2. I don't, and won't, work for any company that requires drug testing, and oppose the war on drugs.
The options of response are... to pass a law that specifically takes away a companies right to make you take a drug test as a condition of employment.
What about the companies that check your financial records? Isn't it the legitimate right of the companies to protect themselves from the people who are deemed "vulnerable" enough to sell sensitive information?
The point is that whoever gives you money can attach strings to that money - and there's no way short of global boycott (yeah, dream on!) to stop these practices. I used to work for a small "non-testing" company, but when we were contracted by an investment bank, everybody who worked on the project had to fill out those scary SEC forms.
It's sad and scary, but there's no stopping it unless you can just print money in your basement.
Once Microsoft is recognized by the government as a monopoly, there's going to be A LOT of consequences for both its stock performance and day-to-day operations. Essentially it will be forced to behave the same way as, say, your local utility.
1. Monopolies have their "rates of return" on capital set by the BPU (Board of Public Utilities).
For example, MS will have to prove to BPU that they made a prudent investment of, say, $1 billion to develop Windows 2001. Then BPU will allow them to earn 12% return on that investment - the excess will have to be returned to the customers instead of shareholders.
2. If MS spins off an unregulated subsidiary (for example, MS Office), they will have to institute a strict information separation between the regulated company MS OS and unregulated MS Office.
This separation will mean complete API disclosure - exactly the thing we were fighting for!
3. Every time MS will want to buy another company, they will have to go through a special market power case before BPU to prove that this new purchase is not going to affect competitive markets.
Does anybody here even remember the story of the "European Union Bank" from Cayman (or was it Antigua?) Islands? They registered a bank, set up a webserver and started opening accounts via credit card cash withdrawals. When they got bored, they simply pulled the plug and split.;-)
Internet anonymuity is a double-edged sword. And, of all people, slashdotters should be aware of it.
Another problem with using any really junky computers for a "worthy" cause is Y2K compliance of their BIOS chips. The company I work for regularly sells these to the employees, but they make everybody sign a Y2k disclaimer.
On the surface (which is just underneath all the catchy nonsense) this looks just like a gov't-operated syslog monitor and port wrapper. So far so good - this is something that a considerate sysadmin would do on his network. BUT...
If the gov't then tries to leverage its influence against the private sector, we're in big poo-poo. As you probably know, any business dealing with the gov't has to comply with the whole slew of requirements. Next thing we'll see is the gov't DEMANDING that all of its contractors use FIDNET and escrowed encryption (all, of course, under the pretext of reliable supply of whatever the gov't is buying). Once the Fortune XXX companies are sucked into this, FIDNET is going to propagate itself further down the food chain. Pretty soon in-duh-viduals will not be able to get an account with an ISP without allowing FIDNET into their home computer...
If not, then I'd suggest revoking Mr. Katz's posting privileges.
OTOH, perhaps it's just the "American Way" (TM) to seek ego gratification in such mundane activity as shopping. Perhaps Mr. Katz thought that somehow by clicking around (what a "Hip" (TM) activity - buying books!) on the Amazon in his underwear he becomes a part of the "elite" - an information age equivalent of wearing tuxedo to a theater.
Amazon is not a social community - it's just another intermediary between authors and readers. And as price comparison shows, it's not a particularly efficient intermediary.
And as far as readers' comments go, IMNSHO it's much better to stop by your local "evil chain" store, pay for a beverage (optional) and familiarize yourself with the book/CD/whatever.
I switched to NL quite some time ago, and it's comprehensive enough for me (dunno about your "common searches"). What I like best is 1. Breaks down the search results by their type and location (mini-directory) 2. Doesn't annoy your with stupid plugs (ahem, "recommendations").
Apparently they also have a fair amount of non-web (presumably OCR scanned) material, but I've never tried purchasing it.
I subscribe to The Economist and it's the most useful mag I've ever subscribed to - with one rolled-up issue I killed a mouse roaming my apartment (plus, of course, some Wall Street Journals to trap him in the bathroom).
But this e-commerce "supplement" was the most useless circle-jerk I've seen - even worse than the "supplements" touting investments in some unstable desert or tropical semi- or barely_past- dictatorships. They talked a lot about "visions" and "explosive growth", but completely ignored the effects of global data warehousing on privacy and anonymity that will transform this society.
Anybody can signup for MSDN and obtain the specs for file formats. But simply adhering to these specs doesn't make a "competing" office suite usable in a MS-centric environment. If my personal experience with StarOffice is an indicator, only primitive files are rendered correctly. IMVHO one problem is OLE. There's a GPL'd OLE library, but I'm not sure how well it (and OLE in general) works outside of MS-Win environment. Apparently StarDivision couldn't get it to work (and I tried StarOffice for both Linux and Win32!)
Even if we implement a "Chinese Wall"-style system between OS and Office divisions of MS (same way as SEC mandates strict information barrier between investment and trading divisions of the same company), I wouldn't bet on a 100% compatible office suite for a non-Win32 OS...
Well, I guess, the situation described by Charles Wu gives yet another meaning to the term "network computer"...;-( It all boils down to a business decision: spend money on MS software or forego some of the clientele.
1. Everybody wants money unless they live in some sort of self-sufficient anarchist community in the woods of Montana. Grow up! Selling Linux for living beats hundreds of other occupations.
2. There's a strong commitement from RedHat to keep their distribution FTP'able.
3. Yes, they sell their stock to any idiot with the money, but it's no different from letting any idiot with an ISP account to download Linux. Or are you suggesting they should police the downloading part also?
4. As long as they remain a majority shareholder, IPO is a very good move.
This is not true. Induhviduals can get IPO shares before they hit the market IF they have a brokerage account with the underwriter of that particular IPO AND they are considered a prime account (typically $100k+). In the case of RedHat, these brokerages are Goldman Sachs and E-Trade.
So, unless you, dear slashdotters, are one of the newly rich web capitalists, don't hold your breath on this one.;-)
Do you realize that "scanning people" (or rather their computers) by a phone company is equivalent to eavesdropping and/or invasion of privacy by a common carrier? Anybody with a legal degree around here?? I am sure that if you have any proof of that (like old logs), many people from FCC to local legislators would love to hear about it!
I had a plan to subscribe to DSL from Bell Atlantic and setup an old 486 as a firewall under Linux...
Re:I tend to agree, but...
on
The KDE Future
·
· Score: 3
Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it. -- Seymour Cray commenting on virtual memory
Yeah, Palm III is 2Mb+2Mb - so far it's enough for me. And if bulkier body is the price of more memory, I'm not willing to pay it. Do you remember the time when really cool programs with graphics and stuff could fit on one floppy? It's not the size of the wand... Ooops! wrong discussion!;-)
P.S. Long time ago, I studied a computer that would real-time operate a SAM battery with 64kb (that's k!) RAM.
Yeah, and Apple's Newton did that before anybody else. Palms were always able to connect (telnet, WWW, e-mail) via external clip-on modem. The only piece of news is that "The Palm VII offers no real hardware enhancements to the Palm III, except for the wireless antenna enabling the Web clipping service". However, cellular networking was available for Palm before (again via a clip-on).
Well, it looks more like a commodity web-based e-mail, but running on a SSL-enabled server. Their FAQ plainly states that only e-mail sent to another hushmail user is secure. Duh...
1. Database server - fair. 2. Web server - fair. 3. File server - unfair.
Benchmarking UNIX as NT-emulator via Samba is just not fair. I would love to see Microsoft clocking NT as an NFS server. And people - forget about the "low end" challenge, it is just not "sexy" (imagine Formula 1 being replaced by the race of truly stock cars).
The most important paragraph of this interview is a sort of resignation Ken expressed at the fact that certain bad OS prevails through established complacent user base (Office, yes Office!). We need to seriously look into this challenge. Write letters to DOJ and demand that M$ be broken up into OS and user app companies!
Linux is not super Unix. The reason we love Linux in the first place is the ability to run a Unix at our home PCs. And Linux does damn good job at that.
I don't know what kind of instability Ken refers to, but hopefully it's all in the past. I remember myself struggling with lockup on a NE2000 clone with earlier (0.99.x and 1.0.x) kernels.
If you check their web page, they now (do not know for how long they've been doing this) register your domain simultaneously under.com,.org and.net! What happened to the functional distinction between for-profits, non-profits and network providers??
1. In today's Russia public funding for anything that is not private villas in Switzerland is good by definition.
2. I don't know why Elbrus is not selling their chip design, but I surely know why they shouldn't be selling it. Technology denial is already an efficient geopolitical weapon whose importance will only increase in the future. "Free markets" only work when everything is tranquil in the world.
When I started reading their "non-analysis", I thought of writing a reply. But this article has so much nonsense and factual errors, that it would be nauseating just to list them.
Slashdot Mirror
The options of response are ... to pass a law that specifically takes away a companies right to make you take a drug test as a condition of employment.
What about the companies that check your financial records? Isn't it the legitimate right of the companies to protect themselves from the people who are deemed "vulnerable" enough to sell sensitive information?
The point is that whoever gives you money can attach strings to that money - and there's no way short of global boycott (yeah, dream on!) to stop these practices. I used to work for a small "non-testing" company, but when we were contracted by an investment bank, everybody who worked on the project had to fill out those scary SEC forms.
It's sad and scary, but there's no stopping it unless you can just print money in your basement.
1. Monopolies have their "rates of return" on capital set by the BPU (Board of Public Utilities).
For example, MS will have to prove to BPU that they made a prudent investment of, say, $1 billion to develop Windows 2001. Then BPU will allow them to earn 12% return on that investment - the excess will have to be returned to the customers instead of shareholders.
2. If MS spins off an unregulated subsidiary (for example, MS Office), they will have to institute a strict information separation between the regulated company MS OS and unregulated MS Office.
This separation will mean complete API disclosure - exactly the thing we were fighting for!
3. Every time MS will want to buy another company, they will have to go through a special market power case before BPU to prove that this new purchase is not going to affect competitive markets.
4. I am not a lawyer... ;-)
Does anybody here even remember the story of the "European Union Bank" from Cayman (or was it Antigua?) Islands? They registered a bank, set up a webserver and started opening accounts via credit card cash withdrawals. When they got bored, they simply pulled the plug and split. ;-)
Internet anonymuity is a double-edged sword. And, of all people, slashdotters should be aware of it.
Donation instructions are here and here Good luck!
P.S. And, unlike this credit card gimmick, you really know how much you've given!
P.P.S. If you hate your CC being passed from MBNA to FirstUSA to CapitalOne and back, get it from a bank that is big enough - Chase, Citibank.
Another problem with using any really junky computers for a "worthy" cause is Y2K compliance of their BIOS chips. The company I work for regularly sells these to the employees, but they make everybody sign a Y2k disclaimer.
If the gov't then tries to leverage its influence against the private sector, we're in big poo-poo. As you probably know, any business dealing with the gov't has to comply with the whole slew of requirements. Next thing we'll see is the gov't DEMANDING that all of its contractors use FIDNET and escrowed encryption (all, of course, under the pretext of reliable supply of whatever the gov't is buying). Once the Fortune XXX companies are sucked into this, FIDNET is going to propagate itself further down the food chain. Pretty soon in-duh-viduals will not be able to get an account with an ISP without allowing FIDNET into their home computer...
Electronic bookstores a dime a dozen these days when everybody and his dog can buy e-commerce packages and support. Just to name a few:
www.a1books
www.booksamillion.com
www.buybooks.com
www.shopping.com
And then of course, there's the "equalizer" that compares prices in many stores:
www.bottomdollar.com
If not, then I'd suggest revoking Mr. Katz's posting privileges.
OTOH, perhaps it's just the "American Way" (TM) to seek ego gratification in such mundane activity as shopping. Perhaps Mr. Katz thought that somehow by clicking around (what a "Hip" (TM) activity - buying books!) on the Amazon in his underwear he becomes a part of the "elite" - an information age equivalent of wearing tuxedo to a theater.
Amazon is not a social community - it's just another intermediary between authors and readers. And as price comparison shows, it's not a particularly efficient intermediary.
And as far as readers' comments go, IMNSHO it's much better to stop by your local "evil chain" store, pay for a beverage (optional) and familiarize yourself with the book/CD/whatever.
A store is a store is a store!
I switched to NL quite some time ago, and it's comprehensive enough for me (dunno about your "common searches"). What I like best is
1. Breaks down the search results by their type and location (mini-directory)
2. Doesn't annoy your with stupid plugs (ahem, "recommendations").
Apparently they also have a fair amount of non-web (presumably OCR scanned) material, but I've never tried purchasing it.
I subscribe to The Economist and it's the most useful mag I've ever subscribed to - with one rolled-up issue I killed a mouse roaming my apartment (plus, of course, some Wall Street Journals to trap him in the bathroom).
But this e-commerce "supplement" was the most useless circle-jerk I've seen - even worse than the "supplements" touting investments in some unstable desert or tropical semi- or barely_past- dictatorships. They talked a lot about "visions" and "explosive growth", but completely ignored the effects of global data warehousing on privacy and anonymity that will transform this society.
Anybody can signup for MSDN and obtain the specs for file formats. But simply adhering to these specs doesn't make a "competing" office suite usable in a MS-centric environment. If my personal experience with StarOffice is an indicator, only primitive files are rendered correctly. IMVHO one problem is OLE. There's a GPL'd OLE library, but I'm not sure how well it (and OLE in general) works outside of MS-Win environment. Apparently StarDivision couldn't get it to work (and I tried StarOffice for both Linux and Win32!)
;-( It all boils down to a business decision: spend money on MS software or forego some of the clientele.
Even if we implement a "Chinese Wall"-style system between OS and Office divisions of MS (same way as SEC mandates strict information barrier between investment and trading divisions of the same company), I wouldn't bet on a 100% compatible office suite for a non-Win32 OS...
Well, I guess, the situation described by Charles Wu gives yet another meaning to the term "network computer"...
Are you drunk, on drugs or both?
1. Everybody wants money unless they live in some sort of self-sufficient anarchist community in the woods of Montana. Grow up! Selling Linux for living beats hundreds of other occupations.
2. There's a strong commitement from RedHat to keep their distribution FTP'able.
3. Yes, they sell their stock to any idiot with the money, but it's no different from letting any idiot with an ISP account to download Linux. Or are you suggesting they should police the downloading part also?
4. As long as they remain a majority shareholder, IPO is a very good move.
This is not true. Induhviduals can get IPO shares before they hit the market IF they have a brokerage account with the underwriter of that particular IPO AND they are considered a prime account (typically $100k+). In the case of RedHat, these brokerages are Goldman Sachs and E-Trade.
;-)
So, unless you, dear slashdotters, are one of the newly rich web capitalists, don't hold your breath on this one.
Do you realize that "scanning people" (or rather their computers) by a phone company is equivalent to eavesdropping and/or invasion of privacy by a common carrier? Anybody with a legal degree around here?? I am sure that if you have any proof of that (like old logs), many people from FCC to local legislators would love to hear about it!
I had a plan to subscribe to DSL from Bell Atlantic and setup an old 486 as a firewall under Linux...
Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
-- Seymour Cray commenting on virtual memory
Yeah, Palm III is 2Mb+2Mb - so far it's enough for me. And if bulkier body is the price of more memory, I'm not willing to pay it. Do you remember the time when really cool programs with graphics and stuff could fit on one floppy? It's not the size of the wand... Ooops! wrong discussion! ;-)
P.S. Long time ago, I studied a computer that would real-time operate a SAM battery with 64kb (that's k!) RAM.
Yeah, and Apple's Newton did that before anybody else. Palms were always able to connect (telnet, WWW, e-mail) via external clip-on modem. The only piece of news is that "The Palm VII offers no real hardware enhancements to the Palm III, except for the wireless antenna enabling the Web clipping service". However, cellular networking was available for Palm before (again via a clip-on).
;-)
P.S. Did I mention that CE sucks?
Well, it looks more like a commodity web-based e-mail, but running on a SSL-enabled server. Their FAQ plainly states that only e-mail sent to another hushmail user is secure. Duh...
PGP all the way!
There are 3 basic components to this challenge.
1. Database server - fair.
2. Web server - fair.
3. File server - unfair.
Benchmarking UNIX as NT-emulator via Samba is just not fair. I would love to see Microsoft clocking NT as an NFS server. And people - forget about the "low end" challenge, it is just not "sexy" (imagine Formula 1 being replaced by the race of truly stock cars).
The most important paragraph of this interview is a sort of resignation Ken expressed at the fact that certain bad OS prevails through established complacent user base (Office, yes Office!). We need to seriously look into this challenge. Write letters to DOJ and demand that M$ be broken up into OS and user app companies!
Linux is not super Unix. The reason we love Linux in the first place is the ability to run a Unix at our home PCs. And Linux does damn good job at that.
I don't know what kind of instability Ken refers to, but hopefully it's all in the past. I remember myself struggling with lockup on a NE2000 clone with earlier (0.99.x and 1.0.x) kernels.
If you check their web page, they now (do not know for how long they've been doing this) register your domain simultaneously under
Erskin> Then maybe we can have it, eh?
Yeah, imagine a logo: penguin trapped in a cube cage. Sheesh...
1. In today's Russia public funding for anything that is not private villas in Switzerland is good by definition.
2. I don't know why Elbrus is not selling their chip design, but I surely know why they shouldn't be selling it. Technology denial is already an efficient geopolitical weapon whose importance will only increase in the future. "Free markets" only work when everything is tranquil in the world.
How about this 100% explicit non-parody:
Where do you want to go today?
Away from Microsoft towards Linux! (or *BSD if you wish)
This establishes quite clearly 100% non-affiliation between what Microsoft and free Unices stand for.
When I started reading their "non-analysis", I thought of writing a reply. But this article has so much nonsense and factual errors, that it would be nauseating just to list them.
I liked the term "Baby Bills" though...