Not long ago spiegel.de, Germany's largest print magazine's website (also one of the most visited), reported that after work hours Firefox users are the overwhelming majority, and only during work hours, when most visitors visit the site from their corporate computers over which the IT depmt. has control, does MS IE have the lead.
The problem is not Linux, MS, Novell, etc. - the problem is you, me, US. Since when have knee-jerk reactions ever benefited anyone - long-term, I mean? Isn't using the brain and controlling ones natural pre-human genetically coded urges a beautiful thing? What I mean: Giving in to that first impulse of "kill them!" (or "slap them!", less strong) when you THINK someone else did something wrong (cut you off in traffic, stole your girlfriend, etc.) is natural, sure.
However, question is, is it sane? Which means nothing else but is it beneficial to you/us - long-term?
There seem to be way too many frustrated single males posting on Slashdot... how else can obvious OPINION pieces be modded "+5 Insightful" - only because they show the posters very strong superficial opinions against the "foe of the day/week/month"?
Since there are WAY more useless postings/articles/etc. expressing opinions, repeating hearsay, and all without ANY kind of fact-checking or thinking, maybe it's time to create a tax on them... okay, I pay the first 6 cents since I don't have too much to say myself but to express an opinion. Well, at least I *know* that.
Firefox and the "Adblock Plus" add-on - what ads are you talking about? I don't see no ads anywhere, not even in any Yahoo pages incl. my Yahoo mail interface;-)
I get about 30-50 spam messages per day on my Yahoo account. Not more than 1 per day get into my inbox, all others end up in the spam folder - I am very satisfied with their spam selection.
Second, they lost you as a "customer"??? How much did you pay them for the free Email account??? This is preposterous, complaining about their ads but being unwilling to pay anything (there are no ads when you get a plus account).
I was looking for which framework to use. I didn't look (further) at Google's offering because I wanted a JS framework, not Java, so I cannot comment on it. Yet I would like to make a posting to point out my personal favorite, the YUI, and how I got there.
First, on the page http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ the Yahoo "JavaScript Architect" Douglas Crockford gives some really *excellent* learning presentations on JS and the DOM that convinced me that there are really knowledgable people whos philosophy I like too.
Second, the license is BSD - it can hardly be any more free.
Last, if I have to rely on a framework I want to be sure it stays around. So even if some of the others are nice too and would fit, I must say I trust Yahoo a lot more to stay around and improve their framework - especially since they use it themselves for everything they do.
I also must say that I wasn't impressed at all when I finally tried GMail a few weeks ago, as a regular user of Yahoo mail for all my "public" mail (my own domain has 4000 email addresses left but I prefer Yahoo because of the excellent Spam-filter and only use my own domain-address for close friends) I find the Yahoo mail interface superior and much nicer.
What's more, there's YUI-ext, an extension for YUI (and now available for Jquery too), which provides some great-looking and very functional add-ons: http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/index.php
innerHTML is non standard - but the standard sucks. As Douglas Crockford says in one of his GREAT videos about Javascript and the DOM on Yahoo (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/), why does the W3C want you to write an HTML parser in Javascript (to create all those DOM nodes manually), when the webbrowser in which this code is running has a very good HTML parser optimized to do just that already?
I think the Slashdot moderating system is VERY badly broken. I would very much prefer to see "insightful" articles instead of junk when I view articles labled as "insightful" and "5". It seems that most posters derive their pleasure from causing displeasure rather than from having been able to make a good intelligent argument.
Maybe it's time to start thinking about a new moderation system. For example: - Leave the current system for those who are not interested in the new system - Add a new category of "Premium Posters", and the ability for viewers to read only their postings and postings modded up by such members - Premium Members pay money into a pot (fully refundable, not a fee!!!) - Every Premium Member who mis-behaves looses some of his otherwise refundable deposit (those fines might be distributed to Unicef or to other Prem. Members, just an example) - Prem. Members who are consistently rated highly receive money, because they are a driving force behind the power of the website and have "high employee value"
Et voila! There's a reason both A) for the members to behave and THINK before posting, and B) fro viewers to encourage and prefer "Premium Members". It is important, I think, that there is a distinction between people paying a fee and people paying a fully refundable deposit for what I just described - this kind of "moderation system" should not be confused with how the website makes money, because that would erode trust.
What negative side? The only negative side I've heared so far - and I try reading most of the articles and comments out of personal interest, since I still know some of the people involved personally - is fears and words. I could not discover a single FACT. The same thing Microsoft is so often accused of ("FUD") is presented here instead of evidence. Test: If you had never HEARD about that MS-Novell deal, what influence on your life would it have now? So far the answer seems to be "none" by all the posters. Well, except for "I fear", "I think", "It's obvious" and other junk words and pseudo-arguments.
On the other hand, Novell is able to present some very high-profile customers who signed on for Linux through Microsoft that SuSE and later Novell for years tried to convince of Linux unsuccessfully.
Why is something that stupid modded funny? Oh I forgot, it's Slashdot.
He did not get anything from Microsoft. He got (lots of) money from Novell - when they purchased SuSE. After that H.Mantel, like everyone else who had owned SuSE shares, he had no shares of either company any more - so there was/is no reason to care. Besides, it is VERY stupid to accuse H.Mantel, of all people, of being a capitalist (know him personally as former SUSE employee - former because I started my own [small and non-IT] biz).
Isn't the real problem - and not just for Linux but in general - that it is MUCH easier to destroy, i.e. to be AGAINST something, instead of FOR something and to DO something? So of course, lazy as people are (for evolutionary reasons, food was scarce until only *very* recently! (yes yes, and for many even today)), they all prefer to be against something rather than do soemthing they are for. Important words are "be" vs. "do".
I've a suggestion for all those MS/Novell haters (but by the way, this very much reminds me of the communists in Germany in 1933 who fought the left - but not left enough for the communists - party "SPD" a lot harder than the real enemy of both of them, fashism. I guess it's human to go with much more religious fervor against your own people rather than the enemy if one feels they stray from the "one true path"). DO something! Sue someone. Organize a march on the MS HQ. Hand out leaflets in your hometown. Somehow the one thing I truly don't like is everyone talking, and worse: imagining things that just MIGHT happen! It's Iraq all over again (yup, maybe unfair to use this comparison, unfair but maybe not wrong - in both cases the spin doctors played on the public's fears and used intimidation and speaking loudly whenever a voice of reason attempted to be heard) - lots of fear of what MIGHT happen! Most postings I've seen against Novell only ever refer to secrets, might-be's, *perceived* threats (or does anyone have any PROOF - and I would count a GOOD argument, I don't even ask for hard numbers, that the threat of litigation to anyone has increased (instead of remaining the same or even decreasing)?)
On the flip side, I don't expect my car, my house, my office and my bicycle all to be unlocked with the same key,
VERY bad analogy - you don't need ANY keys to enter a store, coffee shop, etc. in the real world, but on the Internet you do! In the real world you need keys only for YOUR stuff, on the Internet they won't let you in without one even though the places are "public". (I'm not complaining about THAT, the spammers caused a lot of that so I don't blame the site owners. You'd install ID-checks at your coffee shop door too if 100 people would come in every day in order to try to sell Viagra and other stuff to your guests...)
Would you also condone paying al-Qaida for not bombing your business?
Businesses as well as governments have done just that since the dawn of time. Welcome to reality. And yes - if *I* had a business and the Mafia or al-Quaida - who cares who if I'm dead in the end in either case? - would trheaten to kill me unless I pay "protection money", I would pay. You, hero that you are, would of course get into your Rambo outfit and start killing everyone and their grandmother because you actually believe Hollywood is reality?
What kind of idiots get moderator rights at Slashdot? How can a single (pretty stupid) line of text which does not say ANYTHING useful get all those points AND be tagged "insightful"? What kind of "insights" does someone have who doesn't actually say anything??? (Not that I'm saying anything useful right now, but this time I *DO* have to vent some anger at hearing the same BS again and again and again and... and then some people even mod this up!)
Agree! (I have to post this useless "me too" because idiot that I am I just modded you DOWN because somehow I thought this is the idiot-rant article of the "I know everything better" guy, and by posting something my moderation is undone since I cannot post AND mod the same discussion...)
Apparently whoever produced that documentary didn't have enough sleep.
One thing happening during sleep has to do with the way human memory functions.
There are three stages of memory: - ultra short term memory - short term memory - long term memory
The first one is entirely "electric". The second and especially the third one are chemical. That means during the very short time (a few seconds only) you remember something in your ultra short term memory the storage is done using electrical signals, but if it gets into short term memory (that would be ca. 20 minutes, I believe), and then from there into long term memory (only if there are enough associations to make it worth it to the longterm mem. gatekeeper functions of your brain) the information is stored in chemical form - and not in one place, but all over your brain! So if you (physically) loose brain, you don't actually loose memory, it's just that your memories become more fuzzy.
Anyway, during sleep some things happen that help put some memories into long term storage.
None of this is my own wisdom, I'm reading "Denken, Lernen, Vergessen" by Frederic Vester - who's a German. That VERY interesting book is about learning and talks about brain functions to help understand learning. It was written in the 70s and last updated 2001 - it's very popular in Germany for good reason. However, still way too few people, especially those responsible for educating others, read it...
A friend of mine has a very nice mexican restaurant and the software for the cash register is DOS based. It looks good (even uses a touch screen), it works - why would he ever invest 10000 Euros to buy a new one (that much because it's special software, you can't buy cash register software for restaurants at CompUSA, and he has to buy new hardware too - even if the new stuff would run on his machine, the companies who sell it to him and support him require this to lower their own support load by refusing to support any hardware/software combinations but their own ones).
I myself still own half of a (German) MBE (Mailboxes Etc.) store (95% business customers, 75% digital printing), and the only reasons our PCs were up to date were a) we did a lot of digital printing and some design, and Adobe Creative Suite CS(2) needs LOTS of resources (but it's great software - proprietary, bloated, etc. - but I like it anyway except for the price:-) ), b) I'm an IT guy, had quit my employee life only half a year before starting this business together with a friend, c) we just started so everything was new. But reality is, you're busy all day and thinking about which patch, what software, or what nice piece of hardware one could buy for ones business is the LAST thing one wants to worry about in such a situation! There just is no time to deal with IT, and little money ((esp. onsite) IT support is *very* expensive if you have a question that cannot be answered by the outsourced call center in India), and if there's money left one can think of many more important investments than IT. Do you know how expensive even very basic equipment used for making brochures or booklets is? (tip: don't EVER buy plastic, such machines must be STEEL or they'll fall apart - paper is very tough, hard to process, you won't belive it!)
There are many, many SMALL businesses like that. You/. guys keep talking about huge data centers and big businesses with a big budget and an IT department. Do you have any idea how hard any update is for the much larger part of the economy, the SMALL businesses? They cannot afford to higher someone, they cannot afford to spend much time on their software (even I need more than a full day to finish setting up a new PC, I just got a new Dell, and installing all my software and setting up my work environment is SUCH a pain!)
You (in general, majority here) don't like large corporations or at least treat them with a LOT of suspicion, but all I ever read here is about the big companies.
Not possible - no one supports that old version. If there are any important fixes (not just security, anything) they are always for the latest version. Open source people don't bother supporting older versions...;-)
It's also open-source, so you're free to keep your own development and bug fixes going if you can fund it yourself.
This argument isn't even worth refuting, it's so obviously childish.
On the contrary, free open sourced software has much better support than proprietary software. With proprietary software you, the end user, are at the mercy of the maker of the software;...
Only a tiny percentage of "free software" has good support. The majority languishes after having been started with much enthusiasm. Then the author starts recognizing the amount of time and effort he has to put in. I just added some modules to a PHPBB2 forum I put on some website, and it was interesting to track the evolution of some of those modules. At the beginning the authors almost daily answered questions and posted updates. A few months later the project had been pretty much abandoned. Of course, some of the posts of users of that FREE stuff read as if they had paid a thousand dollars and now almost *demanded* the author to fulfill their wishes. Very few OS projects are (have become) large enough to attract enough followers - and that doesn't mean just users, but people who contribute LABOUR - to be self-sustainable.
Okay, last comment - let's just call it an "aircraft" and I think we can both agree on that term:-)
On the twins, as I said it doesn't change the reasons for having them if they're pretty bad with one engine off - the performance with NO engine is even worse and that's what a twin avoids;-)
... and I'm well aware that many twins cannot fly anywhere near their altitude with just one engine, nethertheless that doesn't change any of the reasons why they are used instead of singl-engine airplanes, which almost always win in terms of efficiency at least in all the small airplanes (i.e. Boeing-size is an entirely different story). So I did not mention it in order to not increase size of the off-topic posting even further, which I now do anyway...;-)
Unfortunately waaaaayyyy off the topic of this discussion, but I've no choice! As a pilot I am forced to humbly but strongly object to two of your statements...
First, gliders ARE airplanes in every sense of the word including the legal one. It's not the engine that makes an airplane, it's the method of flight. Balloons are different, but gliders and a Boeing 747 use exactly the same principle and are therefore both called an airplane.
Second, having more than one engine IS done to increase the likelihood of survival when an engine quits e.g. while flying over water or mountains, where it's hard/impossible to find an area emergency landing, not to mention IFR flight conditions (little or no sight so for landing anywhere you need landing guidance systems).
There are quite a few small two-engine airplanes (and the worldwide fleet of 2-8 seat airplanes is much larger than in the 100+ seat category, of course most people don't notice them because when "normal" people fly it's in the large ones) that would be a lot more efficient, cheaper (to buy, to fly and to maintain), even faster and able to carry more load, etc. if the two engines would be replaced by a single one. Still, a lot of people buy them, and not just for introductary "multiple engine" rating training where the only reason to have two engines is the thing itself. They're wanted for IFR flying, for redundancy, to avoid having to land under conditions mentioned above when one engine quits.
Also, I'm not sure comparing RAID and multiple engines on aircrafts makes that much sense...
I'm 34 and self-employed, actually quite happy and - single. I would take the woman and the family and ignore the stupid job. But then, I gave up my job even without the reason of a woman (and never regretted it, although I was very well-paid) so maybe I'm not quite average:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Not long ago spiegel.de, Germany's largest print magazine's website (also one of the most visited), reported that after work hours Firefox users are the overwhelming majority, and only during work hours, when most visitors visit the site from their corporate computers over which the IT depmt. has control, does MS IE have the lead.
Mod parent *up*, please!
The problem is not Linux, MS, Novell, etc. - the problem is you, me, US. Since when have knee-jerk reactions ever benefited anyone - long-term, I mean? Isn't using the brain and controlling ones natural pre-human genetically coded urges a beautiful thing? What I mean: Giving in to that first impulse of "kill them!" (or "slap them!", less strong) when you THINK someone else did something wrong (cut you off in traffic, stole your girlfriend, etc.) is natural, sure.
However, question is, is it sane? Which means nothing else but is it beneficial to you/us - long-term?
There seem to be way too many frustrated single males posting on Slashdot... how else can obvious OPINION pieces be modded "+5 Insightful" - only because they show the posters very strong superficial opinions against the "foe of the day/week/month"?
Since there are WAY more useless postings/articles/etc. expressing opinions, repeating hearsay, and all without ANY kind of fact-checking or thinking, maybe it's time to create a tax on them... okay, I pay the first 6 cents since I don't have too much to say myself but to express an opinion. Well, at least I *know* that.
Firefox and the "Adblock Plus" add-on - what ads are you talking about? I don't see no ads anywhere, not even in any Yahoo pages incl. my Yahoo mail interface ;-)
I get about 30-50 spam messages per day on my Yahoo account. Not more than 1 per day get into my inbox, all others end up in the spam folder - I am very satisfied with their spam selection.
Second, they lost you as a "customer"??? How much did you pay them for the free Email account??? This is preposterous, complaining about their ads but being unwilling to pay anything (there are no ads when you get a plus account).
I was looking for which framework to use. I didn't look (further) at Google's offering because I wanted a JS framework, not Java, so I cannot comment on it. Yet I would like to make a posting to point out my personal favorite, the YUI, and how I got there.
First, on the page http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ the Yahoo "JavaScript Architect" Douglas Crockford gives some really *excellent* learning presentations on JS and the DOM that convinced me that there are really knowledgable people whos philosophy I like too.
Second, the license is BSD - it can hardly be any more free.
Last, if I have to rely on a framework I want to be sure it stays around. So even if some of the others are nice too and would fit, I must say I trust Yahoo a lot more to stay around and improve their framework - especially since they use it themselves for everything they do.
I also must say that I wasn't impressed at all when I finally tried GMail a few weeks ago, as a regular user of Yahoo mail for all my "public" mail (my own domain has 4000 email addresses left but I prefer Yahoo because of the excellent Spam-filter and only use my own domain-address for close friends) I find the Yahoo mail interface superior and much nicer.
What's more, there's YUI-ext, an extension for YUI (and now available for Jquery too), which provides some great-looking and very functional add-ons: http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/index.php
innerHTML is non standard - but the standard sucks. As Douglas Crockford says in one of his GREAT videos about Javascript and the DOM on Yahoo (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/), why does the W3C want you to write an HTML parser in Javascript (to create all those DOM nodes manually), when the webbrowser in which this code is running has a very good HTML parser optimized to do just that already?
I think the Slashdot moderating system is VERY badly broken. I would very much prefer to see "insightful" articles instead of junk when I view articles labled as "insightful" and "5". It seems that most posters derive their pleasure from causing displeasure rather than from having been able to make a good intelligent argument.
Maybe it's time to start thinking about a new moderation system. For example:
- Leave the current system for those who are not interested in the new system
- Add a new category of "Premium Posters", and the ability for viewers to read only their postings and postings modded up by such members
- Premium Members pay money into a pot (fully refundable, not a fee!!!)
- Every Premium Member who mis-behaves looses some of his otherwise refundable deposit (those fines might be distributed to Unicef or to other Prem. Members, just an example)
- Prem. Members who are consistently rated highly receive money, because they are a driving force behind the power of the website and have "high employee value"
Et voila! There's a reason both A) for the members to behave and THINK before posting, and B) fro viewers to encourage and prefer "Premium Members". It is important, I think, that there is a distinction between people paying a fee and people paying a fully refundable deposit for what I just described - this kind of "moderation system" should not be confused with how the website makes money, because that would erode trust.
What negative side? The only negative side I've heared so far - and I try reading most of the articles and comments out of personal interest, since I still know some of the people involved personally - is fears and words. I could not discover a single FACT. The same thing Microsoft is so often accused of ("FUD") is presented here instead of evidence. Test: If you had never HEARD about that MS-Novell deal, what influence on your life would it have now? So far the answer seems to be "none" by all the posters. Well, except for "I fear", "I think", "It's obvious" and other junk words and pseudo-arguments.
On the other hand, Novell is able to present some very high-profile customers who signed on for Linux through Microsoft that SuSE and later Novell for years tried to convince of Linux unsuccessfully.
Why is something that stupid modded funny? Oh I forgot, it's Slashdot.
He did not get anything from Microsoft. He got (lots of) money from Novell - when they purchased SuSE. After that H.Mantel, like everyone else who had owned SuSE shares, he had no shares of either company any more - so there was/is no reason to care. Besides, it is VERY stupid to accuse H.Mantel, of all people, of being a capitalist (know him personally as former SUSE employee - former because I started my own [small and non-IT] biz).
Congratulations, now THAT's a good summary!!!
Isn't the real problem - and not just for Linux but in general - that it is MUCH easier to destroy, i.e. to be AGAINST something, instead of FOR something and to DO something? So of course, lazy as people are (for evolutionary reasons, food was scarce until only *very* recently! (yes yes, and for many even today)), they all prefer to be against something rather than do soemthing they are for. Important words are "be" vs. "do".
I've a suggestion for all those MS/Novell haters (but by the way, this very much reminds me of the communists in Germany in 1933 who fought the left - but not left enough for the communists - party "SPD" a lot harder than the real enemy of both of them, fashism. I guess it's human to go with much more religious fervor against your own people rather than the enemy if one feels they stray from the "one true path"). DO something! Sue someone. Organize a march on the MS HQ. Hand out leaflets in your hometown. Somehow the one thing I truly don't like is everyone talking, and worse: imagining things that just MIGHT happen! It's Iraq all over again (yup, maybe unfair to use this comparison, unfair but maybe not wrong - in both cases the spin doctors played on the public's fears and used intimidation and speaking loudly whenever a voice of reason attempted to be heard) - lots of fear of what MIGHT happen! Most postings I've seen against Novell only ever refer to secrets, might-be's, *perceived* threats (or does anyone have any PROOF - and I would count a GOOD argument, I don't even ask for hard numbers, that the threat of litigation to anyone has increased (instead of remaining the same or even decreasing)?)
VERY bad analogy - you don't need ANY keys to enter a store, coffee shop, etc. in the real world, but on the Internet you do! In the real world you need keys only for YOUR stuff, on the Internet they won't let you in without one even though the places are "public". (I'm not complaining about THAT, the spammers caused a lot of that so I don't blame the site owners. You'd install ID-checks at your coffee shop door too if 100 people would come in every day in order to try to sell Viagra and other stuff to your guests...)
Businesses as well as governments have done just that since the dawn of time. Welcome to reality. And yes - if *I* had a business and the Mafia or al-Quaida - who cares who if I'm dead in the end in either case? - would trheaten to kill me unless I pay "protection money", I would pay. You, hero that you are, would of course get into your Rambo outfit and start killing everyone and their grandmother because you actually believe Hollywood is reality?
What kind of idiots get moderator rights at Slashdot? How can a single (pretty stupid) line of text which does not say ANYTHING useful get all those points AND be tagged "insightful"? What kind of "insights" does someone have who doesn't actually say anything??? (Not that I'm saying anything useful right now, but this time I *DO* have to vent some anger at hearing the same BS again and again and again and... and then some people even mod this up!)
I guess you mean "ad hominem"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Agree! (I have to post this useless "me too" because idiot that I am I just modded you DOWN because somehow I thought this is the idiot-rant article of the "I know everything better" guy, and by posting something my moderation is undone since I cannot post AND mod the same discussion...)
Apparently whoever produced that documentary didn't have enough sleep.
One thing happening during sleep has to do with the way human memory functions.
There are three stages of memory:
- ultra short term memory
- short term memory
- long term memory
The first one is entirely "electric". The second and especially the third one are chemical. That means during the very short time (a few seconds only) you remember something in your ultra short term memory the storage is done using electrical signals, but if it gets into short term memory (that would be ca. 20 minutes, I believe), and then from there into long term memory (only if there are enough associations to make it worth it to the longterm mem. gatekeeper functions of your brain) the information is stored in chemical form - and not in one place, but all over your brain! So if you (physically) loose brain, you don't actually loose memory, it's just that your memories become more fuzzy.
Anyway, during sleep some things happen that help put some memories into long term storage.
None of this is my own wisdom, I'm reading "Denken, Lernen, Vergessen" by Frederic Vester - who's a German. That VERY interesting book is about learning and talks about brain functions to help understand learning. It was written in the 70s and last updated 2001 - it's very popular in Germany for good reason. However, still way too few people, especially those responsible for educating others, read it...
A friend of mine has a very nice mexican restaurant and the software for the cash register is DOS based. It looks good (even uses a touch screen), it works - why would he ever invest 10000 Euros to buy a new one (that much because it's special software, you can't buy cash register software for restaurants at CompUSA, and he has to buy new hardware too - even if the new stuff would run on his machine, the companies who sell it to him and support him require this to lower their own support load by refusing to support any hardware/software combinations but their own ones).
:-) ), b) I'm an IT guy, had quit my employee life only half a year before starting this business together with a friend, c) we just started so everything was new. But reality is, you're busy all day and thinking about which patch, what software, or what nice piece of hardware one could buy for ones business is the LAST thing one wants to worry about in such a situation! There just is no time to deal with IT, and little money ((esp. onsite) IT support is *very* expensive if you have a question that cannot be answered by the outsourced call center in India), and if there's money left one can think of many more important investments than IT. Do you know how expensive even very basic equipment used for making brochures or booklets is? (tip: don't EVER buy plastic, such machines must be STEEL or they'll fall apart - paper is very tough, hard to process, you won't belive it!)
/. guys keep talking about huge data centers and big businesses with a big budget and an IT department. Do you have any idea how hard any update is for the much larger part of the economy, the SMALL businesses? They cannot afford to higher someone, they cannot afford to spend much time on their software (even I need more than a full day to finish setting up a new PC, I just got a new Dell, and installing all my software and setting up my work environment is SUCH a pain!)
I myself still own half of a (German) MBE (Mailboxes Etc.) store (95% business customers, 75% digital printing), and the only reasons our PCs were up to date were a) we did a lot of digital printing and some design, and Adobe Creative Suite CS(2) needs LOTS of resources (but it's great software - proprietary, bloated, etc. - but I like it anyway except for the price
There are many, many SMALL businesses like that. You
You (in general, majority here) don't like large corporations or at least treat them with a LOT of suspicion, but all I ever read here is about the big companies.
Not possible - no one supports that old version. If there are any important fixes (not just security, anything) they are always for the latest version. Open source people don't bother supporting older versions...
This argument isn't even worth refuting, it's so obviously childish.
Only a tiny percentage of "free software" has good support. The majority languishes after having been started with much enthusiasm. Then the author starts recognizing the amount of time and effort he has to put in. I just added some modules to a PHPBB2 forum I put on some website, and it was interesting to track the evolution of some of those modules. At the beginning the authors almost daily answered questions and posted updates. A few months later the project had been pretty much abandoned. Of course, some of the posts of users of that FREE stuff read as if they had paid a thousand dollars and now almost *demanded* the author to fulfill their wishes. Very few OS projects are (have become) large enough to attract enough followers - and that doesn't mean just users, but people who contribute LABOUR - to be self-sustainable.
He has not insulted anyone, yet you insult him. I think YOU are the bad guy.
Okay, last comment - let's just call it an "aircraft" and I think we can both agree on that term :-)
;-)
On the twins, as I said it doesn't change the reasons for having them if they're pretty bad with one engine off - the performance with NO engine is even worse and that's what a twin avoids
... and I'm well aware that many twins cannot fly anywhere near their altitude with just one engine, nethertheless that doesn't change any of the reasons why they are used instead of singl-engine airplanes, which almost always win in terms of efficiency at least in all the small airplanes (i.e. Boeing-size is an entirely different story). So I did not mention it in order to not increase size of the off-topic posting even further, which I now do anyway... ;-)
Right of way has nothing to do with airplane or not. What you say about gliders not being airplanes is simply not correct, period.
Unfortunately waaaaayyyy off the topic of this discussion, but I've no choice! As a pilot I am forced to humbly but strongly object to two of your statements...
First, gliders ARE airplanes in every sense of the word including the legal one. It's not the engine that makes an airplane, it's the method of flight. Balloons are different, but gliders and a Boeing 747 use exactly the same principle and are therefore both called an airplane.
Second, having more than one engine IS done to increase the likelihood of survival when an engine quits e.g. while flying over water or mountains, where it's hard/impossible to find an area emergency landing, not to mention IFR flight conditions (little or no sight so for landing anywhere you need landing guidance systems).
There are quite a few small two-engine airplanes (and the worldwide fleet of 2-8 seat airplanes is much larger than in the 100+ seat category, of course most people don't notice them because when "normal" people fly it's in the large ones) that would be a lot more efficient, cheaper (to buy, to fly and to maintain), even faster and able to carry more load, etc. if the two engines would be replaced by a single one. Still, a lot of people buy them, and not just for introductary "multiple engine" rating training where the only reason to have two engines is the thing itself. They're wanted for IFR flying, for redundancy, to avoid having to land under conditions mentioned above when one engine quits.
Also, I'm not sure comparing RAID and multiple engines on aircrafts makes that much sense...
I'm 34 and self-employed, actually quite happy and - single. I would take the woman and the family and ignore the stupid job. But then, I gave up my job even without the reason of a woman (and never regretted it, although I was very well-paid) so maybe I'm not quite average :-)