As far as IBM is concerned, money talks. If you are planning a 100,000 seat Debian deployment and want IBM tools, contact IBM sales and tell them. If enough people ask, maybe Debian will become a supported platform.
Plenty of us inside IBM would like to see some free Linux distributions supported, but the company makes its decisions based on commercial pressures, not ideology, and right now not enough people want to run their enterprise on Debian, Gentoo or any other free (beer) Linux.
The statistic you cite, assuming it's true, doesn't actually prove that US healthcare is any better, for two reasons.
Firstly, it's entirely plausible that UK doctors are more willing to carry out risky procedures than litigation-fearing US doctors, especially in marginal situations. So you'd need to control for that in the study.
Secondly, US healthcare has a skewed population because 60% of people have no healthcare coverage. That instantly removes a chunk of the poorest people from the pool of patients, and of course poor people are more likely to die of complications following treatment. The UK health service has the statistical disadvantage of being expected to treat even people who can't afford to heat their homes and buy nutritious food.
The community should be more active in the design phase of video games. It should make for a better game with more comments from the public about how the game should look and play.
Like it does with movies, you mean?
Hollywood movies are extensively tested on the general public, and carefully tweaked based on their feedback. I guess we all love the intelligent plots and inventive movies that result, huh?
Design-by-marketing has costs as well as benefits. In general, it will turn bad products into palatable ones... but it also turns really good products into palatable ones. Most really good art is polarizing; for example, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", half the audience came out of the previews and said "That was the best movie I've ever seen", the other half came out and said "That was the worst movie I've ever seen". If you apply the public feedback process, you get something which pleases more people, but the result is the infamous "Love Conquers All" edit of "Brazil".
Personally, I think we have enough Hollywood-style "Well, it was OK I guess" video games. What we need is more people taking risks, more people producing truly innovative and unique games like "Rez", "Ico", "Sentinel", and so on. Of course, I think that because those are the games I like to play. If you like playing "Generic Sports Game 200x" or "Movie Tie In FPS", you will indeed prefer the results of designers taking more notice of user feedback.
I lived in the UK up until 1997, and had the pleasure of experiencing UK National Health Service care in 1996, and the same treatment supplied by the USA's #1-rated HMO (Harvard Pilgrim) in 1997.
My medical needs included diagnosis and treatment of a kidney stone (i.e. typical non-surgical stuff) plus treatment for common chronic conditions like allergies.
Guess what? In my personal informed experience, the best US HMO healthcare is about as good as the UK's state-funded National Health Service. Wait times are about the same, quality of care is about the same. Yes, I had to wait weeks or even months for treatment in the US.
And remember, that was the #1 rated HMO in the country that year. I hate to think what kind of medical care you get if you live in rural Alabama.
Of course, the medical industry loves the fat profits it soaks out of the US consumer, and has lots of money to pay for the dissemination of propaganda to try and convince US consumers that those poor European countries with their universal healthcare systems are much worse off than the lucky USA. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they paid people to post propaganda to the Internet.
Here's your free clue for the day: Try talking to people who actually have experience of both US healthcare and state-funded European healthcare. Don't just believe what you read in the corporate media or hear on FOX News.
Why hasn't anyone developed a system that, from the End-user perspective, works similarly to MSI installations (which work very well). Point, click, next next next. In principal, DEBS/RPMs work similarly to MSIs, but the installation isn't as obvious a procedure to end-users.
They have. In Mandrake Linux you download the RPM, double-click it, and it asks you to enter the root password and leads you through the install. That's actually better than MSI, which craps out if you're not already the administrator.
Perhaps the reason you get flamed is that it has been clearly demonstrated that the UNIX filesystem layout need not be a problem for end users--just look at Mac OS X.
What's retarded is fancy window managers that make the entire underlying UNIX filesystem layout visible to end users by default. If you're going to build a desktop abstraction, do the whole job.
The important thing about the UNIX filesystem layout is that, unlike that of Windows, it is technically sound. You can add user friendliness to a technically sound design later on.
I'm an IBM web developer, and I know for a fact that the internal web standards mandate XHTML 1.0, which is based on XML 1.0. The standards also mandate Mozilla compatibility and Dublin Core metadata. Seems forward-thinking enough to me, given that XHTML 2.0 isn't a standard yet and isn't implemented by any browser, and XML 1.1 was only approved last week. Sheesh.
Sure, there's lots of bureaucracy and politics in some parts of IBM, but the company's not generally a slouch when it comes to technical standards.
First off, there is no such thing as "the White race". In fact, the idea of "race" as commonly assigned to humans has no scientific or biological validity whatsoever.
That, combined with the fact that you see fit to capitalize "White" but not the names of countries, and the fact that you choose to post as an anonymous coward, strongly suggests that you're a piece of Neo-Nazi trailer trash. Perhaps next time you might choose to give your comments at least a veneer of respectability.
You know, the stuff about Edwin Black would be a lot more convincing if it didn't come a David Irving web site.
For those who don't know, David Irving is a prominent Holocaust denier. After an extensive libel trial it was officially decided in court that he is also a racist and anti-Semite, and he was denied permission to appeal the case.
Amusingly, it was reported in the UK press that at one point in the trial Irving absent-mindedly addressed the judge as "mein Fuhrer"...
Yup, I agree. I just bought a Gamecube and Metroid Prime and put the PlayStation 2 away for a while. The first time I walked through a patch of ferns at the edge of a misty lake, and watched the condensation from the waterfall appear on my helmet visor, I was amazed. No slowdown glitches, no aliasing problems... The graphics are fantastic, like Riven or Myst III: Exile, except all in true 3D with real time lighting. Really, let's be reasonable, what more do you need?
The cube is a lovely piece of hardware too. Ultra-compact and almost totally silent, unlike the jet engine roar of the PS2. The controllers are taking a little getting used to, but I'm starting to like them.
So yeah, I'd like to see Nintendo push all of its effort into more games, better games, a wider range of games. Forget the hardware for a couple of years, it's good enough.
Sony, on the other hand--I'd like to see them make a small, silent PS2...
I don't give a flying fuck about software support, or I wouldn't be buying from Dell in the first place. I just want them to sell me a laptop without forcing me to buy Windows.
I'm still looking for the elusive ultraportable with 10" screen and Linux...
You say "exhilerating", I say "stressful". Well, stress kills, and some of us don't have the kind of personality that can survive an entrepreneurial career.
Having been physically ill with stress, I know it's not something I want to repeat.
Basically IMHO the spammers are just a symptom of the complete lack of accountability or responsibility in this industry. The whole "if you can make a buck with snake oil, lies and deceit, go for it" mentality. Spammers are just the brute force/low IQ version of what everyone else is doing.
Until we stand up and say "no more!" to the whole snake oil deal, it will only get worse.
Nice sermon, but I notice you're still running Windows software from those master sellers of crap, lies and snake-oil in Redmond, 'cause the game you mention is Windows only.
I guess it's like "Bob" Dobbs said: "I don't practice what I preach, because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to."
Whitelists will only work so long as hardly anybody uses them. As soon as they become commonplace and people start responding to whitelist challenge messages, spammers can simply phrase their spam to look like a whitelist challenge, with a URL redirect to their ad.
The other kind of whitelist challenge, that relies on an e-mail reply, would also serve spammers as an excellent way to verify e-mail addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as IBM is concerned, money talks. If you are planning a 100,000 seat Debian deployment and want IBM tools, contact IBM sales and tell them. If enough people ask, maybe Debian will become a supported platform.
Plenty of us inside IBM would like to see some free Linux distributions supported, but the company makes its decisions based on commercial pressures, not ideology, and right now not enough people want to run their enterprise on Debian, Gentoo or any other free (beer) Linux.
Now, can we please have the 3E core rules available as an e-book, pretty please?
The statistic you cite, assuming it's true, doesn't actually prove that US healthcare is any better, for two reasons.
Firstly, it's entirely plausible that UK doctors are more willing to carry out risky procedures than litigation-fearing US doctors, especially in marginal situations. So you'd need to control for that in the study.
Secondly, US healthcare has a skewed population because 60% of people have no healthcare coverage. That instantly removes a chunk of the poorest people from the pool of patients, and of course poor people are more likely to die of complications following treatment. The UK health service has the statistical disadvantage of being expected to treat even people who can't afford to heat their homes and buy nutritious food.
Yeah, well... That just makes him even more wrong :-)
As far as the effect on package managers, there's nothing wrong with the UNIX directory structure.
Like it does with movies, you mean?
Hollywood movies are extensively tested on the general public, and carefully tweaked based on their feedback. I guess we all love the intelligent plots and inventive movies that result, huh?
Design-by-marketing has costs as well as benefits. In general, it will turn bad products into palatable ones... but it also turns really good products into palatable ones. Most really good art is polarizing; for example, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", half the audience came out of the previews and said "That was the best movie I've ever seen", the other half came out and said "That was the worst movie I've ever seen". If you apply the public feedback process, you get something which pleases more people, but the result is the infamous "Love Conquers All" edit of "Brazil".
Personally, I think we have enough Hollywood-style "Well, it was OK I guess" video games. What we need is more people taking risks, more people producing truly innovative and unique games like "Rez", "Ico", "Sentinel", and so on. Of course, I think that because those are the games I like to play. If you like playing "Generic Sports Game 200x" or "Movie Tie In FPS", you will indeed prefer the results of designers taking more notice of user feedback.
OK, Mr Republican Propaganda Machine, I'll bite.
I lived in the UK up until 1997, and had the pleasure of experiencing UK National Health Service care in 1996, and the same treatment supplied by the USA's #1-rated HMO (Harvard Pilgrim) in 1997.
My medical needs included diagnosis and treatment of a kidney stone (i.e. typical non-surgical stuff) plus treatment for common chronic conditions like allergies.
Guess what? In my personal informed experience, the best US HMO healthcare is about as good as the UK's state-funded National Health Service. Wait times are about the same, quality of care is about the same. Yes, I had to wait weeks or even months for treatment in the US.
And remember, that was the #1 rated HMO in the country that year. I hate to think what kind of medical care you get if you live in rural Alabama.
Of course, the medical industry loves the fat profits it soaks out of the US consumer, and has lots of money to pay for the dissemination of propaganda to try and convince US consumers that those poor European countries with their universal healthcare systems are much worse off than the lucky USA. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they paid people to post propaganda to the Internet.
Here's your free clue for the day: Try talking to people who actually have experience of both US healthcare and state-funded European healthcare. Don't just believe what you read in the corporate media or hear on FOX News.
They have. In Mandrake Linux you download the RPM, double-click it, and it asks you to enter the root password and leads you through the install. That's actually better than MSI, which craps out if you're not already the administrator.
Yes, but think of all the wonderful square, triangular and pentagonal wheels we've gotten as a result of those efforts.
Perhaps the reason you get flamed is that it has been clearly demonstrated that the UNIX filesystem layout need not be a problem for end users--just look at Mac OS X.
What's retarded is fancy window managers that make the entire underlying UNIX filesystem layout visible to end users by default. If you're going to build a desktop abstraction, do the whole job.
The important thing about the UNIX filesystem layout is that, unlike that of Windows, it is technically sound. You can add user friendliness to a technically sound design later on.
I'm an IBM web developer, and I know for a fact that the internal web standards mandate XHTML 1.0, which is based on XML 1.0. The standards also mandate Mozilla compatibility and Dublin Core metadata. Seems forward-thinking enough to me, given that XHTML 2.0 isn't a standard yet and isn't implemented by any browser, and XML 1.1 was only approved last week. Sheesh.
Sure, there's lots of bureaucracy and politics in some parts of IBM, but the company's not generally a slouch when it comes to technical standards.
First off, there is no such thing as "the White race". In fact, the idea of "race" as commonly assigned to humans has no scientific or biological validity whatsoever.
That, combined with the fact that you see fit to capitalize "White" but not the names of countries, and the fact that you choose to post as an anonymous coward, strongly suggests that you're a piece of Neo-Nazi trailer trash. Perhaps next time you might choose to give your comments at least a veneer of respectability.
You know, the stuff about Edwin Black would be a lot more convincing if it didn't come a David Irving web site.
For those who don't know, David Irving is a prominent Holocaust denier. After an extensive libel trial it was officially decided in court that he is also a racist and anti-Semite, and he was denied permission to appeal the case.
Amusingly, it was reported in the UK press that at one point in the trial Irving absent-mindedly addressed the judge as "mein Fuhrer"...
I couldn't care less if Lucas finally releases Star Wars on DVD.
What I want to see is THX-1138 on DVD. His one great movie.
Yup, I agree. I just bought a Gamecube and Metroid Prime and put the PlayStation 2 away for a while. The first time I walked through a patch of ferns at the edge of a misty lake, and watched the condensation from the waterfall appear on my helmet visor, I was amazed. No slowdown glitches, no aliasing problems... The graphics are fantastic, like Riven or Myst III: Exile, except all in true 3D with real time lighting. Really, let's be reasonable, what more do you need?
The cube is a lovely piece of hardware too. Ultra-compact and almost totally silent, unlike the jet engine roar of the PS2. The controllers are taking a little getting used to, but I'm starting to like them.
So yeah, I'd like to see Nintendo push all of its effort into more games, better games, a wider range of games. Forget the hardware for a couple of years, it's good enough.
Sony, on the other hand--I'd like to see them make a small, silent PS2...
Yeah, but they might want to run Gentoo.
Damn right. Screw Microsoft, even if I wanted to play Halo (which I don't without cooperative mode), I wouldn't buy it.
I don't give a flying fuck about software support, or I wouldn't be buying from Dell in the first place. I just want them to sell me a laptop without forcing me to buy Windows.
I'm still looking for the elusive ultraportable with 10" screen and Linux...
You say "exhilerating", I say "stressful". Well, stress kills, and some of us don't have the kind of personality that can survive an entrepreneurial career.
Having been physically ill with stress, I know it's not something I want to repeat.
I can't wait until GPS technology is small enough and cheap enough to put inside the camera. It'd be great for looking at holiday photos...
"Where the hell was that?"
"Lemme check the map... Oh, that was St Jude's Cathedral."
They certainly could have had one more paying subscriber if it hadn't been Windows-only: me.
I see that they've now started the Mac version of Uru. Bittersweet news.
Show me a dictionary that lists "virii".
And it's not acceptable on linguistic grounds either.
I'll stop being an ass when you do.
Well, if you have game consoles, I have to wonder what non-gaming stuff you need to do that couldn't be done with Mac OS X or Linux.
Nice sermon, but I notice you're still running Windows software from those master sellers of crap, lies and snake-oil in Redmond, 'cause the game you mention is Windows only.
I guess it's like "Bob" Dobbs said: "I don't practice what I preach, because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to."
Whitelists will only work so long as hardly anybody uses them. As soon as they become commonplace and people start responding to whitelist challenge messages, spammers can simply phrase their spam to look like a whitelist challenge, with a URL redirect to their ad.
The other kind of whitelist challenge, that relies on an e-mail reply, would also serve spammers as an excellent way to verify e-mail addresses.
Mis-spelling "viruses" is also a byproduct of stupidity.