"The MS side does it for money, and the Linux side does it for passion. Unfortunately, most Linux proponents who are loud enough to be noticed tend to come off as fanatical, and I think that's hurting its image, and reducing the "street cred.""
There is no way around this: You either have passion for the platform merits which allow Linux or OS X to compete against the "Windows Everywhere" network effect... or people will assume those alternative platforms are even less deserving of their attention because their users do not promote or recommend. OTOH Windows users tend to actively dislike the OS and its vendor these days, so its easy to see why moderately enthusiastic folks employing neither guns nor the threat of damnation might be seen as 'fanatics' in comparison.
Maybe if lots of us told people we are unhappy with Desktop Linux but don't see anything better, then lots more people could identify with that and switch from Windows. "Well, at least its an improvement." Increased security but none of that smelly penguin-kissing. Then again, installing apps and drivers on Linux is a real b!tch and the community is only starting to get a clue as to fixing this, so we have reasons to be unhappy.
Excel used to have competitors, like 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro. In the early nineties they were about as good as Excel (or possibly better?). But when Microsoft decided that usability was what counted, they crushed their competitors who considered that less important (or simply didn't have the resources to keep up in the arms race).
Yes but they did this by having a head-start in the Windows 95 environment, the replacement for their monopoly product. OTOH Wordperfect Suite (incl. Quattro) has been advancing and really a fine product for many years now in terms of usability and otherwise. Yet it's not overtaking MS Office. Lotus SmartSuite I used alot back ion 1996, and it was excellent. Most people still swore by DOS products up until W95 arrived, and what it amounted to was people switching their excuses for not changing their vendor.
What MS did right was maintain the focus on visual interaction, which saved their monopoly from competition on yet another front. The Mac became a bit more marginalized as a result.
OTOH Linux is a true threat. You can't play the usual dirty tricks against it, even if it lacks the user-focus needed to catch fire. So you have to compensate with real, hard work like adding stability and security. We just need a stable place that inspires programmers with the confidence to bang on (not IN) out platform; We need to attractively define the API set and hold to it until the next major revision. Then the use-case of "Download app from ACME website and install" becomes workable for average people. Leave the distro repositories for updating the core OS, and much of what is supplied with Linux distros should be marked as 'extras'.
MS really did get lucky with their initial association with IBM. With an IBM PC, you could make an end-run (literally, with SneakerNet) around the sleepy mainframe programmers in M.I.S., and take control of your department's data and even get creative with it. What fealty that inspires! I know from experience.
Later on, MS could let Lotus keep selling DOS/Windows systems while they plotted Lotus' demise. Its win-win for MS in the short term.
I never denied that non-profits have agendas. It just another way of saying they have a vision or some need to be fulfilled. It could even be founded on the notion that our lives ought to be entirely monetized, with profit-seeking transactions defining our lives. So there's good and bad in many degrees.
That does not make a non-profit necessarily driven by simple, irrational bias (the only kind worth highlighting). A 'bias' for facts which may reflect certain trends (like a monopolized market) is not the kind you throw in someone's face to dismiss their good judgement; That is an intellectually dishonest smokescreen.
In contrast, the profit motive is undeniably an indication of bias toward self-interest, with plenty of examples of that getting out of hand. Pushing an assumption that "markets" are rational is a sham that cannot cover-up this simple fact of life.
Microsoft has killed-off or neutered all other OS/Officeware entities resembling its own business model (for-profit corporations); they ARE those markets. So why is there so much manipulation, abuse and crime associated with them? Is this market rationality revealing itself to the consumer? The situation is so extreme, that its only real competition is based on volunteer effort and donations (although not single-mindedly).
Microsoft's AGENDA is the same as other behemoths in this regard: To push the ideology of monetization, that the only trustworthy and 'good' processes in our lives are those that are based on for-profit transactions. Whatever restructuring, investments, manufacturing or lobbying that will get their 'services' in between you and your pursuits and coexistence with others is a 'good thing'. Ideally all decisions are made in the consumer mode, and everything must have a pricetag on it to ensure they can buy it up and monopolize it. And if you want a say in how any of this is executed, you get to vote with your wallet and preferably nothing else.
Yes, you're quite right; non-profits are driven by motives far less rational: religious fervour for OSS.
That's a predictable response, and yet it doesn't hold water. It is the MS camp that insists on A) Retaining a monopoly, B) Money in all binding relationships. I don't know about you, but I distrust such single-mindedness.
Money isn't even close to being the measure of all that is rational.
OTOH mixing the for-profit and free seem much more natural.
What's dismissive about that? Microsoft really does think that everyone ought to use Microsoft software, and the FSF really does think that everyone ought to use free software. Everyone is biased.
Not necessarily. And in this case its a matter of degree.
Put it this way: Who do you trust more, the FSF or Microsoft... and why? For that matter, why does someone go to work for Microsoft vs. the FSF or particular FOSS projects? The former is always characterized by money, whereas the latter operates on and advocates for a mix of business models and incentives. Does providing an alternative to vendor-lockin have to mean that someone is "biased" instead of using good judgement?
Just because some people have strong opinions or come to certain conclusions doesn't meant they're "biased". And I must say, this is the typical "Fox News Defense". They won the right to knowingly LIE to viewers in a court of law, then they try to tear down everyone else with innuendos starting with "everyone is biased". That's the defense of someone who cannot convincingly marshall actual facts in response to criticism.
Maybe you should be more concerned with how complete and accurate a picture the different parties are willing to reveal.
One side of the transaction must remain anonymous. That's how it differs from ATMs.
Also, they didn't put MS Access into their ATMs! Why? I guess it has a little something to do with people being able to check their receipt and bank statement.
Hello Doctor, How many Microsoft funded studies has Microsoft published for public review where the results of the study cast a bad or negative light on the company or its products? If the answer is 0, would not this indicate they are not interested in the truth but in misinforming the public for their own benefit?
If it's MS-funded, it's probably skewed to Windows. If it's performed by Linux advocates, it's skewed.
The difference, my dear fellow, is that the former is throwing money around from on-high whereas the latter group tend to advocate Linux for much better reasons. IOW, they have "street cred".
Is a Linux study funded by GNU/FSF/OSI/OSDL or whatever any more impartial? No.
I think many here would disagree. Nonprofits are not driven by motives which could be considered the mirrored opposite of commercial corporations. There is not the tremendous pressure to turn a profit (or some analog to monetary gain), and in your examples they're run by mere handfuls of individuals receiving very little compensation with only their reputations to fall back on. They represent what are largely hobbyists, almost to a maddening degree.
OTOH, in Microsoft we have a callow and selfish for-profit entity with a rather abusive track record right up through their financial, er, daliances with SCO.
Need I say more?
Given their dynamics and history, being so dismissive of FOSS organizations as to just say 'well, eveone's biased anyway' really doesn't seem like an acceptable attitude.
the answer most open source developers seem to have is some variant of "Who needs usability testing?".
Probably true. What strikes me is that most OSS projects don't even collect use-cases, so their concept of who their audience is and what their habits are likely to be becomes unhinged. And of course there is no plain-language, functional basis for actually testing the UI or cerating the docs, etc. Check out the Help section, and you see what... entries arranged by the contents of the pulldown menu or by the buttons on the form. And there are so many GUI apps that won't even provide an icon for a Linux desktop, cutting the user off at the knees near their very first step; that's not to mention the apps that half-heartedly try to provide an accessible icon and fail. A document listing common use-cases would have made these shortcomings stand out like a sore thumb after a few revisions; Its something you look at to ponder, "How is the user going to get from A all the way to Z?"
User installs application
User starts application
User drops file onto app icon
Admin updates application
User opens document in home directory
Take the last use-case: You create a real scenario for it, and have a person sit down and execute it. They're puzzled or annoyed that the file dialog defaults to "/", or that it remembers the last location but there is no easy way to get back to home. After the issue is addressed, major revisions of the app in future will not alienate existing users because their most basic expectations are no longer being met. But in real life, the coding hotshots out there are consistently hampering the acceptance of their apps with such simple yet humungous blind spots.
My advice to the FOSS dev community *cough*Gimp*cough*Xorg*cough*Kino*cough*... Get a red-hot poker and force OOo and Mozilla to teach you professional, user-centric methods.
Xorg, for instance, does not accommodate the essential use-case of a user permanently changing their screen resolution. The product just screams: "Let the vi-jockey or desktop-layer grok our conf file on their own." Hello??? This is a major component that cannot serialize its own configuration data back to disk??? Xorg still handles a crucial GUI-configuration task as though a sysadmin were present (not unlike the early Windows-NT method for which Microsoft fired the author back in the 90s!). So we get KDE and Gnome applets that are custom-supplied by each distro, and all understand xorg.conf in many different but deeply flawed ways. Supplying an API function to write the config to disk to enable these KDE/Gnome/Other applets to work consistently and well is not even on their radar, because runtime use-cases are beaneath them... those are for KDE/Gnome people and their style guides.
Other OSes ace'd this stuff a very long time ago.
Simple things facilitate an end-user focus, most of which don't even need beta-test volunteers or fancy automation....Rant OFF:-)
Microsoft is one of those rare companies that turn evil with its founders at the helm. Normally it takes time and considerable turnover in management with beancounter mentality before the evil sets in.
I've never seen the original Prisoner so I might catch the new series... although I doubt it, the premise is kind of stale by today's standards.
Wow. How remarkably arrogant and naive you are.
And what are you, a bitter TV addict? Since when are people expected to watch a show before they decide if they are going to watch the show? And they are supposed to be personally attacked because they express disinterest in the basic idea of a TV show?
This is how fanboys sink to new lows when they try to climb onto a high-horse.
I think having a government that wasn't bought out by international oil companies would make officials more accountable to the needs of the population.
Well I suppose you could outlaw unions. Otherwise I don't see how you are going to get anyone to give up a huge chunk of their salary to buy a very expensive share. How do you fire someone? Suing for breach of contract? Much worse than unions! This is hare-brained wishful thinking. If co-ops were that useful, we would see many more of them around today and its not like the presence of unions are stopping them.
I am ambivalent about giving particular unions monopolies over organizing certain jobs, but its not like they don't have to compete with non-union outfits nor are all industries unionized. And having democratic controls both without and within, not to mention very few differentiating assets other than skill, unions are nothing near as abusive as private monopolies.
And you may think shareholder plutocracy in a private-sector corporation is a common good, but it isn't nor is it a democracy, which is measured in individuals not dollars. Oh well.
What all this has to do with the media I'm not sure... The issue was the media's portrayal of unions and such, and you defended them using a false conception of "union" which exists only in your personal "world". I think you did not want to address my charge that pro-capital extremism abounds in the industry and there is nothing to balance it. Again, when broadcasters and periodicals warm up to the idea of completely nationalizing all retirement schemes, as well as all utilities incl voice and data, then I might consider Fox to be providing a useful element of balance... because the opposite of those things are what's in vogue among journalists now. Fox is just the most comfortable place on the dial for an ignorant white suburban man to assuage his conscience with a combination of half-truth and empty propaganda.
You should know better. That's like saying hard disks weren't designed for consumers to access files after pressing 'delete'. Or that the LEDs on your network device weren't intended to have data read from them.
I mean, how silly! Yet, the US government and other parties have made it their serious business to do exactly these things. Read CRT conents around corners? Yep! Keylogging using audio profiling techniques? Famously so.
Yes, there is a concern even if there is no serruptitious RFID spying at the moment. It's broadcasting sensitive data in some part of the spectrum.
Do I need to remind slashdotters that yeags ago, infrared Keyfobs were hijacked by car thieves using cheap Palm Pilots? Now imagine that Keyfob is not only radio, but transmits without you pressing it and the data contains biometric data about YOUR PERSON.
So even unions should operate as a group of shareholders in order to be considered "moral". I have seen the light: The Market Is All.
What a sense of 'balance': No democratic controls through government, no workplace democracy where the poor can participate. Zip. Just a veneer of accommodation with an unoriginal outsourcing and worker investment scheme underneath. I'd say that is completely lopsided; calling it the product of a plutocratic instinct would be kind.
Of course, your exercise in rationalizing such a proposal through relabeling sure would make it seem fair on the evening news. To stupid people. Translating from doublespeak to plain-spokenness: "See this here outsourcing corporation? It's a 'Union' now. The mandarins at the Federalist Society say so!"
At least communists these days seem to recognize where their ideology had slid into single-minded totalitarianism. Libertarians advocating the "purely capitalist way" have that same sort of zeal, but unfortunately aren't nearly experienced enough to realize this themselves much less admit it to others. Still, market utopia could arrive in New Hampshire one day, right before the Rapture comes to South Carolina (or whatever place it is now).
As for the confusion you feel about the UAW, let me spell it out for you: They work well for Honda, so the common point of failure here is the American executive just as was the case in the 1970s (unless you can point out the union picket lines demanding an end to fuel-efficient cars on the production lines... I didn't think so). IMO America should accelerate this trend of outsourcing CEO and Director positions to other countries; It's very effective.
Now I'm going to check my bank account to see how much I can buy into this moral 'workplace democracy' (e.g. union) that you speak of.
Nah, screw you hippie.
I eat hippies for breakfast. And apparently, you too...:^)
That's what Christian Rock says to me: Ideological Purity.
There are so many mainstream artists who sing Christian themes (when its appropriate, or if fits well to make a good song), perhaps even most artists. Do the 'unsaved' reject them for it? No. Do 'Christian Rock' devotees consider them to be Christian-enough? No, because they don't pass the purity test.
On the Mac, the apps's dock icon will just jump up and down for a while without stealing focus. The modal dialog will be there waiting for you when the app is selected.
Slashdot Mirror
"The MS side does it for money, and the Linux side does it for passion. Unfortunately, most Linux proponents who are loud enough to be noticed tend to come off as fanatical, and I think that's hurting its image, and reducing the "street cred.""
There is no way around this: You either have passion for the platform merits which allow Linux or OS X to compete against the "Windows Everywhere" network effect... or people will assume those alternative platforms are even less deserving of their attention because their users do not promote or recommend. OTOH Windows users tend to actively dislike the OS and its vendor these days, so its easy to see why moderately enthusiastic folks employing neither guns nor the threat of damnation might be seen as 'fanatics' in comparison.
Maybe if lots of us told people we are unhappy with Desktop Linux but don't see anything better, then lots more people could identify with that and switch from Windows. "Well, at least its an improvement." Increased security but none of that smelly penguin-kissing. Then again, installing apps and drivers on Linux is a real b!tch and the community is only starting to get a clue as to fixing this, so we have reasons to be unhappy.
Excel used to have competitors, like 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro. In the early nineties they were about as good as Excel (or possibly better?). But when Microsoft decided that usability was what counted, they crushed their competitors who considered that less important (or simply didn't have the resources to keep up in the arms race).
Yes but they did this by having a head-start in the Windows 95 environment, the replacement for their monopoly product. OTOH Wordperfect Suite (incl. Quattro) has been advancing and really a fine product for many years now in terms of usability and otherwise. Yet it's not overtaking MS Office. Lotus SmartSuite I used alot back ion 1996, and it was excellent. Most people still swore by DOS products up until W95 arrived, and what it amounted to was people switching their excuses for not changing their vendor.
What MS did right was maintain the focus on visual interaction, which saved their monopoly from competition on yet another front. The Mac became a bit more marginalized as a result.
OTOH Linux is a true threat. You can't play the usual dirty tricks against it, even if it lacks the user-focus needed to catch fire. So you have to compensate with real, hard work like adding stability and security. We just need a stable place that inspires programmers with the confidence to bang on (not IN) out platform; We need to attractively define the API set and hold to it until the next major revision. Then the use-case of "Download app from ACME website and install" becomes workable for average people. Leave the distro repositories for updating the core OS, and much of what is supplied with Linux distros should be marked as 'extras'.
MS really did get lucky with their initial association with IBM. With an IBM PC, you could make an end-run (literally, with SneakerNet) around the sleepy mainframe programmers in M.I.S., and take control of your department's data and even get creative with it. What fealty that inspires! I know from experience.
Later on, MS could let Lotus keep selling DOS/Windows systems while they plotted Lotus' demise. Its win-win for MS in the short term.
I never denied that non-profits have agendas. It just another way of saying they have a vision or some need to be fulfilled. It could even be founded on the notion that our lives ought to be entirely monetized, with profit-seeking transactions defining our lives. So there's good and bad in many degrees.
That does not make a non-profit necessarily driven by simple, irrational bias (the only kind worth highlighting). A 'bias' for facts which may reflect certain trends (like a monopolized market) is not the kind you throw in someone's face to dismiss their good judgement; That is an intellectually dishonest smokescreen.
In contrast, the profit motive is undeniably an indication of bias toward self-interest, with plenty of examples of that getting out of hand. Pushing an assumption that "markets" are rational is a sham that cannot cover-up this simple fact of life.
Microsoft has killed-off or neutered all other OS/Officeware entities resembling its own business model (for-profit corporations); they ARE those markets. So why is there so much manipulation, abuse and crime associated with them? Is this market rationality revealing itself to the consumer? The situation is so extreme, that its only real competition is based on volunteer effort and donations (although not single-mindedly).
Microsoft's AGENDA is the same as other behemoths in this regard: To push the ideology of monetization, that the only trustworthy and 'good' processes in our lives are those that are based on for-profit transactions. Whatever restructuring, investments, manufacturing or lobbying that will get their 'services' in between you and your pursuits and coexistence with others is a 'good thing'. Ideally all decisions are made in the consumer mode, and everything must have a pricetag on it to ensure they can buy it up and monopolize it. And if you want a say in how any of this is executed, you get to vote with your wallet and preferably nothing else.
That's a predictable response, and yet it doesn't hold water. It is the MS camp that insists on A) Retaining a monopoly, B) Money in all binding relationships. I don't know about you, but I distrust such single-mindedness.
Money isn't even close to being the measure of all that is rational.
OTOH mixing the for-profit and free seem much more natural.
What's dismissive about that? Microsoft really does think that everyone ought to use Microsoft software, and the FSF really does think that everyone ought to use free software. Everyone is biased.
Not necessarily. And in this case its a matter of degree.
Put it this way: Who do you trust more, the FSF or Microsoft... and why? For that matter, why does someone go to work for Microsoft vs. the FSF or particular FOSS projects? The former is always characterized by money, whereas the latter operates on and advocates for a mix of business models and incentives. Does providing an alternative to vendor-lockin have to mean that someone is "biased" instead of using good judgement?
Just because some people have strong opinions or come to certain conclusions doesn't meant they're "biased". And I must say, this is the typical "Fox News Defense". They won the right to knowingly LIE to viewers in a court of law, then they try to tear down everyone else with innuendos starting with "everyone is biased". That's the defense of someone who cannot convincingly marshall actual facts in response to criticism.
Maybe you should be more concerned with how complete and accurate a picture the different parties are willing to reveal.
One side of the transaction must remain anonymous. That's how it differs from ATMs.
Also, they didn't put MS Access into their ATMs! Why? I guess it has a little something to do with people being able to check their receipt and bank statement.
No, it means Microsoft is always right.
If it's MS-funded, it's probably skewed to Windows.
If it's performed by Linux advocates, it's skewed.
The difference, my dear fellow, is that the former is throwing money around from on-high whereas the latter group tend to advocate Linux for much better reasons. IOW, they have "street cred".
"If scaling up on windows means significant reliability issues, how has google managed to avoid these despite scaling to the level they have?"
Excellent question.
Is a Linux study funded by GNU/FSF/OSI/OSDL or whatever any more impartial? No.
I think many here would disagree. Nonprofits are not driven by motives which could be considered the mirrored opposite of commercial corporations. There is not the tremendous pressure to turn a profit (or some analog to monetary gain), and in your examples they're run by mere handfuls of individuals receiving very little compensation with only their reputations to fall back on. They represent what are largely hobbyists, almost to a maddening degree.
OTOH, in Microsoft we have a callow and selfish for-profit entity with a rather abusive track record right up through their financial, er, daliances with SCO.
Need I say more?
Given their dynamics and history, being so dismissive of FOSS organizations as to just say 'well, eveone's biased anyway' really doesn't seem like an acceptable attitude.
Probably true. What strikes me is that most OSS projects don't even collect use-cases, so their concept of who their audience is and what their habits are likely to be becomes unhinged. And of course there is no plain-language, functional basis for actually testing the UI or cerating the docs, etc. Check out the Help section, and you see what... entries arranged by the contents of the pulldown menu or by the buttons on the form. And there are so many GUI apps that won't even provide an icon for a Linux desktop, cutting the user off at the knees near their very first step; that's not to mention the apps that half-heartedly try to provide an accessible icon and fail. A document listing common use-cases would have made these shortcomings stand out like a sore thumb after a few revisions; Its something you look at to ponder, "How is the user going to get from A all the way to Z?"
User installs application
User starts application
User drops file onto app icon
Admin updates application
User opens document in home directory
Take the last use-case: You create a real scenario for it, and have a person sit down and execute it. They're puzzled or annoyed that the file dialog defaults to "/", or that it remembers the last location but there is no easy way to get back to home. After the issue is addressed, major revisions of the app in future will not alienate existing users because their most basic expectations are no longer being met. But in real life, the coding hotshots out there are consistently hampering the acceptance of their apps with such simple yet humungous blind spots.
My advice to the FOSS dev community *cough*Gimp*cough*Xorg*cough*Kino*cough*... Get a red-hot poker and force OOo and Mozilla to teach you professional, user-centric methods.
Xorg, for instance, does not accommodate the essential use-case of a user permanently changing their screen resolution. The product just screams: "Let the vi-jockey or desktop-layer grok our conf file on their own." Hello??? This is a major component that cannot serialize its own configuration data back to disk??? Xorg still handles a crucial GUI-configuration task as though a sysadmin were present (not unlike the early Windows-NT method for which Microsoft fired the author back in the 90s!). So we get KDE and Gnome applets that are custom-supplied by each distro, and all understand xorg.conf in many different but deeply flawed ways. Supplying an API function to write the config to disk to enable these KDE/Gnome/Other applets to work consistently and well is not even on their radar, because runtime use-cases are beaneath them... those are for KDE/Gnome people and their style guides.
Other OSes ace'd this stuff a very long time ago.
Simple things facilitate an end-user focus, most of which don't even need beta-test volunteers or fancy automation.
Do you still cry when you think about those times that daddy touched you?
Haha! You started this by attacking someone and you're trying to end it the same way, with linguistic nitpicking to boot? How pathetic.
Have a better day...
I chose Visio as it was easily available in our office, no doubt there's an OO.org equivalent that would do just as well.
I believe the leading FOSS application would be Kivio (although Dia and OOo Draw work well for many people). I think there are one or two others.
Gorm is the IDE environment for NextStep. sorry..... I meant GNUStep ;-)
http://www.gnustep.org/experience/Gorm.html
Its still ugly as sin, but its the closest thing OS X has "native" that could also be considered multi-platform.
Microsoft is one of those rare companies that turn evil with its founders at the helm. Normally it takes time and considerable turnover in management with beancounter mentality before the evil sets in.
"It's not in the Box, it's in the Band!!!"
::shrug::
Perfectly reasonable thing to believe when Bill Gates is trying to off you.
And what are you, a bitter TV addict? Since when are people expected to watch a show before they decide if they are going to watch the show? And they are supposed to be personally attacked because they express disinterest in the basic idea of a TV show?
This is how fanboys sink to new lows when they try to climb onto a high-horse.
I think having a government that wasn't bought out by international oil companies would make officials more accountable to the needs of the population.
Well I suppose you could outlaw unions. Otherwise I don't see how you are going to get anyone to give up a huge chunk of their salary to buy a very expensive share. How do you fire someone? Suing for breach of contract? Much worse than unions! This is hare-brained wishful thinking. If co-ops were that useful, we would see many more of them around today and its not like the presence of unions are stopping them.
I am ambivalent about giving particular unions monopolies over organizing certain jobs, but its not like they don't have to compete with non-union outfits nor are all industries unionized. And having democratic controls both without and within, not to mention very few differentiating assets other than skill, unions are nothing near as abusive as private monopolies.
And you may think shareholder plutocracy in a private-sector corporation is a common good, but it isn't nor is it a democracy, which is measured in individuals not dollars. Oh well.
What all this has to do with the media I'm not sure... The issue was the media's portrayal of unions and such, and you defended them using a false conception of "union" which exists only in your personal "world". I think you did not want to address my charge that pro-capital extremism abounds in the industry and there is nothing to balance it. Again, when broadcasters and periodicals warm up to the idea of completely nationalizing all retirement schemes, as well as all utilities incl voice and data, then I might consider Fox to be providing a useful element of balance... because the opposite of those things are what's in vogue among journalists now. Fox is just the most comfortable place on the dial for an ignorant white suburban man to assuage his conscience with a combination of half-truth and empty propaganda.
You should know better. That's like saying hard disks weren't designed for consumers to access files after pressing 'delete'. Or that the LEDs on your network device weren't intended to have data read from them.
I mean, how silly! Yet, the US government and other parties have made it their serious business to do exactly these things. Read CRT conents around corners? Yep! Keylogging using audio profiling techniques? Famously so.
Yes, there is a concern even if there is no serruptitious RFID spying at the moment. It's broadcasting sensitive data in some part of the spectrum.
Do I need to remind slashdotters that yeags ago, infrared Keyfobs were hijacked by car thieves using cheap Palm Pilots? Now imagine that Keyfob is not only radio, but transmits without you pressing it and the data contains biometric data about YOUR PERSON.
What a sense of 'balance': No democratic controls through government, no workplace democracy where the poor can participate. Zip. Just a veneer of accommodation with an unoriginal outsourcing and worker investment scheme underneath. I'd say that is completely lopsided; calling it the product of a plutocratic instinct would be kind.
Of course, your exercise in rationalizing such a proposal through relabeling sure would make it seem fair on the evening news. To stupid people. Translating from doublespeak to plain-spokenness: "See this here outsourcing corporation? It's a 'Union' now. The mandarins at the Federalist Society say so!"
At least communists these days seem to recognize where their ideology had slid into single-minded totalitarianism. Libertarians advocating the "purely capitalist way" have that same sort of zeal, but unfortunately aren't nearly experienced enough to realize this themselves much less admit it to others. Still, market utopia could arrive in New Hampshire one day, right before the Rapture comes to South Carolina (or whatever place it is now).
As for the confusion you feel about the UAW, let me spell it out for you: They work well for Honda, so the common point of failure here is the American executive just as was the case in the 1970s (unless you can point out the union picket lines demanding an end to fuel-efficient cars on the production lines... I didn't think so). IMO America should accelerate this trend of outsourcing CEO and Director positions to other countries; It's very effective.
Now I'm going to check my bank account to see how much I can buy into this moral 'workplace democracy' (e.g. union) that you speak of.
I eat hippies for breakfast. And apparently, you too...
Must... Not... Let... Non... Christian... Thoughts... Enter... Head! AARGH!!!
That's what Christian Rock says to me: Ideological Purity.
There are so many mainstream artists who sing Christian themes (when its appropriate, or if fits well to make a good song), perhaps even most artists. Do the 'unsaved' reject them for it? No. Do 'Christian Rock' devotees consider them to be Christian-enough? No, because they don't pass the purity test.
The best Hardware Compatability List for Linux that I've seen is here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php
It could be better (it HAS to get better) but I did get some useful modem purchasing info from it.
You are wise to inquire about Linux compatability before buying components for your 'industry standard x86 platform'.
On the Mac, the apps's dock icon will just jump up and down for a while without stealing focus. The modal dialog will be there waiting for you when the app is selected.
That's all I want to know. :-)