And apparently they've done very little to educate their customers, except to instill a generalized fear of incomprehensible perils that only AOL can protect them from?
If people aren't willing to expend even the most minimal amount of effort to learn their world around them
Unfortunately, you've just described about 80% of humanity. At least. Learning is a lot like physical exercise; some people can't get enough, but most avoid it every chance they get...
Wrong audience, probably; most of the responses here are about the gear. But one of the main differences between leasing and buying is that all of your costs are expensed as they occur with a lease. When you buy, it has to be amortized over several years. That means that cash is going out the door that you won't be able to claim as an expense for tax purposes until later years.
Well, I would turn your comment around and ask why I should have hundreds or thousands of cookies on my machine when I do just fine with only a few or none at all? The main point to the end-of-session rule is that it's just easier than having to manually distinguish between benign cookies (like login info for sites that I visit by choice) and more intrusive ones (like those left by advertisers to track activity across sites). In-session cookies (like shopping carts, etc.) are not an issue. An nice browser feature would be to expire all cookies at end-of-session, except those specifically designated as "keepers".
When I saw this I'd just finished reading an article in Science (18 Feb 05) entitled Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers (subscription required). Contrary to the "mainstream" approach of actuating every joint with a complex control system, the authors describe three robots that achieve very natural human-like gaits using far fewer actuators and much simpler control principles (one of them using adaptive learning). Not only are these robots far simpler to control, but they typically require only about a tenth of the energy of designs that attempt to actuate every joint (e.g., knees). I'll speculate that this passive/dynamic approach is going to dominate in the future.
The fact that the source is open for the vast majority of companies is irrelevant.
A lot of things seem irrelevant if you're sufficiently short-sighted. In fact, knowing that the source will continue to be available regardless of what the current developers may do means everything to the realization of your objectives (2) and (3) above, regardless of whether you intend to work with directly with it or not.
More to the point, it probably doesn't matter much if the developers walk away. The source is still in your hands, and even if you don't have the sophistication in-house to do anything with it yourself, somebody else surely will, if it's used very widely at all. The risks of being at the mercy of a single closed-source vendor are considerably greater, and include everything from backruptcies and cessation of product support to abject blackmail based on your dependence.
Clearly all of the money and marketing is going to fall on the side of closed-source solutions, because that's where the money & marketing is. They'll make a straw man out of Jimmy-Blow-Job's project and characterize that as the alternative to Microsoft and Oracle. And this will work for a long time, until businesses notice that their competition is doing Just Fine with OSS at the same time that they're being hit up for big licensing fees on forced upgrades. Any money spent postponing these Days of Reckoning is going to be a good investment, however!
given the choice between installing a poorly supported, poorly documented open source database, or something like Microsoft SQL Server
You're being a little presumptive there, aren't you? You'll keep your cushy IT position right up until your CEO starts noticing that his competitors are doing just fine with OSS (where appropriate, of course), and with greater flexibility and no vendor lock-in. Maybe you'll have some splainin' to do?
Seriously, though... Maybe we need a discussion of what "support" really means, when it is necessary, and how much it's really worth. It's been years since I've been more than a Google search and a minute or two away from any answer I've needed on the OSS that I use. How much of the need for external support is actually created by vendors themselves, and the closed nature of their products?
Have you ever seen a popular business book written beyond the 8th-grade level? I'm not sure that I have. In 300 pages, you'll get about 2 pages of actual information, and 298 of repetition and anecdotes about people who (a) followed the author's advice and became fabulously successful or (b) ignored it and became miserable failures. And most of those are probably made up.
People use Flash because they want to ANIMATE, and animation is rarely a boon for the end-user.
So true. In fact, you can eliminate a good share of the most annoying crap on the web by disabling Flash completely. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to enable it to see something that I actually wanted to see...
I'd reconsider. If the Justice Department ever lays a subpeona on your ass, how are you going to prove that you haven't been visiting unapproved websites?
Most web users couldn't live without cookies, since a lot of web sites (including Slashdot) use them for automatic login.
I recently told Mozilla to delete all cookies at the end of every session, and this hasn't been a problem for me at all. Why? Because Moz remembers my login info for me, so logging in is just a single click.
I hate advertising and spyware as much as the next guy
Well, I'm the next guy, and it's pretty clear to me that you don't. Deleting cookies and avoiding ads has become kind of a sport for me. I clear 'em out as soon as I'm done with a site or very shortly thereafter; it takes about 2 seconds. You've got my (dynamic) IP address, and that's all you're going to get.
but Senator Kerry's spending plan involving wasting a lot more money than Bush.
So how much is Iraq still costing? Something like $200 billion a year now? Of course if you're a Bushie, it's all just abstract numbers. It's not even in the budget. Hey, we can borrow it from China, and let the next generation or two worry about it!
Movie theaters, television, music etc. is all teenager domain.. and I don't see teenagers boycotting any form of entertainment any time soon.
Sad but true. I remember when I first started seeing product commercials in movie theaters; there was a lot of hissing from the audience and a good portion of us walked out demanding (and getting) refunds. But then, I grew up in the 60s, when kids understood better the power of collective action. Since then, it seems, people have been conditioned to expect and accept crap, and no one has even a vague clue that it's their complacency that keeps it coming by the bucketload.
Do you even know what evolution (or science, for that matter) is? You think Science is just whatever some privileged, self-appointed elite arbitrarily chooses to represent as Absolute Truth at any given time, don't you?
Sigh... This was going to be a long response, but I think I'll go talk to my dog instead...
Why confuse the poor bastards by assuming that their cognitive apparatus is so radically different than ours, when it's most likely not? Chances are that they evolved somewhere basking in enough stellar energy to support complex life, so it's highly doubtful that they would have achieved space travel without having at least evolved the ability to percieve light and discern imagery. So just show 'em some pictures of the kids, a newspaper or two, and maybe some porn. All this geometric and binary crap is just going to confuse them; they'll spend lots of time trying to figure out stuff that not even we understand, when all they'll really want is to observe us as we are!
Slashdot Mirror
And apparently they've done very little to educate their customers, except to instill a generalized fear of incomprehensible perils that only AOL can protect them from?
Unfortunately, you've just described about 80% of humanity. At least. Learning is a lot like physical exercise; some people can't get enough, but most avoid it every chance they get...
Which, of course, is as likely as not to be a spoof. The worst of the disadvantages of cluelessness is the inability to distinguish friend from foe.
Wrong audience, probably; most of the responses here are about the gear. But one of the main differences between leasing and buying is that all of your costs are expensed as they occur with a lease. When you buy, it has to be amortized over several years. That means that cash is going out the door that you won't be able to claim as an expense for tax purposes until later years.
Well, I would turn your comment around and ask why I should have hundreds or thousands of cookies on my machine when I do just fine with only a few or none at all? The main point to the end-of-session rule is that it's just easier than having to manually distinguish between benign cookies (like login info for sites that I visit by choice) and more intrusive ones (like those left by advertisers to track activity across sites). In-session cookies (like shopping carts, etc.) are not an issue. An nice browser feature would be to expire all cookies at end-of-session, except those specifically designated as "keepers".
When I saw this I'd just finished reading an article in Science (18 Feb 05) entitled
Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers (subscription required). Contrary to the "mainstream" approach of actuating every joint with a complex control system, the authors describe three robots that achieve very natural human-like gaits using far fewer actuators and much simpler control principles (one of them using adaptive learning). Not only are these robots far simpler to control, but they typically require only about a tenth of the energy of designs that attempt to actuate every joint (e.g., knees). I'll speculate that this passive/dynamic approach is going to dominate in the future.
When I saw this I'd just finished reading an article in Science (18 Feb 05) entitled (subscription required). Contrary to the "mainstream" approach of actuating every joint with a complex control system, the authors describe three robots that achieve very natural human-like gaits using far fewer actuators and much simpler control principles (one of them using adaptive learning). Not only are these robots far simpler to control, but they typically require only about a tenth of the energy of designs that attempt to actuate every joint (e.g., knees). I'll speculate that this passive/dynamic approach is going to dominate in the future.
A lot of things seem irrelevant if you're sufficiently short-sighted. In fact, knowing that the source will continue to be available regardless of what the current developers may do means everything to the realization of your objectives (2) and (3) above, regardless of whether you intend to work with directly with it or not.
More to the point, it probably doesn't matter much if the developers walk away. The source is still in your hands, and even if you don't have the sophistication in-house to do anything with it yourself, somebody else surely will, if it's used very widely at all. The risks of being at the mercy of a single closed-source vendor are considerably greater, and include everything from backruptcies and cessation of product support to abject blackmail based on your dependence.
Clearly all of the money and marketing is going to fall on the side of closed-source solutions, because that's where the money & marketing is. They'll make a straw man out of Jimmy-Blow-Job's project and characterize that as the alternative to Microsoft and Oracle. And this will work for a long time, until businesses notice that their competition is doing Just Fine with OSS at the same time that they're being hit up for big licensing fees on forced upgrades. Any money spent postponing these Days of Reckoning is going to be a good investment, however!
You're being a little presumptive there, aren't you? You'll keep your cushy IT position right up until your CEO starts noticing that his competitors are doing just fine with OSS (where appropriate, of course), and with greater flexibility and no vendor lock-in. Maybe you'll have some splainin' to do?
Seriously, though... Maybe we need a discussion of what "support" really means, when it is necessary, and how much it's really worth. It's been years since I've been more than a Google search and a minute or two away from any answer I've needed on the OSS that I use. How much of the need for external support is actually created by vendors themselves, and the closed nature of their products?
Have you ever seen a popular business book written beyond the 8th-grade level? I'm not sure that I have. In 300 pages, you'll get about 2 pages of actual information, and 298 of repetition and anecdotes about people who (a) followed the author's advice and became fabulously successful or (b) ignored it and became miserable failures. And most of those are probably made up.
And you'll probably have to get it from a bankruptcy court. Maybe some infinitesimal fraction of $lots, anyway.
So true. In fact, you can eliminate a good share of the most annoying crap on the web by disabling Flash completely. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to enable it to see something that I actually wanted to see...
I'd reconsider. If the Justice Department ever lays a subpeona on your ass, how are you going to prove that you haven't been visiting unapproved websites?
I recently told Mozilla to delete all cookies at the end of every session, and this hasn't been a problem for me at all. Why? Because Moz remembers my login info for me, so logging in is just a single click.
Well, I'm the next guy, and it's pretty clear to me that you don't. Deleting cookies and avoiding ads has become kind of a sport for me. I clear 'em out as soon as I'm done with a site or very shortly thereafter; it takes about 2 seconds. You've got my (dynamic) IP address, and that's all you're going to get.
What is the proper term for a Bush apologist, then, if his own name is an insult?
Slickwillie and the Clintonazis
Whose transgressions seem positively quaint by current standards, don't they?
if Senator Kerry would have won, there would still be the same spent on Iraq.
Since the mess had already been made, I can't really disagree with you on this point...
So how much is Iraq still costing? Something like $200 billion a year now? Of course if you're a Bushie, it's all just abstract numbers. It's not even in the budget. Hey, we can borrow it from China, and let the next generation or two worry about it!
I'm waiting for some conservative to say that if you simply decline to read this kind of littrachaw, you'll have nothing to worry about...
Don't forget to learn the Executive Belly Laugh (and when to use it)...
Sad but true. I remember when I first started seeing product commercials in movie theaters; there was a lot of hissing from the audience and a good portion of us walked out demanding (and getting) refunds. But then, I grew up in the 60s, when kids understood better the power of collective action. Since then, it seems, people have been conditioned to expect and accept crap, and no one has even a vague clue that it's their complacency that keeps it coming by the bucketload.
When was that... 1993?
Sigh... This was going to be a long response, but I think I'll go talk to my dog instead...
Why confuse the poor bastards by assuming that their cognitive apparatus is so radically different than ours, when it's most likely not? Chances are that they evolved somewhere basking in enough stellar energy to support complex life, so it's highly doubtful that they would have achieved space travel without having at least evolved the ability to percieve light and discern imagery. So just show 'em some pictures of the kids, a newspaper or two, and maybe some porn. All this geometric and binary crap is just going to confuse them; they'll spend lots of time trying to figure out stuff that not even we understand, when all they'll really want is to observe us as we are!