Most that I have dealt with are not IT or CS degree holders. In fact, the norm is for it to be a police officer who has taken a 2 week course in Encase, nothing more. Their knowledge of operating systems is lacking to say the least.
Encase is a great product, with powerful scripting capabilities that you could devote a 2 week course to alone, presuming you were already a capable programmer. Expecting people with little or no IT experience to actually do anything useful with just a 2 week intro course is remarkably stupid. I know resources are tight, but surely something a little better than this can be arranged - if there are that many cases that require computer forensics for Firefox and Opera to be a problem, then there's enough work to actually hire and train someone knowledeable in this stuff.
I hope they do some actualized ROI analysis. It'd be really interesting to find out what percentage of the money they save in software licensing is offset by the paid-time of implementation, user training, and dealing with interoperability issues with other organizations/individuals/citizens.
And they also better factor in future upgrade costs, costs of any retraining required after upgrades, future document conversion costs, potential virus costs, the potential costs should they ever switch to a different platform, the costs of...
ROI/TCO calculations are mostly just so much garbage because it's merely a matter of choosing what "costs" and "benefits" you choose to see and include, and which you choose to ignore. It can give you a vague ballpark, but I wouldn't count on it to be all that useful. Besides, this is about something other than saving costs.
The gain is that they will have all their public documents in open formats which can thus be read by anyone. Given that all their work is being paid for by taxpayers, it only seems fair that the product of that labour should be readable by said taxpayers, regardless of whether they own MS Office or not. Instead of having to go through individual conversions for each and every request they can simply keep everything open to begin with. Are you suggesting that greater transparency in government is a bad thing?
The "Massachusetts government" is not one entity, but a lot of pretty normal users. Why should these be capable of thinking to save "right", when millions of exactly as normal users can't?
Because they've been told that, in fact, formats do matter, and having been made aware of it they will start to care? People didn't used to think that formats didn't matter back when there were a variety of formats used widely. It's a matter of laziness and the fact that one set of formats has become so dominant. Once people start thinking about formats again (because, for instance, their boss has told them to) they may find that options other than what they normally use actually look rather attractive.
Currently, Microsoft office can't read or write either of these formats[1]. So which is Microsoft going to add?
Both? PDF is making steady inroads as an interchange format and from what I understand of Avalon it should make generating PDF on Vista pretty much as easy as on OS X. It would make sense to support it.
As for OpenOffice.org - they're using the OASIS format and Microsoft is a sponsor of that so you'd think they'd get around to it eventually. I think Microsoft is realising that locking up Office document formats isn't going to work for much longer (see their various efforts to create more "open" XML based formats for MS Office) and are trying to work out what to do instead.
See, you'd think that would be stupid right? I mean, penguins in Norway?! But in fact one of the Norwegian army's sergeant majors is a penguin. No, really! The Norwegian army has penguin soldiers!
Icons generally are double clicked whereas toolbar buttons are not...That convention is generally accepted on most OSes throughout history.
Saying "because that's how it is" does not magically make it intuitive, obvious or consistent. Just because everyone else does it just as badly doesn't make it right.
I love the new features of OSX, but don't kid yourself. It's not getting faster because the Apple folks are working magic, they are fixing bloated/bugged code, and the OS is only now starting to run at the speeds it should have run at to begin with.
And to be fair, premature optimisation is the root of all evil. Windows has been "optimised" from the get go, with the downside being that adding things too it tended to result in hacks and cruft. I kind of appreciate the philosphy of aiming for a good architecture and then optimising that as you go.
Your point remains quite valid though: there's no magic to OS X's speed improvements, it merely a matter of actually optimising what they've got.
Actually, that might be a good idea... how about someone creates a really good commercial windowing system for those poor souls who have to use X every day? I'd love to have something with the quality of Avalon or Aqua on Solaris. That would be fantastic!
It's all a matter of what level of graphics architecture your talking about though. In many ways X is simply a matter of how you draw graphics to the screen, how you access the hardware. You're, for some reason, comparing it with Aqua and Avalon. In practice X is more comparable with Quartz and GDI which Aqua and Avalon sit on top of. You want something comparable, then try looking at GTK sitting on top of Cairo. Cairo provides the same sort of drawing abstraction and interface that Quartz offers, the same sort of thing Avalon offers. It also has multiple backends so if you work in Cairo you can display on X, Quartz, Windows, or in print via PDF or Postscript. You can use Cairo acclerated over OpenGL. In terms of ease of programming Cairo offers a nice graphics API of various drawing commands. If you want a GUI interface (as in Aqua or Avalon (I think - I'm still a little unclear on what all Avalon exactly entails)) then you'll want a toolkit to expose an interface there. Something like GTK is being converted to run on Cairo (the latest version of GTK uses Cairo for some of its rednering already). It's there in Free software, though it is still young. It provides a lot of what you're looking for and X doesn't matter a bit - X is just how you draw to screen... and in a conveniently network transparent way. X doesn't necessarily suck, but a good graphics stack in Free software is certainly fairly young right now. The need is fairly new as well though... the desktop was not something that was much of a focus (everyone kept saying the desktop wasn't viable). It is coming along though.
You claim that ID can't be tested by repeatable experiments. Well that is true, but can evolution be tested by repeatable experiments? Maybe some of the smaller claims of evolution such as bacteria growing more resilient etc etc, but those claims can fit in with ID as well.
The real problem with ID is that the very method of argument it is founded on is rubbish. Given the approach taken by ID people you can show that pretty much any scientific theory is, in fact, wrong and clearly needs to be taught differently. Look here's an article that uses ID style methods to argue that, in fact, gravity is false and we should instead believe in an "Uncaused Force" acting upon objets in the universe. It's quite accurate in the science it quotes, properly references a number of peer reviewed papers and reads very similarly to material from the Discovery Institute. If you want to allow for ID then please read the article carefully because it is every bit as scientific and well referenced as any ID piece.
Now if I could only merge gnome-terminal with nautilus...
Indeed. The best I've seen for this is Evidence the file manager for enlightenment. The downside is that it's still in development and doesn't necessarily do all the things you want in a GUI file manager. The upside is that it has a microshell built in, which lets you do things like select files (in the GUI) with a command line (using the usual wildcards and globbing) or execute command line on the GUI selection - just type what you want. It's a feature that I hope will prove popular and become available in the more mainstream file managers to.
I'm really not sure what a correct, elegant solution would be. I loathe the usual Windows container-window MDI, and I do realise that GTK has very little, if any support for writing applications in such a manner, but I do wonder how the situation could be improved for Windows users.
GTK doesn't have support for MDI for a very good reason - it just isn't its responsibility. A widget tollset shouldn't be implementing its own separate window management scheme, which is what MDI as part of GTK would amount to. Handling windows is the Window Managers job. Unfortunately current X Window Managers want to absolve themselves of responsibility and pretend the toolkit should do it. Much silliness and bitching from users ensues. I do agree though, that on Windows, which does provide its own (different!) window management scheme as part of the toolkit, and hence provides no facility in the overall window manager, this presents a problem. But GTK isn't really designed for Windows... perhaps the Windows-GTK people ould add a special patch or soemthing...
A default setup with all the tools and palettes in one tall window on the left of the screen, and some code to grab the 'Maximise' button on image windows so that they expand to fit the space not occupied by the tools window?
Again, I have to blame Window Managers - where oh where is the "maximise to available area" function?! This used to be standard on X WMs, and is still available in things like FVWM and Enlightenment. Windows certainly has no such thing, but then Windows window management is quite sad in so many respects that we shouldn't be surprised.
Likewise, the 'Minimise' button on the tools window could minimise all windows belonging to The GIMP - perhaps a bit of a hack, but it could help.
Ideally I'd like to see a solution that allowed you to finesse that so it does what you want, and you can, for instance, just minimise a single image window, or minimise everything, or maybe just all the tool palettes in an easily controllable manner. It isn't that hard to do.
IMO, raising one of them should raise them ALL, and I have yet to find a way to do that. If you know of one (Windows OR Linux), please tell me.
Use a window manager that support window groups and group your GIMP windows. Enlightenment does, I'm not sure about others. I have a proposal for a decent way to do window groups easily here, with advanced features if you want to offer something new for power users. Basically the principle is this: all your GIMP windows belong to a group, and actions applied to a member of the group (like a raise operation) get applied to all members of the group.
The other option, which may e easier to find, is a window manager that supports "send to back", and simply send the other application to the back behind all the various GIMP windows. This used to be a standard feature of X WMs with a toggle key that alternately raised to the top or sent to the back. For some reason a lot of window managers have hidden this feature, or simply not include it at all.
In my opinion a lot of the "issues" with the GIMP interface (in terms of the multiple windows) is more to do with the lack of good window handling from mainstream WMs rather than inherent failings of GIMP. Yes it would be nice to adapt to what's available now, but WMs used to have all these features, so it made sense at the time... and now we're waiting to get our perfectly reasonable and sensible features back damnit!
1 - You want a GUI which looks like Photoshop? Get Gimpshop and stop whining! 2- Now, what about comparing GimpShop to Photoshop?
Unless GimpShop for Windows is different that's probably not going to make people as happy as you'd think, because GimpShop (the Linux and Mac versions anyway) was altered by a Mac Photoshop user... which means floating (dockable) tool palettes and multiple individual image windows, just like Photoshop on the Mac, and many of the complainers really just want an MDI like Photoshop on Windows. I can kind of understand the complaints about lack of an MDI on Windows in that Windows has such sucky window management that it is a little clunky, but on Linux, with a decent WM? Its fine. Unless you're wedded to Photoshop on Windows and simply can't understand that document centric is a reasonable way to go - hell it works for Mac.
...This results in code that is very understandable...For enterprise apps java is FAST, whereas other languages that you mention, such as python are just too slow (zope/plone). Perl code just gets too messy after a while, and as you say.NET not being cross platform makes it useless.
Eiffel, on the other hand, is very fast indeed (it is a statically typed natively compiled language after all) with a nice IDE and compilers for many platforms. Certainly Eiffel results in clean very understandable code. It doesn't have the widespread adoption that Java does, which is probably its biggest failing, but that doesn't make it any less nice a language.
Most people are indirect investors. That is, they have some fund at some bank who manages their money or retirement fund. The people pressures the institutional investors (e.g. banks) who pressures the companies.
Which is no different than handing off your voting rights to someone who asks for it without bothering to check what the believe and what sort of person they'll vote for. Adding layers of indirection does not absolve one of responsibility. The simple truth is people can't be bothered thinking about their investing choices - just as many can't really be bothered thinking about their voting choices. They then happily blame companies and the government for their ills, even though they bear a degree of responsibility.
You also need someone who WANTS to learn zOS, and possibly end up working with it and it alone for the rest of their career.
Choosing to specialize in mainframe technology means your employment options are going to be limited to those companies which have mainframes.
All that really means is that companies that want people to support their mainframes need to offer contracts that guarantee employment for some fixed period (presumably the better part of a career), or offer a sufficiently good salary that the employee doesn't care. If they don't want to do that then they shouldn't be surprised when no one really wants to take them up on the offer.
It's amazing how many people are whining about the shareholders demanding higher revenue causing less jobs or inferior products or whatever while they or their parents or neighbours are shareholders themselves whom start whining the moment stock prices are dropping. Blame the managers for being clueless or whatever, but not the shareholders.
Certainly the managers deserve some blame, but so do the shareholders. They are asking for higher profits no matter what the cost (as long as the costs are external). If people weren't willing to invest in companies based solely on their profit margin without consideration of how the company acts or what other damage they may do then those companies would struggle to exist. Not blaming the shareholders is like not blaming the electorate for the actions of their government. Sure they don't have direct control and the goverment has its share of blame, but if they didn't keep voting for the bastards it wouldn't have happened.
The fact of the matter is that most successful men want a hot, attentive young wife. if I'm making $500k/yr, I probably don't care if you have a PhD and make $100k/yr yourself. I'm probably more interested in whether you will be good at raising children, be good in bed, look good, etc....Just like how girls don't want sweet nice guys. They want a bad boy or a guy with money.
And yet oddly attitudes change, though more so for women than men. Older women (and by that I mean late 20's/early 30's onward start to move away from the hunting the rich bad boy and start to actually prefer "sweet nice guys". That is to say, they actually grow up. A similar change happens around the same time, though a little later, for men once their libido calms down and they realise that there is more to life than sex. Of course a lot of men are sufficiently ingrained in their patterns that they never grow out of it, and then there are the men who have a midlife crisis and decide that sex is the only way they can now validate their lives...
Oh, I know it's almost certainly twaddle. Heck, let's assume it IS twaddle. My point is that IF the DVD were available now, I would rent it. Thus, the movie industry would get my money. However, by waiting to release the DVD, the movie industry will get nothing from me.
Simultaneous theatrical and DVD release is coming, it's only a matter of time. Why spend money marketing a film all over again for the DVD release? Steven Soderbergh is doing just that with his next few films apparently, though that's not with one of the mainstream studios. If that's successful however, you can expect the major studios to follow suit.
Remember when we used to hate all the damn previews? Now we look forward to them, thankful the commercials are over!
I'd pay extra for reserved seating in a theatre with class and no commercials and previews.
I must admit that I've been surprised and disappointed with theatres in North America coming from New Zealand. Most theatres there run with assigned seating (or used to, I've been away a while now) - if you buy your ticket early you get a good seat, it doesn't matter when you show up. If the theatre is only half full or less there's people sit where they like, but if it's busy you sit where your ticket says. This has the added bonus that, for busy sessions, you can check the available seats when buying your tickets and if you're going to be in the front right corner you can, well, pass and see it at a later date. Demand better, it's entirely possible.
Huh? Yes, I read the Harper's article recently and remembered some of the stats they used - that hardly counts as plaigarism. I just did a quick scan of my comment and the online version (only the first 1/3) of the article and besides arguing a similar point and using the same stats there is no significant similarity.
As for the other case you cite? Wow, a comment that again reiterates (with no real similarity to the original article) an idea I found compelling and agree with. Go and click on the link to the other Slashdot comment. Yes, it's by me, this time discussing in more depth, and quoting and referencing the AMS article.
Surprisingly enough I read things, and if the ideas are interesting, or compelling they become part of my own beliefs. When I happen to write a comment expressing some of my beliefs it may, in fact, be related to something I've read at some point.
1. I was having a jibe at the LDS, it was joke about ho they're perceived. Let's move on.
2 & 3. Capital punishment mostly features in the old testament, while Jesus preaches a very different approach. Can you explain how:
"38 You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' 39 But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41 If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you."
Means what you claim rather than having compassion even for those who wrong you? It would seem to be to be saying that "an eye for an eye" is wrong, and that we should have compassion and understanding even for those who try to hurt us.
There's this thing called "The Book of Mormon" that supercedes the new testament though, which essentially makes them a new US religion based on Christianity...
Slashdot Mirror
Most that I have dealt with are not IT or CS degree holders. In fact, the norm is for it to be a police officer who has taken a 2 week course in Encase, nothing more. Their knowledge of operating systems is lacking to say the least.
Encase is a great product, with powerful scripting capabilities that you could devote a 2 week course to alone, presuming you were already a capable programmer. Expecting people with little or no IT experience to actually do anything useful with just a 2 week intro course is remarkably stupid. I know resources are tight, but surely something a little better than this can be arranged - if there are that many cases that require computer forensics for Firefox and Opera to be a problem, then there's enough work to actually hire and train someone knowledeable in this stuff.
Jedidiah.
I hope they do some actualized ROI analysis. It'd be really interesting to find out what percentage of the money they save in software licensing is offset by the paid-time of implementation, user training, and dealing with interoperability issues with other organizations/individuals/citizens.
...
And they also better factor in future upgrade costs, costs of any retraining required after upgrades, future document conversion costs, potential virus costs, the potential costs should they ever switch to a different platform, the costs of
ROI/TCO calculations are mostly just so much garbage because it's merely a matter of choosing what "costs" and "benefits" you choose to see and include, and which you choose to ignore. It can give you a vague ballpark, but I wouldn't count on it to be all that useful. Besides, this is about something other than saving costs.
The gain is that they will have all their public documents in open formats which can thus be read by anyone. Given that all their work is being paid for by taxpayers, it only seems fair that the product of that labour should be readable by said taxpayers, regardless of whether they own MS Office or not. Instead of having to go through individual conversions for each and every request they can simply keep everything open to begin with. Are you suggesting that greater transparency in government is a bad thing?
Jedidiah.
The "Massachusetts government" is not one entity, but a lot of pretty normal users. Why should these be capable of thinking to save "right", when millions of exactly as normal users can't?
Because they've been told that, in fact, formats do matter, and having been made aware of it they will start to care? People didn't used to think that formats didn't matter back when there were a variety of formats used widely. It's a matter of laziness and the fact that one set of formats has become so dominant. Once people start thinking about formats again (because, for instance, their boss has told them to) they may find that options other than what they normally use actually look rather attractive.
Jedidiah.
Currently, Microsoft office can't read or write either of these formats[1]. So which is Microsoft going to add?
Both? PDF is making steady inroads as an interchange format and from what I understand of Avalon it should make generating PDF on Vista pretty much as easy as on OS X. It would make sense to support it.
As for OpenOffice.org - they're using the OASIS format and Microsoft is a sponsor of that so you'd think they'd get around to it eventually. I think Microsoft is realising that locking up Office document formats isn't going to work for much longer (see their various efforts to create more "open" XML based formats for MS Office) and are trying to work out what to do instead.
Jedidiah.
So did he find any penguins in Norway yet?
See, you'd think that would be stupid right? I mean, penguins in Norway?! But in fact one of the Norwegian army's sergeant majors is a penguin. No, really! The Norwegian army has penguin soldiers!
Jedidiah.
Icons generally are double clicked whereas toolbar buttons are not...That convention is generally accepted on most OSes throughout history.
Saying "because that's how it is" does not magically make it intuitive, obvious or consistent. Just because everyone else does it just as badly doesn't make it right.
Jedidiah.
I love the new features of OSX, but don't kid yourself. It's not getting faster because the Apple folks are working magic, they are fixing bloated/bugged code, and the OS is only now starting to run at the speeds it should have run at to begin with.
And to be fair, premature optimisation is the root of all evil. Windows has been "optimised" from the get go, with the downside being that adding things too it tended to result in hacks and cruft. I kind of appreciate the philosphy of aiming for a good architecture and then optimising that as you go.
Your point remains quite valid though: there's no magic to OS X's speed improvements, it merely a matter of actually optimising what they've got.
Jedidiah.
Actually, that might be a good idea... how about someone creates a really good commercial windowing system for those poor souls who have to use X every day? I'd love to have something with the quality of Avalon or Aqua on Solaris. That would be fantastic!
It's all a matter of what level of graphics architecture your talking about though. In many ways X is simply a matter of how you draw graphics to the screen, how you access the hardware. You're, for some reason, comparing it with Aqua and Avalon. In practice X is more comparable with Quartz and GDI which Aqua and Avalon sit on top of. You want something comparable, then try looking at GTK sitting on top of Cairo. Cairo provides the same sort of drawing abstraction and interface that Quartz offers, the same sort of thing Avalon offers. It also has multiple backends so if you work in Cairo you can display on X, Quartz, Windows, or in print via PDF or Postscript. You can use Cairo acclerated over OpenGL. In terms of ease of programming Cairo offers a nice graphics API of various drawing commands. If you want a GUI interface (as in Aqua or Avalon (I think - I'm still a little unclear on what all Avalon exactly entails)) then you'll want a toolkit to expose an interface there. Something like GTK is being converted to run on Cairo (the latest version of GTK uses Cairo for some of its rednering already). It's there in Free software, though it is still young. It provides a lot of what you're looking for and X doesn't matter a bit - X is just how you draw to screen... and in a conveniently network transparent way. X doesn't necessarily suck, but a good graphics stack in Free software is certainly fairly young right now. The need is fairly new as well though... the desktop was not something that was much of a focus (everyone kept saying the desktop wasn't viable). It is coming along though.
Jedidiah.
You claim that ID can't be tested by repeatable experiments. Well that is true, but can evolution be tested by repeatable experiments? Maybe some of the smaller claims of evolution such as bacteria growing more resilient etc etc, but those claims can fit in with ID as well.
The real problem with ID is that the very method of argument it is founded on is rubbish. Given the approach taken by ID people you can show that pretty much any scientific theory is, in fact, wrong and clearly needs to be taught differently. Look here's an article that uses ID style methods to argue that, in fact, gravity is false and we should instead believe in an "Uncaused Force" acting upon objets in the universe. It's quite accurate in the science it quotes, properly references a number of peer reviewed papers and reads very similarly to material from the Discovery Institute. If you want to allow for ID then please read the article carefully because it is every bit as scientific and well referenced as any ID piece.
Jedidiah.
Now if I could only merge gnome-terminal with nautilus...
Indeed. The best I've seen for this is Evidence the file manager for enlightenment. The downside is that it's still in development and doesn't necessarily do all the things you want in a GUI file manager. The upside is that it has a microshell built in, which lets you do things like select files (in the GUI) with a command line (using the usual wildcards and globbing) or execute command line on the GUI selection - just type what you want. It's a feature that I hope will prove popular and become available in the more mainstream file managers to.
Jedidiah.
I'm really not sure what a correct, elegant solution would be. I loathe the usual Windows container-window MDI, and I do realise that GTK has very little, if any support for writing applications in such a manner, but I do wonder how the situation could be improved for Windows users.
GTK doesn't have support for MDI for a very good reason - it just isn't its responsibility. A widget tollset shouldn't be implementing its own separate window management scheme, which is what MDI as part of GTK would amount to. Handling windows is the Window Managers job. Unfortunately current X Window Managers want to absolve themselves of responsibility and pretend the toolkit should do it. Much silliness and bitching from users ensues. I do agree though, that on Windows, which does provide its own (different!) window management scheme as part of the toolkit, and hence provides no facility in the overall window manager, this presents a problem. But GTK isn't really designed for Windows... perhaps the Windows-GTK people ould add a special patch or soemthing...
A default setup with all the tools and palettes in one tall window on the left of the screen, and some code to grab the 'Maximise' button on image windows so that they expand to fit the space not occupied by the tools window?
Again, I have to blame Window Managers - where oh where is the "maximise to available area" function?! This used to be standard on X WMs, and is still available in things like FVWM and Enlightenment. Windows certainly has no such thing, but then Windows window management is quite sad in so many respects that we shouldn't be surprised.
Likewise, the 'Minimise' button on the tools window could minimise all windows belonging to The GIMP - perhaps a bit of a hack, but it could help.
Ideally I'd like to see a solution that allowed you to finesse that so it does what you want, and you can, for instance, just minimise a single image window, or minimise everything, or maybe just all the tool palettes in an easily controllable manner. It isn't that hard to do.
Jedidiah.
IMO, raising one of them should raise them ALL, and I have yet to find a way to do that. If you know of one (Windows OR Linux), please tell me.
Use a window manager that support window groups and group your GIMP windows. Enlightenment does, I'm not sure about others. I have a proposal for a decent way to do window groups easily here, with advanced features if you want to offer something new for power users. Basically the principle is this: all your GIMP windows belong to a group, and actions applied to a member of the group (like a raise operation) get applied to all members of the group.
The other option, which may e easier to find, is a window manager that supports "send to back", and simply send the other application to the back behind all the various GIMP windows. This used to be a standard feature of X WMs with a toggle key that alternately raised to the top or sent to the back. For some reason a lot of window managers have hidden this feature, or simply not include it at all.
In my opinion a lot of the "issues" with the GIMP interface (in terms of the multiple windows) is more to do with the lack of good window handling from mainstream WMs rather than inherent failings of GIMP. Yes it would be nice to adapt to what's available now, but WMs used to have all these features, so it made sense at the time... and now we're waiting to get our perfectly reasonable and sensible features back damnit!
Jedidiah.
1 - You want a GUI which looks like Photoshop? Get Gimpshop and stop whining! 2- Now, what about comparing GimpShop to Photoshop?
Unless GimpShop for Windows is different that's probably not going to make people as happy as you'd think, because GimpShop (the Linux and Mac versions anyway) was altered by a Mac Photoshop user... which means floating (dockable) tool palettes and multiple individual image windows, just like Photoshop on the Mac, and many of the complainers really just want an MDI like Photoshop on Windows. I can kind of understand the complaints about lack of an MDI on Windows in that Windows has such sucky window management that it is a little clunky, but on Linux, with a decent WM? Its fine. Unless you're wedded to Photoshop on Windows and simply can't understand that document centric is a reasonable way to go - hell it works for Mac.
Jedidiah.
...This results in code that is very understandable...For enterprise apps java is FAST, whereas other languages that you mention, such as python are just too slow (zope/plone). Perl code just gets too messy after a while, and as you say .NET not being cross platform makes it useless.
Eiffel, on the other hand, is very fast indeed (it is a statically typed natively compiled language after all) with a nice IDE and compilers for many platforms. Certainly Eiffel results in clean very understandable code. It doesn't have the widespread adoption that Java does, which is probably its biggest failing, but that doesn't make it any less nice a language.
Jedidiah.
Most people are indirect investors. That is, they have some fund at some bank who manages their money or retirement fund. The people pressures the institutional investors (e.g. banks) who pressures the companies.
Which is no different than handing off your voting rights to someone who asks for it without bothering to check what the believe and what sort of person they'll vote for. Adding layers of indirection does not absolve one of responsibility. The simple truth is people can't be bothered thinking about their investing choices - just as many can't really be bothered thinking about their voting choices. They then happily blame companies and the government for their ills, even though they bear a degree of responsibility.
Jedidiah.
You also need someone who WANTS to learn zOS, and possibly end up working with it and it alone for the rest of their career.
Choosing to specialize in mainframe technology means your employment options are going to be limited to those companies which have mainframes.
All that really means is that companies that want people to support their mainframes need to offer contracts that guarantee employment for some fixed period (presumably the better part of a career), or offer a sufficiently good salary that the employee doesn't care. If they don't want to do that then they shouldn't be surprised when no one really wants to take them up on the offer.
Jedidiah.
It's amazing how many people are whining about the shareholders demanding higher revenue causing less jobs or inferior products or whatever while they or their parents or neighbours are shareholders themselves whom start whining the moment stock prices are dropping.
Blame the managers for being clueless or whatever, but not the shareholders.
Certainly the managers deserve some blame, but so do the shareholders. They are asking for higher profits no matter what the cost (as long as the costs are external). If people weren't willing to invest in companies based solely on their profit margin without consideration of how the company acts or what other damage they may do then those companies would struggle to exist. Not blaming the shareholders is like not blaming the electorate for the actions of their government. Sure they don't have direct control and the goverment has its share of blame, but if they didn't keep voting for the bastards it wouldn't have happened.
Jedidiah.
The fact of the matter is that most successful men want a hot, attentive young wife. if I'm making $500k/yr, I probably don't care if you have a PhD and make $100k/yr yourself. I'm probably more interested in whether you will be good at raising children, be good in bed, look good, etc....Just like how girls don't want sweet nice guys. They want a bad boy or a guy with money.
And yet oddly attitudes change, though more so for women than men. Older women (and by that I mean late 20's/early 30's onward start to move away from the hunting the rich bad boy and start to actually prefer "sweet nice guys". That is to say, they actually grow up. A similar change happens around the same time, though a little later, for men once their libido calms down and they realise that there is more to life than sex. Of course a lot of men are sufficiently ingrained in their patterns that they never grow out of it, and then there are the men who have a midlife crisis and decide that sex is the only way they can now validate their lives...
Jedidiah.
Oh, I know it's almost certainly twaddle. Heck, let's assume it IS twaddle. My point is that IF the DVD were available now, I would rent it. Thus, the movie industry would get my money. However, by waiting to release the DVD, the movie industry will get nothing from me.
Simultaneous theatrical and DVD release is coming, it's only a matter of time. Why spend money marketing a film all over again for the DVD release? Steven Soderbergh is doing just that with his next few films apparently, though that's not with one of the mainstream studios. If that's successful however, you can expect the major studios to follow suit.
Jedidiah.
Remember when we used to hate all the damn previews? Now we look forward to them, thankful the commercials are over!
I'd pay extra for reserved seating in a theatre with class and no commercials and previews.
I must admit that I've been surprised and disappointed with theatres in North America coming from New Zealand. Most theatres there run with assigned seating (or used to, I've been away a while now) - if you buy your ticket early you get a good seat, it doesn't matter when you show up. If the theatre is only half full or less there's people sit where they like, but if it's busy you sit where your ticket says. This has the added bonus that, for busy sessions, you can check the available seats when buying your tickets and if you're going to be in the front right corner you can, well, pass and see it at a later date. Demand better, it's entirely possible.
Jedidiah.
One particular film/song is successful so they just clone it and flog the same formula to death because they have no imagination whatsoever.
Ah yes, kind of like this. The tracks not just similar, they're frighteningly similar, and very obviously a paint by numbers forumla effort.
Jedidiah.
Huh? Yes, I read the Harper's article recently and remembered some of the stats they used - that hardly counts as plaigarism. I just did a quick scan of my comment and the online version (only the first 1/3) of the article and besides arguing a similar point and using the same stats there is no significant similarity.
As for the other case you cite? Wow, a comment that again reiterates (with no real similarity to the original article) an idea I found compelling and agree with. Go and click on the link to the other Slashdot comment. Yes, it's by me, this time discussing in more depth, and quoting and referencing the AMS article.
Surprisingly enough I read things, and if the ideas are interesting, or compelling they become part of my own beliefs. When I happen to write a comment expressing some of my beliefs it may, in fact, be related to something I've read at some point.
1. I was having a jibe at the LDS, it was joke about ho they're perceived. Let's move on.
2 & 3. Capital punishment mostly features in the old testament, while Jesus preaches a very different approach. Can you explain how:
"38 You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' 39 But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41 If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you."
Means what you claim rather than having compassion even for those who wrong you? It would seem to be to be saying that "an eye for an eye" is wrong, and that we should have compassion and understanding even for those who try to hurt us.
Jedidiah.
I'm fairly well acquainted with the beliefs of the church of latter day saints. I was having a cheap jibe at their expense.
There's this thing called "The Book of Mormon" that supercedes the new testament though, which essentially makes them a new US religion based on Christianity...