> Intuit will NEVER involve itself with a serious > competitor to MS.
Is that why they bundle a customized version of Netscape with their package? And don't be ridiculous, no company would "rather go broke than use Linux". For-profit companies always prefer making money to not making money. If supporting Linux was the only was MS could succeed, they would.
... I guess you might do something like that, if you don't appreciate what Red Hat has done for Linux and free software. They are the first publicly traded "software company" I know of to allow and encourage their flagship product to be copied freely and to avoid draconian licensing policies entirely.
... but it's still a cheap knock-off -- no printed manual, no support, no RH bumper sticker, and no supporting the programmers and the product's future.
Yeah, but if Red Hat fails... so does Mandrake, since they rely on having the newest version of Red Hat to tweak for their distribution. Sure, they'll still have existing versions to sell. But they've never shown the ability to put out their own software.
Not a lot of discussion of this great GPL'd RDBMS, but I use it every day for whatever mission critical stuff I can think of to put on it. Clients crash? No problem. Power outages? No loss. Dump and restore from command line? Easy as pie.
Basically, PostgreSQL is so 3133+ it makes me want to UUencode it and post it to alt.warez in 261 segments.
I use Linux/GNU commercially on many public and internal servers and workstations. The only non-free software I have used on these systems is Netscape, which I'll replace with a free browser when I find one that does what I need.
Who needs proprietary commercial databases with weird licenses and fees? PostgreSQL, GPL'd, has been providing excellent performance and 100 percent reliability for our multi-user database containing millions of records.
GM has a lot of paid lobbies. Notably the infamous "highway lobby" funded by GM and tire and oil companies, active through the entire second half of this century, attempted to ensure that every quiet little neighborhood in America had a freeway running through it, and that so-called obsolete (also very efficient and well-liked) were removed from circulation. GM might also help this org. by making individual donations.
But THIS IS A DIFFERENT ISSUE than the highway lobby. Insurance companies make a lot of money off of trying to make driving as illegal as possible, so that people will make "mistakes" and get screwed by high insurance rates. They frequently purchase radar guns for police departments to "keep the streets safer for their customers" because every speeding ticket written gets an insurance company a few hundred dollars more in increased rates.
Besides, I don't feel right about being stopped for revenue collection, so that the fine I pay is used to pay for more traffic cops so that they can generate more revenue. Which is that, protecting, or serving? *cough*
I know many aging smokers with no attention problems or impotency. In fact, all the weed smokers I know who are over the age of 30 make good money and can concentrate better than most people, and some have children. This is coincidence, of course, but luckily it's enough to prove you wrong. Did you ever consider that maybe you were just slow and impotent to begin with?
Sure, weed is not great for you. The smoke can be harmful to your throat and lungs. And the psychotropic effects can be pretty dangerous, particularly to people who are on OTHER prescription drugs or have a genetic predisposition for mental instability. And many people report lessened motivation and loss of short term memory which seems to go away after stopping for a few months.
I've never heard of a case of permanant motivation loss or impotency with a proven connection to pot, but I don't deny that it might happen to a small percentage of users. We could have a study, but most American doctors are prohibited from doing real studies on the effects. And when people come up with positive-sounding reports, they might get suppressed by the government. There are a number of reasons why someone might choose NOT to smoke weed. It's just that you didn't mention any, since you were too busy spreading the ol' FUD.
A lot of kids are too smart to fall for BS, and so they try it themselves. Want less of them to be chronic users (pardon the pun)? Fine -- give them the equivalent education of having smoked dope for their whole life. Tell them all the good parts, too. And let them make their own decisions. Because if you say "Weed makes you impotent and dumb", then your kid goes and smokes and it makes him horny and inspired, he's going to think you're completely full of sh*t. And in a way, he'll be right -- cause you didn't give 'em the whole story.
That seriously makes me sick. Those items, regardless of an accountant's number juggling, have a value and should not be destroyed. If the company is throwing away and destroying usable "fully depreciated" hardware, their dishonest and irresponsible accountant should be fucking shot.
Are the managers or IT people just too boneheaded to realize how easy it is to wipe sensitive information before giving away the gear, and/or too mean-spirited to donate it for the remainder of its value after CORRECT depreciation? Or is it another example of lazy, stupid, lying accountants trying to save a few minutes of work (proper depreciation calculation and calling a charity to pick up the old systems) and instead helping to cause an environmental/social mini-disaster? Probably a little of both. There are so many other options for disposing of old hardware.
THESE PEOPLE NEED EDUCATION. They need to be told what they are doing wrong. If not you explaining it to them, who will it be?
Well, aren't you just the irresponsible one. I guess you dump old motor oil in the gutter too. Would you dump unwanted cats by the side of the road too, because they were "your old stuff" and nobody can get it for free?
A little bitter about having to work for a living, huh? Or maybe you just don't like people?
Here's the deal: If someone can use something that you don't need or want, and the creation of that thing used precious natural resources (such as the metals and chemicals and petroleum products used to make a computer) you should sell it to them instead of throwing it away. Always. Old computers typically are worth less than the cost of labor to refurbish them, so the only reasonable price is $0, though you may be able to get more from a metal recycler for old heavy metal cases (seperate from the internals).
Old "obsolete" computers should be donated to whoever can use them. From inner city families to college students with barely any time to work and barely enough money to eat (yes kids, sometimes people without rich mommies and daddies still go to school), there is a great need for even out-of-date computers. In fact, I'd rather someone use those old computers as doorstops or project boxes or anything, rather than throwing them away where they won't do anyone any good, and will become part of the landfill-overfill-pollution problem we experience in many parts of the world.
> In some sense, the piraters are taking a free > ride (it's comparable to sneaking into the > cinema without paying ).
Thank you! That is one of the best metaphors I've seen for copying software without a license that permits you to copy it. It's not like stealing a car. You're "not supposed" to do it and it can be illegal, but nobody really loses money or property -- they just never get your money in the first place. Of course, a movie theater might be crowded and a sneaker might take a paying customer's good seat, but running software on your own computer is like bringing your own seat with you.
Theaters would eventually go out of business if most people started sneaking in -- actually they'd probably get guards -- but a few people doing it doesn't cause a significant problem. And anyone who sees a movie and likes it a lot is likely to tell their friends (most of whom will just PAY for their tickets) about it. It's arguably a good idea to have a "no-sneaking" policy which is not rigidly enforced (no guards, but an occasional inquisitive usher and obvious signs -- sort of like putting serial numbers with checksums in your installer) as opposed to taking extreme measures to ensure that potential patrons don't sneak.
If you run a movie theater or a software company, I don't think you need to have sneakers thrown in jail to make an example of them. Or even the guy that held open the back door for them. Just slap 'em on the wrist and keep an eye on them in the future. They are simply NOT a big problem.
Umm, I'd say most of the trolls today are from one person. Note the similar misspellings (for instance: always your, never you're or you are or yr or ur) and "tone". Take a look at the sentence structure. Observe the kinds of posts Mr. Troll is responding to. There's a very distinct pattern. Not an influx of lusers, just one guy with no life -- one guy who can't think of anything more creative to do with his anonymity than flame software and talk about being gay.
IIRC, about half of the new noise came from AOLers who didn't know better, and the other half was people complaining about the AOLers increasing noise. Sure, the AOLer's were often dumb. And they definitely increased the noise on UseNet. But the people flaming them for doing that increased the noise just as much, while inciting more nonsense -- and they are the ones who should have known better.
See a metaphor here? I see just as many posts on/. uselessly declaring that "the quality of posts is decreasing" posts as I do so-called "low-quality" posts.
The inevitable occasional uninformed/childish posts will always be there, since this is a public forum.. so what I'd like to see is those posts followed by complete silence -- to keep from encouraging them -- or responded to by a knowledgeable person providing useful information (denewbiefication) without calling anyone names. Complaining about the noise is just part of increasing it, my friend.
Why yes, that *would* work nicely. However, said off-the-shelf FM transmitters tend to suck donkey balls, espescially the one from Radio Shack. Through the static and interference, I could just barely hear the CD -- with the xmitter a couple feet from the reciever antenna. I have seen pretty good quality fm xmitters included with car CD changers tho.
The thing is, the (American) FCC does not allow us to broadcast with sufficient power on standard FM bands to get any kind of range. You're allowed a little more power on 2.4Ghz (which is what MP3/DVD Anywhere uses). Just enough to get decent range.
Yeah, definitely a good party and I managed to get a spiffy tshirt and some nifty-cool/. cups filled with all the Guiness I could drink (which is apparently quite a bit.. ohh my head..). Everyone who enjoyed themselves, be sure and thank Rob and Jeff and the/. crew any maybe they'll have another one soon.
I talked to an account manager from Andover and discussed targeted advertising categories on/. (I requested that, no matter how much we fit the demographic, they should avoid ads for dating services and porn).
Write or call Sen Feinstein! (number below)
on
New Cyberlaws
·
· Score: 1
If you are concerned about your civil liberties being chipped away by the government, who wants to "protect the children" or some such nonsense, and furthermore seems to think that we're ALL children, the least you can do is voice your opinion. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is one of the major proponents of this bill. WRITE or call and let her know what you think about The Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act.
(from http://feinstein.senate.gov/cal ifornia_offices.html) This is her SAN FRANCISCO office, for other offices follow the above link. Jim Lazarus, State Director 525 Market Street, Suite 3670 San Francisco, CA 94105 415/536-6868
You Utah-ites (Utahns? Utonions? Utizens?) can call up Orrin Hatch and give him a piece of your mind too.
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> Intuit will NEVER involve itself with a serious
> competitor to MS.
Is that why they bundle a customized version of Netscape with their package? And don't be ridiculous, no company would "rather go broke than use Linux". For-profit companies always prefer making money to not making money. If supporting Linux was the only was MS could succeed, they would.
it reveals web sites, does it not?
revelant software.
... I guess you might do something like that, if you don't appreciate what Red Hat has done for Linux and free software. They are the first publicly traded "software company" I know of to allow and encourage their flagship product to be copied freely and to avoid draconian licensing policies entirely.
... but it's still a cheap knock-off -- no printed manual, no support, no RH bumper sticker, and no supporting the programmers and the product's future.
Yeah, but if Red Hat fails... so does Mandrake, since they rely on having the newest version of Red Hat to tweak for their distribution. Sure, they'll still have existing versions to sell. But they've never shown the ability to put out their own software.
Not a lot of discussion of this great GPL'd RDBMS, but I use it every day for whatever mission critical stuff I can think of to put on it. Clients crash? No problem. Power outages? No loss. Dump and restore from command line? Easy as pie.
Basically, PostgreSQL is so 3133+ it makes me want to UUencode it and post it to alt.warez in 261 segments.
I use Linux/GNU commercially on many public and internal servers and workstations. The only non-free software I have used on these systems is Netscape, which I'll replace with a free browser when I find one that does what I need.
Who needs proprietary commercial databases with weird licenses and fees? PostgreSQL, GPL'd, has been providing excellent performance and 100 percent reliability for our multi-user database containing millions of records.
Sybase and Oracle can bite me.
GM has a lot of paid lobbies. Notably the infamous "highway lobby" funded by GM and tire and oil companies, active through the entire second half of this century, attempted to ensure that every quiet little neighborhood in America had a freeway running through it, and that so-called obsolete (also very efficient and well-liked) were removed from circulation. GM might also help this org. by making individual donations.
But THIS IS A DIFFERENT ISSUE than the highway lobby. Insurance companies make a lot of money off of trying to make driving as illegal as possible, so that people will make "mistakes" and get screwed by high insurance rates. They frequently purchase radar guns for police departments to "keep the streets safer for their customers" because every speeding ticket written gets an insurance company a few hundred dollars more in increased rates.
Besides, I don't feel right about being stopped for revenue collection, so that the fine I pay is used to pay for more traffic cops so that they can generate more revenue. Which is that, protecting, or serving? *cough*
I don't know why it keeps getting posted, but I've got a suspiscion.. maybe because you keep responding to it!
I know many aging smokers with no attention problems or impotency. In fact, all the weed smokers I know who are over the age of 30 make good money and can concentrate better than most people, and some have children. This is coincidence, of course, but luckily it's enough to prove you wrong. Did you ever consider that maybe you were just slow and impotent to begin with?
Sure, weed is not great for you. The smoke can be harmful to your throat and lungs. And the psychotropic effects can be pretty dangerous, particularly to people who are on OTHER prescription drugs or have a genetic predisposition for mental instability. And many people report lessened motivation and loss of short term memory which seems to go away after stopping for a few months.
I've never heard of a case of permanant motivation loss or impotency with a proven connection to pot, but I don't deny that it might happen to a small percentage of users. We could have a study, but most American doctors are prohibited from doing real studies on the effects. And when people come up with positive-sounding reports, they might get suppressed by the government. There are a number of reasons why someone might choose NOT to smoke weed. It's just that you didn't mention any, since you were too busy spreading the ol' FUD.
A lot of kids are too smart to fall for BS, and so they try it themselves. Want less of them to be chronic users (pardon the pun)? Fine -- give them the equivalent education of having smoked dope for their whole life. Tell them all the good parts, too. And let them make their own decisions. Because if you say "Weed makes you impotent and dumb", then your kid goes and smokes and it makes him horny and inspired, he's going to think you're completely full of sh*t. And in a way, he'll be right -- cause you didn't give 'em the whole story.
That seriously makes me sick. Those items, regardless of an accountant's number juggling, have a value and should not be destroyed. If the company is throwing away and destroying usable "fully depreciated" hardware, their dishonest and irresponsible accountant should be fucking shot.
Are the managers or IT people just too boneheaded to realize how easy it is to wipe sensitive information before giving away the gear, and/or too mean-spirited to donate it for the remainder of its value after CORRECT depreciation? Or is it another example of lazy, stupid, lying accountants trying to save a few minutes of work (proper depreciation calculation and calling a charity to pick up the old systems) and instead helping to cause an environmental/social mini-disaster? Probably a little of both. There are so many other options for disposing of old hardware.
THESE PEOPLE NEED EDUCATION. They need to be told what they are doing wrong. If not you explaining it to them, who will it be?
Well, aren't you just the irresponsible one. I guess you dump old motor oil in the gutter too. Would you dump unwanted cats by the side of the road too, because they were "your old stuff" and nobody can get it for free?
A little bitter about having to work for a living, huh? Or maybe you just don't like people?
Here's the deal: If someone can use something that you don't need or want, and the creation of that thing used precious natural resources (such as the metals and chemicals and petroleum products used to make a computer) you should sell it to them instead of throwing it away. Always. Old computers typically are worth less than the cost of labor to refurbish them, so the only reasonable price is $0, though you may be able to get more from a metal recycler for old heavy metal cases (seperate from the internals).
Old "obsolete" computers should be donated to whoever can use them. From inner city families to college students with barely any time to work and barely enough money to eat (yes kids, sometimes people without rich mommies and daddies still go to school), there is a great need for even out-of-date computers. In fact, I'd rather someone use those old computers as doorstops or project boxes or anything, rather than throwing them away where they won't do anyone any good, and will become part of the landfill-overfill-pollution problem we experience in many parts of the world.
> In some sense, the piraters are taking a free
> ride (it's comparable to sneaking into the
> cinema without paying ).
Thank you! That is one of the best metaphors I've seen for copying software without a license that permits you to copy it. It's not like stealing a car. You're "not supposed" to do it and it can be illegal, but nobody really loses money or property -- they just never get your money in the first place. Of course, a movie theater might be crowded and a sneaker might take a paying customer's good seat, but running software on your own computer is like bringing your own seat with you.
Theaters would eventually go out of business if most people started sneaking in -- actually they'd probably get guards -- but a few people doing it doesn't cause a significant problem. And anyone who sees a movie and likes it a lot is likely to tell their friends (most of whom will just PAY for their tickets) about it. It's arguably a good idea to have a "no-sneaking" policy which is not rigidly enforced (no guards, but an occasional inquisitive usher and obvious signs -- sort of like putting serial numbers with checksums in your installer) as opposed to taking extreme measures to ensure that potential patrons don't sneak.
If you run a movie theater or a software company, I don't think you need to have sneakers thrown in jail to make an example of them. Or even the guy that held open the back door for them. Just slap 'em on the wrist and keep an eye on them in the future. They are simply NOT a big problem.
Umm, I'd say most of the trolls today are from one person. Note the similar misspellings (for instance: always your, never you're or you are or yr or ur) and "tone". Take a look at the sentence structure. Observe the kinds of posts Mr. Troll is responding to. There's a very distinct pattern. Not an influx of lusers, just one guy with no life -- one guy who can't think of anything more creative to do with his anonymity than flame software and talk about being gay.
IIRC, about half of the new noise came from AOLers who didn't know better, and the other half was people complaining about the AOLers increasing noise. Sure, the AOLer's were often dumb. And they definitely increased the noise on UseNet. But the people flaming them for doing that increased the noise just as much, while inciting more nonsense -- and they are the ones who should have known better.
/. uselessly declaring that "the quality of posts is decreasing" posts as I do so-called "low-quality" posts.
See a metaphor here? I see just as many posts on
The inevitable occasional uninformed/childish posts will always be there, since this is a public forum.. so what I'd like to see is those posts followed by complete silence -- to keep from encouraging them -- or responded to by a knowledgeable person providing useful information (denewbiefication) without calling anyone names. Complaining about the noise is just part of increasing it, my friend.
Why yes, that *would* work nicely. However, said off-the-shelf FM transmitters tend to suck donkey balls, espescially the one from Radio Shack. Through the static and interference, I could just barely hear the CD -- with the xmitter a couple feet from the reciever antenna. I have seen pretty good quality fm xmitters included with car CD changers tho.
The thing is, the (American) FCC does not allow us to broadcast with sufficient power on standard FM bands to get any kind of range. You're allowed a little more power on 2.4Ghz (which is what MP3/DVD Anywhere uses). Just enough to get decent range.
I think he meant "IMNSHO". And I've known a couple that said they were, and actually were. Quality code is required. Modesty is optional.
Same point, different country.
..AAAAaaaaaaaaaiiiiiigh"
"African or European?"
"I don't know that!
Okay, but they wouldn't have a choice of where to work if they had been born and raised in Antarctica, either...
No.
but I just had to say:
"this AC probly works for microsoft"
So, you advocate laws based on how BAD they are for the people that they affect?
Yeah, definitely a good party and I managed to get a spiffy tshirt and some nifty-cool /. cups filled with all the Guiness I could drink (which is apparently quite a bit.. ohh my head..). Everyone who enjoyed themselves, be sure and thank Rob and Jeff and the /. crew any maybe they'll have another one soon.
/. (I requested that, no matter how much we fit the demographic, they should avoid ads for dating services and porn).
I talked to an account manager from Andover and discussed targeted advertising categories on
If you are concerned about your civil liberties being chipped away by the government, who wants to "protect the children" or some such nonsense, and furthermore seems to think that we're ALL children, the least you can do is voice your opinion. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is one of the major proponents of this bill. WRITE or call and let her know what you think about The Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act.
(from http://feinstein.senate.gov/cal ifornia_offices.html)
This is her SAN FRANCISCO office, for other offices follow the above link.
Jim Lazarus, State Director
525 Market Street, Suite 3670
San Francisco, CA 94105
415/536-6868
You Utah-ites (Utahns? Utonions? Utizens?) can call up Orrin Hatch and give him a piece of your mind too.
We weren't ignoring what they said about the weather.. we were just laughing about it :)