misunderstanding this or only feeling unhappy because general public has moved over to your sandbox? :)
Ever wondered why those totally copyright-free mp3s on free mp3 sites produced by artists themselves sound so crappy? They are like demo tapes, they just miss "that one thing" (or sometimes bunch of them :). It's because they're missing the producer.
This is one of the things that record companies (ok, not always them) provide the artists with and his job is to kick the artists' butts so that they FINISH the music and maybe even make them to change music so that it appeals to more people (no, it's not "faking it", it's actually making it better). And I am not talking here about some Britney Spears' etc. crap producer who makes all the music and hires guys to write the lyrics.
While I have heard some good indie music (but even then there have usually been one of those "big" names behind it doing the producing) I really don't think most of these "free" bands could attract the producer just with the music and talent.
Could one of those lawyers who previously answered to some Slashdotters' questions give a quick comment on this?
This comment came of course from the other Operating System Exporting Country, Finland :)
What's wrong with ZEN? Haven't encountered any problems yet, but I want to be prepared...
So, it's not only US investors who are insane but it applies globally.
In Finland the allocations in IPOs are much more fair than in the US: All public is usually allowed to participate and the "public investors" quota is more or less evenly allocated to all the participants. In this case, everyone got only 25 shares :)
Meanwhile, my cell phone and brains work ok, but memory loss and symptoms of radiation sickness are observed after alcohol consumption.