I do look forward to entrusting them with my retirement benefits once we privatize Social Security. Surely they will exercise their fiduciary responsibilities diligently when that happens!
Heh heh... For Linux I do this routinely to get rid of the manufacturer's crapware, but every time I mount it on my GF's WinXP box it actually has to pause so it can download and reinstall it. WTF?
Unions become a problem when they start to see companies as being the enemy, rather than something they're in partnership with.
If you study the history of the labor movement and management/labor relations in the U.S., you'd realize how absurd that statement is. Owners, management, and labor are all eating from the same plate. It's the job of owners and management to keep the workers' share as small as possible, and this is best done by keeping them afraid of losing what little they've got.
A union should exist as a group of people freely associating to promote their self interests
Unions aren't social clubs; they exist so that labor can deal with management on a level playing field in the process of collective bargaining. The purpose of "right to work" laws is not to promote "freedom" from association for workers, as the name suggests. Those laws exist to destroy unions by permitting workers to benefit from collective bargaining without contributing to the process. If you look at who promotes them, you'll find precious little evidence that they were motivated by any concern for the rights, welfare, or safety of working people.
Climatology became political because the fossil fuel industry spends a boatload of money on public relations to make it so. If they can stall the development and adoption of carbon-neutral energy technologies for even 10 or 15 years by spreading misinfomation and confusion, it still means hundreds of billions of dollars to them, and PR firms are cheap compared to that.
I've spoken with conservatives - a couple in my own family - who've never taken any interest in any science of any kind, yet have big, loud opinions on climatology and "bad science". Their complete lack of interest and knowledge in the subject shields them from having to consider any evidence you might present, so reason is useless. To ask them how they arrived at their conclusions is to open up a boiling cauldron of nonsense and paranoia that usually boils down to all scientists belonging to some great liberal conspiracy bent on destroying the economy. Or sometimes, just a blank stare.
The insurance companies will have a lot to say about that. Long before your beachside home is eroded out from under you, your insurance carrier will be informing you that it doesn't want to underwrite that risk anymore. Not, at least, at anywhere near the paltry fee you're paying them now.
I think it's sad to see such ill-informed, unimaginative responses from the general public
To be fair, a lot of money has been spent - by the fossil carbon industry in particular - on PR to achieve precisely that end. Their job is to sow confusion and doubt over the issue, not to educate. This crap gets fed to the public through the usual bellowing conservative commentators, and voila! An issue that was once a scientific one becomes a rallying cry of conservatives as part of their core ideology, along with their antipathy to evolution, astronomy, geology, and just about every other product of human reason in the past 200 years.
Indeed. The numbers that these companies deal with are mind-boggling, and the valuations so seldom seem justifiable. Maybe part of it boils down to strategic panic, but the egos of everyone involved play a part, too, I think. None of these executives want to be messing around with smaller deals than their peers, even if they're on the paying end.
The saving grace with Linux is that you have a lot of DE choices and can use something other than Unity or Gnome3 if you like. I recently installed Fedora 17 with Xfce instead of Gnome3 and have been quite pleased with it. Maybe Microsoft should offer similar flexibility with Windows.
Can't claim it handles "all".doc files correctly, because I only generate/read a tiny, tiny fraction of all that exist. But, it (and OpenOffice before it) has worked well for me, on documents ranging from simple 1-pagers to 80-page grant proposals. MS Office may render them "subtly" different, as you say, but since I'm not running both office suites side-by-side I'd be unlikely to notice. The fact that I always have the full and latest version at no cost doesn't hurt, either!
A huge amount of money is riding on people not believing that, however.
At this point I only have a fb id so that I can be invited to events by others.
Some old-timers once told me of a time when you could have friends and get invited to things without needing the services of a corporation that makes its money by knowing and selling every detail of your life, but I can't imagine how it was ever done.
LibreOffice handles.doc files (both input and output) just fine, in my experience. Most of what I do with it goes out either as.doc or.pdf with no problems.
Haven't looked at it in detail so I'm just guessing what they're doing here, but it's likely that this would only work well for periodic motion. In fact, the examples in their video are just that: pumping blood, breathing, guitar strings vibrating, etc. Of course, you can make anything periodic by essentially playing it in a loop, with a good windowing function...
As a matter of fact you can. If the source is open, then anyone can propose the fix (to either the driver or the kernel) and even do it themselves. If it's proprietary, then you're shit-out-of-luck unless the vendor sees it in their business interest to make the fix and distribute it. That's what this entire thread illustrates: the video drivers and hardware specs are closed, and so all we can do is plead and whine.
So yes, complaining about a problem in Linux is just the first step along the way to getting it addressed (if there's sharp disagreement about how best to do it, then you'll get your 10,000 page thread!). Believe me, if the capabilities of the hardware that you and I purchase weren't treated like state secrets, we wouldn't need to be having this discussion.
OEMs can't support each and every OS, kernel version,... especially when the market share is marginal, and revenue almost nil.
Well, it's been argued that the whole Linux ecosystem can't possibly exist for just that reason, much like flight for bees being aerodynamically impossible. And yet, there they are. Drives you nuts every time you update your OS and software, doesn't it?
We don't need them to spend money developing Linux drivers; we only need them to stop throwing roadblocks in the way so that others can write and maintain them. That's the way Linux has always worked. The only cost to the manufacturers is proper documentation, which must already exist internally (or so one would hope).
Well, maybe if I could be assured that it was only on company time and wouldn't be used for an unreasonable level of micromanagement. However, we all should know by now that many employers won't stop there, and will insist on the ability to track you on your off-hours as well. It'll be the Facebook password fiasco all over again.
Employees are people that you pay in return for services rendered. They aren't property.
I just did this with my Linux installation with no sweat at all, and now the GF wants me to do it for her Windows (XP) box. It's been 10 or 12 years since I've had anything to do with Windows, so I'm a bit nervous about it. While it should be fairly trivial, you also have to worry whether the vendor of a proprietary OS sees a business interest in making it more difficult or dangerous than it needs to be.
The other reason I'm nervous is because it's my GF I'll be doing it for. If there's even the slightest hiccup, I'll have to throw her into the gaping maw of a volcano before I'll ever hear the end of it.
It's nice that that works for you, but I'm curious about your take on why the "intermediate or senior folks" weren't fitting in with your corporate culture. E.g., were they unable to adapt their entrenched ways of thinking and working to their new environment? Or did their experience and exposure to different ways of doing things lead them to challenge how things are done? Some company cultures are highly paternalistic, and might view hiring highly experienced employees as disruptive to the "family" hierarchy. In short, I guess I'm asking: Was it something about them, or something about your company culture, or both?
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I do look forward to entrusting them with my retirement benefits once we privatize Social Security. Surely they will exercise their fiduciary responsibilities diligently when that happens!
Oh lordy, here come the trademark lawyers...
Heh heh... For Linux I do this routinely to get rid of the manufacturer's crapware, but every time I mount it on my GF's WinXP box it actually has to pause so it can download and reinstall it. WTF?
You remind me of myself when I was 22. Good luck with that.
Unions become a problem when they start to see companies as being the enemy, rather than something they're in partnership with.
If you study the history of the labor movement and management/labor relations in the U.S., you'd realize how absurd that statement is. Owners, management, and labor are all eating from the same plate. It's the job of owners and management to keep the workers' share as small as possible, and this is best done by keeping them afraid of losing what little they've got.
A union should exist as a group of people freely associating to promote their self interests
Unions aren't social clubs; they exist so that labor can deal with management on a level playing field in the process of collective bargaining. The purpose of "right to work" laws is not to promote "freedom" from association for workers, as the name suggests. Those laws exist to destroy unions by permitting workers to benefit from collective bargaining without contributing to the process. If you look at who promotes them, you'll find precious little evidence that they were motivated by any concern for the rights, welfare, or safety of working people.
Oh, I wish I had ranted that. Well done.
Climatology became political because the fossil fuel industry spends a boatload of money on public relations to make it so. If they can stall the development and adoption of carbon-neutral energy technologies for even 10 or 15 years by spreading misinfomation and confusion, it still means hundreds of billions of dollars to them, and PR firms are cheap compared to that.
I've spoken with conservatives - a couple in my own family - who've never taken any interest in any science of any kind, yet have big, loud opinions on climatology and "bad science". Their complete lack of interest and knowledge in the subject shields them from having to consider any evidence you might present, so reason is useless. To ask them how they arrived at their conclusions is to open up a boiling cauldron of nonsense and paranoia that usually boils down to all scientists belonging to some great liberal conspiracy bent on destroying the economy. Or sometimes, just a blank stare.
People will move on their own when they can no longer buy insurance at an affordable price. It'll be a hell of a time to sell, though.
and who is going to pay for it?
The insurance companies will have a lot to say about that. Long before your beachside home is eroded out from under you, your insurance carrier will be informing you that it doesn't want to underwrite that risk anymore. Not, at least, at anywhere near the paltry fee you're paying them now.
I think it's sad to see such ill-informed, unimaginative responses from the general public
To be fair, a lot of money has been spent - by the fossil carbon industry in particular - on PR to achieve precisely that end. Their job is to sow confusion and doubt over the issue, not to educate. This crap gets fed to the public through the usual bellowing conservative commentators, and voila! An issue that was once a scientific one becomes a rallying cry of conservatives as part of their core ideology, along with their antipathy to evolution, astronomy, geology, and just about every other product of human reason in the past 200 years.
I'm not a climatologist any more than you are, but I do wonder how all of the additional energy from warmer surface waters might be dissipated.
Indeed. The numbers that these companies deal with are mind-boggling, and the valuations so seldom seem justifiable. Maybe part of it boils down to strategic panic, but the egos of everyone involved play a part, too, I think. None of these executives want to be messing around with smaller deals than their peers, even if they're on the paying end.
The saving grace with Linux is that you have a lot of DE choices and can use something other than Unity or Gnome3 if you like. I recently installed Fedora 17 with Xfce instead of Gnome3 and have been quite pleased with it. Maybe Microsoft should offer similar flexibility with Windows.
If Oracle doesn't want to support it on your platform, you can do it yourself. For less than $4 billion, anyway...
Can't claim it handles "all" .doc files correctly, because I only generate/read a tiny, tiny fraction of all that exist. But, it (and OpenOffice before it) has worked well for me, on documents ranging from simple 1-pagers to 80-page grant proposals. MS Office may render them "subtly" different, as you say, but since I'm not running both office suites side-by-side I'd be unlikely to notice. The fact that I always have the full and latest version at no cost doesn't hurt, either!
A huge amount of money is riding on people not believing that, however.
At this point I only have a fb id so that I can be invited to events by others.
Some old-timers once told me of a time when you could have friends and get invited to things without needing the services of a corporation that makes its money by knowing and selling every detail of your life, but I can't imagine how it was ever done.
LibreOffice handles .doc files (both input and output) just fine, in my experience. Most of what I do with it goes out either as .doc or .pdf with no problems.
Haven't looked at it in detail so I'm just guessing what they're doing here, but it's likely that this would only work well for periodic motion. In fact, the examples in their video are just that: pumping blood, breathing, guitar strings vibrating, etc. Of course, you can make anything periodic by essentially playing it in a loop, with a good windowing function...
You can't have it both ways...
As a matter of fact you can. If the source is open, then anyone can propose the fix (to either the driver or the kernel) and even do it themselves. If it's proprietary, then you're shit-out-of-luck unless the vendor sees it in their business interest to make the fix and distribute it. That's what this entire thread illustrates: the video drivers and hardware specs are closed, and so all we can do is plead and whine.
So yes, complaining about a problem in Linux is just the first step along the way to getting it addressed (if there's sharp disagreement about how best to do it, then you'll get your 10,000 page thread!). Believe me, if the capabilities of the hardware that you and I purchase weren't treated like state secrets, we wouldn't need to be having this discussion.
OEMs can't support each and every OS, kernel version, ... especially when the market share is marginal, and revenue almost nil.
Well, it's been argued that the whole Linux ecosystem can't possibly exist for just that reason, much like flight for bees being aerodynamically impossible. And yet, there they are. Drives you nuts every time you update your OS and software, doesn't it?
We don't need them to spend money developing Linux drivers; we only need them to stop throwing roadblocks in the way so that others can write and maintain them. That's the way Linux has always worked. The only cost to the manufacturers is proper documentation, which must already exist internally (or so one would hope).
The only "support" they need to do is document their hardware specifications accurately and publicly. The community will take care of the rest.
People who use Linux for anything other than command line programs are the minority of Linux users.
And people who believe that have no idea what they're talking about.
Well, maybe if I could be assured that it was only on company time and wouldn't be used for an unreasonable level of micromanagement. However, we all should know by now that many employers won't stop there, and will insist on the ability to track you on your off-hours as well. It'll be the Facebook password fiasco all over again.
Employees are people that you pay in return for services rendered. They aren't property.
I just did this with my Linux installation with no sweat at all, and now the GF wants me to do it for her Windows (XP) box. It's been 10 or 12 years since I've had anything to do with Windows, so I'm a bit nervous about it. While it should be fairly trivial, you also have to worry whether the vendor of a proprietary OS sees a business interest in making it more difficult or dangerous than it needs to be.
The other reason I'm nervous is because it's my GF I'll be doing it for. If there's even the slightest hiccup, I'll have to throw her into the gaping maw of a volcano before I'll ever hear the end of it.
It's nice that that works for you, but I'm curious about your take on why the "intermediate or senior folks" weren't fitting in with your corporate culture. E.g., were they unable to adapt their entrenched ways of thinking and working to their new environment? Or did their experience and exposure to different ways of doing things lead them to challenge how things are done? Some company cultures are highly paternalistic, and might view hiring highly experienced employees as disruptive to the "family" hierarchy. In short, I guess I'm asking: Was it something about them, or something about your company culture, or both?