I also recall a scene in Infinity in which Feynman set up the computing machines to play music for the new recruits. I can't remember exactly what it was.
The debate goes back as far as you want to go back. Someone mentioned classical. Many famous compositions were decried as little more than random noise when they premiered. Many would consider jazz as a random sequence of squeaks.
Earlier this year I went to a presentation of three one act ballets . The company is a major, tours worldwide, and has significant funding. The new artistic director is a young guy of his mid thirties. Anyway the third act was an incredibly choreographed presentation. Beautiful costumes. Minimalist scenery. And prerecorded industrial noise.
Now noise is not my favorite but I was getting into the rhythms of the music and the movements of the barely clothed bodies. Other older patrons were not so lucky. I heard that a few got physically ill.
To them and the rest I say get some broad culture. You can't submerse yourself in local or some accepted standard culture and consider yourself "cultured." Music is varied and arbitrary judgments are just silly. You enjoy what you enjoy, but there is more music in heaven and earth than any of us could possible appreciate.
Although everyone states monopoly, the issue is deepper. Apple does in fact try to create monopolies, and would be happy if it had a couple. Itunes and IMS and iPod is an attempt to create a monopoly.
However, iTunes is not the OS. iTunes does not hide in various places an reappear magically. We do not hear stories of viruses exploiting iTunes even if it is removed.
The issue is that MS wants everyone to use the same bloated system even if that bloated system makes no sense for the customer. While some might want WMP functionality for the production floor, other will see it as a security and production risk. The problem is that if you want to use MS, you have no choice.
On the other hand, iTunes and Quicktime can be removed from Apple systems. In fact, you could start with Darwin, add the stuff that you need, and have a computer that does only what you need. Of course the same thing can be said for any *nix.
This is a DVD player that can access the Clearplay database of naughty bits. Such bits will be skipped or muted.
What is not mentioned is how the DVD player is implemented. On the PC, filter files for all movies are already stored, and internet connections are only needed for updates. Could an $80 DVD player, which is about the same cost of a normal RCA player, have enough memory to do this? Will a connection be needed for every movie?
The critical part for most people is going to be the $80 a year fee to use the technology. Also, only about 500 standard movies have been edited. I wonder if you buy a special edition reedit, and it isn't in the database, will Walmart accept the return on the open package. I think they should on the grounds it is defective.
Also, looking at the database of movies, it's a wonder there is any content left.
Perhaps the better thing to debate is the motivations of the people distributing this video. Clearly the sites distributing this are reveling in the death of a human. This is generally considered not a cool thing. Now I understand that recently otherwise ethical and moral people have discovered the wonder of the snuff film, but, the special case withstanding, such films are considered in bad taste.
The people posting this video seem to be used to incite inappropriate actions. This may be enough to cause legal problems. At the very least such things are reminiscent of the postcard from the lynchings of the 60's in America. I am sure there are similar examples from every country.
By your logic I can only assume that you had no issues with the graphic depiction of the dead humans hanging from the bridge last week.
I don't know why people still spout this crap. A movie on DVD is dated product. Charging real money for it is like charged for rotten fruit. By the time a movie gets to DVD it has been shown in the good theaters, the dollar theaters, pay cable, and maybe even cable. Aside from the bogus accounting, the money has been made. The fact that studios ever charged $50 for a home licensed movie shows the stupidity of the industry. Combine this with the fact that the DVD is arguably a much less versatile product than a VHS, at least for the consumer, and will tend to result in many more sales than a VHS, which often costs less, one wonders why a DVD is sold for so much.
To summarize, the content you pay $15 for is the extras. The movies has been paid for. Why a few hours of random conversations and extra footage should be worth more than half an hour of so of music is beyond comprehension. I try to pay about the same amount for my music and movies.
Such bundling is nothing new. It was done with singles, which had a A-side and a B-Side. This term is used in many ways, including Princes collection of greatest hits called 'The Hits - The B Sides.' The b-side is generally considered a derogatory statement.
There were practical reasons to justify the existence of b-sides, the most prominent one being that vinyl in fact had a b-side, something might as well by pressed there, and the person buying the single mostly just wanted the single.
And people bought singles. IIRC, singles were of a higher quality than LPs. Also, people often wanted, and only had enough money, for the single. Many were willing to wait for the LP to go on the used rack
The interesting thing is that in the pre p2p days, there was much talk that singles were the cause of the declining record sales. The labels claimed that people were buying singles instead of albums, which was likely true, but in that case we were actually paying money for music. The labels did not like that money and began to try to limit the availability of singles.
Which bring us to today and the current evil of p2p. One reason we do not legally license music(as we no longer are allowed to purchase it) is that the music is just not there. There are many tunes for which I have to download album for 10 bucks. I often buy the used cd for 7 or 8 bucks. Often the desired track is widely available. Just as often I can run off a copy from a friend. The labels need to just let Apple sell tracks for a buck. People are buying them. It solves a bunch of problems. All this other crap is just unneccesary jacking with market.
I think I have written this before to another comment about Han Solo.
I think Star Wars is about the possibility of personal redemption. In ep 4, the person who was redeemed, and the hero in the classical sense, was Han Solo. He was pretty much the rogue in every cheesy way. He cared only for the money. The princess went for him instead of the innocent boy. By the end the purity of the boy helped Hans redeem himself.
In ep 5, Lando was the one who needed redeeming, and it was the changed hans that was the major cause of that redemption. Luke had become a secondary story of a boy grappling with the need to become a responsible adult.
By ep 6, Luke has lost his innocence but is redeemed but is still able to fulfill the final function of the trilogy, to redeem the misunderstood vader, who turned out not to be so bad after all. Of course the emperor is and was bad so had to be killed in a horrible way.
The transformation of Hans from villain to hero caused problems wrt the expectations of movie goers which is why we have the revisionist mythology of star wars. There is a lot to indicate that there were few details when Star Wars first came out, and it has been modified to meet modern sensibilities and expectations. For example, Anikin is child, instead of a teenager as Luke, because no one today would believe that Luke was an innocent. This of course leads to silly scenes of a child with under developed motor control piloting a race car
Employess have rights in theory. Just like Mexican Citizens, in theory, have a constitution that gives them the most rights as almost anyone in the world.
Both these cases suffer from two realities. First, there must be a way for a person to demand the rights, for example a petition of suit. This ability is being systematically dismantled in the US.
Second, the government must be dedicated to enforce these rights. In both countries funding is being actively curtailed to make sure the citizens recieve less protection. This is why, for example, New York state must enforce transparancy laws that would be better suited for a federal court.
As far as taxes, most companies actively minimize taxes. Questionable tax shelters generate big money. American companies have drop boxes in the third world countries while maintaining thier real office in lush American locations.
Pay by the hour inevitably leads to these games. In my current situation I am ostensible paid by the hour, but it is actually by the day. The only reason they want to pay me by the hour is so that on the short days they can dock my pay, but not increase my pay for days I work more. In past situation I would shuffle time around myself so my 60 hours week and my 20 hour week would average out and I would not have to take vacation or personal time.
No solution exists. Workers are naturally going to minimize the work they must do to maximize their pay, and management is naturally going to try to maximize they work they get for a given unit of payment. It is the way things are and complaining that about either side is just ignorant. This is especially so wrt to unions, as unions are just a natural part of the free market for labor. If you believe in the free market, then you must accept that certain worker, management, and industrial organizations will form.
I would say this. Management claiming that adjusting workers hours is not policy is the most ludicrous statement I have ever heard. It many cases it is clearly a lie. If it were not policy, such changes would lead a clear audit trail, and a process of disputing the changes would be in place. The fact that we have lawsuits on the issue clearly indicate that such devices are not in place.
IMHO, most of the problems with ads involve a misunderstanding of the medium and a lack of respect for the consumer.
This is shown in animated push ads that gives the consumer no choice about viewing the ad. The ad downloads and begins to play. There is no way to stop it. There is no way to pause it. You must watch it. There is no analog to this intrusion in any other medium. On TV ads appear once in a while, and that is an opportunity for the viewer to take a break. The net is a much more interactive experience and not suitable for the intermittent viewing of tv.
We also see the crap about click through rates and viewing. This is also from television. Some fly by night company puts an ad on the TV and measures success from the number of viewers that call in. Again, the web is not TV. Most users are not as completely the mindless zombies of the TV. For one things, much of the web is still text based, and reading requires much processing (decoding/comprehending/analyzing) that watch tv.
Then there is the issue of pop-ups and third party servers being significant security risks. MS pushes these technologies, but MS has never put the security of the consumer over the bloat and ad-centric IE.
The ad model needs to be primarily based on print medium. Ads are sold in bulk and no guarantee is made about who will see the ad. Branding needs to be a primary purpose. Any animated ad must have a play button.
Also, like print ads, the advertisers must give away something of value in exchange for the click. As usability studies cite, the user must be told of the value of clicking or registering. It must not be assumed that the consumer is obligated to do these things. Once the user clicks, the promises must be met. One of the biggest problems is the fraud perpetrated by advertisers(which happens in the offline world, but online the reprecussions are swift and merciless).
The people who do the Simpsons deserve all the money they want. It and a few other shows made the Fox what it is. the Simpson's in particular help other less creative shows (Malcolm, which is on it's last legs) do well.
That said, the end of the show is near. The voice actors know this and are just trying to get a bit of money for retirement. The network knows this and is trying to decide a another season of two will be useful. It is like other shows. The show will be probably be operating at a loss for a while, but that will be made up with past profits and futrue syndication.
The question of who is greedy is irrevelent. It is the greed of Fox that will allow the voice actors to suceed. It is the greed of the actors that keep the Simpsons on the air long after all creative content had expired. I agree with Groeing. Everyone should have the opportunity to be rich and unhappy.
One problem is that everyone is stuck in the 1980's. That was when we ran one application at a time, when we had little to no copy and paste between applications, when your one aplication had to suite all your needs because it took to long to start another one.
The office suite is derived from that painful paste. It lingers because it is provides a nice profit center for microsoft. It, like the value meal, make what should be a $1 sale a $5 sale.
There is really no need for an office suite. For example, word processing a mature product. Nothing significant has been added to it in many years. In fact many packages are adding features that reduce the usability of the wordprocessors. For example advanced publishing features, which one would only be found in Pagemaker, are being included in word processors, at the cost of effeciency. It would be much better to have an active market of targeted word processors rather than the one size fits all, and it will cost your $250.
If we set standards and fully exploited things likie OLE, we would fully exploit the power of the PC. We would not be living in the 1980's with the fiction that we cannot run three or four differnt products from three or four different vendors.
And, as far the PC version being better, it depends on your view. The PC version are more bloated with features that are better represented in more specific packages. The Mac version tend to be less obese, presumable under the assumption the user has the ability to acquire and the ability to utilize these better products. If you will recall the history of MS Office, you will see that most of the GUI sides was built after the Mac versions.
I often use TextEdit for writing. If I need to dash off a quick text/grahic presentaiton, i will use OO.o writer. I will also do simple layouts in OO.o. For spreadsheet I use Excel. If MS would get off it's high horse and sell me a version for $100, I would upgrade from the last century. i use Foxpro oe MySQL for databases. For programming I like Emacs. For simple scripts vi. For even simpler scripts, ed.
In short, I wish that people would leave the monolithiic philosophy behind.
For four years straight, clueless, witless, and styless cowards have been criticizing the articles on/. These are the same people that post, and probably leave roomd to whine to their mothers, about the unfairness of the editors and the world in general. These are the same people that moderate the same lame joke up every time they have points, but moderate any novel humor as flamebait. These are the same people whose minds and lives are so empty that all they can see are the spelling and grammar errors. Their posts are devoid of logic, relevance, or any meaningful content.
Om short, these mentally ill people believe that they are right, everyone else is wrong, and in a proper functioning world all communications would be about how wonderful and grand they are. Clearly these could be considered a vile and useless group of people. Clearly we could call for their eradication not only from the/. but also from the face of the Earth. Clearly many would support us in that cause.
However, we are not a vengeful people. Also, I believe that as a group we are a relatively wealthy people. I am sure we have hundreds of internet millionaires, and probably dozens of MS multi-millionaires. I am also sure that/. has large numbers of less wealthy but well off denizens. Therefore I suggest that we set up a charity that will provide online counseling services for these lost souls. I am sure there are many counselors out there that we could contact the service to. Perhaps even in India. I believe the online counseling is the best we can hope for because these people tend to have trouble getting out of their chair, much less out of the house, for mental and physical reasons.
My hope is that slowly these crazies will replaced their delusions with more appropriate images of reality. I would also hope that these people might find healthy relationships, rather than stalking supermodels or molesting persons they bought in Mexico. Such an exercise would truly be worthwhile if it rid/. of the meaningless tripe typified by the parent.
[Ed. note: I assume the parent is flamebait and not a joke as it was an AC.]
I thought the joke was that anyone was actually working on *BSD. It seemed perfectly logical that if we stipulated *BSD as a rational platform, porting it to a Gameboy would be cake.
Ok, so SCO is now under $8 a share, which puts it's market cap around $120 million.
Also, it appears that SCO insiders now own less than 50% of the stock, while institutions own a like 40% and over 10% is in private hands.
So, unlike the last time that SCO was trading as a penny stock, it might be possible for some enterprising company to just buy a controlling share for 60 million and be done with it.
This is unless the instituational holders have some vested interest in seeing debacle continue. I would think that it there are several two and three letter companies that might be willing to pay a significant premium to make SCO go away.
I would say most in the US do not have a sense of the risk. I am sure that e-loan does not have a bold headline, although likely says elsewhere, that indicates information shipped to India will be covered under different laws and be subject to different security protocols. All the customers know is that the process is quicker, and since all the Free Market Invisible Hands insures all large companies are responsible caring members of society, why wait?
In any case, the fast food analogy is good. The additional risks introduced by the need for cheap meat and artificial flavorings is significant, just like the cheaper loan processing. However, everything possible is done to minimize the possibility that an average citizen can get information to assess that risk. Therefore, people go to such places never knowing the damage they cause to themselves and others.
The problem really is that subcontracting is meant to pass responsibility to another party. The person who contracts the work, as is the case woth, for example, Walmart or Nike, is allowed to feign ignorance and tends to be resolved of all responsibility. This situation, of course, gets worse as you move down the chain of subcontractors. It is a situation in which contractors are taking money for doing little more than taking a cut for mailing some paper.
The truly scary part is that the US government is trying to outsource everything as well. This includes the IRS, which means that your personal tax information is going to be in hands of some work-at-home person making $1 per transaction filed, stored on the computers on some half-assed system administrator. The original contractors will have no responsibility as the contracts will be written to require minimal due diligence and almost no penalties for infractions.
This of course has been defended as completely consistent with all current privacy laws. In addition, the somewhat friendly people at the IRS, a result of new regulations that resulted from the friends-or-Reagan audits, will be replace with the same people who call during diner asking you to buy their product, or yelling at your children because their parents did not pay a bill.
In America it was certainly the big issues that divided churches. IIRC, the southern baptists were formed out a devout belief that slavery was the white mans god given right. I hear stories at my so-called cult church that many other churches turned blacks away, while mine was characterized as devil worshipping liberals because we did not segregate. Same thing with marriage. Who ever heard of letting a white person, especially your white daughter, marry some n-word scum.
Bigotry is alive and well. The groups that are oppressed for personal and financial gain change, but the greed and dogma is still the same as Jesus was fighting against 2000 years ago. It is easy to stone the wench because she is too weak to defend herself, and no one has the courage to speak against the power-crazed religious leaders. We have seen where such stoning inevitable lead. And, from Jesus' 'turn the other cheek' quote, we know who, in that situation, is the coward and who is hero.
Or they could just block all HTML email. That would be my preferred solution.
However they can't do that because HTML email is too important an advertising medium. Most computer companies, including MS, Yahoo, and Apple have their mail readers set to render HTML by default so that they can get ads to their customers. Never mind that this allows spammers to operate and allows all sort of other nasties to spread.
HTML email should not be set a default for send or receive. HTML email should never be rendered without a case by case approval.
The difference between HTML on a web page and HTML on an email is that the Web page is generally requested by the user, and the user can in principle limit exposure by going only to known sites. With email, all emails, are in principle, from unknown sources that are best assumed malicious. It may seem extreme, but that is the current situation.
'We can get the work done for half the cost that it takes in the U.S.,' said Vange, president of Ketsujin Studios
Well, let's just hope that Vange gets paid half of what is normal in the U.S. and the price for the games are half as much so that the unemployed, underemployed, and those working a minimum wage to compete with Russia can afford the games.
Unless, of course, the primary market for these games is Russia.
I don't really see outsourcing as such a big deal. I just don't understand why some CEOs get paid so much money to supervise a workforce halfway across the world for a company that is officially located in a third world country. It really seems the company could increase shareholder values by moving the CxO to those cheaper countries as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I also recall a scene in Infinity in which Feynman set up the computing machines to play music for the new recruits. I can't remember exactly what it was.
Earlier this year I went to a presentation of three one act ballets . The company is a major, tours worldwide, and has significant funding. The new artistic director is a young guy of his mid thirties. Anyway the third act was an incredibly choreographed presentation. Beautiful costumes. Minimalist scenery. And prerecorded industrial noise.
Now noise is not my favorite but I was getting into the rhythms of the music and the movements of the barely clothed bodies. Other older patrons were not so lucky. I heard that a few got physically ill.
To them and the rest I say get some broad culture. You can't submerse yourself in local or some accepted standard culture and consider yourself "cultured." Music is varied and arbitrary judgments are just silly. You enjoy what you enjoy, but there is more music in heaven and earth than any of us could possible appreciate.
However, iTunes is not the OS. iTunes does not hide in various places an reappear magically. We do not hear stories of viruses exploiting iTunes even if it is removed.
The issue is that MS wants everyone to use the same bloated system even if that bloated system makes no sense for the customer. While some might want WMP functionality for the production floor, other will see it as a security and production risk. The problem is that if you want to use MS, you have no choice.
On the other hand, iTunes and Quicktime can be removed from Apple systems. In fact, you could start with Darwin, add the stuff that you need, and have a computer that does only what you need. Of course the same thing can be said for any *nix.
What is not mentioned is how the DVD player is implemented. On the PC, filter files for all movies are already stored, and internet connections are only needed for updates. Could an $80 DVD player, which is about the same cost of a normal RCA player, have enough memory to do this? Will a connection be needed for every movie?
The critical part for most people is going to be the $80 a year fee to use the technology. Also, only about 500 standard movies have been edited. I wonder if you buy a special edition reedit, and it isn't in the database, will Walmart accept the return on the open package. I think they should on the grounds it is defective.
Also, looking at the database of movies, it's a wonder there is any content left.
The people posting this video seem to be used to incite inappropriate actions. This may be enough to cause legal problems. At the very least such things are reminiscent of the postcard from the lynchings of the 60's in America. I am sure there are similar examples from every country.
By your logic I can only assume that you had no issues with the graphic depiction of the dead humans hanging from the bridge last week.
bring out the 110 foot pole!
To summarize, the content you pay $15 for is the extras. The movies has been paid for. Why a few hours of random conversations and extra footage should be worth more than half an hour of so of music is beyond comprehension. I try to pay about the same amount for my music and movies.
There were practical reasons to justify the existence of b-sides, the most prominent one being that vinyl in fact had a b-side, something might as well by pressed there, and the person buying the single mostly just wanted the single.
And people bought singles. IIRC, singles were of a higher quality than LPs. Also, people often wanted, and only had enough money, for the single. Many were willing to wait for the LP to go on the used rack
The interesting thing is that in the pre p2p days, there was much talk that singles were the cause of the declining record sales. The labels claimed that people were buying singles instead of albums, which was likely true, but in that case we were actually paying money for music. The labels did not like that money and began to try to limit the availability of singles.
Which bring us to today and the current evil of p2p. One reason we do not legally license music(as we no longer are allowed to purchase it) is that the music is just not there. There are many tunes for which I have to download album for 10 bucks. I often buy the used cd for 7 or 8 bucks. Often the desired track is widely available. Just as often I can run off a copy from a friend. The labels need to just let Apple sell tracks for a buck. People are buying them. It solves a bunch of problems. All this other crap is just unneccesary jacking with market.
I think Star Wars is about the possibility of personal redemption. In ep 4, the person who was redeemed, and the hero in the classical sense, was Han Solo. He was pretty much the rogue in every cheesy way. He cared only for the money. The princess went for him instead of the innocent boy. By the end the purity of the boy helped Hans redeem himself.
In ep 5, Lando was the one who needed redeeming, and it was the changed hans that was the major cause of that redemption. Luke had become a secondary story of a boy grappling with the need to become a responsible adult.
By ep 6, Luke has lost his innocence but is redeemed but is still able to fulfill the final function of the trilogy, to redeem the misunderstood vader, who turned out not to be so bad after all. Of course the emperor is and was bad so had to be killed in a horrible way.
The transformation of Hans from villain to hero caused problems wrt the expectations of movie goers which is why we have the revisionist mythology of star wars. There is a lot to indicate that there were few details when Star Wars first came out, and it has been modified to meet modern sensibilities and expectations. For example, Anikin is child, instead of a teenager as Luke, because no one today would believe that Luke was an innocent. This of course leads to silly scenes of a child with under developed motor control piloting a race car
Both these cases suffer from two realities. First, there must be a way for a person to demand the rights, for example a petition of suit. This ability is being systematically dismantled in the US.
Second, the government must be dedicated to enforce these rights. In both countries funding is being actively curtailed to make sure the citizens recieve less protection. This is why, for example, New York state must enforce transparancy laws that would be better suited for a federal court.
As far as taxes, most companies actively minimize taxes. Questionable tax shelters generate big money. American companies have drop boxes in the third world countries while maintaining thier real office in lush American locations.
No solution exists. Workers are naturally going to minimize the work they must do to maximize their pay, and management is naturally going to try to maximize they work they get for a given unit of payment. It is the way things are and complaining that about either side is just ignorant. This is especially so wrt to unions, as unions are just a natural part of the free market for labor. If you believe in the free market, then you must accept that certain worker, management, and industrial organizations will form.
I would say this. Management claiming that adjusting workers hours is not policy is the most ludicrous statement I have ever heard. It many cases it is clearly a lie. If it were not policy, such changes would lead a clear audit trail, and a process of disputing the changes would be in place. The fact that we have lawsuits on the issue clearly indicate that such devices are not in place.
This is shown in animated push ads that gives the consumer no choice about viewing the ad. The ad downloads and begins to play. There is no way to stop it. There is no way to pause it. You must watch it. There is no analog to this intrusion in any other medium. On TV ads appear once in a while, and that is an opportunity for the viewer to take a break. The net is a much more interactive experience and not suitable for the intermittent viewing of tv.
We also see the crap about click through rates and viewing. This is also from television. Some fly by night company puts an ad on the TV and measures success from the number of viewers that call in. Again, the web is not TV. Most users are not as completely the mindless zombies of the TV. For one things, much of the web is still text based, and reading requires much processing (decoding/comprehending/analyzing) that watch tv.
Then there is the issue of pop-ups and third party servers being significant security risks. MS pushes these technologies, but MS has never put the security of the consumer over the bloat and ad-centric IE.
The ad model needs to be primarily based on print medium. Ads are sold in bulk and no guarantee is made about who will see the ad. Branding needs to be a primary purpose. Any animated ad must have a play button.
Also, like print ads, the advertisers must give away something of value in exchange for the click. As usability studies cite, the user must be told of the value of clicking or registering. It must not be assumed that the consumer is obligated to do these things. Once the user clicks, the promises must be met. One of the biggest problems is the fraud perpetrated by advertisers(which happens in the offline world, but online the reprecussions are swift and merciless).
Ok. I'm dense. What does this mean?
Far Out Space Nuts!
That said, the end of the show is near. The voice actors know this and are just trying to get a bit of money for retirement. The network knows this and is trying to decide a another season of two will be useful. It is like other shows. The show will be probably be operating at a loss for a while, but that will be made up with past profits and futrue syndication.
The question of who is greedy is irrevelent. It is the greed of Fox that will allow the voice actors to suceed. It is the greed of the actors that keep the Simpsons on the air long after all creative content had expired. I agree with Groeing. Everyone should have the opportunity to be rich and unhappy.
The office suite is derived from that painful paste. It lingers because it is provides a nice profit center for microsoft. It, like the value meal, make what should be a $1 sale a $5 sale.
There is really no need for an office suite. For example, word processing a mature product. Nothing significant has been added to it in many years. In fact many packages are adding features that reduce the usability of the wordprocessors. For example advanced publishing features, which one would only be found in Pagemaker, are being included in word processors, at the cost of effeciency. It would be much better to have an active market of targeted word processors rather than the one size fits all, and it will cost your $250.
If we set standards and fully exploited things likie OLE, we would fully exploit the power of the PC. We would not be living in the 1980's with the fiction that we cannot run three or four differnt products from three or four different vendors.
And, as far the PC version being better, it depends on your view. The PC version are more bloated with features that are better represented in more specific packages. The Mac version tend to be less obese, presumable under the assumption the user has the ability to acquire and the ability to utilize these better products. If you will recall the history of MS Office, you will see that most of the GUI sides was built after the Mac versions.
I often use TextEdit for writing. If I need to dash off a quick text/grahic presentaiton, i will use OO.o writer. I will also do simple layouts in OO.o. For spreadsheet I use Excel. If MS would get off it's high horse and sell me a version for $100, I would upgrade from the last century. i use Foxpro oe MySQL for databases. For programming I like Emacs. For simple scripts vi. For even simpler scripts, ed.
In short, I wish that people would leave the monolithiic philosophy behind.
Om short, these mentally ill people believe that they are right, everyone else is wrong, and in a proper functioning world all communications would be about how wonderful and grand they are. Clearly these could be considered a vile and useless group of people. Clearly we could call for their eradication not only from the /. but also from the face of the Earth. Clearly many would support us in that cause.
However, we are not a vengeful people. Also, I believe that as a group we are a relatively wealthy people. I am sure we have hundreds of internet millionaires, and probably dozens of MS multi-millionaires. I am also sure that /. has large numbers of less wealthy but well off denizens. Therefore I suggest that we set up a charity that will provide online counseling services for these lost souls. I am sure there are many counselors out there that we could contact the service to. Perhaps even in India. I believe the online counseling is the best we can hope for because these people tend to have trouble getting out of their chair, much less out of the house, for mental and physical reasons.
My hope is that slowly these crazies will replaced their delusions with more appropriate images of reality. I would also hope that these people might find healthy relationships, rather than stalking supermodels or molesting persons they bought in Mexico. Such an exercise would truly be worthwhile if it rid /. of the meaningless tripe typified by the parent.
[Ed. note: I assume the parent is flamebait and not a joke as it was an AC.]
I thought the joke was that anyone was actually working on *BSD. It seemed perfectly logical that if we stipulated *BSD as a rational platform, porting it to a Gameboy would be cake.
Also, it appears that SCO insiders now own less than 50% of the stock, while institutions own a like 40% and over 10% is in private hands.
So, unlike the last time that SCO was trading as a penny stock, it might be possible for some enterprising company to just buy a controlling share for 60 million and be done with it.
This is unless the instituational holders have some vested interest in seeing debacle continue. I would think that it there are several two and three letter companies that might be willing to pay a significant premium to make SCO go away.
In any case, the fast food analogy is good. The additional risks introduced by the need for cheap meat and artificial flavorings is significant, just like the cheaper loan processing. However, everything possible is done to minimize the possibility that an average citizen can get information to assess that risk. Therefore, people go to such places never knowing the damage they cause to themselves and others.
The truly scary part is that the US government is trying to outsource everything as well. This includes the IRS, which means that your personal tax information is going to be in hands of some work-at-home person making $1 per transaction filed, stored on the computers on some half-assed system administrator. The original contractors will have no responsibility as the contracts will be written to require minimal due diligence and almost no penalties for infractions.
This of course has been defended as completely consistent with all current privacy laws. In addition, the somewhat friendly people at the IRS, a result of new regulations that resulted from the friends-or-Reagan audits, will be replace with the same people who call during diner asking you to buy their product, or yelling at your children because their parents did not pay a bill.
Bigotry is alive and well. The groups that are oppressed for personal and financial gain change, but the greed and dogma is still the same as Jesus was fighting against 2000 years ago. It is easy to stone the wench because she is too weak to defend herself, and no one has the courage to speak against the power-crazed religious leaders. We have seen where such stoning inevitable lead. And, from Jesus' 'turn the other cheek' quote, we know who, in that situation, is the coward and who is hero.
However they can't do that because HTML email is too important an advertising medium. Most computer companies, including MS, Yahoo, and Apple have their mail readers set to render HTML by default so that they can get ads to their customers. Never mind that this allows spammers to operate and allows all sort of other nasties to spread.
HTML email should not be set a default for send or receive. HTML email should never be rendered without a case by case approval.
The difference between HTML on a web page and HTML on an email is that the Web page is generally requested by the user, and the user can in principle limit exposure by going only to known sites. With email, all emails, are in principle, from unknown sources that are best assumed malicious. It may seem extreme, but that is the current situation.
Well, let's just hope that Vange gets paid half of what is normal in the U.S. and the price for the games are half as much so that the unemployed, underemployed, and those working a minimum wage to compete with Russia can afford the games.
Unless, of course, the primary market for these games is Russia.
I don't really see outsourcing as such a big deal. I just don't understand why some CEOs get paid so much money to supervise a workforce halfway across the world for a company that is officially located in a third world country. It really seems the company could increase shareholder values by moving the CxO to those cheaper countries as well.
Jane Horrocks
Emma Chambers
Danny John-Jules
And I would have loved a Lenny Henry/Dawn French situation. Either one could have been an awesome doctor.
Nightmare scenario 1: Jane Leeves anywhere in the show.
Nightmare scenario 2: The New Adventures of The Young Dr. Who with Daniel Radcliffe.