early in 2007, i was working the weekend shift. i parked my motorcycle in front of the office and went to work.
about 2:00PM, one of the security guards came to my desk and asked me to come to the building door. i thought "i'm getting fired on the weekend ?". WTF ???
when i got there, there was a police car there, 2 officers and a bum in handcufs. he had tried to steal my bike...
here's the thing, the bike's alarm was off, and i had no chains or other kind of locks on the wheels. it was just a matter of hardwiring the ignition and ride away.
now, the fact that i had no protection other than having removed the key makes it OK for this guy to take away what's mine ?
even if i had left the key on the ignition he'd have no right to ride it away, absence of security measures is not a permission to use.
"It's not an expensive product. Especially for the vast majority of people, who get it "free"."
you're dead WRONG! it's not free for a long stretch. here in brasil HP sells presario notebooks preloaded with mandriva linux for R$ 1500,00. the VERY SAME hardware with windows goes for R$ 1800,00.
when you have the two of them side-by-side in the same shelf on a wall-mart, carrefour or extra store, the real cost of OEM windows becomes clear.
to put things in perspective, the national minimun wage is R$ 380,00 a month.
so, either we kill ourselves by burning coal and oil, or we kill ourselves chopping forests.
you know what ? fuckit!!!
if we're so stupid we can't find a stable balance to ensure the survival of the specie, so be it. let mass extinction come. and in 60 million years from now, some form of land dweling squid will be unearthing our bones, just like we do with the dinosaurs.
frauds do happen, but it's mostly illegal propaganda, manipulation of voters (vote buying), this kind of stuff. ballot tampering attempts became less frequent since the electronic voting became widespread. i remember there were a couple of attempts in the last election, but the responsible were cought and prosecuted.
granted, just low level grunts were arrested, the top guys shielded themselves with several layers of party hiererchy.
the decentralized nature of american elections, where, in some cases, countirs are free to chose the method of posting and counting votes are the greatest barrier for standardization.
here in brasil, where elections has always been centralized by the federal judicial branch, creating a standard method of voting is much easier.
here we used to have a starndard canvas sack and standard paper balots, now we have a single, federaly mandated model of electronic voting machines.
both proccesses were|are hardened against tampering. i can usually vote and choose my candidates in less than a minute, even in general elections where i have to choose: 1 president, 2 senators, 1 federal deputy, 1 governor, 1 state deputy. in local elections where i only need to choose a mayor a representative, 20 seconds are enough. it's made easier by the fact that every candidate is identified by a unique number composed of . so the voting machine is incredibly simple and convenient to use. a numeric keypad + a button to cast a blank vote (if you want to vote only for mayor but not for a representative, for exemple), a button to clear the vote and a confirm button.
if you USians want, i'm pretty sure the brasilian govt. would be more than glad to license the technology.
When microsoft started, it was a young company, with a new view of technology. they "got" that microcomputer toy thingie a lot better than traditional mainframe and minicomputer makers like IBM, DEC, honeywell, etc. this allowed them grow exponentially, based not only on their own capabilities, but also on the series of mistakes and fuckups of the competition.
well, now it's against them. now THEY are the "traditional" guys with a backwards vision of computers, while google, yahoo and - surprisingly - apple have a grasp of how people see the digital world. google and yahoo caters to the connected crowd, and apple to the people that sees digital gadgets as fashion statements, two things MS with can't get a foot on.
of, course, MS is not going away anytime soon, the same way IBM, unisys, bull and HP are still around. what they need to do is recognize that they're pretty much irrelevant in those two markets, find a stable but big niche and stay on it. we don't see HP or IBM making atempts on the on-line or digital fashion markets, yet they're still huge and profitable.
so, here's a tip for microsoft: leave online services and fashion for the likes of nokia, apple, google, yahoo, etc. and go take care of what you do well: corporative operating systems like win2k (the only version of windows i dare saying i liked) and office tools.
i was in the beach near sao paulo on the new years eve between 2006/2007. guaruja, where i was, is a little town with some 300.000 fixed inhabitants. but the problem is that it's one of the most sought after places for the new year's holyday by the people of sao paulo (a 20 million people urban sprawl). with the population of guaruja temporarily inflated from 300k to about 1 million, it took me half an hour to complete a call from my cell phone.
cram too much people in too little space, and if everyone decides to call someone to wish a happy new year and you'll see the ugly limitations of wireless data transmission.
heck, congestion happens even with wired connections. remember 9/11/2001 ? the (mostly wired) internet almost melted down under the traffic. if something like that happens again, the air might even glow hot with the electromagnetic energy of all these wirelless thingies but people still won't get the information.
"anything-that-plays-music" is a competitor to the ipod the same way beer is a competitor to wine. you can argue they're diferent classes of beverage, but it doesn't change the fact they're competitors.
just because apple's marketing is way more efficient at creating hype, doesn't change the fact that the iphone has _hundreds_ of competitors that apeal to the "i just want a phone that makes calls" crowd, and bunch of competition on the smartphone area.
one guy here at the office offered me an iphone he brought from US, but i turned it down for a motorola ming, smaller, does everything the iphone does plus more, costs less, there's a lot of homebrew and commercial apps and is not chained to itunes. so yes, the ming IS a competitor. so are the N95, treo, blackbery, etc.
same for the ipod. i only have one because i bought used for less than half the price of a new one, otherwise i would have bought something else.
believe it or not, apple doesn't have a monopoly on cool gadgets.
check out www.kde.org, and if you're using ubuntu, check www.kubuntu.org. they already have a liveCD and packages you can install side-by-side with KDE3.5
test it out, but keep in mind that KDE usually is not all that usefull in x.0 versions, so test this version but keep your 3.5 in place until 4.1 is out, ok ?
thanks dude. i was going mad googling for that FF option. i had it set on seamonkey on my desktop box before i turned it into a hackint0sh (don't ask!!!), and now i was having a hard time trying to find it againg to apply to my notebook.
my pet peevee with _any_ GTK based app is the filechooser.
it's ugly and far from intuitive.
there's a wrapper aplication that allows some GTK apps use KDE's filechooser, but it doesn't work with everyting.
if GTK developers really don't wan't to fix this, could they at least put something to allow the use of KDE's dialogs when the app is not running under gnome ?
the thing is not if the format came from sony or philips or toshiba. the thing is: the more partners you have, the more likelly for the format to succeed.
the CD and the floppy were smashing successes because sony worked with other companies. the success of the VHS was because JVC worked with a whole bunch of companies.
HD-DVD only has toshiba (hardware) and microsoft (software. namely the codec used internaly on the players), while sony has samsung, philips, lg, apple, HP, etc. (hardware) and industry standard codecs plus java, wich is a successfull software stack on the embeded world (if you like it or not, it's irrelevant).
at least they don't keep hitting it after it's dead.
NIS+ is deprecated on solaris 10. i asked about it in my solaris 10 classes in a sun education center. the order now is to put whatever doesn't fit on regular, non-plus NIS on LDAP. it could be either openLDAP or Java directory server (former iPlanet).
On the other hand, FTA: "A cellphone should auto-format phone numbers with parentheses and hyphens when you enter them in the address book. When the cursor is in a number box, like ZIP code, the keyboard should automatically start typing numbers. The owner should not have to press the alternate-symbols key."
I can't agree more with this statement. I have the same problem on my Motorola Q . The design choices are nearly laughable. There are many inputs in the phone where the edit box will only take a numeric input. And yet, the phone design (specifically, the OS) forces me to press the Alt button to allow me to enter numbers.
i disagree. in this globalised world, a business oriented phone like this must have the ability to store phone numbers and ZIP codes in international formats, which means the ZIP code must accept letters too. also, auto formatting phone numbers with parenthesis, what if you have a brasilian number ? our numbers are formated as (xx) yyyy-zzzz. two digits for area code and 8 for the number. some countries have only one digit for area code, it varies wildly.
Slashdot Mirror
so long, and thanks for all the grief.
wanna bet one dollar that he'll sue SCO and/or SNCP as soon as he's kicked out ?
sid meyer is Shakespeare. play some civilization IV and you'll know what i mean.
underwear ? why do you need underwear ?
early in 2007, i was working the weekend shift. i parked my motorcycle in front of the office and went to work.
about 2:00PM, one of the security guards came to my desk and asked me to come to the building door. i thought "i'm getting fired on the weekend ?". WTF ???
when i got there, there was a police car there, 2 officers and a bum in handcufs. he had tried to steal my bike...
here's the thing, the bike's alarm was off, and i had no chains or other kind of locks on the wheels. it was just a matter of hardwiring the ignition and ride away.
now, the fact that i had no protection other than having removed the key makes it OK for this guy to take away what's mine ?
even if i had left the key on the ignition he'd have no right to ride it away, absence of security measures is not a permission to use.
oh, yeah. the guy is still in jail.
"It's not an expensive product. Especially for the vast majority of people, who get it "free"."
you're dead WRONG! it's not free for a long stretch. here in brasil HP sells presario notebooks preloaded with mandriva linux for R$ 1500,00. the VERY SAME hardware with windows goes for R$ 1800,00.
when you have the two of them side-by-side in the same shelf on a wall-mart, carrefour or extra store, the real cost of OEM windows becomes clear.
to put things in perspective, the national minimun wage is R$ 380,00 a month.
submited that just now. let's see if it catches.
so, either we kill ourselves by burning coal and oil, or we kill ourselves chopping forests.
you know what ? fuckit!!!
if we're so stupid we can't find a stable balance to ensure the survival of the specie, so be it. let mass extinction come. and in 60 million years from now, some form of land dweling squid will be unearthing our bones, just like we do with the dinosaurs.
Wii for the WIIn!!!
got it ? WIIn !
i'll go back to my cave now.
are you sure ? are you sure ? are you sure ? are you sure ? are you sure ? are you sure ?
i thought the DoJ used imperial units...
frauds do happen, but it's mostly illegal propaganda, manipulation of voters (vote buying), this kind of stuff. ballot tampering attempts became less frequent since the electronic voting became widespread. i remember there were a couple of attempts in the last election, but the responsible were cought and prosecuted.
granted, just low level grunts were arrested, the top guys shielded themselves with several layers of party hiererchy.
the decentralized nature of american elections, where, in some cases, countirs are free to chose the method of posting and counting votes are the greatest barrier for standardization.
here in brasil, where elections has always been centralized by the federal judicial branch, creating a standard method of voting is much easier.
here we used to have a starndard canvas sack and standard paper balots, now we have a single, federaly mandated model of electronic voting machines.
both proccesses were|are hardened against tampering. i can usually vote and choose my candidates in less than a minute, even in general elections where i have to choose: 1 president, 2 senators, 1 federal deputy, 1 governor, 1 state deputy. in local elections where i only need to choose a mayor a representative, 20 seconds are enough. it's made easier by the fact that every candidate is identified by a unique number composed of . so the voting machine is incredibly simple and convenient to use. a numeric keypad + a button to cast a blank vote (if you want to vote only for mayor but not for a representative, for exemple), a button to clear the vote and a confirm button.
if you USians want, i'm pretty sure the brasilian govt. would be more than glad to license the technology.
When microsoft started, it was a young company, with a new view of technology. they "got" that microcomputer toy thingie a lot better than traditional mainframe and minicomputer makers like IBM, DEC, honeywell, etc. this allowed them grow exponentially, based not only on their own capabilities, but also on the series of mistakes and fuckups of the competition.
well, now it's against them. now THEY are the "traditional" guys with a backwards vision of computers, while google, yahoo and - surprisingly - apple have a grasp of how people see the digital world. google and yahoo caters to the connected crowd, and apple to the people that sees digital gadgets as fashion statements, two things MS with can't get a foot on.
of, course, MS is not going away anytime soon, the same way IBM, unisys, bull and HP are still around. what they need to do is recognize that they're pretty much irrelevant in those two markets, find a stable but big niche and stay on it. we don't see HP or IBM making atempts on the on-line or digital fashion markets, yet they're still huge and profitable.
so, here's a tip for microsoft: leave online services and fashion for the likes of nokia, apple, google, yahoo, etc. and go take care of what you do well: corporative operating systems like win2k (the only version of windows i dare saying i liked) and office tools.
i was in the beach near sao paulo on the new years eve between 2006/2007. guaruja, where i was, is a little town with some 300.000 fixed inhabitants. but the problem is that it's one of the most sought after places for the new year's holyday by the people of sao paulo (a 20 million people urban sprawl). with the population of guaruja temporarily inflated from 300k to about 1 million, it took me half an hour to complete a call from my cell phone.
cram too much people in too little space, and if everyone decides to call someone to wish a happy new year and you'll see the ugly limitations of wireless data transmission.
heck, congestion happens even with wired connections. remember 9/11/2001 ? the (mostly wired) internet almost melted down under the traffic. if something like that happens again, the air might even glow hot with the electromagnetic energy of all these wirelless thingies but people still won't get the information.
"anything-that-plays-music" is a competitor to the ipod the same way beer is a competitor to wine. you can argue they're diferent classes of beverage, but it doesn't change the fact they're competitors.
just because apple's marketing is way more efficient at creating hype, doesn't change the fact that the iphone has _hundreds_ of competitors that apeal to the "i just want a phone that makes calls" crowd, and bunch of competition on the smartphone area.
one guy here at the office offered me an iphone he brought from US, but i turned it down for a motorola ming, smaller, does everything the iphone does plus more, costs less, there's a lot of homebrew and commercial apps and is not chained to itunes. so yes, the ming IS a competitor. so are the N95, treo, blackbery, etc.
same for the ipod. i only have one because i bought used for less than half the price of a new one, otherwise i would have bought something else.
believe it or not, apple doesn't have a monopoly on cool gadgets.
it's ready since january 11.
check out www.kde.org, and if you're using ubuntu, check www.kubuntu.org. they already have a liveCD and packages you can install side-by-side with KDE3.5
test it out, but keep in mind that KDE usually is not all that usefull in x.0 versions, so test this version but keep your 3.5 in place until 4.1 is out, ok ?
thanks dude. i was going mad googling for that FF option. i had it set on seamonkey on my desktop box before i turned it into a hackint0sh (don't ask!!!), and now i was having a hard time trying to find it againg to apply to my notebook.
my pet peevee with _any_ GTK based app is the filechooser.
it's ugly and far from intuitive.
there's a wrapper aplication that allows some GTK apps use KDE's filechooser, but it doesn't work with everyting.
if GTK developers really don't wan't to fix this, could they at least put something to allow the use of KDE's dialogs when the app is not running under gnome ?
BTW, the wrapper is here: http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=36077
CD is sony, 3 1/2" floppy is sony...
the thing is not if the format came from sony or philips or toshiba. the thing is: the more partners you have, the more likelly for the format to succeed.
the CD and the floppy were smashing successes because sony worked with other companies. the success of the VHS was because JVC worked with a whole bunch of companies.
HD-DVD only has toshiba (hardware) and microsoft (software. namely the codec used internaly on the players), while sony has samsung, philips, lg, apple, HP, etc. (hardware) and industry standard codecs plus java, wich is a successfull software stack on the embeded world (if you like it or not, it's irrelevant).
i think we're slashdot's popular people's party, aren't we ?
at least they don't keep hitting it after it's dead.
NIS+ is deprecated on solaris 10. i asked about it in my solaris 10 classes in a sun education center. the order now is to put whatever doesn't fit on regular, non-plus NIS on LDAP. it could be either openLDAP or Java directory server (former iPlanet).
if you want to go above 250km/h, buy an exotic.
wanna bet porsches are not limited like that ? same for ferraris, aston martins, bugattis and what not.
i'm a farker, so i'm geting a kick out of this replies.
/slashies
THIS!
because the idea is to show how broken the patent/trademark system is.
/i'm a farker //slashdot needs more slashies ///slashies
this application is social commentary with the added bonus of increasing fark's page views.
On the other hand, FTA: "A cellphone should auto-format phone numbers with parentheses and hyphens when you enter them in the address book. When the cursor is in a number box, like ZIP code, the keyboard should automatically start typing numbers. The owner should not have to press the alternate-symbols key."
I can't agree more with this statement. I have the same problem on my Motorola Q . The design choices are nearly laughable. There are many inputs in the phone where the edit box will only take a numeric input. And yet, the phone design (specifically, the OS) forces me to press the Alt button to allow me to enter numbers.
i disagree. in this globalised world, a business oriented phone like this must have the ability to store phone numbers and ZIP codes in international formats, which means the ZIP code must accept letters too. also, auto formatting phone numbers with parenthesis, what if you have a brasilian number ? our numbers are formated as (xx) yyyy-zzzz. two digits for area code and 8 for the number. some countries have only one digit for area code, it varies wildly.