/* and the very term "hate crime" is meaningless to me. [...] Hate crime: I kill a jew because I hate jews. Did I commit a crime? Of course, but it was not hating jews - it was murder. */
You must 1st understand the nature of the beast...
The term hate crime was created so that certain crimes could be dealt with more harshly _because_ of racial or religious implications. Murder is murder and whatnot.
However if you beet someone to a bloody pulp just because he got in your way that is a relatively minor offense. The courts go easy on you ( rarely more than a few months in prison ) because it is assumed you will simply learn your lesson and contain your anger next time.
However when a gang of Skinhead thugs beat the stuffing out of a nigger, the situation is different.
1st. The anger involved wasn't immediate and transient. It's something that has been carefully built for years before use.
2nd. The crime is more likely to be repeated because a Nazi honestly thinks he is on a holy crusade to protect his own kind from an alien invader of sorts.
For a real life example. If I have a quarrel with my priest ( How dare he not give a mob hitman absolution ? ) and come back to burn down the church then it's a simple act of Arson that won't escalate.
However what happens when 200 black churches ( in theory this doesn't exist. In practices American blacks and whites attend different temples. especially in the south ) are burned to the ground in one year ? It's considered an organized hate crime and someone caught for one is treated almost as a serial arsonist or a conspirator on the others. This stuff can't generally be proven but you can sometimes prove that the color of the congregation was the motive.
and don't get me started on the Sphinx. The infamous "broken nose" was shot off with mortar fire by French or Italian troops because a broad flat nose on such a huge and ancient monument implies something they were not willing to consider. In theory this is an act of vandalism on par with painting a mustache on Mona Lisa ( never happened ). The racial implications add a lot to the crime however. The perpetrators wanted to claim the Sphinx and by extension the Pyramids as being the creation of Europeans or failing that space aliens. Nobody can claim a great engineer as inferior or less than human so destroy the evidence of that engineering and you can get by.
Lucky for us all, one of the newer and larger pyramids contained detailed documentation of how it was built. This was only recently translated. 150,000 full time workers for 15 years. As many as a million part time volunteers. Too bad the shiny tiles that covered the surface were all stolen. They are impressive now. Imagine when they sparkled in the sunlight ?
Note: Hate Speech and people who use it do not need to be suppressed. Merely watched from a distance. Invariably they escalate to Hate Crimes and are hence subject to imprisonment. They don't preach that "We whites must work harder and build more wealth and power for ourselves". Rather that "These [insert favorite grope here] must be driven back from whence they came at gunpoint because they are steeling our jobs and rapping our women and we don't care if there is no truth to any of this.
PS : It's not widely known but Nazis also killed all the Black people they found in Germany. It's only luck that there were not 6 million of them to make it a holocaust.
No rest, Malnutrition and a bad attitude. Meanwhile the Linux admin has time to work out and whereas a penguin on his T-shirt which everyone knows causes women to want sex with you. ( sex is exercise and builds lower back strength while improving balance, dexterity and rhythm.)
The NT admin is no match for the Linux admin. Playing quake and pumping iron in your office doesn't hurt ( all the better for filling out that sexy XXXL Penguin emblazoned T-shirt.)
For some reason I suspect "build a faster ship" to be a problem more easily solved than all the others we worry about.
BTW: If you Accelerate at 1G for a 2 years, you will come pretty close to light speed. Personally, I don't think Light speed is a real barrier in the vacuum. Except that space isn't really a vacuum and at that kind of speed dust could rip a conventional ship apart.
So we need a Warp drive and force fields. Artificial gravity is a mere side benefit ( Accelerating at a steady 1G == artificial gravity on board ).
Actually the theory of relativity has the solution to long term interstellar travel. The theory goes that time slows down as the speed you are traveling at increases. As you approach the speed of light time almost comes to a standstill.
This means that a flight to alpha century at just under light speed would take a little over 4 years for the people on earth but mere days for the crew of the ship.
Then there is the question of defining close quarters. If you follow mainstream comics ( Marvel, DC ) and TV SiFi then you know there are many stories of whole civilizations adrift in ships for generations. The key to survival is that these ships must be very very large.
Add Cryogenics to the mix ( which by the way nobody has got working and I suspect those people already frozen cannot be resurrected.
For a moment I thought it was all the DHMO based kind. HTTP://www.dhmo.org but alas this stuff is just as dangerous. Lakes of Lava. sheshee, and I thought Kingston Harbor was bad to swim in.
It is worth noting however that these items force IO to have a climate that's almost fit for human habitation. Sure there is lots of Volcanic activity but the general temperature has to approach livable limits.
My own bet however is that when we eventually do find life on another planet it will not be one in our solar system. That however is based on the idea that life is too complex to occur entirely by accident. If it did come about that way, IO and Titan may have some living microbes swimming around.
I however expect a universe that looks much like the Star Trek/Wars universe. I.e. many civilizations of various levels of advancement that never invaded earth simply because they didn't want to or were busy doing other things.
Then again maybe we are the decedents of an occupying force from another planet.
No. They are ambitious and desperate people looking for an escape from poverty. For such people simply living inside the USA is all it takes for them to acquire relatively huge amounts of wealth.
They already have better education and a stronger work ethic than the typical american. The only reason Jamaicans don't go to the US in the same way is that 1. It's very hard to navigate around Cuba and find the US without proper sailing skills and/or equipment and 2. The US government will simply deport any Jamaican boat people it finds in Florida. Cubans on the other hand get to stay simply by asking for "political asylum".
So those Cubans are by no means dumb. Quite the opposite they are seeking the best possible future for themselves and their families. If you are trained in Cuba and migrate to the US you will be able to buy your own home and save enough to open your own business in far less time than it would take to do the same in Cuba. For many, those simple dreams are simply not possible in a depressed economy.
Now if only we ( Jamaica ) could figure out a way to make Uncle Sam treat us as political refuges.
According to IRS statistics, Jamaican's living in the US earn more, save more and have more rapid growth in net worth than any other ethnic grope. The Jews are a close 2nd.
If LDS means what I think ( chorch of jesos christ of Later Day Saints ) then no. They are not realy christians. They are Mormons.
Having read the book of Mormon ( availeble at Barnsandnoble and Amazon ) I can safewly say that it's a whole other religeon with it's own uniqu belifes and practices.
Those rools have changed and they changed a looong time ago. My brother went there with a teem of missionaries in around 1993. A few interesting things to know about Cuba that most Americans are seriously mistaken about;
Cubans are allowed to leave the country. It's just hard to get a US visa. No visas are required for going to other Caribbean countries and the nearby University hospital has around 150 Cuban nurses and 30 Cuban doctors on staff. ( That's hardly enough to notice, really ).
The tourism sector in Cuba is booming. Mostly from Americans who go there via Jamaica.
Citizens get rations of basic foods and cloths in addition to whatever they may earn but salaries are low, like in most pore countries.
Cuban prostitutes are on average the most beautiful anywhere west of the atlantic. Girls who look that good in other countries do not need to walk the streets.
Cubana ( Cuban Airlines ) has daily flights to Jamaica.
Make up your mind. Do you want to favorite Bear or do you want to include Bud in the pole ? Hint: That's like asking about favorite aircraft and including the "F-150".
Failyor is not an Option. It's included with every copy of Win2K.
Ohh... sorry, I thought you were quoting Microsoft, marketspeak.
NASA is cool in the way they succeed even when Murphy's law takes a turn for the worst.
Murphy's Law #1 -: If anything can go wrong it probably will. ( I.e. A picnic with No Umbrella means rain. )
Murphy's Law #2 -: If nothing can go wrong, something definitely will. ( I.e. A picnic with proper shelter means horizontal wind driven rain. )
Murphy's Law #3 -: If you go in expecting to benefit from a failure or foul-up then things will run smoothly. ( I.e. When you park the car outside expecting that rain will wash it for you, dry weather will come ).
Just ask the crew of Apollo 13 how much fun they had.
SGI was around when it was fashionable to own your own OS. Then they switched to Unix and are one of the few survivors from that war.
When Unix started to fall they saw it as a Windows NT world in the making and began to turn that way. However 1/2 way through the transition they realized NT had already peaked and was on it's way down. So they are taking up Linux.
If BEOS shows some signs of being "the next big thing" they will adopt that too.
Some people see this as being indecisive. I see it as flowing the money and the customer who spends it. Only companies that do that have long term viability. Just ask IBM how they made it through the last 100+ years to the point where I haven't seen a new IBM typewriter in years. ( Once opon a time that was *the* IBM business )
Sun on the other hand shows no singes of being able to outlive Solaris and no OS is forever. Sure unix has been with us for 30 years but who uses AT&T Unix still ?
Ohh.. BTW. The boixes listed on the "Configurations link" above are kinda sweat but not the real kickass workstations yet. ( SMP ? Where are you ? )
It would be helpful if some of these patents were very general and onproveble. I.e. in the same class as "One Click Shopping". This way they could be used as a club whenever someone tries to harass a GPLed product for violating such a patent.
Before you react, read the Halloween Documents. At least one researcher in Microsoft ( Where is Vinoid Vilapolil [SP?] these days ? ) suggested this specific tactic as a way to combat free software.
5 years ago when I started to use Linux one of the things I noticed was that Netscape Navigator had two Linux builds. A static Motif and a Dynamic Motif version. I eventually gave up on that without ever having seen Dynamic Motif on a Linux system. It existed back then, I just had not seen it.
These days Netscape no longer produces the smaller DynaMotif build. Probably realizing nobody uses it. This release dose matter for another reason however.
POSIX actually requires Motif. Linux aims to be Posix compliant and this was one of the main barriers to that. If memory serves ( And it probably doesn't ) Caldera had produced a distribution which included a Commercial Motif and sold for around $300. This distrib either was Posix compliant or almost compliant.
It really is that simple. Tell them that this program is your personal property and has been for some years and any changes you make to it must remain under the original copyright. The fact that you wrote and own this baby means that they are assured of a few things.
1. Never having to worry about compatibility with the official version.
2. Having absolutely the best possible bug fixer for this prog on staff
3. Having one very Gruntled ( It's a word if I say so ) employee who is getting paid to do what he did for free before.
Unless your employer is truly, monumentally anal retentive he should go for this. Just be polite about it. Start by printing out the CREDITS file ( or your programs equivalent ) and the GPL ( not that this is relevant ).
Did it ever occur to you that they may already know about your status and chose you from the pack _because_ you wrote an application they need improved ?
The number of users is just one small aspect of how much IT staff you need. Vastly more important is the kind of network you run. What types of servers and how knowledgeable are each of these tech support people.
As an example a company running on NT servers with 76 users has a Network that's mostly BNC ethernet. On the desktops many machines are running beyond the physical capabilities (P100+16MB running Win98. Similar machine with 32 megs running Win2K).
they have no power protection and they run several hurriedly written custom apps on underpowerd servers. with slightly broken VB fruntends on the desktops.
The 5 member IT staff is overworked.
Another company of 112 users has a single Turnkey application running on SCO. They have a stove sized UPs running the server room and little ones scattered on roughly 87 of the desktops. They also have an NT server running Lotus notes. They have a Linux server acting as an internet gateway ( Thank you wwww.e-smith.net ) and doing the heavy file serving. Twisted pare from end to end with 100MB Ethernet split out from a switch to a dozen small hubs and 10 meg ethernet on the desktops. Except for those 4 mac users who do graphics stuff. ( There are also two Windows PCs and a Linux box in that room but only 4 users betweanthe 7 machines. )
There has been no attempt to organize printing. the 1 full time IT man has become very good at Quake. He is paid almost 2X what each of the 5 above makes however.
KDE set a release date for this BETA. As that date drew near they found it wasn't quite stable enough to call a BETA. So they didn't release one until now.
Sure there are people who will complain about this but the fact is quality is more important than time.
As for new features. I have been using the CVS code for a few months now and the UI improvements are truly astounding. There is evidence of this KDE being extremely fast. I haven't bench marked it but it's faster than the old one IMHO.
KOffice is truly ambitious. I have managed to get real work done in KOffice and some people have actually begin using KPresenter at conferences, What really impresses me though is the OLE like functionality. When you embed bits and pieces of different document types into a Presentation or a KWOrd doc you can edit them in place. The menus change on cue and the whole thing prefers not to crash. It dose keel over but not surprisingly often for a beta program.
This baby also comes in several languages already. English, German and French have nearly 100% coverage and some others come pretty close. Anyone who speaks another language natively and is fluent in one of these core languages should go join up.
Finally KWord is in need of developers. Sure there are other programs with manpower problems, even within KDE but KWord is IMHO the most important program for which the lead developer has made a special appeal.
Sure Oracle has a hell of a lot more features than Postgress. It had better since it's more than an Order of Magnitude larger (and yes, I know what that means). However for the majority of database tasks you don't need any of those extra features. In those cases people still go with Oracle for support and a developers infrastructure etc...
It's like the case with Linux a few years ago when companies started to back it for profit. Sure it didn't have all the high-end features of other Unix or the ease of Windows but for many tasks it was more than good enough and for some it was the best choice. However, the boss wants to buy it somewhere even if he can get it for free.
If these people can supply the support and the name branding, then developers can say, "just buy a database from this place". How about similar orgs for SamBa, and KDE. Well, I guess Burland / Corel is becoming that since this Kylix thing will generate pure KDE code on the QT libs.
Somehow I get the feeling that Astronomers are working against the grain of normal science right now. I.e. they theorize that something exists because it would have to in order for some other theory to be true. Then they go off and do whatever it takes to prove it's existence.
When they fail to achieve this they just try again.
Eventually. some theories will have to be abandoned and others that were previously called laughable are found to be true. This whole "dark matter" thing is an example. I.e. there is a vast amount of matter in the universe that doesn't show up on any of the scans. In fact, vastly more than dose show up or can be accounted for in interstellar gas and black holes etc...
Why dose this dark matter exist ? Because without it the Big Bang is called into question. Of course the BB can't be wrong. We have built whole curriculums around this. It MUST be true.
Other scientists are quicker to throw away used theories. Maybe I am being too harsh. After all it's hard to sit in one far corner of the universe and see what the whole looks like.
I was going to say "the latest Dildo" but then I thought better of it. I'll leave that kind of comment for an AC.
Instead I'll ask what took so long and when can I get a waterproof rubber wrapped web pad with a touch screen pointing device and a Transmeta chip. It took a lot of work to move an old PS/2 into the bathroom so I could brows while siting on the throne. With this I should be able to surf in the tub.
Latter on we can deal with a laptop version where shear bulk is sacrificed to get you everything you need. I.e. Solar panels, 3 day battery life, wireless internet connection, sound. No removable media and 3 layers of sealing to get to the adapter port for when you really need to plug in.
I certainly wouldnt want people opening up the sealed units within my engine, I certainly would not want to go on a Bus where the driver and any old person could fiddle with it and I wouldnt go on a plane where the pilot could get out and tamper with it.
The reason is that each and every one of these claims is bogus at best ( unless you walk everywhere ).
I certainly wouldnt want people opening up the sealed units within my engine,
Mechanics go wherever they need to inside an engine. Sometimes that means "tampering" with a seal unit and other time it means replacing that unit with a compatible one. Clueless drivers just don't know how the car was fixed.
I certainly would not want to go on a Bus where the driver and any old person could fiddle with it
Next time you get on a bus talk to the driver. Most of the bus drivers I know are second rate mechanics. They fix little things themselves and some other person in the office fixes big things. Maybe it's different in your side of the world but Bus companies around here NEVER buy support from the dealer.
and I wouldnt go on a plane where the pilot could get out and tamper with it.
uhm... You do know that a Commercial Pilot is required to know a little about how a plane works right ? In an emergency the pilot may be required to make repairs. I.e. What do you do when the landing gear on a 747 is jammed ?
Around here the term "Buff" is reserved for the unique bulging curvature of "the mound of venus". That female body part for which we have found so many colorful names ( including "Red" ).
In this case the various stages of Bufness are on a scale similar to the various levels of Bufness the way emmett probably meant it. Therefore by being "really buff" would make you attractive to Heterosexual men. The same kind who get mad when the realize they are dating a man in disguise.
So emmett. Next time be more careful what you wish for. A larger more muscular body is more accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
/*
and the very term "hate crime" is meaningless to me. [...] Hate crime: I kill a jew because I hate jews. Did I commit a crime? Of course, but it was not hating jews - it was murder.
*/
You must 1st understand the nature of the beast...
The term hate crime was created so that certain crimes could be dealt with more harshly _because_ of racial or religious implications. Murder is murder and whatnot.
However if you beet someone to a bloody pulp just because he got in your way that is a relatively minor offense. The courts go easy on you ( rarely more than a few months in prison ) because it is assumed you will simply learn your lesson and contain your anger next time.
However when a gang of Skinhead thugs beat the stuffing out of a nigger, the situation is different.
1st. The anger involved wasn't immediate and transient. It's something that has been carefully built for years before use.
2nd. The crime is more likely to be repeated because a Nazi honestly thinks he is on a holy crusade to protect his own kind from an alien invader of sorts.
For a real life example. If I have a quarrel with my priest ( How dare he not give a mob hitman absolution ? ) and come back to burn down the church then it's a simple act of Arson that won't escalate.
However what happens when 200 black churches ( in theory this doesn't exist. In practices American blacks and whites attend different temples. especially in the south ) are burned to the ground in one year ? It's considered an organized hate crime and someone caught for one is treated almost as a serial arsonist
or a conspirator on the others. This stuff can't generally be proven but you can sometimes prove that the color of the congregation was the motive.
and don't get me started on the Sphinx. The infamous "broken nose" was shot off with mortar fire by French or Italian troops because a broad flat nose on such a huge and ancient monument implies something they were not willing to consider. In theory this is an act of vandalism on par with painting a mustache on Mona Lisa ( never happened ). The racial implications add a lot to the crime however. The perpetrators wanted to claim the Sphinx and by extension the Pyramids as being the creation of Europeans or failing that space aliens. Nobody can claim a great engineer as inferior or less than human so destroy the evidence of that engineering and you can get by.
Lucky for us all, one of the newer and larger pyramids contained detailed documentation of how it was built. This was only recently translated. 150,000 full time workers for 15 years. As many as a million part time volunteers. Too bad the shiny tiles that covered the surface were all stolen. They are impressive now. Imagine when they sparkled in the sunlight ?
Note: Hate Speech and people who use it do not need to be suppressed. Merely watched from a distance. Invariably they escalate to Hate Crimes and are hence subject to imprisonment. They don't preach that "We whites must work harder and build more wealth and power for ourselves". Rather that "These [insert favorite grope here] must be driven back from whence they came at gunpoint because they are steeling our jobs and rapping our women and we don't care if there is no truth to any of this.
PS : It's not widely known but Nazis also killed all the Black people they found in Germany. It's only luck that there were not 6 million of them to make it a holocaust.
PPS : France is still asking too much.
No rest, Malnutrition and a bad attitude. Meanwhile the Linux admin has time to work out and whereas a penguin on his T-shirt which everyone knows causes women to want sex with you. ( sex is exercise and builds lower back strength while improving balance, dexterity and rhythm.)
The NT admin is no match for the Linux admin. Playing quake and pumping iron in your office doesn't hurt ( all the better for filling out that sexy XXXL Penguin emblazoned T-shirt.)
For some reason I suspect "build a faster ship" to be a problem more easily solved than all the others we worry about.
BTW: If you Accelerate at 1G for a 2 years, you will come pretty close to light speed. Personally, I don't think Light speed is a real barrier in the vacuum. Except that space isn't really a vacuum and at that kind of speed dust could rip a conventional ship apart.
So we need a Warp drive and force fields. Artificial gravity is a mere side benefit ( Accelerating at a steady 1G == artificial gravity on board ).
Actually the theory of relativity has the solution to long term interstellar travel. The theory goes that time slows down as the speed you are traveling at increases. As you approach the speed of light time almost comes to a standstill.
This means that a flight to alpha century at just under light speed would take a little over 4 years for the people on earth but mere days for the crew of the ship.
Then there is the question of defining close quarters. If you follow mainstream comics ( Marvel, DC ) and TV SiFi then you know there are many stories of whole civilizations adrift in ships for generations. The key to survival is that these ships must be very very large.
Add Cryogenics to the mix ( which by the way nobody has got working and I suspect those people already frozen cannot be resurrected.
It is worth noting however that these items force IO to have a climate that's almost fit for human habitation. Sure there is lots of Volcanic activity but the general temperature has to approach livable limits.
My own bet however is that when we eventually do find life on another planet it will not be one in our solar system. That however is based on the idea that life is too complex to occur entirely by accident. If it did come about that way, IO and Titan may have some living microbes swimming around.
I however expect a universe that looks much like the Star Trek/Wars universe. I.e. many civilizations of various levels of advancement that never invaded earth simply because they didn't want to or were busy doing other things.
Then again maybe we are the decedents of an occupying force from another planet.
No. They are ambitious and desperate people looking for an escape from poverty. For such people simply living inside the USA is all it takes for them to acquire relatively huge amounts of wealth.
They already have better education and a stronger work ethic than the typical american. The only reason Jamaicans don't go to the US in the same way is that 1. It's very hard to navigate around Cuba and find the US without proper sailing skills and/or equipment and 2. The US government will simply deport any Jamaican boat people it finds in Florida. Cubans on the other hand get to stay simply by asking for "political asylum".
So those Cubans are by no means dumb. Quite the opposite they are seeking the best possible future for themselves and their families. If you are trained in Cuba and migrate to the US you will be able to buy your own home and save enough to open your own business in far less time than it would take to do the same in Cuba. For many, those simple dreams are simply not possible in a depressed economy.
Now if only we ( Jamaica ) could figure out a way to make Uncle Sam treat us as political refuges.
According to IRS statistics, Jamaican's living in the US earn more, save more and have more rapid growth in net worth than any other ethnic grope. The Jews are a close 2nd.
1. I am dyslectic
http://www.dislexia.org
2. I was on a clumsy keyboard for that post.
3. I graduated university.
If LDS means what I think ( chorch of jesos christ of Later Day Saints ) then no. They are not realy christians. They are Mormons.
Having read the book of Mormon ( availeble at Barnsandnoble and Amazon ) I can safewly say that it's a whole other religeon with it's own uniqu belifes and practices.
Onfortunatly the members tend to think otherwise.
Those rools have changed and they changed a looong time ago. My brother went there with a teem of missionaries in around 1993. A few interesting things to know about Cuba that most Americans are seriously mistaken about;
Cubans are allowed to leave the country. It's just hard to get a US visa. No visas are required for going to other Caribbean countries and the nearby University hospital has around 150 Cuban nurses and 30 Cuban doctors on staff. ( That's hardly enough to notice, really ).
The tourism sector in Cuba is booming. Mostly from Americans who go there via Jamaica.
Citizens get rations of basic foods and cloths in addition to whatever they may earn but salaries are low, like in most pore countries.
Cuban prostitutes are on average the most beautiful anywhere west of the atlantic. Girls who look that good in other countries do not need to walk the streets.
Cubana ( Cuban Airlines ) has daily flights to Jamaica.
Is that the Check Republic or Slovakia ?
Czechoslovakia doesn't exist anymore.
Make up your mind. Do you want to favorite Bear or do you want to include Bud in the pole ? Hint: That's like asking about favorite aircraft and including the "F-150".
1) Red Stripe
2) Guinness
6) Heineken
Failyor is not an Option. It's included with every copy of Win2K.
Ohh... sorry, I thought you were quoting Microsoft, marketspeak.
NASA is cool in the way they succeed even when Murphy's law takes a turn for the worst.
Murphy's Law #1 -: If anything can go wrong it probably will. ( I.e. A picnic with No Umbrella means rain. )
Murphy's Law #2 -: If nothing can go wrong, something definitely will. ( I.e. A picnic with proper shelter means horizontal wind driven rain. )
Murphy's Law #3 -: If you go in expecting to benefit from a failure or foul-up then things will run smoothly. ( I.e. When you park the car outside expecting that rain will wash it for you, dry weather will come ).
Just ask the crew of Apollo 13 how much fun they had.
http://www.opensource.org/halloween
SGI was around when it was fashionable to own your own OS. Then they switched to Unix and are one of the few survivors from that war.
When Unix started to fall they saw it as a Windows NT world in the making and began to turn that way. However 1/2 way through the transition they realized NT had already peaked and was on it's way down. So they are taking up Linux.
If BEOS shows some signs of being "the next big thing" they will adopt that too.
Some people see this as being indecisive. I see it as flowing the money and the customer who spends it. Only companies that do that have long term viability. Just ask IBM how they made it through the last 100+ years to the point where I haven't seen a new IBM typewriter in years. ( Once opon a time that was *the* IBM business )
Sun on the other hand shows no singes of being able to outlive Solaris and no OS is forever. Sure unix has been with us for 30 years but who uses AT&T Unix still ?
Ohh.. BTW. The boixes listed on the "Configurations link" above are kinda sweat but not the real kickass workstations yet. ( SMP ? Where are you ? )
It would be helpful if some of these patents were very general and onproveble. I.e. in the same class as "One Click Shopping". This way they could be used as a club whenever someone tries to harass a GPLed product for violating such a patent.
Before you react, read the Halloween Documents. At least one researcher in Microsoft ( Where is Vinoid Vilapolil [SP?] these days ? ) suggested this specific tactic as a way to combat free software.
5 years ago when I started to use Linux one of the things I noticed was that Netscape Navigator had two Linux builds. A static Motif and a Dynamic Motif version. I eventually gave up on that without ever having seen Dynamic Motif on a Linux system. It existed back then, I just had not seen it.
These days Netscape no longer produces the smaller DynaMotif build. Probably realizing nobody uses it. This release dose matter for another reason however.
POSIX actually requires Motif. Linux aims to be Posix compliant and this was one of the main barriers to that. If memory serves ( And it probably doesn't ) Caldera had produced a distribution which included a Commercial Motif and sold for around $300. This distrib either was Posix compliant or almost compliant.
It really is that simple. Tell them that this program is your personal property and has been for some years and any changes you make to it must remain under the original copyright. The fact that you wrote and own this baby means that they are assured of a few things.
1. Never having to worry about compatibility with the official version.
2. Having absolutely the best possible bug fixer for this prog on staff
3. Having one very Gruntled ( It's a word if I say so ) employee who is getting paid to do what he did for free before.
Unless your employer is truly, monumentally anal retentive he should go for this. Just be polite about it. Start by printing out the CREDITS file ( or your programs equivalent ) and the GPL ( not that this is relevant ).
Did it ever occur to you that they may already know about your status and chose you from the pack _because_ you wrote an application they need improved ?
The number of users is just one small aspect of how much IT staff you need. Vastly more important is the kind of network you run. What types of servers and how knowledgeable are each of these tech support people.
As an example a company running on NT servers with 76 users has a Network that's mostly BNC ethernet. On the desktops many machines are running beyond the physical capabilities (P100+16MB running Win98. Similar machine with 32 megs running Win2K).
they have no power protection and they run several hurriedly written custom apps on underpowerd servers. with slightly broken VB fruntends on the desktops.
The 5 member IT staff is overworked.
Another company of 112 users has a single Turnkey application running on SCO. They have a stove sized UPs running the server room and little ones scattered on roughly 87 of the desktops. They also have an NT server running Lotus notes. They have a Linux server acting as an internet gateway ( Thank you wwww.e-smith.net ) and doing the heavy file serving. Twisted pare from end to end with 100MB Ethernet split out from a switch to a dozen small hubs and 10 meg ethernet on the desktops. Except for those 4 mac users who do graphics stuff. ( There are also two Windows PCs and a Linux box in that room but only 4 users betweanthe 7 machines. )
There has been no attempt to organize printing. the 1 full time IT man has become very good at Quake. He is paid almost 2X what each of the 5 above makes however.
KDE set a release date for this BETA. As that date drew near they found it wasn't quite stable enough to call a BETA. So they didn't release one until now.
Sure there are people who will complain about this but the fact is quality is more important than time.
As for new features. I have been using the CVS code for a few months now and the UI improvements are truly astounding. There is evidence of this KDE being extremely fast. I haven't bench marked it but it's faster than the old one IMHO.
KOffice is truly ambitious. I have managed to get real work done in KOffice and some people have actually begin using KPresenter at conferences, What really impresses me though is the OLE like functionality. When you embed bits and pieces of different document types into a Presentation or a KWOrd doc you can edit them in place. The menus change on cue and the whole thing prefers not to crash. It dose keel over but not surprisingly often for a beta program.
This baby also comes in several languages already. English, German and French have nearly 100% coverage and some others come pretty close. Anyone who speaks another language natively and is fluent in one of these core languages should go join up.
Finally KWord is in need of developers. Sure there are other programs with manpower problems, even within KDE but KWord is IMHO the most important program for which the lead developer has made a special appeal.
Sure Oracle has a hell of a lot more features than Postgress. It had better since it's more than an Order of Magnitude larger (and yes, I know what that means). However for the majority of database tasks you don't need any of those extra features. In those cases people still go with Oracle for support and a developers infrastructure etc...
It's like the case with Linux a few years ago when companies started to back it for profit. Sure it didn't have all the high-end features of other Unix or the ease of Windows but for many tasks it was more than good enough and for some it was the best choice. However, the boss wants to buy it somewhere even if he can get it for free.
If these people can supply the support and the name branding, then developers can say, "just buy a database from this place". How about similar orgs for SamBa, and KDE. Well, I guess Burland / Corel is becoming that since this Kylix thing will generate pure KDE code on the QT libs.
Somehow I get the feeling that Astronomers are working against the grain of normal science right now. I.e. they theorize that something exists because it would have to in order for some other theory to be true. Then they go off and do whatever it takes to prove it's existence.
When they fail to achieve this they just try again.
Eventually. some theories will have to be abandoned and others that were previously called laughable are found to be true. This whole "dark matter" thing is an example. I.e. there is a vast amount of matter in the universe that doesn't show up on any of the scans. In fact, vastly more than dose show up or can be accounted for in interstellar gas and black holes etc...
Why dose this dark matter exist ? Because without it the Big Bang is called into question. Of course the BB can't be wrong. We have built whole curriculums around this. It MUST be true.
Other scientists are quicker to throw away used theories. Maybe I am being too harsh. After all it's hard to sit in one far corner of the universe and see what the whole looks like.
I was going to say "the latest Dildo" but then I thought better of it. I'll leave that kind of comment for an AC.
Instead I'll ask what took so long and when can I get a waterproof rubber wrapped web pad with a touch screen pointing device and a Transmeta chip. It took a lot of work to move an old PS/2 into the bathroom so I could brows while siting on the throne. With this I should be able to surf in the tub.
Latter on we can deal with a laptop version where shear bulk is sacrificed to get you everything you need. I.e. Solar panels, 3 day battery life, wireless internet connection, sound. No removable media and 3 layers of sealing to get to the adapter port for when you really need to plug in.
Thank you very much. I am sure that any bus driver who comes here wold say something similar.
LINUX - musical horns for the
The reason is that each and every one of these claims is bogus at best ( unless you walk everywhere ).
Mechanics go wherever they need to inside an engine. Sometimes that means "tampering" with a seal unit and other time it means replacing that unit with a compatible one. Clueless drivers just don't know how the car was fixed.
Next time you get on a bus talk to the driver. Most of the bus drivers I know are second rate mechanics. They fix little things themselves and some other person in the office fixes big things. Maybe it's different in your side of the world but Bus companies around here NEVER buy support from the dealer.
uhm... You do know that a Commercial Pilot is required to know a little about how a plane works right ? In an emergency the pilot may be required to make repairs. I.e. What do you do when the landing gear on a 747 is jammed ?
Around here the term "Buff" is reserved for the unique bulging curvature of "the mound of venus". That female body part for which we have found so many colorful names ( including "Red" ).
In this case the various stages of Bufness are on a scale similar to the various levels of Bufness the way emmett probably meant it. Therefore by being "really buff" would make you attractive to Heterosexual men. The same kind who get mad when the realize they are dating a man in disguise.
So emmett. Next time be more careful what you wish for. A larger more muscular body is more accurate.