For those of you that don't know, Underwriter's Laboratories is a private company. It is not a government agency. It predates most regulatory agencies. It predates Consumer Reports. It predates Ralph Nader. It's a system that works. Once upon a time calling upon the government to pass a law was an act of LAST resort, not first resort as it is now. That's when UL started.
The UL label doesn't mean that the product cannot possibly cause harm. Rather it means that the product is safe when used in an appropriate fashion according to the directions. Unlike your assertion, the manufacturer cannot slap the UL logo on a product without UL's permission. That's why there's this little (r) next to the letters UL. Does this hurt the little guy? A little bit, but not nearly as much as a government regulation in the same circumstances. A UL label is voluntary. You can always wholesale your products through outlets other than Wal-Mart. But don't be surprised if no one wants to buy it. I certainly wouldn't buy a power saw without a UL label, would you?
Right now there's this big push to label food differently. People want to know if their tomatoes are organic (as opposed to inorganic), the milk doesn't have hormones, their steak wasn't irradiated, etc. But because calling upon the government is the first resort in this day and age, everyone is looking to the FDA or equivalent to provide these labels.
I wonder how a UL style private system of food testing and labelling would work instead. Currently when I see a label that says "organic" it's meaningless to me. Maybe the state I'm in has incredibly lax standards for organic. Maybe there's no regulations at all, so the producer just slapped their own label on it. Maybe there's really strict regulations that put the small family organic farms out of business. On the other hand, I would trust a food label that says "UL(r) certified organic".
"telemarketing are planning to counterattack consumers with a barrage of spam and junk mail in October"
That's not what the story says. Sheesh, don't the submitters even read the articles? This story isn't about counterattacking anyone.
Here's a quote that summarizes the story: ''"We plan to shift into other communication mediums, and rely more heavily on traditional TV advertising and e-mail marketing," Allstate acting Chief Marketing Officer Todd DeYoung told the paper.''
In other words, they will stop using telemarketing and shift over to snail mail and email. Will that email be spam? Maybe, maybe not, but a spam from Allstate is a heck of a lot better than a phone call from Allstate every time I sit down to a meal.
I don't use Mandrake. Can I just get a fricking HP without any operating system at all? No, I don't want support for something I install, I just want the damn hardware without paying a tax to Microsoft of Mandrake.
Java - install the compatibility VM; use the same binary on all platforms
I'm laughing so hard Dr. Pepper is spewing out my nose! Let me wipe off my screen...
Trying to get Java applications to work on my Solaris workstation is a nightmare. I can't understand it because the company that makes Java makes Solaris. I try to figure out what the problem is, and hidden way deep in the README is this thing that says I need to install a different version than what Sun provided with Solaris. I fix that and it still doesn't work. Looking deeper into the problem, I see that I need a couple of other components that didn't come with the application. After about two hours of searching for the "myleetclasses.jar" and "ubercoolstuff.jar" files, I put them in a directory, fiddle with the CLASSPATH variable, and finally get the program up and running. And then it crashes five seconds later.
you either have to manage binary chaos or you have to start distributing your code as source.
Binary chaos is a pain. A royal pain. So I distribute my code as source instead. Easy. Painless. Users that don't want to compile can grab a prebuilt package from their distro or another repository.
Of course, I'm writing Open Source, and not cheesy shareware. Perhaps that's the true niche for Java and.NET...
"Gee, I don't know if this code I just wrote will work or not. But it takes too much time to compile it under C++. So I'll just use this interpreted weakly typed language and hope it can read my mind to find out what I want it to do."
C and C++ are most certainly viable development languages. Let's see now: Linux, BSD, GNOME, KDE, Apache, Mozilla. Even Perl, Python and Ruby are written in C or C++. But maybe the author is saying those projects aren't viable...
Use the right language for the job. If all you're doing is interfacing to a database, then a scripting language may be the most appropriate. But if you're writing system software, then by all means stick with C and C++ with some shell glue.
Compiled languages are damned convenient to the user. "Here's an executable, just run it", versus, "here's a script, go download compile and install the interpreter first, making sure it's the correct version, set up your environment variables correctly, then run the script."
Do you also advocate that the private sector come up with technological solutions to poverty, rape, vandalism, homelessness, and theft?
Except for the poverty and homelessness, the others in your list are most certainly NOT social problems, they are violence problems. But funny thing is, the "capitalist" market has come up with some innovative technologies to help combat them. Like locks, alarms, firearms, and self defense classes. Of course those won't solve the problems because those are violence problems, where the government has a legitimate and neccesary role.
Poverty and homelessness are social problems, so let's see how the government helps in solving them: taxes, taxes, taxes, rent control, subsidies for homelessness, and taxes. I'm not saying that the market can solve those problems, it can't. I'm just saying that the government does a heck of a lot to make it worse.
I don't use mice. So I use a Logitech 3 button Trackman Marble. They don't make this anymore, so I bought three of them on eBay while I had the chance (one of which had never been used). These things are great. It takes about five minutes to get used to them, but after that nothing else in the world will do.
You rest your hand on it and then never move it again. The curve of the trackman is shallow so that your hand rests on it naturally, instead of like the newer models where it feels like you have to grab it.
And of course, the three buttons! Clicking a scroll wheel is like kissing your sister, it just isn't the same. And of course, scrolling a scrollwheel is for those that never figured out that the scrollbar is an interactive control... With the trackman, the marble is the scrollwheel only better!
I wonder if the Gentoo guys are related to the Dvorak guys. Anytime someone says something good about Redhat or Qwerty they both some crawling out of the woodwork.
Customer: My Mercedes Benz blew up in my driveway, severly injuring my dog.
Daimler-Chrysler: Your honor, the plaintiff failed to excercise due diligence by failing to disassemble the automobile and examine each individual part before using said automobile.
Funny you should mention Siemens. I work for Siemens. They are 100% behind Windows all the way. Non-Windows projects in my division are being phased out or outright halted. The corporate wide IT policy is MS Exchange only, with no webdav support. In my own division we are building an realtime diagnostic embedded system that is based on WinXP solely because Siemens Corporate says it will be WinXP. Anytime a "new" technology is rolled out of Siemens USA IT headquarters in Isselin, it is invariably a Windows only solution. Most company intranet sites are only viewable under IExploder.
If you know of a Siemens division that genuinely does have an interest in Linux, UNIX, BSD, Open Source, etc., please let me know, so that I can see about transferring there. But my current division is strickly a "yes man" to Bill Gates.
You mean like when they increased the amount of regulation on power generation and distribution, but mistakingly called it "deregulation?" The political structure of the industry shifted a bit, but it certainly wasn't deregulated.
Wrong! Bill Gates didn't wake up one morning and decide to set up a monopoly by the afternoon. If that's all it takes I could do it too. On Monday I establish a monopoly, on Tuesday I maintain it illegally, on Wednesday I bank my billions, and on Thursday I apologize to everyone and then retire to Tahiti. I guess your problem is that Bill didn't retire on Thursday, so that you didn't get your turn at the billions on Friday.
You mean if I had a father who could have fixed my speeding tickets, I could have been a billionaire too? My dad actually did help me fix a speeding ticket once by having a private talk with his friend the judge. But I'm still not a billionaire. I'm not a millionaire either. I don't own any businesses. Fat lot of good that ticket fixing did.
Face it, Bill Gates didn't become a billionaire because his daddy was a lawyer or because his mommy knew somebody at IBM or because he didn't have to pay a $100 speeding ticket as a kid.
leaving the world without a reliable and secure OS.
Mac OSX, Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, yada, yada, yada. Oh, did you mean to say "free"? Very well then: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Plan9, Atheos, yada, yada, yada.
Will SCO gun for those systems next? Probably. But so what? You have to live in the present without wasting time about what's going to happen ten years from now.
Funny, in the middle of logging that bug, as I was copying over the url where the source code should have been, suddenly there it was! Bitching on Slashdot sometimes works:-)
Okay, now that the source code is available, feel free to go build it for any of those platforms I listed.
No wait! The source code magically appeared at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla 1.4/src/ mere minutes after I posted my previous reply. Bitching sometimes does work!
Okay, now that you have the source code, you can build it for any Win32, Aqua or X11R6 platform, which include all of those that I listed.
You build it yourself from the source code. It is an Open Source and Free Software project, so the source code has to be there somewhere. Just don't ask me, I can't find it... Sigh. My respect for Mozilla just got flushed down the toilet.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got it way too complicated. Here's how it works.
1) Microsoft saleman visits the medical company.
2) CEO tells engineers to use Windows XP for our hard realtime embedded system controlling an intracardiac catheter.
This is actually not a joke. I'm as serious as a cardiac infarction.
For those of you that don't know, Underwriter's Laboratories is a private company. It is not a government agency. It predates most regulatory agencies. It predates Consumer Reports. It predates Ralph Nader. It's a system that works. Once upon a time calling upon the government to pass a law was an act of LAST resort, not first resort as it is now. That's when UL started.
The UL label doesn't mean that the product cannot possibly cause harm. Rather it means that the product is safe when used in an appropriate fashion according to the directions. Unlike your assertion, the manufacturer cannot slap the UL logo on a product without UL's permission. That's why there's this little (r) next to the letters UL. Does this hurt the little guy? A little bit, but not nearly as much as a government regulation in the same circumstances. A UL label is voluntary. You can always wholesale your products through outlets other than Wal-Mart. But don't be surprised if no one wants to buy it. I certainly wouldn't buy a power saw without a UL label, would you?
Right now there's this big push to label food differently. People want to know if their tomatoes are organic (as opposed to inorganic), the milk doesn't have hormones, their steak wasn't irradiated, etc. But because calling upon the government is the first resort in this day and age, everyone is looking to the FDA or equivalent to provide these labels.
I wonder how a UL style private system of food testing and labelling would work instead. Currently when I see a label that says "organic" it's meaningless to me. Maybe the state I'm in has incredibly lax standards for organic. Maybe there's no regulations at all, so the producer just slapped their own label on it. Maybe there's really strict regulations that put the small family organic farms out of business. On the other hand, I would trust a food label that says "UL(r) certified organic".
You missed my point. I don't want to pay for Mandrake, Windows, or any other operating system. I already have one, so why should I go buy another?
"telemarketing are planning to counterattack consumers with a barrage of spam and junk mail in October"
That's not what the story says. Sheesh, don't the submitters even read the articles? This story isn't about counterattacking anyone.
Here's a quote that summarizes the story: ''"We plan to shift into other communication mediums, and rely more heavily on traditional TV advertising and e-mail marketing," Allstate acting Chief Marketing Officer Todd DeYoung told the paper.''
In other words, they will stop using telemarketing and shift over to snail mail and email. Will that email be spam? Maybe, maybe not, but a spam from Allstate is a heck of a lot better than a phone call from Allstate every time I sit down to a meal.
I don't use Mandrake. Can I just get a fricking HP without any operating system at all? No, I don't want support for something I install, I just want the damn hardware without paying a tax to Microsoft of Mandrake.
I'll have to check into that division, but I still bet they all have Windows desktops just to schedule meetings with Outlook Calendar...
Java - install the compatibility VM; use the same binary on all platforms
.NET...
I'm laughing so hard Dr. Pepper is spewing out my nose! Let me wipe off my screen...
Trying to get Java applications to work on my Solaris workstation is a nightmare. I can't understand it because the company that makes Java makes Solaris. I try to figure out what the problem is, and hidden way deep in the README is this thing that says I need to install a different version than what Sun provided with Solaris. I fix that and it still doesn't work. Looking deeper into the problem, I see that I need a couple of other components that didn't come with the application. After about two hours of searching for the "myleetclasses.jar" and "ubercoolstuff.jar" files, I put them in a directory, fiddle with the CLASSPATH variable, and finally get the program up and running. And then it crashes five seconds later.
you either have to manage binary chaos or you have to start distributing your code as source.
Binary chaos is a pain. A royal pain. So I distribute my code as source instead. Easy. Painless. Users that don't want to compile can grab a prebuilt package from their distro or another repository.
Of course, I'm writing Open Source, and not cheesy shareware. Perhaps that's the true niche for Java and
"Gee, I don't know if this code I just wrote will work or not. But it takes too much time to compile it under C++. So I'll just use this interpreted weakly typed language and hope it can read my mind to find out what I want it to do."
C and C++ are most certainly viable development languages. Let's see now: Linux, BSD, GNOME, KDE, Apache, Mozilla. Even Perl, Python and Ruby are written in C or C++. But maybe the author is saying those projects aren't viable...
Use the right language for the job. If all you're doing is interfacing to a database, then a scripting language may be the most appropriate. But if you're writing system software, then by all means stick with C and C++ with some shell glue.
Compiled languages are damned convenient to the user. "Here's an executable, just run it", versus, "here's a script, go download compile and install the interpreter first, making sure it's the correct version, set up your environment variables correctly, then run the script."
Do you also advocate that the private sector come up with technological solutions to poverty, rape, vandalism, homelessness, and theft?
Except for the poverty and homelessness, the others in your list are most certainly NOT social problems, they are violence problems. But funny thing is, the "capitalist" market has come up with some innovative technologies to help combat them. Like locks, alarms, firearms, and self defense classes. Of course those won't solve the problems because those are violence problems, where the government has a legitimate and neccesary role.
Poverty and homelessness are social problems, so let's see how the government helps in solving them: taxes, taxes, taxes, rent control, subsidies for homelessness, and taxes. I'm not saying that the market can solve those problems, it can't. I'm just saying that the government does a heck of a lot to make it worse.
I don't use mice. So I use a Logitech 3 button Trackman Marble. They don't make this anymore, so I bought three of them on eBay while I had the chance (one of which had never been used). These things are great. It takes about five minutes to get used to them, but after that nothing else in the world will do.
You rest your hand on it and then never move it again. The curve of the trackman is shallow so that your hand rests on it naturally, instead of like the newer models where it feels like you have to grab it.
And of course, the three buttons! Clicking a scroll wheel is like kissing your sister, it just isn't the same. And of course, scrolling a scrollwheel is for those that never figured out that the scrollbar is an interactive control... With the trackman, the marble is the scrollwheel only better!
I wonder if the Gentoo guys are related to the Dvorak guys. Anytime someone says something good about Redhat or Qwerty they both some crawling out of the woodwork.
Customer: My Mercedes Benz blew up in my driveway, severly injuring my dog.
Daimler-Chrysler: Your honor, the plaintiff failed to excercise due diligence by failing to disassemble the automobile and examine each individual part before using said automobile.
Funny you should mention Siemens. I work for Siemens. They are 100% behind Windows all the way. Non-Windows projects in my division are being phased out or outright halted. The corporate wide IT policy is MS Exchange only, with no webdav support. In my own division we are building an realtime diagnostic embedded system that is based on WinXP solely because Siemens Corporate says it will be WinXP. Anytime a "new" technology is rolled out of Siemens USA IT headquarters in Isselin, it is invariably a Windows only solution. Most company intranet sites are only viewable under IExploder.
If you know of a Siemens division that genuinely does have an interest in Linux, UNIX, BSD, Open Source, etc., please let me know, so that I can see about transferring there. But my current division is strickly a "yes man" to Bill Gates.
and power, California!
You mean like when they increased the amount of regulation on power generation and distribution, but mistakingly called it "deregulation?" The political structure of the industry shifted a bit, but it certainly wasn't deregulated.
Wrong! Bill Gates didn't wake up one morning and decide to set up a monopoly by the afternoon. If that's all it takes I could do it too. On Monday I establish a monopoly, on Tuesday I maintain it illegally, on Wednesday I bank my billions, and on Thursday I apologize to everyone and then retire to Tahiti. I guess your problem is that Bill didn't retire on Thursday, so that you didn't get your turn at the billions on Friday.
Completely beside the point. The BSD license still says I don't owe SCO shit.
You mean if I had a father who could have fixed my speeding tickets, I could have been a billionaire too? My dad actually did help me fix a speeding ticket once by having a private talk with his friend the judge. But I'm still not a billionaire. I'm not a millionaire either. I don't own any businesses. Fat lot of good that ticket fixing did.
Face it, Bill Gates didn't become a billionaire because his daddy was a lawyer or because his mommy knew somebody at IBM or because he didn't have to pay a $100 speeding ticket as a kid.
Everytime I ponder why Microsoft has %90+ marketshare and Linux does not, I come across a post like yours and realize why.
leaving the world without a reliable and secure OS.
Mac OSX, Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, yada, yada, yada. Oh, did you mean to say "free"? Very well then: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Plan9, Atheos, yada, yada, yada.
Will SCO gun for those systems next? Probably. But so what? You have to live in the present without wasting time about what's going to happen ten years from now.
Funny, the BSD systems also have a license saying they don't owe SCO anything either.
Funny, in the middle of logging that bug, as I was copying over the url where the source code should have been, suddenly there it was! Bitching on Slashdot sometimes works :-)
Okay, now that the source code is available, feel free to go build it for any of those platforms I listed.
No wait! The source code magically appeared at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla 1.4/src/ mere minutes after I posted my previous reply. Bitching sometimes does work!
Okay, now that you have the source code, you can build it for any Win32, Aqua or X11R6 platform, which include all of those that I listed.
Okay, the source code is there now. It took them awhile, but they finally got their act together.
You build it yourself from the source code. It is an Open Source and Free Software project, so the source code has to be there somewhere. Just don't ask me, I can't find it... Sigh. My respect for Mozilla just got flushed down the toilet.