as someone who taught in China I can affirm that a scary number of students exhibit symptoms of heavy metal poisoning today. Not to mention the underbelly of kids who are socially promoted out the top (flushed out so to speak) with no skills. In the west we see the best and the brightest, but i worked with kids from rich families who could not process anything that required any thinking skills at all. Their parents were paying gobs of money to have them educated. There is no problem too large in China that it cannot be ignored by the government AND the parents
no, the issue is the moronic American cars. I moved back here last summer after 15 years in Asia, and the first thing that shocked my whole family was the absolute insane size of the cars. In Asia we had a few H2s, but they were like tanks on the roads and people who owned them could only fit on big roads, lots of city streets couldn't fit them. People traveled at the same speeds there as here (although I would get a speeding ticket for my landlord every 6 months or so-- speeding cameras set up everywhere, the picture of your car is printed on the ticket) and I am not convinced that there was any greater mortality, they just have smaller cars.
So, i wonder if this is a function of the insurance industry. Insurance companies decreasing your rates for monster sized cars to protect you at the expense of others, which forces a retaliation by the others and now we have these giganto cars. When we bought a car here in August, we got something that seemed huge to us, but as we drive around it is small compared to these elephant cars.
Hopeless situation? no wonder we consume such an insane amount of the world's energy...
I agree. The only move that Red Hat has made against companies using their core software for their own distro has been to block anyone from using their kernel patches. This because of Oracle and the "unbreakable Linux" fiasco. Oracle desrved it by deliberately attacking Red Hat's customers and trolling for them. So Red Hat refused to release their patches for the red hat kernel versions that they prepped to begin with. The preps are free, but the patches are not.
let me say this very clearly: been there, done that; got the t-shirt. 1) when I was 28 I quit drinking any alcohol, in the process I suffered two weeks of physical pain, caused by the removal of any alcohol from a body that was used to a moderate amount every day. It was sobering (that was an intentional joke) and made me realize how very powerful a drug alcohol is. I also learned very quickly not to tell any one about that because they don't want to know. 2) In the mid-1990's, 1996 I think, I was in the airport in Toronto and decided to quit smoking pot. After 25 years of smoking high quality weed daily, pretty much all day in fact, I quit. I took my shit and dumped it in the trashcan. And never felt the least pang , qualm or problem with it. 3) In 2005 I decided to quit smoking cigarettes. I had smoked for a long time, tried to and "succeeded " at quitting twice but always went back to it. In my personal view I never really quit. That time I really quit. I sent my wife and kids away for the first month of the summer, locked myself away in the house for a month and spent two to four weeks of the most painful, gut wrenching,mind numbing, time in my entire life. Even quitting alcohol didn't come close to this.
anecdotal, yes, but powerful enough to show the difference between addiction and habituation. BTW, I also quit cocaine in the 80s with any problem, but I had no interest in cocaine at any time, always disliked it in fact, a stupid drug from my point of view.
LOL: one of my students was in class the other day with a Macbook Air. She was running WinXP on it because that is what she knew how to do, she had the store (in China) take off (or else hide somewhere and run the winxp as a virt appliance, i don't know or care) so that she could have the pirated version of xp that everyone else in china uses.
Whoa, jump back Jack and STFU. I am a Red Hat Shareholder, have been for a number of years. Before any of the FUDdite fools get too excited and feel a feeding frenzy coming on go look at Red Hat stock on NASDAQ: it is rock solid AND climbing fast. Like it gained $4/share (about 8%) last week. Historic highs for the company. And, before everyone wastes their electrons saying more about Red Hat when they obviously know dog about it let me add that Red Hat is completely and totally dedicated to FOSS as a vehicle to that shareholder bottom line. They have backed up their philosophy with their actions over and over again. Quality stands in the forefront of what they do, they don't put out the closed source stuff they purchase until it is good software, not the garbage cludge that hides behind closed code. They take heat for this approach, but they have never shafted the community, the shareholders or the FOSS philosophy. Unlike some other companies that fail to keep their promises.
So everybody needs to stop shooting from the lip and move along.
perhaps i have just been too close to the wrong side of the law too often, but in truth, the police are sadly addicted to power, to physical force and to their mind trip that says they are better than everyone else. I had a younger friend, not a bad guy from a problematic but close knit family. He and another friend joined the sheriffs department and then he went on to the local police force. He quickly got the reputation for being vicious, physically brutal and untrustworthy. Mutual friends shake their heads these days and talk about how he "went to the dark side".
But the sad story was the other boy who went with him and who wasn't quite tough enough to be mean has become More of a headcase.The police didn't want him and it twisted his head around. I don't want to know what he is doing to the prisoners in the jails today.
Another guy I worked with, from a good family, poor, uneducated but honest, left the job where we were working together and was really excited to get a job as a prison guard for minimum security state prison. A week later he came back to his old job, chastened. His comment "those guards are worse than the criminals. I left because I didn't ever want to be a horrible as they were."
The moral is that there are some truly good people in the world, but they don't go into law enforcement (or politics it seems)
i am just back from 15 years in Asia, the last 6 in China. Hear what I say! The mobile phone market in Asia, including China, is more free than the North American market. You are being robbed, cheated, locked out and kept out of the phones, the services and the value of the mobile marketplace. You are only a revenue source for the companies, not customers, just useful chumps.
In China I can have as many SIM cards as I want. I pay by the minute and a robust and diverse marketplace keeps prices reasonable (about 2 dollars a month for the most basic service plus about a penny for a SMS message and 2 cents a minute for calls anywhere in the country. My wife just landed in Kunming, Yunnan province last weekend and had a new phone and SIM card for 20 dollars within an hour or so from landing.
Not only that, the market is pushing development of the best phones in the world! The government stays out of it except in doing the kind of monitoring that our government does on people they don't like, we have no more freedom on that account either i fear. So, the corporate control of our mobile market is robbing us with the support of the government. The more money we spend on phones the less we have to support adverse political ideas like the occupy movements.
Why Apple "kicks ass" and why they were so successful and why they might continue to be so (but only if they have the sense to not buy into the foolishness being spouted above and below) is because they were absolutely fantastic at marketing.
Think of it this way: design is primarily a marketing function in this modern world. This is not to say that it has always been primary, it sometimes was about ergonomics or usability or even fitting in the right place at the right time. But today, design is just about creating a brand style that can be sold to the public as sleek, special, beautiful, desirable, modern, high-value and high (add your desirable characteristic here). the key word is "sold" and Apple, Jobs especially, got that part. Sometime in the Pixar years he had an epiphany when he realized that it was the marketing of an identifiable design style that could set Apple apart.
Look at the patents that they are beating Samsung about with: design stuff like rounded corners. Look at the iMac, there was no cutting edge tech there, it was all off the shelf at the time, but the design aspect built a remarkable brand that people could want to have. The innovation that Jobs had for the iMac, and arguably for every other "breakthru product" was not the tech or the iStore or anything really that remarkable, what he did was make the tech subservient to the design.
In the iMac that meant fitting a full 3.5" HDD together with a laptop CD player and a laptop motherboard with limited ports. I had one of the first iMacs (blue and white with a tray CD player-- first three months production before the slot loaders were ready) that my wife bought, take that thing apart and it wasn't much at all. What was impressive was that by controlling the symmetry (by which I mean that he kept the number of devices that could be used to a minimum so that the OS9 kernel only had to hold drivers for a very limited number of devices) he could have a pretty zippy system even with lower speed processors (needed to keep a fan out of the case). All design criteria (no fan, no noise, valuable in a desktop system).
Brilliant! but only in terms of marketing. Think of it as the Yves St Laurent approach to computers and you realize that the accolades he is receiving are the stuff of fashion legends as well. They always get "modded up" in the glitter world based on the effect they had in marketing their products, not in any real innovation.
Using Win 7 i notice that my desktop is NOT immediately usable. But, the problem is clearly that many of the files and folders I access first are on network drives that are painfully slow to load in windows. The files are stored and served off of oracle mainframes.
yes but remember what politicians have to contend with, even assuming they have a clue (and usually they have someone working for them who should) listen to the outrage when you tell the "taxpayers" that they are going to have all their tax money "given" to the universities! They will be up in arms at their tea party/ ron paul/ libertarian meetings because we should privatize the universities and only support loans from private banks backed by government bonds administered by private investment bankers who we know we can trust.
In the world today, no matter how much sense your idea makes (and I am not sure that I agree with your premise that universities use student loan revenues to inflate their salaries or budgets or whatever. Being a faculty member I know we all struggle with tight budgets, lack of funds for basic goods and services and salaries that increase by less than inflation over the long term.) I fear that there cannot be an intelligent and thoughtful discussion of the facts that you and I might like to see so that we can reach a reasonable and productive understanding that leads to a cogent and intelligent solution
And then Look at the brilliant fool who is governor of Florida telling students that they should go into business studies (whatever that broad brush paints) that will help them make money when they graduate. Excuse the EF out of me but since more than 95% of new businesses go belly up in their first 5 years, how will these grateful alums pay their bills and repay their loans. The streets are full of them right now, already. I wonder what percent of the rebellious 99% have a business degree?
Not only this, but, for example, when I lived in a small southern city of 70,000 residents in an area that had a total of about 135,000 residents and two major industries: General Electric and Babcock and Wilcox Nuclear (where they made da bombz and the reactors). Do you seriously think that the local people had any say at all in local government. That is a big laugh. The only individual in the community who had any political power was a local TV preacher named Jerry Falwell, maybe you've heard of him? Now tell me about the "power" of local government. You might WANT it to be that way, but in reality just open your eyes and see who really controls YOUR local government.
I was a beta tester for gnome 3 until i admitted I was using cairo dock and some of the devs got cranky about it. I still kept using it but didn't post bugs after that. After fedora came out with the final product I decided to dump the dock and use the dasher, and am pretty happy overall with it. I know some love to hate and that is their right. My wife is still on ubuntu 10.4 and is not happy about the possibility of change, but change must come. I still support the concept that gnome 3 helps you do things faster, maybe not find your stuff faster (although doing a search is doing something) but i can almost double my work speed over KDE and win7 with gnome 3. The numbers aren't 2x for gnome 2, but that was what I was used to and had my skillset built around it. Nonetheless, I am more efficient overall now with gnome 3.
As for the poor fool talking about the joys of win7, i have to use that stuff at work and it just chafes the hell out of me. Slow, retarded, better than XP? whoopee! Get real and join the 21st century.
sadly phreaking like we used to do disappeared before it really homogenized into something solid. It was taken over by kids who used the name as when all they did was look over the shoulders of people entering their phone card numbers and remember them. Lame shit, even script kiddies have to at least press the enter key a few times, those guys were shit.
BTW, the remnants of the phone company response to the original boxes remains to this day. If you call a number and it rings more than a set number of times (usually 20 I think) the company cuts the call off. This was because the boxes would send a signal that copied the ringtone back to the company while you were talking on the line (you were on the green wire (or yellow?) I forget) and the ringer was on the red. As long as they had a ringing line they didn't start to charge so you could talk for hours.
interestingly, and in my experience as well, prodigies seldom fulfill their early promise. I knew two brothers, as different as nnight and day physically but both as brilliant as this young man. They were at an elite boarding school with me back in the early 70s. They both disappeared into Stanford at age 16 or 17 never to be heard from again. This is not uncommon, apparently they burnout early as well, and retire early. Doesn't sound like a lot of fun, and fun is good.
me thinks thou doest protest too much. While there might be a few of the ilk you describe here, you are guilty of branding us all with the same iron when many of us do not deserve it.
AmI the only one who is remarking on the real facts of what Jobs did for us? It seems the lovefest about the iPad/Phone/Pod/Mac missed out on the real things he did invent (not just market the hell out of) 1) as I recall he was the first company to have a mouse attached to a PC in a consumer item (i put it this way to avoid the people who would argue that he didn't invent the mouse, some unknown crank from the English midlands did it in his garage 3 months before Jobs) 2) The "Desktop" metaphor. The IIe was the first PC that used a "desktop", a place to put the things you wanted close at hand while you are at work on your computer. For better or worse (and being a Gnome 3 user i really love the "workplace" metaphor of Gnome3 over the "have things place" metaphor) it revolutionized the screen use on PCs. 3) He was quite prescient about "dead tech" and quickly moved his products away from it.
Now the first two were clear improvements in the use of computers and in user interface. That was worth celebrating. But, notice, if they were "the most important things" that he did no one would care. Instead because he sold a bunch of glossy "fondleslabs" (a tip of the hat to the Register) he becomes as hyped as those products are.
I'm afraid that RMS is right, the hype is not the real man.
yeah, the p's facts are wrong. Actually IBM hires contractors to do their work. The contractors are "self-employed" and have to pay for all their stuff: insurance, un-employment, etc. etc, it is actually better for IBM to do it that way.
I had a friend who was offered a position as an IELTS (international English Language testing service) tester/ grader. She left after the second day with the comment that they were trying to get her to agree that European accents were "better" and "more comprehensible to most people". She had spent ten years teaching in China and found that Chinese accents were much easier to understand than European accents.
The problem was/is not the accent itself, it is always the determination that one accent is "better" or more comprehensible than another. People speak Indian English as their mother language, but that doesn't necessarily make it comprehensible to every other native English speaker. Ditto for Nigerian or Kenyan or Australian for that matter. No offense intended of course, that is the point. Only people without international experience assume that the problem is with the speaker, when you are "somewhere else" and can't understand how people speak your language the problem of understanding is yours!
I am a teacher drone at a "state-funded" university. The idea that state tax money does dog sh*t for us is ludicrous. The fed's provide a small piece of grant money for US students, a few hundred a year at most. The state's usually match that. What else is on the chart: well most state universities get about 2-4% of their operating budgets covered by the state. That is the money you are talking about when you talk about pensions and benefits. The rest of the money (and I mean for the balance of the operating budget AND the cost of instruction and research and capital investments, upgrades, improvements that keep us current, all that, comes from the money that the university EARNS with tuitions and research contracts. So explain to me why a state school should be jumping with joy about being required to provide tuition, room and board to in-state students at cost or loss just to get a tiny fraction of the operating budget. Makes more sense to tell the states to suck off and charge everyone the same, which might lower cost for the out of state and international students that are paying extra to subsidize the instate students.
If you want to see where this stupidity leads just look at England. They are franchising out their universities around the world to get the income needed to provide services for English students who get heavily subsidized education.
the state and the feds do so little for universities it would be easier of they just went away and left us alone
Actually TOR was developed by/for the FaLunGong group to get around the Chinese firewall and allow them to communicate/ share data across the firewall. It has proved valuable against the Iranian firewall as well, but it also is still the baby of FaLunGong.
As a Fedora fanboy (let me be clear about my position here) AND a RedHat (RHT) stockholder (money where my mouth is) let me point out that: 1) Red Hat announced last year that they were approaching the 1 billion mark and hoped to pass it this year 2) This announcement is merely a prognostication that they will accomplish that this year 3) their stocks have been a consistent and strong investment for me (as opposed to AMD, various solar energy and battery companies). 4) Red Hat is a company, they are doing what their stock holders wish, as directed by the Board. We and the board believe in their implementation of OSS, FOSS, as well as their approach to the ideas of software freedom and how a company can be an important implementer of FOSS software. The amount of money (in salaries and development) that Red Hat gives back to the FOSS community and FOSS projects from the Linux kernel to thousands of gnu projects they help support is huge (not unparalleled, but only paralleled by companies like Google or IBM who are ginormous compared to Red Hat), yet they are growing in value year over year and have been for more than 10 years).
They have done this in the server and business market, competing with the huge players in the game and earning their respect and fear (MS, Oracle, Sun, etc although these companies might like to crush them they have not succeeded).
The report being quoted in the storyline is a report to the stockholders, a public document that Red Hat uses to give us good news and warn us of impending problems. It is notable that Red Hat is always honest in these public announcements, but also conservative. They normally do not trumpet changes or important milestones unless they have good reason to believe they will come about. Unlike many companies that use creative accounting to project rosy futures to try to pump up their share value only to have it crash after the truth comes out. Red Hat supports software freedom and honesty. They are a company I am proud to be a part of and proud to use their products and promote their products at every opportunity.
ok, i've been away too long and not really kept up with the scene. While I own a Hyundai hybrid sans plug and recently rode in a Toyota sans plug I spoke without checking on the newer ones which, being touted as "all-electric" would to my mind require some kind of plug as the electrics in China do. So, I was wrong, my wife and kids would give you a big "duh, he usually is" if i told them.... drools slowly and shuffles away
probably another attempt by 360 AV to crush competition. They attacked QQ last Spring and made a big fuss, now maybe they are going after some competitors. It is the wild west over there.
Slashdot Mirror
as someone who taught in China I can affirm that a scary number of students exhibit symptoms of heavy metal poisoning today. Not to mention the underbelly of kids who are socially promoted out the top (flushed out so to speak) with no skills. In the west we see the best and the brightest, but i worked with kids from rich families who could not process anything that required any thinking skills at all. Their parents were paying gobs of money to have them educated. There is no problem too large in China that it cannot be ignored by the government AND the parents
no, the issue is the moronic American cars. I moved back here last summer after 15 years in Asia, and the first thing that shocked my whole family was the absolute insane size of the cars. In Asia we had a few H2s, but they were like tanks on the roads and people who owned them could only fit on big roads, lots of city streets couldn't fit them. People traveled at the same speeds there as here (although I would get a speeding ticket for my landlord every 6 months or so-- speeding cameras set up everywhere, the picture of your car is printed on the ticket) and I am not convinced that there was any greater mortality, they just have smaller cars.
So, i wonder if this is a function of the insurance industry. Insurance companies decreasing your rates for monster sized cars to protect you at the expense of others, which forces a retaliation by the others and now we have these giganto cars. When we bought a car here in August, we got something that seemed huge to us, but as we drive around it is small compared to these elephant cars.
Hopeless situation? no wonder we consume such an insane amount of the world's energy...
I agree. The only move that Red Hat has made against companies using their core software for their own distro has been to block anyone from using their kernel patches. This because of Oracle and the "unbreakable Linux" fiasco. Oracle desrved it by deliberately attacking Red Hat's customers and trolling for them. So Red Hat refused to release their patches for the red hat kernel versions that they prepped to begin with. The preps are free, but the patches are not.
let me say this very clearly: been there, done that; got the t-shirt.
1) when I was 28 I quit drinking any alcohol, in the process I suffered two weeks of physical pain, caused by the removal of any alcohol from a body that was used to a moderate amount every day. It was sobering (that was an intentional joke) and made me realize how very powerful a drug alcohol is. I also learned very quickly not to tell any one about that because they don't want to know.
2) In the mid-1990's, 1996 I think, I was in the airport in Toronto and decided to quit smoking pot. After 25 years of smoking high quality weed daily, pretty much all day in fact, I quit. I took my shit and dumped it in the trashcan. And never felt the least pang , qualm or problem with it.
3) In 2005 I decided to quit smoking cigarettes. I had smoked for a long time, tried to and "succeeded " at quitting twice but always went back to it. In my personal view I never really quit. That time I really quit. I sent my wife and kids away for the first month of the summer, locked myself away in the house for a month and spent two to four weeks of the most painful, gut wrenching,mind numbing, time in my entire life. Even quitting alcohol didn't come close to this.
anecdotal, yes, but powerful enough to show the difference between addiction and habituation.
BTW, I also quit cocaine in the 80s with any problem, but I had no interest in cocaine at any time, always disliked it in fact, a stupid drug from my point of view.
LOL: one of my students was in class the other day with a Macbook Air. She was running WinXP on it because that is what she knew how to do, she had the store (in China) take off (or else hide somewhere and run the winxp as a virt appliance, i don't know or care) so that she could have the pirated version of xp that everyone else in china uses.
Whoa, jump back Jack and STFU. I am a Red Hat Shareholder, have been for a number of years. Before any of the FUDdite fools get too excited and feel a feeding frenzy coming on go look at Red Hat stock on NASDAQ: it is rock solid AND climbing fast. Like it gained $4/share (about 8%) last week. Historic highs for the company. And, before everyone wastes their electrons saying more about Red Hat when they obviously know dog about it let me add that Red Hat is completely and totally dedicated to FOSS as a vehicle to that shareholder bottom line. They have backed up their philosophy with their actions over and over again. Quality stands in the forefront of what they do, they don't put out the closed source stuff they purchase until it is good software, not the garbage cludge that hides behind closed code. They take heat for this approach, but they have never shafted the community, the shareholders or the FOSS philosophy. Unlike some other companies that fail to keep their promises.
So everybody needs to stop shooting from the lip and move along.
perhaps i have just been too close to the wrong side of the law too often, but in truth, the police are sadly addicted to power, to physical force and to their mind trip that says they are better than everyone else. I had a younger friend, not a bad guy from a problematic but close knit family. He and another friend joined the sheriffs department and then he went on to the local police force. He quickly got the reputation for being vicious, physically brutal and untrustworthy. Mutual friends shake their heads these days and talk about how he "went to the dark side".
But the sad story was the other boy who went with him and who wasn't quite tough enough to be mean has become More of a headcase.The police didn't want him and it twisted his head around. I don't want to know what he is doing to the prisoners in the jails today.
Another guy I worked with, from a good family, poor, uneducated but honest, left the job where we were working together and was really excited to get a job as a prison guard for minimum security state prison. A week later he came back to his old job, chastened. His comment "those guards are worse than the criminals. I left because I didn't ever want to be a horrible as they were."
The moral is that there are some truly good people in the world, but they don't go into law enforcement (or politics it seems)
i am just back from 15 years in Asia, the last 6 in China. Hear what I say!
The mobile phone market in Asia, including China, is more free than the North American market. You are being robbed, cheated, locked out and kept out of the phones, the services and the value of the mobile marketplace. You are only a revenue source for the companies, not customers, just useful chumps.
In China I can have as many SIM cards as I want. I pay by the minute and a robust and diverse marketplace keeps prices reasonable (about 2 dollars a month for the most basic service plus about a penny for a SMS message and 2 cents a minute for calls anywhere in the country. My wife just landed in Kunming, Yunnan province last weekend and had a new phone and SIM card for 20 dollars within an hour or so from landing.
Not only that, the market is pushing development of the best phones in the world!
The government stays out of it except in doing the kind of monitoring that our government does on people they don't like, we have no more freedom on that account either i fear. So, the corporate control of our mobile market is robbing us with the support of the government. The more money we spend on phones the less we have to support adverse political ideas like the occupy movements.
Why Apple "kicks ass" and why they were so successful and why they might continue to be so (but only if they have the sense to not buy into the foolishness being spouted above and below) is because they were absolutely fantastic at marketing.
Think of it this way: design is primarily a marketing function in this modern world. This is not to say that it has always been primary, it sometimes was about ergonomics or usability or even fitting in the right place at the right time. But today, design is just about creating a brand style that can be sold to the public as sleek, special, beautiful, desirable, modern, high-value and high (add your desirable characteristic here). the key word is "sold" and Apple, Jobs especially, got that part. Sometime in the Pixar years he had an epiphany when he realized that it was the marketing of an identifiable design style that could set Apple apart.
Look at the patents that they are beating Samsung about with: design stuff like rounded corners. Look at the iMac, there was no cutting edge tech there, it was all off the shelf at the time, but the design aspect built a remarkable brand that people could want to have. The innovation that Jobs had for the iMac, and arguably for every other "breakthru product" was not the tech or the iStore or anything really that remarkable, what he did was make the tech subservient to the design.
In the iMac that meant fitting a full 3.5" HDD together with a laptop CD player and a laptop motherboard with limited ports. I had one of the first iMacs (blue and white with a tray CD player-- first three months production before the slot loaders were ready) that my wife bought, take that thing apart and it wasn't much at all. What was impressive was that by controlling the symmetry (by which I mean that he kept the number of devices that could be used to a minimum so that the OS9 kernel only had to hold drivers for a very limited number of devices) he could have a pretty zippy system even with lower speed processors (needed to keep a fan out of the case). All design criteria (no fan, no noise, valuable in a desktop system).
Brilliant! but only in terms of marketing. Think of it as the Yves St Laurent approach to computers and you realize that the accolades he is receiving are the stuff of fashion legends as well. They always get "modded up" in the glitter world based on the effect they had in marketing their products, not in any real innovation.
Using Win 7 i notice that my desktop is NOT immediately usable. But, the problem is clearly that many of the files and folders I access first are on network drives that are painfully slow to load in windows. The files are stored and served off of oracle mainframes.
yes but remember what politicians have to contend with, even assuming they have a clue (and usually they have someone working for them who should) listen to the outrage when you tell the "taxpayers" that they are going to have all their tax money "given" to the universities! They will be up in arms at their tea party/ ron paul/ libertarian meetings because we should privatize the universities and only support loans from private banks backed by government bonds administered by private investment bankers who we know we can trust.
In the world today, no matter how much sense your idea makes (and I am not sure that I agree with your premise that universities use student loan revenues to inflate their salaries or budgets or whatever. Being a faculty member I know we all struggle with tight budgets, lack of funds for basic goods and services and salaries that increase by less than inflation over the long term.) I fear that there cannot be an intelligent and thoughtful discussion of the facts that you and I might like to see so that we can reach a reasonable and productive understanding that leads to a cogent and intelligent solution
And then Look at the brilliant fool who is governor of Florida telling students that they should go into business studies (whatever that broad brush paints) that will help them make money when they graduate. Excuse the EF out of me but since more than 95% of new businesses go belly up in their first 5 years, how will these grateful alums pay their bills and repay their loans. The streets are full of them right now, already. I wonder what percent of the rebellious 99% have a business degree?
Not only this, but, for example, when I lived in a small southern city of 70,000 residents in an area that had a total of about 135,000 residents and two major industries: General Electric and Babcock and Wilcox Nuclear (where they made da bombz and the reactors). Do you seriously think that the local people had any say at all in local government. That is a big laugh. The only individual in the community who had any political power was a local TV preacher named Jerry Falwell, maybe you've heard of him? Now tell me about the "power" of local government. You might WANT it to be that way, but in reality just open your eyes and see who really controls YOUR local government.
agreed,my completely tech illiterate wife uses android and ubuntu and would kill u if u tried to take them away now
I was a beta tester for gnome 3 until i admitted I was using cairo dock and some of the devs got cranky about it. I still kept using it but didn't post bugs after that. After fedora came out with the final product I decided to dump the dock and use the dasher, and am pretty happy overall with it. I know some love to hate and that is their right. My wife is still on ubuntu 10.4 and is not happy about the possibility of change, but change must come. I still support the concept that gnome 3 helps you do things faster, maybe not find your stuff faster (although doing a search is doing something) but i can almost double my work speed over KDE and win7 with gnome 3. The numbers aren't 2x for gnome 2, but that was what I was used to and had my skillset built around it. Nonetheless, I am more efficient overall now with gnome 3.
As for the poor fool talking about the joys of win7, i have to use that stuff at work and it just chafes the hell out of me. Slow, retarded, better than XP? whoopee! Get real and join the 21st century.
sadly phreaking like we used to do disappeared before it really homogenized into something solid. It was taken over by kids who used the name as when all they did was look over the shoulders of people entering their phone card numbers and remember them. Lame shit, even script kiddies have to at least press the enter key a few times, those guys were shit.
BTW, the remnants of the phone company response to the original boxes remains to this day. If you call a number and it rings more than a set number of times (usually 20 I think) the company cuts the call off. This was because the boxes would send a signal that copied the ringtone back to the company while you were talking on the line (you were on the green wire (or yellow?) I forget) and the ringer was on the red. As long as they had a ringing line they didn't start to charge so you could talk for hours.
ah the old days
interestingly, and in my experience as well, prodigies seldom fulfill their early promise. I knew two brothers, as different as nnight and day physically but both as brilliant as this young man. They were at an elite boarding school with me back in the early 70s. They both disappeared into Stanford at age 16 or 17 never to be heard from again. This is not uncommon, apparently they burnout early as well, and retire early. Doesn't sound like a lot of fun, and fun is good.
me thinks thou doest protest too much. While there might be a few of the ilk you describe here, you are guilty of branding us all with the same iron when many of us do not deserve it.
AmI the only one who is remarking on the real facts of what Jobs did for us? It seems the lovefest about the iPad/Phone/Pod/Mac missed out on the real things he did invent (not just market the hell out of)
1) as I recall he was the first company to have a mouse attached to a PC in a consumer item (i put it this way to avoid the people who would argue that he didn't invent the mouse, some unknown crank from the English midlands did it in his garage 3 months before Jobs)
2) The "Desktop" metaphor. The IIe was the first PC that used a "desktop", a place to put the things you wanted close at hand while you are at work on your computer. For better or worse (and being a Gnome 3 user i really love the "workplace" metaphor of Gnome3 over the "have things place" metaphor) it revolutionized the screen use on PCs.
3) He was quite prescient about "dead tech" and quickly moved his products away from it.
Now the first two were clear improvements in the use of computers and in user interface. That was worth celebrating. But, notice, if they were "the most important things" that he did no one would care. Instead because he sold a bunch of glossy "fondleslabs" (a tip of the hat to the Register) he becomes as hyped as those products are.
I'm afraid that RMS is right, the hype is not the real man.
yeah, the p's facts are wrong. Actually IBM hires contractors to do their work. The contractors are "self-employed" and have to pay for all their stuff: insurance, un-employment, etc. etc, it is actually better for IBM to do it that way.
I had a friend who was offered a position as an IELTS (international English Language testing service) tester/ grader. She left after the second day with the comment that they were trying to get her to agree that European accents were "better" and "more comprehensible to most people". She had spent ten years teaching in China and found that Chinese accents were much easier to understand than European accents.
The problem was/is not the accent itself, it is always the determination that one accent is "better" or more comprehensible than another. People speak Indian English as their mother language, but that doesn't necessarily make it comprehensible to every other native English speaker. Ditto for Nigerian or Kenyan or Australian for that matter. No offense intended of course, that is the point. Only people without international experience assume that the problem is with the speaker, when you are "somewhere else" and can't understand how people speak your language the problem of understanding is yours!
I am a teacher drone at a "state-funded" university. The idea that state tax money does dog sh*t for us is ludicrous. The fed's provide a small piece of grant money for US students, a few hundred a year at most. The state's usually match that. What else is on the chart: well most state universities get about 2-4% of their operating budgets covered by the state. That is the money you are talking about when you talk about pensions and benefits. The rest of the money (and I mean for the balance of the operating budget AND the cost of instruction and research and capital investments, upgrades, improvements that keep us current, all that, comes from the money that the university EARNS with tuitions and research contracts.
So explain to me why a state school should be jumping with joy about being required to provide tuition, room and board to in-state students at cost or loss just to get a tiny fraction of the operating budget. Makes more sense to tell the states to suck off and charge everyone the same, which might lower cost for the out of state and international students that are paying extra to subsidize the instate students.
If you want to see where this stupidity leads just look at England. They are franchising out their universities around the world to get the income needed to provide services for English students who get heavily subsidized education.
the state and the feds do so little for universities it would be easier of they just went away and left us alone
Actually TOR was developed by/for the FaLunGong group to get around the Chinese firewall and allow them to communicate/ share data across the firewall. It has proved valuable against the Iranian firewall as well, but it also is still the baby of FaLunGong.
As a Fedora fanboy (let me be clear about my position here) AND a RedHat (RHT) stockholder (money where my mouth is) let me point out that:
1) Red Hat announced last year that they were approaching the 1 billion mark and hoped to pass it this year
2) This announcement is merely a prognostication that they will accomplish that this year
3) their stocks have been a consistent and strong investment for me (as opposed to AMD, various solar energy and battery companies).
4) Red Hat is a company, they are doing what their stock holders wish, as directed by the Board. We and the board believe in their implementation of OSS, FOSS, as well as their approach to the ideas of software freedom and how a company can be an important implementer of FOSS software. The amount of money (in salaries and development) that Red Hat gives back to the FOSS community and FOSS projects from the Linux kernel to thousands of gnu projects they help support is huge (not unparalleled, but only paralleled by companies like Google or IBM who are ginormous compared to Red Hat), yet they are growing in value year over year and have been for more than 10 years).
They have done this in the server and business market, competing with the huge players in the game and earning their respect and fear (MS, Oracle, Sun, etc although these companies might like to crush them they have not succeeded).
The report being quoted in the storyline is a report to the stockholders, a public document that Red Hat uses to give us good news and warn us of impending problems. It is notable that Red Hat is always honest in these public announcements, but also conservative. They normally do not trumpet changes or important milestones unless they have good reason to believe they will come about. Unlike many companies that use creative accounting to project rosy futures to try to pump up their share value only to have it crash after the truth comes out. Red Hat supports software freedom and honesty. They are a company I am proud to be a part of and proud to use their products and promote their products at every opportunity.
ok, i've been away too long and not really kept up with the scene. While I own a Hyundai hybrid sans plug and recently rode in a Toyota sans plug I spoke without checking on the newer ones which, being touted as "all-electric" would to my mind require some kind of plug as the electrics in China do. So, I was wrong, my wife and kids would give you a big "duh, he usually is" if i told them.... drools slowly and shuffles away
probably another attempt by 360 AV to crush competition. They attacked QQ last Spring and made a big fuss, now maybe they are going after some competitors. It is the wild west over there.