I can't know the answer to that any more than you can. I am willing to make the assumption, based on the fact that we haven't seen a reoccurrence of 9/11 or anything similar, that anti-terrorism measures have met with at least some modicum of success.
That's a pretty unjustified assumption. How many occurences of 9/11 or similar have there been in the last 200 years of US history? Does that mean anti-terrorism efforts for the 195 years prior to 9/11 were fine - I mean, they managed to prevent all those terrorist attacks right?
If you don't cut out a slave's heart every morning before sunrise then the sun won't rise: I mean, obviously its working, we've killed a slave every morning, and the sun keeps rising.
While I personally agree with Conservatives that the size of the federal government should be decreased, I do not agree with this strategy. It creates a situation that makes it incredibly difficult to pay off the debt.
It is also incredibly foolish to be running a massive budget deficit when you're also facing consistent trade deficits year after year. The end result has been a blowout in the current account deficit, and a fall in the US Dollar. Worse though, is that with all of that other countries are less and less keen to buy US debt (China and Japan, the biggest foreign buyers, seem to be reaching their limit). That, of course, is only going to make servicing of debt ever more expensive, as ever better rates of return on debt need to be offered to find buyers. It's a nasty spiral, and someone needs to take a grip and pull the US out of it.
Right. Because the poor are not at all served by programs that keep them from getting blown up in their homes by terrorists.
By proportion of money spent? An interesting question. How many people have had their homes blown up by terrorists recently? More importantly, how many people have been saved from having their homes blown up by terrorists recently? No, honestly, for all the speeches about the imminent threat, exactly how much danger has been eliminated? There have been some cases of "terrorist cells" found in the US. Unfortunately you don't hear much about those cases anymore. That's because they've all been dropped, thrown out of court, or quietly shuffled off to minor charges like "wearing any enemy uniform". Have a search around. See if you can find a single significant justified case of terrorism on US soil that has been quelled, postponed, or stopped by the various initiaives. Now consider all the shootings, knifings, murders and random acts of violence (like the Washington Sniper) that were completely unrelated to terrorism and went completely ignored by these anti-terror intiatives. Which, honestly, is a greater threat to the average American?
Curious as to why open-source stuff isn't catching on?
Open-source software is catching on - when it's good, and failing to catch on when it sucks; just like all the other software out there. Software being open source doesn't guarantee you anything (except te source code). There are people on here who will tell open source software is more secure, or better coded. I can point you to a thousand projects on freshmeat or souceforge that contradict that. Just because its open source is no guarantee of quality. Equally, it is no guarantee of a lack of quality. Darwin is open source and seems to be catching on fairly well. Firefox is open source, and seem to be doing well for itself. Linux, and GAIM and bittorrent and OpenOffice all have growing user bases. For every open source project with a crappy name, there is another that has a good name. Some projects with good names are popular, some projects are popular despite their names.
Open source doesn't mean anything at all - except that you get the source code. Everything else is entirely up to the individual project. Stop trying to randomly lump them together (though, to be fair, you're hardly the only one - the dumbass fanboys do it too).
Palm does. And they didn't seem that keen on selling them. Microsoft could always buy Palm to get BeOS. As a convenient side effect they'd also end up with about 90% of the PDA OS market. And at about that point the government might start asking questions about antitrust.
Microsoft doing much of anything with the remains of BeOS is highly unlikely. Maybe they could buy out the Haiku people, but that doesn't seem like much of a possibility either. Tjose people want to recreat and extend BeOS because they love it. I don't think they'd be keen to let Microsoft turn their efforts into some bastard stepchild of BeOS.
maybe they should take the OS X route and just buy a competitor and cut their loses. Starting over from (not quite) scratch will give Windows a shot in the arm. WINE has already proven that backwards compatibility with Windows applications doesn't have to be dependent on using their existing OS code. They should just buy out Be (a good choice since they already have a metadata filesystem) or someone else with a Unix-like underpinning
Be, what Be? I think you'll find that company doesn't exist anymore. They'd have to buy out palm to get the rights, and that might cause some antitrust ructions given the market for PDAs.
And who else is there to buy exactly? They could license OS X from Apple, but that would be a serious loss of face. Otherwise your down to Solaris, or AIX, or HPUX/Tru64 from Sun, IBM, or HP respectively, none of which would be terribly appealing. I guess they could buy SCO - that would given them something with UNIX-like underpinnings.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft will keep polishing the turd they have rather than going fishing amongst everyone elses turds.
I don't think that a single install file working across distros and providing a simple uninstallation interface is too Windows-ish for Linux. Linux can be hip and different all it wants to be, but until the software installation is simplified mass adoption will never happen.
You mean like this? Autopackage is almost at 1.0, and while nice to have features like package manager integration won't be available in 1.0, it will do exactly what you are asking for: provide a single binary package that can install on any distribution. Just run the package file to install it (just like setup.exe files on Windows). It keeps track of packages installed this way, and has a simple GUI interface to remove them if you want. Simple, easy, cross distribution package installation. That's what you asked for isn't it? It's here, we just have to wait for developers to realise and start packaging their binaries that way.
I'm still waiting for a reasonable alternative to the underlying X server that isn't completely unheard of in 90% of the OSS world.
I'm not sure what you mean here, do you want a different implementation of the X protocol? If so, why not try Freedesktop.org's experimental XServer? It's quite a nice fast modular server. Are you looking for something other than X11 protocol? Then why not try DirectFB? DirectFB doesn't have enough supported applications for you? Why not try Quartz, which I imagine at least 90% of the OSS world as heard of. I don't really see a lack of options there.
I'm sure a Mac GUI is coming, my point was that if you want the new functionality now it is still entirely usable. The curses interface is actually quite nice, and was all I used for quite some time.
The OS X client is still at 3.4.2. Is anyone working on an update? (I'd offer to help, but I don't program:p)
It's in python so you should be able to just grab the source and use btdownloadcurses.py in Terminal.app (or whatever it is). Do you need a pretty GUI, or do you just want the new functionality etc.?
And I hate this shit. "It's ok if it doesn't work in Linux because it also doesn't work in Windows."
I'm not claiming its okay, I'm claiming its just what you're going to get when developers are free to write and use whatever toolkit meets their whims. You can't expect every application to behave exactly the way you want, because the developer of the app might disagree with you.
That's a fact. Small details, like implementing copy and paste correctly in all cases, will improve software in general regardless of the platform.
That would be lovely. GNOME and KDE apps copy and paste between each other perfectly well, so there's not really a problem there. The problem is with more fringe applications. The problem with them is that said developer might think the "standard" method of copy and paste is silly, and implement his own "better" system. Are you going to stop him?
Maybve we can form the "Hit Squad for Developer's Who Don't Agree With Me About How to Implement Copy and Paste" and we can take them all out. Alternatively we can just not use their applications and generally ignore them. I tend to do the latter. That means I have no problems with copy and paste on Linux. Odd that.
I gather that it is possible to remap the Emacs keybindings to conform to the Apple standards (I've seen at least one.emacs file out there to do just that), in which case you would presumably be able to work seamlessly with Emacs. But why bother when there's jEdit;)
Then the point stands: there are applications (Xlib apps on X11 on MacOS X) that don't behave "properly/consistently" for copy and paste.
I agree, this issue is mitigated on the Mac by the fact that the majority of Mac software uses standard Mac toolkits and hence integrate together wonderfully, so 99.99% of the time it doesn't matter.
I wasn't trying to claim MacOS X was horribly broken, merely that the standards "Must work for every toolkit that runs on the platform" just isn't viable: nothing can hew to that because someone can just write a new toolkit for the platform that disrespects the standards.
The problem is worse on linux because there is no centralised, locked down, mandated set of toolkits, and more of the apps are free software that simply use whatever toolkit they like. That means the odds of running into an app that doesn't play nice is a lot higher. That's the price for using such an open system. But as you have obviously found MacOS X provides excellent consistency in such things, so really why would you ever use Linux or associated apps? If you have reasons to want to use Linux, then you should expect potential inconsistency from random app foo that decided not to use the standard Freedesktop.org clipboard interface.
When Linux can do that, consistantly, across all applications no matter the toolkit, give me a call. Until then, I'm with the grandparent here: Copy and paste in Linux DOES NOT WORK.
You can't even do that in Windows, across all applications no matter what the toolkit. Control-C does weird things in xedit running on X11 for windows - that's an application and toolkit (X11 + Xlib) on Windows that doesn't work. I had rxvt compiled to run natively (no X11 required) on Windows, and the Control-C method didn't work there either. Much closer to home, the last time I used Windows (Windows 2000) the DOS/cmd window did some really weird shit as far as copy and paste went - and that's a Microsoft application.
If you have no control over the applications and toolkits, how can you expect to enforce that they all behave the way you expect. Someone can come along and write something for your platform that ignores your suggestions. Either you block them from running, or you just say "non-standard toolkit, can't be helped". Your request is unrealistic.
Do the standard MacOS copy/paste keybindings work in xterm and xedit? How about Emacs on X? I don't have vast experience on OS X, but I would be surprised if everything worked perfectly. I will bet any GNOME or KDE apps will integrate wonderfully. I will be surprised if every X app has perfectly consistent copy and paste. If so, someone needs to get a hold of Apple's X11 code because we can make absolutely every X11 application for Linux behave utterly consistently too.
Yeah. Most users would have a hard time with Linux if they have to find out about the differences between GNOME, GTK, KDE/Qt, Motif, (insert random toolkit here) applications, all with their own rules of usability, standards, and copy/paste.
But you see copy and paste doesn't work under Windows or MacOS X if you hold it to the same standards. On MacOS X if you use an X app then copy and paste doesn't perfectly integrate with the rest of your MacOS X apps. Same for Windows - try using Ctrl-C Ctrl-V on Windows Emacs or XEmacs for instance. With Windows and Mac those difficulties are written off because it's just a "bad application" or using a "non-standard toolkit". With Linux if you stick with KDE, or stick with GNOME then you won't have issues with copy and paste. If you use a "bad application" or a "non-standard toolkit" you may run into copy and paste difficulties. Why is the problem more obvious on Linux? Because a lot of the software running on it is Free software, and those people are Free to use whatever tool kit appeals to them. If you don't like it, don't use the app - no one is forcing you to.
Besides, GNOME and KDE now play pretty nicely together for copy and paste, so the only odd ones out are Motif, old X apps, and apps that use other weird toolkits. How is this that different from some weird toolkit running on Mac or Windows that decides not to support the generally agreed standard clipboard functions? X has a well defined clipboard - it's actually quite a featureful one, if app developers want to fail to use it properly, or generally just abuse it then that is their fault. Blame the app.
Why can't we just unite like all the good apps on windows, mac os, qnx, amiga.. and everything else with a real solid dev team?
Linux is Free software, and most of the stuff running on it is usually also Free software. That has costs, and one of those costs is that people will write whatever they feel like writing. You won't be able to force people to conform. You can have things like Freedesktop.org to lay out some suggested standards, but no one is compelled to follow them. The only way to enforce consistency is to dictate that there is only one way to do things, and the only realistic way to do that is to have a single group in sole control of all the core libraries, which means they need to locked down to prevent forking parallel development, etc. If that's what you want, great. It's out there and available right now: Apple is offering it with MacOS X, Microsoft is offering it with Windows. If you want Free software with open source, you have to be willing to take the bad with the good.
Sure, the free market will try and correct for a lack of honesty. The internet will route around censorship - that doesn't mean you may as well have censorship because the internet will manage to get past it. If the market is going to move toward a more honest system, and an honest system is going to be more efficient, you may as well just go straight there if you can. Or do you really believe that laws against fraud are onerous and repressive restrictions on freedom?
Alternatively you can just point out that free markets tend to work best when the parties involved in a transaction have as information as possible. Introducing false information distorts transactions and harms the efficiency of the free market. Requiring truth in avertising is helping the maximise the efficiency of the market.
Why are you writing that ledger program for the accountants on their AS/400? Or how do you calculate EBITDA or any other number on an income statement, and how do the head decision-makers in a company want to see the resulting data? It really would make your job easier if you happen to be programming financial systems.
Because obviously that is the sot of thing you just can't learn outside of a degree program in Business or Accounting. Did you consider maybe just asking people these things, or doing some quick study in EBITDA, income statements, etc.? Are the answers to those questions the sort of thing that you won't understand without a few years of education under your belt?
I've heard from people in similar positions that MBA programs are a joke compared to the hardcore science classes (but I'm sure some/.ers will mod me down for that).
When I was doing my honours degree in mathematics there was another math honours student who decided to do some Management Science courses. He had never taken any MSci courses prior to that but managed to talk them into letting him try the grad level courses. Despite having never done anything in the subject previously, he found them trivial and got top marks in the classes - his only complaint was the large amount of pure busy work.
It is worth noting that this was a very bright guy. Then again, I would be very very surprised to see a Management/Business student who hadn't taken any undergrad math managing to fare at all well in grad level math courses.
Perhaps that was just the University I was at though...
On the flip side it may also say, "This guy has no business and people skills". Get a Communications or Business degree. Raw brains are a cheap commodity on the global market.
You can demonstrate communication and people skills when you show up for the interview. A piece of paper saying you have them hardly helps. On the other hand proving that you are adept at abstract and logical thought and a sound grounding in advanced mathematics: Not quite so easy to demonstrate at an interview; you might want a piece of paper for that one.
Really folks, people and communication skills are something you mostly either have or don't. If you aren't much of a people person taking a course in Business isn't going to turn you into one. If you are incapable of actually forming your thoughts into something you can communicate to others - well, maybe you should be taking some remedial English courses.
Classic example of "Americanisation" of a reasonably good British comedy: The film Fever Pitch has been remade as a Hollywood film. It looks appalling, and bears all the hallmarks of a "bad americanisation" of something.
Be aware, of course, that it is entirely possible for Americans to get it, and produce something good suitably adapted: Look at High Fidelity. Same source author, similar kind of story and humour, yet well adapted.
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I can't know the answer to that any more than you can. I am willing to make the assumption, based on the fact that we haven't seen a reoccurrence of 9/11 or anything similar, that anti-terrorism measures have met with at least some modicum of success.
That's a pretty unjustified assumption. How many occurences of 9/11 or similar have there been in the last 200 years of US history? Does that mean anti-terrorism efforts for the 195 years prior to 9/11 were fine - I mean, they managed to prevent all those terrorist attacks right?
If you don't cut out a slave's heart every morning before sunrise then the sun won't rise: I mean, obviously its working, we've killed a slave every morning, and the sun keeps rising.
Jedidiah.
While I personally agree with Conservatives that the size of the federal government should be decreased, I do not agree with this strategy. It creates a situation that makes it incredibly difficult to pay off the debt.
It is also incredibly foolish to be running a massive budget deficit when you're also facing consistent trade deficits year after year. The end result has been a blowout in the current account deficit, and a fall in the US Dollar. Worse though, is that with all of that other countries are less and less keen to buy US debt (China and Japan, the biggest foreign buyers, seem to be reaching their limit). That, of course, is only going to make servicing of debt ever more expensive, as ever better rates of return on debt need to be offered to find buyers. It's a nasty spiral, and someone needs to take a grip and pull the US out of it.
Jedidiah.
Right. Because the poor are not at all served by programs that keep them from getting blown up in their homes by terrorists.
By proportion of money spent? An interesting question. How many people have had their homes blown up by terrorists recently? More importantly, how many people have been saved from having their homes blown up by terrorists recently? No, honestly, for all the speeches about the imminent threat, exactly how much danger has been eliminated? There have been some cases of "terrorist cells" found in the US. Unfortunately you don't hear much about those cases anymore. That's because they've all been dropped, thrown out of court, or quietly shuffled off to minor charges like "wearing any enemy uniform". Have a search around. See if you can find a single significant justified case of terrorism on US soil that has been quelled, postponed, or stopped by the various initiaives. Now consider all the shootings, knifings, murders and random acts of violence (like the Washington Sniper) that were completely unrelated to terrorism and went completely ignored by these anti-terror intiatives. Which, honestly, is a greater threat to the average American?
Jedidiah.
Curious as to why open-source stuff isn't catching on?
Open-source software is catching on - when it's good, and failing to catch on when it sucks; just like all the other software out there. Software being open source doesn't guarantee you anything (except te source code). There are people on here who will tell open source software is more secure, or better coded. I can point you to a thousand projects on freshmeat or souceforge that contradict that. Just because its open source is no guarantee of quality. Equally, it is no guarantee of a lack of quality. Darwin is open source and seems to be catching on fairly well. Firefox is open source, and seem to be doing well for itself. Linux, and GAIM and bittorrent and OpenOffice all have growing user bases. For every open source project with a crappy name, there is another that has a good name. Some projects with good names are popular, some projects are popular despite their names.
Open source doesn't mean anything at all - except that you get the source code. Everything else is entirely up to the individual project. Stop trying to randomly lump them together (though, to be fair, you're hardly the only one - the dumbass fanboys do it too).
Jedidiah.
Palm does. And they didn't seem that keen on selling them. Microsoft could always buy Palm to get BeOS. As a convenient side effect they'd also end up with about 90% of the PDA OS market. And at about that point the government might start asking questions about antitrust.
Microsoft doing much of anything with the remains of BeOS is highly unlikely. Maybe they could buy out the Haiku people, but that doesn't seem like much of a possibility either. Tjose people want to recreat and extend BeOS because they love it. I don't think they'd be keen to let Microsoft turn their efforts into some bastard stepchild of BeOS.
Jedidiah.
maybe they should take the OS X route and just buy a competitor and cut their loses. Starting over from (not quite) scratch will give Windows a shot in the arm. WINE has already proven that backwards compatibility with Windows applications doesn't have to be dependent on using their existing OS code. They should just buy out Be (a good choice since they already have a metadata filesystem) or someone else with a Unix-like underpinning
Be, what Be? I think you'll find that company doesn't exist anymore. They'd have to buy out palm to get the rights, and that might cause some antitrust ructions given the market for PDAs.
And who else is there to buy exactly? They could license OS X from Apple, but that would be a serious loss of face. Otherwise your down to Solaris, or AIX, or HPUX/Tru64 from Sun, IBM, or HP respectively, none of which would be terribly appealing. I guess they could buy SCO - that would given them something with UNIX-like underpinnings.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft will keep polishing the turd they have rather than going fishing amongst everyone elses turds.
Jedidiah.
Autopackage linkage. Sorry.
I don't think that a single install file working across distros and providing a simple uninstallation interface is too Windows-ish for Linux. Linux can be hip and different all it wants to be, but until the software installation is simplified mass adoption will never happen.
You mean like this? Autopackage is almost at 1.0, and while nice to have features like package manager integration won't be available in 1.0, it will do exactly what you are asking for: provide a single binary package that can install on any distribution. Just run the package file to install it (just like setup.exe files on Windows). It keeps track of packages installed this way, and has a simple GUI interface to remove them if you want. Simple, easy, cross distribution package installation. That's what you asked for isn't it? It's here, we just have to wait for developers to realise and start packaging their binaries that way.
Jedidiah.
I'm still waiting for a reasonable alternative to the underlying X server that isn't completely unheard of in 90% of the OSS world.
I'm not sure what you mean here, do you want a different implementation of the X protocol? If so, why not try Freedesktop.org's experimental XServer? It's quite a nice fast modular server. Are you looking for something other than X11 protocol? Then why not try DirectFB? DirectFB doesn't have enough supported applications for you? Why not try Quartz, which I imagine at least 90% of the OSS world as heard of. I don't really see a lack of options there.
Jedidiah.
I'm sure a Mac GUI is coming, my point was that if you want the new functionality now it is still entirely usable. The curses interface is actually quite nice, and was all I used for quite some time.
Jedidiah.
The OS X client is still at 3.4.2. Is anyone working on an update? (I'd offer to help, but I don't program :p)
It's in python so you should be able to just grab the source and use btdownloadcurses.py in Terminal.app (or whatever it is). Do you need a pretty GUI, or do you just want the new functionality etc.?
Jedidiah.
And I hate this shit. "It's ok if it doesn't work in Linux because it also doesn't work in Windows."
I'm not claiming its okay, I'm claiming its just what you're going to get when developers are free to write and use whatever toolkit meets their whims. You can't expect every application to behave exactly the way you want, because the developer of the app might disagree with you.
That's a fact. Small details, like implementing copy and paste correctly in all cases, will improve software in general regardless of the platform.
That would be lovely. GNOME and KDE apps copy and paste between each other perfectly well, so there's not really a problem there. The problem is with more fringe applications. The problem with them is that said developer might think the "standard" method of copy and paste is silly, and implement his own "better" system. Are you going to stop him?
Maybve we can form the "Hit Squad for Developer's Who Don't Agree With Me About How to Implement Copy and Paste" and we can take them all out. Alternatively we can just not use their applications and generally ignore them. I tend to do the latter. That means I have no problems with copy and paste on Linux. Odd that.
Jedidiah.
I gather that it is possible to remap the Emacs keybindings to conform to the Apple standards (I've seen at least one .emacs file out there to do just that), in which case you would presumably be able to work seamlessly with Emacs. But why bother when there's jEdit ;)
Indeed, why use Linux when there is MacOS X?
Jedidiah.
Then the point stands: there are applications (Xlib apps on X11 on MacOS X) that don't behave "properly/consistently" for copy and paste.
I agree, this issue is mitigated on the Mac by the fact that the majority of Mac software uses standard Mac toolkits and hence integrate together wonderfully, so 99.99% of the time it doesn't matter.
I wasn't trying to claim MacOS X was horribly broken, merely that the standards "Must work for every toolkit that runs on the platform" just isn't viable: nothing can hew to that because someone can just write a new toolkit for the platform that disrespects the standards.
The problem is worse on linux because there is no centralised, locked down, mandated set of toolkits, and more of the apps are free software that simply use whatever toolkit they like. That means the odds of running into an app that doesn't play nice is a lot higher. That's the price for using such an open system. But as you have obviously found MacOS X provides excellent consistency in such things, so really why would you ever use Linux or associated apps? If you have reasons to want to use Linux, then you should expect potential inconsistency from random app foo that decided not to use the standard Freedesktop.org clipboard interface.
Jedidiah.
When Linux can do that, consistantly, across all applications no matter the toolkit, give me a call. Until then, I'm with the grandparent here: Copy and paste in Linux DOES NOT WORK.
You can't even do that in Windows, across all applications no matter what the toolkit. Control-C does weird things in xedit running on X11 for windows - that's an application and toolkit (X11 + Xlib) on Windows that doesn't work. I had rxvt compiled to run natively (no X11 required) on Windows, and the Control-C method didn't work there either. Much closer to home, the last time I used Windows (Windows 2000) the DOS/cmd window did some really weird shit as far as copy and paste went - and that's a Microsoft application.
If you have no control over the applications and toolkits, how can you expect to enforce that they all behave the way you expect. Someone can come along and write something for your platform that ignores your suggestions. Either you block them from running, or you just say "non-standard toolkit, can't be helped". Your request is unrealistic.
Jedidiah,
Do the standard MacOS copy/paste keybindings work in xterm and xedit? How about Emacs on X? I don't have vast experience on OS X, but I would be surprised if everything worked perfectly. I will bet any GNOME or KDE apps will integrate wonderfully. I will be surprised if every X app has perfectly consistent copy and paste. If so, someone needs to get a hold of Apple's X11 code because we can make absolutely every X11 application for Linux behave utterly consistently too.
Jedidiah.
Yeah. Most users would have a hard time with Linux if they have to find out about the differences between GNOME, GTK, KDE/Qt, Motif, (insert random toolkit here) applications, all with their own rules of usability, standards, and copy/paste.
But you see copy and paste doesn't work under Windows or MacOS X if you hold it to the same standards. On MacOS X if you use an X app then copy and paste doesn't perfectly integrate with the rest of your MacOS X apps. Same for Windows - try using Ctrl-C Ctrl-V on Windows Emacs or XEmacs for instance. With Windows and Mac those difficulties are written off because it's just a "bad application" or using a "non-standard toolkit". With Linux if you stick with KDE, or stick with GNOME then you won't have issues with copy and paste. If you use a "bad application" or a "non-standard toolkit" you may run into copy and paste difficulties. Why is the problem more obvious on Linux? Because a lot of the software running on it is Free software, and those people are Free to use whatever tool kit appeals to them. If you don't like it, don't use the app - no one is forcing you to.
Besides, GNOME and KDE now play pretty nicely together for copy and paste, so the only odd ones out are Motif, old X apps, and apps that use other weird toolkits. How is this that different from some weird toolkit running on Mac or Windows that decides not to support the generally agreed standard clipboard functions? X has a well defined clipboard - it's actually quite a featureful one, if app developers want to fail to use it properly, or generally just abuse it then that is their fault. Blame the app.
Jedidiah.
Why can't we just unite like all the good apps on windows, mac os, qnx, amiga.. and everything else with a real solid dev team?
Linux is Free software, and most of the stuff running on it is usually also Free software. That has costs, and one of those costs is that people will write whatever they feel like writing. You won't be able to force people to conform. You can have things like Freedesktop.org to lay out some suggested standards, but no one is compelled to follow them. The only way to enforce consistency is to dictate that there is only one way to do things, and the only realistic way to do that is to have a single group in sole control of all the core libraries, which means they need to locked down to prevent forking parallel development, etc. If that's what you want, great. It's out there and available right now: Apple is offering it with MacOS X, Microsoft is offering it with Windows. If you want Free software with open source, you have to be willing to take the bad with the good.
Jedidiah.
Sure, the free market will try and correct for a lack of honesty. The internet will route around censorship - that doesn't mean you may as well have censorship because the internet will manage to get past it. If the market is going to move toward a more honest system, and an honest system is going to be more efficient, you may as well just go straight there if you can. Or do you really believe that laws against fraud are onerous and repressive restrictions on freedom?
Jedidiah.
Alternatively they could simply put a "Prices valid until yyyy-mm-dd" like everyone does on every but of print advertising you'll see.
Jedidiah.
Alternatively you can just point out that free markets tend to work best when the parties involved in a transaction have as information as possible. Introducing false information distorts transactions and harms the efficiency of the free market. Requiring truth in avertising is helping the maximise the efficiency of the market.
Jedidiah.
Why are you writing that ledger program for the accountants on their AS/400? Or how do you calculate EBITDA or any other number on an income statement, and how do the head decision-makers in a company want to see the resulting data? It really would make your job easier if you happen to be programming financial systems.
Because obviously that is the sot of thing you just can't learn outside of a degree program in Business or Accounting. Did you consider maybe just asking people these things, or doing some quick study in EBITDA, income statements, etc.? Are the answers to those questions the sort of thing that you won't understand without a few years of education under your belt?
Jedidiah.
I've heard from people in similar positions that MBA programs are a joke compared to the hardcore science classes (but I'm sure some /.ers will mod me down for that).
When I was doing my honours degree in mathematics there was another math honours student who decided to do some Management Science courses. He had never taken any MSci courses prior to that but managed to talk them into letting him try the grad level courses. Despite having never done anything in the subject previously, he found them trivial and got top marks in the classes - his only complaint was the large amount of pure busy work.
It is worth noting that this was a very bright guy. Then again, I would be very very surprised to see a Management/Business student who hadn't taken any undergrad math managing to fare at all well in grad level math courses.
Perhaps that was just the University I was at though...
Jedidiah.
On the flip side it may also say, "This guy has no business and people skills". Get a Communications or Business degree. Raw brains are a cheap commodity on the global market.
You can demonstrate communication and people skills when you show up for the interview. A piece of paper saying you have them hardly helps. On the other hand proving that you are adept at abstract and logical thought and a sound grounding in advanced mathematics: Not quite so easy to demonstrate at an interview; you might want a piece of paper for that one.
Really folks, people and communication skills are something you mostly either have or don't. If you aren't much of a people person taking a course in Business isn't going to turn you into one. If you are incapable of actually forming your thoughts into something you can communicate to others - well, maybe you should be taking some remedial English courses.
Jedidiah.
Classic example of "Americanisation" of a reasonably good British comedy: The film Fever Pitch has been remade as a Hollywood film. It looks appalling, and bears all the hallmarks of a "bad americanisation" of something.
Be aware, of course, that it is entirely possible for Americans to get it, and produce something good suitably adapted: Look at High Fidelity. Same source author, similar kind of story and humour, yet well adapted.
Jedidiah.