No, it's a republic and republics arn't all they're cracked up to be. Just look at the US, for example. Bush should have been booted but the fact that American politcs has been turned into a sporting event means that the electorate collective IQ has dropped exponentially. People forget that human lives are at stake when they elect somebody who cannot own up to the fact they have really screwed up. Americans seem to have decided that the truth doesn't matter either with respect to Iraq.
As an American I see in this society a low level hatred of Muslims and general xenophobia. I see a significant group of people who believe that what makes a great civilization is people screaming "God Bless America" and running around with a flag. When the citizens of a country take their government seriously, hold it accountable, and refuse to allow themselves to be herded in to two rival camps then a Republic is a good idea. When people treat it like a game of baseball, these people no longer have any business voting. That is the point at which their government should be taken away from them.
In many ways I think China is better of then the so called "free world". The Chinese civil service, a large part of the government, is very efficient and relatively impartial. For example, I know people who have adopted children from China. In that case the trouble wasn't getting the children out of China, it was getting the children into the US. The Chinese agency handling adoption was very efficient and the path to adoption and removing the children from the country clearly laid out. The US INS does not have a clear cut set of rules on how to get an adopted child into the country. The job of aproving the children is left up to the assigned case worker and that person is under no obligation to follow any seblence of a proceedure in a given period of time. Put simply they were at the mercy of the whims of the INS, not an established legal proceeding. They are not alone in that regard as many other couples attempting the same thing have run afoul of the US INS, an institution of a so called "democracy".
Another good example comes from my own experiances in China. Visas are very easy to get and aproval can be obtained for a nominal fee in 24hrs. The reverse for Chinese can take months because of the ineptitude of the US government.
China may not have a so called "democracy" politically, but I believe this is an advantage. By not holding popular elections, nut cases like Bush are not elected. Instead stable and moderate people are put into power. Change is controlled and radical political factions are subdued. I also recognize China has had its share of nut case leaders, however these were largely reactionary due to western interference (and yes the US is partly to blame for this).
The Chinese may not have a TV in every room or a three car garage, but they are more focused than the US and have a much larger and more diverse intelligencia. You should not be so quick to treat world governments like a sporting event.
Actually, I worked there as a contracter and the only reason I didn't work 80-120hr weeks was because I wasn't salaried and they would have to pay me. It really is as bad a as people say, that is to say their negative image is well earned. People like to say there has to be some truth in both accounts, a middle road so to speak. Well there isn't. I sat in meetings where the topic of discussion was how to use existing products to capture the rest of the market and manipulate it to take over the next. It was never about how can we improve the product. I saw pletty of junk go out the door simply because management and marketing didn't care.
Sure there are good programmers there, but unfortunately bad managers and marketers run the place. This so called "Microsoft in the Mirror" is nothing more than propaganda. Stay in the FOSS world, it's a whole lot nicer than Bill's world.
Why do people who work there deny Microsoft is doing anything wrong but "...Making Great Software..."? There are lots of perks like: free beer in meetings (good beer), beer and pizza fridays, kid friendly environment, fire sale software perks, bonuses, etc... the list goes on and on (by the way this is what they do with some of that 90% they make on Windows and Office) so basically the employees loyalty is bought.
I left because I wanted to good quality development and still go to sleep at night knowing I had done a good job.
In terms of OEM OS, perhaps not. But Red Hat comes with a load of other software that actually makes the computer useful.. Microsoft requires that you purchase all of those things you should get for free like an office suite, decent CD burning software, etc...The reality is that there is much more value in the Linux system even if the base system price is the same.
Inovative my foot! That's like our friends in Redmond claiming they inovate and after working there they I found they couldn't inovate their way out of a paper bag!
That said what Mandrake offers that others do not is user support. Mandrakeuser.org and Mandrake Forum, now Mandrake Club, as well as free software updates leave SUSE and Redhat behind. That's what sets them appart, their user community is tightly coupled to the company. I feel like I'm dealing with MS with the other two.
Sci-fi tech has nothing to do with it. Ion drives have been around for over 30yrs. Just check JPL or NASA Glen. While Ion drives are cool, they're not as neat as Hall Thrusters.
So cry me a river. TCODI applies to anything. For example, some of my coworkers were changed over to WIN2000 from WINNT and they wanted training. Linux is ideal for these people because it can be geared towards their own stupidity. If they are afraid of a GUI, skip the window manager and have them use emacs (or VI) and lynx. The point is that with Linux there is no need for a "hodge podge". Then, when you change the computer on them they can still work in a familar environmetn. With windows you are really screwed. So don't give me this BS about getting the job done.
While it is true that the result from Iter will be a lot of radioactive waste, this project must continue because it is vital to fusion research. The radioactive waste will result because of the plan to use stainless steel in the reactor construction. Stainless steel is easy to activate (because of the nickle and other elements in it) however it is one of the few materials that can take the reactor wall loading that we know how to work with (Vanadium would be an excellent replacement and have a very short halflife (on the order of decades) except for the fact nobody really knows how to roll it, weld it, make it into a pipe etc...). Don't forget that the vast majority of our industrial complex is built on the understaning of steel.
As with any prototype, there are issues. Fusion by itself is clean and if low activation materials can be used, such a silicon carbide and vanadium, which will result in very little radioactive waste with short halflifes.
The other aspect of ITER, which is a boon for fusion research, is that it is the first comercial "scale up" of a fusion reactor. Current research reactors are small and thus too small to generate enough fusion power to be useful on a grid. Fusion does occur, but it is not at a "density" (I am taking a bit of liberty with the nomenclature for a simplified explanation) that is sufficient to offset the power put into the system (ie other lossy effects are not overcome until there are more fusion reactions per unit time in a given volume)
In short future reactors will be a LOT cleaner after ITER. It's sort of like the early days of fission. A crude graphite pile lead to intrinsically safe and efficient boiling water reactors. It seems to me that a little bit of pain to jumpstart the research is worthwhile.
If you knew as much about Linux as you claim then you would realize that:
1) GUI setup is a non-issue on most Linux Distros 2) If you don't like so many options in a GUI choose a different GUI 3) If you like the MS look so much there are 12 step programs availible, I mean GUI's that are similar.
So a hot key is not the same, big hairy deal. With all of the carp MS has put users through with their less than reliable software a few different commands should be a nicer alternative to random dll faults, BSOD's, and poor performance.
Here is a suggestion for training, find somebody in a group who is interested in switching. Train them and then use them as a local guru when you start to switch the other users in the group. You will actually save training costs in the long run by moving to a non-comercially driven platform and keeping working knowledge at the worker level. How many 98 classes did you have to hold when switching from 95?
People don't need training to use a spreadsheet or click a mouse button, they just want the paid time off from their job.
Dan, its Dan. I lost your email, please email me, my address is ******@alum.rpi.edu where the stars are the first five letters of my last name followed by the first letter of my first name (in case you no longer have it).
I purchased two laptops from QLI mid and end of last year, their EM3000 and former Emperor 2. The quality of the laptop construction in excellent and they perform very well for numeric computation, CAD, and a few games. I too have found their support to be second to none, this is most likely because they are a small company. If you have any questions give them a call and they will be happy to help.
Directors in the Tech world are a type of Group Engineer/Manager, not a Board of Director dweeb. The writer is absolutely right, the company has no right to demand this information. Background checks are only required, by law, for working with classified material.
This argument is only valid for DSL, however I think the cable companies should be hauled into court for false advertising.
In my experience, when I get DSL I am paying for a particular guaranteed bandwidth to my ISP. How many machines I choose to hook up to that is purely my business, provided I am not running a neighborhood LAN (fair enough) because the contract is per address.
What an ISP does not like is the fact that their "model" of what you should be doing tends to get blown away by multiple machines. They may not like this, but thats too bad. If you are going to promise bandwidth, then that is what you should deliver. If you don't, it's false advertising. It is a bit like the RIAA because they do not want to adopt methods that give them public relations headaches (ie. they do not like admitting their true intentions) such as:
"Garunteed 650kbs (so long as you only use it less than 2hr out of every day)"
As a side note, I remember reading the contract for my ISP stating that excessive Up/Downloading were grounds for termination of service. However there was no definition for this term and nobody at the company seemed to have a good idea of what this was. Put simply, if I did use enough bandwidth downloading Linux Distro's 20 times a week and they terminated me I could sue them. Frankly I am surprised their lawyers allowed that one to get out the door.
To the first part I was implying that Apple had survived.
But my point is that Linux is too centralized due to the fact there are too many disto's. The issue is that IF M$ is able to marginalize Linux with.NET, then it will fizzle because Linux lacks the centralization to keep it together. And yes I am a Linux "fanatic" (not a very smart thing to be when one works at M$).
The problem is that.NET is not just about udates over the internet, it's about eventually getting rid of the setop box by providing all of the services needed through an appliance such as a digital TV. How can Linux compete with that if it gets that far?.NET must be stopped in its tracks and that will take some serious changes in the Linux comunity.
This is a bit long winded but please bear with me
Red Hat has done some wonderfull things by diversifying into embeded solutions, and they will probably prosper.
That aside, I paid $70 for the deluxe version of Mandrake 7.0 a while back. Sure I could have gotten everything free online, but I wanted to help Mandrake. I wanted to say good job, keep up the good work and by the way here's a $70 (minus the overhead for the distro media and books) donation.
Turbo Linux is too small to make it in this tough market. There are simply too many Linux disto's out there trying to make it. There is nothing wrong with a taylored distro, but having so many is keeping many companies from prospering due to too much competition. M$ is too big and if Linux does not move quickly enough, it will be marginalized by.NET.
Linuxcare is a good idea, but I know of no tech company which has been able to survive solely off of service contracts. Linuxcare may take off if it is part of a larger distribution, especially in the highend market.
Ultimately this merger is a good thing. Ideally more mergers need to happen so that Linux can gain the resources it needs to truely take over the desktop. As long as there are a few major disto's, the open source model can still be maintained. Otherwise Linux will continue to be used by 5% of the desktop market (Linux Magazine) out of transient fanatisism. It has no prayer of surviving, like Apple has in this way, because it is not very centralized.
You may say that I would be a prime suspect if I used Whistler, but this is not true. I'm never going to buy Whistler because it makes me dependent upon their database. I don't like the idea of MS looking over my shoulder, no matter what the incentive. I don't care if every company I work for continues to use Winblows. I'm going to maintain my 98 machines until they are completely obsolete and continue with Linux. Congradualtions MS and manufacturers of MS compatable products, you have lost a customer.
Slashdot Mirror
Even Hitler was popular. It just shows how gullible the American people are.
No, it's a republic and republics arn't all they're cracked up to be. Just look at the US, for example. Bush should have been booted but the fact that American politcs has been turned into a sporting event means that the electorate collective IQ has dropped exponentially. People forget that human lives are at stake when they elect somebody who cannot own up to the fact they have really screwed up. Americans seem to have decided that the truth doesn't matter either with respect to Iraq.
As an American I see in this society a low level hatred of Muslims and general xenophobia. I see a significant group of people who believe that what makes a great civilization is people screaming "God Bless America" and running around with a flag. When the citizens of a country take their government seriously, hold it accountable, and refuse to allow themselves to be herded in to two rival camps then a Republic is a good idea. When people treat it like a game of baseball, these people no longer have any business voting. That is the point at which their government should be taken away from them.
In many ways I think China is better of then the so called "free world". The Chinese civil service, a large part of the government, is very efficient and relatively impartial. For example, I know people who have adopted children from China. In that case the trouble wasn't getting the children out of China, it was getting the children into the US. The Chinese agency handling adoption was very efficient and the path to adoption and removing the children from the country clearly laid out. The US INS does not have a clear cut set of rules on how to get an adopted child into the country. The job of aproving the children is left up to the assigned case worker and that person is under no obligation to follow any seblence of a proceedure in a given period of time. Put simply they were at the mercy of the whims of the INS, not an established legal proceeding. They are not alone in that regard as many other couples attempting the same thing have run afoul of the US INS, an institution of a so called "democracy".
Another good example comes from my own experiances in China. Visas are very easy to get and aproval can be obtained for a nominal fee in 24hrs. The reverse for Chinese can take months because of the ineptitude of the US government.
China may not have a so called "democracy" politically, but I believe this is an advantage. By not holding popular elections, nut cases like Bush are not elected. Instead stable and moderate people are put into power. Change is controlled and radical political factions are subdued. I also recognize China has had its share of nut case leaders, however these were largely reactionary due to western interference (and yes the US is partly to blame for this).
The Chinese may not have a TV in every room or a three car garage, but they are more focused than the US and have a much larger and more diverse intelligencia. You should not be so quick to treat world governments like a sporting event.
Actually, I worked there as a contracter and the only reason I didn't work 80-120hr weeks was because I wasn't salaried and they would have to pay me. It really is as bad a as people say, that is to say their negative image is well earned. People like to say there has to be some truth in both accounts, a middle road so to speak. Well there isn't. I sat in meetings where the topic of discussion was how to use existing products to capture the rest of the market and manipulate it to take over the next. It was never about how can we improve the product. I saw pletty of junk go out the door simply because management and marketing didn't care.
Sure there are good programmers there, but unfortunately bad managers and marketers run the place. This so called "Microsoft in the Mirror" is nothing more than propaganda. Stay in the FOSS world, it's a whole lot nicer than Bill's world.
Why do people who work there deny Microsoft is doing anything wrong but "...Making Great Software..."? There are lots of perks like: free beer in meetings (good beer), beer and pizza fridays, kid friendly environment, fire sale software perks, bonuses, etc... the list goes on and on (by the way this is what they do with some of that 90% they make on Windows and Office) so basically the employees loyalty is bought.
I left because I wanted to good quality development and still go to sleep at night knowing I had done a good job.
Actually, as long as people devote a significant amount of time to listing to the media and watching TV, they will remain stupid all of the time.
In terms of OEM OS, perhaps not. But Red Hat comes with a load of other software that actually makes the computer useful.. Microsoft requires that you purchase all of those things you should get for free like an office suite, decent CD burning software, etc...The reality is that there is much more value in the Linux system even if the base system price is the same.
Inovative my foot! That's like our friends in Redmond claiming they inovate and after working there they I found they couldn't inovate their way out of a paper bag!
That said what Mandrake offers that others do not is user support. Mandrakeuser.org and Mandrake Forum, now Mandrake Club, as well as free software updates leave SUSE and Redhat behind. That's what sets them appart, their user community is tightly coupled to the company. I feel like I'm dealing with MS with the other two.
Sci-fi tech has nothing to do with it. Ion drives have been around for over 30yrs. Just check JPL or NASA Glen. While Ion drives are cool, they're not as neat as Hall Thrusters.
So cry me a river. TCODI applies to anything. For example, some of my coworkers were changed over to WIN2000 from WINNT and they wanted training. Linux is ideal for these people because it can be geared towards their own stupidity. If they are afraid of a GUI, skip the window manager and have them use emacs (or VI) and lynx. The point is that with Linux there is no need for a "hodge podge". Then, when you change the computer on them they can still work in a familar environmetn. With windows you are really screwed. So don't give me this BS about getting the job done.
The US has been unenamoured with fusion for several reasons, however the fact that we are primarily an oil economy is a big one.
Small scale fusion is not economically practicle. Put simply, your n*tau*T will never be high enough because your confinement times will be too small.
While it is true that the result from Iter will be a lot of radioactive waste, this project must continue because it is vital to fusion research. The radioactive waste will result because of the plan to use stainless steel in the reactor construction. Stainless steel is easy to activate (because of the nickle and other elements in it) however it is one of the few materials that can take the reactor wall loading that we know how to work with (Vanadium would be an excellent replacement and have a very short halflife (on the order of decades) except for the fact nobody really knows how to roll it, weld it, make it into a pipe etc...). Don't forget that the vast majority of our industrial complex is built on the understaning of steel.
As with any prototype, there are issues. Fusion by itself is clean and if low activation materials can be used, such a silicon carbide and vanadium, which will result in very little radioactive waste with short halflifes.
The other aspect of ITER, which is a boon for fusion research, is that it is the first comercial "scale up" of a fusion reactor. Current research reactors are small and thus too small to generate enough fusion power to be useful on a grid. Fusion does occur, but it is not at a "density" (I am taking a bit of liberty with the nomenclature for a simplified explanation) that is sufficient to offset the power put into the system (ie other lossy effects are not overcome until there are more fusion reactions per unit time in a given volume)
In short future reactors will be a LOT cleaner after ITER. It's sort of like the early days of fission. A crude graphite pile lead to intrinsically safe and efficient boiling water reactors. It seems to me that a little bit of pain to jumpstart the research is worthwhile.
If you knew as much about Linux as you claim then you would realize that:
1) GUI setup is a non-issue on most Linux Distros
2) If you don't like so many options in a GUI choose a different GUI
3) If you like the MS look so much there are 12 step programs availible, I mean GUI's that are similar.
So a hot key is not the same, big hairy deal. With all of the carp MS has put users through with their less than reliable software a few different commands should be a nicer alternative to random dll faults, BSOD's, and poor performance.
Here is a suggestion for training, find somebody in a group who is interested in switching. Train them and then use them as a local guru when you start to switch the other users in the group. You will actually save training costs in the long run by moving to a non-comercially driven platform and keeping working knowledge at the worker level. How many 98 classes did you have to hold when switching from 95?
People don't need training to use a spreadsheet or click a mouse button, they just want the paid time off from their job.
Dan, its Dan. I lost your email, please email me, my address is ******@alum.rpi.edu where the stars are the first five letters of my last name followed by the first letter of my first name (in case you no longer have it).
I purchased two laptops from QLI mid and end of last year, their EM3000 and former Emperor 2. The quality of the laptop construction in excellent and they perform very well for numeric computation, CAD, and a few games. I too have found their support to be second to none, this is most likely because they are a small company. If you have any questions give them a call and they will be happy to help.
Directors in the Tech world are a type of Group Engineer/Manager, not a Board of Director dweeb. The writer is absolutely right, the company has no right to demand this information. Background checks are only required, by law, for working with classified material.
This argument is only valid for DSL, however I think the cable companies should be hauled into court for false advertising.
In my experience, when I get DSL I am paying for a particular guaranteed bandwidth to my ISP. How many machines I choose to hook up to that is purely my business, provided I am not running a neighborhood LAN (fair enough) because the contract is per address.
What an ISP does not like is the fact that their "model" of what you should be doing tends to get blown away by multiple machines. They may not like this, but thats too bad. If you are going to promise bandwidth, then that is what you should deliver. If you don't, it's false advertising. It is a bit like the RIAA because they do not want to adopt methods that give them public relations headaches (ie. they do not like admitting their true intentions) such as:
"Garunteed 650kbs (so long as you only use it less than 2hr out of every day)"
As a side note, I remember reading the contract for my ISP stating that excessive Up/Downloading were grounds for termination of service. However there was no definition for this term and nobody at the company seemed to have a good idea of what this was. Put simply, if I did use enough bandwidth downloading Linux Distro's 20 times a week and they terminated me I could sue them. Frankly I am surprised their lawyers allowed that one to get out the door.
Will I have retirement, benefits, etc...? Of Course! I don't work in IT.
To the first part I was implying that Apple had survived. But my point is that Linux is too centralized due to the fact there are too many disto's. The issue is that IF M$ is able to marginalize Linux with .NET, then it will fizzle because Linux lacks the centralization to keep it together. And yes I am a Linux "fanatic" (not a very smart thing to be when one works at M$).
The problem is that .NET is not just about udates over the internet, it's about eventually getting rid of the setop box by providing all of the services needed through an appliance such as a digital TV. How can Linux compete with that if it gets that far? .NET must be stopped in its tracks and that will take some serious changes in the Linux comunity.
This is a bit long winded but please bear with me Red Hat has done some wonderfull things by diversifying into embeded solutions, and they will probably prosper. That aside, I paid $70 for the deluxe version of Mandrake 7.0 a while back. Sure I could have gotten everything free online, but I wanted to help Mandrake. I wanted to say good job, keep up the good work and by the way here's a $70 (minus the overhead for the distro media and books) donation. Turbo Linux is too small to make it in this tough market. There are simply too many Linux disto's out there trying to make it. There is nothing wrong with a taylored distro, but having so many is keeping many companies from prospering due to too much competition. M$ is too big and if Linux does not move quickly enough, it will be marginalized by .NET.
Linuxcare is a good idea, but I know of no tech company which has been able to survive solely off of service contracts. Linuxcare may take off if it is part of a larger distribution, especially in the highend market.
Ultimately this merger is a good thing. Ideally more mergers need to happen so that Linux can gain the resources it needs to truely take over the desktop. As long as there are a few major disto's, the open source model can still be maintained. Otherwise Linux will continue to be used by 5% of the desktop market (Linux Magazine) out of transient fanatisism. It has no prayer of surviving, like Apple has in this way, because it is not very centralized.
You may say that I would be a prime suspect if I used Whistler, but this is not true. I'm never going to buy Whistler because it makes me dependent upon their database. I don't like the idea of MS looking over my shoulder, no matter what the incentive. I don't care if every company I work for continues to use Winblows. I'm going to maintain my 98 machines until they are completely obsolete and continue with Linux. Congradualtions MS and manufacturers of MS compatable products, you have lost a customer.