Probably not a fair comparison. A more fair comparison would be- what if Iran put a lander on Mars (or the Moon, etc.)? Would we sabotage it for no reason? I'd guess not- the political/diplomatic fallout would be large, and the gains would be non-existent.
Same true of China. Would China sabotage a USA space probe for no gain? Well, would we sabotage a Chinese spacecraft for no gain? Again, I'd guess not.
Inked fingers solve the "dead people voting" problem, and other related ballot-stuffing techniques. Those are what that idiotic GGGP (or however many layers it was) was getting at. It's also a good way of raising awareness about voting on voting day- a very visual sign of who has been bothered to vote and who has stayed at home.
While it doesn't solve the "illegal immigrants voting in my elections" problem, I'm not convinced that's even a real problem. Is there any decent evidence that illegal voters are anything like a big enough problem to actually influence results?
Giving far reaching powers to detain, strip-search and irradiate people to private companies in the hope that they can mount an effective and fool-proof security system to protect things of national importance? What could possibly go wrong?
Having said that, I would not recommend GnuCash for your business because: 1. You will need to share your data with your accountant, and they understand QuickBooks or PeachTree only.
Aside from anything else, I think this comment is probably overly harsh but does have a useful nugget in it: make sure you're hiring people who are happy with your open source choices.
An accountant is only an employee. If you want to use GnuCash, then it's not unreasonable that your accountant should accommodate it- but it will probably mean shopping around for an accountant who either has previous experience or is tech savvy and open to using a new tool.
Same goes for the rest of your support network. It's not unreasonable that this guy might source his hardware and software from a local computer shop, maybe even pay them a retainer to be his "tech support". If that's the case, he can demand any crazy software and hardware combinations he likes- but it's worth shopping around for an IT shop that's willing to support you, rather than an entrenched MS shop.
Puppy is great for running off a permanent live USB. Although to be honest I've lost track of the development of it somewhat- last time I downloaded a new version of it I felt like I was using a completely different distro to how it was originally...
Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'd be interested to hear from a more regular user on what's changed over the years.
The concept of "pre-ordering" is clearly not for you.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. You'll just have to wait for the release and buy it conventionally (if you still want one). Pre-ordering will always be a leap of faith.
I would be interested in an "unsigned only" mode, if it'd let me ditch the pre-installed shovelware that uses up about a quarter of my phone's goddamned memory...
Isn't the definition of terrorist always "those people we don't like"?
Don't get me wrong, lots of "terrorists" are definitely bad people and all that. But there's only so often you can hear Taliban fighters (nasty lot, undoubtedly) fighting in their own country against foreign invaders called "terrorists" in the media before you decide the term no longer has any objective meaning.
Already happened. They've "transferred all their assets" to Unxis Inc, which according to Groklaw seems to be comprised of many of the same people from SCO Group. Even their website has been hastily and lazily re-branded in a "we barely care if you don't believe us" sort of way: http://www.sco.com/
Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3?
on
CDE Open Sourced
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· Score: 1
There are already plenty of desktop environments for low end hardware, such as XFCE, LXDE and god knows how many others. It doesn't sound like CDE (still) has anything to offer above the competition.
This sounds like a case of open-sourcing abandonware so as not to leave the remaining users high and dry (particularly important here as the existing CDE users will all be industrial equipment users who have paid millions for their systems). Better than letting the code sink into a blackhole, but hardly much for most of us to get excited about.
It's just a shame CDE wasn't open-sourced back when it was still relevant. If it had, it would probably still be relevant today; there wouldn't have been a KDE or XFCE if CDE had been open, and it's feasible that it could have gone on to grab a significant chunk of the Linux, BSD and Unix market and held onto it to this day.
Yes it does. At most I could accept that due to our technology we can (hardly) substitute meat with something else.
Unless I'm much mistaken, many Buddhist sects mandate vegetarianism. Buddhism is about 2500 years old. Jainism is even stricter, and that's 3000 or so years old. I'm guessing the followers of those religions figured out a way of substituting meat decently enough without modern technology.
If you're not a vegan, the only super-high-tech meat substitute you really need is eggs. Eggs contain almost exactly the same protein, amino acids, vitamin B12, and other nutrients as meat. Basically, they are meat (an unfertilised egg has exactly the same composition as a fertilised egg, much the same as the animal it grows in to). That plus the same mix of vegetables and nuts that meat eaters should be eating anyway and you're nutritionally good to go.
I'm no vegetarian, but I think that if I had to reduce my meat intake to one portion a month or something (which $30 a cut would probably imply) I'd survive happily enough. As an enthusiastic cook I'd be very sad about it, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
Perhaps the broader point is that it should apply to more people. People should be more inclined to grow or raise their own food. People should be inclined to eat more vegetables and less meat. People should stop breeding (and eating) at a pace that is beyond our sustainability. We shouldn't be wasting the majority of our food crops to feed livestock, just so we can eat beef three times per day.
I have a very small garden (maybe 5 metres by 5 metres, including the very small patio. I'm not going to be raising many livestock if that's what I've got to work with; it's barely big enough to fit a rabbit hutch. It's big enough to grow a few veggies and fruits, but I'm not exactly going to manage subsistence living any time soon.
A lot of people I know grow a few edibles (tomato plants, gooseberry bushes, etc.) and that's no bad thing from a sustainability point of view. But once you factor in just how little space most people have, plus gardening incompetence (most of what I grow gets murdered by aphids or harvested by the magpies before I can get my teeth into it), you're not exactly going to save the world.
Why not? Things get more expensive sometimes- it can happen to meat.
Fun fact is that oysters used to be a peasant food in the UK- there are old recipes for things like "beef and oyster pie", where the oysters were used to bulk out the mega-expensive beef. Now beef is cheap, and oysters are a hugely expensive luxury item; those peasant recipes would cost £100's to cook at today's prices. That had nothing to do with the government.
Meat could go back that way again (and oysters won't be coming back down). We'll have to adjust our diets again- and your choice will be either going back to the mostly turnip-based diet of our ancestors, or finding something new to eat with all our modern knowledge.
During that time, Earth had almost no ice cover at all. The odds of a cold-blooded dinosaur getting frozen (being somewhere very cold while still alive), happening to be frozen in one of the tiniest of handfuls of places that remained frozen throughout the PETM, and that place staying undisturbed throughout 55 million years of continental drift and shifting mountain ranges, is pretty much slim to none. That's the reason we've never seen anything like it yet.
Patents are supposed to be for "non-obvious" inventions- things which you can be reasonably sure someone else in the field wouldn't come up with in the same circumstances.
If Apple and Sony (not to mention LG with the Prada Phone) all came up with identical designs independently at almost exactly the same time, that's a pretty strong statement that the patent is "obvious" and shouldn't be allowed.
I was going to say something similar, but not in a negative way.
TFA appears to be arguing that Android will fail because it doesn't follow Apple's highly restrictive business model. The other big company to follow an non-restrictive business model like Android was Microsoft- and they've had an almost completely dominant position in the OS space for decades. If Android has a similar experience to what Windows has had, they can count themselves lucky.
Not to mention the fact that because sending things through space is more to do with gravitational billiards than it is to do with simply aiming and firing, it has almost nothing in common with launching something from one point on the Earth's surface to another.
Or the fact that there's no way that a golfer could hit a ball that far, so they might as well have picked any sport ("kicking a football", "throwing a javelin", "firing an arrow").
Or the fact that in golf (and the others) you launch the projectile from a stationary launcher, while in space travel the projectile carries its own propulsion.
Although I can see the appeal of something like "bug bounties", I can't help but feel that it's basically testing on the cheap. As an IT professional, it feels a bit like devaluing a highly skilled career; or at best, making testers nothing but self-employed, pay-as-you-go workers rather than full employees or traditional contractors.
I mean, what Facebook are basically offering is "no win no fee" Penetration Testing. Rather than paying a team of certified, experienced Pen Testers to run a thorough and comprehensive report, they're saying "yeah, do a Pen Test, but we'll only pay you if you find anything wrong". Not only that, but "we'll only pay you properly if you find something really wrong". And if Facebook have actually managed to inadvertently make their system secure, they'll get to find that out via 100's of hours of free testing.
Bug bounties to encourage end-users to post proper bug reports is one thing, but this seems like a slightly grubby step too far to me.
I disagree. The point of an IPO is to get money for the company doing the offering, not to make institutional investors rich. The stock was priced perfectly to extract the most money out of investors and give it to Facebook. Had they priced it at $25 and it had popped to $50, Facebook would have had less money at the end of the day.
FB were, like you say, trying to get the most amount of money for FB. But the investors were trying to get the most amount of money for the investors. It's essentially a competition between the two. It's the same as selling beans in a shop- the shopkeeper is trying to get the most money for the fewest beans, the shopper is trying to get the most beans for the least money.
As someone who is not the founder of Facebook, I have more affinity to the "investors" group (although I didn't actually invest). It's fair to say, from this perspective, that the shares were way overpriced. It was far too much money for far too few beans. Sane people should not have invested at that price.
Big institutional investors can look after themselves- I'm not going to cry any tears that they've lost money. But it's a real shame for the naive minor investors who get ripped off by these things. You could take a Darwinian "fools will be parted from their money" attitude, but it's still rotten.
I was under the impression that the Galaxy range outsells the Nexus range at a similar price point. I've not used either extensively, but I'm not sure what features Nexus is supposed to have over Galaxy. The only things I've heard that Nexus beats Galaxy on are ease of rooting and re-flashing and other such geeky treats- all good, but not exactly marks of great innovation; just marks of a different philosophy towards the end user.
Other than the fact that Google like to have a flagship model under their own brand, I don't see how Nexus is a sign of the "first party getting sick of OEMs".
Ethanol is renewable and zero carbon. Zero carbon because in order to make the ethanol, you grow plants which absorb CO2 out of the air. The amount of carbon those plants absorb must be at least equal to the amount released when you burn the end product.
Ethanol has "non-green" drawbacks. Burning it still produces air pollution in the original sense, and growing feedstock for bio-fuels deprives people of land for growing edible crops.
Slashdot Mirror
1: Android sells on cheap phones.
2: Android sells on expensive phones.
3: Android makers profit.
1: Symbian sells on cheap phones.
2: Symbian does not sell on expensive phones.
3: Nokia profits.
1: iOS does not sell on cheap phones.
2: iOS sells on expensive phones.
3: Apple profits.
1: Windows doesn't sell on cheap phones.
2: Windows doesn't sell on expensive phones.
3: Microsoft does not profit.
2 out of 2 is good. 1 out of 2 is OK. 0 out of 2 is a fail. I think that's the point.
Probably not a fair comparison. A more fair comparison would be- what if Iran put a lander on Mars (or the Moon, etc.)? Would we sabotage it for no reason? I'd guess not- the political/diplomatic fallout would be large, and the gains would be non-existent.
Same true of China. Would China sabotage a USA space probe for no gain? Well, would we sabotage a Chinese spacecraft for no gain? Again, I'd guess not.
Inked fingers solve the "dead people voting" problem, and other related ballot-stuffing techniques. Those are what that idiotic GGGP (or however many layers it was) was getting at. It's also a good way of raising awareness about voting on voting day- a very visual sign of who has been bothered to vote and who has stayed at home.
While it doesn't solve the "illegal immigrants voting in my elections" problem, I'm not convinced that's even a real problem. Is there any decent evidence that illegal voters are anything like a big enough problem to actually influence results?
Giving far reaching powers to detain, strip-search and irradiate people to private companies in the hope that they can mount an effective and fool-proof security system to protect things of national importance? What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe those good folks at G4S would take the contract?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=g4s+olympics
It works for the games consoles...
Having said that, I would not recommend GnuCash for your business because:
1. You will need to share your data with your accountant, and they understand QuickBooks or PeachTree only.
Aside from anything else, I think this comment is probably overly harsh but does have a useful nugget in it: make sure you're hiring people who are happy with your open source choices.
An accountant is only an employee. If you want to use GnuCash, then it's not unreasonable that your accountant should accommodate it- but it will probably mean shopping around for an accountant who either has previous experience or is tech savvy and open to using a new tool.
Same goes for the rest of your support network. It's not unreasonable that this guy might source his hardware and software from a local computer shop, maybe even pay them a retainer to be his "tech support". If that's the case, he can demand any crazy software and hardware combinations he likes- but it's worth shopping around for an IT shop that's willing to support you, rather than an entrenched MS shop.
Puppy is great for running off a permanent live USB. Although to be honest I've lost track of the development of it somewhat- last time I downloaded a new version of it I felt like I was using a completely different distro to how it was originally...
Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'd be interested to hear from a more regular user on what's changed over the years.
The concept of "pre-ordering" is clearly not for you.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. You'll just have to wait for the release and buy it conventionally (if you still want one). Pre-ordering will always be a leap of faith.
I would be interested in an "unsigned only" mode, if it'd let me ditch the pre-installed shovelware that uses up about a quarter of my phone's goddamned memory...
Presumably a burnt out husk is safer and easier to deal with than a metal box of damaged electronics and high explosives.
Although if they were happy with the risks, presumably it'd be easier to perform the autopsy on the crash if it hasn't been burnt to cinders first.
Isn't the definition of terrorist always "those people we don't like"?
Don't get me wrong, lots of "terrorists" are definitely bad people and all that. But there's only so often you can hear Taliban fighters (nasty lot, undoubtedly) fighting in their own country against foreign invaders called "terrorists" in the media before you decide the term no longer has any objective meaning.
If Debian is Linux's best chance at a mass-market, broad appeal desktop OS then I think it's fair to say that that's a dream that's dead on arrival
Already happened. They've "transferred all their assets" to Unxis Inc, which according to Groklaw seems to be comprised of many of the same people from SCO Group. Even their website has been hastily and lazily re-branded in a "we barely care if you don't believe us" sort of way:
http://www.sco.com/
There are already plenty of desktop environments for low end hardware, such as XFCE, LXDE and god knows how many others. It doesn't sound like CDE (still) has anything to offer above the competition.
This sounds like a case of open-sourcing abandonware so as not to leave the remaining users high and dry (particularly important here as the existing CDE users will all be industrial equipment users who have paid millions for their systems). Better than letting the code sink into a blackhole, but hardly much for most of us to get excited about.
It's just a shame CDE wasn't open-sourced back when it was still relevant. If it had, it would probably still be relevant today; there wouldn't have been a KDE or XFCE if CDE had been open, and it's feasible that it could have gone on to grab a significant chunk of the Linux, BSD and Unix market and held onto it to this day.
"The human body does not require meat."
Yes it does. At most I could accept that due to our technology we can (hardly) substitute meat with something else.
Unless I'm much mistaken, many Buddhist sects mandate vegetarianism. Buddhism is about 2500 years old. Jainism is even stricter, and that's 3000 or so years old. I'm guessing the followers of those religions figured out a way of substituting meat decently enough without modern technology.
If you're not a vegan, the only super-high-tech meat substitute you really need is eggs. Eggs contain almost exactly the same protein, amino acids, vitamin B12, and other nutrients as meat. Basically, they are meat (an unfertilised egg has exactly the same composition as a fertilised egg, much the same as the animal it grows in to). That plus the same mix of vegetables and nuts that meat eaters should be eating anyway and you're nutritionally good to go.
I'm no vegetarian, but I think that if I had to reduce my meat intake to one portion a month or something (which $30 a cut would probably imply) I'd survive happily enough. As an enthusiastic cook I'd be very sad about it, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
Perhaps the broader point is that it should apply to more people. People should be more inclined to grow or raise their own food. People should be inclined to eat more vegetables and less meat. People should stop breeding (and eating) at a pace that is beyond our sustainability. We shouldn't be wasting the majority of our food crops to feed livestock, just so we can eat beef three times per day.
I have a very small garden (maybe 5 metres by 5 metres, including the very small patio. I'm not going to be raising many livestock if that's what I've got to work with; it's barely big enough to fit a rabbit hutch. It's big enough to grow a few veggies and fruits, but I'm not exactly going to manage subsistence living any time soon.
A lot of people I know grow a few edibles (tomato plants, gooseberry bushes, etc.) and that's no bad thing from a sustainability point of view. But once you factor in just how little space most people have, plus gardening incompetence (most of what I grow gets murdered by aphids or harvested by the magpies before I can get my teeth into it), you're not exactly going to save the world.
Why not? Things get more expensive sometimes- it can happen to meat.
Fun fact is that oysters used to be a peasant food in the UK- there are old recipes for things like "beef and oyster pie", where the oysters were used to bulk out the mega-expensive beef. Now beef is cheap, and oysters are a hugely expensive luxury item; those peasant recipes would cost £100's to cook at today's prices. That had nothing to do with the government.
Meat could go back that way again (and oysters won't be coming back down). We'll have to adjust our diets again- and your choice will be either going back to the mostly turnip-based diet of our ancestors, or finding something new to eat with all our modern knowledge.
Sub freezing temperatures 65 million years ago, maybe. Sub freezing temperatures 55 million years ago, probably not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
During that time, Earth had almost no ice cover at all. The odds of a cold-blooded dinosaur getting frozen (being somewhere very cold while still alive), happening to be frozen in one of the tiniest of handfuls of places that remained frozen throughout the PETM, and that place staying undisturbed throughout 55 million years of continental drift and shifting mountain ranges, is pretty much slim to none. That's the reason we've never seen anything like it yet.
Patents are supposed to be for "non-obvious" inventions- things which you can be reasonably sure someone else in the field wouldn't come up with in the same circumstances.
If Apple and Sony (not to mention LG with the Prada Phone) all came up with identical designs independently at almost exactly the same time, that's a pretty strong statement that the patent is "obvious" and shouldn't be allowed.
I was going to say something similar, but not in a negative way.
TFA appears to be arguing that Android will fail because it doesn't follow Apple's highly restrictive business model. The other big company to follow an non-restrictive business model like Android was Microsoft- and they've had an almost completely dominant position in the OS space for decades. If Android has a similar experience to what Windows has had, they can count themselves lucky.
Not to mention the fact that because sending things through space is more to do with gravitational billiards than it is to do with simply aiming and firing, it has almost nothing in common with launching something from one point on the Earth's surface to another.
Or the fact that there's no way that a golfer could hit a ball that far, so they might as well have picked any sport ("kicking a football", "throwing a javelin", "firing an arrow").
Or the fact that in golf (and the others) you launch the projectile from a stationary launcher, while in space travel the projectile carries its own propulsion.
Also, golf isn't an Olympic event.
Although I can see the appeal of something like "bug bounties", I can't help but feel that it's basically testing on the cheap. As an IT professional, it feels a bit like devaluing a highly skilled career; or at best, making testers nothing but self-employed, pay-as-you-go workers rather than full employees or traditional contractors.
I mean, what Facebook are basically offering is "no win no fee" Penetration Testing. Rather than paying a team of certified, experienced Pen Testers to run a thorough and comprehensive report, they're saying "yeah, do a Pen Test, but we'll only pay you if you find anything wrong". Not only that, but "we'll only pay you properly if you find something really wrong". And if Facebook have actually managed to inadvertently make their system secure, they'll get to find that out via 100's of hours of free testing.
Bug bounties to encourage end-users to post proper bug reports is one thing, but this seems like a slightly grubby step too far to me.
I disagree. The point of an IPO is to get money for the company doing the offering, not to make institutional investors rich. The stock was priced perfectly to extract the most money out of investors and give it to Facebook. Had they priced it at $25 and it had popped to $50, Facebook would have had less money at the end of the day.
FB were, like you say, trying to get the most amount of money for FB. But the investors were trying to get the most amount of money for the investors. It's essentially a competition between the two. It's the same as selling beans in a shop- the shopkeeper is trying to get the most money for the fewest beans, the shopper is trying to get the most beans for the least money.
As someone who is not the founder of Facebook, I have more affinity to the "investors" group (although I didn't actually invest). It's fair to say, from this perspective, that the shares were way overpriced. It was far too much money for far too few beans. Sane people should not have invested at that price.
Big institutional investors can look after themselves- I'm not going to cry any tears that they've lost money. But it's a real shame for the naive minor investors who get ripped off by these things. You could take a Darwinian "fools will be parted from their money" attitude, but it's still rotten.
I was under the impression that the Galaxy range outsells the Nexus range at a similar price point. I've not used either extensively, but I'm not sure what features Nexus is supposed to have over Galaxy. The only things I've heard that Nexus beats Galaxy on are ease of rooting and re-flashing and other such geeky treats- all good, but not exactly marks of great innovation; just marks of a different philosophy towards the end user.
Other than the fact that Google like to have a flagship model under their own brand, I don't see how Nexus is a sign of the "first party getting sick of OEMs".
Ethanol is renewable and zero carbon. Zero carbon because in order to make the ethanol, you grow plants which absorb CO2 out of the air. The amount of carbon those plants absorb must be at least equal to the amount released when you burn the end product.
Ethanol has "non-green" drawbacks. Burning it still produces air pollution in the original sense, and growing feedstock for bio-fuels deprives people of land for growing edible crops.