My hope is that one day we can have a story submitted from the CSM that doesn't generate volumes of insignificant chatter of over the name of the newspaper.
You don't hear constant blah blah about the state or city of New York every time someone mentions the NYT. People tend to focus on the story. What a concept!
It's interesting that losing your child by choosing a solution other than medicine is "criminal", while having your children die in the hospital is perfectly acceptible.
Now hours later that same story is approved, and appears./. needs a change of editors. The/. community is ok, and the OSS/Linux-centric stories are often valuable, at least for OSS/Linux advocacy. It's a good digest.
But over the last year I've noticed the rate of new stories has gone down, while at the same time/. is promoting its supremely lame subscription service. Brilliant.
Now, mod me down. Some of the moderators are as useful as the editors.
This gives RedHat an opportunity to force SCO to show its hand. You can bet that one of RedHat's goals here is to draw SCO's claims out into full light so they can be fully refuted.
With SCO on the offensive, they have control of the game. With RedHat initiating its own offensive, you can expect more progress more quickly.
The reason US hasn't implemented IPv6 isn't because of fears of Big Brother.
The reason we're not running to IPv6 is because the expenditure won't increase quarterly EPS, and we all know by now that quarterly EPS is the whole purpose in life, right?
Maybe your experience with Indians has been positive.
I've worked with many Indians. Just like everyone, there are good ones and bad ones.
But sometimes it's hard to find the good ones when you can't communicate verbally.
As it was explained to me, the higher class (caste) Indians are often taught English by teachers who speak English as their first language. For the lower classes, it's often taught by Indians who have learned it from Indians who learned it from Indians. It's so far removed from English, it's near impossible to understand.
And of the Indians I've met, more than half were "trained" to program, but didn't appear to be able to think independently. Some were just plain awful. Like I said though, there are some awful American developers too, but they usually find their way into management:)
drop Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into SCO's headquarters with some sawed-off shotguns and enough ammo to level the alamo
That didn't sound like you were specifically targeting just the executives and lawyers. Besides, you used as reference an event that involved random targets.
I didn't really take offense to your previous comment. I attributed it to immaturity. But the comment about kissing your Irish ass does offend me. It conjures up really frightening images.
In fact, maybe we'd get more accomplished if you approached evil executives, Irish-ass first, offering them to kiss it as penalty for their evil ways.
But that's like suggesting that people should read EULAs:) They should, but they won't. Me included. It's stupid not to, but I'm not qualified to make real sense of it anyway.
In any case, if false claims are being made with intent to pump the stock price, that's criminal, despite what the risk statement might say.
And what's this "investors" word you use? Don't you mean speculators?:)
Actually, if this can later be proved to have been an intentional ploy to manipulate the stock price, then hopefully the SEC can pull out the stops to put some people in jail.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit to discover these guys were just creating talk that would pump the stock up.
I think your comment is in very poor taste, for several reasons.
Have some respect for victems and their families at Columbine.
And have some respect for victems of recent and past office/school shootings.
If you want to express your outrage over the SCO bs, direct it toward the upper management of SCO. Your comment is only a step or two away from saying "let's just bomb Salt Lake City (or Lindon)". Assuming killing the leaders of the company were a valid solution, you would also be killing lots of innocent people.
The other 98 copies actually serve to improve the visibility of the software. In a strange sense, they're gaining marketshare thru the illegal distribution of their software.
It's actually similar to companies selling their items at a price way below cost, or even giving those items away, in an effort to gain marketshare. Then once you have a bigger market, you find ways to get that bigger market to pay you.
There are lots of examples of this behavior. Sometimes it's even illegal as a company to give your products away like this.
The only difference here is that the company that wrote the software didn't choose to release it for free. That doesn't mean they're not actually helped by it being out there. Speaking of which, I wonder how many copies of Photoshop Adobe could sell if they priced it "reasonably"? I wouldn't think twice about paying $150 for a full version. But since they don't get the clue, other companies like Jasc Software created a great product, PaintShopPro (which costs about $100) to fill that void.
Besides all of that, what if DRM were able to keep copyrighted music from being heard by anyone but the person who purchased it? How many albums would be selling then? Imagine this conversation:
Buyer: Dude! Check out this new Fluff Girlz album I just got! It's really great, you should go buy it. They start out with some guitars, and then they start singing. And in the second track, they have a saxophone playing. It's really choice. Friend: Can I listen? Buyer: Sorry dude, nocando. But here, check out the album art.
It's the "free" distribution of music, via audible sound waves, that generates interest, and causes people to buy music. In much the same way, free copies of software help build interest, which can lead to sales, assuming pricing is reasonable.
I couldn't land for shit until I'd done it in the real plane maybe 100 times, and I didn't get really good at it until about 300 times.
That's scary... I was making respectable landings slipping in with 10kt crosswinds by my 6th hour of airtime. That probably amounted to 15 touch and goes.
I wish you weren't AC, I'd like to make sure you're never my pilot:)
Like I said, I forget specific details, but it was something like erratic behavior at certain limits. Perhaps it was rounding problems, or perhaps something else.
For example, and I think this is one of the specific problems I encountered, if you pulled into a vertical, cut power, stalled, and played with the controls, you could cause the plane to spin wildly (pitch) at the center of gravity. The rate at which the aircraft was doing endover spins was impossible, assuming even such a flipping motion would have occurred.
This was not a flat spin. This was something physically impossible. Assuming the aircraft would begin such a flipping motion, there would be no force to cause it to continue along that axis, much less at that very high rate.
There were two or three different situations that could cause impossible behavior. I may not have my details right, as I stated, because my recollection is fuzzy.
I'm not making this stuff up. I was very interested in trying that sim from what I had read.
I played it alongside FS2002, if I remember correctly, about 18 months ago.
It was not too bad, but it had some serious physics problems. There was a lot of incorrect behavior at extremes. It may have been technically more realistic in terms of calculation, but it was also incorrect in enough cases to make it not fun for me.
FS behaved more consistently, and close enough to correct to make it superior, in my opinion.
I'd love to give some detail about the problems I encountered, but I really don't remember anymore. I just remember buying it, giving it some good play, and deciding it had fundamental problems.
Now thinking back, the best flight sim I recall playing was the one by the guys who made System Shock. It was an aerobatics focused sim, and the physics seemed very accurate.
You state as fact that these are just weasels who merely built up an IP portfolio.
So you know the history of this company? Hell even the article states that before the technology bubble shakeout, this company was around 400 employees strong.
So here's some of what your "slimy opportunits" were busy doing before you heard about them...
From Fortune:
In 1990, when commerce over the Internet was still illegal--the National Science Foundation lifted the ban the following year--Shear founded InterTrust with the extravagant aim of inventing core technologies that would enable "technology-mediated commerce," as he put it.
Now considering Intertrust filed their 1000 page vision of how DRM would work back in 1995, after several years of research, how does this make them weasels?
You incorrectly assume that they merely applied for a patent after there was prior art (which is common nowdays, albiet unreasonable), with the single goal being litigation.
They instead appear to have made a real attempt at business, perhaps a little before the market was ready. But in their foresight they did apply for patents.
The newest scourge of the computer world is spyware. Spam is bad, but it's generally isolated to your inbox.
Spyware, crapware, whatever (read: Gator, Xupiter, Save4whatever, etc.) suck the life out of computers.
Spyware is the secret plague. Most people don't realize they have it, but most people do have it. It slowly sucks the life out of their machines. It pops up porn ads. It changes browser address entries. It sucks bandwidth and CPU.
Of course, the scum who create this spyware should be doomed to a life of cleaning up messes using SpyBot and AdAware.
But MS, and the IE project, should receive some of the blame, since they've done little or nothing to prevent ignorant (and I use that term politely) users from getting this stuff installed on their machines.
How many security problems have existed that take advantage of IE/ActiveX weaknesses?
Anyway, I just get personally sick of having everyone I know come to me with a story like, "I've got a new P4 computer, but it's really slow, and I get porn popups all the time, and sometimes when I'm entering a web address, my browser changes it to www.myfookingcasino.com".
Many development jobs may be leaving the US, but there are many other tech related jobs that will exist (and don't currently).
From my consulting experience (large and small companies), I've seen two areas that need major improvement: workflow and training.
They're actually strongly related. Many companies are just now basing a significant part of their business processes on technology. They've been gradually moving this way for some time, but it's at the point now where a tech catastrophy would seriously hurt them. However, they're still only taking advantage of perhaps 10 to 40% of what's technically feasible and also practical. There's still quite a lot of double entry of data and shuffling of papers.
So the workflow side should see a continued increase in technical development for years to come, and this will require services of "experts" of both the problem domain and technology solutions.
Training is the other area that should see continued and hopefully increased rate focus from businesses. Most users (and their bosses) approach computers and software as they approach a rental vehicle. They don't typically get much or any formal training, and they don't spend much time with books or manuals.
They're just scratching the surface of what much of their tools could do for them. Many people need broad and specific training to really make their technology work. An example of this is MS Exchange and Outlook. (I'm no fan of these, but I use them as example since they're ubiquitous.) Most business users can send and receive email, possibly with attachments. But most never touch their calendars, public folders, etc.
So maybe development is moving away, but there exists a big vacuum for other tech-related services, and those are going to stay right here in the US, if only because they often require personal contact.
Slashdot Mirror
I like this comment. It sums things up pretty well regarding people and religions.
It goes something like you stated: I don't know anything about religion X, but I disagree with them.
Brilliant. At least do yourself a favor and research a religion before you decide it's wrong. That goes for any religion.
My hope is that one day we can have a story submitted from the CSM that doesn't generate volumes of insignificant chatter of over the name of the newspaper.
You don't hear constant blah blah about the state or city of New York every time someone mentions the NYT. People tend to focus on the story. What a concept!
It's interesting that losing your child by choosing a solution other than medicine is "criminal", while having your children die in the hospital is perfectly acceptible.
I submit this story hours ago, and it's rejected.
/.
/. needs a change of editors. The /. community is ok, and the OSS/Linux-centric stories are often valuable, at least for OSS/Linux advocacy. It's a good digest.
/. is promoting its supremely lame subscription service. Brilliant.
Meanwhile there's very little news appearing on
Now hours later that same story is approved, and appears.
But over the last year I've noticed the rate of new stories has gone down, while at the same time
Now, mod me down. Some of the moderators are as useful as the editors.
Enjoy.
This gives RedHat an opportunity to force SCO to show its hand. You can bet that one of RedHat's goals here is to draw SCO's claims out into full light so they can be fully refuted.
With SCO on the offensive, they have control of the game. With RedHat initiating its own offensive, you can expect more progress more quickly.
Plus, they greatly reduce fire risk, termite risk, and wind damage risk.
Now, if you combine solar with ICF, you end up with a house that would require very little power from the grid.
The reason US hasn't implemented IPv6 isn't because of fears of Big Brother.
The reason we're not running to IPv6 is because the expenditure won't increase quarterly EPS, and we all know by now that quarterly EPS is the whole purpose in life, right?
Considering probably 4 of 5 computers has spyware dribbling out of every orifice, I'd say there's plenty of business.
In fact, as long as MS is the market leader in OS and desktop "productivity" software, tech support should thrive.
Maybe your experience with Indians has been positive.
:)
I've worked with many Indians. Just like everyone, there are good ones and bad ones.
But sometimes it's hard to find the good ones when you can't communicate verbally.
As it was explained to me, the higher class (caste) Indians are often taught English by teachers who speak English as their first language. For the lower classes, it's often taught by Indians who have learned it from Indians who learned it from Indians. It's so far removed from English, it's near impossible to understand.
And of the Indians I've met, more than half were "trained" to program, but didn't appear to be able to think independently. Some were just plain awful. Like I said though, there are some awful American developers too, but they usually find their way into management
Neat product. Now they just need to pay a graphic artist (and I use the term loosely) to give them a real logo).
That didn't sound like you were specifically targeting just the executives and lawyers. Besides, you used as reference an event that involved random targets.
I didn't really take offense to your previous comment. I attributed it to immaturity. But the comment about kissing your Irish ass does offend me. It conjures up really frightening images.
In fact, maybe we'd get more accomplished if you approached evil executives, Irish-ass first, offering them to kiss it as penalty for their evil ways.
But that's like suggesting that people should read EULAs :) They should, but they won't. Me included. It's stupid not to, but I'm not qualified to make real sense of it anyway.
:)
In any case, if false claims are being made with intent to pump the stock price, that's criminal, despite what the risk statement might say.
And what's this "investors" word you use? Don't you mean speculators?
Refer to me as passive non-aggressive again and I'll kick your ass you pansy AC.
Is that better?
You can say stupid shit without bringing up unfortunate actual events. Just try harder next time.
Actually, if this can later be proved to have been an intentional ploy to manipulate the stock price, then hopefully the SEC can pull out the stops to put some people in jail.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit to discover these guys were just creating talk that would pump the stock up.
I think your comment is in very poor taste, for several reasons.
Have some respect for victems and their families at Columbine.
And have some respect for victems of recent and past office/school shootings.
If you want to express your outrage over the SCO bs, direct it toward the upper management of SCO. Your comment is only a step or two away from saying "let's just bomb Salt Lake City (or Lindon)". Assuming killing the leaders of the company were a valid solution, you would also be killing lots of innocent people.
It's actually similar to companies selling their items at a price way below cost, or even giving those items away, in an effort to gain marketshare. Then once you have a bigger market, you find ways to get that bigger market to pay you.
There are lots of examples of this behavior. Sometimes it's even illegal as a company to give your products away like this.
The only difference here is that the company that wrote the software didn't choose to release it for free. That doesn't mean they're not actually helped by it being out there. Speaking of which, I wonder how many copies of Photoshop Adobe could sell if they priced it "reasonably"? I wouldn't think twice about paying $150 for a full version. But since they don't get the clue, other companies like Jasc Software created a great product, PaintShopPro (which costs about $100) to fill that void.
Besides all of that, what if DRM were able to keep copyrighted music from being heard by anyone but the person who purchased it? How many albums would be selling then? Imagine this conversation:
Buyer: Dude! Check out this new Fluff Girlz album I just got! It's really great, you should go buy it. They start out with some guitars, and then they start singing. And in the second track, they have a saxophone playing. It's really choice.
Friend: Can I listen?
Buyer: Sorry dude, nocando. But here, check out the album art.
It's the "free" distribution of music, via audible sound waves, that generates interest, and causes people to buy music. In much the same way, free copies of software help build interest, which can lead to sales, assuming pricing is reasonable.
You then suggest it took 100 tries before you could land "for shit". Now you suggest that you mean "make a very nice landing".
Perhaps you can see why I misunderstood.
That's scary... I was making respectable landings slipping in with 10kt crosswinds by my 6th hour of airtime. That probably amounted to 15 touch and goes.
I wish you weren't AC, I'd like to make sure you're never my pilot :)
Like I said, I forget specific details, but it was something like erratic behavior at certain limits. Perhaps it was rounding problems, or perhaps something else.
For example, and I think this is one of the specific problems I encountered, if you pulled into a vertical, cut power, stalled, and played with the controls, you could cause the plane to spin wildly (pitch) at the center of gravity. The rate at which the aircraft was doing endover spins was impossible, assuming even such a flipping motion would have occurred.
This was not a flat spin. This was something physically impossible. Assuming the aircraft would begin such a flipping motion, there would be no force to cause it to continue along that axis, much less at that very high rate.
There were two or three different situations that could cause impossible behavior. I may not have my details right, as I stated, because my recollection is fuzzy.
I'm not making this stuff up. I was very interested in trying that sim from what I had read.
I played it alongside FS2002, if I remember correctly, about 18 months ago.
It was not too bad, but it had some serious physics problems. There was a lot of incorrect behavior at extremes. It may have been technically more realistic in terms of calculation, but it was also incorrect in enough cases to make it not fun for me.
FS behaved more consistently, and close enough to correct to make it superior, in my opinion.
I'd love to give some detail about the problems I encountered, but I really don't remember anymore. I just remember buying it, giving it some good play, and deciding it had fundamental problems.
Now thinking back, the best flight sim I recall playing was the one by the guys who made System Shock. It was an aerobatics focused sim, and the physics seemed very accurate.
So you know the history of this company? Hell even the article states that before the technology bubble shakeout, this company was around 400 employees strong.
So here's some of what your "slimy opportunits" were busy doing before you heard about them...
From Fortune:
Or just go to this article directly.
Or perhaps see this reference...
1999
Now considering Intertrust filed their 1000 page vision of how DRM would work back in 1995, after several years of research, how does this make them weasels?
You incorrectly assume that they merely applied for a patent after there was prior art (which is common nowdays, albiet unreasonable), with the single goal being litigation.
They instead appear to have made a real attempt at business, perhaps a little before the market was ready. But in their foresight they did apply for patents.
What typical /. crap.
Now you got me started.
The newest scourge of the computer world is spyware. Spam is bad, but it's generally isolated to your inbox.
Spyware, crapware, whatever (read: Gator, Xupiter, Save4whatever, etc.) suck the life out of computers.
Spyware is the secret plague. Most people don't realize they have it, but most people do have it. It slowly sucks the life out of their machines. It pops up porn ads. It changes browser address entries. It sucks bandwidth and CPU.
Of course, the scum who create this spyware should be doomed to a life of cleaning up messes using SpyBot and AdAware.
But MS, and the IE project, should receive some of the blame, since they've done little or nothing to prevent ignorant (and I use that term politely) users from getting this stuff installed on their machines.
How many security problems have existed that take advantage of IE/ActiveX weaknesses?
Anyway, I just get personally sick of having everyone I know come to me with a story like, "I've got a new P4 computer, but it's really slow, and I get porn popups all the time, and sometimes when I'm entering a web address, my browser changes it to www.myfookingcasino.com".
This may be way off topic, but it's a fun read.
:)
It beats the heck out of many + moderated posts...
Maybe you should switch to Mozilla. I've been happily-popup-free for quite a while now.
Many development jobs may be leaving the US, but there are many other tech related jobs that will exist (and don't currently).
From my consulting experience (large and small companies), I've seen two areas that need major improvement: workflow and training.
They're actually strongly related. Many companies are just now basing a significant part of their business processes on technology. They've been gradually moving this way for some time, but it's at the point now where a tech catastrophy would seriously hurt them. However, they're still only taking advantage of perhaps 10 to 40% of what's technically feasible and also practical. There's still quite a lot of double entry of data and shuffling of papers.
So the workflow side should see a continued increase in technical development for years to come, and this will require services of "experts" of both the problem domain and technology solutions.
Training is the other area that should see continued and hopefully increased rate focus from businesses. Most users (and their bosses) approach computers and software as they approach a rental vehicle. They don't typically get much or any formal training, and they don't spend much time with books or manuals.
They're just scratching the surface of what much of their tools could do for them. Many people need broad and specific training to really make their technology work. An example of this is MS Exchange and Outlook. (I'm no fan of these, but I use them as example since they're ubiquitous.) Most business users can send and receive email, possibly with attachments. But most never touch their calendars, public folders, etc.
So maybe development is moving away, but there exists a big vacuum for other tech-related services, and those are going to stay right here in the US, if only because they often require personal contact.