He was also the host of the US version of Iron Chef!
Re:Stop looking for "programming" jobs
on
Exporting Myself?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A BS and a BA both take 4 years typically... Depending on the school, you can easily spend more on a BA than a BS. You have to do more math to get the BS, which may be what scared the poster off. You're probably thinking of an Associates degree.
As for the "analyst" thing, that's not really what I was talking about. There are plenty of entry level design jobs that involve implementation. The only types of tasks that are getting outsourced with any success are fully speced out. He needs to get in on a new product that needs some independant thinkers instead of somebody to read the spec and write the code as specified. Maintnence of legacy code would also be good for him. If you're not the type of person that can be productive dealing with a legacy mess, you're in trouble, because soon there won't be any jobs for that type of person.
I also had some interactions with Sprint about access to development information. What I found was that generally when they say they are working with a third party to roll out services soon, it means that they are looking for somebody to pay them lots of money to offer said services, and they haven't found that somebody yet.
Stop looking for "programming" jobs
on
Exporting Myself?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Go for a design job. There's plenty of those if you're good (did you have good grades in your CS classes?). Lean towards the Science part of your degree instead of trying to pimp the programming skills you learned as a side effect. Who wants to be just a programmer anyway? It's like manual labor for your fingers.
Also, be an example for others. You are living proof that you should get a BS in computer science, not a BA. Yes, employers notice, and also, the background courses for a science degree will actually relate to real world exprience in your field, where the types of employers you're looking for probably don't care in the least about the non-CS stuff you did for your BA.
The ID in the chip is a great example because it didn't stop you from doing whatever you want with the chip. Requesting the ID over a net connection is absurd, and was never possible without supporting software (that you weren't required to run). Last I checked there wern't any P3 or P4 processors with an embedded network interface, and even the Centrino crap requires drivers to be loaded.
I don't know why you think the RIAA or the MPAA have anything to do with Intel's sales. Intel sells chips to many more people than desktop customers, and they'd loose lots of server clients with the added DRM overhead. The bottom line is that you're going to be able to run whatever instructions you'd like on your Intel chip for a long time now. If some software you want requires you to enable DRM features to run it, you have a problem with your software vendor, not Intel.
This is a rediculous conversation anyway. Like I said. The EFI spec is available to all. Take a look and stop speculating.
When I was untangling cords, I accidentally plugged my LaserJet 4050TN into my little UPS instead of my computer. The power switch on the printer was on, and the UPS lasted slightly less than a second... Made a cool noise too!
I disagree. The current closed model makes DRM more practical. EFI makes it easier to run user generated pre-boot code without building hardware, and thus makes DRM less practical.
Intel only cares about DRM to the extent that it prevents the loss of customers. defining a platform that requires DRM would loose them more customers than adding mandatory DRM would gain them. They will for the forseeable future continue to design for general purpose computing with DRM as an option.
Also, you have to remember that Linus lives in a different world than the rest of the industry. He has the luxury of being idealistic. While the EFI implementation from intel is still slightly buggy, as a whole it's not too bad. It's not designed from an ideal engineering perspective (which Linus can be free to have) but from the perspective of Intel's desire to make money from their platform. From that perspective they made many of the right decisions.
The EFI spec is free for the asking (I have a copy right here)... There's no need to speculate as to what's possible, just get the PDF and see for yourself.
You want it back for yourself (!) so you can be lazy and let the television raise your children for you. The real solution to your problem is to not leave your children in front of the television alone, and to have them watch public television.
Are you completely blind to the fact that childrens shows these days *are* the advertising? Look around your house. How many TV show related dolls or action figures do you have? How will auto-skipping the commercials fix that?
Also, don't underestimate the ability of a 3 year old to fast forward through ads. You'd be surprised how fast they learn to use the buttons on the TiVo remote. Doesn't take them long to learn to read the names of the shows they like off the Now Playing list either.
In the future, if you ever catch yourself about to say the phrase "for the children", stop and think for a moment, because there's almost nothing that acompanies those words that's not total bullshit.
AHhhh! Running PRE-BOOT operations! This sounds like a lame way to shoe-horn in DRM or something similar onto my machine before it loads up.
Actually, pre-boot operations are a nescisity, and exist on your current system. They're things like ECC initialization, memory tests, boot image acquisition, and hardware management functions (boot passwords, frequency selection, onboard device selection and removal). It's stuff you need to do to get the machine ready to run the first user instruction.
I was raised as a Catholic Christian and attended Catholic schools. I would like to think that I have little bias dispite this, but I figure I should throw that out there as a disclaimer, not that you can derive from it anything at all about my beliefs... That being said, I'd like to address a few of your points:
If it needed me to defend it, it wouldn't still be such a driving force in a large part of the planets population.
One of my teachers in (catholic) high school told my class a story that stands out amongst the most important things I learned in the 720 days I spent wasting away in that archaic building. The story goes roughly as follows (please forgive me, Mr. Carney, if I don't get it exactly right):
A newlywed couple returns from their honeymoon to begin spending the rest of their lives together. (This was a catholic school, remember... Obviously they hadn't spent an entire day together before this:) On their first night together the wife decides to prepare a roast for dinner. The still swooning newlywed husband watches her prepare the meal. As she prepares to place the roast in the pan, she cuts the ends off the meat and throws them away. This perplexes the husband, and he asks her why she did this. She explains to him that she learned to cook from her mother, and that's what her mother taught her to do. The next time the couple visits the wife's mother, they ask her why she cuts the ends off her roasts, and she tells a similar story about seeing her mother do it, and thus always doing it herself. The same tale is also told by the grand-mother. When the couple finally asks the (now quite elderly) great-grandmother why she used to cut the ends off her roasts, she smiles and explains that it is because she had a small pan.
The moral of the story of course is to never underestimate the power of blind tradition. It should be obvious how this relates to your point, but I'll spell it out. Christianity being a driving force after many generations is not nescicarily particularly remarkable, and could be easily and believably explained by pure tradition. You shouldn't base your faith purely on what those before you did because to do so isn't to truly believe. Your belief must stand on it's own merits. For this reason also, it is a horrible way to try to win converts.
Rather, I can let the Bible speak for itself. Got a "probing question"? Read for yourself.
The bible cannot speak for itself, rather it must be interpreted. It is illogical to be a litteralist given all of the contradictions in the text if taken literally. The Bible is a work of literature that needs to be interpreted as do all written accounts, historical or otherwise. (To call it such says nothing about the fictionality or lack thereof... Check the definition of literature in Websters 1913 or your favorite edition of the OED)
Dispite the numbers that may claim membership of a particular faith, it is still a personal thing. Nothing can speak to your faith for you, you must do it yourself. You may not feel the need to defend your faith, but you need to *be able* to defend your faith. If you can't defend it then you can't count yourself as a believer, but merely a follower.
Re:It's backwards client server
on
Skip The IP Address
·
· Score: 5, Informative
What?
The end that sits there passively waiting for someone to connect is called the "client", and the end you run when you want to talk is called the "server".
That's not how X works, nor is the terminology backwards. In X, the resource that's being served is the terminal (the display and input devices). The server sits around waiting for the clients (applications) to connect to it.
The problem is that you think server means remote and client means local, and that's just wrong; it's actually about who is providing resources and who is consuming them.
The point I was trrying to make is that this is neither easy nor is it intuitive for the "normal" user. Floppies need to be killed once and for all.
Floppies suck - I agree with you there. If there's no reason to break compatability, however, then you shouldn't. I'm merely pointing out that the bootable floppy image is completely useable on a floppyless system where a non-floppy image system may be unuseable on existing systems. Sure, it could be made more user friendly (in fact I know there are lots of pointy-clicky GUIs for this, but I personally don't use them), but it doesn't impare the gradual death of floppies... And it should be a gradual death. Why should we make everybody change all at once when it's merely an minor inconvienience to be acommodating.
As an aside, I just did a BIOS update on an IBM eSeries x330, and it was slick. There was a gui utility that flipped an NVRAM bit and uploaded the floppy image into some flash on the motherboard. Then the system rebooted from the flash, updated itself and restarted. They also offer a floppy image, and a linux flashing tool. Go IBM!
Another aside... When are we going to see 3.5" slot-loading CD-RW or DVD+RW drives?
On systems with a ElTorito capable BIOS (practically any x86 machine built since 1996) this will allow you to boot a floppy image from a CD-R. No floppy needed. Of course if you don't like your data, there's always:
My guess is that GM won't bother because nobody is going to perform this "hack".
Why?
Because the GPS module in the unit, or one very similar, can be had on ebay for $20. It's worth spending the $20 to not lower the resale value of your car.
Right. There aren't any new storylines out there. Everything is old and cliche. We should stop taking ourselves seriously altogether because our golden days as an artistically creative species are all behind us. We should be satisfied with a string of first person shooters with progressively fancier graphics, because live action is the only thing that can be "real" anymore. We should give up on reinterpreting the classics and make all directors and fantasy authors do some actual work for a living. All of our shildren should play football in lieu of all other potential activities. All television series should become "reality" shows.
Really, what business does a game have taking it self seriously? How dare a game company assume it has an educated audience or incorporate satire and history? It's a video game it's supposed to be mindless entertainment for children and lazy ass 20-sometings. Somebody needs to tell those Xenosaga folks that they're not artists before they put any thoughtful storytelling in episode 2!
Let's assume for the sake of argument that France and Germany truly opposed war in Iraq for moralistic reasons based on lessons learned during the second world war. Interesting that they're those two countries in particular, huh? Perhaps you should crack open your history books and read about what happend in those countries soon after the war ended. Are those really the countries we should be looking to as an example?
This article isn't about how to build an H-Bomb, it's porpaganda for the anti-proliferation movement, and was suppressed for exactly that reason. Ironically,tThe secrets of the cold war were kept mostly because people in positions of power *knew* those wars had to be faught, and *knew* that escalation was nescicary to keep truly evil forces in check (on both sides) and were under the mistaken impression that the population in general could be best brought on board in support of such a position by keeping them mostly in the dark when in reality, full disclosure may have won support even from those most opposed to proliferation.
Unfortunatly we haven't learned from the past. We continue to shadow the reasoning for participation in conflicts with thin vails of partial truths and secrecy. Nobody is willing to stand up and talk about all of the real and good reasons why what we've done in the last few years was *right* because they are afraid it will be politically unpopular. Someday 25 years in the future though, we will probably look back on today, and many of us will see the truth and many will still be blinded by the propaganda from both sides of the issues, but all of us will probably again see history repeating itself.
Perhaps your thinking would change if you realized that he was talking about commercial property and the taxes would be paid by corporate enteties... Though it probably shouldn't.
People won't be booted from their homes because the resturaunt and clothing store downtown has to pay higher taxes though, as long ast the project nets more jobs.
Once you've switched to the Qt commercial license you've left behand the reasons you switched to an open platform in the first place. If you're going to buy a Qt developer licens, then why wouldn't you just stick with Visual Studio?
- it needs to support closed apps - it needs to have less choice (1 desktop) - one scripting environment
May as well have it just like all the other distros, huh?
Seriously, if you don't like it, pick a different one. User Linux is being made because some very smart people with the ear of businesses think it will meet the needs of business users better. It's not one size fits all, and it's not out there to shut the other distros down.
Exactly the point. GTK+ is available under the LGPL, rather than the *less* free GPL like Qt. You can't create closed applications with a GPLd toolkit, where you can with an LGPLd toolkit. A viable platform has to support closed applications.
When you're opposed to something it's so easy to overstep the line between making a good argument, and convincing people you're a crackpot.... It seems that the latter is what happened here. Either that, or you have a seriously selfish outlook on other members of our society.
Let's look at some of your weaker points individually:
Wal-Mart stores average 200,000 feet in size: more than 4 football fields and destroying any sense of community or character where they are located.
Does a 200,000 square foot factory or warehouse destroy the sense of community? How about somebody fencing off their 4 acre lot? What about a supermarket, shopping mall, or department store? This is an outrageous claim that is probably a second-hand opinion borrowed from one of the numerous local anti-building proponents. Allowing larger buildings to be built doesn't destroy a community, it reduces the scarcity of usable land in a cummunity. That lowers average property value, which is the real reason why people complain about it. It's an age old syndrome in small-town USA: complain about how expensive it is to buy property until you can afford it, and then once you buy some fight against anything that would lower it's value.
By pricing items below cost they crush local retailers. Once they hold a monopoly in the market they raise prices.
A classic argument that there is little to no evidence for. Most of Wal-Mart's prices are standardized across the country. You can go to their website and look up a price, and the item will cost that much or more in the local store. This is also an illegal practice. If there were real proof available that this is what was happening, they'd have been taken to court for it and lost by now. They truth of the situation is that Wal-Mart has lower costs for the same items because they have enormous bargaining power with manufacturers and command lower prices.
Three good jobs are destroyed for every two Wal-Mart jobs created.
Where good job is defined as a non-Wal-Mart job? Give me a break.
Instead of business profits being reinvested in the community they are shipped to Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Last I checked, Wall-Mart hires local service contractors for business maintnence in communities where it owns stores, just like a smaller business would. They also support fund raisers for local organizations (arguably better than a smaller business would due to the higher traffic), and they advertize in local publications. They also pay local property taxes just like any other local business. After that it keeps the profits, which is roughly the equivalent of a local business holder putting his/her profits in their bank account. Locally based business owners are in it for the profit too.
Wal-Mart is radically remaking our labor standards and local economies by stifling debate, suppressing knowledge, and not asking our consent.
When's the last time you've heard *any* retailer go out of their way to explain the conditions in which the goods they sell are manufactured? When was the last time you saw a Wal-Mart go up without permission from the local zoning board?
Ther is an art to persuasion. When you make questionable claims beyond the needs of the argument you are making you cross into "crackpot" territory. When you exagerate statistics and provide no references, people will be inclined to disbelieve.... And most importantly, when some of your arguments are blatent fabrications, or pure opinion, you fail to persuade anybody by default.
Slashdot Mirror
You want some more perspective? Compare the number of turbines to the number of cars, windows or cats.
He was also the host of the US version of Iron Chef!
A BS and a BA both take 4 years typically... Depending on the school, you can easily spend more on a BA than a BS. You have to do more math to get the BS, which may be what scared the poster off. You're probably thinking of an Associates degree.
As for the "analyst" thing, that's not really what I was talking about. There are plenty of entry level design jobs that involve implementation. The only types of tasks that are getting outsourced with any success are fully speced out. He needs to get in on a new product that needs some independant thinkers instead of somebody to read the spec and write the code as specified. Maintnence of legacy code would also be good for him. If you're not the type of person that can be productive dealing with a legacy mess, you're in trouble, because soon there won't be any jobs for that type of person.
I also had some interactions with Sprint about access to development information. What I found was that generally when they say they are working with a third party to roll out services soon, it means that they are looking for somebody to pay them lots of money to offer said services, and they haven't found that somebody yet.
Go for a design job. There's plenty of those if you're good (did you have good grades in your CS classes?). Lean towards the Science part of your degree instead of trying to pimp the programming skills you learned as a side effect. Who wants to be just a programmer anyway? It's like manual labor for your fingers.
Also, be an example for others. You are living proof that you should get a BS in computer science, not a BA. Yes, employers notice, and also, the background courses for a science degree will actually relate to real world exprience in your field, where the types of employers you're looking for probably don't care in the least about the non-CS stuff you did for your BA.
The ID in the chip is a great example because it didn't stop you from doing whatever you want with the chip. Requesting the ID over a net connection is absurd, and was never possible without supporting software (that you weren't required to run). Last I checked there wern't any P3 or P4 processors with an embedded network interface, and even the Centrino crap requires drivers to be loaded.
I don't know why you think the RIAA or the MPAA have anything to do with Intel's sales. Intel sells chips to many more people than desktop customers, and they'd loose lots of server clients with the added DRM overhead. The bottom line is that you're going to be able to run whatever instructions you'd like on your Intel chip for a long time now. If some software you want requires you to enable DRM features to run it, you have a problem with your software vendor, not Intel.
This is a rediculous conversation anyway. Like I said. The EFI spec is available to all. Take a look and stop speculating.
Heh.... By accident!
When I was untangling cords, I accidentally plugged my LaserJet 4050TN into my little UPS instead of my computer. The power switch on the printer was on, and the UPS lasted slightly less than a second... Made a cool noise too!
I disagree. The current closed model makes DRM more practical. EFI makes it easier to run user generated pre-boot code without building hardware, and thus makes DRM less practical.
Intel only cares about DRM to the extent that it prevents the loss of customers. defining a platform that requires DRM would loose them more customers than adding mandatory DRM would gain them. They will for the forseeable future continue to design for general purpose computing with DRM as an option.
Also, you have to remember that Linus lives in a different world than the rest of the industry. He has the luxury of being idealistic. While the EFI implementation from intel is still slightly buggy, as a whole it's not too bad. It's not designed from an ideal engineering perspective (which Linus can be free to have) but from the perspective of Intel's desire to make money from their platform. From that perspective they made many of the right decisions.
The EFI spec is free for the asking (I have a copy right here)... There's no need to speculate as to what's possible, just get the PDF and see for yourself.
Oh please.
For the children my ass.
You want it back for yourself (!) so you can be lazy and let the television raise your children for you. The real solution to your problem is to not leave your children in front of the television alone, and to have them watch public television.
Are you completely blind to the fact that childrens shows these days *are* the advertising? Look around your house. How many TV show related dolls or action figures do you have? How will auto-skipping the commercials fix that?
Also, don't underestimate the ability of a 3 year old to fast forward through ads. You'd be surprised how fast they learn to use the buttons on the TiVo remote. Doesn't take them long to learn to read the names of the shows they like off the Now Playing list either.
In the future, if you ever catch yourself about to say the phrase "for the children", stop and think for a moment, because there's almost nothing that acompanies those words that's not total bullshit.
AHhhh! Running PRE-BOOT operations! This sounds like a lame way to shoe-horn in DRM or something similar onto my machine before it loads up.
Actually, pre-boot operations are a nescisity, and exist on your current system. They're things like ECC initialization, memory tests, boot image acquisition, and hardware management functions (boot passwords, frequency selection, onboard device selection and removal). It's stuff you need to do to get the machine ready to run the first user instruction.
I was raised as a Catholic Christian and attended Catholic schools. I would like to think that I have little bias dispite this, but I figure I should throw that out there as a disclaimer, not that you can derive from it anything at all about my beliefs... That being said, I'd like to address a few of your points:
:) On their first night together the wife decides to prepare a roast for dinner. The still swooning newlywed husband watches her prepare the meal. As she prepares to place the roast in the pan, she cuts the ends off the meat and throws them away. This perplexes the husband, and he asks her why she did this. She explains to him that she learned to cook from her mother, and that's what her mother taught her to do. The next time the couple visits the wife's mother, they ask her why she cuts the ends off her roasts, and she tells a similar story about seeing her mother do it, and thus always doing it herself. The same tale is also told by the grand-mother. When the couple finally asks the (now quite elderly) great-grandmother why she used to cut the ends off her roasts, she smiles and explains that it is because she had a small pan.
If it needed me to defend it, it wouldn't still be such a driving force in a large part of the planets population.
One of my teachers in (catholic) high school told my class a story that stands out amongst the most important things I learned in the 720 days I spent wasting away in that archaic building. The story goes roughly as follows (please forgive me, Mr. Carney, if I don't get it exactly right):
A newlywed couple returns from their honeymoon to begin spending the rest of their lives together. (This was a catholic school, remember... Obviously they hadn't spent an entire day together before this
The moral of the story of course is to never underestimate the power of blind tradition. It should be obvious how this relates to your point, but I'll spell it out. Christianity being a driving force after many generations is not nescicarily particularly remarkable, and could be easily and believably explained by pure tradition. You shouldn't base your faith purely on what those before you did because to do so isn't to truly believe. Your belief must stand on it's own merits. For this reason also, it is a horrible way to try to win converts.
Rather, I can let the Bible speak for itself. Got a "probing question"? Read for yourself.
The bible cannot speak for itself, rather it must be interpreted. It is illogical to be a litteralist given all of the contradictions in the text if taken literally. The Bible is a work of literature that needs to be interpreted as do all written accounts, historical or otherwise. (To call it such says nothing about the fictionality or lack thereof... Check the definition of literature in Websters 1913 or your favorite edition of the OED)
Dispite the numbers that may claim membership of a particular faith, it is still a personal thing. Nothing can speak to your faith for you, you must do it yourself. You may not feel the need to defend your faith, but you need to *be able* to defend your faith. If you can't defend it then you can't count yourself as a believer, but merely a follower.
What?
The end that sits there passively waiting for someone to connect is called the "client", and the end you run when you want to talk is called the "server".
That's not how X works, nor is the terminology backwards. In X, the resource that's being served is the terminal (the display and input devices). The server sits around waiting for the clients (applications) to connect to it.
The problem is that you think server means remote and client means local, and that's just wrong; it's actually about who is providing resources and who is consuming them.
The point I was trrying to make is that this is neither easy nor is it intuitive for the "normal" user. Floppies need to be killed once and for all.
Floppies suck - I agree with you there. If there's no reason to break compatability, however, then you shouldn't. I'm merely pointing out that the bootable floppy image is completely useable on a floppyless system where a non-floppy image system may be unuseable on existing systems. Sure, it could be made more user friendly (in fact I know there are lots of pointy-clicky GUIs for this, but I personally don't use them), but it doesn't impare the gradual death of floppies... And it should be a gradual death. Why should we make everybody change all at once when it's merely an minor inconvienience to be acommodating.
As an aside, I just did a BIOS update on an IBM eSeries x330, and it was slick. There was a gui utility that flipped an NVRAM bit and uploaded the floppy image into some flash on the motherboard. Then the system rebooted from the flash, updated itself and restarted. They also offer a floppy image, and a linux flashing tool. Go IBM!
Another aside... When are we going to see 3.5" slot-loading CD-RW or DVD+RW drives?
My guess is that GM won't bother because nobody is going to perform this "hack".
Why?
Because the GPS module in the unit, or one very similar, can be had on ebay for $20. It's worth spending the $20 to not lower the resale value of your car.
Right. There aren't any new storylines out there. Everything is old and cliche. We should stop taking ourselves seriously altogether because our golden days as an artistically creative species are all behind us. We should be satisfied with a string of first person shooters with progressively fancier graphics, because live action is the only thing that can be "real" anymore. We should give up on reinterpreting the classics and make all directors and fantasy authors do some actual work for a living. All of our shildren should play football in lieu of all other potential activities. All television series should become "reality" shows.
Excuse me while I go shoot myself.
Really, what business does a game have taking it self seriously? How dare a game company assume it has an educated audience or incorporate satire and history? It's a video game it's supposed to be mindless entertainment for children and lazy ass 20-sometings. Somebody needs to tell those Xenosaga folks that they're not artists before they put any thoughtful storytelling in episode 2!
Let's assume for the sake of argument that France and Germany truly opposed war in Iraq for moralistic reasons based on lessons learned during the second world war. Interesting that they're those two countries in particular, huh? Perhaps you should crack open your history books and read about what happend in those countries soon after the war ended. Are those really the countries we should be looking to as an example?
This article isn't about how to build an H-Bomb, it's porpaganda for the anti-proliferation movement, and was suppressed for exactly that reason. Ironically,tThe secrets of the cold war were kept mostly because people in positions of power *knew* those wars had to be faught, and *knew* that escalation was nescicary to keep truly evil forces in check (on both sides) and were under the mistaken impression that the population in general could be best brought on board in support of such a position by keeping them mostly in the dark when in reality, full disclosure may have won support even from those most opposed to proliferation.
Unfortunatly we haven't learned from the past. We continue to shadow the reasoning for participation in conflicts with thin vails of partial truths and secrecy. Nobody is willing to stand up and talk about all of the real and good reasons why what we've done in the last few years was *right* because they are afraid it will be politically unpopular. Someday 25 years in the future though, we will probably look back on today, and many of us will see the truth and many will still be blinded by the propaganda from both sides of the issues, but all of us will probably again see history repeating itself.
Perhaps your thinking would change if you realized that he was talking about commercial property and the taxes would be paid by corporate enteties... Though it probably shouldn't.
People won't be booted from their homes because the resturaunt and clothing store downtown has to pay higher taxes though, as long ast the project nets more jobs.
Digikey. $23. Ships the same day if you order before 3pm EST.
Once you've switched to the Qt commercial license you've left behand the reasons you switched to an open platform in the first place. If you're going to buy a Qt developer licens, then why wouldn't you just stick with Visual Studio?
this userLinux stuff sound really great -
- it needs to support closed apps
- it needs to have less choice (1 desktop)
- one scripting environment
May as well have it just like all the other distros, huh?
Seriously, if you don't like it, pick a different one. User Linux is being made because some very smart people with the ear of businesses think it will meet the needs of business users better. It's not one size fits all, and it's not out there to shut the other distros down.
Christ, I'm sick of people who don't know what they're talking about telling other people they don't know what they're talking about.
(Hint: you aren't a developer)
Most companies *are* developers. They write internal applications. They care about developer freedoms at least as much as user freedoms.
Now, if you have to pick a platform and one has zero licensing costs, but both are (arguably) equals in other ways, which do you pick?
Qt is OSS! It was GPL'ed long ago.
Exactly the point. GTK+ is available under the LGPL, rather than the *less* free GPL like Qt. You can't create closed applications with a GPLd toolkit, where you can with an LGPLd toolkit. A viable platform has to support closed applications.
When you're opposed to something it's so easy to overstep the line between making a good argument, and convincing people you're a crackpot.... It seems that the latter is what happened here. Either that, or you have a seriously selfish outlook on other members of our society.
Let's look at some of your weaker points individually:
Wal-Mart stores average 200,000 feet in size: more than 4 football fields and destroying any sense of community or character where they are located.
Does a 200,000 square foot factory or warehouse destroy the sense of community? How about somebody fencing off their 4 acre lot? What about a supermarket, shopping mall, or department store? This is an outrageous claim that is probably a second-hand opinion borrowed from one of the numerous local anti-building proponents. Allowing larger buildings to be built doesn't destroy a community, it reduces the scarcity of usable land in a cummunity. That lowers average property value, which is the real reason why people complain about it. It's an age old syndrome in small-town USA: complain about how expensive it is to buy property until you can afford it, and then once you buy some fight against anything that would lower it's value.
By pricing items below cost they crush local retailers. Once they hold a monopoly in the market they raise prices.
A classic argument that there is little to no evidence for. Most of Wal-Mart's prices are standardized across the country. You can go to their website and look up a price, and the item will cost that much or more in the local store. This is also an illegal practice. If there were real proof available that this is what was happening, they'd have been taken to court for it and lost by now. They truth of the situation is that Wal-Mart has lower costs for the same items because they have enormous bargaining power with manufacturers and command lower prices.
Three good jobs are destroyed for every two Wal-Mart jobs created.
Where good job is defined as a non-Wal-Mart job? Give me a break.
Instead of business profits being reinvested in the community they are shipped to Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Last I checked, Wall-Mart hires local service contractors for business maintnence in communities where it owns stores, just like a smaller business would. They also support fund raisers for local organizations (arguably better than a smaller business would due to the higher traffic), and they advertize in local publications. They also pay local property taxes just like any other local business. After that it keeps the profits, which is roughly the equivalent of a local business holder putting his/her profits in their bank account. Locally based business owners are in it for the profit too.
Wal-Mart is radically remaking our labor standards and local economies by stifling debate, suppressing knowledge, and not asking our consent.
When's the last time you've heard *any* retailer go out of their way to explain the conditions in which the goods they sell are manufactured? When was the last time you saw a Wal-Mart go up without permission from the local zoning board?
Ther is an art to persuasion. When you make questionable claims beyond the needs of the argument you are making you cross into "crackpot" territory. When you exagerate statistics and provide no references, people will be inclined to disbelieve.... And most importantly, when some of your arguments are blatent fabrications, or pure opinion, you fail to persuade anybody by default.