I see no reason why OS X should take any less time than Linux to support
That makes you sound like someone who's never supported any more users than your parents and that girl from 11th grade English class you had a crush on so you helped her with her computer class project.
The reason why OSX takes less time than Linux to support is - wait for it - that you don't have to spent any time answering stupid questions for users. And anyone who's actually done support knows that answering stupid questions for users is what takes up the majority of the time. Unless they've only supported Mac users, in which case they're unfamiliar with the concept.
Excatly what makes you think you'd end up with the same demand for programmers? If all the software companies in, for example, the United States suddenly evaporated off the planet, do you really think the vast majority of those displacaced would find consultant work? The reason why software companies can hire so many programmers is that they create a product, and millions of people can buy it.
I know a lot of programmers. I don't think I've ever even met one who creates packaged software for sale. I have always assumed that development of shrink-wrappable commercial software was a miniscule part of the industry, and what I'm reading in this thread from other posters supports it.
Thus you get a significant multiple of what you put into it. What you're describing is a service based contract. "Make this for us, and only we use it." How can that possibly work on the same scale as the previous model mentioned?
What does that have to do with jobs? That's a question of business model viability. No amount of marginal profitability will increase the demand for prepackaged software.
Also, aside from a few well supported projects, many projects (just check Sourceforge) do not get updated or bug fixed that often. What I've seen in the OSS field (aside from the few well supported "glamorous" projects) is that initially, there is some interest in the application so it is kept up to date. But since there is no real incentive to keep it going past the initial glitz phase, updates come fewer and farther between until it stagnates.
This is no different from the commercial software world. There is a certain amount of demand for a given piece of software, and that drives the remuneration (be it money, fame, credibility, or whatever) that goes to those who maintain it. If nobody cares about a commercial program, the company drops the product line or goes broke.
The one big advantage of open source here is that you can at least hire someone to pick up the pieces for you. If a closed-source product disappears, you're totally screwed.
I think a better analogy would be Mexican food vs. French cuissine.
Amen, brother. It's about time that goopy French mayonnaise pap stopped getting a free pass just because some pantywaist liberal decided all cuisines deserved equal respect.
i'm interested what country you're in that it's available in.
Malaysia.
however, yesterday i went all over town looking for this movie, and it wasn't available anywhere.
It just appeared two days ago here. I am always curious as to which movies are popular here (because I wonder what sort of perceptions people develop of the West) so I give the tables a scan when I pass by.
oh, and we pay about $3 per dvd instead of $2 (but we have PC games at $2 a pop, sometimes coming with the crack and/or serial number generator...)
Do NOT download this CAM! If you look here you will see that people who have seen both versions have reported that there is at least 20 minutes missing from the middle of the movie! This is a critical part too. Sorry Vcdquality.
Interestingly, we bought it at one of the dozens of pirate DVD stalls downtown (yes, I live in that sort of a country, it's not coming to theatres here anytime soon, and I took Michael Moore's statement as permission to go ahead and do that - at US$2, nobody's making much money), and while all the quality issues are exactly as described in the message board (cut off subtitles, missing sound channels, etc.) the parts that were described as missing were present in this DVD.
How desperate do you reckon they'll have to be before we see an OSX version named "flat-headed cat"?
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i
on
eFax Hell?
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· Score: 2, Funny
This is limitation resulting from first generation 20th century software. 21st century software will note that a person is sending an unusually large document and check (using OCR and a spell checker in the local language on the random portions of the file) to see if it is a rogue transmission
Good God, I hope not.
It looks like you're trying to write a letter! Would you like some tips?
Sounds familiar? That's what you get when some idiot programmer decides to try to outsmart the users by guessing what they're doing: An unholy pain in the rear that every halfway-experienced user makes it their first order of business to deactivate with extreme prejudice before trying to make productive use of their a computer.
When I am trying to crush a deadly snake that is slithering across my thumb, the last thing I want is my Microsoft Hammer beeping at me and refusing to deal the blow because there's no nail around and it's worried I might accidentally hurt my thumb.
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key
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Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 1
the current PC caps lock location is where previously *everyone* had the control key
Not everyone. You may be familiar with typewriters? You know, those devices where the QWERTY layout made its dashing debut? Caps lock was always right above the shift key on manual typewriters, because it engaged a mechanism that physically held the shift key down until it was pressed to release it again.
I've seen Direcway (as resold by Bentley, which I believe was mentioned above) used aplenty in Iraq. So clearly it's possible outside of North America. As to whether their footprint covers Afghanistan, that I cannot answer.
Why would they do that? The letter "C" in French is pronounced much like the word "say" in English. The only point of the cedilla is to soften what would otherwise be a "hard c," such as in façade and François. "C" by itself already has a soft sound.
Duh. Anyone knows that a C followed by a + in French takes on a hard sound unless mollified by a cedilla. Je suis sic+ et tired de votre nonsense.
I'd like to take this idea of living in a low-cost neighborhood and telecommuting to a new extreme. I've been living in China for six months now and have found that the cost of living, including food, housing, transportation, and entertainment is only about $10 a day. Now if I could just get a telecommuting job doing software development for a company in the US I could put tons of money into savings and long-term investments. That way I could retire much earlier or use the savings to develop my own business.
If it makes you feel any better, in about 2 weeks I'm moving off to Asia, and taking my U.S. job with me. The majority of the work I do just requires an internet connection and sometimes a telephone, and the rest involves travel to random places that are just as (in-)accessible from there as here, so why not? I figure the low cost of living means I can drop to about 3/4 time and work on a book.
However, my hunch is that it's a whole lot easier to be in the US, telecommuting, and convince your boss that you might as well be somewhere else more pleasant, than to reach out and find a job from halfway around the planet. Maybe you have to come back home to the US for a spell in order to establish yourself on solid ground in China.
If large numbers of workers are *forced* to work from home when they don't want to, they may ver well demand that the company pay at least part of their housing costs. Maybe even electricity costs to run the computer they'd normally be using at the office.
Taking the Google example, I doubt those costs would come close to the financial and soul-suckage costs of commuting to that Godforsaken middle-of-nowhere campus. Unless you live in a tent at the Shoreline or in the bleakest, dullest part of Mountain View, you've got a serious daily drive (which costs money) or bike ride (which costs laundry).
I guess you can argue there's a handy tradeoff for the worker--less time commuting, less fuel and maintenance costs for car, more time with family, etc.
No doubt about it. Things like time with family and stress-free mornings seem a whole lot more important to me than $45/year in extra electric bills.
The monitor you use to run Photoshop on uses RGB. These precious CMYK colours of yours that cannot be represented in RGB have to be translated to an RGB approximation before you can edit a single pixel.
Photoshop is sensitive to this, and translates the display colors based on your output color model. It also provides a warning when the colors you are trying to work with onscreen are outside the bounds of the colorspace of your selected output device.
Whether or not a designer's screen can simulate matte paper or gloss glare or whatever other irrelevant frippery you can conjure up has nothing to do with the fundamental requirement to be able to precisely specify colors. People who are accustomed to working in four (or more) colors know what something's going to look like when they specify a color outside their monitor's gamut. But that doesn't help them when their software can't tell the printer to use that color, because said software was developed by amateurs who don't know the difference.
Re:Uh, you wanna try your comment again?
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WiFi On Two Wheels
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· Score: 1
I can't wait for some patronizing idiot to complain...
"As a traveller (I did not say tourist)..."
And with that, the person you're quoting firmly establishes himself as an Enterprise-class dickhead.
How do you know you're all that and a bag of chips if you don't expose yourself to something outside of your own intuited experience? Don't get me wrong. Several years ago I was using WordPerfect to produce a weekly magazine. I had trouble with a particular header and sent it to WP for help. They told me I was using the product well beyond its intended design and I was on my own. I finally figured it out on my own. There've been too many things I've learned about PS that I never would have picked up intuitively for me to think that you can just fall into it the way you seem to think you have.
I learned by working with other designers for well over a decade (not to mention that I'd been using Photoshop ever since the 0.x versions that leaked out from the Knolls to the Art & Architecture computing center machines at U of M). and by experimenting with every single menu option, icon, key-modified click, etc., until I understood what they did.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure some people can learn from the book. But I'm one of those people who learn by doing. We do exist, dammit, and we're tired of being marginalized by you book-readers! We cry like everyone else.
One thing that reinforces my confidence is that it's been many years since anyone has shown me anything I didn't already know (unless they happened to buy a new version a few days before I did).
Uhm, Newsflash! If its open, we can put our own apps on it and fuck their jvm or closed source apps.
Not if their interface doesn't let you.
A few weeks ago I was on a KLM 777 with video-on-demand in the seatback entertainment system. I noticed the guy sitting next to me frowning and grunting, and looked at his screen - presto, a penguin and a Linux boot sequence (sadly, the LCD screens are pretty directional, and since I didn't know him, I couldn't really stick my head in front of it to get a closer look).
The interface they provide (remote with maybe 30 buttons) is a bit more complicated than a phone, and I'm pretty confident - backed up by an 8-hour flight's worth of experimentation - that there's no way someone's going to hack in there without a decent-length code/key. The same goes for a phone, if so designed.
Of course, I could have gone under the seat with my toolkit (oh, wait, they made me check my toolkit in my baggage - now I know why!) and gotten in there. But with a phone there's nothing stopping them from making it self-destruct if tampered with.
At that point, it's no different from a phone running any other contemporary software. Sure you can beat it up and eventually subvert it, but it doesn't have to be easy.
I guess a lot of people in middle-eastern countries like Egypt use linux because it isn't American and commercial as well
Actually, nobody there does. Everyone in the middle east uses Windows because software piracy is rampant and knowledge is limited.
A couple months ago I was in Iraq talking to people about Linux; despite a few attempts at distribution and evangelism, they all found that there was almost no interest - local folks could not possibly see why they'd want to invest precious time and energy in a system that was (A) also free, just like Windows, (B) unfamiliar and thus requiring additional learning, and (C) different from what other people were using.
There are a lot of persuasive arguments for using open source software but this is one part of the world where the case is not being made well and is not being received much. So it was quite exiting for me to see the news of the Egypt event.
The first time I started using Paint Shop Pro, I only had experience with MS Paint. PSP confused me. All the menus/buttons/tool windows/etc. didn't make any sense to me. At first I wasn't productive in PSP at all - I thought MS Paint is better.
Only after having worked with PSP for a few months, I was able to work well with it.
Actually, if it took you a few months to be able to do more with Paint Shop Pro than with MS Paint, then you are legally functionally retarded and are eligible to ride the short bus to school. You might also get a discount at Burger King but I'd have to check on that.
The problem is that OpenOffice was developed as a closed-source proprietary application and then made free software as an afterthought.
This is a very fair point. However, at some point the post-open work will outweigh the pre-open work.
Like it or not, the offensively-named GIMP is the highest profile application that anyone has managed to produce using a pure OSS development model.
Good point about the name too. Highlights the poor marketing instincts of many in the open source world who will gleefully let a stupid inside joke overtake common sense. I cannot say to a suit-wearing client, "this image was created using the GIMP," or "you'll need the GIMP if you want to make some changes here."
Then I'd wager you're either not using it for much or not using it very well. The program is immense.
Not so immense that you wouldn't have to be substantially retarded not to be able to go through the menus and options, and eventually figure out what they do.
Hell, 10 years ago I was teaching Photoshop classes to pro magazine designers for $100/hr, and I'd never looked at the manual.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes you sound like someone who's never supported any more users than your parents and that girl from 11th grade English class you had a crush on so you helped her with her computer class project.
The reason why OSX takes less time than Linux to support is - wait for it - that you don't have to spent any time answering stupid questions for users. And anyone who's actually done support knows that answering stupid questions for users is what takes up the majority of the time. Unless they've only supported Mac users, in which case they're unfamiliar with the concept.
I know a lot of programmers. I don't think I've ever even met one who creates packaged software for sale. I have always assumed that development of shrink-wrappable commercial software was a miniscule part of the industry, and what I'm reading in this thread from other posters supports it.
What does that have to do with jobs? That's a question of business model viability. No amount of marginal profitability will increase the demand for prepackaged software.
This is no different from the commercial software world. There is a certain amount of demand for a given piece of software, and that drives the remuneration (be it money, fame, credibility, or whatever) that goes to those who maintain it. If nobody cares about a commercial program, the company drops the product line or goes broke.
The one big advantage of open source here is that you can at least hire someone to pick up the pieces for you. If a closed-source product disappears, you're totally screwed.
Amen, brother. It's about time that goopy French mayonnaise pap stopped getting a free pass just because some pantywaist liberal decided all cuisines deserved equal respect.
If you're willing to relocate, I might be able to hook you up with a gig importing and supporting grey market computers for a client named Nigel.
Malaysia.
It just appeared two days ago here. I am always curious as to which movies are popular here (because I wonder what sort of perceptions people develop of the West) so I give the tables a scan when I pass by.
Sorry - PC CDROMs are US$1.25 here!
Interestingly, we bought it at one of the dozens of pirate DVD stalls downtown (yes, I live in that sort of a country, it's not coming to theatres here anytime soon, and I took Michael Moore's statement as permission to go ahead and do that - at US$2, nobody's making much money), and while all the quality issues are exactly as described in the message board (cut off subtitles, missing sound channels, etc.) the parts that were described as missing were present in this DVD.
How desperate do you reckon they'll have to be before we see an OSX version named "flat-headed cat"?
Good God, I hope not.
It looks like you're trying to write a letter! Would you like some tips?
Sounds familiar? That's what you get when some idiot programmer decides to try to outsmart the users by guessing what they're doing: An unholy pain in the rear that every halfway-experienced user makes it their first order of business to deactivate with extreme prejudice before trying to make productive use of their a computer.
When I am trying to crush a deadly snake that is slithering across my thumb, the last thing I want is my Microsoft Hammer beeping at me and refusing to deal the blow because there's no nail around and it's worried I might accidentally hurt my thumb.
Yeah, sure, Denmark was pretty stable too...
Not everyone. You may be familiar with typewriters? You know, those devices where the QWERTY layout made its dashing debut? Caps lock was always right above the shift key on manual typewriters, because it engaged a mechanism that physically held the shift key down until it was pressed to release it again.
I've seen Direcway (as resold by Bentley, which I believe was mentioned above) used aplenty in Iraq. So clearly it's possible outside of North America. As to whether their footprint covers Afghanistan, that I cannot answer.
Duh. Anyone knows that a C followed by a + in French takes on a hard sound unless mollified by a cedilla. Je suis sic+ et tired de votre nonsense.
And I've got a 3-D television set. Oh wait, it's also got an auditory dimension. Make that 4-D.
If it makes you feel any better, in about 2 weeks I'm moving off to Asia, and taking my U.S. job with me. The majority of the work I do just requires an internet connection and sometimes a telephone, and the rest involves travel to random places that are just as (in-)accessible from there as here, so why not? I figure the low cost of living means I can drop to about 3/4 time and work on a book.
However, my hunch is that it's a whole lot easier to be in the US, telecommuting, and convince your boss that you might as well be somewhere else more pleasant, than to reach out and find a job from halfway around the planet. Maybe you have to come back home to the US for a spell in order to establish yourself on solid ground in China.
Taking the Google example, I doubt those costs would come close to the financial and soul-suckage costs of commuting to that Godforsaken middle-of-nowhere campus. Unless you live in a tent at the Shoreline or in the bleakest, dullest part of Mountain View, you've got a serious daily drive (which costs money) or bike ride (which costs laundry).
No doubt about it. Things like time with family and stress-free mornings seem a whole lot more important to me than $45/year in extra electric bills.
Photoshop is sensitive to this, and translates the display colors based on your output color model. It also provides a warning when the colors you are trying to work with onscreen are outside the bounds of the colorspace of your selected output device.
Whether or not a designer's screen can simulate matte paper or gloss glare or whatever other irrelevant frippery you can conjure up has nothing to do with the fundamental requirement to be able to precisely specify colors. People who are accustomed to working in four (or more) colors know what something's going to look like when they specify a color outside their monitor's gamut. But that doesn't help them when their software can't tell the printer to use that color, because said software was developed by amateurs who don't know the difference.
And with that, the person you're quoting firmly establishes himself as an Enterprise-class dickhead.
I learned by working with other designers for well over a decade (not to mention that I'd been using Photoshop ever since the 0.x versions that leaked out from the Knolls to the Art & Architecture computing center machines at U of M). and by experimenting with every single menu option, icon, key-modified click, etc., until I understood what they did.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure some people can learn from the book. But I'm one of those people who learn by doing. We do exist, dammit, and we're tired of being marginalized by you book-readers! We cry like everyone else.
One thing that reinforces my confidence is that it's been many years since anyone has shown me anything I didn't already know (unless they happened to buy a new version a few days before I did).
Not if their interface doesn't let you.
A few weeks ago I was on a KLM 777 with video-on-demand in the seatback entertainment system. I noticed the guy sitting next to me frowning and grunting, and looked at his screen - presto, a penguin and a Linux boot sequence (sadly, the LCD screens are pretty directional, and since I didn't know him, I couldn't really stick my head in front of it to get a closer look).
The interface they provide (remote with maybe 30 buttons) is a bit more complicated than a phone, and I'm pretty confident - backed up by an 8-hour flight's worth of experimentation - that there's no way someone's going to hack in there without a decent-length code/key. The same goes for a phone, if so designed.
Of course, I could have gone under the seat with my toolkit (oh, wait, they made me check my toolkit in my baggage - now I know why!) and gotten in there. But with a phone there's nothing stopping them from making it self-destruct if tampered with.
At that point, it's no different from a phone running any other contemporary software. Sure you can beat it up and eventually subvert it, but it doesn't have to be easy.
Ethernet cards have MAC addresses. That is a subset of "network cards" and does not include the DS-3 interface cards that the article is about.
And, of course, even if it did, MAC addresses are only visible to someone on the same side of a router as the card in question.
Actually, nobody there does. Everyone in the middle east uses Windows because software piracy is rampant and knowledge is limited.
A couple months ago I was in Iraq talking to people about Linux; despite a few attempts at distribution and evangelism, they all found that there was almost no interest - local folks could not possibly see why they'd want to invest precious time and energy in a system that was (A) also free, just like Windows, (B) unfamiliar and thus requiring additional learning, and (C) different from what other people were using.
There are a lot of persuasive arguments for using open source software but this is one part of the world where the case is not being made well and is not being received much. So it was quite exiting for me to see the news of the Egypt event.
Actually, if it took you a few months to be able to do more with Paint Shop Pro than with MS Paint, then you are legally functionally retarded and are eligible to ride the short bus to school. You might also get a discount at Burger King but I'd have to check on that.
This is a very fair point. However, at some point the post-open work will outweigh the pre-open work.
Good point about the name too. Highlights the poor marketing instincts of many in the open source world who will gleefully let a stupid inside joke overtake common sense. I cannot say to a suit-wearing client, "this image was created using the GIMP," or "you'll need the GIMP if you want to make some changes here."
Not so immense that you wouldn't have to be substantially retarded not to be able to go through the menus and options, and eventually figure out what they do.
Hell, 10 years ago I was teaching Photoshop classes to pro magazine designers for $100/hr, and I'd never looked at the manual.