Seeing as how you've posted anonymously, most folks probably won't see the post. For this reason I'll quote the bulk of it here.
You are stating your opinion about what companies should be, not what they must be. Once more, you are stating your opinion about what companies should be, not what they must be.
Not at all. I am stating what they are.
Many an organization can perform essentially the task of a social program. These are called charities, or non-profit organizations. By and large, we usually don't refer to them as companies.
What is a company? A legal fiction of an individual? A registered organization that does business and is run by a set of bylaws on file the secretary of state? Is it more than that?
This greatly depends on what kind of company that we're talking about. If you are referring to a corporation that can be publicly traded and invested in, then you are essentially correct. A proprietary business or simple partnership would not fall within the guidelines you are suggesting.
A company is anything the legislature (state or federal) says it is. There's no inherent right of companies.
It may sound like I'm nit picking at terminology, but the terms in question are quite important to understand.
First off your use of the term "right" does not apply here. A "right" is only that which the government cannot do. A company can only fall within regulations at varying levels of government.
Secondly, you keep saying company throughout your post, when it seems what you really mean is corporation. There is a distinct difference between the two concepts.
By contrast, there are inherent rights that people posses. (Our founding documents called these "inalienable rights", meaning that we cannot by contract abrogate them. E.g., you cannot literally sell yourself into slavery even voluntarily, because the freedom you have is part of your humanity, and is not a mere interest or state in property.)
The term "inalieanable rights" has nothing at all to do with slavery. Your inability to sell yourself, or to purchase a person, is not a right. This is a regulation added to the constitution. A fine one at that. Should have been in the first draft!
Anyway, the elevation of companies to individual status is a long process, but nearly complete. You can be sued for slandering a company (and are more likely to than slandering an individual!). A company has rights to due process, often more than individuals who are poor.
Again, you mean "corporation". Furthermore, this wasn't something that was legislated into being. A number of Supreme Court decisions lead us to where we are today, overriding the laws in place at both the state and local levels.
And now on/., we see the growing opinion that companies have the right to be left alone by the very state that gives them ANY life or existence.
Not true in the slightest. Assuming you are still referring to corporations, there are a number of things given up in order to become one. One of the primary things is that the company must disclose all of it's financial status publicly. It also falls under a number of strict laws that a proprietary business isn't.
Well not on my watch. New flash: COMPANIES ARE CREATIONS OF THE STATE. They are fictions; they exist only so long as they do what the state tells them to do.
Perhaps this was true about 100 years ago, using the original concept of what a corporation was.
They have no "inherent" rights to fuck over workers. When it comes to priorities, I place a greater priority on the rights, wellbeing and dignity of people, and less on the "rights" of companies to engage in sharp practices, screw over workers, pay outrageous bonuses to dishonest management, and fire the workers when, for a few years, things are not profitable.
So, what you would suggest is that a company, corporation, whatever, should retain a staff it can no longer afford to pay? HOW?
Look, I'm not saying that pay scales are exactly perfect these days. There's an obvious sucking sound at the top of a lot of these failed companies we've seen over the last few years. It would be highly advantageous for you to actually understand the problems that you apparently feel passionate about.
All your last paragraph amounted to was a stack of leftist propaganda. Whether it's correct or not gets lost in the rhetoric of shallow emotional button pushing.
In our society, at one time, and perhaps once again someday, goverment serves the needs of the PEOPLE, and not the corporations that dominate donations and fund raising.
What mythical time was this? What country? Which corporations??
For instance, do you know which interest groups pay into the political process? How much? To which parties? Again, these are things you should bother to find out rather than allowing yourself to just parrot Ralph Nader rhetoric.
Your heart is in the right place, but it's in desperate need of facts over rhetoric.
Sigh. SGI's core market has never been "movie animation."
I stand corrected. Perhaps a more accurate way to state it would be "one of SGI's most visible markets". 10% is still a pretty healthy chunk to just up and vanish on you one day though.
After seeing your post I feel I should toss in a disclaimer. I have nothing at all against any products from either Sun or SGI. I only wished to point out that Linux has done pretty darn well in their respective core markets.
Thanks for providing the clarification to my post.
If this economic downturn starts to hit enough dotcom kids
Where have you been the last two years? Those dotcom kids you so lovingly refer to WERE the hardest hit sector of the economy.
They have no connection whatsoever to the concept that one can be qualified, willing, and actively searching for work and yet still end up starving.
A little tip you might wish to take to heart, assuming starving isn't something you wish to do. You, the employee, are worth precisely the amount it takes to replace you, and not a penny more.
No economic system in existance works around this basic fact. If after 20 years on the job your qualifications equate to that of that "dotcom kid" fresh out of college, you will go hungry. You can be pro-union, anti-union, socialist, communist, capitalist, and it just won't matter. If someone else can do the same job you're doing at half the cost, you're gonna be out of work!
This isn't some evil corporate scheme designed to pound down the little guy. It's a basic natural law of the relationship between an employer and employee. The only reason an employer hires anyone at all is in the belief that the person in question can make more revenue for that company. Whether you're talking about IBM, Microsoft, or the local coffee shop, this basic fact doesn't go away.
The anti-union attitudes of/. editors is astouding sometimes
A company is not a social program. Once more, a company is not a social program.
A company, any company, exists to provide a product or service that results in what most folks hope is a positive cash flow. If that is the result, it will grow. In that growth will certainly be newer jobs.
The reverse is also true. If a company has proven that it cannot make money, it will shrink. In it's shrinking, fewer employment opportunities exist.
No union, legislation, or any other happy thoughts can change this basic economic fact. When a company, like Corel, is no longer producing products that customers wish to buy, fewer jobs will result. How can you maintain staffing rates of old when you no longer have the cash to pay them?
The US has gone from a "right to work" country to a "right to get fired" country, almost within a few years. The focus on "keeping corporations profitable EVERY SINGLE YEAR" is absurd.
Nevermind the fact that we're actually talking about CANADA here. There has never been, in ANY nation a "right to work". Oh sure, there have been lofty attempts with subsequent failures, but the concept simply doesn't exist in the wild.
First off, a "right" is not what someone does for you. A "right" is what the government can not do to you. Just as true in Canada as the US, or any other country for that matter. At most, something a government does for you could only be described as a "social program".
Please refer to the beginning of this post... repeat as needed.
KDE and Gnome are fighting it out to see which one can be the blandest
Okay, I guess we've got a big fan of both KDE and Gnome going. Aside from how impossibly wrong the above statement is, let's move along here....
trying to catch up to the leading server OS's, like Solaris or IRIX
Trying to catch up?? What freaking planet have you been living on for the past 2 years? IRIX's core market, movie animation, has all but vanished due to Linux. Sun is running about as scared as they ever have over Solaris. It's very fair to say that open source has done a wee more than just "catch up".
we might actually see something revolutionary
What, like the core infrastructure of the Internet your browsing on now? Who knows, maybe that'll amount to something some day.
For your own well being, you might want to consider taking a shot of Pebto, relax a bit, and actually take a hard look at what you're talking about here. A clue stick might just find you!
The only question is, why would you _want_ to do that? The original document was more useful in most cases than the resulting PDF.
Although PDF can be used for collaborating on a project, that is not it's true purpose. It's meant to send a completed document from one point to another, as the author intended it to look.
Why not just send a.doc file? Because there's a darn good chance that the receiving end won't see the same exact document. Word will change the formatting of a document based on the local printer configuration. Page breaks where you don't expect them and such.
Also, if there's isn't a perfect sync between machines and the fonts in use, there becomes another formatting nightmare. The document's presentation changes drastically from what the original author intended.
PDF solves these problems, while also being truly cross platform at no cost.
the lack of any decent viewing software. (By decent, I mean the ability to use my colour preferences (because blinding white backgrounds are more evil than Bill Gates)....
PDF is meant to present what the original author meant for the document to look like. It is not a word processing format, nor is it meant to replace HTML. It exists to transfer a complete document from one point to another, and have it look identical no matter what the platform.
...the ability to search, to copy text to the clipboard, to scroll off the bottom of one page and onto the top of the next, and to do all the other usual things you can normally do with regular documents that are a royal pain with PDF if they are even possible.)
Each and every one of these points are possible, and are built within every Acrobat Reader on all platforms. You may have tried Acrobat, but it sounds like you didn't take the time to actually learn how to use it.
If you're not truly desparate to see this information, go away
Care to share with the Slashdot community exactly what document format can be seen on Windows, Mac, and Unix? Oh, and it has to seemlessly provide font information, and print out the very same document no matter what platform or printer is used.
I'll save you the trouble. PDF is the only thing that fits that bill.
I'm honestly not up to speed enough on Python to say. I believe it is fair to say that Python presents itself as a general purpose language for use in a wide range of uses. PHP doesn't. It's a language with a set of commands that are very focused on creating web applications.
To your point, PHP definitely does lose benefits stepping outside the realm of the web. It generally isn't meant to go there. With that in mind, I guess I'd have to toss the reverse question back at you.
What does Python do specifically for web applications that PHP doesn't?
For how I use PHP, I don't believe Python would be as suitable, but again I must disclaimer this with my ignorance of the language. PHP's native ability to process forms, integrate Apache environment variables, and even the ability to set PHP run time attributes directly within a.htaccess file are a few things off the top of my head that make PHP a stonger candidate for this type of application writing.
Where as I'm sure Python may very well be able to do these things, PHP has this stuff natively entrenched into it's core. In Python, I would think you would not want this kind of native web server support for a general purpose language.
I do realize that both Python and Perl have tons of extensions and modules that provide for both web and database interaction. PHP has this stuff built in from the ground up. Again, the difference lies in the focus of the projects.
Now if I could just get the time to crack open this "Learning Python" book I purchased too long ago, I could probably come up with a better answer to your question!
The original PHP that Rasmus Lerdorf wrote back in '95 was written in Perl. The second version was written in C as more folks started contributing to the project. By the time version 3.0 hit the net, it hardly resembled anything looking like PHP 1.0.
PHP's roots do go back to Perl, but that's where the story begins and ends. The whole point was to take a different direction from what Perl was doing, and to utilize a C based structure in the process.
Today, PHP's resemblence to Perl stems from 2 things. Both are roughly C based in their structure and PHP has a number of functions that emulate similar ones found in Perl. Mostly regexp kinds of functions.
Bottom line, you're not going to take a PHP programmer, sit him/her down to an editor and expect Perl to come flowing out. Each language has a very different approach to how to go about doing things.
I am surprised that Python was not among the possibilities examined
I would think the same reasons that ruled out Perl would also impact Python. Neither were designed specifically with the web in mind.
This aspect of PHP more than anything else is probably the primary consideration of a lot of PHP zealots out there... myself included. This doesn't detract in the least from where both Perl, Python, Ruby, or similar langauges shine. It's just that PHP is the only true programming language that I know of that has this kind of dedicated focus to the web.
No, I don't count Cold Fusion either. Closed source, and support tentative on whether or not Macromedia can still pull a buck out of it. Not a warm fuzzy place to be for a project as large as Yahoo.
Would have loved to. Only thing is, none of the Linux based PDA's provide any software for actually syncing to a Linux desktop! ACK! Okay, so I actually run FreeBSD on my desktop, but the same applies.
Bottom line, the only reasonable way to put a PDA to use today for a Unix user is to buy a Palm. Need Windows to actually use a Linux PDA... irony outta control or what?
Similarly, with global warning, by the time the results are catastrophic, it will be too late for us to reverse the process.
If we could reverse the process, would we want to? Here's where running off with incomplete data bites you. What if some clever fella came up with a way to drop the average global temperature by 2 degrees over the next 10 years. Should he do so?
It could be that by interfering with what very well may be a normal, natural process a larger aspect of the Earth's cycles may be disrupted, thus causing more harm. That's the real problem we face here. We really don't know!
Applying solutions to problems you don't understand can be suicidal.
The most visible example is Rush Limbaugh, whose knowledge of science is stubbornly zero, and who thus has indeed stated that mankind is too insignificant to cause such changes.
The thing that Rush often mentions are the various large volcano erruptions that have occurred within written history. Comparing and contrasting these natural events to what industry spews out into the sky.
One thing that's kind of curious here is that I don't believe your views on this would be all that much different than what Rush has presented on his show. He's made comments concerning Kyoto that sound quite a bit like what you're saying.
He sort of becomes this 2 dimensional caricature of the right wing to critics who don't listen to what he's actually saying. Personally, I have my disagreements with where he stands on certain issues, but the show is worth the listen as he rarely shows up without facts to back up his arguments. He really isn't a propoganda mouth piece as is often claimed.
Seems the local Indian name for the area translates to "Valley of the Smokes". The shape of the land and the wind patterns over much of the year trap airborne pollution - so badly that a single campfire would smoke it up for a day or more.
Hmm, I'd always heard it was the "Valley of the Haze", or some such thing. Not debating the point, just what I had thought it was. Even without campfires the area would be hazy on a regular basis just due to the sea air getting trapped.
Another intereresting bit of history has to do with when the term "smog" was first coined. The LA Times used to sell or give out these hard bound coffee table books with front pages going back to the late 1800's, which is where I got this.
As the US was ramping up to deal with the coming war with Japan, the factories in the area seriously ramped up production. With no controls at all on these things you had tons of smoke going up, but not out.
In a rather sudden way, the morning sky had turned orange. Residents were thinking that they were being gassed by the Japanese. Pearl had just been attacked after all, so the paranoia on the west coast was high. One of the reporters for the Times said something to the effect that it looked like a combination of "smoke" and "fog".
I honestly don't recall if the reporter actually stated "smog", but the phrase caught on.
It's a testimony to US automobile technology (even if driven by legislation) that so many cars can now operate in that valley without photochemical smog being so thick that the light is blocked.
Cars were a factor, but not the true cause. It takes a combination of controls on both vehicles and industry to keep things under control here. Just from what I've seen in my 30 some odd years residing here, things have gotten a LOT better.
By the way: DON'T call them "Native Americans". It annoys them.
Sounds like I'd best stick with "Hey you!" and leave it at that.:)
Personally, I have zero use for hyphenated Americans of any sort. It's divisive and demeaning. A citizen of this nation is an "American".
That has happened with PCB, DDT, CRC and other fine chemichals in past.
Here's the problem with panic now, think later... it can cause FAR more harm. Case in point, DDT.
DDT single handedly killed maleria in the areas where it was used, due to it's very effective control of mosquitos. Thousands of lives saved. Then the panic kicked in.
First, the panic was that it was toxic, and killing people. Turns out not to be true at all.
Second panic was that it was destroying the eggs of birds in the areas that it was used. This turned out to be valid. Unfortunately not as valid as the reaction... banning it entirely.
What could have happened was using it in a far more targetted manner, rather than dumping it in large quantities without further consideration. Nope, had to pass laws, panic now, think later.
It's later, and maleria related deaths are on the rise again. Birds are fine though.
I honestly don't understand one thing. Why is it that in almost any other human endeavor problem solving involves actually figuring out what the problem truly is before taking corrective action. When it comes to how we get along with the environment around us we're all too easily lulled into the notion that problem definition can be waved for the greater good.
Could some rabid conservative please post the party line that global warming is the only thing holding off another ice age?
Okay, I'll bite. Not really a hard line conservative, but certainly far enough over on the right to take this one on.
First off, anyone claiming that global warming is going to hold off an ice age couldn't possibly be bright enough to hold any kind of political position. Furthermore, if we're just talking about straight party line, that is NOT the position conservatives take on the matter.
The argument from the right is that humans just aren't capable of causing the massive changes being claimed. If warming is happening, the causes are most likely due to cyclical changes our environment goes through. Burn what ya like, it won't make a lick of difference.
Of course, over on the left we're all doomed unless nobody ever burns anything ever again. Every match that's struck or deoderant sprayed is going to lift the average temperature to the 100's of degrees.
Personally, I'm strongly of the opinion that both of these viewpoints are harmful. Over on the right there seems to be a lack of consideration for other very localized harm burning nasty stuff can cause. As a lifelong inhabitant of Los Angeles I've seen this first hand.
The view on the left is just as harmful though. First, the non-stop claims about so many different dangers goes a long way to desensitizing the populace, as well as policy makers. The enviromentalists are a political movement, not a scientific body. Need to do something about the problem NOW, regardless if we really understand the problem or not.
When it comes right down to it, I don't believe we have conclusively proven two very key points. Is the global temperature really increasing? That seems to depend on which group of scientists looking at which data, then filtered through a LOT of political interests.
The second point; if it is warming, what exactly is causing it? The right claims not us humans, the left claims they've got it all figured out. In truth, we really don't know what in the heck is going on. It may very well be a combination of cyclical changes along with human factors. Meterology is a damn complex science, and one we're still trying to figure out.
Okay, so I probably wouldn't get invited to too many conservative parties with this post. I suppose calling for "rabid conservatives" gets a pass to the "kneejerk liberal" get togethers though.
Write your fucking desktop program so that people upgrading can do so seamlessly and painlessly
Why I left Linux behind. This is a distro issue, not KDE's. On FreeBSD, to upgrade from 2.x to 3.x looks just like this...
# pkg_delete -rf qt* # portinstall kde3
This removes the old stuff, compiles the new stuff, and installs it. Don't have time for a compile?
# pkg_add -r kde3
Done.
I am forever amazed at the folks that can actually get stuff like RPM working properly to upgrade large packages like this. I'm guessing these folks are not that numerous, as there appear to be a lot of folks posting here waiting for their distro to come out with a totally new release just to get KDE updated.
It is kind funny, though, that KDE is integrating a browser with the desktop environment.
You've got this a little backwards, though it may look very much the same to an end user.
Konqueror itself is just a shell that can embed components. One of those components just happens to be khtml, the web browser. It also embeds a media player, file manager, image viewer, and probably a few other goodies I've neglected to mention. You simply have one window capable of a variety of embeddable tasks.
Microsoft took the approach starting from the browser, then getting things to work around it. It's an entirely different approach, but the end result "appears" to be what KDE is doing.
In any case, if 3.1 has cool new stuff, you may want to wait until 3.1.1 for the bugs in the cool new stuff to be fixed.
Over in FreeBSD land folks have set up regular builds off the KDE CVS to allow for much more testing than in the past. It's part of the FruitSalad project (not gonna link it, cause I don't wanna crash it) which you can fine linked from the KDE on FreeBSD project site.
Anyone doing something similar for any of the Linux distros?
I just installed the Linux binaries on my FreeBSD box and they ran perfectly. Installing was as easy as untarring and running./phoenix. Very, very fast.
THANK YOU soooo much for this post of yours. I would have never bothered to try the Linux binaries out otherwise. Just assumed it wouldn't fly without some mucking around, or compiling from source for FreeBSD. Talk about multi-platform!
It really does work wonderfully. I'm getting some errors about not being able to locate libpixmap.so, but otherwise it appears to be functioning very nicely.
The parent post put it as eloquently as anyone could. This thing is working at 1.0 quality for me. Loading up at just a hair slower then Konq (yes, I raced them). Moz rendering, Konq load speed... this app was LONG overdue. I'm a convert.
There is only one thing missing that may force me back to mozilla: the inability to "block images from this server," i.e., to get rid of ads.
Couldn't disagree more with the sentiment. Still getting a download of Pheonix myself here, so I can't yet comment directly on it. What does bother me are browsing tools that truly do remove the basic ad banners like seen here on Slashdot.
Those banners are going to help pay for the time and bandwidth costs for the vast majority of my favorite sites. As I write this, the banner at the top of the page is for a special Penquin Computing has running. Hey, I'd like to see them folks do well too! In order to do that, they've got to get their message out.
I will agreee that browser support preventing overtly intrusive advertising, such as pop ups or pop behinds, are a good thing. It's also reasonable in my mind to allow the user to restrict the number of rotations an animation gets to run through. It would be nice to allow that same user to be able to manually request the animation to start over again for the interested.
Blocking all ads entirely is an extremely bad thing to see get so much time and effort devoted to it. It hurts content sites, and the companies willing to sponsor them. Also, every once in a while there may actually be an ad for a product that you'd purchase. Especially here on Slashdot!
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Seeing as how you've posted anonymously, most folks probably won't see the post. For this reason I'll quote the bulk of it here.
/., we see the growing opinion that companies have the right to be left alone by the very state that gives them ANY life or existence.
You are stating your opinion about what companies should be, not what they must be. Once more, you are stating your opinion about what companies should be, not what they must be.
Not at all. I am stating what they are.
Many an organization can perform essentially the task of a social program. These are called charities, or non-profit organizations. By and large, we usually don't refer to them as companies.
What is a company? A legal fiction of an individual? A registered organization that does business and is run by a set of bylaws on file the secretary of state? Is it more than that?
This greatly depends on what kind of company that we're talking about. If you are referring to a corporation that can be publicly traded and invested in, then you are essentially correct. A proprietary business or simple partnership would not fall within the guidelines you are suggesting.
A company is anything the legislature (state or federal) says it is. There's no inherent right of companies.
It may sound like I'm nit picking at terminology, but the terms in question are quite important to understand.
First off your use of the term "right" does not apply here. A "right" is only that which the government cannot do. A company can only fall within regulations at varying levels of government.
Secondly, you keep saying company throughout your post, when it seems what you really mean is corporation. There is a distinct difference between the two concepts.
By contrast, there are inherent rights that people posses. (Our founding documents called these "inalienable rights", meaning that we cannot by contract abrogate them. E.g., you cannot literally sell yourself into slavery even voluntarily, because the freedom you have is part of your humanity, and is not a mere interest or state in property.)
The term "inalieanable rights" has nothing at all to do with slavery. Your inability to sell yourself, or to purchase a person, is not a right. This is a regulation added to the constitution. A fine one at that. Should have been in the first draft!
Anyway, the elevation of companies to individual status is a long process, but nearly complete. You can be sued for slandering a company (and are more likely to than slandering an individual!). A company has rights to due process, often more than individuals who are poor.
Again, you mean "corporation". Furthermore, this wasn't something that was legislated into being. A number of Supreme Court decisions lead us to where we are today, overriding the laws in place at both the state and local levels.
And now on
Not true in the slightest. Assuming you are still referring to corporations, there are a number of things given up in order to become one. One of the primary things is that the company must disclose all of it's financial status publicly. It also falls under a number of strict laws that a proprietary business isn't.
Well not on my watch. New flash: COMPANIES ARE CREATIONS OF THE STATE. They are fictions; they exist only so long as they do what the state tells them to do.
Perhaps this was true about 100 years ago, using the original concept of what a corporation was.
They have no "inherent" rights to fuck over workers. When it comes to priorities, I place a greater priority on the rights, wellbeing and dignity of people, and less on the "rights" of companies to engage in sharp practices, screw over workers, pay outrageous bonuses to dishonest management, and fire the workers when, for a few years, things are not profitable.
So, what you would suggest is that a company, corporation, whatever, should retain a staff it can no longer afford to pay? HOW?
Look, I'm not saying that pay scales are exactly perfect these days. There's an obvious sucking sound at the top of a lot of these failed companies we've seen over the last few years. It would be highly advantageous for you to actually understand the problems that you apparently feel passionate about.
All your last paragraph amounted to was a stack of leftist propaganda. Whether it's correct or not gets lost in the rhetoric of shallow emotional button pushing.
In our society, at one time, and perhaps once again someday, goverment serves the needs of the PEOPLE, and not the corporations that dominate donations and fund raising.
What mythical time was this? What country? Which corporations??
For instance, do you know which interest groups pay into the political process? How much? To which parties? Again, these are things you should bother to find out rather than allowing yourself to just parrot Ralph Nader rhetoric.
Your heart is in the right place, but it's in desperate need of facts over rhetoric.
...you'd see that IBM is also introducing the first 7200 RPM drives for laptops.
Which has the additional benefit of acting as an in-flight gyroscope. Never have an unlevel lap again!
Sigh. SGI's core market has never been "movie animation."
I stand corrected. Perhaps a more accurate way to state it would be "one of SGI's most visible markets". 10% is still a pretty healthy chunk to just up and vanish on you one day though.
After seeing your post I feel I should toss in a disclaimer. I have nothing at all against any products from either Sun or SGI. I only wished to point out that Linux has done pretty darn well in their respective core markets.
Thanks for providing the clarification to my post.
If this economic downturn starts to hit enough dotcom kids
Where have you been the last two years? Those dotcom kids you so lovingly refer to WERE the hardest hit sector of the economy.
They have no connection whatsoever to the concept that one can be qualified, willing, and actively searching for work and yet still end up starving.
A little tip you might wish to take to heart, assuming starving isn't something you wish to do. You, the employee, are worth precisely the amount it takes to replace you, and not a penny more.
No economic system in existance works around this basic fact. If after 20 years on the job your qualifications equate to that of that "dotcom kid" fresh out of college, you will go hungry. You can be pro-union, anti-union, socialist, communist, capitalist, and it just won't matter. If someone else can do the same job you're doing at half the cost, you're gonna be out of work!
This isn't some evil corporate scheme designed to pound down the little guy. It's a basic natural law of the relationship between an employer and employee. The only reason an employer hires anyone at all is in the belief that the person in question can make more revenue for that company. Whether you're talking about IBM, Microsoft, or the local coffee shop, this basic fact doesn't go away.
The anti-union attitudes of /. editors is astouding sometimes
A company is not a social program. Once more, a company is not a social program.
A company, any company, exists to provide a product or service that results in what most folks hope is a positive cash flow. If that is the result, it will grow. In that growth will certainly be newer jobs.
The reverse is also true. If a company has proven that it cannot make money, it will shrink. In it's shrinking, fewer employment opportunities exist.
No union, legislation, or any other happy thoughts can change this basic economic fact. When a company, like Corel, is no longer producing products that customers wish to buy, fewer jobs will result. How can you maintain staffing rates of old when you no longer have the cash to pay them?
The US has gone from a "right to work" country to a "right to get fired" country, almost within a few years. The focus on "keeping corporations profitable EVERY SINGLE YEAR" is absurd.
Nevermind the fact that we're actually talking about CANADA here. There has never been, in ANY nation a "right to work". Oh sure, there have been lofty attempts with subsequent failures, but the concept simply doesn't exist in the wild.
First off, a "right" is not what someone does for you. A "right" is what the government can not do to you. Just as true in Canada as the US, or any other country for that matter. At most, something a government does for you could only be described as a "social program".
Please refer to the beginning of this post... repeat as needed.
KDE and Gnome are fighting it out to see which one can be the blandest
Okay, I guess we've got a big fan of both KDE and Gnome going. Aside from how impossibly wrong the above statement is, let's move along here....
trying to catch up to the leading server OS's, like Solaris or IRIX
Trying to catch up?? What freaking planet have you been living on for the past 2 years? IRIX's core market, movie animation, has all but vanished due to Linux. Sun is running about as scared as they ever have over Solaris. It's very fair to say that open source has done a wee more than just "catch up".
we might actually see something revolutionary
What, like the core infrastructure of the Internet your browsing on now? Who knows, maybe that'll amount to something some day.
For your own well being, you might want to consider taking a shot of Pebto, relax a bit, and actually take a hard look at what you're talking about here. A clue stick might just find you!
I can't think of any flat-out LOSSES for MS
Quicken
The only question is, why would you _want_ to do that? The original document was more useful in most cases than the resulting PDF.
.doc file? Because there's a darn good chance that the receiving end won't see the same exact document. Word will change the formatting of a document based on the local printer configuration. Page breaks where you don't expect them and such.
...the ability to search, to copy text to the clipboard, to scroll off the bottom of one page and onto the top of the next, and to do all the other usual things you can normally do with regular documents that are a royal pain with PDF if they are even possible.)
Although PDF can be used for collaborating on a project, that is not it's true purpose. It's meant to send a completed document from one point to another, as the author intended it to look.
Why not just send a
Also, if there's isn't a perfect sync between machines and the fonts in use, there becomes another formatting nightmare. The document's presentation changes drastically from what the original author intended.
PDF solves these problems, while also being truly cross platform at no cost.
the lack of any decent viewing software. (By decent, I mean the ability to use my colour preferences (because blinding white backgrounds are more evil than Bill Gates)....
PDF is meant to present what the original author meant for the document to look like. It is not a word processing format, nor is it meant to replace HTML. It exists to transfer a complete document from one point to another, and have it look identical no matter what the platform.
Each and every one of these points are possible, and are built within every Acrobat Reader on all platforms. You may have tried Acrobat, but it sounds like you didn't take the time to actually learn how to use it.
If you're not truly desparate to see this information, go away
Care to share with the Slashdot community exactly what document format can be seen on Windows, Mac, and Unix? Oh, and it has to seemlessly provide font information, and print out the very same document no matter what platform or printer is used.
I'll save you the trouble. PDF is the only thing that fits that bill.
But what does PHP do that Python can't?
.htaccess file are a few things off the top of my head that make PHP a stonger candidate for this type of application writing.
I'm honestly not up to speed enough on Python to say. I believe it is fair to say that Python presents itself as a general purpose language for use in a wide range of uses. PHP doesn't. It's a language with a set of commands that are very focused on creating web applications.
To your point, PHP definitely does lose benefits stepping outside the realm of the web. It generally isn't meant to go there. With that in mind, I guess I'd have to toss the reverse question back at you.
What does Python do specifically for web applications that PHP doesn't?
For how I use PHP, I don't believe Python would be as suitable, but again I must disclaimer this with my ignorance of the language. PHP's native ability to process forms, integrate Apache environment variables, and even the ability to set PHP run time attributes directly within a
Where as I'm sure Python may very well be able to do these things, PHP has this stuff natively entrenched into it's core. In Python, I would think you would not want this kind of native web server support for a general purpose language.
I do realize that both Python and Perl have tons of extensions and modules that provide for both web and database interaction. PHP has this stuff built in from the ground up. Again, the difference lies in the focus of the projects.
Now if I could just get the time to crack open this "Learning Python" book I purchased too long ago, I could probably come up with a better answer to your question!
PHP is based off of perl and has similiar issues.
Umm, time for a wee history lesson.
The original PHP that Rasmus Lerdorf wrote back in '95 was written in Perl. The second version was written in C as more folks started contributing to the project. By the time version 3.0 hit the net, it hardly resembled anything looking like PHP 1.0.
PHP's roots do go back to Perl, but that's where the story begins and ends. The whole point was to take a different direction from what Perl was doing, and to utilize a C based structure in the process.
Today, PHP's resemblence to Perl stems from 2 things. Both are roughly C based in their structure and PHP has a number of functions that emulate similar ones found in Perl. Mostly regexp kinds of functions.
Bottom line, you're not going to take a PHP programmer, sit him/her down to an editor and expect Perl to come flowing out. Each language has a very different approach to how to go about doing things.
I am surprised that Python was not among the possibilities examined
I would think the same reasons that ruled out Perl would also impact Python. Neither were designed specifically with the web in mind.
This aspect of PHP more than anything else is probably the primary consideration of a lot of PHP zealots out there... myself included. This doesn't detract in the least from where both Perl, Python, Ruby, or similar langauges shine. It's just that PHP is the only true programming language that I know of that has this kind of dedicated focus to the web.
No, I don't count Cold Fusion either. Closed source, and support tentative on whether or not Macromedia can still pull a buck out of it. Not a warm fuzzy place to be for a project as large as Yahoo.
...get a Linux PDA
Would have loved to. Only thing is, none of the Linux based PDA's provide any software for actually syncing to a Linux desktop! ACK! Okay, so I actually run FreeBSD on my desktop, but the same applies.
Bottom line, the only reasonable way to put a PDA to use today for a Unix user is to buy a Palm. Need Windows to actually use a Linux PDA... irony outta control or what?
Similarly, with global warning, by the time the results are catastrophic, it will be too late for us to reverse the process.
If we could reverse the process, would we want to? Here's where running off with incomplete data bites you. What if some clever fella came up with a way to drop the average global temperature by 2 degrees over the next 10 years. Should he do so?
It could be that by interfering with what very well may be a normal, natural process a larger aspect of the Earth's cycles may be disrupted, thus causing more harm. That's the real problem we face here. We really don't know!
Applying solutions to problems you don't understand can be suicidal.
The most visible example is Rush Limbaugh, whose knowledge of science is stubbornly zero, and who thus has indeed stated that mankind is too insignificant to cause such changes.
The thing that Rush often mentions are the various large volcano erruptions that have occurred within written history. Comparing and contrasting these natural events to what industry spews out into the sky.
One thing that's kind of curious here is that I don't believe your views on this would be all that much different than what Rush has presented on his show. He's made comments concerning Kyoto that sound quite a bit like what you're saying.
He sort of becomes this 2 dimensional caricature of the right wing to critics who don't listen to what he's actually saying. Personally, I have my disagreements with where he stands on certain issues, but the show is worth the listen as he rarely shows up without facts to back up his arguments. He really isn't a propoganda mouth piece as is often claimed.
Seems the local Indian name for the area translates to "Valley of the Smokes". The shape of the land and the wind patterns over much of the year trap airborne pollution - so badly that a single campfire would smoke it up for a day or more.
:)
Hmm, I'd always heard it was the "Valley of the Haze", or some such thing. Not debating the point, just what I had thought it was. Even without campfires the area would be hazy on a regular basis just due to the sea air getting trapped.
Another intereresting bit of history has to do with when the term "smog" was first coined. The LA Times used to sell or give out these hard bound coffee table books with front pages going back to the late 1800's, which is where I got this.
As the US was ramping up to deal with the coming war with Japan, the factories in the area seriously ramped up production. With no controls at all on these things you had tons of smoke going up, but not out.
In a rather sudden way, the morning sky had turned orange. Residents were thinking that they were being gassed by the Japanese. Pearl had just been attacked after all, so the paranoia on the west coast was high. One of the reporters for the Times said something to the effect that it looked like a combination of "smoke" and "fog".
I honestly don't recall if the reporter actually stated "smog", but the phrase caught on.
It's a testimony to US automobile technology (even if driven by legislation) that so many cars can now operate in that valley without photochemical smog being so thick that the light is blocked.
Cars were a factor, but not the true cause. It takes a combination of controls on both vehicles and industry to keep things under control here. Just from what I've seen in my 30 some odd years residing here, things have gotten a LOT better.
By the way: DON'T call them "Native Americans". It annoys them.
Sounds like I'd best stick with "Hey you!" and leave it at that.
Personally, I have zero use for hyphenated Americans of any sort. It's divisive and demeaning. A citizen of this nation is an "American".
Shucks. I just do the kneejerk liberal thing to pick up chicks.
:)
If ever there were a noble reason to be a kneejerk liberal, that'd do it.
You have regained my respect sir
That has happened with PCB, DDT, CRC and other fine chemichals in past.
Here's the problem with panic now, think later... it can cause FAR more harm. Case in point, DDT.
DDT single handedly killed maleria in the areas where it was used, due to it's very effective control of mosquitos. Thousands of lives saved. Then the panic kicked in.
First, the panic was that it was toxic, and killing people. Turns out not to be true at all.
Second panic was that it was destroying the eggs of birds in the areas that it was used. This turned out to be valid. Unfortunately not as valid as the reaction... banning it entirely.
What could have happened was using it in a far more targetted manner, rather than dumping it in large quantities without further consideration. Nope, had to pass laws, panic now, think later.
It's later, and maleria related deaths are on the rise again. Birds are fine though.
I honestly don't understand one thing. Why is it that in almost any other human endeavor problem solving involves actually figuring out what the problem truly is before taking corrective action. When it comes to how we get along with the environment around us we're all too easily lulled into the notion that problem definition can be waved for the greater good.
Could some rabid conservative please post the party line that global warming is the only thing holding off another ice age?
Okay, I'll bite. Not really a hard line conservative, but certainly far enough over on the right to take this one on.
First off, anyone claiming that global warming is going to hold off an ice age couldn't possibly be bright enough to hold any kind of political position. Furthermore, if we're just talking about straight party line, that is NOT the position conservatives take on the matter.
The argument from the right is that humans just aren't capable of causing the massive changes being claimed. If warming is happening, the causes are most likely due to cyclical changes our environment goes through. Burn what ya like, it won't make a lick of difference.
Of course, over on the left we're all doomed unless nobody ever burns anything ever again. Every match that's struck or deoderant sprayed is going to lift the average temperature to the 100's of degrees.
Personally, I'm strongly of the opinion that both of these viewpoints are harmful. Over on the right there seems to be a lack of consideration for other very localized harm burning nasty stuff can cause. As a lifelong inhabitant of Los Angeles I've seen this first hand.
The view on the left is just as harmful though. First, the non-stop claims about so many different dangers goes a long way to desensitizing the populace, as well as policy makers. The enviromentalists are a political movement, not a scientific body. Need to do something about the problem NOW, regardless if we really understand the problem or not.
When it comes right down to it, I don't believe we have conclusively proven two very key points. Is the global temperature really increasing? That seems to depend on which group of scientists looking at which data, then filtered through a LOT of political interests.
The second point; if it is warming, what exactly is causing it? The right claims not us humans, the left claims they've got it all figured out. In truth, we really don't know what in the heck is going on. It may very well be a combination of cyclical changes along with human factors. Meterology is a damn complex science, and one we're still trying to figure out.
Okay, so I probably wouldn't get invited to too many conservative parties with this post. I suppose calling for "rabid conservatives" gets a pass to the "kneejerk liberal" get togethers though.
Here solve your very own problems without any C++ what so ever. Heck, just use the Gnome icons if you prefer them. They work just as nicely under KDE.
Write your fucking desktop program so that people upgrading can do so seamlessly and painlessly
Why I left Linux behind. This is a distro issue, not KDE's. On FreeBSD, to upgrade from 2.x to 3.x looks just like this...
# pkg_delete -rf qt*
# portinstall kde3
This removes the old stuff, compiles the new stuff, and installs it. Don't have time for a compile?
# pkg_add -r kde3
Done.
I am forever amazed at the folks that can actually get stuff like RPM working properly to upgrade large packages like this. I'm guessing these folks are not that numerous, as there appear to be a lot of folks posting here waiting for their distro to come out with a totally new release just to get KDE updated.
It is kind funny, though, that KDE is integrating a browser with the desktop environment.
You've got this a little backwards, though it may look very much the same to an end user.
Konqueror itself is just a shell that can embed components. One of those components just happens to be khtml, the web browser. It also embeds a media player, file manager, image viewer, and probably a few other goodies I've neglected to mention. You simply have one window capable of a variety of embeddable tasks.
Microsoft took the approach starting from the browser, then getting things to work around it. It's an entirely different approach, but the end result "appears" to be what KDE is doing.
In any case, if 3.1 has cool new stuff, you may want to wait until 3.1.1 for the bugs in the cool new stuff to be fixed.
Over in FreeBSD land folks have set up regular builds off the KDE CVS to allow for much more testing than in the past. It's part of the FruitSalad project (not gonna link it, cause I don't wanna crash it) which you can fine linked from the KDE on FreeBSD project site.
Anyone doing something similar for any of the Linux distros?
I just installed the Linux binaries on my FreeBSD box and they ran perfectly. Installing was as easy as untarring and running ./phoenix. Very, very fast.
THANK YOU soooo much for this post of yours. I would have never bothered to try the Linux binaries out otherwise. Just assumed it wouldn't fly without some mucking around, or compiling from source for FreeBSD. Talk about multi-platform!
It really does work wonderfully. I'm getting some errors about not being able to locate libpixmap.so, but otherwise it appears to be functioning very nicely.
The parent post put it as eloquently as anyone could. This thing is working at 1.0 quality for me. Loading up at just a hair slower then Konq (yes, I raced them). Moz rendering, Konq load speed... this app was LONG overdue. I'm a convert.
There is only one thing missing that may force me back to mozilla: the inability to "block images from this server," i.e., to get rid of ads.
Couldn't disagree more with the sentiment. Still getting a download of Pheonix myself here, so I can't yet comment directly on it. What does bother me are browsing tools that truly do remove the basic ad banners like seen here on Slashdot.
Those banners are going to help pay for the time and bandwidth costs for the vast majority of my favorite sites. As I write this, the banner at the top of the page is for a special Penquin Computing has running. Hey, I'd like to see them folks do well too! In order to do that, they've got to get their message out.
I will agreee that browser support preventing overtly intrusive advertising, such as pop ups or pop behinds, are a good thing. It's also reasonable in my mind to allow the user to restrict the number of rotations an animation gets to run through. It would be nice to allow that same user to be able to manually request the animation to start over again for the interested.
Blocking all ads entirely is an extremely bad thing to see get so much time and effort devoted to it. It hurts content sites, and the companies willing to sponsor them. Also, every once in a while there may actually be an ad for a product that you'd purchase. Especially here on Slashdot!
A direct quote from SARC...
. asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-020.asp for additional information.
The email message can be composed with or without the use of the Incorrect MIME Header Can Cause IE to Execute E-mail Attachment vulnerability to autoexecute on a vulnerable system. Please go to http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default
Patch or not, this bugger is gonna launch!