Having grown up in Kansas and voted against him every chance I had I don't like the guy, and the company he keeps.
That being said..
one of his children is adopted from China. he puts his money where his mouth is sometimes, and I respect him for that sometimes.
But...
Just look at his voting record. He's voted to force the installation of the same software China wants to use. It seems extremely hypocritical and headline grabbing move to me, instead of something true.
We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave, and that's the way it is and we like it apparently, because no one will make any effort. We like being the land of the monitored and home of the scared. It's not a big deal, and it's to stop the terrorists.
China's doing it because they're mean. We're doing it to protect you, so we're ok. That's the politicians logic for you.
Yeah my daughter will constantly run off the edge dying and loosing all the bricks over and over, it's damn near impossible to get a gold brick out of one of those.
The weirdest bug I've hit so far though was at the end of the ROTJ speeder bikes one. one of the characters got flipped behind the AT-AT and we couldn't get back up, so both couldn't stand on the pads to unlock whatever it was.
The other challenge of a five year old is the 'new game over the old save gamed' feature. I never finished Chibi Robo because of that and didn't want to start over.
I think so, because what a briefcase can hold vs. what my little laptop can hold are several orders of magnitude different.
If your documents were written in code, did you have to provide a cypher ? Just curious, I've never had a border patrol agent search anything the few times I've left the country over the last two years.
Also, a cursory scan of the contents of a brief case vs. a file by file look? It's one thing to open the laptop, check the desktop and it to have a big folder labeled 'CHILD PORN' on it vs. searching with tools to try and find things.
Did they scan in the documents in your brief case, or read through each of them?
yay for spell checker and not looking closely. I knew the word, spelled it wrong and lazily used the firefox spell checker and clicked the wrong one and didn't notice.
Must be just you, I've used safari since it was in early wide beta and available years ago. other than not being fond of the name I've never had an issue with it. Then again i just use it to browse the internet.
Actually, it's quite entertaining. Also, we don't suicide bomb them, we attack, and the police show up and shoot our ship, you get your insurance payout, get another one for 'free', and rinse and repeat.
Yes, they use a 'jihad' theme. The thing is, this is a game, not some life or death thing. It's intentionally irreverant and can be quite funny if you drop your PC life for a bit. nothing quite as amusing as logging onto a kill board and seeing one person has taken out 15 to 20 rather expensive Mackinaw's within a 40 m period. Clearly these are all botters because this was all in one system, the guy would kill one, get popped, and then repeat and they never moved. Pretty sure that if they actually cared / weren't botting the first time an Ibis or a
Also, while there may be a few folks that have gotten caught in the jihad a lot of the folks getting blown to the next kingdom are in fact the botters that the person that leaked this code is apparently after.
I'll admit, when I first joined my corp, which is a part of goonswarm I was shocked at some of the 'euphamisms' that are used for the game mechanics. Being raised in small town Kansas the word 'jew' was never a verb, and many things still make my eyes pop open wide the first time I see them.
That being said, it's not a chore, it's a game. WoW Became a chore so I looked for something else. Goonswarm is reviled by some, and laughed at by others. Meanwhile, we somehow manage to have laugh out loud fun while we loose millions of in game money on it only to replace it 15s later.
Yeah, screaming 'For Allah' in chat and blowing up a 100M ice miner might seem immature, but keep in mind usually the guy screaming Allah might be 15 beers in, with 14 other people egging them on with other things they could say to blow off steam from a shitty day coding, supporting users, or whatever. A lot of us 20 to 40 somethings that play have real life requirements that don't let us go out and sit in a bar and get shitfaced every night, but we can do it in front of a computer.
I just think it's an interesting sociological study in and of itself.
Compared to BoB at least. Bunch of elitist capital ship / titan blobs that magically seem to do some things that you really have to wonder if there isn't a ring of truth to the BoD comments of the last few years.
I've only been playing in ernest now for about six months mind you, I don't have years of history with this game. I played for a little bit in early '06, and late '06 as a 'pubby' and then found a forum that had a corp in EVE, so I joined via that group of people and have been playing that way ever since.
First off, I didn't call them deathstars, you did.
Secondly, I didn't say IBM was poor hardware quality. I stated a well known fact that there were issues with those drives, in fact there was a lawsuit about it and IBM settled the suit. So there was something too it. I'm happy you had better results. I didn't enjoy that luck.
I owned 1x75GB and 4x250GB drives. The 75GB failed, and 2 of the 250GB drives failed. Because I didn't read the part about 'no peanuts' my 75GB was voided and it was never fixed. The second time I sent the 2x250GBs in I made sure not to make that mistake, and they were fixed under warranty and worked until I got rid of the server they were in.
I now happen to buy Seagate hard drives for my personal use, but it happens that the reason I do that is IBM no longer is in the hard drive business so my incentive to buy them is not so high any more.
What was that incentive? I happen to work for them. One of those 'eat your own dogfood' kinda things in that if I can work for them, I can use the stuff in my personal projects. That being said my response was a personal one, on my own time, and didn't express any IBM opinion on the matter.
I'm just expressing my own opinion in the original post was rather dubious in nature because I find it hard to believe no one ever had hard disk fail - ever - I've been using computers now for almost 30 years. From my little Atari 800. Saying that in all that time you never had a disk fail says you either never used computers, or you should buy a lottery ticket. I can remember a 10MB hard drive actually smoking in the late 80s in a Compaq Plus, and the excitement of getting it replaced with a 'hard card' that had a whoppin 20MB on it.
Since then, I've had hard disk never fail the entire time I owned a system, and I've had others crash and burn within weeks of getting them. It's impossible to expect something that does the equivalent of a 747 flying over water 2ft above ground at mach 20 or whatever the stat is to not break every once in a while.
yeah I was being sarcastic, as usual it didn't come across clearly.
I've been deep into 64 bit computing now since the opteron hit the shelves, and nobody - and I mean nobody - generally uses it well for commercial applications. Key word is applications mind you, not servers. In the server space there is lots of good things you can do with the 64-bit capabilities of Opteron or Intel, but on the desktop, heaven forbid if you accidentally get the 64-bit version.
Windows has XP 64 and Vista 64 sure, but they're the redhead bastard stepchilds. Mac OS X tried to do it a little differently, but in Adobe's case they did it to Cocoa but not Carbon. Photoshop is a carbon app, and will require re-write to Cocoa to get 64 bitness. Lightroom is a pure cocoa app as I understand it and will be 64-bit as it comes out.
It's just a timing thing for photoshop. Other than people with too much time on their hands I really doubt a lot of people are going to flip to windows for a single generation of a 64-bit app on the desktop.
I'm not overly concerned, it's not like I'm editing 64 bit color images, 12 - 16 bit tops (but then, I don't have a Hasselblad)
I'd be more concerned if they said something like it ignores 2 of the 4 cores per processor, or can't due SMT, or something else. 64-bit isn't as sexy/important in this case as far as I understand it.
It's the fucking millennial types that are the problem, with their helicopter parents fresh out of college dipshits that fuck up the work. I'm pretty sure that's what the recent negative press was about, not 'gen y'
My experience as someone being tagged with the latter quarter of Gen X the guys I still am friends with get the top end of the Gen Y tags. both of us can't stand the little dipshits that are finishing college as interns and what not, because their work avoidance skills are amazing.
that being said, hope is not lost, because every once in a while you find one that had parents who made them work as hard as the rest of us did.
There is a fine line between moderation and censorship though.
Just post something 'anti-linux' in a slashdot comment, lot of times you'll see the ratings of 'informative, interesting, offtopic, troll, and over rated'
Don't like science? tell your church to logon and moderate the hell out of the evolution article
Don't like the bible? Get all your research partners to logon and moderate the biblical section as 'fiction'
Don't like the democrats? moderate them into oblivion.
It's human nature, until you can break that, each method gets abused. Who is to say that the almighty Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book haven't buried some innovation because the editor didn't like the idea back then? Without peer review lot harder to find, but it happened way back when in that little book called the Bible. There's clear historical evidence of that, even if some people have their fingers in their ear screaming 'I CAN'T HEAR YOU! NA NAH NA' or whatever.
Raleigh actually, most of System x is done in Raleigh (Research Triangle Park)
Sorry for the delay in replying, my 18 month old Mac Pro decided to finally break. yay for applecare I guess.
I agree, tunnel vision is a dangerous thing. What set me off on my rant (with quite entertaining moderation, insightful, informative, and offtopic) was the 'yay, Apple will start something that open source will take over' which to me is one of the faults of Slashdot's comments. Linux is going to solve world hunger because it's free.
if nobody gets paid and everything is given away, I don't see how it'll take over the world because everyone wants to eat. Companies that do that can only last so long and with the market drying up faster than North Carolina in this drought we've been in you have to wonder how long that will last.
That being said, you can work with a certain amount of open-ness. that's what drew me from Linux to Mac OS X in 2001 - 2002 time frame. The core, yes, at its core it's built on an open architecture. however one step above the core is a completely closed system with lots of innovation. Compared to Windows (and even linux, though it's hard to compare Mac OS X to linux) there seems to be massive ammounts of innovation going on and lots of people attracted to it. I don't know how much of it is 'not windows' and how much of it is 'wow shiny' type of things.
To qualify my 'hard to compare' statement I mean that there isn't a press machine behind linux like there is Mac OS X, and there aren't huge sites dedicated to what linux is doing next. So unless you look for it, you're not seeing it.
First off, I'm not trolling, but come on, this response clearly is.
So my troll responses:
That's some great crack your smoking. Or is that in Soviet Russia where you think this will happen?
Or is it the
Step 1: iPhone takes over the market Step 2: someone makes an 'open' device Step 3: ??? Step 4: PROFIT! (oh wait, we give everything away, what?)
I mean, open devices took over the iPod market share quickly...oh wait.
So, now that I got that out of my system I'd like to point out a few issues with your starry eyed response from a hardened cynical 36 year old who has two kids to feed, a mortgage (with a regular 30 year loan thank you), and a few other bills to pay, and likes shiny gadgets to play with.
in otherwords, I need ot make money to get the things I like, because cars aren't free, homes aren't free, and the materials to make them aren't free. Someone expects to be compensated for their work.
So to CYA, I'm speaking of my own personal opinions using examples from my employment.
I work for big blue, I'm in hardware engineering these days. I interact with some of our largest customers on a weekly basis in an effort to get their feedback on what they like/don't like about our stuff and try to convince our really smart people why making something easy to do, or automatable, or whatever is a great idea while at the same time not trying to chase what people want, but try and predict it. I love my job, it's a lot of fun to try and do that and you're not always right, but when you are, it's pretty fun to be right.
I get paid to do that. We use 'open' technology such as Intel or AMD processors, 'industry standard' memory, 'industry standard' chipsets, and we try to put our spin on them to add value so that people will buy our stuff.
We've got competitors who do the same, and others who buy a bunch of crap, slap it in a box and call it a cheap computer and appeal to the 'cheap' vs 'innovation'. Personally, I don't like that. It encourages people to be lazy, not learn much, and just slap crap together made somewhere else and not promote science, math, and all those 'hard' subjects at schools and promotes the slimier legal, MBA, and what not fields. But I get off topic.
If you compare those two companies, one is 'encumbered' by employing PHDs, Masters of Engineering, Computer Science, all that stuff. Because there's an 'open' architecture out there and you could just buy parts from all sorts of people, put it in a metal box, and point at it as a computer.
Sure, that appeals to a few people, and Dell is a great #3 vendor in servers to prove that. Depending on which marketing guy you talk to HP and IBM trade between #1 and #2 depending on what countries & products they count. But, they're more expensive, and they have 'proprietary' solutions (Thinking along the lines of Blade servers especially, but AIX or HP-UX isn't open, neither is Tandem or Mainframes)
They make a lot of money on those 'closed' systems, and while Dell came along and got some of the business in the repeat buyers that buy servers in the 100s or 1000s at a time typically HP or IBM wins because the 'proprietary' stuff they add benefits the customer without burdening the customer with cost.
Maybe it's power usage savings, thermal output savings, managing 100s of nodes simply through a single interface, whatever the reason people continue to buy these things that cost more, sometimes with 98% of the same parts on the inside.
30%. that's a big number on the outside. But sometimes that's the price difference between a Dell and an IBM or HP box. That's not a small number either.
But, people pay it. Why? Maybe that 30% difference saves them 28% total of the 3 or 5 year they own that box because with their tools they can manage 50% more systems per person, or some other measurement like they save $1.0M a year in power costs on that 50,000 server web farm so it makes more sense to buy the more expensive initial
you've never taking Chem 184 or whatever the first level of Chemistry was called? My class had 834 students to start, and about 200 at the end. 147 could have been the final number in my class in 1989.
I agree, we started them hating us. That was one of the few things I agreed with Ron Paul about. I mean the old video of Rumsfeld shaking hands and greeting Saddam like an old buddy just 20 years earlier.
1) i had a very unpopular opinion then. I thought the missionaries arrested were legally arrested in the country. They broke the law, tacking them onto the demand of osama bin laden was a pure disrespect to their beliefs I thought. Be like them showing up at times square and stoning women for not wearing their appropriate clothing, ok maybe not exactly, but we don't have a law that forbids teaching one religion or the other so I can't think of a non-sensationalist example. The challenge is, a lot of our 'little' things end up in people loosing a hand or dying, like, having a beer.. Would think if the death sentence applied St. Patrick's Day parade would be quite the slaughter in NYC.
2) This part is unsubstantiated by my own research. But, to my understanding from reading on the internet, and you know what they say about reading on the internet, the law system in place in Afghanistan was pure islamic law. Since the United States was not a dhimmi of Afghanistan, and as such not subject to their protection (this is the best reference I could find to support that thought) and hence find him innocent of all charges, because he only killed 3rd class people.
Now, the kink in that is yes, according to reports there were actual real live middle easterners killed. They could have/probably were Muslim. Would he have been found guilty of killing them, but not the non-protected 'infidels ' or 'Kafir'? I think based on what we know of Bush looking back at the last 6 years he's been in office since then, he would have refused to let that even be a possibility, hence the tactic they took.
personally, i don't disagree with the attack on Afghanistan itself. I feel culturally it was our only option, there was no workaround that would have been acceptable due to the level of fear/tension/anger here in the states.
I do have a huge issue with the invasion of iraq, and had so at a time and argued for hours with my conservative friend who felt he was a bad guy that needed removing. I felt it detracted from the real issue of extremists using faith as a weapon and that should have been rooted out before doing anything else. His counter argument was the number of people Saddam had killed was good enough reason to do it anyway while we're there. Sadly it appears that I was more correct as both regions are unstable and nothing has been solved, and now, we got a big mess to clean up.
For the record, I was raised catholic, but as I grew into my late teens I started questioning things, and as I moved away from my home from my two parents who were not monsters and treated me very well I quit going to church. Since the early 90s when I made that decision I have tried to come to terms with why it appears that Christianity in the united states surged into the fore front, or if it was always there and as a child I didn't see it. But to me it seemed that until the late 80s, early 90s, evangellicals weren't up in everyones business. Maybe they were more subdued, or, being raised catholic I didn't see it crossing into my TV or my computers.
Fair point, Attract was the wrong verb. Foster? I don't know, it just seems odd to me that the 'all or nothing' approach seems to appear in the Islamic side of the faith compared to the other two abrahamic faiths like Christianity or Judaism.
I was raised catholic until I hit my teenage years, and started to ask questions. The day I moved out was the day I was allowed to stop going to church almost 20 years ago. Haven't been since except in rare occasions such as a wedding, a death, or just trying to avoid a fight on Christmas.
Slashdot Mirror
bad non sequitor, sorry. I mean that a lot of times the things he rails against are things he practices in real life, some, I strongly disagree with.
in this case however, while railing against government sponsored monitoring while he in fact voted for the same thing...smacked of the hypocracy.
At the risk of being labeled troll/flamebait I say to you
Was she hot or something? That's the only excuse I can think of worth feeling that generous.
Having grown up in Kansas and voted against him every chance I had I don't like the guy, and the company he keeps.
...
That being said..
one of his children is adopted from China. he puts his money where his mouth is sometimes, and I respect him for that sometimes.
But
Just look at his voting record. He's voted to force the installation of the same software China wants to use. It seems extremely hypocritical and headline grabbing move to me, instead of something true.
We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave, and that's the way it is and we like it apparently, because no one will make any effort. We like being the land of the monitored and home of the scared. It's not a big deal, and it's to stop the terrorists.
China's doing it because they're mean. We're doing it to protect you, so we're ok. That's the politicians logic for you.
Yeah my daughter will constantly run off the edge dying and loosing all the bricks over and over, it's damn near impossible to get a gold brick out of one of those.
The weirdest bug I've hit so far though was at the end of the ROTJ speeder bikes one. one of the characters got flipped behind the AT-AT and we couldn't get back up, so both couldn't stand on the pads to unlock whatever it was.
The other challenge of a five year old is the 'new game over the old save gamed' feature. I never finished Chibi Robo because of that and didn't want to start over.
Coming soon too we have LEGO Raiders of the Lost Ark and such. It's amazing how fun that game is, especially with a competent second player.
However, play it with a five year old, my god, you'll go insane. It's like playing Contra all over again.
I think so, because what a briefcase can hold vs. what my little laptop can hold are several orders of magnitude different.
If your documents were written in code, did you have to provide a cypher ? Just curious, I've never had a border patrol agent search anything the few times I've left the country over the last two years.
Also, a cursory scan of the contents of a brief case vs. a file by file look? It's one thing to open the laptop, check the desktop and it to have a big folder labeled 'CHILD PORN' on it vs. searching with tools to try and find things.
Did they scan in the documents in your brief case, or read through each of them?
yay for spell checker and not looking closely. I knew the word, spelled it wrong and lazily used the firefox spell checker and clicked the wrong one and didn't notice.
It makes you wonder that if there hadn't been something like Child Porn on there if this would have been overruled.
If it'd been a violation of rights search where they searched and you sued just for that with no criminal conviction.
The sad part, is this sets a president if it is allowed to stand, and whittles away at everything else.
Must be just you, I've used safari since it was in early wide beta and available years ago. other than not being fond of the name I've never had an issue with it. Then again i just use it to browse the internet.
Actually, it's quite entertaining. Also, we don't suicide bomb them, we attack, and the police show up and shoot our ship, you get your insurance payout, get another one for 'free', and rinse and repeat.
Yes, they use a 'jihad' theme. The thing is, this is a game, not some life or death thing. It's intentionally irreverant and can be quite funny if you drop your PC life for a bit. nothing quite as amusing as logging onto a kill board and seeing one person has taken out 15 to 20 rather expensive Mackinaw's within a 40 m period. Clearly these are all botters because this was all in one system, the guy would kill one, get popped, and then repeat and they never moved. Pretty sure that if they actually cared / weren't botting the first time an Ibis or a
Also, while there may be a few folks that have gotten caught in the jihad a lot of the folks getting blown to the next kingdom are in fact the botters that the person that leaked this code is apparently after.
I'll admit, when I first joined my corp, which is a part of goonswarm I was shocked at some of the 'euphamisms' that are used for the game mechanics. Being raised in small town Kansas the word 'jew' was never a verb, and many things still make my eyes pop open wide the first time I see them.
That being said, it's not a chore, it's a game. WoW Became a chore so I looked for something else. Goonswarm is reviled by some, and laughed at by others. Meanwhile, we somehow manage to have laugh out loud fun while we loose millions of in game money on it only to replace it 15s later.
Yeah, screaming 'For Allah' in chat and blowing up a 100M ice miner might seem immature, but keep in mind usually the guy screaming Allah might be 15 beers in, with 14 other people egging them on with other things they could say to blow off steam from a shitty day coding, supporting users, or whatever. A lot of us 20 to 40 somethings that play have real life requirements that don't let us go out and sit in a bar and get shitfaced every night, but we can do it in front of a computer.
I just think it's an interesting sociological study in and of itself.
Compared to BoB at least. Bunch of elitist capital ship / titan blobs that magically seem to do some things that you really have to wonder if there isn't a ring of truth to the BoD comments of the last few years.
I've only been playing in ernest now for about six months mind you, I don't have years of history with this game. I played for a little bit in early '06, and late '06 as a 'pubby' and then found a forum that had a corp in EVE, so I joined via that group of people and have been playing that way ever since.
First off, I didn't call them deathstars, you did.
Secondly, I didn't say IBM was poor hardware quality. I stated a well known fact that there were issues with those drives, in fact there was a lawsuit about it and IBM settled the suit. So there was something too it. I'm happy you had better results. I didn't enjoy that luck.
I owned 1x75GB and 4x250GB drives. The 75GB failed, and 2 of the 250GB drives failed. Because I didn't read the part about 'no peanuts' my 75GB was voided and it was never fixed. The second time I sent the 2x250GBs in I made sure not to make that mistake, and they were fixed under warranty and worked until I got rid of the server they were in.
I now happen to buy Seagate hard drives for my personal use, but it happens that the reason I do that is IBM no longer is in the hard drive business so my incentive to buy them is not so high any more.
What was that incentive? I happen to work for them. One of those 'eat your own dogfood' kinda things in that if I can work for them, I can use the stuff in my personal projects. That being said my response was a personal one, on my own time, and didn't express any IBM opinion on the matter.
I'm just expressing my own opinion in the original post was rather dubious in nature because I find it hard to believe no one ever had hard disk fail - ever - I've been using computers now for almost 30 years. From my little Atari 800. Saying that in all that time you never had a disk fail says you either never used computers, or you should buy a lottery ticket. I can remember a 10MB hard drive actually smoking in the late 80s in a Compaq Plus, and the excitement of getting it replaced with a 'hard card' that had a whoppin 20MB on it.
Since then, I've had hard disk never fail the entire time I owned a system, and I've had others crash and burn within weeks of getting them. It's impossible to expect something that does the equivalent of a 747 flying over water 2ft above ground at mach 20 or whatever the stat is to not break every once in a while.
More like 'those that never owned an IBM Deskstar drive'
yeah I was being sarcastic, as usual it didn't come across clearly.
I've been deep into 64 bit computing now since the opteron hit the shelves, and nobody - and I mean nobody - generally uses it well for commercial applications. Key word is applications mind you, not servers. In the server space there is lots of good things you can do with the 64-bit capabilities of Opteron or Intel, but on the desktop, heaven forbid if you accidentally get the 64-bit version.
Windows has XP 64 and Vista 64 sure, but they're the redhead bastard stepchilds. Mac OS X tried to do it a little differently, but in Adobe's case they did it to Cocoa but not Carbon. Photoshop is a carbon app, and will require re-write to Cocoa to get 64 bitness. Lightroom is a pure cocoa app as I understand it and will be 64-bit as it comes out.
It's just a timing thing for photoshop. Other than people with too much time on their hands I really doubt a lot of people are going to flip to windows for a single generation of a 64-bit app on the desktop.
According to this, 64-bit cocoa was introduced back in March 2007
I'm not overly concerned, it's not like I'm editing 64 bit color images, 12 - 16 bit tops (but then, I don't have a Hasselblad)
I'd be more concerned if they said something like it ignores 2 of the 4 cores per processor, or can't due SMT, or something else. 64-bit isn't as sexy/important in this case as far as I understand it.
while risking an offtopic mod, I'm always on the look out for something to read that I might have missed.
Which titles fit your mod requirement? want to make sure I'd not missed anything.
As a Gen X get off my lawn type.
Gen Y wasn't the problem.
It's the fucking millennial types that are the problem, with their helicopter parents fresh out of college dipshits that fuck up the work. I'm pretty sure that's what the recent negative press was about, not 'gen y'
My experience as someone being tagged with the latter quarter of Gen X the guys I still am friends with get the top end of the Gen Y tags. both of us can't stand the little dipshits that are finishing college as interns and what not, because their work avoidance skills are amazing.
that being said, hope is not lost, because every once in a while you find one that had parents who made them work as hard as the rest of us did.
so, get off my lawn.
There is a fine line between moderation and censorship though.
Just post something 'anti-linux' in a slashdot comment, lot of times you'll see the ratings of 'informative, interesting, offtopic, troll, and over rated'
Don't like science? tell your church to logon and moderate the hell out of the evolution article
Don't like the bible? Get all your research partners to logon and moderate the biblical section as 'fiction'
Don't like the democrats? moderate them into oblivion.
It's human nature, until you can break that, each method gets abused. Who is to say that the almighty Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book haven't buried some innovation because the editor didn't like the idea back then? Without peer review lot harder to find, but it happened way back when in that little book called the Bible. There's clear historical evidence of that, even if some people have their fingers in their ear screaming 'I CAN'T HEAR YOU! NA NAH NA' or whatever.
Raleigh actually, most of System x is done in Raleigh (Research Triangle Park)
Sorry for the delay in replying, my 18 month old Mac Pro decided to finally break. yay for applecare I guess.
I agree, tunnel vision is a dangerous thing. What set me off on my rant (with quite entertaining moderation, insightful, informative, and offtopic) was the 'yay, Apple will start something that open source will take over' which to me is one of the faults of Slashdot's comments. Linux is going to solve world hunger because it's free.
if nobody gets paid and everything is given away, I don't see how it'll take over the world because everyone wants to eat. Companies that do that can only last so long and with the market drying up faster than North Carolina in this drought we've been in you have to wonder how long that will last.
That being said, you can work with a certain amount of open-ness. that's what drew me from Linux to Mac OS X in 2001 - 2002 time frame. The core, yes, at its core it's built on an open architecture. however one step above the core is a completely closed system with lots of innovation. Compared to Windows (and even linux, though it's hard to compare Mac OS X to linux) there seems to be massive ammounts of innovation going on and lots of people attracted to it. I don't know how much of it is 'not windows' and how much of it is 'wow shiny' type of things.
To qualify my 'hard to compare' statement I mean that there isn't a press machine behind linux like there is Mac OS X, and there aren't huge sites dedicated to what linux is doing next. So unless you look for it, you're not seeing it.
First off, I'm not trolling, but come on, this response clearly is.
So my troll responses:
That's some great crack your smoking. Or is that in Soviet Russia where you think this will happen?
Or is it the
Step 1: iPhone takes over the market
Step 2: someone makes an 'open' device
Step 3: ???
Step 4: PROFIT! (oh wait, we give everything away, what?)
I mean, open devices took over the iPod market share quickly...oh wait.
So, now that I got that out of my system I'd like to point out a few issues with your starry eyed response from a hardened cynical 36 year old who has two kids to feed, a mortgage (with a regular 30 year loan thank you), and a few other bills to pay, and likes shiny gadgets to play with.
in otherwords, I need ot make money to get the things I like, because cars aren't free, homes aren't free, and the materials to make them aren't free. Someone expects to be compensated for their work.
So to CYA, I'm speaking of my own personal opinions using examples from my employment.
I work for big blue, I'm in hardware engineering these days. I interact with some of our largest customers on a weekly basis in an effort to get their feedback on what they like/don't like about our stuff and try to convince our really smart people why making something easy to do, or automatable, or whatever is a great idea while at the same time not trying to chase what people want, but try and predict it. I love my job, it's a lot of fun to try and do that and you're not always right, but when you are, it's pretty fun to be right.
I get paid to do that. We use 'open' technology such as Intel or AMD processors, 'industry standard' memory, 'industry standard' chipsets, and we try to put our spin on them to add value so that people will buy our stuff.
We've got competitors who do the same, and others who buy a bunch of crap, slap it in a box and call it a cheap computer and appeal to the 'cheap' vs 'innovation'. Personally, I don't like that. It encourages people to be lazy, not learn much, and just slap crap together made somewhere else and not promote science, math, and all those 'hard' subjects at schools and promotes the slimier legal, MBA, and what not fields. But I get off topic.
If you compare those two companies, one is 'encumbered' by employing PHDs, Masters of Engineering, Computer Science, all that stuff. Because there's an 'open' architecture out there and you could just buy parts from all sorts of people, put it in a metal box, and point at it as a computer.
Sure, that appeals to a few people, and Dell is a great #3 vendor in servers to prove that. Depending on which marketing guy you talk to HP and IBM trade between #1 and #2 depending on what countries & products they count. But, they're more expensive, and they have 'proprietary' solutions (Thinking along the lines of Blade servers especially, but AIX or HP-UX isn't open, neither is Tandem or Mainframes)
They make a lot of money on those 'closed' systems, and while Dell came along and got some of the business in the repeat buyers that buy servers in the 100s or 1000s at a time typically HP or IBM wins because the 'proprietary' stuff they add benefits the customer without burdening the customer with cost.
Maybe it's power usage savings, thermal output savings, managing 100s of nodes simply through a single interface, whatever the reason people continue to buy these things that cost more, sometimes with 98% of the same parts on the inside.
30%. that's a big number on the outside. But sometimes that's the price difference between a Dell and an IBM or HP box. That's not a small number either.
But, people pay it. Why? Maybe that 30% difference saves them 28% total of the 3 or 5 year they own that box because with their tools they can manage 50% more systems per person, or some other measurement like they save $1.0M a year in power costs on that 50,000 server web farm so it makes more sense to buy the more expensive initial
you've never taking Chem 184 or whatever the first level of Chemistry was called? My class had 834 students to start, and about 200 at the end. 147 could have been the final number in my class in 1989.
I believe the difference was the ability to distribute applications without using the App store inside your corporate network.
(don't know for sure, that's how I understood the answer to one of the questions filtered through the liveblogging)
I agree, we started them hating us. That was one of the few things I agreed with Ron Paul about. I mean the old video of Rumsfeld shaking hands and greeting Saddam like an old buddy just 20 years earlier.
Couple comments to the linked article.
1) i had a very unpopular opinion then. I thought the missionaries arrested were legally arrested in the country. They broke the law, tacking them onto the demand of osama bin laden was a pure disrespect to their beliefs I thought. Be like them showing up at times square and stoning women for not wearing their appropriate clothing, ok maybe not exactly, but we don't have a law that forbids teaching one religion or the other so I can't think of a non-sensationalist example. The challenge is, a lot of our 'little' things end up in people loosing a hand or dying, like, having a beer.. Would think if the death sentence applied St. Patrick's Day parade would be quite the slaughter in NYC.
2) This part is unsubstantiated by my own research. But, to my understanding from reading on the internet, and you know what they say about reading on the internet, the law system in place in Afghanistan was pure islamic law. Since the United States was not a dhimmi of Afghanistan, and as such not subject to their protection (this is the best reference I could find to support that thought) and hence find him innocent of all charges, because he only killed 3rd class people.
Now, the kink in that is yes, according to reports there were actual real live middle easterners killed. They could have/probably were Muslim. Would he have been found guilty of killing them, but not the non-protected 'infidels ' or 'Kafir'? I think based on what we know of Bush looking back at the last 6 years he's been in office since then, he would have refused to let that even be a possibility, hence the tactic they took.
personally, i don't disagree with the attack on Afghanistan itself. I feel culturally it was our only option, there was no workaround that would have been acceptable due to the level of fear/tension/anger here in the states.
I do have a huge issue with the invasion of iraq, and had so at a time and argued for hours with my conservative friend who felt he was a bad guy that needed removing. I felt it detracted from the real issue of extremists using faith as a weapon and that should have been rooted out before doing anything else. His counter argument was the number of people Saddam had killed was good enough reason to do it anyway while we're there. Sadly it appears that I was more correct as both regions are unstable and nothing has been solved, and now, we got a big mess to clean up.
For the record, I was raised catholic, but as I grew into my late teens I started questioning things, and as I moved away from my home from my two parents who were not monsters and treated me very well I quit going to church. Since the early 90s when I made that decision I have tried to come to terms with why it appears that Christianity in the united states surged into the fore front, or if it was always there and as a child I didn't see it. But to me it seemed that until the late 80s, early 90s, evangellicals weren't up in everyones business. Maybe they were more subdued, or, being raised catholic I didn't see it crossing into my TV or my computers.
Fair point, Attract was the wrong verb. Foster? I don't know, it just seems odd to me that the 'all or nothing' approach seems to appear in the Islamic side of the faith compared to the other two abrahamic faiths like Christianity or Judaism.
I was raised catholic until I hit my teenage years, and started to ask questions. The day I moved out was the day I was allowed to stop going to church almost 20 years ago. Haven't been since except in rare occasions such as a wedding, a death, or just trying to avoid a fight on Christmas.