Typical putdown of McDonalds that isn't borne out by the facts. A quick search at http://www.monster.com reveals that shift workers in Dallas are being recruited for $7-$9/hour. Management positions are $25,500.00 to $37,500.00 per year. It's not very much compared to computer programming, perhaps, but it's not minimum wage either. I wonder if there's a McDonald's anywhere in the U.S. that actually pays minimum wage.
Re:The human mind is a good filter [possibly OT]
on
The Hypermedia Hazard
·
· Score: 1
"If you are going to spout off about things, please in the future be informed."
So you're arguing that had the Americans not intervened, either directly through what grew to be a 700,000 man attack force by the end of the war or indirectly through the Lend-Lease Act which helped keep Britain afloat financially, the British would have invaded continental Europe on their own and defeated the Nazis completely either on their own or in partnership with the Soviets.
I think it's much more likely that without the USA, Britain would have kept its independence but that the Nazis and Stalin would have fought it out on the continent, possibly with a stalemate occurring at some point with Germany controlling the western portion and Russia reconquering its own territory and possibly some of the Slavic countries as a buffer. Of course the Germans would have kept working on their atomic bomb and missile delivery systems so who knows what a few more years of Nazism would have meant for Britain's survival.
"Again, please get your history right next time, thanks in advance."
OK so Britain played a role in developing underlying technologies and has continuted to contribute to the field. Yet the original point still stands. Are you implying that US technology was a trivial or non-existent factor in the development of modern networks? How absolutely ludicrous.
Regarding your original point about lack of multi-lingualism in the USA, it's simply not true and bespeaks a tired old closed-minded view that Europeans typically adopted (and that elitist Americans mimicked), probably out of resentment over the USA's displacement of Europe as the premier economic and and cultural power. Most kids get at least some Spanish in secondary school, or else French or German. The fact that there's little opportunity or need to use foreign languages in most of the US and Canada, except for inroads of Spanish speaking communities in the South and West and access by portions of the population to Mexico and Quebec, accounts for a lack of fluency in a second language by most 3rd generation and earlier immigrants. I have met countless Chinese Americans who speak Cantonese or Mandarin in the home, Italian Americans who can converse in their grandparents' native Italian, Polish Americans who learned Polish in the home, Jewish Americans who learned Yiddish from their parents or grandparents, Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican and other Hispanic immigrants who have Spanish, and British immigrants who speak... well... English. To say Americans are monolingual is simply wrong. Furthermore some American universities have begun in recent years to reinstate language requirements that were dropped in the early 1970s. I majored in Chinese and studied Japanese as well; I can get by in French and I took a year of Spanish in high school, plus four years of Latin. My wife speaks passable Cantonese, French, Spanish, Vietnamese, and a bit of several African languages as a result of her work with various immigrant groups. We are Americans. A friend of mine majored in Russian, someone else I know somehow took French and Spanish and German and Chinese in college. They, too, are Americans. Take a walk down the street in Manhattan and you will hear thirty languages spoken within a few city blocks.
Re:The human mind is a good filter [possibly OT]
on
The Hypermedia Hazard
·
· Score: 1
Q: What do you call someone who left footsteps on the Moon?
A: American.
Q: What do you call the people who saved the Swedes and everyone else in W. Europe from Hitler?
A: American.
Q: What do you call the inventor of the Internet and most of the technologies that allow you to post your anti-American drivel?
A: American.
When is Palm going to adopt Handera's screen innovations? The virtual graffiti area and higher resolution is so much better than a Palm that it's hard to believe they never implemented it.
It's also nice having a 256M compact flash card for instant backups and a growing library of books;)
Microsoft is predominant today, but twenty-five years ago IBM was in a similar position; they were the predominant computer manufacturer in every country in the world. Then, new technologies arose and smaller companies began to eat IBM's lunch.
Remember how the federal government wasted 10 years and millions of dollars trying to break IBM up? They failed but managed to leave it a crippled giant, stodgy and conservative and afraid to appear too predatory. Hindsight shows that the feds should have saved their time and our money for more productive pursuits.
Another example of how history repeats itself is how the Japanese almost took over the world. Does anyone remember the "threat" of Japanese software factories? They were going to blow away American software makers, who were "too expensive" and "in decline". Meanwhile, American car makers and steel makers, especially the Texas mini-mills, have made a big comeback, despite the dire predictions of the late 1970s.
This is Microsoft's day in the sun, but sooner or later things will change. Meanwhile, FTC should act as a referee and otherwise keep out of the fray.
I've heard that the programmers at MSFT were using some kind of proprietary in-house development environment, not the commercially available Visual Studio. This was true a few years ago; perhaps it's no longer the case.
Not to dispute your main point but the Crusades were not about individual freedom. The real point of the Crusades was to consolidate and glorify the power of the Church. It was a pretty awful period of European history, really. They killed a lot of people both at home, e.g. Jews they found along the way, and Moslems in the Holy Land and anyone else who got in their way.
If it weren't for unions, and more succinctly, people looking out for their own best interests, workers would be working 16 hour shifts and would be getting paid $5.35 an hour
This is a commonly held myth. There's almost no evidence to support it. I work in a non-union profession (software engineering) and the pay is quite good. I'm self-taught and worked my way up from the very bottom. No damn union helped me float along. As for long hours, there is that but it's usually by choice, not fiat. When there was a severe labor shortage in the food service industry here in Boston the employers responded by offering higher pay, e.g. 8.50/hr and up to start at MacDonald's. Pretty good for unskilled work.
The problem is that unions artificially suppress the laws of supply and demand and of course they don't like meritocracy. It's the guild system of the Middle Ages all over again. My grandfather had to quit the shoe business in New York because he couldn't hire a driver of his choice; had to be picked by a union. He worked hard all his life (died at 91) what the hell did he do to deserve that?
As for workers getting shafted that's a typical justification for stealing from one's employer, lying on one's timesheet, etc. The fact is that if you hurt your company you're hurting yourself, long term. Soiling your own nest and all that.
I say to hell with unions, they've driven all the manufacturing out of the U.S., they've ruined the schools, air travel, on and on and on.
Dream on. Windows 2000 is doing pretty well, and probably XP will do well. It's gonna have some innovative UI features which should spark a lot of interest among users.
MSFT has always done well with their operating systems and there's no reason to believe anything has changed. Corporations tend to buy Microsoft products; there are lots of companies with tens of thousands of workstations running NT or 2000 and MS Office, and they're all going to eventually get XP, and all new machines will have XP preinstalled.
I guess we'll eventually have to dual boot to Linux to play our MP3s.
I've got a Palm III and IIIxe. Great stuff; got a Kodak Palmpix camera for quick digital pictures. Couldn't live without one of these things. Well, life wouldn't be as fun anyway.
But Palm has come out with four incompatible hardware lines: Pilot/5000, III/VII, V/Vx, and M100/105 series. Cradles are different, expansion devices like modems are different. Who are they kidding? All they've done is shoot themselves in the foot.
Now Handspring is coming out with one great product after another, all using the same cradles and expansion boards. Is there any reason to buy a Palm anymore?
How is this bad? Nutritionally? Better to eat fish and chips (Britain), or chicken feet (Taiwan)? Or do you mean people should eat at traditional restaurants more and forego the convenience of fast food?
mental disorders
The US is not alone in that.
worst education system
Nonsense. The U.S. university system is arguably the best in the world, by almost any measure. The secondary school system is hurt by undermotivated students and selfish parents. For motivated students, the U.S. system works pretty well, generally speaking. The system itself can always improve but there are much worse systems in the world. There's the Japanese examination-based system that boasts high standards and high suicide rates--the world's highest. Which would you rather have?
I can't even go out for a walk in the summer with a beer in my hand
Get active in your local community and rescind that law. That's what democracy is about.
fat, murderous, uneducated, and restricted people
Maybe you need to get out more often. Stop reading the crime section and go join a charitable organization. You will meet a higher class of people and they will set you straight. Americans, by the way, donate more to charities than any other nation, per capita and in total.
The U.S. population has always been a hodge-podge. According to John Gunther in "Inside America", half the men who were called up for military duty in 1945 were considered unfit for service. Divorce and neglected children were major social problems even then. African-Americans, Asians, Jews, and Native peoples were discriminated against, often violently. The U.S. has come a long way since then; give it a little credit.
Americans are consistently underestimated by others. In the 1930s, Mussolini mockingly called the U.S. a "3rd grade democracy" following Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast, which caused mass panic. The U.S. went on to defeat Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese and proceeded to run the world for the next fifty years.
What's wrong with MKS toolkit? Surely your childhood friend can elaborate a bit. I've been using MKS recently on NT 4 and have had no problems. It works pretty well actually. If it were up to me we'd be using the gnu versions, which are free and simpler to install.
How silly. Try living in the Netherlands or any other European country if you're African or Asian or Turkish or Arab. See how well you are accepted in these societies. You will be regarded as a guest, at best, by everyone there including official government agencies, schools, and employers.
The U.S. has its problems but it's tried harder for much longer to have a modicum of equality for all ethnic groups, ages and genders. If the U.S. falls short of perfection, well, humans are imperfect and these massive experiments such as Bill of Rights take centuries to succeed.
To assert that people are less free in 2001 than in 1971 in the U.S. is to ignore history.
Corporate dominance is nothing new; has everyone forgotten the monopolism of the 1890s, when union strikers could be shot with impunity and individuals had no protection from the economic imperatives of the giant railroads and other industrial concerns? --
A quick scan of the article did not make it clear whether the museum cravenly paid the ransom or not. If so would this not set off a rash of thefts from museums followed by ransom demands from "unwitting" buyers? I can hardly wait.
Where do you draw the line between public and private? It sounds like this company is doing something for the general public, or at least a specialized sector of the general public. At least, it's more "public" than, say, a manufacturing process strictly for internal use at a factory.
--
Public opinion has always been an issue. Back in the late Fifties, every time a rocket failed to launch, the newspapers would write it up as though it were a catastrophe, when in fact it was just normal learning curve. "Our rockets always blow up" they wrote, in comparison to the apparently infallible Soviets, who never pre-announced flights and covered up all their own failures.
Keep in mind as well that the early manned missions were basically PR stunts; there was little scientific value to sending a man up there in a "capsule", but there was tremendous publicity payback. Of course, each mission added knowledge of human survival techniques in space, but it was orchestrated very much for the public's consumption. See Tom Wolf's book "The Right Stuff" for some interesting insights.
A big difference today is that NASA has spread its facilities around the country to get more Congressional support. In doing so, unfortunately, they lost the cohesiveness of the Sixties and Seventies efforts and greatly politicized their operations.
Then there's the dumbing down of scientific and mathematical standards in secondary education, with the resulting reduction in a supply of competent technicians. Happily, non-US citizens are flocking in to fill this need in colleges and graduate schools, but of course lots of them get kicked out of the country soon after graduation.
Luckily, all the money that would have gone to NASA has been very well spent. Just look at all the great public housing and well fed poor people and gleaming interstate highways, and... and... happy federal pensioners? where DOES all the money go, anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
> a cultural wasteland full of ignorant, illiterate , xenophebic bigots who are the descendants of the worst people Europe had on offer
-1 Flamebait
Jeez. Isn't there any moderator out there willing to take this to 0? Doesn't anyone read past the first 25 comments?
> The reason Xerox hasn't sued, and won't sue Apple, is that...
Xerox did indeed sue Apple in 1989 for $150 million over look-and-feel patent violations. The suit was thrown out.
Typical putdown of McDonalds that isn't borne out by the facts. A quick search at http://www.monster.com reveals that shift workers in Dallas are being recruited for $7-$9/hour. Management positions are $25,500.00 to $37,500.00 per year. It's not very much compared to computer programming, perhaps, but it's not minimum wage either. I wonder if there's a McDonald's anywhere in the U.S. that actually pays minimum wage.
"If you are going to spout off about things, please in the future be informed."
So you're arguing that had the Americans not intervened, either directly through what grew to be a 700,000 man attack force by the end of the war or indirectly through the Lend-Lease Act which helped keep Britain afloat financially, the British would have invaded continental Europe on their own and defeated the Nazis completely either on their own or in partnership with the Soviets.
I think it's much more likely that without the USA, Britain would have kept its independence but that the Nazis and Stalin would have fought it out on the continent, possibly with a stalemate occurring at some point with Germany controlling the western portion and Russia reconquering its own territory and possibly some of the Slavic countries as a buffer. Of course the Germans would have kept working on their atomic bomb and missile delivery systems so who knows what a few more years of Nazism would have meant for Britain's survival.
"Again, please get your history right next time, thanks in advance."
OK so Britain played a role in developing underlying technologies and has continuted to contribute to the field. Yet the original point still stands. Are you implying that US technology was a trivial or non-existent factor in the development of modern networks? How absolutely ludicrous.
Regarding your original point about lack of multi-lingualism in the USA, it's simply not true and bespeaks a tired old closed-minded view that Europeans typically adopted (and that elitist Americans mimicked), probably out of resentment over the USA's displacement of Europe as the premier economic and and cultural power. Most kids get at least some Spanish in secondary school, or else French or German. The fact that there's little opportunity or need to use foreign languages in most of the US and Canada, except for inroads of Spanish speaking communities in the South and West and access by portions of the population to Mexico and Quebec, accounts for a lack of fluency in a second language by most 3rd generation and earlier immigrants. I have met countless Chinese Americans who speak Cantonese or Mandarin in the home, Italian Americans who can converse in their grandparents' native Italian, Polish Americans who learned Polish in the home, Jewish Americans who learned Yiddish from their parents or grandparents, Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican and other Hispanic immigrants who have Spanish, and British immigrants who speak... well... English. To say Americans are monolingual is simply wrong. Furthermore some American universities have begun in recent years to reinstate language requirements that were dropped in the early 1970s. I majored in Chinese and studied Japanese as well; I can get by in French and I took a year of Spanish in high school, plus four years of Latin. My wife speaks passable Cantonese, French, Spanish, Vietnamese, and a bit of several African languages as a result of her work with various immigrant groups. We are Americans. A friend of mine majored in Russian, someone else I know somehow took French and Spanish and German and Chinese in college. They, too, are Americans. Take a walk down the street in Manhattan and you will hear thirty languages spoken within a few city blocks.
Q: What do you call someone who left footsteps on the Moon?
A: American.
Q: What do you call the people who saved the Swedes and everyone else in W. Europe from Hitler?
A: American.
Q: What do you call the inventor of the Internet and most of the technologies that allow you to post your anti-American drivel?
A: American.
When is Palm going to adopt Handera's screen innovations? The virtual graffiti area and higher resolution is so much better than a Palm that it's hard to believe they never implemented it.
;)
It's also nice having a 256M compact flash card for instant backups and a growing library of books
There are several types of keyboards available for Palms and Pocket PCs. It's a remarkably useful accessory.
How 'bout Oracle? It's industrial strength, and unlike MS it's multi-platform.
Microsoft is predominant today, but twenty-five years ago IBM was in a similar position; they were the predominant computer manufacturer in every country in the world. Then, new technologies arose and smaller companies began to eat IBM's lunch.
Remember how the federal government wasted 10 years and millions of dollars trying to break IBM up? They failed but managed to leave it a crippled giant, stodgy and conservative and afraid to appear too predatory. Hindsight shows that the feds should have saved their time and our money for more productive pursuits.
Another example of how history repeats itself is how the Japanese almost took over the world. Does anyone remember the "threat" of Japanese software factories? They were going to blow away American software makers, who were "too expensive" and "in decline". Meanwhile, American car makers and steel makers, especially the Texas mini-mills, have made a big comeback, despite the dire predictions of the late 1970s.
This is Microsoft's day in the sun, but sooner or later things will change. Meanwhile, FTC should act as a referee and otherwise keep out of the fray.
just my 2 centimos.
--
I've heard that the programmers at MSFT were using some kind of proprietary in-house development environment, not the commercially available Visual Studio. This was true a few years ago; perhaps it's no longer the case.
--
Not to dispute your main point but the Crusades were not about individual freedom. The real point of the Crusades was to consolidate and glorify the power of the Church. It was a pretty awful period of European history, really. They killed a lot of people both at home, e.g. Jews they found along the way, and Moslems in the Holy Land and anyone else who got in their way.
--
If it weren't for unions, and more succinctly, people looking out for their own best interests, workers would be working 16 hour shifts and would be getting paid $5.35 an hour
This is a commonly held myth. There's almost no evidence to support it. I work in a non-union profession (software engineering) and the pay is quite good. I'm self-taught and worked my way up from the very bottom. No damn union helped me float along. As for long hours, there is that but it's usually by choice, not fiat. When there was a severe labor shortage in the food service industry here in Boston the employers responded by offering higher pay, e.g. 8.50/hr and up to start at MacDonald's. Pretty good for unskilled work.
The problem is that unions artificially suppress the laws of supply and demand and of course they don't like meritocracy. It's the guild system of the Middle Ages all over again. My grandfather had to quit the shoe business in New York because he couldn't hire a driver of his choice; had to be picked by a union. He worked hard all his life (died at 91) what the hell did he do to deserve that?
As for workers getting shafted that's a typical justification for stealing from one's employer, lying on one's timesheet, etc. The fact is that if you hurt your company you're hurting yourself, long term. Soiling your own nest and all that.
I say to hell with unions, they've driven all the manufacturing out of the U.S., they've ruined the schools, air travel, on and on and on.
Feh.
--
Dream on. Windows 2000 is doing pretty well, and probably XP will do well. It's gonna have some innovative UI features which should spark a lot of interest among users.
MSFT has always done well with their operating systems and there's no reason to believe anything has changed. Corporations tend to buy Microsoft products; there are lots of companies with tens of thousands of workstations running NT or 2000 and MS Office, and they're all going to eventually get XP, and all new machines will have XP preinstalled.
I guess we'll eventually have to dual boot to Linux to play our MP3s.
--
I've got a Palm III and IIIxe. Great stuff; got a Kodak Palmpix camera for quick digital pictures. Couldn't live without one of these things. Well, life wouldn't be as fun anyway.
But Palm has come out with four incompatible hardware lines: Pilot/5000, III/VII, V/Vx, and M100/105 series. Cradles are different, expansion devices like modems are different. Who are they kidding? All they've done is shoot themselves in the foot.
Now Handspring is coming out with one great product after another, all using the same cradles and expansion boards. Is there any reason to buy a Palm anymore?
--
I don't get your meaning. What is "this" if not "Mission of Gravity"?
--
How is this bad? Nutritionally? Better to eat fish and chips (Britain), or chicken feet (Taiwan)? Or do you mean people should eat at traditional restaurants more and forego the convenience of fast food?
mental disorders
The US is not alone in that.
worst education system
Nonsense. The U.S. university system is arguably the best in the world, by almost any measure. The secondary school system is hurt by undermotivated students and selfish parents. For motivated students, the U.S. system works pretty well, generally speaking. The system itself can always improve but there are much worse systems in the world. There's the Japanese examination-based system that boasts high standards and high suicide rates--the world's highest. Which would you rather have?
I can't even go out for a walk in the summer with a beer in my hand
Get active in your local community and rescind that law. That's what democracy is about.
fat, murderous, uneducated, and restricted people
Maybe you need to get out more often. Stop reading the crime section and go join a charitable organization. You will meet a higher class of people and they will set you straight. Americans, by the way, donate more to charities than any other nation, per capita and in total.
The U.S. population has always been a hodge-podge. According to John Gunther in "Inside America", half the men who were called up for military duty in 1945 were considered unfit for service. Divorce and neglected children were major social problems even then. African-Americans, Asians, Jews, and Native peoples were discriminated against, often violently. The U.S. has come a long way since then; give it a little credit.
Americans are consistently underestimated by others. In the 1930s, Mussolini mockingly called the U.S. a "3rd grade democracy" following Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast, which caused mass panic. The U.S. went on to defeat Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese and proceeded to run the world for the next fifty years.
Sorry about wandering so far off topic.
-Terry
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You were racist because there was not enough cultural diversity in your posting.
--
> 12 months ago Microsoft was nearly $120 now it's around 30 (25% of its Jan 2000 value)
Actually MSFT is 54 today (Jan 18)
--
What's wrong with MKS toolkit? Surely your childhood friend can elaborate a bit. I've been using MKS recently on NT 4 and have had no problems. It works pretty well actually. If it were up to me we'd be using the gnu versions, which are free and simpler to install.
--
How silly. Try living in the Netherlands or any other European country if you're African or Asian or Turkish or Arab. See how well you are accepted in these societies. You will be regarded as a guest, at best, by everyone there including official government agencies, schools, and employers.
The U.S. has its problems but it's tried harder for much longer to have a modicum of equality for all ethnic groups, ages and genders. If the U.S. falls short of perfection, well, humans are imperfect and these massive experiments such as Bill of Rights take centuries to succeed.
To assert that people are less free in 2001 than in 1971 in the U.S. is to ignore history.
Corporate dominance is nothing new; has everyone forgotten the monopolism of the 1890s, when union strikers could be shot with impunity and individuals had no protection from the economic imperatives of the giant railroads and other industrial concerns?
--
The math major (he, she) could have said any digit at all. How would anyone else know?
--
A quick scan of the article did not make it clear whether the museum cravenly paid the ransom or not. If so would this not set off a rash of thefts from museums followed by ransom demands from "unwitting" buyers? I can hardly wait.
--
Where do you draw the line between public and private? It sounds like this company is doing something for the general public, or at least a specialized sector of the general public. At least, it's more "public" than, say, a manufacturing process strictly for internal use at a factory.
--
Public opinion has always been an issue. Back in the late Fifties, every time a rocket failed to launch, the newspapers would write it up as though it were a catastrophe, when in fact it was just normal learning curve. "Our rockets always blow up" they wrote, in comparison to the apparently infallible Soviets, who never pre-announced flights and covered up all their own failures.
Keep in mind as well that the early manned missions were basically PR stunts; there was little scientific value to sending a man up there in a "capsule", but there was tremendous publicity payback. Of course, each mission added knowledge of human survival techniques in space, but it was orchestrated very much for the public's consumption. See Tom Wolf's book "The Right Stuff" for some interesting insights.
A big difference today is that NASA has spread its facilities around the country to get more Congressional support. In doing so, unfortunately, they lost the cohesiveness of the Sixties and Seventies efforts and greatly politicized their operations.
Then there's the dumbing down of scientific and mathematical standards in secondary education, with the resulting reduction in a supply of competent technicians. Happily, non-US citizens are flocking in to fill this need in colleges and graduate schools, but of course lots of them get kicked out of the country soon after graduation.
Luckily, all the money that would have gone to NASA has been very well spent. Just look at all the great public housing and well fed poor people and gleaming interstate highways, and... and... happy federal pensioners? where DOES all the money go, anyway?
check out the Jot product; it allows full screen text entry.