You need a reference for people having a whole range of different personalities, intelligence, capabilities and personalities?
There are many, many people (indeed the vast majority) who just do not have the excruciatingly logical (and perhaps blinkered) mind that a good programmer requires. Unless there is some major racial difference with the Vienamese (I am prepared to believe there is some) the Google blogger is talking bollocks. Even among engineers: I have worked with other engineers all my life and there are some who simply do not have a coder's mindset. I thought I did (I do some small apps in C as a hobby) until I met some real expert coders. The are not "better" people, they just have that particular capability and were certainly less good than I am in other areas like getting a broken-down machinery going again, my own particular skill.
Many people are no more likely to make good programmers than I am to be a good chat-show host - believe me.
"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."
That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."
The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer.
I thought it would be obvious that I was making the point that media and its reader hardware are changing so fast that you cannot trust a "standard" to last a decade, let alone two or more generations. If our great-great-grand-children find a 3.5" floppy in a box in the attic with our life story on it they are most likely to throw it away without a glance, even if they knew what a 3.5" floppy was and they could possibly find a agent somewhere who could read it at some cost. OTOH, there is a chance they will stop and read printed papers since it would not cost them any money or much effort. Some chance, anyway.
Thanks for the offer of a floppy drive, but I have a 3.5" drive within reach right here. I keep an old PC on my network specially for it, until I get round to transferring all my data on floppies onto DVD's - hopefully before DVDs become old hat too.
I am a fan of open source, but we shouldn't be mandating EITHER way...... A good analogy is if the UK government mandated that fleet vehicles have their design and manufacturing processes laid bare, or they wouldn't buy the vehicles. I really don't care about the processes documentation - buy the best car at the best price.
Wrong car analogy. Unlike software, it is easy to replace one type of car with another if the first is unsatisfactory.
Nevertheless, I once worked in ship design for the Royal Navy and every detail of the design WAS required. We needed (among other things) to be damn sure that the ships were maintainable by any dockyard - not just the one that built it for example.
"Oh, look, great grand papa's diary from the year 2013! Let's open it!"
Unrecognized file type.DOC
Exactly. And that is one of the things that makes me so angry with Microsoft - their attempt to scupper the non-proprietory Open Document format which stood a chance of becoming a standard for a long time to come. MS want to control any standard and keep changing it - so that people keep having to buy the latest version of Word to keep up.
But another problem is storage media. A few years ago I wrote some family history on an Amstrad PCW and saved it on 3" floppies. Now I cannot read them. Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more.
My advice:- print everything you wnat to be available for a long time. Not on a laser printer though, because I have found that fades too, as do photocopies.
Your fight against globalization has pretty much the same chance of success like staying in front of Hurricane Sandy and yelling "thou shalt NOT pass!!!".
No, I believe it is a passing phase. At the moment we have a barmy situation whereby I see in my South Wales supermarket bottles of water brought from the Alps, beer brought from India and the Far East (insipid stuff anyway), and vegtables from South America - none of which could not be and are not produced here. With rising fuel prices, follies like driving a lorry-load of water across Europe will become more rare, as will airliner tourism.
As natural resources run out, overtaken by spiralling populations, each country will start to keep and make more use of its own resources (eg, the UK will re-open its coal mines instead of importing it from Australia), and certain people will at last stop arguing that large numbers of people are an asset, but recognise that they are a burden instead.
When a desert island cast-away starts running out of his food, he does not talk of "expense" or "value for money".
Looking for dates at work? - that's a new one. I read a [UK] survey once that found that very few people found their partners in the work environment. It could be embarrasing - if it does not work out you still have to come in and see them every day.
Nor have I ever met anyone who chose their career on the basis of increasing their romance chances. Oddly enough, men who do work with women (hairdressers, theatre people) are notorious for being gay - probably because they are more relaxed with women.
To re-inforce shutdown -p now's point, join a dating club instead.
Yes, there is racism in UK, way way worse than in USA. I am black, with a PhD, worked for some of the largest tech companies
You seem to have overlooked my point "It is racial discrimination, although of the opposite sense to what is always assumed". The large tech companies I have worked for seem to bust their guts trying to recruit and promote suitably qualified non-whites and women. They are terrified of being accused of discriminating against them. Maybe the other way round in small companies.
could not find another job in UK. Was even willing to take a pay cut - not even serious interviews came my way.
That seems to be most people's experience these days, at least in the technical and manufacturing industries. What vacancies exist are mostly in service industries (arse-wiping the old folks) and the white-van-driving trades.
It's the job of the immigrant's government to make their economy competitive and make it interesting for him to stay in his country.
It shouldn't be very difficult, the person probably has personal and family ties there already.
Sounds like cloud cuckoo land. In the UK, many of the immigrants we get are positively escaping or avoiding their families, or getting away from a trail of petty crookery (or worse) and starting fresh (ie fresh crookery). The East Europeans in particular have set up an extensive new gangster culture here. Metal theft is a speciality among them - they send it back to agents back home on containers. No doubt their bringing UK railway lines to a halt because of stolen copper signal cables is not something those other governments care greatly about when wealth in the form of copper and other earnings is flowing back to those countries.
Prostitution is another speciality - take a look at any of several UK escort directories (I don't want to give links here) and you will see a much higher proportion of Asian and East European girls than in the general population. The advantage for "escorts" moving to another country is in fact to get well away from "personal and family ties"; the last thing those girls want is for their mother to find out what they do.
We should improve the education system and encourage our fine American youth to make use of it rather than importing immigrants from abroad. Why is the knee jerk reaction from these greedy corporate bastards always to import talent or export jobs rather than fix the what's wrong at home?
Because training workers from scratch to do the job costs MONEY.
Who said about "training from scratch"? Schools an universities should do much of the training. And if someone is going to be good at something it will have been a hobby too. I am a senior professional engineer and was model engineering from about the age of 8. My son was writing games programs from about that age too and is now an IT consultant.
Once intelligent people have the basics of a subject it does not take them long to adapt to a particular applications.
But bosses tend to look for exact matching previous experience. My wife sat on an interview panel for a book-keeper and favoured the obviously most intelligent candidate. But the company used Sage book-keeping software, and the bright candidate had previously used Quickbooks, not Sage, so the boss chose a duller candidate just because they had used Sage before.
It turned out that the woman who got the job was absolutely f#@king useless . She just sat and moaned all day and had to be shown everything and even then could not do it (including using Sage). The boss pushed her out after 3 months, but no doubt, and this is the point, she would now be able to say that she had "experience" of Sage in two jobs - at her next interview with the next stupid boss who believes experience = capability.
My wife's theory is that the boss (like many) was frightened/envious of employing someone more intelligent than himself.
Of course you need to search all over the world if you only want highly skilled people.
What bollocks.
I know highly skilled and qualified people (in the UK this is) who are cleaning offices for a living, while the politicians and businessmen are believing that such people can only be found abroad. In fact some of those office cleaners DID come from abroad under the delusion that they could get good jobs here and they are STILL overlooked by employers.
When did the bosses acquire this obsessive delusion that someone coming from abroad must be a superior worker to a home-grown one? Not in my experience anyway. How ironic it is that our UK universities are half-filled with overseas students - because UK teaching is held in high regard world-wide - and yet the bosses believe that people educated abroad must be better.
It is racial discrimination, although of the opposite sense to what is always assumed, but they get away with it.
I'm all for enforcing safer driving, but many camera emplacements are obviously for revenue-generating rather than safety.
What you mean is that they are places in areas where people are likely to be speeding. Isn't that the point?
They don't do anything to discourage the single-biggest cause of road deaths either, drunk driving.
WTF has that got to do with it? You think the police should also stop investigating murder cases and switch to working for cancer reseach because cancer kills even more people? There are other meassures against drink-driving.
if you are installing the speed camera because "people should adhere to the law" rather than to improve safety, then I tend to think the law should be examined more closely. If people are speeding in a particular location and there isn't a problem with speed-related accidents then maybe the speed limit should be raised a bit rather than enforcing the existing limit?
Law is binary, you are breaking it or not. Do you seriously expect a committee of experts to have to go out and visit the site of every speeding case that comes up at magistrates courts, to assess whether the speeding was dangerous or not? The legal system does not have the time, resources or money to do that. What is a "safe" speed has already been decided by highways staff who must make an overall judgement. They are not generally able to set different limits for different circumstances (day/night, rush-hour/non-rush-hour etc).
Having said that, yes, some limits are daft. I know (in the UK) a mile stretch of straight country road with no houses in sight, only fields, with a 30mph limit. OTOH there is a small village in North Wales on the A5, which bends through it, where there is not only no limit (except the default 60mph), but there are "all clear" repeaters on every lamp-post just to make the point. That is not "examining the law more closely", it is to do with the local assessment.
Secondly, I would say that even in the speeding incidents, often an on-the-spot ticking off by a police officer would be more effective than getting a bit of paper in the post 2 weeks later.
No, that just does not work with many people. Even the money does not work.
3. Is it to generate revenue?
How else would you suggest punishing people? Imprisoning them? Flogging them? (Might not be such a bad idea, at least it would sidestep the claims of money-making.) Or just let people get away with it - look to places like Africa and the Middle East to see what happens then.
Fuck how parents feel. The kids don't really care. And I don't give a damn about the candy industry
Who the hell modded this rant as insightful? The only insight is into this guys head. The fact is that road accidents, particularly to pedestrians, are less likely in daylight than in darkness. And as I said in another comment, that is applicable to all traffic, not just schoolchildren. Is he saying that road accidents don't matter?
I get the feeling that the lattitude of where they live is affecting some people's view here. In more northern lattitudes there is much more of an increase in the number of daylight hours in summer. There is therefore an opportunity in the middle of the year to centre the working day on daylight hours so that the morning and evening rush-hours at least occur in daylight for as much of the year as possible. I guess it does not make so much difference in places like Texas.
You could solve that problem by scheduling school in a more reasonable way without effecting everybody else. Ultimately... the only way to avoid that problem is by centering the school day around noon
But rescheduling things never happens, no matter how much of a good idea it is. It seems deep rooted in human culture that we do not centre our day on noon by the clock. But in fact, in the UK, school hours are roughly centred on noon by the clock anyway.
Anyway, daylight saving hours were never just about schoolchildren, in the UK at least. It was to get the morning and evening rush hours both into daylight as far as possible - to reduce general traffic accidents, to increase productivity in outdoor work, and to reduce electricity usage for lighting in offices, schools and factories (home lighting did not count apparently). In the days when it was introduced, people did not automatically have indoor lighting on all day long like they do now.
Its too bad slashdot has been reduced to articles like. I... find it shocking that the new slashdot owners are posting an article trying to shun google for helping in an anti-trust case.
Eh? I had not realised TFA was meant to be anti-Google.
Because Google is in ruins? Nobody's in ruins over it.
Nospam007 said "A competitor violates the rules to ruin a company and if you call the cops you are a snitch?"
I did not read that as Google being in ruins. I read it that MS were violating the rules with that aim. As in "I drank the snake oil to give myself eternal life".
They even had a minor epiphany after the test, while playing around in carnival bumper cars, which are electric. We just need a ton of electrically charged chicken wire mesh running atop the freeway to provide constant charging:)
If you boil this down, what you are left with is the disgusting stench of jealousy.
I'm going to ask my boss to increase my salary ten-fold (>> what he earns) and put that point to him.
Who are you to say that another person's salary is unjustified... ?
As the salaries that we are talking about are exceptional (ie in the top ~0.5 percentile) it is those salaries that need to be justified, not their critics.
They try to justify these salaries either on a percentage of what they handle or by claiming "we need to get the best people". Both are bollocks. I am a senior engineer in the nuclear power industry. I make decisions that cost, or save, tens of millions of $$. Some are been decisions which, if wrong, could have lead to nuclear accidents that would be world headlines. I do get advice from specialists in particular areas such as metallurgy, nuclear physics etc, but so would a senior banker making his financial decisions. If I got 0.5% of the money I see passing through I'd be a multi-millionaire by now. But I regard it as all in a day's work and earn a flat-rate of somewhat under $100,000.
But at another level, consider a car mechanic maintaining brakes. He is maybe saving several lives (worth $1 million each?) every time he spots a leaking seal or worn-down pad. Should he get say 0.5% of that million every time, or is it again all in a day's work? Where does it stop?
As for "valuable" people, over and over again at work I have seen guys retire whom everyone thought were indispensable. Like Engineering Managers at power stations who were there when the places were being built and who knew every nut and bolt. Yet the week after they had gone it was as if they had never been there, like a hole in the water. No-one is indispensable. And many of those bankers were not even doing a good job.
Also, I'm going to go and register a domain name with debian in it. And then I'm going to have a page with something about cats or cars. Screw: "You cannot use Debian trademarks in a domain name, with or without commercial intent." I'm going to sell cats or cars and Debian can't do jack.
Sorry, but I seem to have missed your point. You think someone looking for Debian is going to buy your cat by mistake? Or what?
I want [software] to be stable, functional, and I don't want it to distract me from what I'm doing. Wobbly windows, transparent title bars and other forms of bling bling are distracting to me... Debian, by having a not so nice logo... shows that their focus is not on shiny looks..... it fits their purpose: they make a stable OS, not a shiny one...... I can imagine that this actually helps them to keep focused on quality.
Crickey, all I said was that it was a lousy logo.
Are you seriously distracted by a nice looking logo? Does it really take much effort to design a nice one? And do you think those Debian guys really wake up in the morning saying "Hey, that crappy logo helps keep me focussed on quality!" ?
I too want a stable and plain OS without wobbly windows and stuff. But look again at that logo and see that it is in that irritating "Designer Sloppyness" style, with ragged edges - so is not just a spiral, but one looking like it was done in a hurry by an 8-year old with a worn-out paint brush. A previous company I worked for paid a "Design Consultant" a 5-figure sum for a logo in that style, of which (it was explained to us) every splodge and wobble was supposed to have some inner meaning. I am not suggesting that Debian would have paid such (or any) sum, but it is the same bollocks at any price.
It is a shame though what a crappy trademark Debian has - they offer an unimaginative and badly drawn white spiral on a dull grey-blue background. (Didn't that spiral used to be a sickly magenta BTW?). The "Joy" theme - "Attractive by being efficient" they call it.
Really unattractive IMHO, compared with those of Centos, Raspbery Pi, SUSE, FreeBSD or Tux himself.
Unlike Linux, Apple does not aim to corner the market
Eh? Linux aims to corner the market? Since when? "Linux" has no "aim", as it has no governing corporation to set out such "aims". It is just there, take it or leave it. It is true that some entities such as the unmourned "Lindows" project have taken it and pursued such aims with it, but they are not Linux. Google are perhaps pursuing a similar aim with Android (and with some success) but they again are not Linux.
For myself, I am quite happy with it remaining roughly where it is now in usage share (there is no such thing as Linux "market"), as long as it remains viable, and leave Windows where it is as a sponge to absorb Joe Sixpack and his world of upgrade treadmills, adware, botnets, scams and malware.
Slashdot Mirror
[Citation needed]
You need a reference for people having a whole range of different personalities, intelligence, capabilities and personalities?
There are many, many people (indeed the vast majority) who just do not have the excruciatingly logical (and perhaps blinkered) mind that a good programmer requires. Unless there is some major racial difference with the Vienamese (I am prepared to believe there is some) the Google blogger is talking bollocks. Even among engineers: I have worked with other engineers all my life and there are some who simply do not have a coder's mindset. I thought I did (I do some small apps in C as a hobby) until I met some real expert coders. The are not "better" people, they just have that particular capability and were certainly less good than I am in other areas like getting a broken-down machinery going again, my own particular skill.
Many people are no more likely to make good programmers than I am to be a good chat-show host - believe me.
"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."
That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."
The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer.
I thought it would be obvious that I was making the point that media and its reader hardware are changing so fast that you cannot trust a "standard" to last a decade, let alone two or more generations. If our great-great-grand-children find a 3.5" floppy in a box in the attic with our life story on it they are most likely to throw it away without a glance, even if they knew what a 3.5" floppy was and they could possibly find a agent somewhere who could read it at some cost. OTOH, there is a chance they will stop and read printed papers since it would not cost them any money or much effort. Some chance, anyway.
Thanks for the offer of a floppy drive, but I have a 3.5" drive within reach right here. I keep an old PC on my network specially for it, until I get round to transferring all my data on floppies onto DVD's - hopefully before DVDs become old hat too.
I am a fan of open source, but we shouldn't be mandating EITHER way. ..... A good analogy is if the UK government mandated that fleet vehicles have their design and manufacturing processes laid bare, or they wouldn't buy the vehicles. I really don't care about the processes documentation - buy the best car at the best price.
Wrong car analogy. Unlike software, it is easy to replace one type of car with another if the first is unsatisfactory.
Nevertheless, I once worked in ship design for the Royal Navy and every detail of the design WAS required. We needed (among other things) to be damn sure that the ships were maintainable by any dockyard - not just the one that built it for example.
"Oh, look, great grand papa's diary from the year 2013! Let's open it!"
Unrecognized file type .DOC
Exactly. And that is one of the things that makes me so angry with Microsoft - their attempt to scupper the non-proprietory Open Document format which stood a chance of becoming a standard for a long time to come. MS want to control any standard and keep changing it - so that people keep having to buy the latest version of Word to keep up.
:- print everything you wnat to be available for a long time. Not on a laser printer though, because I have found that fades too, as do photocopies.
But another problem is storage media. A few years ago I wrote some family history on an Amstrad PCW and saved it on 3" floppies. Now I cannot read them. Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more.
My advice
Your fight against globalization has pretty much the same chance of success like staying in front of Hurricane Sandy and yelling "thou shalt NOT pass!!!".
No, I believe it is a passing phase. At the moment we have a barmy situation whereby I see in my South Wales supermarket bottles of water brought from the Alps, beer brought from India and the Far East (insipid stuff anyway), and vegtables from South America - none of which could not be and are not produced here. With rising fuel prices, follies like driving a lorry-load of water across Europe will become more rare, as will airliner tourism.
As natural resources run out, overtaken by spiralling populations, each country will start to keep and make more use of its own resources (eg, the UK will re-open its coal mines instead of importing it from Australia), and certain people will at last stop arguing that large numbers of people are an asset, but recognise that they are a burden instead.
When a desert island cast-away starts running out of his food, he does not talk of "expense" or "value for money".
Looking for dates at work? - that's a new one. I read a [UK] survey once that found that very few people found their partners in the work environment. It could be embarrasing - if it does not work out you still have to come in and see them every day.
Nor have I ever met anyone who chose their career on the basis of increasing their romance chances. Oddly enough, men who do work with women (hairdressers, theatre people) are notorious for being gay - probably because they are more relaxed with women.
To re-inforce shutdown -p now's point, join a dating club instead.
Yes, there is racism in UK, way way worse than in USA. I am black, with a PhD, worked for some of the largest tech companies
You seem to have overlooked my point "It is racial discrimination, although of the opposite sense to what is always assumed". The large tech companies I have worked for seem to bust their guts trying to recruit and promote suitably qualified non-whites and women. They are terrified of being accused of discriminating against them. Maybe the other way round in small companies.
could not find another job in UK. Was even willing to take a pay cut - not even serious interviews came my way.
That seems to be most people's experience these days, at least in the technical and manufacturing industries. What vacancies exist are mostly in service industries (arse-wiping the old folks) and the white-van-driving trades.
It's the job of the immigrant's government to make their economy competitive and make it interesting for him to stay in his country. It shouldn't be very difficult, the person probably has personal and family ties there already.
Sounds like cloud cuckoo land. In the UK, many of the immigrants we get are positively escaping or avoiding their families, or getting away from a trail of petty crookery (or worse) and starting fresh (ie fresh crookery). The East Europeans in particular have set up an extensive new gangster culture here. Metal theft is a speciality among them - they send it back to agents back home on containers. No doubt their bringing UK railway lines to a halt because of stolen copper signal cables is not something those other governments care greatly about when wealth in the form of copper and other earnings is flowing back to those countries.
Prostitution is another speciality - take a look at any of several UK escort directories (I don't want to give links here) and you will see a much higher proportion of Asian and East European girls than in the general population. The advantage for "escorts" moving to another country is in fact to get well away from "personal and family ties"; the last thing those girls want is for their mother to find out what they do.
We should improve the education system and encourage our fine American youth to make use of it rather than importing immigrants from abroad. Why is the knee jerk reaction from these greedy corporate bastards always to import talent or export jobs rather than fix the what's wrong at home?
Because training workers from scratch to do the job costs MONEY.
Who said about "training from scratch"? Schools an universities should do much of the training. And if someone is going to be good at something it will have been a hobby too. I am a senior professional engineer and was model engineering from about the age of 8. My son was writing games programs from about that age too and is now an IT consultant.
Once intelligent people have the basics of a subject it does not take them long to adapt to a particular applications.
But bosses tend to look for exact matching previous experience. My wife sat on an interview panel for a book-keeper and favoured the obviously most intelligent candidate. But the company used Sage book-keeping software, and the bright candidate had previously used Quickbooks, not Sage, so the boss chose a duller candidate just because they had used Sage before.
It turned out that the woman who got the job was absolutely f#@king useless . She just sat and moaned all day and had to be shown everything and even then could not do it (including using Sage). The boss pushed her out after 3 months, but no doubt, and this is the point, she would now be able to say that she had "experience" of Sage in two jobs - at her next interview with the next stupid boss who believes experience = capability.
My wife's theory is that the boss (like many) was frightened/envious of employing someone more intelligent than himself.
Of course you need to search all over the world if you only want highly skilled people.
What bollocks.
I know highly skilled and qualified people (in the UK this is) who are cleaning offices for a living, while the politicians and businessmen are believing that such people can only be found abroad. In fact some of those office cleaners DID come from abroad under the delusion that they could get good jobs here and they are STILL overlooked by employers.
When did the bosses acquire this obsessive delusion that someone coming from abroad must be a superior worker to a home-grown one? Not in my experience anyway. How ironic it is that our UK universities are half-filled with overseas students - because UK teaching is held in high regard world-wide - and yet the bosses believe that people educated abroad must be better.
It is racial discrimination, although of the opposite sense to what is always assumed, but they get away with it.
I'm all for enforcing safer driving, but many camera emplacements are obviously for revenue-generating rather than safety.
What you mean is that they are places in areas where people are likely to be speeding. Isn't that the point?
They don't do anything to discourage the single-biggest cause of road deaths either, drunk driving.
WTF has that got to do with it? You think the police should also stop investigating murder cases and switch to working for cancer reseach because cancer kills even more people? There are other meassures against drink-driving.
if you are installing the speed camera because "people should adhere to the law" rather than to improve safety, then I tend to think the law should be examined more closely. If people are speeding in a particular location and there isn't a problem with speed-related accidents then maybe the speed limit should be raised a bit rather than enforcing the existing limit?
Law is binary, you are breaking it or not. Do you seriously expect a committee of experts to have to go out and visit the site of every speeding case that comes up at magistrates courts, to assess whether the speeding was dangerous or not? The legal system does not have the time, resources or money to do that. What is a "safe" speed has already been decided by highways staff who must make an overall judgement. They are not generally able to set different limits for different circumstances (day/night, rush-hour/non-rush-hour etc). Having said that, yes, some limits are daft. I know (in the UK) a mile stretch of straight country road with no houses in sight, only fields, with a 30mph limit. OTOH there is a small village in North Wales on the A5, which bends through it, where there is not only no limit (except the default 60mph), but there are "all clear" repeaters on every lamp-post just to make the point. That is not "examining the law more closely", it is to do with the local assessment.
Secondly, I would say that even in the speeding incidents, often an on-the-spot ticking off by a police officer would be more effective than getting a bit of paper in the post 2 weeks later.
No, that just does not work with many people. Even the money does not work.
3. Is it to generate revenue?
How else would you suggest punishing people? Imprisoning them? Flogging them? (Might not be such a bad idea, at least it would sidestep the claims of money-making.) Or just let people get away with it - look to places like Africa and the Middle East to see what happens then.
www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/may/11/most-dangerous-roads
Fuck how parents feel. The kids don't really care. And I don't give a damn about the candy industry
Who the hell modded this rant as insightful? The only insight is into this guys head. The fact is that road accidents, particularly to pedestrians, are less likely in daylight than in darkness. And as I said in another comment, that is applicable to all traffic, not just schoolchildren. Is he saying that road accidents don't matter?
I get the feeling that the lattitude of where they live is affecting some people's view here. In more northern lattitudes there is much more of an increase in the number of daylight hours in summer. There is therefore an opportunity in the middle of the year to centre the working day on daylight hours so that the morning and evening rush-hours at least occur in daylight for as much of the year as possible. I guess it does not make so much difference in places like Texas.
You could solve that problem by scheduling school in a more reasonable way without effecting everybody else. Ultimately ... the only way to avoid that problem is by centering the school day around noon
But rescheduling things never happens, no matter how much of a good idea it is. It seems deep rooted in human culture that we do not centre our day on noon by the clock. But in fact, in the UK, school hours are roughly centred on noon by the clock anyway.
Anyway, daylight saving hours were never just about schoolchildren, in the UK at least. It was to get the morning and evening rush hours both into daylight as far as possible - to reduce general traffic accidents, to increase productivity in outdoor work, and to reduce electricity usage for lighting in offices, schools and factories (home lighting did not count apparently). In the days when it was introduced, people did not automatically have indoor lighting on all day long like they do now.
Its too bad slashdot has been reduced to articles like. I ... find it shocking that the new slashdot owners are posting an article trying to shun google for helping in an anti-trust case.
Eh? I had not realised TFA was meant to be anti-Google.
if you search for "web browsers" on Bing[,] IE doesn't show up at all except in a side bar
It's not a browser. It is part of the operating system.
Because Google is in ruins? Nobody's in ruins over it.
Nospam007 said "A competitor violates the rules to ruin a company and if you call the cops you are a snitch?"
I did not read that as Google being in ruins. I read it that MS were violating the rules with that aim. As in "I drank the snake oil to give myself eternal life".
www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/v-a.pdf
They even had a minor epiphany after the test, while playing around in carnival bumper cars, which are electric. We just need a ton of electrically charged chicken wire mesh running atop the freeway to provide constant charging :)
Steel plating on the ground too.
Leftism boils democracy down to "two wolves and one lamb" voting on dinner.
That's democracy. What is leftism to do with it?
If you boil this down, what you are left with is the disgusting stench of jealousy.
I'm going to ask my boss to increase my salary ten-fold (>> what he earns) and put that point to him.
Who are you to say that another person's salary is unjustified ... ?
As the salaries that we are talking about are exceptional (ie in the top ~0.5 percentile) it is those salaries that need to be justified, not their critics.
They try to justify these salaries either on a percentage of what they handle or by claiming "we need to get the best people". Both are bollocks. I am a senior engineer in the nuclear power industry. I make decisions that cost, or save, tens of millions of $$. Some are been decisions which, if wrong, could have lead to nuclear accidents that would be world headlines. I do get advice from specialists in particular areas such as metallurgy, nuclear physics etc, but so would a senior banker making his financial decisions. If I got 0.5% of the money I see passing through I'd be a multi-millionaire by now. But I regard it as all in a day's work and earn a flat-rate of somewhat under $100,000.
But at another level, consider a car mechanic maintaining brakes. He is maybe saving several lives (worth $1 million each?) every time he spots a leaking seal or worn-down pad. Should he get say 0.5% of that million every time, or is it again all in a day's work? Where does it stop?
As for "valuable" people, over and over again at work I have seen guys retire whom everyone thought were indispensable. Like Engineering Managers at power stations who were there when the places were being built and who knew every nut and bolt. Yet the week after they had gone it was as if they had never been there, like a hole in the water. No-one is indispensable. And many of those bankers were not even doing a good job.
Nearly 115,000 people signed a petition asking Google to stop going through their Gmail
So why the hell do they use Gmail? Here's a clue for them - use a proper email client.
Also, I'm going to go and register a domain name with debian in it. And then I'm going to have a page with something about cats or cars. Screw: "You cannot use Debian trademarks in a domain name, with or without commercial intent." I'm going to sell cats or cars and Debian can't do jack.
Sorry, but I seem to have missed your point. You think someone looking for Debian is going to buy your cat by mistake? Or what?
I want [software] to be stable, functional, and I don't want it to distract me from what I'm doing. Wobbly windows, transparent title bars and other forms of bling bling are distracting to me ... Debian, by having a not so nice logo... shows that their focus is not on shiny looks. .... it fits their purpose: they make a stable OS, not a shiny one. ..... I can imagine that this actually helps them to keep focused on quality.
Crickey, all I said was that it was a lousy logo.
Are you seriously distracted by a nice looking logo? Does it really take much effort to design a nice one? And do you think those Debian guys really wake up in the morning saying "Hey, that crappy logo helps keep me focussed on quality!" ?
I too want a stable and plain OS without wobbly windows and stuff. But look again at that logo and see that it is in that irritating "Designer Sloppyness" style, with ragged edges - so is not just a spiral, but one looking like it was done in a hurry by an 8-year old with a worn-out paint brush. A previous company I worked for paid a "Design Consultant" a 5-figure sum for a logo in that style, of which (it was explained to us) every splodge and wobble was supposed to have some inner meaning. I am not suggesting that Debian would have paid such (or any) sum, but it is the same bollocks at any price.
It is a shame though what a crappy trademark Debian has - they offer an unimaginative and badly drawn white spiral on a dull grey-blue background. (Didn't that spiral used to be a sickly magenta BTW?). The "Joy" theme - "Attractive by being efficient" they call it.
Really unattractive IMHO, compared with those of Centos, Raspbery Pi, SUSE, FreeBSD or Tux himself.
Unlike Linux, Apple does not aim to corner the market
Eh? Linux aims to corner the market? Since when? "Linux" has no "aim", as it has no governing corporation to set out such "aims". It is just there, take it or leave it. It is true that some entities such as the unmourned "Lindows" project have taken it and pursued such aims with it, but they are not Linux. Google are perhaps pursuing a similar aim with Android (and with some success) but they again are not Linux.
For myself, I am quite happy with it remaining roughly where it is now in usage share (there is no such thing as Linux "market"), as long as it remains viable, and leave Windows where it is as a sponge to absorb Joe Sixpack and his world of upgrade treadmills, adware, botnets, scams and malware.