The barrier to entry is for the *customer*, not for the *competitor*. It can be difficult as a customer to change operating systems due to compatibility of applications etc., so MS can ream you through lock-in. It is easy to change search engines - just type "search engine" into google and they themselves will give you a whole host of other options.
So you never try on shoes or clothes before buying them? You never see whether the screen of a smartphone is actually bright enough, or whether the interface is smooth? You never need to ask somebody a question because the explanation they gave was ambiguous or vague?
Online interactions are great for a lot of things, and certainly have lower overheads, but there are certain things that are still a lot better with real-live-in-the-flesh experiences.
The UK switched their money to decimal in 1971 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day - imagine if the US hadn't been decimal to start with, how much resistance there would be to changing now!
You're the one who thinks he's so awesome and keeps calling him things like "the anointed one" so I guess I'll just leave you with your opinion. Have a fun time finding more people to hate for no apparent reason! xx
Hmm. So you don't disagree with the fact that the US government is likely instituting a secret campaign against Assange. Your lack of counterargument among the rest of what you said leads me to conclude that you concede this point.
Based on which facts do you make the statement that Assange has discredited himself? Are you referring to the charges which had been dropped but were then reopened against him 3 days after he released the diplomatic cables, during the same week that Mastercard and Visa suddenly decided they didn't like Wikileaks as well? I thought you already conceded that these were likely manufactured by the US government by not counterarguing the main point I was making.
Interesting to hear you compare him to Charles Manson. As far as I can tell he hasn't murdered any women or set up any cults to murder women either. Perhaps you need to examine your feelings and check whether you are biased, because you clearly have strong feeling on this point if you are making such obviously skewed comparisons without batting an eyelid. A Ralph Nader? So, you'd like Assange to say a lot of good stuff and not actually get anything fixed in the ever so slightly dystopian world we live?
Your argument that scandals would come out without an Assange (or at least Wikileaks) is clearly false, as the scandals which were caused by the release of the diplomatic cables and helicopter footage prove. Somebody who isn't afraid to spit in the face of authority is required for a job like this, and such people make enemies who will do their best to discredit them.
You are putting words in my mouth, claiming I am saying that "ALL MUST BOW DOWN BEFORE THE ALMIGHTY ASSANGE". I am saying nothing of the sort. I just think that we shouldn't judge somebody's strength of character on whether they jumped a bail when they were about to be extradited to another country on what may be trumped up charges, particularly if that person has a lot of very angry enemies in high places.
BM knew what he was getting into, but that still doesn't justify the treatment he has been given. Even as a member of the military he is allowed the right to a speedy trial and humane living conditions. And thinking that the same couldn't happen to Assange suggests you have never heard of a certain prison facility located in Guantanamo Bay.
Since you can't figure it out for yourself, let me spell it out for you. The data Wikileaks has published has made us blatantly aware that governments don't bother to inform their citizens about the plethora of illegal and morally reprehensible activities they partake in on a regular basis. Thus, we cannot make an argument that he is safe based on the information that we have been given. If there was a secret plan to assassinate Assange, do you think the US government would let you know? If the US government had set up a secret deal with the Swedes to deport Assange the moment he steps foot on their soil, do you really think you would be privy to that information?
In contrast, Assange has set himself up to be a recipient of any information that people feel unhappy about keeping secret. If there were plans, and anybody felt like talking about it, if anyone knew about it, chances are he would too. Can you blame him for breaking the law and not pitching after his parole if he knows he is the target of an inter-governmental plot to have him "bradleymanninged"?
I guess it depends on what field you're in. If your field has 3 months of hard work implementing a system in order to be able to get any results at all, you probably won't have that kind of problem - it tends to weed out the people who aren't willing to put in the effort. I'm currently doing my MSc in robotic mapping (AKA SLAM) and the quality of papers I find has been consistently high. In fact, sometimes I wish they had tried some little tweak, because it would take me two weeks of coding/testing to figure out if there is even any merit to the idea and chances are my system is so different from theirs to begin with that the results wouldn't even be comparable.
I'm the other way around: I grew up in the US then moved to (and am now a citizen of) South Africa. Unfortunately, there isn't a status of 'African-American' in the affirmative action sections of applications here...
I heard a story of you sitting in on a LUG dressed in a Darth Vader mask so people wouldn't recognise you until the end of the talk. Do you find that people treat you very differently now that you are famous, and seeing that a lot of people take exception to the direction you have taken Ubuntu? How do you deal with this, and what steps do you take to make sure you stay grounded in reality?
So, the quality of a product is determined by how well it implements an undocumented standard designed by a competitor? By that token, MS Office is absolutely terrible - have you ever tried to open.odt or.pdf in MS Office? Because those are the competing standards, and let me tell you, it does a terrible job. Interestingly enough, it does a terrible job *despite* odt and pdf being extremely well documented. As such, using your methodology for determining the quality of an office suite, I'd have to conclude that MS Office is a terrible piece of software, considerably worse than LibreOffice.
If you haven't used it in a few years... why are you even pretending to be unbiased? There have been huge improvements in document handling and rendering in the last few years. Give LibreOffice another try.
As to the ribbon, I can do with keyboard shortcuts what you can do with your precious ribbon in less than half the time. Insert page break? Alt-I-B-Enter. I did that in the amount of time it took your hand to find the mouse. Ribbon works for people who maybe use a word processor once every two weeks - any more than that and learning a few keyboard shortcuts in the old system will save you more time than ribbon ever would. Not only that, ribbon takes up precious screen space even when I don't need menu items - hence the concept of collapsible menus, they were invented for a reason!!
I use the Mendeley plugin for citations and reference list in Writer. It works a charm, I can generally just point it at my folder of PDF papers and it automatically imports them, looks up their details on Google Scholar, and adds them to my references database. When I want to insert an in-text reference I just click on the button, a popup asks me to type keywords, and a list of relevant papers appears. Click on the relevant one, voila! Usually some of the details of the papers might need some fixing, but it is much less effort than doing the entire thing by hand!
Slashdot Mirror
They built an in-house solution instead of using a commercial solution. I fail to see how this is a problem.
My university proxy has 1 IP for ~30000 people. IP tracking in a situation like that is pretty hopeless.
The barrier to entry is for the *customer*, not for the *competitor*. It can be difficult as a customer to change operating systems due to compatibility of applications etc., so MS can ream you through lock-in. It is easy to change search engines - just type "search engine" into google and they themselves will give you a whole host of other options.
So you never try on shoes or clothes before buying them? You never see whether the screen of a smartphone is actually bright enough, or whether the interface is smooth? You never need to ask somebody a question because the explanation they gave was ambiguous or vague?
Online interactions are great for a lot of things, and certainly have lower overheads, but there are certain things that are still a lot better with real-live-in-the-flesh experiences.
Easy fix, just order a whole litre!
The UK switched their money to decimal in 1971 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day - imagine if the US hadn't been decimal to start with, how much resistance there would be to changing now!
Because it gives you large and unfriendly numbers.
And we'd write using the Real Character and Philosophical Language.
Yeah, just like God is doing a great job keeping all the paedophilia out of churches, right?
Mr Hoppy!
You're the one who thinks he's so awesome and keeps calling him things like "the anointed one" so I guess I'll just leave you with your opinion. Have a fun time finding more people to hate for no apparent reason! xx
Hmm. So you don't disagree with the fact that the US government is likely instituting a secret campaign against Assange. Your lack of counterargument among the rest of what you said leads me to conclude that you concede this point.
Based on which facts do you make the statement that Assange has discredited himself? Are you referring to the charges which had been dropped but were then reopened against him 3 days after he released the diplomatic cables, during the same week that Mastercard and Visa suddenly decided they didn't like Wikileaks as well? I thought you already conceded that these were likely manufactured by the US government by not counterarguing the main point I was making.
Interesting to hear you compare him to Charles Manson. As far as I can tell he hasn't murdered any women or set up any cults to murder women either. Perhaps you need to examine your feelings and check whether you are biased, because you clearly have strong feeling on this point if you are making such obviously skewed comparisons without batting an eyelid. A Ralph Nader? So, you'd like Assange to say a lot of good stuff and not actually get anything fixed in the ever so slightly dystopian world we live?
Your argument that scandals would come out without an Assange (or at least Wikileaks) is clearly false, as the scandals which were caused by the release of the diplomatic cables and helicopter footage prove. Somebody who isn't afraid to spit in the face of authority is required for a job like this, and such people make enemies who will do their best to discredit them.
You are putting words in my mouth, claiming I am saying that "ALL MUST BOW DOWN BEFORE THE ALMIGHTY ASSANGE". I am saying nothing of the sort. I just think that we shouldn't judge somebody's strength of character on whether they jumped a bail when they were about to be extradited to another country on what may be trumped up charges, particularly if that person has a lot of very angry enemies in high places.
BM knew what he was getting into, but that still doesn't justify the treatment he has been given. Even as a member of the military he is allowed the right to a speedy trial and humane living conditions. And thinking that the same couldn't happen to Assange suggests you have never heard of a certain prison facility located in Guantanamo Bay.
Every single cell has a complete blueprint of the entire thing. Which makes it slightly difficult if you want to keep some of the design classified...
Since you can't figure it out for yourself, let me spell it out for you.
The data Wikileaks has published has made us blatantly aware that governments don't bother to inform their citizens about the plethora of illegal and morally reprehensible activities they partake in on a regular basis. Thus, we cannot make an argument that he is safe based on the information that we have been given. If there was a secret plan to assassinate Assange, do you think the US government would let you know? If the US government had set up a secret deal with the Swedes to deport Assange the moment he steps foot on their soil, do you really think you would be privy to that information?
In contrast, Assange has set himself up to be a recipient of any information that people feel unhappy about keeping secret. If there were plans, and anybody felt like talking about it, if anyone knew about it, chances are he would too. Can you blame him for breaking the law and not pitching after his parole if he knows he is the target of an inter-governmental plot to have him "bradleymanninged"?
No no, that's Al Gore.
[Disclaimer: I consider several recent UK extradition rulings to be quite bizarre. Assange's being one of them.]
Pinochet being another.
Maybe he knows something we don't...
I guess it depends on what field you're in. If your field has 3 months of hard work implementing a system in order to be able to get any results at all, you probably won't have that kind of problem - it tends to weed out the people who aren't willing to put in the effort. I'm currently doing my MSc in robotic mapping (AKA SLAM) and the quality of papers I find has been consistently high. In fact, sometimes I wish they had tried some little tweak, because it would take me two weeks of coding/testing to figure out if there is even any merit to the idea and chances are my system is so different from theirs to begin with that the results wouldn't even be comparable.
I'm the other way around: I grew up in the US then moved to (and am now a citizen of) South Africa. Unfortunately, there isn't a status of 'African-American' in the affirmative action sections of applications here...
I heard a story of you sitting in on a LUG dressed in a Darth Vader mask so people wouldn't recognise you until the end of the talk. Do you find that people treat you very differently now that you are famous, and seeing that a lot of people take exception to the direction you have taken Ubuntu? How do you deal with this, and what steps do you take to make sure you stay grounded in reality?
Because they find it harder to do product research, and as a result find less material that they can justify spending money on.
So, the quality of a product is determined by how well it implements an undocumented standard designed by a competitor? By that token, MS Office is absolutely terrible - have you ever tried to open .odt or .pdf in MS Office? Because those are the competing standards, and let me tell you, it does a terrible job. Interestingly enough, it does a terrible job *despite* odt and pdf being extremely well documented. As such, using your methodology for determining the quality of an office suite, I'd have to conclude that MS Office is a terrible piece of software, considerably worse than LibreOffice.
Good to know that is the only part of the argument he made that you don't agree with.
If you haven't used it in a few years... why are you even pretending to be unbiased? There have been huge improvements in document handling and rendering in the last few years. Give LibreOffice another try.
As to the ribbon, I can do with keyboard shortcuts what you can do with your precious ribbon in less than half the time. Insert page break? Alt-I-B-Enter. I did that in the amount of time it took your hand to find the mouse. Ribbon works for people who maybe use a word processor once every two weeks - any more than that and learning a few keyboard shortcuts in the old system will save you more time than ribbon ever would. Not only that, ribbon takes up precious screen space even when I don't need menu items - hence the concept of collapsible menus, they were invented for a reason!!
I use the Mendeley plugin for citations and reference list in Writer. It works a charm, I can generally just point it at my folder of PDF papers and it automatically imports them, looks up their details on Google Scholar, and adds them to my references database. When I want to insert an in-text reference I just click on the button, a popup asks me to type keywords, and a list of relevant papers appears. Click on the relevant one, voila! Usually some of the details of the papers might need some fixing, but it is much less effort than doing the entire thing by hand!