Re:Don't mean to sound the troll here but...
on
SJGames Layoffs
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· Score: 3
personally I would rather hear a "Sorry but we're tight right now" and not some "Oops my bad I didn't watch so and so"
So would many other people, apparently. For some reason, a reason which is totally beyond my power to explain, people like being lied to. I wish I knew why.
Once, back when I used to attempt to play Linux advocate (btw, it seems that media manipulation, something I never tried or even considered trying, has been the most successful method of advocating free software) I spent quite some time extolling the virtues of Linux to someone I knew. One point I mentioned was that the producers of Linux systems are more likely to admit mistakes (securty flaws were less important to this person, but basic things like bugs in the OS that would cause a crash) due to the nature of openly developed software. He told me that he would prefer a vendor who did not admit mistakes. It was the kind of statement to which I could never really refute. It still is. It's pretty difficult to refute a statement which is totally beyond one's comprehension.
Why do people prefer to be lied to when they know the truth? I really can't understand it, but it does seem explain some otherwise apparently irrational actions by people and/or organisations who want to pretend that they can't be held accountable for anything.
Having said that, kudos to PJG for being forthright about their problems. I respect them much more for it. --
It's really sad. (It really indicates a lack of pride in one's work, when one is effectively a journalist, to write so poorly.) I've found that I hardly notice the spelling mistakes anymore - they're so prevalent!
Some people claim that verbal skills are unessential in computing. They're sadly mistaken, as any literate person who has had the misfortune to work with a barely literate (are my standards for literacy higher than most? possibly) individual will tell you.
(It was a choice of moderating up or replying; I chose to reply. I'll probably be modded down for my efforts.) --
For the sake of the fools, it is unfortunate the Australia is banning Australian casinos from establishing online gambling sites because the well-regulated Australian casinos would at least ensure an honest game.
They are doing it not out of concern for Australians but rather out of concern for the people who run the casinos, poker machines (I think there are more poker machines in Aus than in the rest of the world), and lotteries.
Sadly, free trade is a myth in Australia: the governments here seem to love to grant artificial monopolies that would never make it in a truly free market. (Of course, that's not terribly different to the rest of the world.) --
No, they'd just make it so you have to be 21 to look at pr0n.
Not too dissimilar to what they've done already with funding public libraries. --
Re:Quality of work goes down the toilet
on
Dial U for Union
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· Score: 1
Unions will just make it so that employers can't fire those who don't do their work
Sorry, but you're promoting a fallacy. While unions do indeed sometimes keep lousy employees employed, that is almost invariably the fault of management.
How?
With a unionised system, a worker generally has a few chances to screw up. When he does, the onus is on his manager to speak to him about it, and keep a written record of that. The second time, there would be written, with perhaps the manager's boss present, records kept. The third time is the last time. (Specifics in this procedure vary, but the idea seems to be pretty universal.) The union may complain if a worker is being unjustifiedly picked on - good! It might also complain even if the worker did screw up. But so long as records exist and an official policy exists, they'll have no leg to stand on.
If management doesn't consistently follow the procedure, then it's largely their own fault that they get stuck with slackers. --
What is ``liberal'', in any sense of the word, about unions?
Just because in many countries the political party that tends to more openly support labour unions, there is nothing inherently liberal about the unions.
Don't be fooled by conventional thinking -- different political issues are often quite orthogonal to each other. To wit, Pat Buchanan supports unions and workers. Yet he's regarded as being quite conservative! A contradiction? Absolutely not. --
Sadly, to get a passable price, you need to sign up for a contract. In my case, it's an 18 month contract.
I'm not sure if a change in the plan entitles me to leave Telstra Bigpond; I should look.
It's all a bit frustrating since Telstra isn't exactly hurting; instead, it has been making record profits. The excuse that it needs to cut back in service simply does not hold any water. --
Those would actually be pretty good moderation options. More than once I've seen posts which I might have moderated down for being wrong or stupid. They weren't offtopic and they weren't redundant. They were just plain wrong.
Just make a list of all the people that you think are good coders, and cross off all the ones who'd rather blow hot air about Free Software than code.
Except that RMS has written a lot of very useful code used by lots of people, yet now he spends much of his time evangelising.
If RMS can sway some people in favour of Free Software, all the better. (However, I do think that someone addressing The Future Suits of America club, or whatever they're called, would probably have more success discussing Open Source. It's all about targeting what you say to your audience, not a matter of whether one term is better than the other.) --
Rail transportation is more efficient than truck transportation. To a large extent, that's due to the lower coefficient of friction of metal on metal as opposed to rubber on bitumen. Trains can also haul a lot more stuff than a truck can -- there can be trains with dozens of cars, but a truck with dozens of trailers would be a real menace.
However, it's better to transport a lot of things in one truck than a lot of things in a lot of cars! That's why busses, even though older ones (newer ones often don't use petrol or diesel) stink, are far preferable to individual cars.
As for flying things being efficient, I have read that a 747 is currently the most efficient way to move large payloads over long distances. Take that information with a grain of salt, however, since I read it at boeing.com!:) --
I heard that a human on a bike is the most energy-efficient creature in the whole of the animal kingdom. I would imagine this is dependent on a flat, hard road surface.
Nah, we're a lot faster when we're going downhill. And bumpy surfaces are a lot more fun.:)
Seriously, though, two points.
First, bear in mind that we do need to eat food in order to ride our bikes, and the food needs to be transported somehow. I don't think anybody has the numbers on how much energy is expended moving food from one place to another. I know that I'd be quite happy to buy food which I know was transported mostly by rail instead of mostly by truck.
Second, how does bike usage compare in terms of efficiency to sailboats?
While I would like to agree with you, I have to point out the above fallacy, which is known as bifurcation.
So it is true that some people who say otherwise may well be liars or wusses, there also other alternatives. I had my girlfriend using Mandrake for some months, Star Office as a word processor. While she has no problem using KDE (at least until some dodgy app fucks permissions and she has to call me to tell her which chmod command to run, an all-too-frequent occurance), Star Office has barely cut the mustard. She wants Windows now, sad to say. --
Linuxworld 'have' this? Jesus. I hope that the submitter doesn't speak English natively, because that's a pretty grievious error. Just another example of how Slashdot's average user IQ is inversely proportional to amount of folks in the user base.
No, it's clear that you are the one who doesn't know English as it is spoken throughout the world well. To wit, in Australia, collective nouns take plural, not singular, verbs. In this case, since LinuxWorld is composed of numerous individuals, it takes a plural verb.
(Did you know that using US grammar rules, collective nouns can also take plural verbs? Yup!
They can when there is some degree of disunity: "The group were unable to decide what to do.")
While it is true that many people who write on slashdot (either as editors or as posters) apparently can not or choose not to write worth a damn, it is also true that many people like to criticise it for the wrong reasons.
(Another aside: what would you say if I declared that slashdot bashing is old and has long since become tiresome? I used to do that in 1997! I even got a defensive email from Rob Malda. Bashing slashdot before bashing slashdot was cool! I like to think that I've since moved beyond that sort of thing, though. In other words, bashing slashdot, for all its faults, is no longer cool.)
My advice: go travel a bit; you might learn something. There's a big world outside of where you live, wherever that is.
--
Re:Baseball + Slashdot = A Whole New World?
on
When Aviaks Attack
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· Score: 1
Re:Mundie's real argument, and why it doesn't matt
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 1
GPL'ed software can not be ported to operating systems where the underlining libraries the application must link to are
not under a GPL compatible license.
Um, that's simply not true. If the operating system's essential libraries are proprietary, you can still link a GPL application with them.
Case in point: most GNU software is ported to proprietary Unixes. (The support for Solaris is typically the best of the non-free Unixes.) It's quite kosher. --
Well, it would be difficult, and/or a bit hackish, but probably not impossible.
It wouldn't be inconceivable to write a supervising process which attempts to monitor ram usage and contention, and which then directs apache to tweak variables like MaxClients, MaxSpareServers, MinSpareServers, &c. This could be done messily by editing the httpd.conf file and HUPing apache; there are likely to be cleaner ways to do it.
I don't know how well it would work, but it seems plausable anyway.:) --
Re:Well, I see the usual anti-union bushwah
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
Is it unfair? Maybe. But is it the reality? Absolutely yes.
Since unions generally refuse to distinguish between employees based on some, perhaps arbitrary, definition of merit (favouring certain workers, either by management or by the union is a no-go), they're left with only the option of rating workers on their senority, which is fair as far as it goes -- all else being equal, those most likely to be the loyal workers deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Otherwise, the hotshots will start to bargain independantly. That may be good, or it may be bad, but it certainly defeates the purpose of the union, which is to achieve solidarity among the workers.
What all of that means is that unions are neither all good nor all bad. Unionisation definitely has its tradeoffs, and only the most intellectually dishonest people (usually politicans) will refute that.
<IMO> If freedom is a concern (it is!) then people ought to have the right to go it alone. That includes appealing to management for raises. But once you forgo the union, just don't expect it to save your ass when the management tells you to go screw. You're also entitled to band together for mutual benefit.
What people need to realise is that in traditional manager-employee situations, the worker and employee need to be regarded as opposing forces to be balanced. If they're too far out of whack, in either direction, bad things start to happen. (Profit goes down, workers get screwed, whatever.)
It takes a smart and forward-thinking company (and perhaps it needs to be operating in an industry that attracts a lot of smart and forward-thinking people) to try to act progressively and proactively to stop these sorts of conflicts before the need for unionisation.
</IMO> --
Slashdot Mirror
So would many other people, apparently. For some reason, a reason which is totally beyond my power to explain, people like being lied to. I wish I knew why.
Once, back when I used to attempt to play Linux advocate (btw, it seems that media manipulation, something I never tried or even considered trying, has been the most successful method of advocating free software) I spent quite some time extolling the virtues of Linux to someone I knew. One point I mentioned was that the producers of Linux systems are more likely to admit mistakes (securty flaws were less important to this person, but basic things like bugs in the OS that would cause a crash) due to the nature of openly developed software. He told me that he would prefer a vendor who did not admit mistakes. It was the kind of statement to which I could never really refute. It still is. It's pretty difficult to refute a statement which is totally beyond one's comprehension.
Why do people prefer to be lied to when they know the truth? I really can't understand it, but it does seem explain some otherwise apparently irrational actions by people and/or organisations who want to pretend that they can't be held accountable for anything.
Having said that, kudos to PJG for being forthright about their problems. I respect them much more for it.
--
Some people claim that verbal skills are unessential in computing. They're sadly mistaken, as any literate person who has had the misfortune to work with a barely literate (are my standards for literacy higher than most? possibly) individual will tell you.
(It was a choice of moderating up or replying; I chose to reply. I'll probably be modded down for my efforts.)
--
Code audits are possible, you know. The OpenBSD project has done it. It wouldn't have been possible with binary-only software.
--
They are doing it not out of concern for Australians but rather out of concern for the people who run the casinos, poker machines (I think there are more poker machines in Aus than in the rest of the world), and lotteries.
Sadly, free trade is a myth in Australia: the governments here seem to love to grant artificial monopolies that would never make it in a truly free market. (Of course, that's not terribly different to the rest of the world.)
--
Not too dissimilar to what they've done already with funding public libraries.
--
Sorry, but you're promoting a fallacy. While unions do indeed sometimes keep lousy employees employed, that is almost invariably the fault of management.
How?
With a unionised system, a worker generally has a few chances to screw up. When he does, the onus is on his manager to speak to him about it, and keep a written record of that. The second time, there would be written, with perhaps the manager's boss present, records kept. The third time is the last time. (Specifics in this procedure vary, but the idea seems to be pretty universal.) The union may complain if a worker is being unjustifiedly picked on - good! It might also complain even if the worker did screw up. But so long as records exist and an official policy exists, they'll have no leg to stand on.
If management doesn't consistently follow the procedure, then it's largely their own fault that they get stuck with slackers.
--
Actually, there are .co.uk and .ac.uk for commercial and academic organisations, respectively.
--
Just because in many countries the political party that tends to more openly support labour unions, there is nothing inherently liberal about the unions.
Don't be fooled by conventional thinking -- different political issues are often quite orthogonal to each other. To wit, Pat Buchanan supports unions and workers. Yet he's regarded as being quite conservative! A contradiction? Absolutely not.
--
I'm not sure if a change in the plan entitles me to leave Telstra Bigpond; I should look.
It's all a bit frustrating since Telstra isn't exactly hurting; instead, it has been making record profits. The excuse that it needs to cut back in service simply does not hold any water.
--
Unfortunately, that is not the case. Telstra has to pay for its overseas links -- not just for having them, but also for the traffic it incurs.
--
Gee, you don't hear that every day!
--
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Those would actually be pretty good moderation options. More than once I've seen posts which I might have moderated down for being wrong or stupid. They weren't offtopic and they weren't redundant. They were just plain wrong.
Oh well.
--
Except that RMS has written a lot of very useful code used by lots of people, yet now he spends much of his time evangelising.
If RMS can sway some people in favour of Free Software, all the better. (However, I do think that someone addressing The Future Suits of America club, or whatever they're called, would probably have more success discussing Open Source. It's all about targeting what you say to your audience, not a matter of whether one term is better than the other.)
--
However, it's better to transport a lot of things in one truck than a lot of things in a lot of cars! That's why busses, even though older ones (newer ones often don't use petrol or diesel) stink, are far preferable to individual cars.
As for flying things being efficient, I have read that a 747 is currently the most efficient way to move large payloads over long distances. Take that information with a grain of salt, however, since I read it at boeing.com! :)
--
Nah, we're a lot faster when we're going downhill. And bumpy surfaces are a lot more fun. :)
Seriously, though, two points.
First, bear in mind that we do need to eat food in order to ride our bikes, and the food needs to be transported somehow. I don't think anybody has the numbers on how much energy is expended moving food from one place to another. I know that I'd be quite happy to buy food which I know was transported mostly by rail instead of mostly by truck.
Second, how does bike usage compare in terms of efficiency to sailboats?
--
You know, that libc.so nonsense.
--
While I would like to agree with you, I have to point out the above fallacy, which is known as bifurcation.
So it is true that some people who say otherwise may well be liars or wusses, there also other alternatives. I had my girlfriend using Mandrake for some months, Star Office as a word processor. While she has no problem using KDE (at least until some dodgy app fucks permissions and she has to call me to tell her which chmod command to run, an all-too-frequent occurance), Star Office has barely cut the mustard. She wants Windows now, sad to say.
--
No, it's clear that you are the one who doesn't know English as it is spoken throughout the world well. To wit, in Australia, collective nouns take plural, not singular, verbs. In this case, since LinuxWorld is composed of numerous individuals, it takes a plural verb.
(Did you know that using US grammar rules, collective nouns can also take plural verbs? Yup! They can when there is some degree of disunity: "The group were unable to decide what to do.")
While it is true that many people who write on slashdot (either as editors or as posters) apparently can not or choose not to write worth a damn, it is also true that many people like to criticise it for the wrong reasons.
(Another aside: what would you say if I declared that slashdot bashing is old and has long since become tiresome? I used to do that in 1997! I even got a defensive email from Rob Malda. Bashing slashdot before bashing slashdot was cool! I like to think that I've since moved beyond that sort of thing, though. In other words, bashing slashdot, for all its faults, is no longer cool.)
My advice: go travel a bit; you might learn something. There's a big world outside of where you live, wherever that is.
--
If you think baseball has a lot of stats, you ain't seen nothing yet.
--
Um, that's simply not true. If the operating system's essential libraries are proprietary, you can still link a GPL application with them.
Case in point: most GNU software is ported to proprietary Unixes. (The support for Solaris is typically the best of the non-free Unixes.) It's quite kosher.
--
And it's not strictly a two party system, although it's clearly too close to one.
--
Good stuff!
--
It wouldn't be inconceivable to write a supervising process which attempts to monitor ram usage and contention, and which then directs apache to tweak variables like MaxClients, MaxSpareServers, MinSpareServers, &c. This could be done messily by editing the httpd.conf file and HUPing apache; there are likely to be cleaner ways to do it.
I don't know how well it would work, but it seems plausable anyway. :)
--
Since unions generally refuse to distinguish between employees based on some, perhaps arbitrary, definition of merit (favouring certain workers, either by management or by the union is a no-go), they're left with only the option of rating workers on their senority, which is fair as far as it goes -- all else being equal, those most likely to be the loyal workers deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Otherwise, the hotshots will start to bargain independantly. That may be good, or it may be bad, but it certainly defeates the purpose of the union, which is to achieve solidarity among the workers.
What all of that means is that unions are neither all good nor all bad. Unionisation definitely has its tradeoffs, and only the most intellectually dishonest people (usually politicans) will refute that.
<IMO>
If freedom is a concern (it is!) then people ought to have the right to go it alone. That includes appealing to management for raises. But once you forgo the union, just don't expect it to save your ass when the management tells you to go screw. You're also entitled to band together for mutual benefit.
What people need to realise is that in traditional manager-employee situations, the worker and employee need to be regarded as opposing forces to be balanced. If they're too far out of whack, in either direction, bad things start to happen. (Profit goes down, workers get screwed, whatever.)
It takes a smart and forward-thinking company (and perhaps it needs to be operating in an industry that attracts a lot of smart and forward-thinking people) to try to act progressively and proactively to stop these sorts of conflicts before the need for unionisation.
</IMO>
--
Most US cities weren't designed to accomodate traffic either.
--