$140 million is the estimated amount of royalties that Nokia will pay Symbian in 2005 (from the article at arcchart.com). In 2004 Nokia apparently paid Symbian $55 million (also from the same article).
The answer to that is simple. Using Symbian currently costs Nokia $140,000,000 a year (or more). The fact that Nokia owns 48% of Symbian helps a little, but that's still a lot of money thrown at an operating system.
What you missed, my good friend, is that all of these purchases require that you either have a Microsoft reseller's license or that you purchase (in the same transaction) a full computer. What's more, you end up with an OEM version that isn't transferable to another machine. That may be acceptable for you, but for a business that has to worry about a BSA audit it isn't likely to be nearly good enough.
That site also listed the retail price (the price you would have to pay if you don't want to buy a computer or if you wanted to purchase a license that was transferable to a new machine), and low and behold the price is over $500.
Spend a little time reading the EULA that came with your "discount" copy of MS Office, and you will probably find that you are breaking the license agreement. If your goal is to be able to pass a BSA audit then chances are good that you are still screwed. If your goal is to get MS Office inexpensively it would probably be easier and far less expensive to simply download a warez version.
Early on, hah. Microsoft's XBox lost something like $391,000,000 last year. The folks at Microsoft were stoked with that because they lost $1.2 billion the year before and even more obscene amounts the previous years. The XBox 360 apparently is going to be even more expensive to manufacture. Expect Microsoft to flush several billion more down the tubes getting people to put XBox 360s in their living room.
However, Microsoft has to say good things about the XBox because the XBox is about the only project that Microsoft has going right now that has potential for serious growth. That's the reason that Microsoft hasn't flushed the XBox project after losing billions on the debut hardware. If Microsoft were to admit publicly that the XBox isn't going to generate huge new revenues then investors might begin to wonder why it is that they are paying a premium for MSFT.
No matter how compliant Harmony purports to be it is still going to be different than Sun's JVM. Any sysadmin that has ever had to juggle multiple JVMs can tell you that Sun's Write Once Run Anywhere motto can quickly become Write Once Debug Everywhere.
It's also entirely possible that Harmony won't even try for complete compliance. Don't forget that IBM is still pushing their non-Java SWT instead of Swing. Red Hat already has its own Java stack that's good enough to run most Java Free Software (including Eclipse), but no one is pretending that it's Java.
Sun has stated that it doesn't want to "free" its J2SE stack because it is afraid that source availability would lead to forks. However, no fork of Sun's code is likely to diverge from Sun's fold as much as a completely new Free Software Java-like implementation.
It's somewhat more serious than that. Because if the government of Norway is going to be moving to OpenOffice.org formats (for example) then everyone that wants to communicate with the government (which likely includes most Norwegians) will have to have software that reads and writes those formats. That means that lots more Norwegians are likely to have a copy of OO.org on their machine. All of a sudden the file compatibility shoe is on the other foot and its MS Office that has poor compatibility with OO.org formats.
Not only does Microsoft lose the Norwegian government accounts, but it almost certainly will find it harder to sell to Norwegian businesses and individuals in general. If this experiment is successful then Microsoft is also faced with the negative PR of a Free Software office suite migration on a massive scale. Norway might not be much of a hit for Microsoft, but throw in a few more EU countries, and Microsoft would definitely start to feel the pain.
Besides, Microsoft still has a ridiculously high price/earnings ratio. If Microsoft wants to keep its stock price where it currently is then it needs to be generating new business, not losing existing business. Microsoft employees, and especially Microsoft executives, have a great deal of their personal wealth wrapped up in MSFT. The last thing that Microsoftees what is for Wall Street to reevaluate the MSFT share price.
Exactly. By fighting against a reasonable anti-porn law the ACLU has basically revealed itself as being pro-porn (instead of pro-free speech).
I think that an organization like the ACLU serves an important check in our society. Unfortunately the ACLU tends to be moronic about picking its battles. It's not every day that my fellow Utahns come up with a reasonable solution to what they feel is a serious problem, and yet we will still get to spend tax payer money in the court system. This just gives ammunition to the folks that want to set up something like the Great Firewall of China and put it in front of Utah.
While I agree that children should be protected from unsuitable content the problem here is that this is the first step on a very slippery slope.
I want to agree with you, but the arguments that you forward simply don't hold much water.
Who's job will it be to advertise / promote this filter?
I don't believe the law says anything about advertising. The ISP simply has to provide a filter, they don't have to advertise it. Of course, this is Utah, most of the local ISPs use their filtering system as a selling point. I moved to Utah a few years ago and pretty much all of the ISPs mention their content filtering ability. XMission.com, the ISP I use and recommend, doesn't mention their filtering in their ads, but they offer a squid proxy running DansGuardian.
Also it's this forcing the need for more hardware onto the ISP's aka higher running costs.
While using a proxy server might increase the ISPs hardware costs, it would probably decrease their bandwidth costs. In general it would probably be a net win for the ISP.
Wouldn't better wording for the law be that the AG's office provide this list AND a proxy server. Then require that the ISP's either allow customers to use that proxy, or they provide such filters themselves. Then additional costs aren't forced onto the ISPs.
Installing squid is probably cheaper than using someone else's proxy server.
That aside how long will it be before all the ISP's will be required to pass ALL traffic through such filters. How long before the filters include not only porn but other material that the state decides is offensive?
That's what I am afraid of too, but I don't think that it's particularly likely, even in Utah.
I can respect that. Heck, I nearly got a tattoo myself at one point. It's a powerful commitment feeling so strongly about something that you want to have it painted on your skin. I get that.
The problem is that there is a stigma attached because there is such a high correlation in the U.S. between people that show visible ink and the criminal element. In a perfect world people wouldn't need to pre-judge because trusting people wouldn't be inherently dangerous, but our world isn't perfect by a long shot.
In your particular case you are essentially breaking this stigma by building a solid reputation before showing ink. IMO that's a sensible compromise for someone that feels strongly about tattoos. There aren't very many people that feel so strongly about tattoos that they would change their opinion about someone's personality that they already knew and trusted, and the ones that would probably are not worth working for long term anyhow.
I realize that not everyone that gets a tattoo is doing it so that they can fit in with some kind of crowd. There are lots of very personal reasons for painting the body. The problem, like usual, is that the dorks spoil it for everyone. If criminals and other social misfits didn't tattoo themselves to mark themselves as part of a group then the stigma behind tattoos would go away. Unfortunately I don't see that happening.
Besides, I am married now and I don't think that my wife would appreciate me getting ink:).
Yes, I realize that there are plenty of examples of people that use this to their advantage. There are lots of people that look clean cut, but aren't, and there are also lots of people that adopt a freakish look but don't adopt a freakish lifestyle. In fact, as your example points out it makes sense to try and hide that you have an objectionable or illegal lifestyle. You don't have to look like a dope fiend to be a dope fiend. Someone else in one of the other threads mentioned that serial killers generally are clean cut. Of course they are. If a serial killer looked like a freak people would suspect them of being a murderer. Oddly enough the "average" murderer looks like a murderer. That makes it easier for the police to catch them before they can kill again and can become a serial killer.
People with visible tattoos and multiple body piercings have to ask themselves why they go through the pain and expense of body modifications when they know (if they have any sense at all) that people are going to pre-judge them negatively by their appearance. Essentially they are taking most people's stereotypical idea of what a misfit loser looks like and then they go out of their way to adopt that style.
Now, I don't have a problem with that. In fact, I've known quite a few people that make this work to their advantage. They match the green hair with a killer suit, an impeccable GQ look, and a completely businesslike manner, that sends the kind of mixed message that causes people to think twice about stereotypes. These people see their appearance as a game, and they think that other people's reactions are funny. Of course, this still isn't particularly "professional" behavior. Most businesses aren't particularly interested in "shocking" their customers, but some folks can pull it off. The few people that can make this work tend to have enough natural charisma that they are able to overcome their self-imposed handicap.
Basically, I have no problem with people that simply like getting a rise out of people, or enjoy the attention that having green hair gives them. I might think that sort of behavior is juvenile, or at least I safely grew out of that stage, but it *is* sort of funny to watch how people react. This sort of behavior still doesn't say a whole lot about your level of professionalism, but there are lots of jobs that don't require a high level of professionalism. It's the people that go out of their way to look like misfits and then spout things like, "you shouldn't judge people by how they look," that really get under my skin.
Riddle me this Batman, if how you look doesn't matter then why in the heck did you shove a safety pin through your eyebrow? Either you are some sort of sicko that likes causing yourself pain for absolutely no reason (because how you look doesn't matter), or you are too stupid to know how to correctly use a safety pin. Either way, it's not a strong endorsement for you as a potential employee.
Clearly how you look matters. That's something we all should be able to agree on. There are even certain advantages to more outrageous looks. People modify their bodies to attract a certain kind of sexual partner, or to fit in with a certain group of people. There's nothing wrong with that. Just don't expect people to be interested in looking too very far past your exterior. After all, the people that you want to hang out with also says a great deal about what sort of person that you are. You can't get to know everyone, and we all need effective ways to narrow the field. Unconventional people do the same thing. The difference is that they filter out the people in the suits and ties instead of the green hair and the nose rings.
And by the way, some of us think that judging people based solely on their appearence is the ultimate sign of idiocy.
How you present yourself to the world says a lot about what sort of person you are. If this wasn't the case then we wouldn't spend so much time on our appearance. You certainly wouldn't go through the pain of getting a tattoo or a body piercing if it didn't convey some sort of a message.
You can pretend that piercing your eyebrow six times makes you some sort of "individual," but that's hardly the case. Chances are good that at the club you hang out at on the weekends half the kids there look just like you. I find it amusing to see packs of these so-called "individuals" roaming around together in their freakish uniforms. The reason to get tattoos and body piercings is to fit in with a crowd, plain and simple.
The question is which crowd do you want to fit in with? Do you want to fit in with the crowd that looks like it is going somewhere, or do you want to fit in with the crowd that looks like it is strung out on dope. Sure, it's possible, even probable in your case, that you simply *dress* like a dope fiend without being one. Theoretically the rest of us should spend some time getting to know the person underneath the freakish exterior before we judge you.
Well, that's not the way the world is ever likely to work. First of all, that sort of behaviour can be dangerous. Quite a few of the people that look like dope fiends *are* dope fiends. And while it's possible that the guy who dresses like a Bible Salesman is really some sort of a hideous menace to society chances are in your favor that he is not.
All of us, to some extent or another wear a mask. However, the mask that we choose to wear says a great deal about the person behind the mask. Only an idiot ignores these important clues when meeting new people, and I have no doubt that you do the same thing. Heck, the reality is that the reason for getting these body modifications is that they serve as an advertisement for the type of person that you are and the types of activities that you are interested in. Employers understand this very well, and they also understand that this sort of personal advertisement doesn't always fit in well in a corporate environment. Employers know that their next client is far more likely to be put off by this sort of thing than attracted by it, and so they hire accordingly.
Throw in planner-mode with its Gnus integration and it's nifty Wiki-fied plans and you have a pretty nice set of tools. Since I already spend most of my day in Emacs adding one more function just makes sense.
As for your reminder system. Why not just have Emacs send your phone an email... Sure, plain text isn't nearly as cool as a computerized voice telling you that you are late, but it's much easier to script.
Fah, I remember when/. was Chips & Dips and it was little more than a few geeks commenting on Linux and other geeky subjects. The only difference between/. and the average blog is that/. has actually become popular.
Microsoft has a problem hitting timelines that are 9 months out. In Microsoft speak "three to five years" translates into "sometime before Jesus comes again."
Heck, this is probably what's taking them so long to actually release Monad. It's one thing to create a scripting language, it's another thing completely to create hooks that allow you to actually administer systems with the scripting language. UNIX has the advantage that A) everything is a file, and B) nearly all configuration files are some sort of structured text.
Microsoft is all excited about being able to pipe objects on the command line, but that's really only because that's what Microsoft has to work with. All of the information that you want is locked up in some poorly documented binary file somewhere that was designed to be accessed from some sort of GUI. The beauty of UNIX's strategy is that I don't have to read some sort of API for a certain configuration object. Instead I simply eyeball the text files and use a vast array of text manipulation tools to do what needs doing.
Exactly. The trick is to be the kind of employee that your boss isn't looking to fire. If your employer wants you fired bad enough to start sifting through your mail then you are screwed no matter what you may or may not have done.
Pretending that you have some sort of privacy while you are at work using your employer's computer (and connecting to the Internet using your employer's proxy server, email server, etc.) is just stupid.
I swear, some people spend more energy trying to hide the fact that they aren't working than they actually expend working. It never fails that these people are the same people that are surprised when their boss is going through their crap looking for reasons to fire them.
Disney's animated films are a perfect example of how copyrights *should* work. Walt basically strip-mined classic tales and retold them. There is no question that Disney put his own spin on the tales, and there is also little doubt that Walt did an excellent job retelling these stories. For many of these classic tales the "Disney" version has become the definitive representation. However, Walt would have never been able to build his empire if Snow White, Pinochio, Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, and many other works would have still been under copyright.
I am as big a Debian bigot as you are likely to meet. However, I recognize that Red Hat has been about as Free Software friendly as any company could hope to be. The people that are upset with Red Hat are upset because Red Hat denied them the use of Red Hat's good name. Basically these folks made a habit of selling people "Red Hat" solutions without actually involving the fine folks at Red Hat. As you yourself point out, the problem with Red Hat's switch to Fedora wasn't technical, but rather it was due to the fact that you could no longer use the Red Hat name. Red Hat wanted the business customers for themselves, and who can blame them? They created the distribution after all.
Personally I think that Red Hat should be allowed to benefit from their excellent name. I just want Free Software, and Fedora gives that in spades. Fedora is quite popular, and considering all of the work that goes into Fedora it is likely to keep growing in popularity. The real question is what Novell's response to Fedora is likely to be.
I happen to prefer Debian's strategy of having a large repository of packages that get tested together over Fedora's strategy of wide availability of third party RPMs, but if Fedora ever wises up and creates a repository system like Debian has, then I would definitely rethink my current strategy.
The folks at Red Hat have been doing this for a while. They know that when push comes to shove the folks doing the development control the direction of the project, and since Red Hat is going to be paying for piles of engineering time then they will have most of the control. It's possible that a few highly motivated outsiders might make a splash, but that's what Red Hat is *trying* to accomplish by opening up the process. Don't be surprised if Red Hat makes a habit of hiring (or "sponsoring") prominent non-Red Hat Fedora contributors.
Red Hat's goal with Fedora is to give its customers a chance to help influence (and pay for) development more directly than they could ever hope to with a commercial software company. So there will be plenty of chances to coax Fedora in interesting diretions. However, Red Hat will have plenty of experienced Free Software developers riding herd on Fedora so that it is guaranteed to go in a direction that will be beneficial to everyone involved. There will be disputes of course, and there might even be another fork (like the Mandrake schism that happened when Red Hat decided to develop Gnome instead of using KDE). However, it's not particularly likely that it will come to that. Red Hat has a long history of making fairly good choices, and so there is little chance that forks of Fedora will gain enough developer mind share to really gain traction.
The Fedora developer test bed was working out fine for Red Hat. Fedora simply was facing a lot of competition from organizations like Debian and Ubuntu that many developers saw as being less influenced by corporations. Red Hat is making it more obvious that they want Fedora to become a stand alone distribution, and not just Red Hat lite. Red Hat's execs know that the more development work that goes into Fedora the more Red Hat licenses they sell as Fedora pilot programs turn into serious production environments. Hooking developers with Free Software has been Red Hat's modus operandi from day one, and it's why Red Hat dominates the Linux game despite the fact that SuSE and Caldera generally had better distributions. SuSE and Caldera were too busy trying to lure Linux users with shiny bits of proprietary software, and that never really worked.
My guess is that Red Hat will primarily be paying Red Hat engineers to work on Gnome, and I would also bet that the folks that work on FC will continue to work on making the Gnome and KDE stuff look similar. In other words the KDE stuff will continue to look like the Gnome stuff.
For this to change then the KDE community would have to get a lot more involved with the FC community. In fact, they would have to get enough involved that they could change the course of the distribution. I am not part of the FC community, but I have watched enough Free Software projects that I would be very surprised if this signalled a big change. Red Hat is doing all it can to make Fedora as independent as possible, but it still is going to be providing the bulk of the actual development time.
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$140 million is the estimated amount of royalties that Nokia will pay Symbian in 2005 (from the article at arcchart.com). In 2004 Nokia apparently paid Symbian $55 million (also from the same article).
The answer to that is simple. Using Symbian currently costs Nokia $140,000,000 a year (or more). The fact that Nokia owns 48% of Symbian helps a little, but that's still a lot of money thrown at an operating system.
What you missed, my good friend, is that all of these purchases require that you either have a Microsoft reseller's license or that you purchase (in the same transaction) a full computer. What's more, you end up with an OEM version that isn't transferable to another machine. That may be acceptable for you, but for a business that has to worry about a BSA audit it isn't likely to be nearly good enough.
That site also listed the retail price (the price you would have to pay if you don't want to buy a computer or if you wanted to purchase a license that was transferable to a new machine), and low and behold the price is over $500.
Spend a little time reading the EULA that came with your "discount" copy of MS Office, and you will probably find that you are breaking the license agreement. If your goal is to be able to pass a BSA audit then chances are good that you are still screwed. If your goal is to get MS Office inexpensively it would probably be easier and far less expensive to simply download a warez version.
Early on, hah. Microsoft's XBox lost something like $391,000,000 last year. The folks at Microsoft were stoked with that because they lost $1.2 billion the year before and even more obscene amounts the previous years. The XBox 360 apparently is going to be even more expensive to manufacture. Expect Microsoft to flush several billion more down the tubes getting people to put XBox 360s in their living room.
However, Microsoft has to say good things about the XBox because the XBox is about the only project that Microsoft has going right now that has potential for serious growth. That's the reason that Microsoft hasn't flushed the XBox project after losing billions on the debut hardware. If Microsoft were to admit publicly that the XBox isn't going to generate huge new revenues then investors might begin to wonder why it is that they are paying a premium for MSFT.
If you are willing to forgo Swing and use SWT then GCJ is a pretty compelling choice.
No matter how compliant Harmony purports to be it is still going to be different than Sun's JVM. Any sysadmin that has ever had to juggle multiple JVMs can tell you that Sun's Write Once Run Anywhere motto can quickly become Write Once Debug Everywhere.
It's also entirely possible that Harmony won't even try for complete compliance. Don't forget that IBM is still pushing their non-Java SWT instead of Swing. Red Hat already has its own Java stack that's good enough to run most Java Free Software (including Eclipse), but no one is pretending that it's Java.
Sun has stated that it doesn't want to "free" its J2SE stack because it is afraid that source availability would lead to forks. However, no fork of Sun's code is likely to diverge from Sun's fold as much as a completely new Free Software Java-like implementation.
Well, we all know that shit happens :).
You've never actually met a farmer, have you?
And all things considered I would bet that Sarah Doohan doesn't mind the fact that she exists.
It's somewhat more serious than that. Because if the government of Norway is going to be moving to OpenOffice.org formats (for example) then everyone that wants to communicate with the government (which likely includes most Norwegians) will have to have software that reads and writes those formats. That means that lots more Norwegians are likely to have a copy of OO.org on their machine. All of a sudden the file compatibility shoe is on the other foot and its MS Office that has poor compatibility with OO.org formats.
Not only does Microsoft lose the Norwegian government accounts, but it almost certainly will find it harder to sell to Norwegian businesses and individuals in general. If this experiment is successful then Microsoft is also faced with the negative PR of a Free Software office suite migration on a massive scale. Norway might not be much of a hit for Microsoft, but throw in a few more EU countries, and Microsoft would definitely start to feel the pain.
Besides, Microsoft still has a ridiculously high price/earnings ratio. If Microsoft wants to keep its stock price where it currently is then it needs to be generating new business, not losing existing business. Microsoft employees, and especially Microsoft executives, have a great deal of their personal wealth wrapped up in MSFT. The last thing that Microsoftees what is for Wall Street to reevaluate the MSFT share price.
Exactly. By fighting against a reasonable anti-porn law the ACLU has basically revealed itself as being pro-porn (instead of pro-free speech).
I think that an organization like the ACLU serves an important check in our society. Unfortunately the ACLU tends to be moronic about picking its battles. It's not every day that my fellow Utahns come up with a reasonable solution to what they feel is a serious problem, and yet we will still get to spend tax payer money in the court system. This just gives ammunition to the folks that want to set up something like the Great Firewall of China and put it in front of Utah.
I want to agree with you, but the arguments that you forward simply don't hold much water.
I don't believe the law says anything about advertising. The ISP simply has to provide a filter, they don't have to advertise it. Of course, this is Utah, most of the local ISPs use their filtering system as a selling point. I moved to Utah a few years ago and pretty much all of the ISPs mention their content filtering ability. XMission.com, the ISP I use and recommend, doesn't mention their filtering in their ads, but they offer a squid proxy running DansGuardian.
While using a proxy server might increase the ISPs hardware costs, it would probably decrease their bandwidth costs. In general it would probably be a net win for the ISP.
Installing squid is probably cheaper than using someone else's proxy server.
That's what I am afraid of too, but I don't think that it's particularly likely, even in Utah.
I can respect that. Heck, I nearly got a tattoo myself at one point. It's a powerful commitment feeling so strongly about something that you want to have it painted on your skin. I get that.
The problem is that there is a stigma attached because there is such a high correlation in the U.S. between people that show visible ink and the criminal element. In a perfect world people wouldn't need to pre-judge because trusting people wouldn't be inherently dangerous, but our world isn't perfect by a long shot.
In your particular case you are essentially breaking this stigma by building a solid reputation before showing ink. IMO that's a sensible compromise for someone that feels strongly about tattoos. There aren't very many people that feel so strongly about tattoos that they would change their opinion about someone's personality that they already knew and trusted, and the ones that would probably are not worth working for long term anyhow.
I realize that not everyone that gets a tattoo is doing it so that they can fit in with some kind of crowd. There are lots of very personal reasons for painting the body. The problem, like usual, is that the dorks spoil it for everyone. If criminals and other social misfits didn't tattoo themselves to mark themselves as part of a group then the stigma behind tattoos would go away. Unfortunately I don't see that happening.
Besides, I am married now and I don't think that my wife would appreciate me getting ink :).
I wish I could moderate this up. That's precisely what I am talking about.
Yes, I realize that there are plenty of examples of people that use this to their advantage. There are lots of people that look clean cut, but aren't, and there are also lots of people that adopt a freakish look but don't adopt a freakish lifestyle. In fact, as your example points out it makes sense to try and hide that you have an objectionable or illegal lifestyle. You don't have to look like a dope fiend to be a dope fiend. Someone else in one of the other threads mentioned that serial killers generally are clean cut. Of course they are. If a serial killer looked like a freak people would suspect them of being a murderer. Oddly enough the "average" murderer looks like a murderer. That makes it easier for the police to catch them before they can kill again and can become a serial killer.
People with visible tattoos and multiple body piercings have to ask themselves why they go through the pain and expense of body modifications when they know (if they have any sense at all) that people are going to pre-judge them negatively by their appearance. Essentially they are taking most people's stereotypical idea of what a misfit loser looks like and then they go out of their way to adopt that style.
Now, I don't have a problem with that. In fact, I've known quite a few people that make this work to their advantage. They match the green hair with a killer suit, an impeccable GQ look, and a completely businesslike manner, that sends the kind of mixed message that causes people to think twice about stereotypes. These people see their appearance as a game, and they think that other people's reactions are funny. Of course, this still isn't particularly "professional" behavior. Most businesses aren't particularly interested in "shocking" their customers, but some folks can pull it off. The few people that can make this work tend to have enough natural charisma that they are able to overcome their self-imposed handicap.
Basically, I have no problem with people that simply like getting a rise out of people, or enjoy the attention that having green hair gives them. I might think that sort of behavior is juvenile, or at least I safely grew out of that stage, but it *is* sort of funny to watch how people react. This sort of behavior still doesn't say a whole lot about your level of professionalism, but there are lots of jobs that don't require a high level of professionalism. It's the people that go out of their way to look like misfits and then spout things like, "you shouldn't judge people by how they look," that really get under my skin.
Riddle me this Batman, if how you look doesn't matter then why in the heck did you shove a safety pin through your eyebrow? Either you are some sort of sicko that likes causing yourself pain for absolutely no reason (because how you look doesn't matter), or you are too stupid to know how to correctly use a safety pin. Either way, it's not a strong endorsement for you as a potential employee.
Clearly how you look matters. That's something we all should be able to agree on. There are even certain advantages to more outrageous looks. People modify their bodies to attract a certain kind of sexual partner, or to fit in with a certain group of people. There's nothing wrong with that. Just don't expect people to be interested in looking too very far past your exterior. After all, the people that you want to hang out with also says a great deal about what sort of person that you are. You can't get to know everyone, and we all need effective ways to narrow the field. Unconventional people do the same thing. The difference is that they filter out the people in the suits and ties instead of the green hair and the nose rings.
How you present yourself to the world says a lot about what sort of person you are. If this wasn't the case then we wouldn't spend so much time on our appearance. You certainly wouldn't go through the pain of getting a tattoo or a body piercing if it didn't convey some sort of a message.
You can pretend that piercing your eyebrow six times makes you some sort of "individual," but that's hardly the case. Chances are good that at the club you hang out at on the weekends half the kids there look just like you. I find it amusing to see packs of these so-called "individuals" roaming around together in their freakish uniforms. The reason to get tattoos and body piercings is to fit in with a crowd, plain and simple.
The question is which crowd do you want to fit in with? Do you want to fit in with the crowd that looks like it is going somewhere, or do you want to fit in with the crowd that looks like it is strung out on dope. Sure, it's possible, even probable in your case, that you simply *dress* like a dope fiend without being one. Theoretically the rest of us should spend some time getting to know the person underneath the freakish exterior before we judge you.
Well, that's not the way the world is ever likely to work. First of all, that sort of behaviour can be dangerous. Quite a few of the people that look like dope fiends *are* dope fiends. And while it's possible that the guy who dresses like a Bible Salesman is really some sort of a hideous menace to society chances are in your favor that he is not.
All of us, to some extent or another wear a mask. However, the mask that we choose to wear says a great deal about the person behind the mask. Only an idiot ignores these important clues when meeting new people, and I have no doubt that you do the same thing. Heck, the reality is that the reason for getting these body modifications is that they serve as an advertisement for the type of person that you are and the types of activities that you are interested in. Employers understand this very well, and they also understand that this sort of personal advertisement doesn't always fit in well in a corporate environment. Employers know that their next client is far more likely to be put off by this sort of thing than attracted by it, and so they hire accordingly.
Throw in planner-mode with its Gnus integration and it's nifty Wiki-fied plans and you have a pretty nice set of tools. Since I already spend most of my day in Emacs adding one more function just makes sense. As for your reminder system. Why not just have Emacs send your phone an email... Sure, plain text isn't nearly as cool as a computerized voice telling you that you are late, but it's much easier to script.
Fah, I remember when /. was Chips & Dips and it was little more than a few geeks commenting on Linux and other geeky subjects. The only difference between /. and the average blog is that /. has actually become popular.
Microsoft has a problem hitting timelines that are 9 months out. In Microsoft speak "three to five years" translates into "sometime before Jesus comes again."
Heck, this is probably what's taking them so long to actually release Monad. It's one thing to create a scripting language, it's another thing completely to create hooks that allow you to actually administer systems with the scripting language. UNIX has the advantage that A) everything is a file, and B) nearly all configuration files are some sort of structured text.
Microsoft is all excited about being able to pipe objects on the command line, but that's really only because that's what Microsoft has to work with. All of the information that you want is locked up in some poorly documented binary file somewhere that was designed to be accessed from some sort of GUI. The beauty of UNIX's strategy is that I don't have to read some sort of API for a certain configuration object. Instead I simply eyeball the text files and use a vast array of text manipulation tools to do what needs doing.
Exactly. The trick is to be the kind of employee that your boss isn't looking to fire. If your employer wants you fired bad enough to start sifting through your mail then you are screwed no matter what you may or may not have done.
Pretending that you have some sort of privacy while you are at work using your employer's computer (and connecting to the Internet using your employer's proxy server, email server, etc.) is just stupid.
I swear, some people spend more energy trying to hide the fact that they aren't working than they actually expend working. It never fails that these people are the same people that are surprised when their boss is going through their crap looking for reasons to fire them.
Disney's animated films are a perfect example of how copyrights *should* work. Walt basically strip-mined classic tales and retold them. There is no question that Disney put his own spin on the tales, and there is also little doubt that Walt did an excellent job retelling these stories. For many of these classic tales the "Disney" version has become the definitive representation. However, Walt would have never been able to build his empire if Snow White, Pinochio, Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, and many other works would have still been under copyright.
I am as big a Debian bigot as you are likely to meet. However, I recognize that Red Hat has been about as Free Software friendly as any company could hope to be. The people that are upset with Red Hat are upset because Red Hat denied them the use of Red Hat's good name. Basically these folks made a habit of selling people "Red Hat" solutions without actually involving the fine folks at Red Hat. As you yourself point out, the problem with Red Hat's switch to Fedora wasn't technical, but rather it was due to the fact that you could no longer use the Red Hat name. Red Hat wanted the business customers for themselves, and who can blame them? They created the distribution after all.
Personally I think that Red Hat should be allowed to benefit from their excellent name. I just want Free Software, and Fedora gives that in spades. Fedora is quite popular, and considering all of the work that goes into Fedora it is likely to keep growing in popularity. The real question is what Novell's response to Fedora is likely to be. I happen to prefer Debian's strategy of having a large repository of packages that get tested together over Fedora's strategy of wide availability of third party RPMs, but if Fedora ever wises up and creates a repository system like Debian has, then I would definitely rethink my current strategy.
The folks at Red Hat have been doing this for a while. They know that when push comes to shove the folks doing the development control the direction of the project, and since Red Hat is going to be paying for piles of engineering time then they will have most of the control. It's possible that a few highly motivated outsiders might make a splash, but that's what Red Hat is *trying* to accomplish by opening up the process. Don't be surprised if Red Hat makes a habit of hiring (or "sponsoring") prominent non-Red Hat Fedora contributors.
Red Hat's goal with Fedora is to give its customers a chance to help influence (and pay for) development more directly than they could ever hope to with a commercial software company. So there will be plenty of chances to coax Fedora in interesting diretions. However, Red Hat will have plenty of experienced Free Software developers riding herd on Fedora so that it is guaranteed to go in a direction that will be beneficial to everyone involved. There will be disputes of course, and there might even be another fork (like the Mandrake schism that happened when Red Hat decided to develop Gnome instead of using KDE). However, it's not particularly likely that it will come to that. Red Hat has a long history of making fairly good choices, and so there is little chance that forks of Fedora will gain enough developer mind share to really gain traction.
The Fedora developer test bed was working out fine for Red Hat. Fedora simply was facing a lot of competition from organizations like Debian and Ubuntu that many developers saw as being less influenced by corporations. Red Hat is making it more obvious that they want Fedora to become a stand alone distribution, and not just Red Hat lite. Red Hat's execs know that the more development work that goes into Fedora the more Red Hat licenses they sell as Fedora pilot programs turn into serious production environments. Hooking developers with Free Software has been Red Hat's modus operandi from day one, and it's why Red Hat dominates the Linux game despite the fact that SuSE and Caldera generally had better distributions. SuSE and Caldera were too busy trying to lure Linux users with shiny bits of proprietary software, and that never really worked.
My guess is that Red Hat will primarily be paying Red Hat engineers to work on Gnome, and I would also bet that the folks that work on FC will continue to work on making the Gnome and KDE stuff look similar. In other words the KDE stuff will continue to look like the Gnome stuff.
For this to change then the KDE community would have to get a lot more involved with the FC community. In fact, they would have to get enough involved that they could change the course of the distribution. I am not part of the FC community, but I have watched enough Free Software projects that I would be very surprised if this signalled a big change. Red Hat is doing all it can to make Fedora as independent as possible, but it still is going to be providing the bulk of the actual development time.