Oh and I almost forgot...
I have written a wonderful program which I call "Hello World 2k4" which I value at 24 Billion dollars. I will donate it to the public domain for the good of all mankind so now I am the world's greatest philanthropist for 2004. Here is an excerpt:
5 REM (C) 2004 7 REM PRICE: $24000000000 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 GOTO 10
Actually according to Business Week Bill Gates is the world's biggest philanthropist.
Congratulations on actually looking something up unlike many of the other posters in this thread, however you overlooked some crucial information. If you read the "special report" closely you will find that the amounts listed are not for donations but for monies 'given or PLEDGED'. This is not a small point. Look in the last column labelled 'Percent of wealth donated'. You can see that several persons have given or pledged much more than they own. This can only happen if they have made large pledges to be spread out over many years which is just what Gates did on his first sizeable donation and possibly all of them.
If it still isn't quite sinking in then let me illustrate by becoming the world's most generous philanthropist myself, right here, right now, on Slashdot. I pledge to GIVE 23 BILLION DOLLARS TO CHARITY(to be spread over 23 billion years) which puts me at the top of the WORLD'S MOST GENEROUS PHILANTHROPIST list. Oh damn, that was only for 1999-2003. Okay forget it, but I think you see how it works now.
Gates has been funding disease research for years, particularly in foreign countries.
I remember that he has made small (by his standards) donations toward disease research or prevention in third world nations. Was this supposed to trick me into a knee jerk denial so that you could discredit me with a news link? How pathetic.
There is a parable that talks of a rich man giving one of his many gold coins to the building of the temple and of a poor man who gives only a copper piece, but God loved the poor man more because the single copper piece was everything he owned. Which of the two men do you think gave more? I wonder if a Gates-fanboy can give the right answer.
It's always been well-known that he's given to charities.
I specifically mentioned a donation he made of $50M per year so why would you pretend to contradict me? My point was that Gates only recently started to give anything to charity and secondly that the size of his actual donations compared to his net worth are disgraceful. I do not wear blinders but I will pretend to 'take them off' for your sake if you will take off your tinfoil hat.
What's sad is bill Gates has donated well over twenty billion dollars to charities
Gates has never donated that much to anything. It was only a few years back when he was exposed as a cheap skinflint for donating almost nothing, ever! Soon after he made a big deal out of offering ONE billion (over twenty years so that means about 50M per year) when his net worth was way over 100 billion. If I made a similar, oh so magnamimous, gesture I could beat Gates by throwing a handful of nickels to a Salvation Army Santa.
I'm posting AC because judging by your +4 insigtful score the mods are abusing their moderation points again and I don't feel like taking the karma hit.
No you are posting as AC because your post is a damn lie. As others have pointed out, even the actual donations that can be counted as coming from Gates are often in the form of Microsoft software (x full retail price) or PC's that come with Microsoft software pre-installed (and choosing which PC vendor to fill that contract can be used to get what you want in unrelated negotiations).
but the only real limiting factor I see here is I cannot really imagine everyone using a cell phone today escentially walking around talking on a speaker phone. It would be so overwhelming that you would hardly be able to carry on a conversation.
How about sub-dermal cochlear implants which receive audio wirelessly?
Also throw in the research on sub-vocalization that Slashdot posted today and Voila! you have what would previously be considered mental telepathy. Now if they can just make people's heads explode by staring at them they'll have a marketable product.
(Metallic Voice): Hello Grandma... This is Peter... I am running late... Will be there after I pick up the kids at the YMCA...
Grandma drops the phone and crys "Oh No! I knew I should have gotten
that policy with Old Glory. Now the metal ones are coming for me and I don't have any insurance."
The D-Link router failed to stealth one port whiles the bare system shows how vulnerable we can be without a firewall.
But the port it shows as closed is 113 which is sometimes needed to authenticate to ftp or web sites. The authors of the review are assuming that the best firewall stealths absolutely everything. But if a product completely protects your system why wouldn't that be good enough? Same for ZoneAlarm4 not stealthing several ports under Advanced Port Scanning.
I like the way they bring up outbound filtering though. Most "personal" firewalls don't do anything with this.
Canada: I would like to refer to the Americans here; they and the Canadians are quite alike when it comes to Counter-Strike. The Canadians benefit much from close competition with some of the most developed American teams, and they also seem to adopt the same kind of abilities as the Americans.
If the differences in play style he has observed are due to culture then this makes sense. Canadian culture and American culture is remarkably similar. I occasionally go up there on business, and I sometimes forget that I'm in a different country (except in Quebec; that really is different)
I never got unsolicited emails back then even (for quite a while) after Canter and Siegel. The commercial cross posts that you refer to were usually just to the few usenet groups that were somewhat relevant to the product or service. Canter and Siegel hit every single newsgroup!
Well, you actually had something insightful to say. You should have said it when the article was fresh. We could have had a good discussion with lots of different viewpoints. Just wanted to say that I agree with much of what you said in this post. I have pined for a standard installer on Linux myself. There are some written in and for Java but I cant expect my users to have a compatible JRE installed. There is also the Lokisoft installer by Sam Latinga. I have not checked it out yet but plan to eventually. You are right that the widely used interfaces (KDE and Gnome) have too many options, yet still not quite the ones I want. There are settings to hide some of that complexity through sort of a User Advancedness Level setting.
Oh and BTW OSX does rock. I don't use it but I'm not so much a zealot of another OS that I can't give credit where credit is due. OS X should be one of the models that Linux emulates. Why perform bizarre UI experiments to try to chance upon something better than Windows when there are plenty of examples already out there? That is what Microsoft did. I saw everything in their UI in other OS's before I saw them in Windows (including Linux and that was pre 95!) We need to use that same strategy to make Linux respectable. Once vendors are including Linux drivers with their new hardware and software is released on Windows and Linux simultaneously, then we can do great things.
or tries so much to be like Windows that it fails to be better... ...you can't force it down userland without them bitching about it. At least for now.
You made one statement that sounded like we shouldn't make Linux like Windows, but then you pointed out the very reason why we must. For Linux to gain enough marketshare to be viable it needs to be so similar to Windows that from a user's viewpoint the only difference is the price. Once Linux has about 25% of the world market then we can afford to let idealism and perfectionism have their say.
Actually corporations in the US have been granted "personhood" as if they are living beings. It is weird yes. And it caused many inconsistencies in the laws which are still being worked out usually to the detriment of actual living persons.
I like your attitude. India does not need people with post-grad degrees answering moronic questions at a call center. But America has an entire class of otherwise unemployable people who would consider that the pinnacle of their careers. In a perfect world, each job would be held by someone to whom it is part of their
self-actualization.
It seems as though Americans are being punished today for having forefathers who loved them and worked hard to give them a better life, because now the fact that our communities are relatively safe, sanitary, and aesthetic is a liability when competing for jobs offered by multinational corporations who pledge allegiance only to money.
Ok. I went back and carefully re-read above figure 3 and re-read below figure 3. I searched the article for "emulate" and for "compat". I studied figure 3 in great detail. I even unfocused my eyes and tried to look *into* figure 3....No joy.
Apparently all an anonymous troll must do to whore karma is to tell someone else to to RTFA and pretend to point them to the right spot. And since the moderators don't bother to look... TADA! +5 informative. Sheesh.
I don't think we should try to find out what the mass of the Higgs-boson particle is. Bad things tend to happen when you do that!!!
Look on the bright side. Now that we know the Large Hadron Collider will commence operation in 2007, we can all save a few bucks by declining those extended warranties.
Otherwise you have to patch Lotus 1-2-3 to make it work.
Seriously though, it seemed to me that at first this should break backward compatability but why couldn't BIOS emulation be plugged in as an EFI driver? All it has to do is provide the same software interrupts and it wouldn't even have to be loaded unless your OS needs BIOS to boot. Just because this "framework" isn't natively backwards compatible doesn't mean it couldn't be made backwards compatible.
These trivial patents are keeping bright, industrious people working as virtual slaves for the established software publishers who steal the fruit of their mental labor through legal chicanery. The copyright and patent laws intended purpose of furthering Progress is not being accomplished. Instead they have been subverted to the point where the Progress is greatly slowed and only the wealthy can fight one of these (ought to be) unenforceable patents long enough to overturn it.
I have been corrected about the Rubik cube spelling myself. In my defense, it has been a quarter century since I saw it in print but I knew there was no 'x'. Well good luck on the rest of your problems.
It's Rubic's Cube. Rubic was the name of the man who invented it.
Sorry about your misfortune. I had a similar one in the early nineties when the cold war ended just in time to eliminate almost all demand for my major in Aerospace Engineering. However I disagree with your recommendation that people don't enter EE or CS. If the current lack of demand causes this country to stop producing graduates in those programs then there could never ever be an upswing here in that industry. The manpower wouldn't exist to even try to compete with China and India.
People should study whatever they are interested in and excel at. If that is CS then good for them. We will need them in the future. Keep in mind that all new technologies will intersect with computer technology. If someone invented a transporter or a holodeck tomorrow, you can be damn sure that it would be controlled by computers. Want to outsource those too?
And cheer up, since the economy is starting to warm up again and the H1B visas have dropped back to their pre-2k levels, you may get a chance to use that fancy degree of yours before long.
Here are a few choice quotes that are easily missed:
over the past six months inquiries have begun coming in from top-level and middle-level executives exploring job opportunities in top technology firms. This is in addition to regular middle-level and top-level management positions held by foreigners in multinational companies that have large operations here.
First of all notice he is talking about management positions. I would bet that this is more a response to the backlash in the U.S. to offshoring of jobs. Communication and project management between U.S. firms and Indian companies they contract with would be smoother if there are U.S. or British managers there to act as liasons. That takes some of the teeth out of the anti-offshoring peoples arguments. Indian companies will pay them handsomely if they have to to get those contracts.
Many of the inquiries are for jobs in foreign-based multinationals.
Foreign based multinationals can afford to pay the same for a manager in India as they can in the U.S. If they need an american manager in India then the multinational will pay whatever they need to attract an acceptable candidate. On a side note, multinational corporations have little nationalist loyalties. They exist to make their owners richer. If U.S. pollution laws got in their way they would have no compunction about moving a factory to Mexico. If the Mexicans tightened their pollution laws they would be just as happy to move it again to Guatemala. Welcome to globalization. Multinationals are not American companies or British companies or Indian companies. They headquarter wherever taxes are lowest (or even non-existent).
...large Indian companies... have started recruiting sales and marketing people in foreign markets. This has... acted as a push to look for jobs in India when the going at home gets tough.
Again we are not talking about tech jobs here but Sales and Marketing droids, er, executives. And if the large Indian company is paying X amount for someone in a foreign market then they can certainly pay that for the same work performed in India though possibly with a downward cost of living adjustment. Or maybe not because after all jetting home to London for the holidays is expensive and they need these particular foreign workers, just like they needed the Finnish call center workers.
The writer is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations on actually looking something up unlike many of the other posters in this thread, however you overlooked some crucial information. If you read the "special report" closely you will find that the amounts listed are not for donations but for monies 'given or PLEDGED'. This is not a small point. Look in the last column labelled 'Percent of wealth donated'. You can see that several persons have given or pledged much more than they own. This can only happen if they have made large pledges to be spread out over many years which is just what Gates did on his first sizeable donation and possibly all of them.
If it still isn't quite sinking in then let me illustrate by becoming the world's most generous philanthropist myself, right here, right now, on Slashdot. I pledge to GIVE 23 BILLION DOLLARS TO CHARITY (to be spread over 23 billion years) which puts me at the top of the WORLD'S MOST GENEROUS PHILANTHROPIST list. Oh damn, that was only for 1999-2003. Okay forget it, but I think you see how it works now.
I remember that he has made small (by his standards) donations toward disease research or prevention in third world nations. Was this supposed to trick me into a knee jerk denial so that you could discredit me with a news link? How pathetic.
There is a parable that talks of a rich man giving one of his many gold coins to the building of the temple and of a poor man who gives only a copper piece, but God loved the poor man more because the single copper piece was everything he owned. Which of the two men do you think gave more? I wonder if a Gates-fanboy can give the right answer.
It's always been well-known that he's given to charities.
I specifically mentioned a donation he made of $50M per year so why would you pretend to contradict me? My point was that Gates only recently started to give anything to charity and secondly that the size of his actual donations compared to his net worth are disgraceful. I do not wear blinders but I will pretend to 'take them off' for your sake if you will take off your tinfoil hat.
Gates has never donated that much to anything. It was only a few years back when he was exposed as a cheap skinflint for donating almost nothing, ever! Soon after he made a big deal out of offering ONE billion (over twenty years so that means about 50M per year) when his net worth was way over 100 billion. If I made a similar, oh so magnamimous, gesture I could beat Gates by throwing a handful of nickels to a Salvation Army Santa.
I'm posting AC because judging by your +4 insigtful score the mods are abusing their moderation points again and I don't feel like taking the karma hit.
No you are posting as AC because your post is a damn lie. As others have pointed out, even the actual donations that can be counted as coming from Gates are often in the form of Microsoft software (x full retail price) or PC's that come with Microsoft software pre-installed (and choosing which PC vendor to fill that contract can be used to get what you want in unrelated negotiations).
How about sub-dermal cochlear implants which receive audio wirelessly? Also throw in the research on sub-vocalization that Slashdot posted today and Voila! you have what would previously be considered mental telepathy. Now if they can just make people's heads explode by staring at them they'll have a marketable product.
She could always tell what I was about to say and warn me not to say it.
Grandma drops the phone and crys "Oh No! I knew I should have gotten that policy with Old Glory. Now the metal ones are coming for me and I don't have any insurance."
But the port it shows as closed is 113 which is sometimes needed to authenticate to ftp or web sites. The authors of the review are assuming that the best firewall stealths absolutely everything. But if a product completely protects your system why wouldn't that be good enough? Same for ZoneAlarm4 not stealthing several ports under Advanced Port Scanning.
I like the way they bring up outbound filtering though. Most "personal" firewalls don't do anything with this.
Finally there are real, measurable monetary losses that customers can sue for.
If the differences in play style he has observed are due to culture then this makes sense. Canadian culture and American culture is remarkably similar. I occasionally go up there on business, and I sometimes forget that I'm in a different country (except in Quebec; that really is different)
I never got unsolicited emails back then even (for quite a while) after Canter and Siegel. The commercial cross posts that you refer to were usually just to the few usenet groups that were somewhat relevant to the product or service. Canter and Siegel hit every single newsgroup!
Well, you actually had something insightful to say. You should have said it when the article was fresh. We could have had a good discussion with lots of different viewpoints. Just wanted to say that I agree with much of what you said in this post. I have pined for a standard installer on Linux myself. There are some written in and for Java but I cant expect my users to have a compatible JRE installed. There is also the Lokisoft installer by Sam Latinga. I have not checked it out yet but plan to eventually. You are right that the widely used interfaces (KDE and Gnome) have too many options, yet still not quite the ones I want. There are settings to hide some of that complexity through sort of a User Advancedness Level setting.
Oh and BTW OSX does rock. I don't use it but I'm not so much a zealot of another OS that I can't give credit where credit is due. OS X should be one of the models that Linux emulates. Why perform bizarre UI experiments to try to chance upon something better than Windows when there are plenty of examples already out there? That is what Microsoft did. I saw everything in their UI in other OS's before I saw them in Windows (including Linux and that was pre 95!) We need to use that same strategy to make Linux respectable. Once vendors are including Linux drivers with their new hardware and software is released on Windows and Linux simultaneously, then we can do great things.
You made one statement that sounded like we shouldn't make Linux like Windows, but then you pointed out the very reason why we must. For Linux to gain enough marketshare to be viable it needs to be so similar to Windows that from a user's viewpoint the only difference is the price. Once Linux has about 25% of the world market then we can afford to let idealism and perfectionism have their say.
That's no superhero. That's junk Frank Costanza's lawyer.
Actually corporations in the US have been granted "personhood" as if they are living beings. It is weird yes. And it caused many inconsistencies in the laws which are still being worked out usually to the detriment of actual living persons.
Yes really. You have made assumptions that may not be true. Nowhere does the article state that the PC BIOS is emulated.
My days really are getting longer!
It seems as though Americans are being punished today for having forefathers who loved them and worked hard to give them a better life, because now the fact that our communities are relatively safe, sanitary, and aesthetic is a liability when competing for jobs offered by multinational corporations who pledge allegiance only to money.
Ok. I went back and carefully re-read above figure 3 and re-read below figure 3. I searched the article for "emulate" and for "compat". I studied figure 3 in great detail. I even unfocused my eyes and tried to look *into* figure 3. ...No joy.
Apparently all an anonymous troll must do to whore karma is to tell someone else to to RTFA and pretend to point them to the right spot. And since the moderators don't bother to look... TADA! +5 informative. Sheesh.
Look on the bright side. Now that we know the Large Hadron Collider will commence operation in 2007, we can all save a few bucks by declining those extended warranties.
Otherwise you have to patch Lotus 1-2-3 to make it work.
Seriously though, it seemed to me that at first this should break backward compatability but why couldn't BIOS emulation be plugged in as an EFI driver? All it has to do is provide the same software interrupts and it wouldn't even have to be loaded unless your OS needs BIOS to boot. Just because this "framework" isn't natively backwards compatible doesn't mean it couldn't be made backwards compatible.
These trivial patents are keeping bright, industrious people working as virtual slaves for the established software publishers who steal the fruit of their mental labor through legal chicanery. The copyright and patent laws intended purpose of furthering Progress is not being accomplished. Instead they have been subverted to the point where the Progress is greatly slowed and only the wealthy can fight one of these (ought to be) unenforceable patents long enough to overturn it.
I have been corrected about the Rubik cube spelling myself. In my defense, it has been a quarter century since I saw it in print but I knew there was no 'x'. Well good luck on the rest of your problems.
It's Rubic's Cube. Rubic was the name of the man who invented it.
Sorry about your misfortune. I had a similar one in the early nineties when the cold war ended just in time to eliminate almost all demand for my major in Aerospace Engineering. However I disagree with your recommendation that people don't enter EE or CS. If the current lack of demand causes this country to stop producing graduates in those programs then there could never ever be an upswing here in that industry. The manpower wouldn't exist to even try to compete with China and India.
People should study whatever they are interested in and excel at. If that is CS then good for them. We will need them in the future. Keep in mind that all new technologies will intersect with computer technology. If someone invented a transporter or a holodeck tomorrow, you can be damn sure that it would be controlled by computers. Want to outsource those too?
And cheer up, since the economy is starting to warm up again and the H1B visas have dropped back to their pre-2k levels, you may get a chance to use that fancy degree of yours before long.
over the past six months inquiries have begun coming in from top-level and middle-level executives exploring job opportunities in top technology firms. This is in addition to regular middle-level and top-level management positions held by foreigners in multinational companies that have large operations here.
First of all notice he is talking about management positions. I would bet that this is more a response to the backlash in the U.S. to offshoring of jobs. Communication and project management between U.S. firms and Indian companies they contract with would be smoother if there are U.S. or British managers there to act as liasons. That takes some of the teeth out of the anti-offshoring peoples arguments. Indian companies will pay them handsomely if they have to to get those contracts.
Many of the inquiries are for jobs in foreign-based multinationals.
Foreign based multinationals can afford to pay the same for a manager in India as they can in the U.S. If they need an american manager in India then the multinational will pay whatever they need to attract an acceptable candidate. On a side note, multinational corporations have little nationalist loyalties. They exist to make their owners richer. If U.S. pollution laws got in their way they would have no compunction about moving a factory to Mexico. If the Mexicans tightened their pollution laws they would be just as happy to move it again to Guatemala. Welcome to globalization. Multinationals are not American companies or British companies or Indian companies. They headquarter wherever taxes are lowest (or even non-existent).
Again we are not talking about tech jobs here but Sales and Marketing droids, er, executives. And if the large Indian company is paying X amount for someone in a foreign market then they can certainly pay that for the same work performed in India though possibly with a downward cost of living adjustment. Or maybe not because after all jetting home to London for the holidays is expensive and they need these particular foreign workers, just like they needed the Finnish call center workers.
The writer is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.
I am not suggesting that the writer was not being truthful about anything only that he is writing from his local perspective. In other words, consider the source. But the impression the article gives is contradicted by this article in the India Times which suggests that Indians are currently looking for ways to circumvent the H1-B visa caps. The author was kind of vague about which foreigners are trying to find work there. Bangalore was mentioned in addition to the U.S. and Britain. So are places like Bangalore the main source of these refugee workers?