Perhaps because shorting a stock is highly risky and not for the faint of heart?
Shorting "highly risky"? That depends entirely on how you use a short. I'll agree that an uncovered short on a volatile stock you don't understand is very very risky. But that doesn't mean the act of shorting is risky, it merely means that *method* of shorting is risky. Shorting can be used as a hedging strategy as well which can be actually risk reducing. Shorting by itself tends to carry a similar amount of risk to buying long on margin. Definitely not for everyone but not insanely risky either. (My definition of insane is writing uncovered call options or anything in the futures market. Your mileage probably varies.) If you trust yourself to pick a stock long, you probably can pick one short.
You'll often hear people argue that shorting carries unlimited risk from the stock going up. This is a bit of a strawman arguement because of both margin calls and the fact that any vaguely reasonable investor will get out once the losses become too large for his risk tolerance and/or investing strategy. True you can lose a lot of money shorting but in real terms your risk is not infinite. Your broker simply won't allow it.
Anyway, you can make a pretty reasonable arguement in this case that SCOX is a stock whose price has gone up >400% in the last 6 months strictly from the announcement of a lawsuit of fairly dubious merit. The fundamentals of the stock do not by any measure I'm aware of support its current stock price valuation. So if you believe the lawsuit is really without merit (I do) then it's probably a pretty good investment to short SCOX. If you aren't so sure the lawsuit is without merit (understandable since our legal system does weird things sometimes) then you probably should keep your money out.
If you are going to short SCO, make sure you know what you are getting into.
I concur wholeheartedly. But the same goes for any investment. You should not make any investment you do not fully understand.
I've seen a lot of people for the last few months expressing outrage over SCO's actions. If you are convinced that SCO has no case and that their claims are false, why not short their stock? Put your money where your mouth is. I have.
SCO has a P/E ratio over 80 lately which indicates it's stock price is inflated anyway so it makes sense. If they're going to be a bunch of lying bastards, why shouldn't we profit from them going out of business?
I should clarify. It connects fine but accounts that are in a workgroup that does not match the samba server can only log in as guest. So for example I have two workgroups GROUPA and GROUPB, and the samba server is in GROUPA. One laptop in each workgroup. The GROUPA laptop can share the printer and copy files to the samba server, but the GROUPB laptop can only do so as Guest. The accounts are properly defined and if I switch the workgroup name for the samba server, the problem reverses itself.
What little documentation I've found (samba documentation is rather poor IMO) indicates that multiple workgroups is difficult at best. It worked fine with a Windows 2000 box but perhaps I'm taking a too simple approach.
Can anyone tell me if 3.0 includes an easier way to get computers in more than one workgroup to connect? I know you can do it with by running an extra instance of samba but it's awkward. Any better ideas?
I've got a bunch of laptops that have to connect to different workgroups but I'd like to have them all connect to my samba server. But they have different workgroups and that cannot easily be changed. Samba doesn't deal well with this out of the box, though it works pretty well under Windows proper.
We have 12 laptops in the office, and in 3 years, all the batteries but one have died...
You are aware that rechargable batteries have a limited lifetime, right? I concur that it is annoying but you should only expect your laptop batteries to last a year or two. After that they lose their ability to recharge and need to be replaced. It's an expense to plan for. It's no different than the batteries for your car which need to be replaced regularly. (every 3-4 years for those) They wear out and need to be replaced.
110+ hour weeks (despite a rule limiting hours ostensibly to 80)
Up for 36 straight hours every 4th night for 3-7 years
Shitty pay compared with amount of work and with no adjustment by area (~$35,000/year)
Faculty hazing
Tons of scut work because the government pays your salary instead of the hospital
Short vacation scheduled a year in advance with time for board exams and sick time taken out of it
Frequently resident doctors have crushing ($150,000+) debt to pay off (note paltry salary above)
Several thousand dollars for board examinations on top of shitty pay and lots of loans
If you are thinking of becoming a doctor and can imagine yourself doing something else, do it. Frankly the lifestyle sucks for the 10 years until you finish med school + residency and for many specialties it still blows once you are done. I have enormous respect for doctors because they've earned every penny they make.
Correct me if im wrong, but doesnt Bluetooth ALWAYS ON, suck a lot of battery on mobiles?
Consider yourself corrected.:-) Bluetooth is designed to be a low power consumption technology. My phone lasts for about 5-7 days without a recharge with Bluetooth on constantly. (Less if I talk a lot, obviously) I think you might be confusing WiFi's power consumption with Bluetooth. They are designed for different purposes. WiFi has much higher power requirements and does suck batteries down much more quickly.
While bluetooth is really cool, I'd be worried about being "bluejacked" ("bluespammed"?). With the current generation of bluetooth phones (US only?), you can supposedly scan for and send messages to any nearby bluetooth-enabled phone. There seems to be no way to prevent from getting spammed, aside from disabling bluetooth on your phone (which is a real bummer, as bluetooth headsets are really cool).
Not really a worry as far as I can tell. My phone allows you to specify whether Bluetooth broadcasts to everyone or whether it is "hidden" (much like hidding your SSID with WiFi). You also can specify which devices are allowed to pair with your phone, and request physical confirmation (you push a button) to authorize a connection. As long as you give your phone a unique name, I don't see spam as being a significant problem.
Interesting that these machines use Bluetooth. My Thinkpad has bluetooth built in and I've just picked up a Bluetooth phone (Nokia 6310i). Bluetooth is *really* slick. I love not having to get my phone out of my bag to check contacts or sync with my address book. I can send SMS messages from my computer via Mobile Master again without having to locate my phone or punch text into a keyboard not designed for it.
I'm now very seriously considering getting a car speaker set for my vehicle and I'm certain my next PDA will have bluetooth. My next laptop will probably be a Powerbook and I hope they have bluetooth built in by then because I'm going to want it. It's one of those nifty technologies you wonder why you didn't bother with before.
Oh, if you do have a Nokia phone, their Nokia Connection Manager software is a bit hit/miss as to whether it will work with a given bluetooth device. Doesn't work with my T30 but I've been able to work around it. YMMV.
Aerospace like software, eh? "Crap, the rocket is not ready and the deadline for launch is tomorrow!" "Bah, launch it anyways and we'll release a patch later!"
Of course they are the same. Just ask the Challenger crew...
There are really only 5 CAD packages that matter. AutoCAD, ProEngineer, I*DEAS, CATIA and Unigraphics. There are lots of other packages out there, some pretty good, some not so good. But the 5 I mentioned above are the "standards" (for lack of a better term) that are used throughout industry. Those others that were mentioned (ArchiCAD, CADintosh,..., MacSchema, PowerCADD, VectorWorks, etc) are not widely used and present potential compatibility headaches if you want to exchange electronic drawings with suppliers or customers.
Want to work with DaimlerChrysler? You need CATIA. Ford? I*DEAS. GM? Unigraphics. If you work in the aerospace industry, chances are very good that you will need CATIA. If you are doing 2D CAD, AutoCAD is the standard everywhere. If these CAD packages are not available on a mac, then the mac doesn't have any CAD packages that matter.
Believe me, I'd love to use a Mac for CAD work but it's simply not an option right now. Now that it is unix based, there is a prayer of seeing CATIA, I*DEAS, UG and ProE on a mac since they also have unix versions already. AutoCAD is unlikely to come to the Mac anytime soon I think. They're tied too closely to Windows and have no real reason to change that.
Making it simpler doesn't necessarily making it better. A simple Windows-like layout has problems in networked/multiuser environments; not good for servers or corporate desktops.
Absolutely true and that's a good point. But the reverse is true as well. A lot of the complexity of the default directory structure in linux is unnecessary and does not aid anyone. It's simply cruft.
It makes sense to me to go for a technically better layout instead of a simple layout for the user. After all, the user *shouldn't have to know* about the layout. The menus and icons are all they should care about. This way, end users won't be annoyed because they shouldn't get exposed to the layout, and the system can take full advantage of the more powerful layout.
Agreed. But I think that as a general principle, an understandable layout (and the current one isn't for most people) will help everyone. Forget the difference between end users, sysadmins, and programmers. A simpler, better designed and consistently used structure helps everyone.
To get virtual desktops in Windows you need to find and install PowerToys manually. Somehow that's an acceptable solution, yet going to www.freshrpms.net for the installation problem isn't? I fail to see the logic.
The problem isn't going to www.freshrpms.net. The problem is going back 20 times because the installer isn't smart enough to figure out the dependencies and solve them without user intervention. The problem is that each installer has different requirements for which you can't (by default) resolve all in one place. Most distros do not direct you to freshrpms so even if that was the perfect solution, it isn't used sufficiently to matter. I'm reasonably confident it will be sorted out in due time but it still is an annoyance right now.
First, the filesystem is described here: http://www.linuxnovice.org/main_focus.php3?VIEW=VI EW&t_id=126
I'm well aware of how it works. (I've been a unix user/sysadmin for years) But it still is an unintuitive and inconsistently used system. Read the rest of the posts. I'm by no means the only one who thinks this.
And second, why should you try to explain this to your wife or mother in the first place?
Missing the point. The point is that if it is simple enough for me to explain it to them (at a high level), then it is simple enough in general. The directory structure of linux has a lot of unnecessary cruft in it. And the distro/application makers do not help matters by each of them having their own opinion about where stuff should go.
"# Dependency hell. This can and should be resolved automatically without needing user intervention."
www.freshrpms.net
Does my SuSE 8.2 installation do that out of the box? Nope. There is no installation system that is universally used. Hopefully this will change, but it will require the distro vendors to cooperate a bit.
If you have a recent distribution (like RedHat 9), all your fonts (including in Mozilla) should be antialiased already. To further improve it, download the Bitstream Vera fonts from ftp.gnome.org, and extract the files to ~/.fonts I'm using SuSE 8.2. I've got the bitstream fonts, microsoft fonts and a bunch of others. Still looks bad. And frankly, I shouldn't have to mess with this. (hence it is an "annoyance") You're spending a lot of time defending all this stuff but the point is that you shouldn't have to. Just because a solution exists doesn't mean it is the right way to do things. I'm not willing to spend my life hunting for workarounds for things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
What kind of documentation? Desktop documentation is quite good and newbie-oriented. I would disagree with that strongly. The documentation is inconsistent, very often not applicable to the particular problem or distribution you are using and often not easily accessible.
Have you ever read the GNOME User Guide? Yep. Though I use KDE mostly.
As for system documentation: only technical users would want to read them. I don't think it's a problem for technical users to learn a bit more about the system.
Which implies that the documentation is written well enough to actually learn from. Frequently not the case. My time is limited and frankly I can think of better things to do than wade through reams of bad documentation.
Most desktop apps are either GTK+ or QT
So what? GTK+ and QT do not force the software designer to create a great or consistent user interface. That is a design issue. It's only partly a tool issue.
As for Gimp: try Gimp 1.3. It's great. The new UI is much more flexible and sane, and makes the whole app much more productive. There's even an option to enable a "normal" (on-the-top) menu bar!
I have. It's still quite unconventional. Don't get me wrong, it works and it's a great application. But from a usability standpoint it does a lot of things that make it hard to learn and/or hard to work with.
Inconsistent location of files./usr ,/usr/local ,/bin ,/sbin, and the like are not intuitive and not consistently used either. I shudder at the thought of trying to explain this structure to my wife or mother.
Dependency hell. This can and should be resolved automatically without needing user intervention.
Too much dependance on editing configuration files by hand. While this can and should always be an option, I've had to do it too many times where it was obvious that the feature should have been accessible through a gui. (most recently, getting samba to boot up automatically instead of being started by hand. Not hard but I can't believe I'm the only one who ever wanted to do that.)
Ugly fonts. Particularly bad in Mozilla. This has been getting better, but there still are issues to be resolved.
Documentation. Usually you can find out how to do something but you had better be technically adept. Previous exposure to unix systems helps a lot. Documentation under linux usually sucks big time.
Lack of formal driver support from hardware vendors. Most hardware these days seems to work, but far too often is unsupported by the vendors and as such doesn't always work as intended. (there are notable exceptions) I understand why they don't support it, but that doesn't mean they couldn't. This is much better than it was a few years back but it still lags windows significantly.
Awkward and inconsistant user interfaces. Virtually all linux applications are guilty of this at some level. Everything from abiword to KDE/GNOME to the GIMP to xv has it's weird interface issues. (I love GIMP but it's interface is bizarre) This has been steadily improving but there is a long way to go still.
I changed the name of the AP from "linksys" to "WhatAboutHIPPA" and left. Hopefully SOMEONE will see that and realize they screwed up, but I'm not counting on it.
Given the level of technical expertise I've come to observe in most medical offices (translation: extremely low) they probably will not get it. The best thing you could do (if you are worried about lawsuits & such) is to notify them anonymously and include some relevant articles from trusted sources they might recognize. (PC Magazine, etc) Even better, start yourself a little "business" and send them some flyers offering to help fix the problem. Maybe you can make some jack and do a good deed in the process.
Granted they might not get it anyway and I applaud you for any effort but the staff which manages that stuff is very unlikely to be security savvy. You'll have to be more obvious than that. Stupid I know but remember that they are trying to help people, so their heart is in the right place.
Proves not a single person who's posted has RTFA yet.
Not sure why I'm responding to an AC but I did RTFA. I wasn't responding to that. I was responding to the stupid comment about the article in slashdot by the submitter.
It amazes me that a such a company would have such lax security as to allow an insider to browse supposedly private data at will.
And why should this "amaze" you? At some level in any company there needs to be people who can do this. Your human resources department has a ton of information about you that they can pretty much look at whenever they want. Medical professionals are the same way. If you are an interesting case, do you honestly believe doctors/nurses will not talk about you? You are naive if you think that, despite laws (HIPPA) prohibiting such behavior.
You need to be able to trust these people and while there does need to be security and surveillance of people with access to sensitive information, you can't keep them completely away from it. This is especially true in a company (or government agency) whose business is based upon such information. It's also nearly impossible to prevent a knowledgeable insider from getting access to sensitive information, so I'm double confused why this should be surprising.
While it is unfortunate that it happened, the fact that it happened should "amaze" no one. Give enough people a chance to make money by breaking the law and guess what? Some of them will.
I'm seeing a lot of people saying something to the effect of "put up or shut up". Are you sure you really want that? How would it affect your life if the Samba or Apache projects were shut down for patent infringement? I'm not saying this is likely, or even possible, but just think about it for a moment. MS could cause a LOT of problems without even having a valid legal leg to stand on. They certainly could convince a lot of companies to question adoption of open source. And it's not as if they are exactly convinced about it now...
SCO is the last gasps of a desparate company. Any legal action from Microsoft will be very calculated and a much bigger threat. Remember, $40 billion buys a lot of time from your friendly neighborhood legal team. That's pretty hard to fight, even if you are right.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps because shorting a stock is highly risky and not for the faint of heart?
Shorting "highly risky"? That depends entirely on how you use a short. I'll agree that an uncovered short on a volatile stock you don't understand is very very risky. But that doesn't mean the act of shorting is risky, it merely means that *method* of shorting is risky. Shorting can be used as a hedging strategy as well which can be actually risk reducing. Shorting by itself tends to carry a similar amount of risk to buying long on margin. Definitely not for everyone but not insanely risky either. (My definition of insane is writing uncovered call options or anything in the futures market. Your mileage probably varies.) If you trust yourself to pick a stock long, you probably can pick one short.
You'll often hear people argue that shorting carries unlimited risk from the stock going up. This is a bit of a strawman arguement because of both margin calls and the fact that any vaguely reasonable investor will get out once the losses become too large for his risk tolerance and/or investing strategy. True you can lose a lot of money shorting but in real terms your risk is not infinite. Your broker simply won't allow it.
Anyway, you can make a pretty reasonable arguement in this case that SCOX is a stock whose price has gone up >400% in the last 6 months strictly from the announcement of a lawsuit of fairly dubious merit. The fundamentals of the stock do not by any measure I'm aware of support its current stock price valuation. So if you believe the lawsuit is really without merit (I do) then it's probably a pretty good investment to short SCOX. If you aren't so sure the lawsuit is without merit (understandable since our legal system does weird things sometimes) then you probably should keep your money out.
If you are going to short SCO, make sure you know what you are getting into.
I concur wholeheartedly. But the same goes for any investment. You should not make any investment you do not fully understand.
I've seen a lot of people for the last few months expressing outrage over SCO's actions. If you are convinced that SCO has no case and that their claims are false, why not short their stock? Put your money where your mouth is. I have.
SCO has a P/E ratio over 80 lately which indicates it's stock price is inflated anyway so it makes sense. If they're going to be a bunch of lying bastards, why shouldn't we profit from them going out of business?
You're right, it's not really appropriate for /. Thanks though. It's nice to know that I may not be experiencing technical limitations after all.
I should clarify. It connects fine but accounts that are in a workgroup that does not match the samba server can only log in as guest. So for example I have two workgroups GROUPA and GROUPB, and the samba server is in GROUPA. One laptop in each workgroup. The GROUPA laptop can share the printer and copy files to the samba server, but the GROUPB laptop can only do so as Guest. The accounts are properly defined and if I switch the workgroup name for the samba server, the problem reverses itself.
What little documentation I've found (samba documentation is rather poor IMO) indicates that multiple workgroups is difficult at best. It worked fine with a Windows 2000 box but perhaps I'm taking a too simple approach.
Can anyone tell me if 3.0 includes an easier way to get computers in more than one workgroup to connect? I know you can do it with by running an extra instance of samba but it's awkward. Any better ideas?
I've got a bunch of laptops that have to connect to different workgroups but I'd like to have them all connect to my samba server. But they have different workgroups and that cannot easily be changed. Samba doesn't deal well with this out of the box, though it works pretty well under Windows proper.
Hmm. I shouldn't post before reading comments carefully. You were saying the same thing I was. Duh. I'll just shut up now.
We have 12 laptops in the office, and in 3 years, all the batteries but one have died...
You are aware that rechargable batteries have a limited lifetime, right? I concur that it is annoying but you should only expect your laptop batteries to last a year or two. After that they lose their ability to recharge and need to be replaced. It's an expense to plan for. It's no different than the batteries for your car which need to be replaced regularly. (every 3-4 years for those) They wear out and need to be replaced.
PS: For the record, I support Bush.
Me too! Oh... wait, you mean the president don't you? Never mind...
Sorta falls under Post-Doc but not really.
Why Medical Resident you ask?
If you are thinking of becoming a doctor and can imagine yourself doing something else, do it. Frankly the lifestyle sucks for the 10 years until you finish med school + residency and for many specialties it still blows once you are done. I have enormous respect for doctors because they've earned every penny they make.
...but this is the dumbest suggestion I've heard in a long time. A security expert recommends more security. Shocking. News at 11.
Correct me if im wrong, but doesnt Bluetooth ALWAYS ON, suck a lot of battery on mobiles?
Consider yourself corrected.
While bluetooth is really cool, I'd be worried about being "bluejacked" ("bluespammed"?). With the current generation of bluetooth phones (US only?), you can supposedly scan for and send messages to any nearby bluetooth-enabled phone. There seems to be no way to prevent from getting spammed, aside from disabling bluetooth on your phone (which is a real bummer, as bluetooth headsets are really cool).
Not really a worry as far as I can tell. My phone allows you to specify whether Bluetooth broadcasts to everyone or whether it is "hidden" (much like hidding your SSID with WiFi). You also can specify which devices are allowed to pair with your phone, and request physical confirmation (you push a button) to authorize a connection. As long as you give your phone a unique name, I don't see spam as being a significant problem.
Interesting that these machines use Bluetooth. My Thinkpad has bluetooth built in and I've just picked up a Bluetooth phone (Nokia 6310i). Bluetooth is *really* slick. I love not having to get my phone out of my bag to check contacts or sync with my address book. I can send SMS messages from my computer via Mobile Master again without having to locate my phone or punch text into a keyboard not designed for it.
I'm now very seriously considering getting a car speaker set for my vehicle and I'm certain my next PDA will have bluetooth. My next laptop will probably be a Powerbook and I hope they have bluetooth built in by then because I'm going to want it. It's one of those nifty technologies you wonder why you didn't bother with before.
Oh, if you do have a Nokia phone, their Nokia Connection Manager software is a bit hit/miss as to whether it will work with a given bluetooth device. Doesn't work with my T30 but I've been able to work around it. YMMV.
Everything you wanted to know about RICO.
I personally can't stand web forums...
Posted to slashdot
Actually, it is worse than that. It takes all those PhDs to figure out that you can count really high if you just keep counting...
Dilberthas a good take
Aerospace like software, eh?
"Crap, the rocket is not ready and the deadline for launch is tomorrow!"
"Bah, launch it anyways and we'll release a patch later!"
Of course they are the same. Just ask the Challenger crew...
Wow, that's a morbid joke. Sorry.
There are really only 5 CAD packages that matter. AutoCAD, ProEngineer, I*DEAS, CATIA and Unigraphics. There are lots of other packages out there, some pretty good, some not so good. But the 5 I mentioned above are the "standards" (for lack of a better term) that are used throughout industry. Those others that were mentioned (ArchiCAD, CADintosh, ..., MacSchema, PowerCADD, VectorWorks, etc) are not widely used and present potential compatibility headaches if you want to exchange electronic drawings with suppliers or customers.
Want to work with DaimlerChrysler? You need CATIA. Ford? I*DEAS. GM? Unigraphics. If you work in the aerospace industry, chances are very good that you will need CATIA. If you are doing 2D CAD, AutoCAD is the standard everywhere. If these CAD packages are not available on a mac, then the mac doesn't have any CAD packages that matter.
Believe me, I'd love to use a Mac for CAD work but it's simply not an option right now. Now that it is unix based, there is a prayer of seeing CATIA, I*DEAS, UG and ProE on a mac since they also have unix versions already. AutoCAD is unlikely to come to the Mac anytime soon I think. They're tied too closely to Windows and have no real reason to change that.
Making it simpler doesn't necessarily making it better. A simple Windows-like layout has problems in networked/multiuser environments; not good for servers or corporate desktops.
Absolutely true and that's a good point. But the reverse is true as well. A lot of the complexity of the default directory structure in linux is unnecessary and does not aid anyone. It's simply cruft.
It makes sense to me to go for a technically better layout instead of a simple layout for the user. After all, the user *shouldn't have to know* about the layout. The menus and icons are all they should care about. This way, end users won't be annoyed because they shouldn't get exposed to the layout, and the system can take full advantage of the more powerful layout.
Agreed. But I think that as a general principle, an understandable layout (and the current one isn't for most people) will help everyone. Forget the difference between end users, sysadmins, and programmers. A simpler, better designed and consistently used structure helps everyone.
To get virtual desktops in Windows you need to find and install PowerToys manually. Somehow that's an acceptable solution, yet going to www.freshrpms.net for the installation problem isn't? I fail to see the logic.
The problem isn't going to www.freshrpms.net. The problem is going back 20 times because the installer isn't smart enough to figure out the dependencies and solve them without user intervention. The problem is that each installer has different requirements for which you can't (by default) resolve all in one place. Most distros do not direct you to freshrpms so even if that was the perfect solution, it isn't used sufficiently to matter. I'm reasonably confident it will be sorted out in due time but it still is an annoyance right now.
First, the filesystem is described here: http://www.linuxnovice.org/main_focus.php3?VIEW=V
I'm well aware of how it works. (I've been a unix user/sysadmin for years) But it still is an unintuitive and inconsistently used system. Read the rest of the posts. I'm by no means the only one who thinks this.
And second, why should you try to explain this to your wife or mother in the first place?
Missing the point. The point is that if it is simple enough for me to explain it to them (at a high level), then it is simple enough in general. The directory structure of linux has a lot of unnecessary cruft in it. And the distro/application makers do not help matters by each of them having their own opinion about where stuff should go.
"# Dependency hell. This can and should be resolved automatically without needing user intervention."
www.freshrpms.net
Does my SuSE 8.2 installation do that out of the box? Nope. There is no installation system that is universally used. Hopefully this will change, but it will require the distro vendors to cooperate a bit.
If you have a recent distribution (like RedHat 9), all your fonts (including in Mozilla) should be antialiased already. To further improve it, download the Bitstream Vera fonts from ftp.gnome.org, and extract the files to ~/.fonts
I'm using SuSE 8.2. I've got the bitstream fonts, microsoft fonts and a bunch of others. Still looks bad. And frankly, I shouldn't have to mess with this. (hence it is an "annoyance") You're spending a lot of time defending all this stuff but the point is that you shouldn't have to. Just because a solution exists doesn't mean it is the right way to do things. I'm not willing to spend my life hunting for workarounds for things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
What kind of documentation? Desktop documentation is quite good and newbie-oriented.
I would disagree with that strongly. The documentation is inconsistent, very often not applicable to the particular problem or distribution you are using and often not easily accessible.
Have you ever read the GNOME User Guide? Yep. Though I use KDE mostly.
As for system documentation: only technical users would want to read them. I don't think it's a problem for technical users to learn a bit more about the system.
Which implies that the documentation is written well enough to actually learn from. Frequently not the case. My time is limited and frankly I can think of better things to do than wade through reams of bad documentation.
Most desktop apps are either GTK+ or QT
So what? GTK+ and QT do not force the software designer to create a great or consistent user interface. That is a design issue. It's only partly a tool issue.
As for Gimp: try Gimp 1.3. It's great. The new UI is much more flexible and sane, and makes the whole app much more productive. There's even an option to enable a "normal" (on-the-top) menu bar!
I have. It's still quite unconventional. Don't get me wrong, it works and it's a great application. But from a usability standpoint it does a lot of things that make it hard to learn and/or hard to work with.
I changed the name of the AP from "linksys" to "WhatAboutHIPPA" and left. Hopefully SOMEONE will see that and realize they screwed up, but I'm not counting on it.
Given the level of technical expertise I've come to observe in most medical offices (translation: extremely low) they probably will not get it. The best thing you could do (if you are worried about lawsuits & such) is to notify them anonymously and include some relevant articles from trusted sources they might recognize. (PC Magazine, etc) Even better, start yourself a little "business" and send them some flyers offering to help fix the problem. Maybe you can make some jack and do a good deed in the process.
Granted they might not get it anyway and I applaud you for any effort but the staff which manages that stuff is very unlikely to be security savvy. You'll have to be more obvious than that. Stupid I know but remember that they are trying to help people, so their heart is in the right place.
Proves not a single person who's posted has RTFA yet.
Not sure why I'm responding to an AC but I did RTFA. I wasn't responding to that. I was responding to the stupid comment about the article in slashdot by the submitter.
Pot, kettle, black...
It amazes me that a such a company would have such lax security as to allow an insider to browse supposedly private data at will.
And why should this "amaze" you? At some level in any company there needs to be people who can do this. Your human resources department has a ton of information about you that they can pretty much look at whenever they want. Medical professionals are the same way. If you are an interesting case, do you honestly believe doctors/nurses will not talk about you? You are naive if you think that, despite laws (HIPPA) prohibiting such behavior.
You need to be able to trust these people and while there does need to be security and surveillance of people with access to sensitive information, you can't keep them completely away from it. This is especially true in a company (or government agency) whose business is based upon such information. It's also nearly impossible to prevent a knowledgeable insider from getting access to sensitive information, so I'm double confused why this should be surprising.
While it is unfortunate that it happened, the fact that it happened should "amaze" no one. Give enough people a chance to make money by breaking the law and guess what? Some of them will.
Nothing to see here. Move along...
I'm seeing a lot of people saying something to the effect of "put up or shut up". Are you sure you really want that? How would it affect your life if the Samba or Apache projects were shut down for patent infringement? I'm not saying this is likely, or even possible, but just think about it for a moment. MS could cause a LOT of problems without even having a valid legal leg to stand on. They certainly could convince a lot of companies to question adoption of open source. And it's not as if they are exactly convinced about it now...
SCO is the last gasps of a desparate company. Any legal action from Microsoft will be very calculated and a much bigger threat. Remember, $40 billion buys a lot of time from your friendly neighborhood legal team. That's pretty hard to fight, even if you are right.