If someone digs up some dirt on Chick-Fil-A's CEO and finds he used to do gay porn movies, he's going to get fired because that makes the company look bad to its customers (conservative Christians).
Here's another example: the CEO of Chick-Fil-A has a change of heart and decides to become a Satanist, and makes public statements to this effect. Should Chick-Fil-A be allowed to fire him? Of course; they're an openly Christian company, and that CEO reflects poorly on that.
It doesn't matter what you think is OK or not. The only thing that matters is what the Board of Directors of a company thinks is OK; if the CEO is not aligned with that, then the BoD has every right to terminate him. It's right there in his employment contract; every CEO has a contract which says the company has the right to terminate him if they don't like the job he's doing or they don't think he's representing their company well. Companies which espouse progressive ideals have every right to fire CEOs who publicly hold non-progressive views. Similarly, companies which espouse conservative Christian ideals have every right to fire CEOs who don't uphold their values (ones who aren't also Christian, or ones who get caught in affairs and things like that).
If you're trying to write software which bypasses the browser and does HTTPS directly, using Wireshark is extremely useful for debugging, and not easily replaced any other way.
You're a moron. Eich didn't lose his freedom of expression; he can express himself as much as he wants, but Mozilla corporation is not required to allow him to use their name as a podium for his speech.
As for a "usable UI", the UI hasn't changed significantly, you idiot. Press "Alt" and the menu is right there. BFD.
The criticism of this new HTTPS fiasco is warranted IMO, but you look like a blithering moron by spouting all that other crap.
Then there was the whole Eich debacle. Regardless of your stance, it's pretty disgusting that somebody had to lose his job merely because of his beliefs regarding same-sex marriages.
Bullshit.
When you're the CEO of a company, your personal beliefs are no longer your own; anything you do in public reflects on that company. You are in effect the company's face and public image. So if the company's board of directors doesn't like the image you're conveying of the company, they are entirely within their rights to fire you and hire someone else.
Simpletons like you don't seem to understand that being a CEO is not a normal job where you come to work, punch a time clock, do what you're told, and collect a paycheck and go home to live your private life. When you're CEO, you have no private life. Just look at Steve Jobs when he was alive: he was well-known, famous, he was Apple. Everything he did represented that company. Not only does the CEO direct the company and make all the big decisions, he also serves as the public face of the company.
Granted, Mozilla isn't as big or prominent a company as Apple Computer, but it's still fairly well-known, as countless people do use their browser (or have in the past). If they thought that Eich was making their company look bad, they had a very good reason to replace him.
Are you going to try to argue that if Coca-Cola hires some celebrity to do some ads for them, and that celebrity gets caught on camera spouting a bunch of racist stuff like Mel Gibson, that they shouldn't fire him, and that they should continue showing ads showing this now-controversial personality and thus completely ruin their public image?
Lots of people don't buy new music, and it's not because they're boycotting an "evil industry", it's because all the new music sucks.
I don't go to movies or subscribe to cable
"Cord cutting" is skyrocketing, and again it's not because people are intentionally boycotting, it's because cable TV is just commercial-packed bullshit programming like Honey Boo Boo and people have lost interest, as they would rather spend their free time doing or seeing things on the internet. It's not just geeks, it's everyone.
No, it really isn't. The Tesla can already go over 200 miles per charge. Commuters don't need that much range.
The key thing, which most people are just too fucking stupid to understand (including most Slashdotters I've noticed, in fact it seems to me that Slashdotters are far less able to understand this than the general public), is that you don't need an electric car to do everything a gas car does to make it viable. A Prius can't tow a boat, but that doesn't stop countless people from buying them and driving them daily. It's the same with electric cars; they're already perfectly viable as commuter vehicles. No, they're not great for road trips; that's why you use your other car for the road trip.
Most families these days have multiple vehicles, so you have one electric car, and one gas-powered car. This isn't a foreign concept to countless married couples, where the husband and wife both have a car: the wife's car is nearly brand-new and expensive, while the husband's car is a 20-year-old piece of shit beater car. The wife uses her fancy car to get her nails done and go to the spa, while the husband drives his shitbox to work every day so he can afford the payments for the wife's car. So, now, the husband can get an EV for his daily commute and they can use the wife's Mercedes for road trips. The main problem with this, of course, is that EVs are still relatively expensive, and since the wife insists on spending most of the car budget on her car and not one red cent on the husband's car even though he spends so much time in it, there's no money for a $30K Chevy Spark or Nissan Leaf or similar low-end EV. But as EVs become more commonplace and older used ones become available, this will change, and husbands will be driving 10-year-old beat-up Leafs to work, and toiling in the garage at night to replace dead cells in their battery packs.
You would need an impractically sized cable to carry the voltage required to "fast charge" a plane battery, and that would still be much slower than using a liquid fuel.
Wrong. With planes, it'd be trivial to just swap out batteries at the airport. Aircraft aren't like cars owned by individuals. With aircraft, they're owned by large companies like Southwest or Delta, who have whole wings or even concourses, plus giant hangars, at every airport they have a presence at. If they actually had batteries sufficient for this task, they'd simply swap them out at each stop, just like they refuel and swap out the baggage right now.
They're already talking about doing exactly this with cars, but with cars there's some problems with the idea. Battery packs aren't fungible like fuel; an old one doesn't work as well as a new one, they can develop problems and need repairs (like replacing individual cells), so if you swap out your brand-new $20K pack for a worn-out old one, you're in effect losing a lot of money. So they're coming up with ideas like leasing the pack when you get a swapped one, and later returning for your charged-up old pack which you own, but that's obviously problematic.
All this goes away with aircraft, since the airline company and the company swapping packs at the airport are one in the same. When a Delta plane lands and docks at the jetway, Delta personnel will swap out the pack for another Delta-owned pack. Delta will manage all its own battery packs, so issues of who owns which pack and who's responsible if one develops problems all go away.
Obviously, this discussion is academic since we certainly don't have batteries capable of storing the amount of energy needed for an electric airplane, but if some giant breakthrough in battery technology is made next year and all of a sudden, electric airplanes are totally feasible and completely capable of replacing modern jet-fuel-powered aircraft, the recharge time will NOT be a problem; they'll just swap batteries the way people do now for rechargeable power tools.
This won't help with your crappy host OS, but the beauty of running a VM is that it's trivial to save the state, then shut it down. You don't need to close any applications at all; they'll be right where you left them when you restore the state.
But the problem is you have to tell users "no, you don't want to play that game", "no, you don't want to use the software that came with your camera", "no, you can't use that VPN software, please spend three years learning unix shell and networking".
You have to tell Mac users the exact same things. MacOSX doesn't play Windows games or run shitty bundled camera software. Yet Apple seems to have no problem profiting greatly off Macbook sales. And why on earth would you want to run bundled software anyway? You can just plug your camera's flash card into your PC and copy the images with your file manager, and then use the image editor of your choice to modify them if desired. I'm sure Macs work the same: plug in a card and some program included in OSX pops up for you. It's only Windows where people have a nasty habit of using some horrible, shitty, buggy bundled software or device driver for every little device they use.
BTW, VPN on Linux is easy. On KDE, I just use the network manager to import the OpenVPN profile files that PIA gives me. Click, click, click, done.
This article is almost two years old now, so it's quite out-of-date. And Android still is not under any real control by Google; Google has so little control over Android that the large majority of Android devices are running hopelessly out-of-date versions of the OS, because the device makers don't give a shit about security updates and customers don't know better and don't have much choice (they're just told to buy a new phone).
Meanwhile, we have alternatives popping up, such as CyanogenMod (and CyanogenOS), FirefoxOS, etc.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the next couple years.
The part that's really interesting is that usually the same people complaining about the disparities show little awareness of the sociocultural forces involved, attributing it completely to bigotry
Exactly.
I do find it really interesting that Indians and Chinese--two much more traditional societies than ours--have far higher numbers of women in engineering than our own western societies. However, there's some big differences I see between these societies: 1) eastern societies don't have Disney teaching little girls that they're all princesses. However, I don't think Disney is such a big deal in European culture either, and it seems they have the same problem with gender disparity in engineering and computing (someone correct me if I'm wrong). 2) engineering is seen as very prestigious in eastern societies, much more so than in western ones. Here in the US, medicine, law, finance, and business (including management) are seen as prestigious; being an employee engineer is not. So I do, for instance, see lots of very smart women in the medical field. There's tons of female doctors these days. My primary care physician is female (which is nice when I need a full-body physical; I'd much rather drop my shorts in front of a woman than a dude), and I just had a minor surgical procedure done by a woman. In fact, I've had a bunch of surgical procedures (such as the root canal I had to have done a while ago) done by women over the years, now that I think about it, many more than by men. So it seems to me the smart women are skipping engineering and going into other professions. 3) engineering pay isn't that great compared to other professions, or at least it isn't commonly thought to pay that much. It's also subject to foreign competition with outsourcing and also H1B visas. With medicine, doctors have to get a license and pass licensing boards locally. There's no such restrictions with engineering; anyone can just make up BS on a resume and get an engineering job. Also, doctors aren't subject to mass layoffs, while engineers go through them commonly these days. I don't know how this compares to eastern societies, but it seems to me that the way companies operate in Asia is entirely different, and not subject to the shortsightedness (worrying only about the next quarter's financials) common to American corporations.
Tell me, what is the #1 most popular OS in the world right now? Most likely, it's Android. Where does Android get its kernel? Linux, an OSS project. Everyone and his brother has an Android phone now (iOS usage has gone down in recent years, thanks to Apple being too expensive and also screwing up a lot, such as with the Apple Maps fiasco), and there's lots of Android tablets out there. In addition to that, countless devices have embedded Linux (which means a full Linux OS and GNU ecosystem, not just the kernel) running on them: car infotainment systems and checkout lane payment terminals as two examples off the top of my head.
Also, what browsers do people use? No one uses MSIE any more except morons and unfortunately corporate drones who have no choice. Everyone else uses Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Firefox is a highly successful OSS project, while the other two both use Webkit rendering engines, which come from KHTML, a component of the KDE project.
And finally, what do most webservers in the world use? (Don't count all the domains parked with MS IIS since MS is paying sites to use IIS in those cases just so they can inflate their figures.) Countless small websites for innumerable small businesses run on Linux, plus lots of large ones too.
But linux use on the desktop is growing?... I mean if we want to include android it's one of the most popular OSes in the world.
Android is not Linux, nor is Android a desktop OS of any kind. Yes, Android probably is one of the most popular OSes in the world, but we're talking about Linux on the desktop here, which is an entirely different animal. The kernel is the only thing they have in common.
It is hard to say whether it's growing or not. You say it's growing, hairyfeet says it's shrinking, who's right? What I do know is true is that desktop PC sales are shrinking, thanks to mobile devices and to people hanging onto their hardware longer.
For the average PC user the Linux desktop is a crappy experience
Bullshit. The average PC user has never even seen a Linux desktop let alone tried one. The average PC user hasn't even ever used MacOS. All they have ever seen or know is Windows.
For people that try it, Linux works great on the desktop: no viruses, no screwing around with antivirus software, no forced reboots due to updates, I could go on and on.
use a desktop that is clearly inferior to the alternatives.
How much is MS paying you for your troll posts anyway?
Its because of guys like you that Linux usage has dropped soooo damned low its now listed as "other"
Wrong. While you're correct about your criticism of his behavior (complaining about specific problems is absolutely justified; if my car nearly got me killed because of poor design or manufacturing, I'd complain about that loudly too), that isn't why Linux usage is low. Linux usage was never high to begin with, and if it has dropped (which is probably nearly impossible to determine, since Linux users don't buy their computers pre-loaded with Linux), it's likely because of the rise of tablets. Anyway, the real reason Linux usage is so low is because of inertia and marketing. Go into any Best Buy and the computers all have Windows and MacOS, so that's what people use.
So if I drive a Ford and it catches on fire when someone rear-ends me at low speed and I narrowly escape burning alive, all because of a faulty design, it's "childish" for me to continue holding a grudge against Ford?
(Note: I haven't had any such problems with Ubuntu (nor have I ever used mainline Ubuntu, only derivatives), so note I'm just making a point here, not bashing Ubuntu for any reliability problems.)
Paying tuition does not mean a University or college never prevents anyone from failing out of school.
Apparently, it does, as this case proves.
Full paying students fail out of school quite frequently and are not "bailed out" in an effort to create future alumni.
Apples and oranges. Those are individuals, this is an entire class.
This is no different than the Big Bailout of 2008. If it were just one bank, the government would have let them go bankrupt (and in fact, IIRC there were one or two banks that did die out). But because it was so many banks, the government bailed them out.
Yes, universities frequently allow individual students to fail out; it's expected, and par for the course. They wouldn't be respected institutions if they just passed everyone; the whole idea is to "weed out" poor students so that only the good ones graduate. But this case is about an entire class failing at once. They won't allow that; it's too much of a disruption to their scheduling and income stream. They're set up to have a small number of students fail out and either leave the school, or retake the class, or switch majors. But a whole class means now that many students don't have the prerequisite needed to proceed to some other classes, which hugely affects their class scheduling. It's too much of a disruption to the institution's operation, just like having too many big banks fail at once is too much of a disruption to the economy, so they get a bail-out.
The exact same thing has happened here: these students pay lots of money in tuition to this school (plus it's hoped they'll become generous alumni later), so the school bails them out for failing miserably in this class.
If this were a free public school (as in no tuition or other costs for students, just a free education), this wouldn't be happening.
There's nothing wrong with being inclusive, and in fact, any elements in STEM groups which are actively keeping women out or making things hard for them due to sexism should be addressed and punished if necessary. I really wish there were more smart engineering women out there; I would really prefer to work in a 50/50 environment with both male and female engineers (hell, I'd be happier working in an all-female-engineering workplace, with me as either the only or one of a few men; I'd probably have a much better sex life if nothing else, and have an easy time finding a really good marriage partner; lots of people meet their spouses at work, after all).
The problem is that very, very few women seem to have any interest in the field, and those that do seem to all come from an Asian background. (Not that there's anything wrong with Asians, it shows there's something wrong with westerners actually.) You just can't make people interested in something they're not interested in.
From what I can tell, this lack of interest comes from the way little girls are raised in our society; parents and schools just don't encourage them in these things, and traditionally these things are seen as "geeky" and derided by everyone. Boys want to be jocks and girls want to be cheerleaders early on. So the boys who are quiet and smart and not-jocks go into computers and engineering, while the girls who are smart go into something like medicine.
Exactly, and there's more to it than that. Firethorn adds that the same can be said for most engineering work. But all this CS and engineering work is what gives us the technology to solve problems. Without engineering, we wouldn't have planes to fly to Africa to do NGO work, we wouldn't have vehicles to transport workers to where they're needed, we wouldn't be able to build bridges or dig wells or filter water. We wouldn't have computers to help coordinate all that work.
People deride a lot of computing work, but much it has some value to making the world better. Look at Google Maps and other GPS navigators; how much fuel has been saved by people using these services/devices, and being able to drive directly to their destination in the most efficient manner possible, rather than taking wrong turns, taking slower/longer routes, stopping to ask for directions, getting lost, etc? Multiply that by 100 million cars in the US, and the numbers are staggering.
What's blindingly obvious is that both sides are horrible. I was only saying that I could see why the Catholics wanted to prevent commoners from doing their own interpretation, because it leads directly to fundamentalism; I never said the Catholics were models of virtue themselves.
The best answer is to not have any "holy books" at all, because as soon as you believe something like that, you get all kinds of twisted logic and justifications for stupid and horrible things. ("It says XYZ here, and we can't question that, so it follows from that that we need to do ABC in this situation.")
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It doesn't matter.
If someone digs up some dirt on Chick-Fil-A's CEO and finds he used to do gay porn movies, he's going to get fired because that makes the company look bad to its customers (conservative Christians).
This is no different.
You're being idiotic.
Here's another example: the CEO of Chick-Fil-A has a change of heart and decides to become a Satanist, and makes public statements to this effect. Should Chick-Fil-A be allowed to fire him? Of course; they're an openly Christian company, and that CEO reflects poorly on that.
It doesn't matter what you think is OK or not. The only thing that matters is what the Board of Directors of a company thinks is OK; if the CEO is not aligned with that, then the BoD has every right to terminate him. It's right there in his employment contract; every CEO has a contract which says the company has the right to terminate him if they don't like the job he's doing or they don't think he's representing their company well. Companies which espouse progressive ideals have every right to fire CEOs who publicly hold non-progressive views. Similarly, companies which espouse conservative Christian ideals have every right to fire CEOs who don't uphold their values (ones who aren't also Christian, or ones who get caught in affairs and things like that).
If you're trying to write software which bypasses the browser and does HTTPS directly, using Wireshark is extremely useful for debugging, and not easily replaced any other way.
You're a moron. Eich didn't lose his freedom of expression; he can express himself as much as he wants, but Mozilla corporation is not required to allow him to use their name as a podium for his speech.
As for a "usable UI", the UI hasn't changed significantly, you idiot. Press "Alt" and the menu is right there. BFD.
The criticism of this new HTTPS fiasco is warranted IMO, but you look like a blithering moron by spouting all that other crap.
Then there was the whole Eich debacle. Regardless of your stance, it's pretty disgusting that somebody had to lose his job merely because of his beliefs regarding same-sex marriages.
Bullshit.
When you're the CEO of a company, your personal beliefs are no longer your own; anything you do in public reflects on that company. You are in effect the company's face and public image. So if the company's board of directors doesn't like the image you're conveying of the company, they are entirely within their rights to fire you and hire someone else.
Simpletons like you don't seem to understand that being a CEO is not a normal job where you come to work, punch a time clock, do what you're told, and collect a paycheck and go home to live your private life. When you're CEO, you have no private life. Just look at Steve Jobs when he was alive: he was well-known, famous, he was Apple. Everything he did represented that company. Not only does the CEO direct the company and make all the big decisions, he also serves as the public face of the company.
Granted, Mozilla isn't as big or prominent a company as Apple Computer, but it's still fairly well-known, as countless people do use their browser (or have in the past). If they thought that Eich was making their company look bad, they had a very good reason to replace him.
Are you going to try to argue that if Coca-Cola hires some celebrity to do some ads for them, and that celebrity gets caught on camera spouting a bunch of racist stuff like Mel Gibson, that they shouldn't fire him, and that they should continue showing ads showing this now-controversial personality and thus completely ruin their public image?
I don't buy new music or go to concerts
Lots of people don't buy new music, and it's not because they're boycotting an "evil industry", it's because all the new music sucks.
I don't go to movies or subscribe to cable
"Cord cutting" is skyrocketing, and again it's not because people are intentionally boycotting, it's because cable TV is just commercial-packed bullshit programming like Honey Boo Boo and people have lost interest, as they would rather spend their free time doing or seeing things on the internet. It's not just geeks, it's everyone.
It's not that hard. You can save up a good amount of money with a job like that when you live with your parents and they pay for all your food.
No, it really isn't. The Tesla can already go over 200 miles per charge. Commuters don't need that much range.
The key thing, which most people are just too fucking stupid to understand (including most Slashdotters I've noticed, in fact it seems to me that Slashdotters are far less able to understand this than the general public), is that you don't need an electric car to do everything a gas car does to make it viable. A Prius can't tow a boat, but that doesn't stop countless people from buying them and driving them daily. It's the same with electric cars; they're already perfectly viable as commuter vehicles. No, they're not great for road trips; that's why you use your other car for the road trip.
Most families these days have multiple vehicles, so you have one electric car, and one gas-powered car. This isn't a foreign concept to countless married couples, where the husband and wife both have a car: the wife's car is nearly brand-new and expensive, while the husband's car is a 20-year-old piece of shit beater car. The wife uses her fancy car to get her nails done and go to the spa, while the husband drives his shitbox to work every day so he can afford the payments for the wife's car. So, now, the husband can get an EV for his daily commute and they can use the wife's Mercedes for road trips. The main problem with this, of course, is that EVs are still relatively expensive, and since the wife insists on spending most of the car budget on her car and not one red cent on the husband's car even though he spends so much time in it, there's no money for a $30K Chevy Spark or Nissan Leaf or similar low-end EV. But as EVs become more commonplace and older used ones become available, this will change, and husbands will be driving 10-year-old beat-up Leafs to work, and toiling in the garage at night to replace dead cells in their battery packs.
You would need an impractically sized cable to carry the voltage required to "fast charge" a plane battery, and that would still be much slower than using a liquid fuel.
Wrong. With planes, it'd be trivial to just swap out batteries at the airport. Aircraft aren't like cars owned by individuals. With aircraft, they're owned by large companies like Southwest or Delta, who have whole wings or even concourses, plus giant hangars, at every airport they have a presence at. If they actually had batteries sufficient for this task, they'd simply swap them out at each stop, just like they refuel and swap out the baggage right now.
They're already talking about doing exactly this with cars, but with cars there's some problems with the idea. Battery packs aren't fungible like fuel; an old one doesn't work as well as a new one, they can develop problems and need repairs (like replacing individual cells), so if you swap out your brand-new $20K pack for a worn-out old one, you're in effect losing a lot of money. So they're coming up with ideas like leasing the pack when you get a swapped one, and later returning for your charged-up old pack which you own, but that's obviously problematic.
All this goes away with aircraft, since the airline company and the company swapping packs at the airport are one in the same. When a Delta plane lands and docks at the jetway, Delta personnel will swap out the pack for another Delta-owned pack. Delta will manage all its own battery packs, so issues of who owns which pack and who's responsible if one develops problems all go away.
Obviously, this discussion is academic since we certainly don't have batteries capable of storing the amount of energy needed for an electric airplane, but if some giant breakthrough in battery technology is made next year and all of a sudden, electric airplanes are totally feasible and completely capable of replacing modern jet-fuel-powered aircraft, the recharge time will NOT be a problem; they'll just swap batteries the way people do now for rechargeable power tools.
This won't help with your crappy host OS, but the beauty of running a VM is that it's trivial to save the state, then shut it down. You don't need to close any applications at all; they'll be right where you left them when you restore the state.
But the problem is you have to tell users "no, you don't want to play that game", "no, you don't want to use the software that came with your camera", "no, you can't use that VPN software, please spend three years learning unix shell and networking".
You have to tell Mac users the exact same things. MacOSX doesn't play Windows games or run shitty bundled camera software. Yet Apple seems to have no problem profiting greatly off Macbook sales. And why on earth would you want to run bundled software anyway? You can just plug your camera's flash card into your PC and copy the images with your file manager, and then use the image editor of your choice to modify them if desired. I'm sure Macs work the same: plug in a card and some program included in OSX pops up for you. It's only Windows where people have a nasty habit of using some horrible, shitty, buggy bundled software or device driver for every little device they use.
BTW, VPN on Linux is easy. On KDE, I just use the network manager to import the OpenVPN profile files that PIA gives me. Click, click, click, done.
This article is almost two years old now, so it's quite out-of-date. And Android still is not under any real control by Google; Google has so little control over Android that the large majority of Android devices are running hopelessly out-of-date versions of the OS, because the device makers don't give a shit about security updates and customers don't know better and don't have much choice (they're just told to buy a new phone).
Meanwhile, we have alternatives popping up, such as CyanogenMod (and CyanogenOS), FirefoxOS, etc.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the next couple years.
The part that's really interesting is that usually the same people complaining about the disparities show little awareness of the sociocultural forces involved, attributing it completely to bigotry
Exactly.
I do find it really interesting that Indians and Chinese--two much more traditional societies than ours--have far higher numbers of women in engineering than our own western societies. However, there's some big differences I see between these societies:
1) eastern societies don't have Disney teaching little girls that they're all princesses. However, I don't think Disney is such a big deal in European culture either, and it seems they have the same problem with gender disparity in engineering and computing (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
2) engineering is seen as very prestigious in eastern societies, much more so than in western ones. Here in the US, medicine, law, finance, and business (including management) are seen as prestigious; being an employee engineer is not. So I do, for instance, see lots of very smart women in the medical field. There's tons of female doctors these days. My primary care physician is female (which is nice when I need a full-body physical; I'd much rather drop my shorts in front of a woman than a dude), and I just had a minor surgical procedure done by a woman. In fact, I've had a bunch of surgical procedures (such as the root canal I had to have done a while ago) done by women over the years, now that I think about it, many more than by men. So it seems to me the smart women are skipping engineering and going into other professions.
3) engineering pay isn't that great compared to other professions, or at least it isn't commonly thought to pay that much. It's also subject to foreign competition with outsourcing and also H1B visas. With medicine, doctors have to get a license and pass licensing boards locally. There's no such restrictions with engineering; anyone can just make up BS on a resume and get an engineering job. Also, doctors aren't subject to mass layoffs, while engineers go through them commonly these days. I don't know how this compares to eastern societies, but it seems to me that the way companies operate in Asia is entirely different, and not subject to the shortsightedness (worrying only about the next quarter's financials) common to American corporations.
WTF are you talking about, "marginal"?
Tell me, what is the #1 most popular OS in the world right now? Most likely, it's Android. Where does Android get its kernel? Linux, an OSS project. Everyone and his brother has an Android phone now (iOS usage has gone down in recent years, thanks to Apple being too expensive and also screwing up a lot, such as with the Apple Maps fiasco), and there's lots of Android tablets out there. In addition to that, countless devices have embedded Linux (which means a full Linux OS and GNU ecosystem, not just the kernel) running on them: car infotainment systems and checkout lane payment terminals as two examples off the top of my head.
Also, what browsers do people use? No one uses MSIE any more except morons and unfortunately corporate drones who have no choice. Everyone else uses Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Firefox is a highly successful OSS project, while the other two both use Webkit rendering engines, which come from KHTML, a component of the KDE project.
And finally, what do most webservers in the world use? (Don't count all the domains parked with MS IIS since MS is paying sites to use IIS in those cases just so they can inflate their figures.) Countless small websites for innumerable small businesses run on Linux, plus lots of large ones too.
Android is not desktop Linux, and has almost nothing in common with it other than a kernel.
But linux use on the desktop is growing? ...
I mean if we want to include android it's one of the most popular OSes in the world.
Android is not Linux, nor is Android a desktop OS of any kind. Yes, Android probably is one of the most popular OSes in the world, but we're talking about Linux on the desktop here, which is an entirely different animal. The kernel is the only thing they have in common.
It is hard to say whether it's growing or not. You say it's growing, hairyfeet says it's shrinking, who's right? What I do know is true is that desktop PC sales are shrinking, thanks to mobile devices and to people hanging onto their hardware longer.
For the average PC user the Linux desktop is a crappy experience
Bullshit. The average PC user has never even seen a Linux desktop let alone tried one. The average PC user hasn't even ever used MacOS. All they have ever seen or know is Windows.
For people that try it, Linux works great on the desktop: no viruses, no screwing around with antivirus software, no forced reboots due to updates, I could go on and on.
use a desktop that is clearly inferior to the alternatives.
How much is MS paying you for your troll posts anyway?
Its because of guys like you that Linux usage has dropped soooo damned low its now listed as "other"
Wrong. While you're correct about your criticism of his behavior (complaining about specific problems is absolutely justified; if my car nearly got me killed because of poor design or manufacturing, I'd complain about that loudly too), that isn't why Linux usage is low. Linux usage was never high to begin with, and if it has dropped (which is probably nearly impossible to determine, since Linux users don't buy their computers pre-loaded with Linux), it's likely because of the rise of tablets. Anyway, the real reason Linux usage is so low is because of inertia and marketing. Go into any Best Buy and the computers all have Windows and MacOS, so that's what people use.
So if I drive a Ford and it catches on fire when someone rear-ends me at low speed and I narrowly escape burning alive, all because of a faulty design, it's "childish" for me to continue holding a grudge against Ford?
(Note: I haven't had any such problems with Ubuntu (nor have I ever used mainline Ubuntu, only derivatives), so note I'm just making a point here, not bashing Ubuntu for any reliability problems.)
Paying tuition does not mean a University or college never prevents anyone from failing out of school.
Apparently, it does, as this case proves.
Full paying students fail out of school quite frequently and are not "bailed out" in an effort to create future alumni.
Apples and oranges. Those are individuals, this is an entire class.
This is no different than the Big Bailout of 2008. If it were just one bank, the government would have let them go bankrupt (and in fact, IIRC there were one or two banks that did die out). But because it was so many banks, the government bailed them out.
Yes, universities frequently allow individual students to fail out; it's expected, and par for the course. They wouldn't be respected institutions if they just passed everyone; the whole idea is to "weed out" poor students so that only the good ones graduate. But this case is about an entire class failing at once. They won't allow that; it's too much of a disruption to their scheduling and income stream. They're set up to have a small number of students fail out and either leave the school, or retake the class, or switch majors. But a whole class means now that many students don't have the prerequisite needed to proceed to some other classes, which hugely affects their class scheduling. It's too much of a disruption to the institution's operation, just like having too many big banks fail at once is too much of a disruption to the economy, so they get a bail-out.
The exact same thing has happened here: these students pay lots of money in tuition to this school (plus it's hoped they'll become generous alumni later), so the school bails them out for failing miserably in this class.
If this were a free public school (as in no tuition or other costs for students, just a free education), this wouldn't be happening.
There's nothing wrong with being inclusive, and in fact, any elements in STEM groups which are actively keeping women out or making things hard for them due to sexism should be addressed and punished if necessary. I really wish there were more smart engineering women out there; I would really prefer to work in a 50/50 environment with both male and female engineers (hell, I'd be happier working in an all-female-engineering workplace, with me as either the only or one of a few men; I'd probably have a much better sex life if nothing else, and have an easy time finding a really good marriage partner; lots of people meet their spouses at work, after all).
The problem is that very, very few women seem to have any interest in the field, and those that do seem to all come from an Asian background. (Not that there's anything wrong with Asians, it shows there's something wrong with westerners actually.) You just can't make people interested in something they're not interested in.
From what I can tell, this lack of interest comes from the way little girls are raised in our society; parents and schools just don't encourage them in these things, and traditionally these things are seen as "geeky" and derided by everyone. Boys want to be jocks and girls want to be cheerleaders early on. So the boys who are quiet and smart and not-jocks go into computers and engineering, while the girls who are smart go into something like medicine.
Exactly, and there's more to it than that. Firethorn adds that the same can be said for most engineering work. But all this CS and engineering work is what gives us the technology to solve problems. Without engineering, we wouldn't have planes to fly to Africa to do NGO work, we wouldn't have vehicles to transport workers to where they're needed, we wouldn't be able to build bridges or dig wells or filter water. We wouldn't have computers to help coordinate all that work.
People deride a lot of computing work, but much it has some value to making the world better. Look at Google Maps and other GPS navigators; how much fuel has been saved by people using these services/devices, and being able to drive directly to their destination in the most efficient manner possible, rather than taking wrong turns, taking slower/longer routes, stopping to ask for directions, getting lost, etc? Multiply that by 100 million cars in the US, and the numbers are staggering.
What's blindingly obvious is that both sides are horrible. I was only saying that I could see why the Catholics wanted to prevent commoners from doing their own interpretation, because it leads directly to fundamentalism; I never said the Catholics were models of virtue themselves.
The best answer is to not have any "holy books" at all, because as soon as you believe something like that, you get all kinds of twisted logic and justifications for stupid and horrible things. ("It says XYZ here, and we can't question that, so it follows from that that we need to do ABC in this situation.")
Hey, if you want to screw hairy-legged women, go right ahead. Don't pretend it's normal though.