Because we have no billyware here at all: including desktops.
Besides lack of security, other objections include fs instability, poor ability to sustain tcpip connections, code bloat, the need for constant rebooting and an ugly primitive and stupid desktop that is impossible to modify beyond superficial changes.
Our strongest objection though is that m$ is motivated by a culture of customer abuse, engineering deliberate incompatibilities with competing software as well as their own older coding, forcing their victims to upgrade at great expense to simply continue the same functional usage they'd been doing for years, and each iteration increases their level of dependency on m$ and excludes more, often better competing products.
This has already come to the attention of our community, our industry in general and the courts, and the U.S. Court of Appeals recently upheld an earlier ruling that m$ is operating as an illegal monopoly.
This same court however has handed down a ruling calling for reconsideration of a remedy. I won't volunteer my suggestions here because they haven't been requested. In the meantime, if any corporations running windoze are reading this and find themselves suddenly interested in installing Linux I would invite them to contact me or any of my competitors in the Linux community to discuss this further.
A few years back I could search for, say, "thai food" and without much additional effort find a kewl recipie from someone in Thailand with an html editor. Back then, I might be inclined to write the author a short note, thanking them for their help (and maybe suggesting kicking up the hot pepper a little). I would say things like that contributed a lot to the attraction of millions of new users onto the internet.
More recently, due to factors like the IPO bubble and paid placements in searchengines, doing that would be a lot more likely to point me to a site maintained by a dotcom operation, with lots and lots of ads and product tieins and some semi-obvious goo-goo doing whatever method of persuasion they can think of to get me to enter an email address [yeah, right]
Ignoring marketing crap like that has become almost subconscious, like slamming shut a popup window before the graphics even begin to load, but even so I think there's a cumulative effect that comes from having to deal with hucksters and panhandlers online on a daily basis, and it isn't uplifting. Knowing that our internet, not to mention our society and culture, is like this (for the time being anyway - a lot of these places are folding as their funds run out) is just simply sad.
One minor point of sublime satisfaction: With Linux i can kill the netscape thread and restart my browser without rebooting when it locks up from some bad m$java, or activeX, or Flash, or whatever those jokers uploaded to do stuff clandestinely to their customers. Incidentally, when I'm talking to Windows users about Linux this fact, along with added security, goes over real well.
I suppose having said all that I should disclaim that I'm not at all an antimaterialist, and that I do when necessary like to purchase online often. The merchants I buy from respect me as a customer and I in turn don't begrudge them the money.
Different businesses have different methods of operation, and deeply different values. The good guys and the others are all equally capitalistic, but the marketplace is and will continue to favor one attitude over the opposite as long as the playing field remains level. The ultimate destination of this process isn't depressing at all, but the present noise level while all this is taking place can be in itself a little annoying to listen to at length without a break.
Borland intended to release a free download from at least the time of the official launch party at Linuxworldexpo last February. [slurp]
On the #Kylix channels on irc.linux.org and undernet.org "where is the free download" and "is it out yet" are frequently asked questions.
Borland don't care to say exactly how many Delphi licenses they've sold since 1995 but I would estimate roughly around a million. This is a large enough community to make Borland's initative worthwhile and they've done the most thoughtful job they could in porting, with the result that they've produced a Linux RAD tool that their own community is already substantially familiar with and knows how to use.
I support the finding of the U.S. court system that m$ is operating a monopoly illegally and the call issued yesterday by Senator Charles Schumer for additional Congressional investigation, as do many others of us, and expect (not entirely as a result of Gate$ well-deserved legal difficulties) for Linux to continue to trend it's way toward majority OS status later into this decade.
This however raises a question for the Linux community: What are we going to do with these vast herds of Windoze developers, sysadmins, technicians? For some of the programmers at least, Kylix represents an honest and helpful direction they can follow away from Billyware and toward working productively in a Linux environment.
Another point to consider is.clx compatibility at component level with Delphi 6. (btw, that's usually writted D6 in online messages) Giving developers the option of coding in Kylix on or offsite and compiling their completed sourcecode in Delphi for deployment onto Windoze desktops is of strategic importance in promoting the incursion of Linux into corporate software development, which is another arguably worthwhile Linux objective.
Last of all, in Linux, Kylix is simply one of many plausible development options. For any of you who really don't feel comfortable using it, nobody is saying you have to.
Actually, on grounds of common decency I'd postulate two alternatives:
Let him out and return his passport, or let him out and don't.
The tone of Adobe's latest announcement suggests they're willing to treat this essentially as a civil matter. It wouldn't destroy the justice system for those guys to recognize that.
I hope that bail has been arranged - hopefully with his passport returned.
The face that EFF have enough stature to make Adobe wish to arrange a settlement on more suitably subdued terms is commendable, but I hope the guy (who could be any one of us) isn't still stuck in the greybar hotel someplace.
I follow the policy, and would broadly encourage those in the industry generally not already doing so, of encouraging Windoze users to switch to Linux.
This suggestion I'm pleased to see is gathering increasing momentum, and it's arguable that this is a substantial part of the effort made by distro developers to create and improve their GUI installation interfaces.
This isn't a bad thing per se, and their elimination would be counterproductive to the objective of broadening the overall number of Linux users. Also worth mentioning with that objective in mind are installation routines that fail. We're doing this in a climate of strong competition with m$, who go far beyond the truth loudly repeating how easy their products are to operate.
Granted, Linux, or any of the other *nix variants, aren't Windoze under another name, and shouldn't be. Part of the attraction for newbies is the achievement of working successfully through the learning curve, and human factors such as impatience or downright stupidity are an issue here.
Please don't take this posting as flamebait - It's not uploaded with that thought in mind. If you prefer managing an installation through the console, by all means do so: That's what it's for. I've been using CLI here dating back to before the DOS era, and do so routinely and often with Linux right now, so I both respect and understand your preference.
I would comment though that the best cure for a weak GUI is an improved one, and I agree emphatically that opening every port in the universe by default is a real dumb idea. (Why the hell would anyone want that anyway?)
As if www advertising wasn't a big enough mess already, take this hypothetical example:
Say, like millions of relatively obscure people, I put up a website talking about things that matter to me, in the hope that people of broadly similar viewpoint see it and derive some vague benefit. (Posting here is motivated by the same general priniple.)
Hypothecate next, that in order to offset some of the cost of the site, I negotiate formal contractual arrangements for banner ads with spiffy-biffy video cards and a company that makes funny colored hats.
Please note that advertising sales is not my motivation in creating the site in the first place: I'm doing that because I have something to say. Also, I feel good about promoting spiffy-biffy because they're inexpensive and rugged and do a really good job rendering KDE and Gnome, and I like my unusually colored hat.
We're not talking tycoon city here. The site gets a small number of hits, and the revenue stream from it's advertisers is proportionate, but it is serious business nevertheless. It produces steady revenue for me, and is mutually beneficial for my site readers and the advertisers involved.
There must be millions of websites like that all over the world. In fact, there are.
Now, if I'm interpreting the meaning of this "innovation" correctly, along comes m$, and they engineer links to appear on my site to the competitors of spiffy-biffy, whose products only work with windoze, and the hat company. They do this without my permission and I never get paid a damn thing, but m$ sure does.
It sounds as if for the purpose of this exercise that Dell, Compaq and IBM jump to the conclusion that the purchaser and end-user are invariably the same.
In this industry, hardware specifications and prices are often checked and reported by consultants for their small business or corporate customers. It isn't untypical for the consultancy to cut orders for hardware and software, typically from separate suppliers, and deliver a bundled fully-configured system ready to transfer live data onto.
In this type of scenario it's unusual for the end-user to take a quote and turn around immediately and say "that's a good idea". More often it takes a few days to clarify it into a definite commitment. Radical price fluctuations in that kind of timeframe play havoc not only with consultancy profit margins, but the viability of transactions in that entire business sector.
Blowing off the website and going back to the telephone era isn't going to save MickeyD or Gerstner any money. These guys should read some of their own advertising and:
Use the power of the Information Superhighway for business to drive new transaction models, synergize new partner dynamics in the online community, queef on their swivelchairs and blah, blah, blah.
Re:Someone finally understands
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
"Although we're a shop of 1,300 people, we don't have the clout to get Microsoft to change their operating system,"
Makes ya wonder: Despite being a customer that size with toplevel Hollywood connections, m$ is still either too arrogant or stupid to clean up their code for them.
I wonder if this means we can look forward to a movie with Tux co-starring Nicole Kidman. I can't wait!
If there was a single defining moment, I think it would have to be when ISPs began marketing unlimited flat-rate dialup access....and everybody immediately wanted it.
Constant connection, a novelty at first, has an odd, subtle fascination. It changes everything, and I don't think there's any way now for the world to turn back.
It's also worth noting in comparison to more recent airhead stupidity that these providers operate profitably by offering a service that customers actually want, and have no objection to paying a modest proportional fee for in return.
Problems actually concerning the product can be solved with comparitive ease.
Ever listen to a group of females talking about lipstick? They have a million questions, comments, suggestions, criticisms, all as much about them as the product, and this is all treated as vitally important stuff.
Computers and cosmetics have this in common, only over centuries more time, women have evolved a socially-complex method of finding solutions from their mothers, close friends, co-workers or whatever. With computing though, calling techsupport has begun to take on it's own form of cultural roleplay.
I don't know if support will remain this way always or what to do about it, but I suspect a long time, as long as customers are prompted to telephone motivated by things like: "I want to do a spreadsheet that beats the one the guy across the hall is doing" or "I want a LAN because I'm too dumb to do tape backups" (which information they never volunteer either)
The fact that the product is working is immaterial with this type of call, and the caller may not even be paying attention, or may get annoyed when you try to discuss it. They want personal triumph by proxy.
Then compound the problem by metering technicians by how many "repairs" they resolve per hour/day/week, response time, queue count and all that.
My first prize goes to an email i recieved from a user complaining they couldn't send email. I've been scratching my head about that one (and telling the story) for years.
A href="http://www.tuxtops.com/"http://www.tuxtops.o rg
At the moment I travel very little, but when that changes I look forward to getting a Tuxtop of my own, from which M$ will profit not one damned cent.
I was lucky enough to attend Linuxworldexpo in New York City this February. It was great.
About three weeks ago, I saw something online about attendance figures - the show was huge, but even knowing that I was surprised and delighted to see that the total came to approximately 10,000, making it not only the biggest Linux show I ever attended, but the biggest computer event.
The news gets back to Ballmer and he involuntarily drops a big wet turd in his underwear.
This includes ME! I was there, and it counted. I'm not sorry - why should I be?
My own opinion is that aggregated data like that is no invasion of privacy, and TiVo's hands are clean, based on facts presented so far.
Compare this to the activities of banks. They routinely market detailed data of specific purchases including name, address, tel # and personal wealth details and I have a paper mailbox full of the most pathetic collection of trash you ever saw as a result. It would also be nice if I could take a shower without the telephone ringing. Wouldn't ya think paying interest on credit cards out the wazoo would have those guys restrain themselves a little?
I have no sympathy for marketteers and their ever-increasing desperation, but TiVo isn't the problem here.
The average Mac user won't give a rat's ass anyway.
The/. crowd aren't the right guys to ask, and that's what makes the equation interesting.
Apple are releasing a BSD distro, heavily modified, targetted at the most content-centric, technically unaware population of users in the history of computing.
Their response will fascinate me, becuase they're the ones who will constitute the majority of OSX installed customers - initially, at least.
Apple is planning prebuilt unpack-and-plug-in as the method of distribution for this, right?
Anyway, wishing Apple good luck, if some Apple user wants to wear a penguin t-shirt and say, "me too", he's qualified on a technicality, I guess, and overall, the Linux community should be pleased.
And who knows - some geeky little kid somewhere may start doinking the console open and wind up cooking sumthin really spicy.
I'm not German, but my company doesn't run billyware here (at all) either. Pathetic security is simply one of a long list of objections.
A strongly held opinion that Windoze Sux is neither surprising, nor restricted geographically to the German nation. It truly does puzzle me however, that qualified managers in my country, who have the background to see m$ for what it is (or isn't) have been so laggard in reaching an indentical decision. The fact that m$ was able tp reach the prominence it did within our inductry is an embarrasment to me as an American, and those crooks have clearly had a deleterious effect on our industry.
As Linux continues it's destiny to mature further and gain marketshare, the German decision seems like just one of the earlier major corporate and national defections away from Redmond I expect to see across the unfolding history of this decade. Also, the selection of Solaris, one of the BSDs, or some similar platform does no damage, nor does it invalidate the point.
Hopefully, this time around, users will choose wisely, and base their choices on good code, and quality of engineering and good design, although I know some airheads will still look to popularity statistics for guidance, or be influenced my marketing pitches.
In time m$ will loose desktop majority status, which will accelerate the process, until it fades into a well-deserved failure and obscurity.
is the biggest waste of the 21st century.
In an ideal world I'd like to see Congressional hearings in the United States investigating the practices of commercial advertising overall.
The practices of telemarketters especially should be a major focus of this investigation.
The common factor extends to panhandlers: "Pay, pay, pay, and I'll leave you alone" {Or will they?]
FWIW, my ratio of paper junk to substance is greater than my email,and a burden, reflected in increasing taxes, to the recycling authorities who have to deal with it. [Unread]
An intersting corollary:
At approximately the same time, bigspending advertisers [translation: major global multinationals} are complaining that banner ads on websites are a waste because only two people out of a million click'em, and neither one buys anything.
Perhaps this means the pavlovian certaintainty of advertisers so unquestioned in the second half of the last century is dying, along with equally-outdated capitalist myths.
We live in interesting times. The commies threw out their bullshit artists in 1989 [1991 in Russia itself} In America, we still have ours.....for the time being.
Borland began shipping Kylix on March 8, 2001. For more details, see http://www.borland.com/kylix
The release last week comes in two versions: Desktop Developer and Enterprise Developer, both of which include Apache, databases and database components. Enterprise includes native connectors for IBM DB2 and Oracle.
My understanding of Borland's present planning is that the free download, slated for availability later this year will consist of the IDE only, minus web and database-related functions.
Borland can be reached on 1-800-632-2864 for specific clarification.
This seems to be one of these incidents where neither side is either alltogether guilty or innocent.
As has been mentioned already, the school has a situation which, in light of recent headlines, they can be forgiven for wanting to invstigate.
So then what? The explanation turns out to be a line of perl code, a little sloppy, that posts a textstream at random. This explains the origin of the content.
What follows can't help me avoid questioning the maturity and judgement of the school administrators and police (Why were the police involved anyway? It's a random quote)
It's been a damn long time since I was in school, and I guess what I'm looking for is an element of restraint and authentically adult insight by the authorities. In a perfect world, this would have taught two obviously intelligent students of evident integrity and good character the lessons of insight, fairness in judgement and forgiveness.
Instead, do they come away having discovered that people in authority are shallowminded and insecure in their responsibility?
I'm afraid they might, and I think that's probably the greatest harm here.
I would suggest sites like monster.com and especially www.dice.com
Find something you like the look of and telephone the recruiter. Have a resume prepared for immediate e-mail. If the conversation goes well, that's always the first thing they request.
With a question like that, it's a little hard to tell if you're being sarcastic or not.:)
Assuming the question is serious, AMD stands for Advanced Micro Devices, who manufacture x86 CPUs in major and increasingly successful competition with Intel. See the AMD website at http://www.amd.com for more information.
Welcome to Linux. You may find the learning curve with it steeper than you expected, but I think the majority of us would feel that it's worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.qlitech.net
Maybe with MickeyD out of the way some smaller companies more dedicated to Linux can participate and prosper.
IBM would be another option if you prefer a major name brand.
Because we have no billyware here at all: including desktops.
Besides lack of security, other objections include fs instability, poor ability to sustain tcpip connections, code bloat, the need for constant rebooting and an ugly primitive and stupid desktop that is impossible to modify beyond superficial changes.
Our strongest objection though is that m$ is motivated by a culture of customer abuse, engineering deliberate incompatibilities with competing software as well as their own older coding, forcing their victims to upgrade at great expense to simply continue the same functional usage they'd been doing for years, and each iteration increases their level of dependency on m$ and excludes more, often better competing products.
This has already come to the attention of our community, our industry in general and the courts, and the U.S. Court of Appeals recently upheld an earlier ruling that m$ is operating as an illegal monopoly.
This same court however has handed down a ruling calling for reconsideration of a remedy. I won't volunteer my suggestions here because they haven't been requested. In the meantime, if any corporations running windoze are reading this and find themselves suddenly interested in installing Linux I would invite them to contact me or any of my competitors in the Linux community to discuss this further.
A few years back I could search for, say, "thai food" and without much additional effort find a kewl recipie from someone in Thailand with an html editor. Back then, I might be inclined to write the author a short note, thanking them for their help (and maybe suggesting kicking up the hot pepper a little). I would say things like that contributed a lot to the attraction of millions of new users onto the internet.
More recently, due to factors like the IPO bubble and paid placements in searchengines, doing that would be a lot more likely to point me to a site maintained by a dotcom operation, with lots and lots of ads and product tieins and some semi-obvious goo-goo doing whatever method of persuasion they can think of to get me to enter an email address [yeah, right]
Ignoring marketing crap like that has become almost subconscious, like slamming shut a popup window before the graphics even begin to load, but even so I think there's a cumulative effect that comes from having to deal with hucksters and panhandlers online on a daily basis, and it isn't uplifting. Knowing that our internet, not to mention our society and culture, is like this (for the time being anyway - a lot of these places are folding as their funds run out) is just simply sad.
One minor point of sublime satisfaction: With Linux i can kill the netscape thread and restart my browser without rebooting when it locks up from some bad m$java, or activeX, or Flash, or whatever those jokers uploaded to do stuff clandestinely to their customers. Incidentally, when I'm talking to Windows users about Linux this fact, along with added security, goes over real well.
I suppose having said all that I should disclaim that I'm not at all an antimaterialist, and that I do when necessary like to purchase online often. The merchants I buy from respect me as a customer and I in turn don't begrudge them the money.
Different businesses have different methods of operation, and deeply different values. The good guys and the others are all equally capitalistic, but the marketplace is and will continue to favor one attitude over the opposite as long as the playing field remains level. The ultimate destination of this process isn't depressing at all, but the present noise level while all this is taking place can be in itself a little annoying to listen to at length without a break.
Borland intended to release a free download from at least the time of the official launch party at Linuxworldexpo last February. [slurp]
.clx compatibility at component level with Delphi 6. (btw, that's usually writted D6 in online messages) Giving developers the option of coding in Kylix on or offsite and compiling their completed sourcecode in Delphi for deployment onto Windoze desktops is of strategic importance in promoting the incursion of Linux into corporate software development, which is another arguably worthwhile Linux objective.
On the #Kylix channels on irc.linux.org and undernet.org "where is the free download" and "is it out yet" are frequently asked questions.
Borland don't care to say exactly how many Delphi licenses they've sold since 1995 but I would estimate roughly around a million. This is a large enough community to make Borland's initative worthwhile and they've done the most thoughtful job they could in porting, with the result that they've produced a Linux RAD tool that their own community is already substantially familiar with and knows how to use.
I support the finding of the U.S. court system that m$ is operating a monopoly illegally and the call issued yesterday by Senator Charles Schumer for additional Congressional investigation, as do many others of us, and expect (not entirely as a result of Gate$ well-deserved legal difficulties) for Linux to continue to trend it's way toward majority OS status later into this decade.
This however raises a question for the Linux community: What are we going to do with these vast herds of Windoze developers, sysadmins, technicians? For some of the programmers at least, Kylix represents an honest and helpful direction they can follow away from Billyware and toward working productively in a Linux environment.
Another point to consider is
Last of all, in Linux, Kylix is simply one of many plausible development options. For any of you who really don't feel comfortable using it, nobody is saying you have to.
I should do up a sign that reads in huge letters:
"This sign was made with GIMP."
Actually, on grounds of common decency I'd postulate two alternatives:
Let him out and return his passport, or let him out and don't.
The tone of Adobe's latest announcement suggests they're willing to treat this essentially as a civil matter. It wouldn't destroy the justice system for those guys to recognize that.
Where is Dimitri Sklyarov right now?
I hope that bail has been arranged - hopefully with his passport returned.
The face that EFF have enough stature to make Adobe wish to arrange a settlement on more suitably subdued terms is commendable, but I hope the guy (who could be any one of us) isn't still stuck in the greybar hotel someplace.
I follow the policy, and would broadly encourage those in the industry generally not already doing so, of encouraging Windoze users to switch to Linux.
This suggestion I'm pleased to see is gathering increasing momentum, and it's arguable that this is a substantial part of the effort made by distro developers to create and improve their GUI installation interfaces.
This isn't a bad thing per se, and their elimination would be counterproductive to the objective of broadening the overall number of Linux users. Also worth mentioning with that objective in mind are installation routines that fail. We're doing this in a climate of strong competition with m$, who go far beyond the truth loudly repeating how easy their products are to operate.
Granted, Linux, or any of the other *nix variants, aren't Windoze under another name, and shouldn't be. Part of the attraction for newbies is the achievement of working successfully through the learning curve, and human factors such as impatience or downright stupidity are an issue here.
Please don't take this posting as flamebait - It's not uploaded with that thought in mind. If you prefer managing an installation through the console, by all means do so: That's what it's for. I've been using CLI here dating back to before the DOS era, and do so routinely and often with Linux right now, so I both respect and understand your preference.
I would comment though that the best cure for a weak GUI is an improved one, and I agree emphatically that opening every port in the universe by default is a real dumb idea. (Why the hell would anyone want that anyway?)
As if www advertising wasn't a big enough mess already, take this hypothetical example:
Say, like millions of relatively obscure people, I put up a website talking about things that matter to me, in the hope that people of broadly similar viewpoint see it and derive some vague benefit. (Posting here is motivated by the same general priniple.)
Hypothecate next, that in order to offset some of the cost of the site, I negotiate formal contractual arrangements for banner ads with spiffy-biffy video cards and a company that makes funny colored hats.
Please note that advertising sales is not my motivation in creating the site in the first place: I'm doing that because I have something to say. Also, I feel good about promoting spiffy-biffy because they're inexpensive and rugged and do a really good job rendering KDE and Gnome, and I like my unusually colored hat.
We're not talking tycoon city here. The site gets a small number of hits, and the revenue stream from it's advertisers is proportionate, but it is serious business nevertheless. It produces steady revenue for me, and is mutually beneficial for my site readers and the advertisers involved.
There must be millions of websites like that all over the world. In fact, there are.
Now, if I'm interpreting the meaning of this "innovation" correctly, along comes m$, and they engineer links to appear on my site to the competitors of spiffy-biffy, whose products only work with windoze, and the hat company. They do this without my permission and I never get paid a damn thing, but m$ sure does.
Something is real wrong with this picture.
It sounds as if for the purpose of this exercise that Dell, Compaq and IBM jump to the conclusion that the purchaser and end-user are invariably the same.
In this industry, hardware specifications and prices are often checked and reported by consultants for their small business or corporate customers. It isn't untypical for the consultancy to cut orders for hardware and software, typically from separate suppliers, and deliver a bundled fully-configured system ready to transfer live data onto.
In this type of scenario it's unusual for the end-user to take a quote and turn around immediately and say "that's a good idea". More often it takes a few days to clarify it into a definite commitment. Radical price fluctuations in that kind of timeframe play havoc not only with consultancy profit margins, but the viability of transactions in that entire business sector.
Blowing off the website and going back to the telephone era isn't going to save MickeyD or Gerstner any money. These guys should read some of their own advertising and:
Use the power of the Information Superhighway for business to drive new transaction models, synergize new partner dynamics in the online community, queef on their swivelchairs and blah, blah, blah.
"Although we're a shop of 1,300 people, we don't have the clout to get Microsoft to change their operating system,"
Makes ya wonder: Despite being a customer that size with toplevel Hollywood connections, m$ is still either too arrogant or stupid to clean up their code for them.
I wonder if this means we can look forward to a movie with Tux co-starring Nicole Kidman. I can't wait!
If there was a single defining moment, I think it would have to be when ISPs began marketing unlimited flat-rate dialup access....and everybody immediately wanted it.
Constant connection, a novelty at first, has an odd, subtle fascination. It changes everything, and I don't think there's any way now for the world to turn back.
It's also worth noting in comparison to more recent airhead stupidity that these providers operate profitably by offering a service that customers actually want, and have no objection to paying a modest proportional fee for in return.
Britney, not Brittany.
I happen to strongly agree with your main point though.
Problems actually concerning the product can be solved with comparitive ease.
Ever listen to a group of females talking about lipstick? They have a million questions, comments, suggestions, criticisms, all as much about them as the product, and this is all treated as vitally important stuff.
Computers and cosmetics have this in common, only over centuries more time, women have evolved a socially-complex method of finding solutions from their mothers, close friends, co-workers or whatever. With computing though, calling techsupport has begun to take on it's own form of cultural roleplay.
I don't know if support will remain this way always or what to do about it, but I suspect a long time, as long as customers are prompted to telephone motivated by things like: "I want to do a spreadsheet that beats the one the guy across the hall is doing" or "I want a LAN because I'm too dumb to do tape backups" (which information they never volunteer either)
The fact that the product is working is immaterial with this type of call, and the caller may not even be paying attention, or may get annoyed when you try to discuss it. They want personal triumph by proxy.
Then compound the problem by metering technicians by how many "repairs" they resolve per hour/day/week, response time, queue count and all that.
My first prize goes to an email i recieved from a user complaining they couldn't send email. I've been scratching my head about that one (and telling the story) for years.
A href="http://www.tuxtops.com/"http://www.tuxtops.o rg
At the moment I travel very little, but when that changes I look forward to getting a Tuxtop of my own, from which M$ will profit not one damned cent.
I was lucky enough to attend Linuxworldexpo in New York City this February. It was great.
About three weeks ago, I saw something online about attendance figures - the show was huge, but even knowing that I was surprised and delighted to see that the total came to approximately 10,000, making it not only the biggest Linux show I ever attended, but the biggest computer event.
The news gets back to Ballmer and he involuntarily drops a big wet turd in his underwear.
This includes ME! I was there, and it counted. I'm not sorry - why should I be?
My own opinion is that aggregated data like that is no invasion of privacy, and TiVo's hands are clean, based on facts presented so far.
Compare this to the activities of banks. They routinely market detailed data of specific purchases including name, address, tel # and personal wealth details and I have a paper mailbox full of the most pathetic collection of trash you ever saw as a result. It would also be nice if I could take a shower without the telephone ringing. Wouldn't ya think paying interest on credit cards out the wazoo would have those guys restrain themselves a little?
I have no sympathy for marketteers and their ever-increasing desperation, but TiVo isn't the problem here.
The average Mac user won't give a rat's ass anyway.
/. crowd aren't the right guys to ask, and that's what makes the equation interesting.
Apple are releasing a BSD distro, heavily modified, targetted at the most content-centric, technically unaware population of users in the history of computing.
The
Their response will fascinate me, becuase they're the ones who will constitute the majority of OSX installed customers - initially, at least.
Apple is planning prebuilt unpack-and-plug-in as the method of distribution for this, right?
Anyway, wishing Apple good luck, if some Apple user wants to wear a penguin t-shirt and say, "me too", he's qualified on a technicality, I guess, and overall, the Linux community should be pleased.
And who knows - some geeky little kid somewhere may start doinking the console open and wind up cooking sumthin really spicy.
I'm not German, but my company doesn't run billyware here (at all) either. Pathetic security is simply one of a long list of objections.
A strongly held opinion that Windoze Sux is neither surprising, nor restricted geographically to the German nation. It truly does puzzle me however, that qualified managers in my country, who have the background to see m$ for what it is (or isn't) have been so laggard in reaching an indentical decision. The fact that m$ was able tp reach the prominence it did within our inductry is an embarrasment to me as an American, and those crooks have clearly had a deleterious effect on our industry.
As Linux continues it's destiny to mature further and gain marketshare, the German decision seems like just one of the earlier major corporate and national defections away from Redmond I expect to see across the unfolding history of this decade. Also, the selection of Solaris, one of the BSDs, or some similar platform does no damage, nor does it invalidate the point.
Hopefully, this time around, users will choose wisely, and base their choices on good code, and quality of engineering and good design, although I know some airheads will still look to popularity statistics for guidance, or be influenced my marketing pitches.
In time m$ will loose desktop majority status, which will accelerate the process, until it fades into a well-deserved failure and obscurity.
is the biggest waste of the 21st century. In an ideal world I'd like to see Congressional hearings in the United States investigating the practices of commercial advertising overall.
The practices of telemarketters especially should be a major focus of this investigation.
The common factor extends to panhandlers: "Pay, pay, pay, and I'll leave you alone" {Or will they?]
FWIW, my ratio of paper junk to substance is greater than my email,and a burden, reflected in increasing taxes, to the recycling authorities who have to deal with it. [Unread]
An intersting corollary:
At approximately the same time, bigspending advertisers [translation: major global multinationals} are complaining that banner ads on websites are a waste because only two people out of a million click'em, and neither one buys anything.
Perhaps this means the pavlovian certaintainty of advertisers so unquestioned in the second half of the last century is dying, along with equally-outdated capitalist myths.
We live in interesting times. The commies threw out their bullshit artists in 1989 [1991 in Russia itself} In America, we still have ours.....for the time being.
Commercial Kylix releases: Si. Free download version: No.
Borland began shipping Kylix on March 8, 2001. For more details, see http://www.borland.com/kylix
The release last week comes in two versions: Desktop Developer and Enterprise Developer, both of which include Apache, databases and database components. Enterprise includes native connectors for IBM DB2 and Oracle.
My understanding of Borland's present planning is that the free download, slated for availability later this year will consist of the IDE only, minus web and database-related functions.
Borland can be reached on 1-800-632-2864 for specific clarification.
This seems to be one of these incidents where neither side is either alltogether guilty or innocent.
As has been mentioned already, the school has a situation which, in light of recent headlines, they can be forgiven for wanting to invstigate.
So then what? The explanation turns out to be a line of perl code, a little sloppy, that posts a textstream at random. This explains the origin of the content.
What follows can't help me avoid questioning the maturity and judgement of the school administrators and police (Why were the police involved anyway? It's a random quote)
It's been a damn long time since I was in school, and I guess what I'm looking for is an element of restraint and authentically adult insight by the authorities. In a perfect world, this would have taught two obviously intelligent students of evident integrity and good character the lessons of insight, fairness in judgement and forgiveness.
Instead, do they come away having discovered that people in authority are shallowminded and insecure in their responsibility?
I'm afraid they might, and I think that's probably the greatest harm here.
I would suggest sites like monster.com and especially www.dice.com
Find something you like the look of and telephone the recruiter. Have a resume prepared for immediate e-mail. If the conversation goes well, that's always the first thing they request.
Good luck.
With a question like that, it's a little hard to tell if you're being sarcastic or not. :)
Assuming the question is serious, AMD stands for Advanced Micro Devices, who manufacture x86 CPUs in major and increasingly successful competition with Intel. See the AMD website at http://www.amd.com for more information.
Welcome to Linux. You may find the learning curve with it steeper than you expected, but I think the majority of us would feel that it's worth it.
Good luck.