Any subversives looking for information to undermine the Communist regime would instead find themselves posting inane posts about dead operating systems, hot grits and beowulf clusters.
What are the "arguably better" non-foreign operating systems?
If you are suggesting that a Linux circa 1996 is ready for the task, you are foooling yourself. One of the attractions of using Windows is the huge number of people familiar with the Windows API.
Operating systems are commodity products. Using a US-produced OS is like using Korean steel... you may not like using it, but it works.
Most desktops have the multi-layered bloat of GNOME with object dispatchers, stacked APIs AND the same structure for KDE as well.
Once upon a time applications and window managers were configured using text files... now we use bloated, illegible XML files that require a parser with a signifigant memory footprint to read.
Linux advocates are going to need to adjust their criticism of Windows to suit the times. Instead of one "registry", linux has a half dozen. Instead of DLL hell, linux has constantly changing libraries that break binary compatability.
No, the Oil-for-food scandal where, among other things, the son of the UN Secretary General received VERY lucrative consulting contracts in exchange for too good to be true deals to "administer" the oil for food program.
BTW, ever wonder where those semi-trailers of $100 bills captured in Baghdad came from?
He got up at 4am and shoveled coal into the boilers of the local elementary school.
He then clocked into his regular job with NYC Sanitation and drove the garbage truck around until 2 or 3, depending on the day. Occassionally he worked for the library as well.
The man worked hard; but plenty of people toil for 10-12 hours a day in front of a screen for $60k.
Thirty years ago, a Data Processing manager would have scoffed at the notion of an IT shop without a staff of operators, programmers and performance analysts to keep the systems running.
Now real programmers are rare, and jack-of-all-trades sysadmins rule the IT roost.
As Unix and Windows systems become more advanced, you see less sysadmins and more specialists again.
The notion that you career as a programmer or technical specialist is going to plateau before you hit your 30's is scary, but often true.
You can make more money in sales, consulting or management. But there are tradeoffs. If you want to be a high-dollar consultant or salesman, the travel can really kill a marriage. If you become a management dork, you essentially abandon your technical career.
The "where do you go?" question is something facing all middle-class people. Over the last 40 years, the purchasing power of the average person has eroded sharply.
My grandfather raised a family of six on one blue-collar income, and managed to own a nice home in NYC, a summer house upstate, and always had two cars. Good luck doing that today.
Counter: lots of bad stuff on news about government
Bzzt... wrong. What you see in the mass media is some "bad stuff" about a few politicians. Nobody says anything bad about government. Media conglomerates make too much money from government to do that.
Since WW1, the US government has essentially determined that it has the right to administer and regulate anything. Hence the amusing news stories about parents with sunburned children being arrested for not applying sunscreen.
I never called the US a totalitarian state.... try Oligarchy.
Nobody with a clear head could call the US a Republic.
I had to waste alot of time with ORBS because my company's upstream provider had a larger netblock that we were a part of blacklisted. The people I emailed were quite obnoxious and rude, despite the fact that our servers were secure and never relayed a thing.
And for what? I still see a ton of spam, despite the fact that my ISP uses MAPS.
Google for "Jersey City corruption" or "Albany, NY democratic machine". Patronage, graft and corruption have been a feature of US politics for 200 years.
Stepping on the Constitution is a regular practice in the US as well. The Federal government, by way of its regulation of electionic media and control of all sorts of information, has essentially turned the press into the public relations arm of the political class. Read about what happens when independent companies without Congressional sponsorship apply for FCC broadcast licenses to use the public airwaves.
Move on to the Second Amendment. Right now, the Feds are looking at prosecuting members of well-maintained & regulated citizen militias that are defending their ranches on the Mexican border from foreign incursions.
Move on the the Fourth Amendment. You are routinely searched and may be detained and strip-searched by a TSA employee for the "crime" of attempting to travel via plane. A police officer can and will rip apart and search your car if he feels that you are acting "suspicious" and are trying to "conceal" something.
Move on the the Fifth Amendment. Today, when a state government loses a politically sensitive criminal case, the Federal government will prosecute you for nebulous "civil rights" violations.
Not really. Kerry is a Washington insider who will tow the status quo. The only difference is that the government contractors who support him will get rich. Troops will still be in Iraq and the FCC will be just as inane as it was.
Gasahol is a completely different animal. Ethanol fuel additives have an added feature of being very rough on your engine. I believe that it has a habit of destroying valve seals.
Instead of trucking jugs of smelly vegetable oil around town to your biodiesel production facility (which btw is probally in violation of your local zoning ordinances)... start "farming".
Get some low-maintenance animals like sheep or goats, however many your state says you need to become a "farm". Then buy conventional diesel or home heating oil at "farm" rates, which are free of most exise and sales taxes.
But on the serious side, you should consider a good set of comfortable noise-cancelling headphones to avoid annoying everyone.
This might be tough if your company doesn't have IM or you need to use the phone though.
Otherwise, I got to agree with your co-workers. People with music in the office drive me nuts. The current offender in my area whose tastes alternate between old-school gangster rap and country. Needsless to say, its rather annoying.
The man is a psycho. Example: <blockquote>I have been part of the hacker community for more than 25 years now and am one of its most expert historians. If we were in the habit of stealing code, I would know — and I would blow the whistle, because I am a libertarian who believes in strong IP rights.</blockquote>
Every statement he makes seeps with arrogance and self-aggrandizement.
Linux on the desktop is a myth because it is prohibitively expensive to run applications when the pace of incompatible kernel, system library, window manager and other changes is so fast.
The independent "distro" operating model for Linux is a total nightmare -- there are literally dozens of different "linux" systems, all with different incompatabilities and quirks. Sounds alot like the Unix market circa 1991, doesn't it?
Even Linux cheerleaders like IBM envision client linux as a glorified terminal -- the real apps run on distributed servers, which is what Linux & Unix systems do best.
Slashdot Mirror
Any subversives looking for information to undermine the Communist regime would instead find themselves posting inane posts about dead operating systems, hot grits and beowulf clusters.
/. is actually a mind control device.
Hmm... maybe
A multi-fuctional, $0.39 notepad combined with a disposable pen or pencil replicates 90% of the functionality of a PDA and is easier to use.
PDAs are a waste of time and money, useful for salespeople and people with too many meetings to go to.
It's pretty simple, actually.
You cannot shoot what you cannot see.
The Swedes need to stay prepared in order to maintain their security... there's no telling what the next 20 years can bring in terms of conflict.
What are the "arguably better" non-foreign operating systems?
If you are suggesting that a Linux circa 1996 is ready for the task, you are foooling yourself. One of the attractions of using Windows is the huge number of people familiar with the Windows API.
Operating systems are commodity products. Using a US-produced OS is like using Korean steel... you may not like using it, but it works.
You'd probally be wrong.
And while NT 4 sucks in some ways, so does HP-UX and Solaris that you find in other ordinance.
How dare you mock Linux on /.!
Have you ever tried running Fedora Core 1 on a 800MHz/256MB machine?
The results are not pretty.
W2K runs fine on a P3-500. Fedora is insanely slow.
Most desktops have the multi-layered bloat of GNOME with object dispatchers, stacked APIs AND the same structure for KDE as well.
Once upon a time applications and window managers were configured using text files... now we use bloated, illegible XML files that require a parser with a signifigant memory footprint to read.
Linux advocates are going to need to adjust their criticism of Windows to suit the times. Instead of one "registry", linux has a half dozen. Instead of DLL hell, linux has constantly changing libraries that break binary compatability.
No, the Oil-for-food scandal where, among other things, the son of the UN Secretary General received VERY lucrative consulting contracts in exchange for too good to be true deals to "administer" the oil for food program.
BTW, ever wonder where those semi-trailers of $100 bills captured in Baghdad came from?
As long as that mortar stays intact, it will probally be fine.
But as you may be aware, wet straw has a tendency to spontaneously combust when packed together... So keep an eye on that mortar.
That's not up to code anywhere.
Not only is straw a fire hazard, but your home will be infested with rodents.
How do you get an earth sheltered, passive solar home anyway?
He got up at 4am and shoveled coal into the boilers of the local elementary school.
He then clocked into his regular job with NYC Sanitation and drove the garbage truck around until 2 or 3, depending on the day. Occassionally he worked for the library as well.
The man worked hard; but plenty of people toil for 10-12 hours a day in front of a screen for $60k.
History repeats itself.
Thirty years ago, a Data Processing manager would have scoffed at the notion of an IT shop without a staff of operators, programmers and performance analysts to keep the systems running.
Now real programmers are rare, and jack-of-all-trades sysadmins rule the IT roost.
As Unix and Windows systems become more advanced, you see less sysadmins and more specialists again.
Nowhere.
The notion that you career as a programmer or technical specialist is going to plateau before you hit your 30's is scary, but often true.
You can make more money in sales, consulting or management. But there are tradeoffs. If you want to be a high-dollar consultant or salesman, the travel can really kill a marriage. If you become a management dork, you essentially abandon your technical career.
The "where do you go?" question is something facing all middle-class people. Over the last 40 years, the purchasing power of the average person has eroded sharply.
My grandfather raised a family of six on one blue-collar income, and managed to own a nice home in NYC, a summer house upstate, and always had two cars. Good luck doing that today.
Don't trust centralized electronic communications services. Period.
You're better off sending your personal communications via a $0.37 stamp in a tamper-evident envelope.
Bzzt... wrong. What you see in the mass media is some "bad stuff" about a few politicians. Nobody says anything bad about government. Media conglomerates make too much money from government to do that.
Since WW1, the US government has essentially determined that it has the right to administer and regulate anything. Hence the amusing news stories about parents with sunburned children being arrested for not applying sunscreen.
I never called the US a totalitarian state.... try Oligarchy.
Nobody with a clear head could call the US a Republic.
I had to waste alot of time with ORBS because my company's upstream provider had a larger netblock that we were a part of blacklisted. The people I emailed were quite obnoxious and rude, despite the fact that our servers were secure and never relayed a thing.
And for what? I still see a ton of spam, despite the fact that my ISP uses MAPS.
Google for "Jersey City corruption" or "Albany, NY democratic machine". Patronage, graft and corruption have been a feature of US politics for 200 years.
Stepping on the Constitution is a regular practice in the US as well. The Federal government, by way of its regulation of electionic media and control of all sorts of information, has essentially turned the press into the public relations arm of the political class. Read about what happens when independent companies without Congressional sponsorship apply for FCC broadcast licenses to use the public airwaves.
Move on to the Second Amendment. Right now, the Feds are looking at prosecuting members of well-maintained & regulated citizen militias that are defending their ranches on the Mexican border from foreign incursions.
Move on the the Fourth Amendment. You are routinely searched and may be detained and strip-searched by a TSA employee for the "crime" of attempting to travel via plane. A police officer can and will rip apart and search your car if he feels that you are acting "suspicious" and are trying to "conceal" something.
Move on the the Fifth Amendment. Today, when a state government loses a politically sensitive criminal case, the Federal government will prosecute you for nebulous "civil rights" violations.
Not really. Kerry is a Washington insider who will tow the status quo. The only difference is that the government contractors who support him will get rich. Troops will still be in Iraq and the FCC will be just as inane as it was.
Gasahol is a completely different animal. Ethanol fuel additives have an added feature of being very rough on your engine. I believe that it has a habit of destroying valve seals.
Instead of trucking jugs of smelly vegetable oil around town to your biodiesel production facility (which btw is probally in violation of your local zoning ordinances)... start "farming".
Get some low-maintenance animals like sheep or goats, however many your state says you need to become a "farm". Then buy conventional diesel or home heating oil at "farm" rates, which are free of most exise and sales taxes.
Blame the retarded US tax system.
If you own a business, leasing is great because you can write off the expenses of operating a car without having to depreciate over five years.
I love leasing... it guarantees me a steady supply of well-maintained late model luxury cars at a 30-70% discount over the original sticker price.
But on the serious side, you should consider a good set of comfortable noise-cancelling headphones to avoid annoying everyone.
This might be tough if your company doesn't have IM or you need to use the phone though.
Otherwise, I got to agree with your co-workers. People with music in the office drive me nuts. The current offender in my area whose tastes alternate between old-school gangster rap and country. Needsless to say, its rather annoying.
The man is a psycho. Example:
<blockquote>I have been part of the hacker community for more than 25 years now and am one of its most expert historians. If we were in the habit of stealing code, I would know — and I would blow the whistle, because I am a libertarian who believes in strong IP rights.</blockquote>
Every statement he makes seeps with arrogance and self-aggrandizement.
Yeah, like that 95% marketshare. Big problem.
Linux on the desktop is a myth because it is prohibitively expensive to run applications when the pace of incompatible kernel, system library, window manager and other changes is so fast.
The independent "distro" operating model for Linux is a total nightmare -- there are literally dozens of different "linux" systems, all with different incompatabilities and quirks. Sounds alot like the Unix market circa 1991, doesn't it?
Even Linux cheerleaders like IBM envision client linux as a glorified terminal -- the real apps run on distributed servers, which is what Linux & Unix systems do best.