``Because I use X forwarding all the damn time. Mind you only on the LAN.''
I've used it on LANs. I've used it across my crummy IDSL link. And I've even used it on dial-up. Only when using very graphics intensive applications on dial-up did I find the performance awful (and, fortunately, I only needed to resort to dial-up during those rare times that the VPN access was down). Caveat: I'm not trying to play games via X11 connections which may be why it works well for me and so badly for the folks who are in favor of Wayland.
I find it amusing that some people are touting how wonderful the implementation of RDP is on Windows 2008 server. I need to access remote UNIX systems, not Windows servers. Those of us that use UNIX (almost exclusively or as exclusively as I can pull off) don't want something that is useful only for Win2008 Server systems. How will an RDP plug-in for Wayland accommodate UNIX/Linux desktops connecting to UNIX/Linux servers? Oh... I guess the people running UNIX servers will have to install a non-native layer to allow the Wayland folks access. That's just nuts.
(Personal opinion time: It seems there is a group of Linux developers who grew up developing for Windows and won't be happy until they've turned Linux into the Windows they would have liked to have seen. Too bad they never used UNIX/Linux as they were developing their programming skills.)
``hey, I don't actually have a warrant, but could you please give me XYZ information?''
Warrant, Schmarrant... they don't need a warrant. The Feds will merely issue another of the ``security'' letters that they crank out by the thousands. Your cloud provider can't say ``no'' and they can't even inform you that your data's been scanned.
``If they do not succeed, you do not do business with them.''
should probably read:
``If they do not succeed, you do not do business.''
Except for a trading group that I worked for back in the '90s, no business that I've worked for had developed (or maintained) an alternate means of running their business should their IT function fail. They were wholly dependent on having access to their IT infrastructure. (Note: wasn't there a recent/. article about the increasing stress levels experienced by IT folks? I think this is one of the reasons for that stress.) The way some companies are jumping into cloud services is scary. If they lose their cloud access they may as well send everyone home. SLA or no SLA, lose access to the data and the applications and some companies are going to fail. All an SLA will do is give the lawyers something to fight over while everyone else is cleaning out their desks.
I will agree that there are some of these outsourcing arrangements that really are as bulletproof as they claim to be and can withstand most types of outages. I strongly suspect, though, that a great many of them aren't. Yet the people who are actually running internal data centers are under constant bombardment by the marketing of the outsourcers who are schmoozing with the folks in the corner offices and come to believe that they just have to do this outsourcing thing, or move to the cloud, or adopt whatever shiny thing that was in that article in the in-flight magazine. The hell of it is that the people running the data centers that are targeted for moving to external providers are quite often the people most knowledgeable about how their applications operated. And they'll quite likely all be let go. After all, you don't need those propeller-heads who knew about such things as servers. But do you think the IT staff at the external data center provider knows -- or even cares that much about -- how your applications work together and will be able to help when you need to migrate or make extensive changes? I wouldn't count on it.
The posters who are saying that there will be failures of outsourced data centers or clouds are, I think, spot on. There will be. They may not be failure in the sense of the data center going down but there will be failures just the same. It'll just be someone else's fault when it hits the fan. That'll sure be comforting.
``Why should the USA's taxpayers be funding the weather data collection for the entire globe... ?''
I don't think that's quite the case. You can't make decent weather predictions by watching only the weather that's currently taking place over CONUS. You watch the entire planet so your weather models have data as to what's happening elsewhere and which affects the weather patterns that will appear over the US. The weather in other countries affects the US in other ways. Economically, for example. You're able to eat food that would normally be out-of-season because it can be shipped in from countries in the Southern hemisphere. Bad weather in, say, Chile, can affect the availability -- and, hence, the price -- of the stuff you buy at the supermarket.
I suspect that you're bugging out over foreign countries having access to that data. Get over it. It helps everyone and not just the subscribers to PlanetIQ or some other rentier class corporate CEO who's only interested in making a profit.
Don't forget the longer term costs involved in stationkeeping. These satellites aren't just lobbed into space and stay in their orbits without a ground-based infrastructure that monitors the satellites and makes sure they stay out the way of other birds up there. Want to bet that that gets short shrift when the shareholders want higher profits?
This idea smacks of the transparent plan by Rick Santorum some years ago where he tried to get a law passed to make it illegal for NOAA to issues weather alerts. (The Weather Channel, Inc was in Santorum's state and, likely, a big campaign contributor.)
If we were to follow the money, it would not surprise me one bit to find that the company testifying for this to happen has a few members of the House in their pocket. This is just another attempt by the "rentier class" to get their greedy little hands into everyone's wallet and have you pay for weather forecasts. They'd love nothing more than to have a tollbooth on everything.
The original poster said he wasn't afraid of hard work. I might suggest that he try Slackware. That was my first foray into Linux and found having to work via the command line extremely educational. (That was back when any X11 configuration was done "by hand" and there was always the threat of frying your monitor with a bad modeline while trying to optimize the setup.) I found I learned a heck of a lot more about UNIX when I started out running Coherent (no X Windows) than I did a few years later when I installed a commercial SVR4.2 UNIX and ran everything via X11 and xterms.
Most any Linux would be a good choice but, for a newbie who is desiring to learn as much possible, I would opt for performing the installation to boot into level "3" but include all the X11 goodies as well during the install. Start out doing as much as possible via the console interface and, occasionally, firing up the GUI with startx. Using Enlightenment is a good choice for a desktop environment as it still uses plain, editable ASCII files for all the configuration.
And... with two members of the FCC board leaving, will anything at all get done? If the FCC rules are anything like those of the NLRB, they may not have a quorum and would be prevented from making any decisions regarding regulation at all. I fully expect that any nominees to the FCC will be blocked by an anonymous senator making a simple phone call to the Senate leadership that will neatly prevent anyone's nomination going to the floor for a vote and leaving the FCC toothless. Nothing will get done.
``Then you kinda wish for a Microsoft platform--something that's going to be around for a couple decades and you don't have to continually be redeveloping expertise in it just to build a stupid gui window...''
Ha ha ha... How many programming models/interfaces has Microsoft foisted on their development community over the years? Please let me know because I've lost count. And none of them were around for a ``couple of decades''.
Right. When I recently installed an upgrade to my desktop, I included the latest (as of last Fall) version of Gnome to see what it was like. I couldn't change my desktop to something else fast enough.
Red Hat (which seems to be driving much of the Gnome craziness) and Ubuntu are going to wind up destroying the desktop Linux market in their hellbent drive toward Linux domination. And I'm getting more than a little fed up with it.
``The rest is just a bunch of dead code and restrictions getting in the way and slowing everything down.''
Maybe I'm just having one of those days, but... how does dead code slow everything down? Unless your system is so short of memory that it's engaged in heavy swapping where that "dead code" would have to get swapped out along with other processes, I have trouble seeing how supposed dead code is causing anything to be slow. Is it those restrictions that are slowing everything down? Exactly what restrictions are we talking about here?
Unless someone can clearly describe just how X11 is slowing everything down I tend to think that there's a lot of myths that are being promulgated about X11.
``I also know that RDP, Teamviewer, VNC etc. fill the same use case and are a lot simpler. THOSE are what EVERYONE uses. Only in-depth linux geeks even know network transparency exists, let alone use it.
Generalize much? Everyone? Really? I've used RDP over a slow Internet connection and I found it to be a painful experience. (Something on par with the time I was forced to use X11 over a 28.8 dial-up. I surely never want to go there again.) I guess everyone else that's using it are masochists. I may be atypical but I often have windows to a dozen or more systems open during the day running remote command lines but mostly other GUI-oriented applications. I frankly don't know if (or how) any of the options you listed would be able to support that. From my previous experience, I strongly doubt that RDP would be able to. X11 does it quite handily.
Q: How many other features of Linux and X11 should be dropped because folks like yourself either don't use them or you don't know that they're even there? What about, oh, I don't know, the cron and at services? They're typically disabled by default after a fresh install. Many may not even know they're there. So let's get rid of those, too. Linux is then simpler so it's gotta be good, right?
I think I had better keep those old Slackware CDs around. Some people are not going to be happy until they've managed to turn Linux into something as broken as Windows.
Plus... he may have hit the limit of how many legal thrillers/mysteries/whatever the public has a stomach for. It's not like he has no competition in the genre, either.
What I found most offensive about his comment is that he seems to think it should be OK for an author to write a single book and the author should have exclusive rights to the proceeds of the book's sales for N hundred years (whatever "N" is nowadays). It's gotten so bad that I expect that the next copyright law extension will grant those rights forever so that they can handed down from generation to generation like family heirlooms. THAT will be when we have no more authors; just the original authors' genetic leeches.
``I mean a bit tax could be a cent per gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email.'
.
.
.
' We all know an e-mail tax is infeasible...'
So is the email tax feasible or infeasible? (Damn... is this another `flammable' vs. `inflammable' thing again?)
If this guy wants to help the Postal Service so much, he ought to be working to repeal that completely asinine rule that the lame duck House Republicans put into place a few years back that makes the USPS completely fund -- over a ten year period -- their pension plan needs for the next 75 years. What other company funds their pensions (hell... how many companies even HAVE pensions any more) to cover employees that haven't even been born yet? I need to speak to my HS-age daughters and be sure and suggest to their future kids to work for the USPS... their pensions are going to be there waiting for them.
The Councilman's suggestion that the tax be used to build out the Internet is stupid as well. Republicans (for one) will never go for it. All politicians will think twice about giving their constituents access to high-speed sources of information about how their politicians are (mis)behaving in Washington. Besides, didn't we give the phone companies a little extra every months for a couple of decades or so with the idea that it was going to be used to build out the phone system to those hard-to-reach areas of the country? Look how well that worked. Who do you think would actually be doing the construction of this additional Internet access? Yep, those same phone companies that ripped us off the last time. (I would, maybe, agree to a small tax if the money was used by a Roosevelt-era styled work program operated by the Feds for the unemployed to do this build out. And, of course, if AT&T et al were loudly told to STFU when they inevitably complained about it.)
``if your gigabit connection is capped at something like 30GB, then you could only back up a quarter of your TB HD every month''
Seagate and Western Digital will just love internet providers like this. Think of all the external disk drives they're going to sell to handle backups. I doubt you'd need to spend more than $100 for an external USB dock and a 1TB or 2TB disk. Simple and it doesn't eat up your bandwidth limit.
The fact that nobody's buying TWC's highest priced access plans is obvious: their customers know they're a ripoff.
``...residential customers have thus far shown little interest in TWC's top internet tiers. `A very small fraction of our customer base' ultimately choose those options.''
I don't even have to go to TWC's website to know that the reason nobody's selecting that option is ``extortionate pricing'.
You wouldn't believe what I have to pay for a fracking third-party IDSL line because AT&T doesn't want to offer me a simple DSL line with a fixed IP address and no port filtering. To be fair to that 3rd-party: AT&T wanted to charge us $700/month PLUS per-minute usage charges for the same service and the 3rd-party provider is significantly less even though it's higher than most people are able to get for higher speeds. (It must cost AT&T a fortune to keep that port filtering turned off). I can only imagine what they'd want for a Gigabit connection.
``Our society needs more heroes who are scientists, researchers and engineers,'' Zuckerberg said. ``We need to celebrate and reward the people who cure diseases, expand our understanding of humanity and work to improve people's lives.''
So I guess what he left unsaid was:
``And we more recognition of you scientists to divert attention from the people like me and the crap like Facebook that we produce.''
If this CEO is smart, he'll curtail any future travel to France. The guy's an absolute dick and one hopes he has no intentions on entering the diplomatic corps.
In his letter he clearly has the attitude that ``I'm a CEO -- a master of the universe -- so I can say whatever the hell I want to say!'' If there's any justice in the world, he'd be pulled off to the side after arriving for his next trip to France for a little body cavity search (and no lubrication!).
I'm from Illinois and I'd rather have our crooked politicians than CEOs like this living in the state. At least we can vote asshat politicians out of office.
``In a letter addressed to French Industrial Renewal Minister, Maurice Taylor, chief executive of Titan writes (French article with English letter) that it would be stupid to buy any factory in France since workers don't really work full time.''
And I hope the Renewal Minister replied: ``Thank you for your `interesting' position. And we're glad our factories are not such an attractive buyout target. That way our citizens don't have to work for the likes of you.''
I doubt that most states have laws that even cover this. At one former employer, the policy was changed from "It's a new year, here's your N weeks of vacation" to "It's a new year now so at the end of this month you will earned 1/12th of your N weeks so don't even think about taking a week off until around June. So forget about that ski trip you were planning for January." The state had nothing to do with vacation policy.
``They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three.''
Hah. This guy's never spent much time away from his friends in their corner offices. That's not too far from what your average office worker in the U.S. has on their agenda each work day. Except that that time spent talking is spent in useless meetings listening to jerks like this CEO drone on about buzzword this and buzzword that. And, hell, guy... If we're not supposed to get an hour for lunch, then why do almost all companies start their work day at 8:00AM and finish at 5:00PM? That's supposed to include an hour for lunch. I guess what you really want is a nine hour work day disguised as an eight hour work day.
Every time I hear about the supposed horrible work conditions in France (from the point of view of idiots like this CEO) I start thinking it might not be the worst idea to brush up on my high school French and pull up the stakes. Are they running everything off of 50Hz power in France? I need to start looking for adapters or new power supplies for the computers.
Maybe if the Ctrl key was back on the left side of the keyboard next to the `A` (as God intended it to be) you wouldn't have that problem.
I knew Emacs key bindings before I actually ever used Emacs so my fingers have adapted. My first PC (Columbia XT-clone) shipped with the Perfect programs (PerfectWriter, PerfectCalc, etc.) and they all used Emacs key bindings. A few years later when I worked with a Tektronics 8086-based workstation that had Emacs, I was all set and have never looked back.
My beef with `vi' is that there are so many implementations of it. On some flavors of UNIX, `vi' allows the cursor keys to be used for moving around in the text while you are in input mode while on others you need to drop out of input mode to move to another line. (I can't count how many times I've farked up a file because of that difference and had to bail out with `q!' to ensure I didn't leave any bizarre characters in the file.) At least `ed' is consistent across different vendors' UNIXes and if I find that Emacs is not available, I can always depend on good 'ol `ed', stone axe that it is, especially in single user mode when `vi' might not be available. Back in my DOS days, the `ed' ripoff 'edlin' was a must on any emergency tools floppy -- it didn't require much space on your 360KB diskette -- so when I migrated over to UNIX, I was at right at home.
Geez... have you read many clearly written business communications lately? I haven't. It seems that as soon as people receive their degree and enter the world of business, their writing skills are the first to go.
Another thing... writing a blog for college credit? Heck, short of digging a trench and tossing the bar into it, I don't see how the bar could be lowered any farther.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used it on LANs. I've used it across my crummy IDSL link. And I've even used it on dial-up. Only when using very graphics intensive applications on dial-up did I find the performance awful (and, fortunately, I only needed to resort to dial-up during those rare times that the VPN access was down). Caveat: I'm not trying to play games via X11 connections which may be why it works well for me and so badly for the folks who are in favor of Wayland.
I find it amusing that some people are touting how wonderful the implementation of RDP is on Windows 2008 server. I need to access remote UNIX systems, not Windows servers. Those of us that use UNIX (almost exclusively or as exclusively as I can pull off) don't want something that is useful only for Win2008 Server systems. How will an RDP plug-in for Wayland accommodate UNIX/Linux desktops connecting to UNIX/Linux servers? Oh... I guess the people running UNIX servers will have to install a non-native layer to allow the Wayland folks access. That's just nuts.
(Personal opinion time: It seems there is a group of Linux developers who grew up developing for Windows and won't be happy until they've turned Linux into the Windows they would have liked to have seen. Too bad they never used UNIX/Linux as they were developing their programming skills.)
Warrant, Schmarrant... they don't need a warrant. The Feds will merely issue another of the ``security'' letters that they crank out by the thousands. Your cloud provider can't say ``no'' and they can't even inform you that your data's been scanned.
I think
should probably read:
Except for a trading group that I worked for back in the '90s, no business that I've worked for had developed (or maintained) an alternate means of running their business should their IT function fail. They were wholly dependent on having access to their IT infrastructure. (Note: wasn't there a recent /. article about the increasing stress levels experienced by IT folks? I think this is one of the reasons for that stress.) The way some companies are jumping into cloud services is scary. If they lose their cloud access they may as well send everyone home. SLA or no SLA, lose access to the data and the applications and some companies are going to fail. All an SLA will do is give the lawyers something to fight over while everyone else is cleaning out their desks.
I will agree that there are some of these outsourcing arrangements that really are as bulletproof as they claim to be and can withstand most types of outages. I strongly suspect, though, that a great many of them aren't. Yet the people who are actually running internal data centers are under constant bombardment by the marketing of the outsourcers who are schmoozing with the folks in the corner offices and come to believe that they just have to do this outsourcing thing, or move to the cloud, or adopt whatever shiny thing that was in that article in the in-flight magazine. The hell of it is that the people running the data centers that are targeted for moving to external providers are quite often the people most knowledgeable about how their applications operated. And they'll quite likely all be let go. After all, you don't need those propeller-heads who knew about such things as servers. But do you think the IT staff at the external data center provider knows -- or even cares that much about -- how your applications work together and will be able to help when you need to migrate or make extensive changes? I wouldn't count on it.
The posters who are saying that there will be failures of outsourced data centers or clouds are, I think, spot on. There will be. They may not be failure in the sense of the data center going down but there will be failures just the same. It'll just be someone else's fault when it hits the fan. That'll sure be comforting.
Just my $0.02...
W
I don't think that's quite the case. You can't make decent weather predictions by watching only the weather that's currently taking place over CONUS. You watch the entire planet so your weather models have data as to what's happening elsewhere and which affects the weather patterns that will appear over the US. The weather in other countries affects the US in other ways. Economically, for example. You're able to eat food that would normally be out-of-season because it can be shipped in from countries in the Southern hemisphere. Bad weather in, say, Chile, can affect the availability -- and, hence, the price -- of the stuff you buy at the supermarket.
I suspect that you're bugging out over foreign countries having access to that data. Get over it. It helps everyone and not just the subscribers to PlanetIQ or some other rentier class corporate CEO who's only interested in making a profit.
I find your .sig amusing only because your post was in reply to one whose author doesn't know the difference between "loose" and "lose".
Don't forget the longer term costs involved in stationkeeping. These satellites aren't just lobbed into space and stay in their orbits without a ground-based infrastructure that monitors the satellites and makes sure they stay out the way of other birds up there. Want to bet that that gets short shrift when the shareholders want higher profits?
This idea smacks of the transparent plan by Rick Santorum some years ago where he tried to get a law passed to make it illegal for NOAA to issues weather alerts. (The Weather Channel, Inc was in Santorum's state and, likely, a big campaign contributor.)
If we were to follow the money, it would not surprise me one bit to find that the company testifying for this to happen has a few members of the House in their pocket. This is just another attempt by the "rentier class" to get their greedy little hands into everyone's wallet and have you pay for weather forecasts. They'd love nothing more than to have a tollbooth on everything.
The original poster said he wasn't afraid of hard work. I might suggest that he try Slackware. That was my first foray into Linux and found having to work via the command line extremely educational. (That was back when any X11 configuration was done "by hand" and there was always the threat of frying your monitor with a bad modeline while trying to optimize the setup.) I found I learned a heck of a lot more about UNIX when I started out running Coherent (no X Windows) than I did a few years later when I installed a commercial SVR4.2 UNIX and ran everything via X11 and xterms.
Most any Linux would be a good choice but, for a newbie who is desiring to learn as much possible, I would opt for performing the installation to boot into level "3" but include all the X11 goodies as well during the install. Start out doing as much as possible via the console interface and, occasionally, firing up the GUI with startx. Using Enlightenment is a good choice for a desktop environment as it still uses plain, editable ASCII files for all the configuration.
And... with two members of the FCC board leaving, will anything at all get done? If the FCC rules are anything like those of the NLRB, they may not have a quorum and would be prevented from making any decisions regarding regulation at all. I fully expect that any nominees to the FCC will be blocked by an anonymous senator making a simple phone call to the Senate leadership that will neatly prevent anyone's nomination going to the floor for a vote and leaving the FCC toothless. Nothing will get done.
Ha ha ha... How many programming models/interfaces has Microsoft foisted on their development community over the years? Please let me know because I've lost count. And none of them were around for a ``couple of decades''.
Right. When I recently installed an upgrade to my desktop, I included the latest (as of last Fall) version of Gnome to see what it was like. I couldn't change my desktop to something else fast enough.
Red Hat (which seems to be driving much of the Gnome craziness) and Ubuntu are going to wind up destroying the desktop Linux market in their hellbent drive toward Linux domination. And I'm getting more than a little fed up with it.
Maybe I'm just having one of those days, but... how does dead code slow everything down? Unless your system is so short of memory that it's engaged in heavy swapping where that "dead code" would have to get swapped out along with other processes, I have trouble seeing how supposed dead code is causing anything to be slow. Is it those restrictions that are slowing everything down? Exactly what restrictions are we talking about here?
Unless someone can clearly describe just how X11 is slowing everything down I tend to think that there's a lot of myths that are being promulgated about X11.
Generalize much? Everyone? Really? I've used RDP over a slow Internet connection and I found it to be a painful experience. (Something on par with the time I was forced to use X11 over a 28.8 dial-up. I surely never want to go there again.) I guess everyone else that's using it are masochists. I may be atypical but I often have windows to a dozen or more systems open during the day running remote command lines but mostly other GUI-oriented applications. I frankly don't know if (or how) any of the options you listed would be able to support that. From my previous experience, I strongly doubt that RDP would be able to. X11 does it quite handily.
Q: How many other features of Linux and X11 should be dropped because folks like yourself either don't use them or you don't know that they're even there? What about, oh, I don't know, the cron and at services? They're typically disabled by default after a fresh install. Many may not even know they're there. So let's get rid of those, too. Linux is then simpler so it's gotta be good, right?
I think I had better keep those old Slackware CDs around. Some people are not going to be happy until they've managed to turn Linux into something as broken as Windows.
Plus... he may have hit the limit of how many legal thrillers/mysteries/whatever the public has a stomach for. It's not like he has no competition in the genre, either.
What I found most offensive about his comment is that he seems to think it should be OK for an author to write a single book and the author should have exclusive rights to the proceeds of the book's sales for N hundred years (whatever "N" is nowadays). It's gotten so bad that I expect that the next copyright law extension will grant those rights forever so that they can handed down from generation to generation like family heirlooms. THAT will be when we have no more authors; just the original authors' genetic leeches.
So is the email tax feasible or infeasible? (Damn... is this another `flammable' vs. `inflammable' thing again?)
If this guy wants to help the Postal Service so much, he ought to be working to repeal that completely asinine rule that the lame duck House Republicans put into place a few years back that makes the USPS completely fund -- over a ten year period -- their pension plan needs for the next 75 years. What other company funds their pensions (hell... how many companies even HAVE pensions any more) to cover employees that haven't even been born yet? I need to speak to my HS-age daughters and be sure and suggest to their future kids to work for the USPS... their pensions are going to be there waiting for them.
The Councilman's suggestion that the tax be used to build out the Internet is stupid as well. Republicans (for one) will never go for it. All politicians will think twice about giving their constituents access to high-speed sources of information about how their politicians are (mis)behaving in Washington. Besides, didn't we give the phone companies a little extra every months for a couple of decades or so with the idea that it was going to be used to build out the phone system to those hard-to-reach areas of the country? Look how well that worked. Who do you think would actually be doing the construction of this additional Internet access? Yep, those same phone companies that ripped us off the last time. (I would, maybe, agree to a small tax if the money was used by a Roosevelt-era styled work program operated by the Feds for the unemployed to do this build out. And, of course, if AT&T et al were loudly told to STFU when they inevitably complained about it.)
... after somebody allowed Dennis Rodman to go to North Korea.
Seagate and Western Digital will just love internet providers like this. Think of all the external disk drives they're going to sell to handle backups. I doubt you'd need to spend more than $100 for an external USB dock and a 1TB or 2TB disk. Simple and it doesn't eat up your bandwidth limit.
The fact that nobody's buying TWC's highest priced access plans is obvious: their customers know they're a ripoff.
I don't even have to go to TWC's website to know that the reason nobody's selecting that option is ``extortionate pricing'.
You wouldn't believe what I have to pay for a fracking third-party IDSL line because AT&T doesn't want to offer me a simple DSL line with a fixed IP address and no port filtering. To be fair to that 3rd-party: AT&T wanted to charge us $700/month PLUS per-minute usage charges for the same service and the 3rd-party provider is significantly less even though it's higher than most people are able to get for higher speeds. (It must cost AT&T a fortune to keep that port filtering turned off). I can only imagine what they'd want for a Gigabit connection.
So I guess what he left unsaid was:
If this CEO is smart, he'll curtail any future travel to France. The guy's an absolute dick and one hopes he has no intentions on entering the diplomatic corps.
In his letter he clearly has the attitude that ``I'm a CEO -- a master of the universe -- so I can say whatever the hell I want to say!'' If there's any justice in the world, he'd be pulled off to the side after arriving for his next trip to France for a little body cavity search (and no lubrication!).
I'm from Illinois and I'd rather have our crooked politicians than CEOs like this living in the state. At least we can vote asshat politicians out of office.
And I hope the Renewal Minister replied: ``Thank you for your `interesting' position. And we're glad our factories are not such an attractive buyout target. That way our citizens don't have to work for the likes of you.''
I doubt that most states have laws that even cover this. At one former employer, the policy was changed from "It's a new year, here's your N weeks of vacation" to "It's a new year now so at the end of this month you will earned 1/12th of your N weeks so don't even think about taking a week off until around June. So forget about that ski trip you were planning for January." The state had nothing to do with vacation policy.
Hah. This guy's never spent much time away from his friends in their corner offices. That's not too far from what your average office worker in the U.S. has on their agenda each work day. Except that that time spent talking is spent in useless meetings listening to jerks like this CEO drone on about buzzword this and buzzword that. And, hell, guy... If we're not supposed to get an hour for lunch, then why do almost all companies start their work day at 8:00AM and finish at 5:00PM? That's supposed to include an hour for lunch. I guess what you really want is a nine hour work day disguised as an eight hour work day.
Every time I hear about the supposed horrible work conditions in France (from the point of view of idiots like this CEO) I start thinking it might not be the worst idea to brush up on my high school French and pull up the stakes. Are they running everything off of 50Hz power in France? I need to start looking for adapters or new power supplies for the computers.
Maybe if the Ctrl key was back on the left side of the keyboard next to the `A` (as God intended it to be) you wouldn't have that problem.
I knew Emacs key bindings before I actually ever used Emacs so my fingers have adapted. My first PC (Columbia XT-clone) shipped with the Perfect programs (PerfectWriter, PerfectCalc, etc.) and they all used Emacs key bindings. A few years later when I worked with a Tektronics 8086-based workstation that had Emacs, I was all set and have never looked back.
My beef with `vi' is that there are so many implementations of it. On some flavors of UNIX, `vi' allows the cursor keys to be used for moving around in the text while you are in input mode while on others you need to drop out of input mode to move to another line. (I can't count how many times I've farked up a file because of that difference and had to bail out with `q!' to ensure I didn't leave any bizarre characters in the file.) At least `ed' is consistent across different vendors' UNIXes and if I find that Emacs is not available, I can always depend on good 'ol `ed', stone axe that it is, especially in single user mode when `vi' might not be available. Back in my DOS days, the `ed' ripoff 'edlin' was a must on any emergency tools floppy -- it didn't require much space on your 360KB diskette -- so when I migrated over to UNIX, I was at right at home.
Geez... have you read many clearly written business communications lately? I haven't. It seems that as soon as people receive their degree and enter the world of business, their writing skills are the first to go.
Another thing... writing a blog for college credit? Heck, short of digging a trench and tossing the bar into it, I don't see how the bar could be lowered any farther.
Agreed. And, yet, politicians still play it with the idea that they won't be suckers. This time.