That's also why it's hard to follow the puck when watching hockey on TV (for the few of us that actually do that). Small black dot on large white surface...
You didn't need to clarify there were few of you. Slashdot is all about accepting other people differences. Sport challenged people have the same rights as any other people. Anyway, some time you will wake up from that bad dream and start watching football like everybody else in the world (that's Association Football for the linguistically challenged, too).
What are you getting at? I can tell you're not trolling, but what do you mean?
This isn't like Europe and developed parts of Asia, we've got relatively low population density and spend far less money on cell phones than typical customers in those areas. As a result the time tends to be longer.
Of course we're also fans of bureaucracy and corporate malfeasance so it'll take even longer than it would in a sanely managed geographic region of similar specifications.
Or in Latin America. In Uruguay we have a country-wide 3G network, even though 3G penetration is not _that_ high. lots of other Latin American countries do too. I think that it's not a geographical thing, it's only an issue of the US being pwned by a couple of telecoms that get away with any shit they want.
I would be very product oriented, if such thing existed.
I prefer clothes that are not internationally branded, I have a 40 dollar prepaid cellphone, and I don't even own a car, while I make more than enough to afford one.
I have Reebok sports shoes I bought for $30, but that's because I couldn't easily find an alternative that provided rubber soles instead of hard plastic. I don't usually drink Coca Cola, just some Sprite Zero when it's the cheapest, easier, non sugar alternative. I drink mate or sorrel if I can find them.
Nevertheless, I think it's naive for me to think I am not affected by consumerism and stuff.
I put trust in some brands. I prefer my beef from a specific meat shop (when I am back home) because it gives me better tenderness and taste. All my work shoes are made in my country and branded Gallarate, and that's because I can trust their product. In a foreign country I would probably buy a well known brand, because I don't like betting my money. Same thing happens with my clothes.
Without trusting brands, you would be your whole life testing stuff, and never learning from experience. Of course in your neighborhood you don't need to trust brands, but it doesn't scale well.
Brands are important, because knowing people you can trust is important. The difficult thing is keeping a balance, where you get to trust some providers, but you don't just follow any well known brand blindly.
The thing is that our brain is not that good separating brands we only know from brands we actually trust. Keeping them separated can be hard, and some times, we have better things to do than to think deeply about why we are choosing one product over another, it can be stressful too.
That weakness is well known, and exploited. What I meant is that one way of preventing our weaknesses from being exploited is to at least acknowledge them.
The whole "subliminal" thing strikes me as a giant load of hogwash.
Just think about it.
Coca Cola and Pepsi use lots of money in advertising. The fact that they are leaders in the world, even the fact that people actually buy sugared tap water must mean something.
Nike sells sports clothes at designer prices, and people actually buy them and wear them. To think that advertising has nothing to with it is nonsense.
People respond to advertising, to think you are so special that you don't is both arrogant and naive.
Aside from that, I don't care either about ads, I have learned to live with them, but I don't think they do not affect me.
All that is fixed by having an architect in your team. Not all projects are single people projects, anyways. I have extensive experience both in Java, and MS platforms. I am working on C# right now. For me, barriers to entry mean nothing. You only need to configure Eclipse once, and build your foundation classes once. I invested weeks of my life getting Java to work great. When I get to hire people to work with me, they won't have to. Now I'm hired for a big ASP.NET project, and the environment was set up faster, but also we ended up with a design from the eighties, that gets in our way every time. Lack of OR mapping is awful. Lack of a fully implemented View layer makes me do all the presentation work myself, and makes me slower. Two way binding doesn't work for nested objects!!! Give me a break!! This framework is BRAINDEAD I say. BRAINDEAD!!! I end up doing lots of casts in the PAGE!! My.aspx's look awful! And those Datasets, they are funny. Try to use some complex datatype like a Guid, and the Table Adapters start laughing behind your back, waiting for your reaction to their behaviour.
And don't get me started with the IDE. It feels like traveling back in time. Random lockups in a powerful machine, lack of search everywhere, braindead cursor navigation. I don't know how I put up with this.
It's ok if you want to do some fast prototyping, I give you that, but right after that, you have to fight your way through it.
(Sorry about the yelling and whining, I just had a "couple" of bad days at work!)
A car analogy would be more appropriate..Net is like an automatic car, while Java is a manual car. The first is easier to learn, and easier to drive in optimal conditions. The latter is cheaper, consumes less, is easier to fix when it breaks, and is safer on rough terrain.
The differences are in distribution. Free Java means easier bundling, more ubiquity, easier deployment, no legal mess.
Not that the "religious" thing is a bad thing. That postmodern stance makes me sick. I think that having principles and following them is a Good Thing (TM), even WRT software. I resent that popular trend that says that lacking ideology is somehow better. I understand it's easier, but I really hate it.
Windows desktop programs are a niche language. Most of us work building enterprise stuff. Tool makers are in the minority. Most developers are building apps for the real world, not for the desktop. That means corporate web applications. There, the only big platforms right now are Java and.NET. Everything else is niche.
You have got to be kidding. I don't pretend to know what percentage of the world's knowledge is in.doc format, but I'd be amazed if you weren't at least an order of magnitude out.
Dude, percentages only go up to 100. You can't have 800% of the world's knowledge - that makes no sense.
No way. Five years from now, slashdot will be owned by Disney, and hotlinking to their sites will be against the law everywhere in the world, but North Korea. Or what will be left from it.
No. Athens is the very definition of a direct democracy.... If there is a triggering event to override popular decision or prevent its immediate enactment, it is not a direct democracy. It may be the closest functional modern analogue, but the reference is a misnomer. Athens was not a democracy, at least by modern standards, because only some people from some families could vote. That is an oligarchy. You could argue that they represented the others, but that would be a representative democracy.
What your argue about Switzerland not being a direct democracy is that it doesn't match your own definition of "direct democracy". For most of us a direct democracy is one where the people are the actual rulers, instead of their representatives. That holds true there. People can gather, and make their own laws, voting for them afterwards. In my country they can do that, but there are lots of restrictions, and our representatives have much more power than that.
Shitty work conditions and slavery are two extremely different things. Not two different things. Imagine you offer a job in a factory to a striving farmer who has a family. He follows you to the city. You charge him for travel expenses, lodging and food. At the end of the day, most of what you are paying him, comes back to you, and the rest goes to support his family. Returning to his land is now not an option, because it takes a couple of seasons to get your own food, and without his work and expertise, farming is under subsistence levels. He can't save money have enough money to go back to farming.
You would say that this is slavery. Well, that is what happens with lots of families in the american continent. Only it didn't happen for one guy in particular, but in several generations. Going back is not an option. Working for what basically is food and lodging is very common.
When I was in Guatemala, I stayed once at an apartment complex where two guards covered all the shifts of the week. That is 12 hours a day, everyday. Like, twice what a person should work at most. And they didn't seem as they were saving money, more than it was their only alternative.
The line between shitty work conditions and slavery is so fine it doesn't exist. The real reason that slavery was abolished is that you get to save money by taking less care about workers, because you are not responsible for their well-being.
In fact, I think France forbids the selling a phone without an unlocked option. There's also some similar weirdness in Germany. Similar weirdness?
So, forced bundling is the normal thing, and regulations against forced bundling are weird?
With that kind of thinking, it seems like everything big corporations choose to do is to be redefined as the normal thing. Or does the corporation need to be C00l, and have a turtlenecked CEO?
For example, Microsoft used every dirty trick in the book to create a virtual monopoly in the operating system market. The market responded with rampant piracy and theft, but also with free open source operating systems. I couldn't read that looong rant, but I don't like your terms, anyway.
Piracy is not copying MS software. It's robbery at sea ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy ), it's a real problem that is happening today, and shouldn't be minimized by comparison with minor stuff. Theft implies loss of property, and copyright is not property, it's copyright.
What I would say instead is that the market responded with allegiance. Using the software without paying, at their own legal risk, doing MS marketing job for free, training generations of future buyers with cost for MS, and providing free support throughout the globe. I don't see how that relates to robbery in the high sees, or depriving MS of their property.
What you claim as "losing choice" is just free market. Of course, free market has its good things and its bad things. That's how it is.
Software companies selling stuff for more than it's worth go under. And you lose choice. But the fact that there are other competitors selling inferior things cheaper is only good. In fact, the original company has the opportunity to change the price to the real market value, that in some cases drops to zero. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I think you have a wrong idea of free software and open source. No-cost or non-commercial was never a goal. Free software is intended to be free as in freedom, they can charge as much as they want, only most people choose not to. When I sell free software, I charge, usually because I build custom software. Free software is usually commercial.
If you want your manager to buy the tools you want, free software has nothing to do with it. You could make the comparison of management buying some cheaper propietary package you didn't want just because it was cheaper to acquire than the one you wanted. The fact that free software can be acquired for no cost doesn't make a difference. It has nothing to do with the "FOSS"/commercial false dichotomy.
Slashdot Mirror
That's also why it's hard to follow the puck when watching hockey on TV (for the few of us that actually do that). Small black dot on large white surface...
You didn't need to clarify there were few of you. Slashdot is all about accepting other people differences.
Sport challenged people have the same rights as any other people. Anyway, some time you will wake up from that bad dream and start watching football like everybody else in the world (that's Association Football for the linguistically challenged, too).
What are you getting at? I can tell you're not trolling, but what do you mean?
This isn't like Europe and developed parts of Asia, we've got relatively low population density and spend far less money on cell phones than typical customers in those areas. As a result the time tends to be longer.
Of course we're also fans of bureaucracy and corporate malfeasance so it'll take even longer than it would in a sanely managed geographic region of similar specifications.
Or in Latin America.
In Uruguay we have a country-wide 3G network, even though 3G penetration is not _that_ high.
lots of other Latin American countries do too.
I think that it's not a geographical thing, it's only an issue of the US being pwned by a couple of telecoms that get away with any shit they want.
Yes, but you look at different parts of the screen, which are different distances from your eyes.
True, but is the difference in distance so great that your eye needs to refocus much to make a difference (if at all)?
Yes.
You don't notice it much, but that is what causes eye strain, the eye constantly refocusing.
Real geeks type their own PostScript. Online.
You have been pwned. Get over it.
Maybe you are responding to the wrong stereotype.
I would be very product oriented, if such thing existed.
I prefer clothes that are not internationally branded, I have a 40 dollar prepaid cellphone, and I don't even own a car, while I make more than enough to afford one.
I have Reebok sports shoes I bought for $30, but that's because I couldn't easily find an alternative that provided rubber soles instead of hard plastic.
I don't usually drink Coca Cola, just some Sprite Zero when it's the cheapest, easier, non sugar alternative. I drink mate or sorrel if I can find them.
Nevertheless, I think it's naive for me to think I am not affected by consumerism and stuff.
I put trust in some brands. I prefer my beef from a specific meat shop (when I am back home) because it gives me better tenderness and taste.
All my work shoes are made in my country and branded Gallarate, and that's because I can trust their product. In a foreign country I would probably buy a well known brand, because I don't like betting my money. Same thing happens with my clothes.
Without trusting brands, you would be your whole life testing stuff, and never learning from experience. Of course in your neighborhood you don't need to trust brands, but it doesn't scale well.
Brands are important, because knowing people you can trust is important. The difficult thing is keeping a balance, where you get to trust some providers, but you don't just follow any well known brand blindly.
The thing is that our brain is not that good separating brands we only know from brands we actually trust. Keeping them separated can be hard, and some times, we have better things to do than to think deeply about why we are choosing one product over another, it can be stressful too.
That weakness is well known, and exploited. What I meant is that one way of preventing our weaknesses from being exploited is to at least acknowledge them.
The whole "subliminal" thing strikes me as a giant load of hogwash.
Just think about it.
Coca Cola and Pepsi use lots of money in advertising. The fact that they are leaders in the world, even the fact that people actually buy sugared tap water must mean something.
Nike sells sports clothes at designer prices, and people actually buy them and wear them. To think that advertising has nothing to with it is nonsense.
People respond to advertising, to think you are so special that you don't is both arrogant and naive.
Aside from that, I don't care either about ads, I have learned to live with them, but I don't think they do not affect me.
All that is fixed by having an architect in your team. Not all projects are single people projects, anyways. .aspx's look awful!
I have extensive experience both in Java, and MS platforms. I am working on C# right now. For me, barriers to entry mean nothing. You only need to configure Eclipse once, and build your foundation classes once.
I invested weeks of my life getting Java to work great. When I get to hire people to work with me, they won't have to.
Now I'm hired for a big ASP.NET project, and the environment was set up faster, but also we ended up with a design from the eighties, that gets in our way every time.
Lack of OR mapping is awful.
Lack of a fully implemented View layer makes me do all the presentation work myself, and makes me slower.
Two way binding doesn't work for nested objects!!! Give me a break!! This framework is BRAINDEAD I say. BRAINDEAD!!! I end up doing lots of casts in the PAGE!! My
And those Datasets, they are funny. Try to use some complex datatype like a Guid, and the Table Adapters start laughing behind your back, waiting for your reaction to their behaviour.
And don't get me started with the IDE. It feels like traveling back in time. Random lockups in a powerful machine, lack of search everywhere, braindead cursor navigation. I don't know how I put up with this.
It's ok if you want to do some fast prototyping, I give you that, but right after that, you have to fight your way through it.
(Sorry about the yelling and whining, I just had a "couple" of bad days at work!)
A car analogy would be more appropriate. .Net is like an automatic car, while Java is a manual car.
The first is easier to learn, and easier to drive in optimal conditions.
The latter is cheaper, consumes less, is easier to fix when it breaks, and is safer on rough terrain.
The differences are in distribution.
Free Java means easier bundling, more ubiquity, easier deployment, no legal mess.
Not that the "religious" thing is a bad thing. That postmodern stance makes me sick.
I think that having principles and following them is a Good Thing (TM), even WRT software. I resent that popular trend that says that lacking ideology is somehow better. I understand it's easier, but I really hate it.
Windows desktop programs are a niche language. .NET. Everything else is niche.
Most of us work building enterprise stuff.
Tool makers are in the minority. Most developers are building apps for the real world, not for the desktop. That means corporate web applications.
There, the only big platforms right now are Java and
But we like him anyways!
Give me the paper. I'm not interested reading on the toilet with a laptop sharing space, but I'll spend hours reading with a book in my hands.
You should definitely eat more fiber.You have got to be kidding. I don't pretend to know what percentage of the world's knowledge is in .doc format, but I'd be amazed if you weren't at least an order of magnitude out.
Dude, percentages only go up to 100. You can't have 800% of the world's knowledge - that makes no sense.Captcha - accuracy. How fitting.
You can. Only you need to be out of this world.No way. Five years from now, slashdot will be owned by Disney, and hotlinking to their sites will be against the law everywhere in the world, but North Korea. Or what will be left from it.
Those grammar nazis are too easy to plan for. They have a lot lo learn from the Spanish Inquisition.
If there is a triggering event to override popular decision or prevent its immediate enactment, it is not a direct democracy. It may be the closest functional modern analogue, but the reference is a misnomer. Athens was not a democracy, at least by modern standards, because only some people from some families could vote. That is an oligarchy. You could argue that they represented the others, but that would be a representative democracy.
What your argue about Switzerland not being a direct democracy is that it doesn't match your own definition of "direct democracy". For most of us a direct democracy is one where the people are the actual rulers, instead of their representatives. That holds true there. People can gather, and make their own laws, voting for them afterwards. In my country they can do that, but there are lots of restrictions, and our representatives have much more power than that.
OLPC is developing in my country, which is run by people who do not hate atheists or gay people.
Helping the BSA as it it would be wrong(TM). Forking it would be the free way to fix the issue.
Piracy is robbery at sea. At least it should be that way in slashdot.
Again, they were not forced to sign that contract.
They chose to sign it, so they chose to fsck customers.
Imagine you offer a job in a factory to a striving farmer who has a family.
He follows you to the city. You charge him for travel expenses, lodging and food. At the end of the day, most of what you are paying him, comes back to you, and the rest goes to support his family.
Returning to his land is now not an option, because it takes a couple of seasons to get your own food, and without his work and expertise, farming is under subsistence levels. He can't save money have enough money to go back to farming.
You would say that this is slavery. Well, that is what happens with lots of families in the american continent. Only it didn't happen for one guy in particular, but in several generations. Going back is not an option. Working for what basically is food and lodging is very common.
When I was in Guatemala, I stayed once at an apartment complex where two guards covered all the shifts of the week. That is 12 hours a day, everyday. Like, twice what a person should work at most. And they didn't seem as they were saving money, more than it was their only alternative.
The line between shitty work conditions and slavery is so fine it doesn't exist. The real reason that slavery was abolished is that you get to save money by taking less care about workers, because you are not responsible for their well-being.
So, forced bundling is the normal thing, and regulations against forced bundling are weird?
With that kind of thinking, it seems like everything big corporations choose to do is to be redefined as the normal thing. Or does the corporation need to be C00l, and have a turtlenecked CEO?
Piracy is not copying MS software. It's robbery at sea ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy ), it's a real problem that is happening today, and shouldn't be minimized by comparison with minor stuff. Theft implies loss of property, and copyright is not property, it's copyright.
What I would say instead is that the market responded with allegiance. Using the software without paying, at their own legal risk, doing MS marketing job for free, training generations of future buyers with cost for MS, and providing free support throughout the globe. I don't see how that relates to robbery in the high sees, or depriving MS of their property.
What you claim as "losing choice" is just free market. Of course, free market has its good things and its bad things. That's how it is.
Software companies selling stuff for more than it's worth go under. And you lose choice. But the fact that there are other competitors selling inferior things cheaper is only good. In fact, the original company has the opportunity to change the price to the real market value, that in some cases drops to zero. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I think you have a wrong idea of free software and open source. No-cost or non-commercial was never a goal. Free software is intended to be free as in freedom, they can charge as much as they want, only most people choose not to. When I sell free software, I charge, usually because I build custom software. Free software is usually commercial.
If you want your manager to buy the tools you want, free software has nothing to do with it. You could make the comparison of management buying some cheaper propietary package you didn't want just because it was cheaper to acquire than the one you wanted. The fact that free software can be acquired for no cost doesn't make a difference. It has nothing to do with the "FOSS"/commercial false dichotomy.
I second that.