I can easily envision the 95% who live in the 12 states (in this example) passing federal laws that do a variety of things: requiring that we strip-mine the resources; requiring that we operate massive land-fills in the non-scenic areas to dispose of waste from the urban states; requiring that we ban all development in scenic areas (even though the large majority of that 95% will never visit them); requiring energy-efficiency standards that make sense in an urban setting but are simply not practical in my state.
That's what the Senate and the Supreme court is supposed to help protect - abuse of the minority. There are plenty of checks in place currently, and realistically te president isn't really one of them, so why worry about the electoral college for presidential voting?
Well, it doesn't taste that bad, if you're eating spirulina, considering how damn good it is for you in the right dosages. Sounds sensible to me. I tease my significant other for drinking "pond scum" in her orange juice, but she doesn't mind the taste at all.
Spirulina does actually taste rather unpleasant. That's why they mix it with orange huice instead of, say, water. Mixed with orange juice I agree, it's really not bad at all, but on its own it really is surprisingly unpleasant.
As for the rates of tax, for me, when I look at my tax bill, I can at least look at where it's being spent and think - yeah, that's worth it.
For a while I was living and working in NZ and my brother was living and working in the US. We were each earning the same amount in local currency. New Zealand has Universal Healthcare, and as we all know, the US does not. Naturally my tax bill was much higher than my brother... except, it wasn't. By the time all the Federal and State taxes, along with various Social Security levies and whatnot, were added up, my borther had a larger tax bill than me.
The US healthcare system is in some weird sort of limbo land where they can't bring themselves to commit to either course of action: they do spend a lot of money of various forms of government subsidising healthcare. I've heard that the US government spends more per person on healthcare than Canada, yet Canada has Universal healthcare*. Now, I haven't seen figures so I don't know if that's true, but I do know that in the US you end up paying as much or more in tax as most of the various "Socialist European countries".
Jedidiah.
* (Canada has its own issues: Fearing the rise of a "two tiered healthcare system, and hence refusing to allow a parallel private system to ease pressure on the public system).
Great, so the population is undemanding of intelligent media, so the media dumbs things down, so people become less informed, and less questioning, and hence less demanding of intelligent media so... You're heading for a cultural meltdown, and regardless of who is "at fault" you need to do something to break the cycle.
Ever listen to "Amused to Death" by Roger Waters. It seems to make more and more sense to me as time goes by.
I look forward to the Fedora SELinux project getting a good workable set of policies so that SELinux can default to being on for Fedora installs. Once that happens the "Linux is more Secure" claim will actually have some serious hard evidence behind it. SELinux and other Mandatory Access Control systems (anything hooking into the Linux Security Module in the kernel really) really are a serious step up in security, and there really is nothing comparable in the windows world.
A good way to think of MAC or SELinux is as a firewall between processes on your machine and the files and devices etc. on your machine. At the kernel level there is a set of rules, at pretty much as fine a grained level as you care to write, as to what can access what. It's well worth readign the FAQ to et a fuller idea of what we're talking about here.
This game was supposed to be HUGE, it was supposed to remind us all why we're into PC gaming instead of that console action, and I just don't think it's been selling on that level.
The game was being released for the Xbox, so it's hardly a reminder of why you play PC games. Moreover, where in the ell did you get that idea anyway? People cmplain about the hype, but I followed Doom3 development (well, id's announcements anyway) and I never recall them trying to claim any such thing, or making any sort of hype on that level. They claimed they had
(1) An impressive graphics engine, with a truly powerful lighting model. (2) A new and original sound system that truly handled 3D sound well. (3) A game that was focussing on the single player experience and was very much Doom recast in a far more realistic environment. (4) A truly frightening game.
I'd say they actually delivered on all those promises.
So where are you getting your claims of what it was supposed to be from? Some fanboy message board where teenagers brag about how "their Doom3 could beat up your Half Life2" and so on? If you listen to hype from people who don't know anything about the development of the game, is it any surprise the game doesn't agree with what you heard?
You are right, the story does seem to mimic Half-Life. Every good FPS since Half-Life has had the same formula too. You're an average guy just minding your own businees, going about your everyday work when some event happens and causes you to fight for your life. You progress through the game collecting weapons, ammo, skills, whatever, and at some point in the game you lose consciousness, get captured, whatever, and LOSE all your great stuff. You then struggle a little more and eventually find your stuff, or more just like it, and a BFG.
You did play the originl Doom right? Because you know that's exactly the plot for the original Doom way back when. I hope your post was sarcastic, but these days with Slashdots audience gettng younger and younger it is so hard to tell.
I agree entirely. I'm not a gamer, for the most part I just don't have the time or inclination. I was a huge fan of Doom way back when, and played Quake heavily when it first came out (and was a little disappointed - that one really was a tech dem and multiplayer game, the single player was largely tacked on) but haven't really played much of anything since besides the odd game of Starcraft or CS on the office LAN. I certainly don't follow the hype all that closely.
Then I heard about Doom3 and thought it sounded interesting so I did bother to follow, at least a little, news about development. Very recently I finally got the game (thanks to the linux binaries coming out) and am still wondering what all the bitching is about. It is exactly what was promised (by id as opposed to random fanboys). A heavily single player focused game that aims to bring the old Doom games to a new level of realism of scariness. The work on level design, attention to detail, and creature animations really are incredibly impressive.
Sure it doesn't have huge outside areas - we were told it wouldn't beforehand. Sure it doesn't have revolutionary new AI - it was never suggested it would. Sure it doesn't revolutionise the game industry - id never made any suggestion that such a thing would happen.
As a non gamer I find the single player game to be excellent, and exactly what I expected and wanted (which, in the end, was a chance to play Doom again, but this time with seriously impressive graphics).
People calling Doom3 a glorified tech demo have clearly forgotten, or never played, Quake1 single player. Quake1 had nice level design (from an architecture point of view) but the monsters, AI, story, the lot of it, were just random hodge podge bits tacked together. Doom3 is a coherent, carefully designed game. If it wasn't the game you wanted fine, but don't pretend that it promised more than it delivered - it was exactly what id always said it would be.
We need a way to track down what we install, modify or remove. In other words, something like apt but more global. This again I'm refering to the last point I made. Maybe if we had a universal format, maybe then we'd see various package managers available to almost all distributions to make the user's life easier.
Apt is fantastic for managing a core set of distribution provided packages. Throw a nice frontend like Synaptic on it and it's user friendly too. Apt works fine for both deb and rpm packages, so you really have the majority of distribution provided packages covered. Those that aren't covered are source distributions like Gentoo, or other fairly hands on distributions like Slackware.
The problem comes when users want to install something outside of their ditribution provided set. Sure, Debian has a very large repository, but it'll never have commercial software. Meanwhile Fedora has a very small repository (comparatively). For non-distribution provided packages I'd suggest you check out Autopackage. You download a packages, run it, and it will check dependencies, resolve them if at all possible, and install itself - it's like installshield but nicer and with dependency resolution. Autopackage isn't done yet, but it already has working packages - its just lacking nice to have features like integration with rpm and deb package databases etc.
Given a combination of Synaptic and Autopackage for base and third party software I think Linux has a very bright future for installing and managing software.
What a sad state Slashdot has come to when someone (with a remarkably high UID I note) uses the phrase "In case you haven't seen it" With respect to the film Wargames.
This is Slashdot - you used to be able to assume everyone would have seen Wargames. I don't know whether this is a dilution of the geek quotient here, or a sign that the Slashdot audience is now made up of 15 year olds, but I fear for Slashdot's future.*
Jedidiah
* Not really, Slashdot went to hell a long time ago, but it still provides amusement such as this.
True. But if you look up the phrase "to bear arms" in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find that the definition current at the time of the writing of the Second Amendment (indeed, the only definition the phrase has ever had) is "to serve as a soldier, to fight."
So then the Second Amendment is ensuring the rights of women and gays to serve in the military, and has nothing to do with the right to own guns? Interesting iterpretation. Sounds kind of tempting, but unfortunately I think you'll find very few people indeed who will read it that way.
The details we won't hear are, of course, the various deals Microsoft cut with Intel and AMD to set their pricing this way. I mean let's face it, in one fell swoop MS could effectively end the chances of multicore processors if they decided to set a different pricing scheme. I wonder what they asked for...
Reminds me of a story I read once but can't find right now. It's the future, and some college kid reads a book from a friend he needs for his degree but can't afford to buy. Reading another person's book is illegal, and he's stressed that the government will bust him and his girlfriend.... 10 karma points to s/he who finds this story. It's perfect for this topic.
No. Some labor is a commodity. Some is not. "Commodity" means a mass-produced unspecialized product . Nice try.
Really, because every dictionary I've looked in gives a variety of defintions, and while "a mass-produced unspecialized product" is one of the defintions given by Merriam Webster, most dictionaries agree on the more common defintions:
"an article of trade or commerce" "an economic good"
Both of which work perfectly well for the parent post. You seem to be extracting a less commonly used defintion and then claiming it is the only defintion - or are you claiming you knew in what sense the parent poster was using the word: specifically in the sense that was refutable, as opposed to the sense that would have left his argument sound.
What makes you think it wouldn't just be annother kernel config parameter to most people?
From what I understand of it, the issue is that it is a big chunk of code that touches and changes the core kernel code in many many places (which naturally has a lot of flow on effects down the line). That makes it a lot harder to make it a single config switch. I understand Linux is not fundamentally opposed, just opposed to trying to merge the patch in its current form in. I series of smaller modularised patches that can be incrementally merged in (and have simple config switches added for them) is probably the way to go (and what Linus is suggesting they do).
"creeping" indeed. C# is here now, and you can write real apps in it now. Parrot still hasn't gotten out of the gate. It just happened to move a little.
And 4 years ago the Java people could happily say exactly the same thing about C#. If Parrot offers real advantages (and it does) then when it does arrive it is going to shake things up. Laugh now, but honestly, wait a few years and see if you're still laughing. I'll put rather good odds that if you are it will be very very nervous laughter.
Parrot is a very interesting project indeed, and it looks as if it is now starting to seriously pick up steam. What we're looking at here is VM that works, and is optimised for Perl, Python, Ruby, Forth and all those other lovely scripting languages.
Given all the current debate raging over JVM vs..NET and Java vs. C# people seemed to have missed Parrot creeping up from behind. Potentially Parrot can pull together Perl, Python and Ruby - imagine CPAN that works with all of those languages at once, but pulls in all the interesting Python and Ruby libraries too.
In general scripting languages have been looked down upon, but realistically the gap between scripting languages (and what you even mean by "scripting language") has been drastically narrowed to the point where it is increasingly less relevant. The only serious remaining issue is speed - and that's something Parrot can help fix, putting Perl, Python and Ruby code on a similar footing as Java and C# code running on their VMs. You'll take a small hit for using a higher level language, but it won't be as drastic as it is now.
Maybe all that GNOME discussion about.NET via Mono or Java via JVM shoudl start considering Perl/Python/Ruby via Parrot as a very serious choice for doing the high level application programming.
The problem with using Linux when the people you work for generally use Windows is, of course, being compatible with them.
Odd that really. If you have a mixed shop with Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, and *BSD everything plays very nicely together. It is very much Windows that is the odd one out here - very much Windows that doesn't play nice with everyone else. That means that should Windows actually lose some real market share and not, by default, be the absolute dominant force that everyone else is forced to be compatible with... well, all of a sudden that lack of playing nice is going to look very bad for Microsoft. It's all about mindshare. Right now MS has it, but a little slip can cause a dramatci change.
until you do realize you can't print to the latest laser printer your boss bought because it's simply not supported by any driver on linux
Run that one by me again. You're saying that after going to the hassle of Linux migration the IT deprtment isn't going to spend the 1 minute required to heck if the new printer they would like to buy is supported?
And then ignoring that issue for a minute - you said "laser printer". I think you're confused. It's the inexpensive home desktop inkjet printers that don't work with Linux. Pretty much all laser printers speak either PostScript (which any UNIX based OS has zero issues with, no extra drivers of any kind required) or PCL which again Linux has no problems with. I dare you to find any decent laser printer that doesn't work flawlessly immediately with Linux.
The thing that stands out most is the number of questions that were simply not answered. Sure, a response was given, but it often completely ignored the real question. All the candidates did this, though some more than others.
The most striking examples include:
Election Reform - Both Bush and Kerry completely ignored the main thrust of the question which related to different voting system, and the two party duopoly.
Personal - All candidates effectively ignored this question, Bush most prominently, but neither Nader nor Kerry actually had much to say about changing their own minds on any issue of any significance.
But many of the other questions involved significant dodges on various points of the question, other otherwise derailing the answer from the main track to make completely unrelated points.
Sure, these are politicians and that's what they do, but really, they had so many advisors to write this for them, and plenty of time to do it - you would think they'd do a better job of actually answering the questions directly.
Slashdot Mirror
I can easily envision the 95% who live in the 12 states (in this example) passing federal laws that do a variety of things: requiring that we strip-mine the resources; requiring that we operate massive land-fills in the non-scenic areas to dispose of waste from the urban states; requiring that we ban all development in scenic areas (even though the large majority of that 95% will never visit them); requiring energy-efficiency standards that make sense in an urban setting but are simply not practical in my state.
That's what the Senate and the Supreme court is supposed to help protect - abuse of the minority. There are plenty of checks in place currently, and realistically te president isn't really one of them, so why worry about the electoral college for presidential voting?
Jedidiah.
They devised a solution to a problem that still exists today: Ensuring that large populations do not dicate law to smaller populations.
Yes, that would be the Supreme Court and the Senate. What does that have to do with Electoral College voting for President?
Jedidiah.
Well, it doesn't taste that bad, if you're eating spirulina, considering how damn good it is for you in the right dosages. Sounds sensible to me. I tease my significant other for drinking "pond scum" in her orange juice, but she doesn't mind the taste at all.
Spirulina does actually taste rather unpleasant. That's why they mix it with orange huice instead of, say, water. Mixed with orange juice I agree, it's really not bad at all, but on its own it really is surprisingly unpleasant.
Jedidiah.
As for the rates of tax, for me, when I look at my tax bill, I can at least look at where it's being spent and think - yeah, that's worth it.
For a while I was living and working in NZ and my brother was living and working in the US. We were each earning the same amount in local currency. New Zealand has Universal Healthcare, and as we all know, the US does not. Naturally my tax bill was much higher than my brother... except, it wasn't. By the time all the Federal and State taxes, along with various Social Security levies and whatnot, were added up, my borther had a larger tax bill than me.
The US healthcare system is in some weird sort of limbo land where they can't bring themselves to commit to either course of action: they do spend a lot of money of various forms of government subsidising healthcare. I've heard that the US government spends more per person on healthcare than Canada, yet Canada has Universal healthcare*. Now, I haven't seen figures so I don't know if that's true, but I do know that in the US you end up paying as much or more in tax as most of the various "Socialist European countries".
Jedidiah.
* (Canada has its own issues: Fearing the rise of a "two tiered healthcare system, and hence refusing to allow a parallel private system to ease pressure on the public system).
Great, so the population is undemanding of intelligent media, so the media dumbs things down, so people become less informed, and less questioning, and hence less demanding of intelligent media so... You're heading for a cultural meltdown, and regardless of who is "at fault" you need to do something to break the cycle.
Ever listen to "Amused to Death" by Roger Waters. It seems to make more and more sense to me as time goes by.
Jedidiah.
I hadn't heard of this before, but it looks very interesting. I would have to spend some time evaluating it, but at a glance it does look quite good.
Please mod the parent up - its adding something very useful to the discussion!
Jedidiah.
I look forward to the Fedora SELinux project getting a good workable set of policies so that SELinux can default to being on for Fedora installs. Once that happens the "Linux is more Secure" claim will actually have some serious hard evidence behind it. SELinux and other Mandatory Access Control systems (anything hooking into the Linux Security Module in the kernel really) really are a serious step up in security, and there really is nothing comparable in the windows world.
A good way to think of MAC or SELinux is as a firewall between processes on your machine and the files and devices etc. on your machine. At the kernel level there is a set of rules, at pretty much as fine a grained level as you care to write, as to what can access what. It's well worth readign the FAQ to et a fuller idea of what we're talking about here.
Jedidiah.
This game was supposed to be HUGE, it was supposed to remind us all why we're into PC gaming instead of that console action, and I just don't think it's been selling on that level.
The game was being released for the Xbox, so it's hardly a reminder of why you play PC games. Moreover, where in the ell did you get that idea anyway? People cmplain about the hype, but I followed Doom3 development (well, id's announcements anyway) and I never recall them trying to claim any such thing, or making any sort of hype on that level. They claimed they had
(1) An impressive graphics engine, with a truly powerful lighting model.
(2) A new and original sound system that truly handled 3D sound well.
(3) A game that was focussing on the single player experience and was very much Doom recast in a far more realistic environment.
(4) A truly frightening game.
I'd say they actually delivered on all those promises.
So where are you getting your claims of what it was supposed to be from? Some fanboy message board where teenagers brag about how "their Doom3 could beat up your Half Life2" and so on? If you listen to hype from people who don't know anything about the development of the game, is it any surprise the game doesn't agree with what you heard?
Jedidiah.
You are right, the story does seem to mimic Half-Life. Every good FPS since Half-Life has had the same formula too.
You're an average guy just minding your own businees, going about your everyday work when some event happens and causes you to fight for your life. You progress through the game collecting weapons, ammo, skills, whatever, and at some point in the game you lose consciousness, get captured, whatever, and LOSE all your great stuff. You then struggle a little more and eventually find your stuff, or more just like it, and a BFG.
You did play the originl Doom right? Because you know that's exactly the plot for the original Doom way back when. I hope your post was sarcastic, but these days with Slashdots audience gettng younger and younger it is so hard to tell.
Jedidiah.
I agree entirely. I'm not a gamer, for the most part I just don't have the time or inclination. I was a huge fan of Doom way back when, and played Quake heavily when it first came out (and was a little disappointed - that one really was a tech dem and multiplayer game, the single player was largely tacked on) but haven't really played much of anything since besides the odd game of Starcraft or CS on the office LAN. I certainly don't follow the hype all that closely.
Then I heard about Doom3 and thought it sounded interesting so I did bother to follow, at least a little, news about development. Very recently I finally got the game (thanks to the linux binaries coming out) and am still wondering what all the bitching is about. It is exactly what was promised (by id as opposed to random fanboys). A heavily single player focused game that aims to bring the old Doom games to a new level of realism of scariness. The work on level design, attention to detail, and creature animations really are incredibly impressive.
Sure it doesn't have huge outside areas - we were told it wouldn't beforehand. Sure it doesn't have revolutionary new AI - it was never suggested it would. Sure it doesn't revolutionise the game industry - id never made any suggestion that such a thing would happen.
As a non gamer I find the single player game to be excellent, and exactly what I expected and wanted (which, in the end, was a chance to play Doom again, but this time with seriously impressive graphics).
People calling Doom3 a glorified tech demo have clearly forgotten, or never played, Quake1 single player. Quake1 had nice level design (from an architecture point of view) but the monsters, AI, story, the lot of it, were just random hodge podge bits tacked together. Doom3 is a coherent, carefully designed game. If it wasn't the game you wanted fine, but don't pretend that it promised more than it delivered - it was exactly what id always said it would be.
Jedidiah.
We need a way to track down what we install, modify or remove. In other words, something like apt but more global. This again I'm refering to the last point I made. Maybe if we had a universal format, maybe then we'd see various package managers available to almost all distributions to make the user's life easier.
Apt is fantastic for managing a core set of distribution provided packages. Throw a nice frontend like Synaptic on it and it's user friendly too. Apt works fine for both deb and rpm packages, so you really have the majority of distribution provided packages covered. Those that aren't covered are source distributions like Gentoo, or other fairly hands on distributions like Slackware.
The problem comes when users want to install something outside of their ditribution provided set. Sure, Debian has a very large repository, but it'll never have commercial software. Meanwhile Fedora has a very small repository (comparatively). For non-distribution provided packages I'd suggest you check out Autopackage. You download a packages, run it, and it will check dependencies, resolve them if at all possible, and install itself - it's like installshield but nicer and with dependency resolution. Autopackage isn't done yet, but it already has working packages - its just lacking nice to have features like integration with rpm and deb package databases etc.
Given a combination of Synaptic and Autopackage for base and third party software I think Linux has a very bright future for installing and managing software.
Jedidiah.
"U2 and Interscope will split a standard royalty for each song downloaded (about $0.60 per download), plus an upfront licensing fee."
Good to know SOMEBODY is getting something approaching a (more) fair cut of online royalties...
Any artist that signs on with Magnatune gets a guaranteed 50% of any sale. That's 50% straight to the artist, not splitting a ~60% royalty with Apple.
They're getting reasonable numbers of artists signing on too. Magnatune really is the best online music seller I've encountered.
Jedidiah.
What a sad state Slashdot has come to when someone (with a remarkably high UID I note) uses the phrase "In case you haven't seen it" With respect to the film Wargames.
This is Slashdot - you used to be able to assume everyone would have seen Wargames. I don't know whether this is a dilution of the geek quotient here, or a sign that the Slashdot audience is now made up of 15 year olds, but I fear for Slashdot's future.*
Jedidiah
* Not really, Slashdot went to hell a long time ago, but it still provides amusement such as this.
True. But if you look up the phrase "to bear arms" in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find that the definition current at the time of the writing of the Second Amendment (indeed, the only definition the phrase has ever had) is "to serve as a soldier, to fight."
So then the Second Amendment is ensuring the rights of women and gays to serve in the military, and has nothing to do with the right to own guns? Interesting iterpretation. Sounds kind of tempting, but unfortunately I think you'll find very few people indeed who will read it that way.
Jedidiah.
The details we won't hear are, of course, the various deals Microsoft cut with Intel and AMD to set their pricing this way. I mean let's face it, in one fell swoop MS could effectively end the chances of multicore processors if they decided to set a different pricing scheme. I wonder what they asked for...
Jedidiah.
The sad fact is that in many regards Slashdot's audience probably is mostly in the upper percentiles for intelligence and education.
Let's just make that clear: Slashdotters are* the intellectual elite. If that's not depressing, I don't know what is...
* (some small percentage of)
Jedidiah.
Reminds me of a story I read once but can't find right now. It's the future, and some college kid reads a book from a friend he needs for his degree but can't afford to buy. Reading another person's book is illegal, and he's stressed that the government will bust him and his girlfriend. ...
10 karma points to s/he who finds this story. It's perfect for this topic.
That ones easy, and I'm sure many here knows it:
"The Right to Read" by Richard Stallman.
(No, I'm not expecting any karma)
Jedidiah
No. Some labor is a commodity. Some is not.
"Commodity" means a mass-produced unspecialized product . Nice try.
Really, because every dictionary I've looked in gives a variety of defintions, and while "a mass-produced unspecialized product" is one of the defintions given by Merriam Webster, most dictionaries agree on the more common defintions:
"an article of trade or commerce"
"an economic good"
Both of which work perfectly well for the parent post. You seem to be extracting a less commonly used defintion and then claiming it is the only defintion - or are you claiming you knew in what sense the parent poster was using the word: specifically in the sense that was refutable, as opposed to the sense that would have left his argument sound.
Jedidiah.
While I think most theory and math discoveries are already made
Having been employed as a professional research mathematician (I'm not talking academia here) I would beg to differ.
Jedidiah.
What makes you think it wouldn't just be annother kernel config parameter to most people?
From what I understand of it, the issue is that it is a big chunk of code that touches and changes the core kernel code in many many places (which naturally has a lot of flow on effects down the line). That makes it a lot harder to make it a single config switch. I understand Linux is not fundamentally opposed, just opposed to trying to merge the patch in its current form in. I series of smaller modularised patches that can be incrementally merged in (and have simple config switches added for them) is probably the way to go (and what Linus is suggesting they do).
Jedidiah.
"creeping" indeed. C# is here now, and you can write real apps in it now. Parrot still hasn't gotten out of the gate. It just happened to move a little.
And 4 years ago the Java people could happily say exactly the same thing about C#. If Parrot offers real advantages (and it does) then when it does arrive it is going to shake things up. Laugh now, but honestly, wait a few years and see if you're still laughing. I'll put rather good odds that if you are it will be very very nervous laughter.
Jedidiah.
Parrot is a very interesting project indeed, and it looks as if it is now starting to seriously pick up steam. What we're looking at here is VM that works, and is optimised for Perl, Python, Ruby, Forth and all those other lovely scripting languages.
.NET and Java vs. C# people seemed to have missed Parrot creeping up from behind. Potentially Parrot can pull together Perl, Python and Ruby - imagine CPAN that works with all of those languages at once, but pulls in all the interesting Python and Ruby libraries too.
.NET via Mono or Java via JVM shoudl start considering Perl/Python/Ruby via Parrot as a very serious choice for doing the high level application programming.
Given all the current debate raging over JVM vs.
In general scripting languages have been looked down upon, but realistically the gap between scripting languages (and what you even mean by "scripting language") has been drastically narrowed to the point where it is increasingly less relevant. The only serious remaining issue is speed - and that's something Parrot can help fix, putting Perl, Python and Ruby code on a similar footing as Java and C# code running on their VMs. You'll take a small hit for using a higher level language, but it won't be as drastic as it is now.
Maybe all that GNOME discussion about
Jedidiah.
The problem with using Linux when the people you work for generally use Windows is, of course, being compatible with them.
Odd that really. If you have a mixed shop with Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, and *BSD everything plays very nicely together. It is very much Windows that is the odd one out here - very much Windows that doesn't play nice with everyone else. That means that should Windows actually lose some real market share and not, by default, be the absolute dominant force that everyone else is forced to be compatible with... well, all of a sudden that lack of playing nice is going to look very bad for Microsoft. It's all about mindshare. Right now MS has it, but a little slip can cause a dramatci change.
Jedidiah.
until you do realize you can't print to the latest laser printer your boss bought because it's simply not supported by any driver on linux
Run that one by me again. You're saying that after going to the hassle of Linux migration the IT deprtment isn't going to spend the 1 minute required to heck if the new printer they would like to buy is supported?
And then ignoring that issue for a minute - you said "laser printer". I think you're confused. It's the inexpensive home desktop inkjet printers that don't work with Linux. Pretty much all laser printers speak either PostScript (which any UNIX based OS has zero issues with, no extra drivers of any kind required) or PCL which again Linux has no problems with. I dare you to find any decent laser printer that doesn't work flawlessly immediately with Linux.
Jedidiah.
The thing that stands out most is the number of questions that were simply not answered. Sure, a response was given, but it often completely ignored the real question. All the candidates did this, though some more than others.
The most striking examples include:
Election Reform - Both Bush and Kerry completely ignored the main thrust of the question which related to different voting system, and the two party duopoly.
Personal - All candidates effectively ignored this question, Bush most prominently, but neither Nader nor Kerry actually had much to say about changing their own minds on any issue of any significance.
But many of the other questions involved significant dodges on various points of the question, other otherwise derailing the answer from the main track to make completely unrelated points.
Sure, these are politicians and that's what they do, but really, they had so many advisors to write this for them, and plenty of time to do it - you would think they'd do a better job of actually answering the questions directly.
Jedidiah.