I hope I don't live in a country where the government operates like that.
You do. And no, it doesn't matter where you live.
Government information should be open and transparent. Putting government documents on the web is a good idea on many levels as it encourages transparency and accountability.
See, it's that accountability thing that's the problem. It makes it difficult for your government officials to to make extra cash giving their rich and powerful friends special treatment.
Obviously there would have to be some exceptions, like security and defence.
So then they would just come up with some excuse, no matter how flimsy, for why giving you that information would be a "national security risk".
Very good. Now tell me how many times you used the command prompt and how many configuration files did you vi when you were setting up your chosen OS?
None. Not one time. The only thing I "need" to use the command line for is killing WOW when it crashes (you know, instead of hitting the reset button like when that happens in Windows).
Honestly, I've consistently found Linux installs to be smoother, faster, and much less complex than Windows installs since the Suse 7 days. It's been a few years since I last had to resort to command line for anything during a Linux install.
Your examples are kind of unfortunate - a quick Google shows up an applet for calculating an alpha hull that dates from 1997. Much of the literature is even older than that.
So what? Just because people had thought about it doesn't mean they figured out how to do it. Just because someone figured out a way to do it doesn't mean that their method is good, efficient, or even numerically stable. In other words: even though an applet existed in 1997, there is almost certainly vast room for improvement in that area.
Take matrix transforms, for example. We've known how to multiply two matrices together for centuries, and yet even today there is significant time, effort, and money being put into finding better ways to do it. Why? Well, for example, all the digital effects and transitions you see in movies and television are created, at a basic level, by matrix transforms. From the hardware's point of view, a video stream is made up of a bunch of relatively large matrices that have to be transformed relatively fast. Standard matrix multiplication is O(n^3). Think of a sports broadcast: every element on the screen, the score, animated logos, etc, each required at least one matrix transform to get on your TV. Consequently, even a seemingly modest gain like bringing it down to O(n^2.38) represents a huge difference in terms of what they're able to put on your screen.
The poster acknowledges that there has been a lot of polishing, and I'd add that there have been some things that were conceived of but were not practical until recently, but implementation is very much still working on catching up to what mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists were dreaming up ten, twenty, thirty and more years ago. Which is not to say that the field isn't advancing quickly, or that those people aren't dreaming up stuff for applied CS to work on in the next twenty years.
Plans for a staged rocket were published in 1650, small animals were being launched into space as early as 1806, and Jules Verne published "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1865. Hell, a Chinese nobleman supposedly tried to get to the moon by strapping rockets to his chair way back when Europe was just starting to claw itself out of the dark ages. And yet, Sputnik still represented a huge amount of invention and innovation.
Theoretical computer scientists who can't produce working code aren't worth much. CS is an applied science, and proof by demonstration is the only kind that matters. The current crop of mathematicians, however, are generally producing working code in Mathematica, MATLAB, and even C++. Their work may not be showing up in the next version of Excel, but to say that applied CS is behind the curve displays a gross lack of understanding on your part.
Most would consider this a good thing. Ok, something similar would be nice, but Access itself is an abomination.
I have to say, the design interface of the current version of Access is pretty nice. Now, I haven't tried to use it for any serious work, I was just helping a friend get through a community college "teach business majors how to use computers" class. I found the interface very discoverable, and it fit well with the concepts i was taught in the upper division database design class I had taken a year earlier (and barely remembered).
For all I know, it's still a god-awful mess under the hood, but the interface is nice, and something we should maybe look into borrowing from for a design interface for MySQL or Postgres.
Mac OS X is... just so well engineered from a usability standpoint that most users will never even know any of that stuff exists behind the well-polished GUI.
No, they assume that stuff doesn't exist because the Apple UI engineers have buried it so deeply under the layers of polish that they can't find it. Sorry, that's not "usability" in my book.
I have to agree with the parent: Ubuntu (Kubuntu in my case) is far more usable. Yes, part of that is because it's what I'm most familiar with, but guess what? I'm most familiar with it because it's what I prefer to use, and it's what I prefer to use because it's what I found most usable, and I'd spent plenty of hours on both Windows and Mac before I even heard of Linux.
of course MS will be cheaper at first because you don't have to cope with defeating the vendor lock-in if you stay with Windows
I'm not sure I buy that, or maybe I should say that I don't see how version lock-in is preferable. Every Windows version migration I've done or been involved with required at least one piece of hardware be replaced due to driver incompatibilities. I'm not blaming Microsoft, it's the hardware vendors that aren't updating their drivers. However, it's pretty much an inherent problem in the closed source model. Once something's supported in Linux, it tends to stay supported.
Pray, tell us, what would have been your alternative to our current economic predicament?
Gee, I don't know, maybe put some kind of conditions or obligations on the money, with some oversight to make sure that it wasn't treated like a free gift to the executive board? Because, as far as I can tell, TARP has done precisely jack shit as far as fixing the credit crisis.
If it were entirely up to me, whatever money was provided would be to directly address the issue. For example, we could have encouraged lenders to renegotiate/refinance problem loans by offering to cover some percentage of the write-off. Off the top of my head, let's just say 50-70%, depending on the circumstances. Obviously, we don't want to cover too much of it, as that would just be inviting fraud, and there needs to be some consequences for the people who made the decisions that created the problem. I think this would allow the lenders to reduce their risk to (hopefully) sane levels while simultaneously allowing more people to remain homeowners, which is generally beneficial because it promotes neighborhood stability.
To be honest though, I really don't have a problem with the "let them fail" solution. I agree that in the short term it would have been hard, but in the long term I believe we would end up with a much stronger economy because of it. The are serious problems with an allegedly capitalist economy where failure is rewarded, which is essentially what TARP has done. There are plenty of smaller banks and insurers in America that didn't participate in the shenanigans who could have stepped up to fill the void had the big ones fallen, so I really don't buy the claims that it would have been totally devastating to let that happen.
Nice set of graphics that tell us absolutely nothing. Where does this data come from? Sales of new hardware? A survey? If it was a survey, was it on some website, or was it a properly conducted survey of a representative sample of PC owners? How was the sample selected? What is the confidence interval?
Your "facts" are no more reliable than the GP's opinion.
Based on my own experience, I have to agree with the GP: the vast majority of machines currently IN USE probably do have 1GB or less. If all you're claiming is that the vast majority of systems currently being sold have more than 1GB, than I absolutely agree, but that is not even close to being the same thing.
This separation between user/developer has emerged from the commercial history of software development.
You couldn't possibly be more wrong.
The separation between users and developers has existed since Turing first conceived of Colossus, long before the advent of commercial software development, and in fact commercially developed software has made incredible strides in narrowing that divide.
The "golden age" of your imagination where there was no separation were the days when the only "users" were the mathematicians and engineers who designed them. Even this is not exactly correct, since those mathematicians and engineers were working for someone else, and we could just as easily call them the "user interface", with the user being their employer (and I'm not about to try making any claims about user friendliness here).
The divide exists because computers are stupid, and need to be given extremely precise instructions. The vast majority of people in this world really don't want to take the time to learn how to do that. We call them "users". The very few who do take the time are called "developers". You can fiddle around with new languages and development models all you want, but at the end of the day, unless the "developer" knows how to write code, they aren't going to get what they were looking for.
And isn't this exactly what the whole Object-Oriented and Component Programming revolution way back in the 80s was supposed to be about? Reusable code? Why didn't it happen?
For the same reason one-size-fits-all clothing didn't happen: because it just doesn't work.
We have found vast amounts of code that are reusable, of course. We make them available in these things called "shared libraries"...
That certainly is a consideration, but remember that the quality of driver is likely substantially diminished... fatigue, possible intoxication, etc.
Bingo!
This sounds like a joke, but bright lights actually attract drunks. The reason is that it attracts their eyes, and they may not have the motor control to not go in the direction they're looking.
That said though, I totally agree with Sparr0's point. Here in California, state unions contracts are a huge part of the budget problem, and something really needs to be done about it.
"My response would go something like, "I'm pretty sure it's illegal for you to ask me this, so I'm gonna just leave this section blank.""
And they'll say "NEXT!"
And I'll say "LAWSUIT!"
As pointed out elsewhere, the information they're asking for will almost certainly give them access to information it is illegal for them to ask about, such as sexual orientation, religious preference, marital status, etc. It would be REALLY stupid for them to not hire me because I refused to give them information they're not allowed to ask for.
Additionally, if they are actually asking for passwords, that's a violation of the TOS of just about every website out there; something people have actually been prosecuted for. It is illegal for them to fire me or refuse to hire me because I refuse to do something illegal.
Actually, I'm tempted to apply, this could be a nice way to pay for grad school.
I was talking about these on-line communities(like Wikipedia) coming together voluntarily to work towards a common goal.
This isn't communism.
Wrong.
This is communism as defined by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, sometimes referred to today as "anarcho-socialism". This form of communism does exist in meatspace as well, albeit generally on a small scale. Look at cooperatives and (the suspiciously named) communes.
Communism was built around planned economies with central figures at the government level deciding what projects were important and what weren't.
Yes, this is more typical of the structure we see in governments that like to call themselves communist, but is more accurately known as Leninism or Stalinism, depending on the level of authoritarianism involved.
well, to be honest, I think if awarding legal costs to the winner were automatic in the US, it would likely end up being yet another legal bludgeon for the wealth/corporations to use against the rest of us. it's hard to say for certain of course, that's just how things generally seem to turn out. God help us if any of the various attempts at torte reform are ever successful.
Also, given that California is currently hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, I don't think you'd want us...
I think it's a matter of (a) asking for legal fees, and (b) being awarded them in the decision. I don't think it has anything to do with it being small claims or not.
That said, there are no lawyers allowed in small claims court (in CA), and so your legal fees damages are limited to filing fees (around $45 iirc).
There is an unfortunate (to me) segment of the environmental movement that would like nothing more than the massive genocide of most of humanity (about 99% of us or more) and the economic suppression of the remaining survivors into a feudal society lead by a few enlightened individuals and the rest of humanity living like 10th Century European peasants.
Is there really such a movement? I keep hearing this claim from a variety of conservative sources, yet I see no evidence of any such group. I have no doubt that there is at least one group that has such beliefs, but I challenge you to show me one that has enough influence to give credible cause for concern.
FWIW, I personally know some extreme environmentalists, and I cannot with any honesty "admit" that they have such a goal.
The entire mortgage meltdown and banking crisis came to a front because energy costs went sky high and people had to make decisions over driving to work or paying the mortgage.
I'm on board with the rest of what you said, but this is simply wrong. The spike in energy costs was inconveniently timed, but the vast majority of foreclosures would have happened without it.
The real problem was the lending practices. There were a variety of loan types that were basically designed to fail, but the worst were the ones that came with a ridiculously low interest rate for the first 2-5 years. People bought houses they could barely afford at those rates, assuming that when the real interest rate kicked in they could refinance and enjoy the low rate for a few more years. However, when that time came, they couldn't refinance for a variety of reasons, including that their home was often then worth less than what they owed. Consequently, the monthly payment they already could only barely afford shot up, in many cases doubling or more.
I develop "embeddded" systems for the broadcast industry. Most every piece of broadcast equipment in a satellite truck and cable head end system runs some flavor of glibc in Linux.
I very much doubt that's the case.
I worked at Grass Valley until late 2004, and to my knowledge they had no products running Linux, and no plans to use it anywhere. There were a few products we inherited when Thomson bought Philips broadcast division that ran some flavor of *nix (Neutrino on Automation, and I don't recall what was on Spirit since I only had to deal with firmware and never actually saw a full system). Everything else used some proprietary embedded OS like VxWorks for the actual work, plus some NT variant for UI on the bigger systems like Profile and Kalypso.
I helped a friend do a presentation for SEMPTE recommending they consider Linux, and nobody seemed to really be into the idea (they had some strange idea that they could sue MS if Windows didn't function properly).
I'm sure Linux has crept into some products, but I'm fairly certain that claiming even a significant percentage of equipment in any broadcast facility runs Linux is a gross exaggeration.
That's totally irrelevant. In any area it's easy to fire teachers in their first year or two, or who fail to get the necessary certifications. Those are not the teachers we're talking about here.
In most schools teachers get tenure after 3-5 years, and that is when it becomes nearly impossible to fire them.
My own experience has been that new teachers are generally pretty good, though they may lack experience. That's understandable; it takes a while to get the hang of any new job. The really bad teachers I've seen have been way past tenure, and were at the point of just clocking time until retirement. Maybe they were good at one time and got burnt out, or maybe they were never more than just good enough to not get fired, I don't know. What I do know is that basically the only way they'll get fired is if they get caught having sex with a minor.
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I hope I don't live in a country where the government operates like that.
You do. And no, it doesn't matter where you live.
Government information should be open and transparent. Putting government documents on the web is a good idea on many levels as it encourages transparency and accountability.
See, it's that accountability thing that's the problem. It makes it difficult for your government officials to to make extra cash giving their rich and powerful friends special treatment.
Obviously there would have to be some exceptions, like security and defence.
So then they would just come up with some excuse, no matter how flimsy, for why giving you that information would be a "national security risk".
Add Lexmark to that list, and I think you'd have a winner
Very good. Now tell me how many times you used the command prompt and how many configuration files did you vi when you were setting up your chosen OS?
None. Not one time. The only thing I "need" to use the command line for is killing WOW when it crashes (you know, instead of hitting the reset button like when that happens in Windows).
Honestly, I've consistently found Linux installs to be smoother, faster, and much less complex than Windows installs since the Suse 7 days. It's been a few years since I last had to resort to command line for anything during a Linux install.
Your examples are kind of unfortunate - a quick Google shows up an applet for calculating an alpha hull that dates from 1997. Much of the literature is even older than that.
So what? Just because people had thought about it doesn't mean they figured out how to do it. Just because someone figured out a way to do it doesn't mean that their method is good, efficient, or even numerically stable. In other words: even though an applet existed in 1997, there is almost certainly vast room for improvement in that area.
Take matrix transforms, for example. We've known how to multiply two matrices together for centuries, and yet even today there is significant time, effort, and money being put into finding better ways to do it. Why? Well, for example, all the digital effects and transitions you see in movies and television are created, at a basic level, by matrix transforms. From the hardware's point of view, a video stream is made up of a bunch of relatively large matrices that have to be transformed relatively fast. Standard matrix multiplication is O(n^3). Think of a sports broadcast: every element on the screen, the score, animated logos, etc, each required at least one matrix transform to get on your TV. Consequently, even a seemingly modest gain like bringing it down to O(n^2.38) represents a huge difference in terms of what they're able to put on your screen.
The poster acknowledges that there has been a lot of polishing, and I'd add that there have been some things that were conceived of but were not practical until recently, but implementation is very much still working on catching up to what mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists were dreaming up ten, twenty, thirty and more years ago. Which is not to say that the field isn't advancing quickly, or that those people aren't dreaming up stuff for applied CS to work on in the next twenty years.
Plans for a staged rocket were published in 1650, small animals were being launched into space as early as 1806, and Jules Verne published "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1865. Hell, a Chinese nobleman supposedly tried to get to the moon by strapping rockets to his chair way back when Europe was just starting to claw itself out of the dark ages. And yet, Sputnik still represented a huge amount of invention and innovation.
Theoretical computer scientists who can't produce working code aren't worth much. CS is an applied science, and proof by demonstration is the only kind that matters. The current crop of mathematicians, however, are generally producing working code in Mathematica, MATLAB, and even C++. Their work may not be showing up in the next version of Excel, but to say that applied CS is behind the curve displays a gross lack of understanding on your part.
Amen, brother! Go tell it on the mountain!
Seriously, I've been trying to figure out how to voice my reaction to that for the last hour, but you've said it perfectly.
Most would consider this a good thing. Ok, something similar would be nice, but Access itself is an abomination.
I have to say, the design interface of the current version of Access is pretty nice. Now, I haven't tried to use it for any serious work, I was just helping a friend get through a community college "teach business majors how to use computers" class. I found the interface very discoverable, and it fit well with the concepts i was taught in the upper division database design class I had taken a year earlier (and barely remembered).
For all I know, it's still a god-awful mess under the hood, but the interface is nice, and something we should maybe look into borrowing from for a design interface for MySQL or Postgres.
Mac OS X is ... just so well engineered from a usability standpoint that most users will never even know any of that stuff exists behind the well-polished GUI.
No, they assume that stuff doesn't exist because the Apple UI engineers have buried it so deeply under the layers of polish that they can't find it. Sorry, that's not "usability" in my book.
I have to agree with the parent: Ubuntu (Kubuntu in my case) is far more usable. Yes, part of that is because it's what I'm most familiar with, but guess what? I'm most familiar with it because it's what I prefer to use, and it's what I prefer to use because it's what I found most usable, and I'd spent plenty of hours on both Windows and Mac before I even heard of Linux.
of course MS will be cheaper at first because you don't have to cope with defeating the vendor lock-in if you stay with Windows
I'm not sure I buy that, or maybe I should say that I don't see how version lock-in is preferable. Every Windows version migration I've done or been involved with required at least one piece of hardware be replaced due to driver incompatibilities. I'm not blaming Microsoft, it's the hardware vendors that aren't updating their drivers. However, it's pretty much an inherent problem in the closed source model. Once something's supported in Linux, it tends to stay supported.
Pray, tell us, what would have been your alternative to our current economic predicament?
Gee, I don't know, maybe put some kind of conditions or obligations on the money, with some oversight to make sure that it wasn't treated like a free gift to the executive board? Because, as far as I can tell, TARP has done precisely jack shit as far as fixing the credit crisis.
If it were entirely up to me, whatever money was provided would be to directly address the issue. For example, we could have encouraged lenders to renegotiate/refinance problem loans by offering to cover some percentage of the write-off. Off the top of my head, let's just say 50-70%, depending on the circumstances. Obviously, we don't want to cover too much of it, as that would just be inviting fraud, and there needs to be some consequences for the people who made the decisions that created the problem. I think this would allow the lenders to reduce their risk to (hopefully) sane levels while simultaneously allowing more people to remain homeowners, which is generally beneficial because it promotes neighborhood stability.
To be honest though, I really don't have a problem with the "let them fail" solution. I agree that in the short term it would have been hard, but in the long term I believe we would end up with a much stronger economy because of it. The are serious problems with an allegedly capitalist economy where failure is rewarded, which is essentially what TARP has done. There are plenty of smaller banks and insurers in America that didn't participate in the shenanigans who could have stepped up to fill the void had the big ones fallen, so I really don't buy the claims that it would have been totally devastating to let that happen.
I haven't seen any Commodore PETs or Apple IIcs anywhere lately, and yet I, and everyone I grew up with, seem to be getting along just fine.
If I had mod points I'd mod everyone who spouts this ridiculous meme as a troll, because really, that's all it is.
OMG, they might actually have to learn something they don't already know?!?!?!?
Oh wait, I thought that was what school was for...
"Aloha" also means goodbye
Nice set of graphics that tell us absolutely nothing. Where does this data come from? Sales of new hardware? A survey? If it was a survey, was it on some website, or was it a properly conducted survey of a representative sample of PC owners? How was the sample selected? What is the confidence interval?
Your "facts" are no more reliable than the GP's opinion.
Based on my own experience, I have to agree with the GP: the vast majority of machines currently IN USE probably do have 1GB or less. If all you're claiming is that the vast majority of systems currently being sold have more than 1GB, than I absolutely agree, but that is not even close to being the same thing.
This separation between user/developer has emerged from the commercial history of software development.
You couldn't possibly be more wrong.
The separation between users and developers has existed since Turing first conceived of Colossus, long before the advent of commercial software development, and in fact commercially developed software has made incredible strides in narrowing that divide.
The "golden age" of your imagination where there was no separation were the days when the only "users" were the mathematicians and engineers who designed them. Even this is not exactly correct, since those mathematicians and engineers were working for someone else, and we could just as easily call them the "user interface", with the user being their employer (and I'm not about to try making any claims about user friendliness here).
The divide exists because computers are stupid, and need to be given extremely precise instructions. The vast majority of people in this world really don't want to take the time to learn how to do that. We call them "users". The very few who do take the time are called "developers". You can fiddle around with new languages and development models all you want, but at the end of the day, unless the "developer" knows how to write code, they aren't going to get what they were looking for.
And isn't this exactly what the whole Object-Oriented and Component Programming revolution way back in the 80s was supposed to be about? Reusable code? Why didn't it happen?
For the same reason one-size-fits-all clothing didn't happen: because it just doesn't work.
We have found vast amounts of code that are reusable, of course. We make them available in these things called "shared libraries"...
That certainly is a consideration, but remember that the quality of driver is likely substantially diminished ... fatigue, possible intoxication, etc.
Bingo!
This sounds like a joke, but bright lights actually attract drunks. The reason is that it attracts their eyes, and they may not have the motor control to not go in the direction they're looking.
That said though, I totally agree with Sparr0's point. Here in California, state unions contracts are a huge part of the budget problem, and something really needs to be done about it.
"My response would go something like, "I'm pretty sure it's illegal for you to ask me this, so I'm gonna just leave this section blank.""
And they'll say "NEXT!"
And I'll say "LAWSUIT!"
As pointed out elsewhere, the information they're asking for will almost certainly give them access to information it is illegal for them to ask about, such as sexual orientation, religious preference, marital status, etc. It would be REALLY stupid for them to not hire me because I refused to give them information they're not allowed to ask for.
Additionally, if they are actually asking for passwords, that's a violation of the TOS of just about every website out there; something people have actually been prosecuted for. It is illegal for them to fire me or refuse to hire me because I refuse to do something illegal.
Actually, I'm tempted to apply, this could be a nice way to pay for grad school.
I was talking about these on-line communities(like Wikipedia) coming together voluntarily to work towards a common goal.
This isn't communism.
Wrong.
This is communism as defined by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, sometimes referred to today as "anarcho-socialism". This form of communism does exist in meatspace as well, albeit generally on a small scale. Look at cooperatives and (the suspiciously named) communes.
Communism was built around planned economies with central figures at the government level deciding what projects were important and what weren't.
Yes, this is more typical of the structure we see in governments that like to call themselves communist, but is more accurately known as Leninism or Stalinism, depending on the level of authoritarianism involved.
well, to be honest, I think if awarding legal costs to the winner were automatic in the US, it would likely end up being yet another legal bludgeon for the wealth/corporations to use against the rest of us. it's hard to say for certain of course, that's just how things generally seem to turn out. God help us if any of the various attempts at torte reform are ever successful.
Also, given that California is currently hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, I don't think you'd want us...
You guys make up the difference with beer.
I think it's a matter of (a) asking for legal fees, and (b) being awarded them in the decision. I don't think it has anything to do with it being small claims or not.
That said, there are no lawyers allowed in small claims court (in CA), and so your legal fees damages are limited to filing fees (around $45 iirc).
There is an unfortunate (to me) segment of the environmental movement that would like nothing more than the massive genocide of most of humanity (about 99% of us or more) and the economic suppression of the remaining survivors into a feudal society lead by a few enlightened individuals and the rest of humanity living like 10th Century European peasants.
Is there really such a movement? I keep hearing this claim from a variety of conservative sources, yet I see no evidence of any such group. I have no doubt that there is at least one group that has such beliefs, but I challenge you to show me one that has enough influence to give credible cause for concern.
FWIW, I personally know some extreme environmentalists, and I cannot with any honesty "admit" that they have such a goal.
The entire mortgage meltdown and banking crisis came to a front because energy costs went sky high and people had to make decisions over driving to work or paying the mortgage.
I'm on board with the rest of what you said, but this is simply wrong. The spike in energy costs was inconveniently timed, but the vast majority of foreclosures would have happened without it.
The real problem was the lending practices. There were a variety of loan types that were basically designed to fail, but the worst were the ones that came with a ridiculously low interest rate for the first 2-5 years. People bought houses they could barely afford at those rates, assuming that when the real interest rate kicked in they could refinance and enjoy the low rate for a few more years. However, when that time came, they couldn't refinance for a variety of reasons, including that their home was often then worth less than what they owed. Consequently, the monthly payment they already could only barely afford shot up, in many cases doubling or more.
Energy costs had nothing to do with it.
I develop "embeddded" systems for the broadcast industry. Most every piece of broadcast equipment in a satellite truck and cable head end system runs some flavor of glibc in Linux.
I very much doubt that's the case.
I worked at Grass Valley until late 2004, and to my knowledge they had no products running Linux, and no plans to use it anywhere. There were a few products we inherited when Thomson bought Philips broadcast division that ran some flavor of *nix (Neutrino on Automation, and I don't recall what was on Spirit since I only had to deal with firmware and never actually saw a full system). Everything else used some proprietary embedded OS like VxWorks for the actual work, plus some NT variant for UI on the bigger systems like Profile and Kalypso.
I helped a friend do a presentation for SEMPTE recommending they consider Linux, and nobody seemed to really be into the idea (they had some strange idea that they could sue MS if Windows didn't function properly).
I'm sure Linux has crept into some products, but I'm fairly certain that claiming even a significant percentage of equipment in any broadcast facility runs Linux is a gross exaggeration.
Or, maybe you should educate yourself on the concept of "agency".
Ramji is an agent of Microsoft, and thus officially authorized to speak on the company's behalf (it's part of his job).
de Icaza is not an agent of the Linux community, merely a member, and has no legal right to speak for anyone but himself in that capacity.
That's totally irrelevant. In any area it's easy to fire teachers in their first year or two, or who fail to get the necessary certifications. Those are not the teachers we're talking about here.
In most schools teachers get tenure after 3-5 years, and that is when it becomes nearly impossible to fire them.
My own experience has been that new teachers are generally pretty good, though they may lack experience. That's understandable; it takes a while to get the hang of any new job. The really bad teachers I've seen have been way past tenure, and were at the point of just clocking time until retirement. Maybe they were good at one time and got burnt out, or maybe they were never more than just good enough to not get fired, I don't know. What I do know is that basically the only way they'll get fired is if they get caught having sex with a minor.